Everything You Need to Know About Call of Duty: Black Ops 2

You shoot things, offline and online. It launches November 13, 2012.

You're good to go.

"Hard Reset: Extended Edition" Early Impressions

Hard Reset showed up in my mailbox unannounced and even though the game has been out for a while -- original release was September 13, 2011 -- I didn't know anything about it, so I went into the experience completely blind.

A couple hours in and it's safe to say it plays in same neighbourhood as Painkiller and Serious Sam and the early Doom games, only with a cyber/sci-fi sensibility.

Enemies most often run straight at you with no regard for tactics or cover. They simply converge. And, at least so far, it typically happens in some kind of "kill room" where the entrance slams shut the moment you enter the area and the exit won't open until you've killed everything that moves. Aim's important, of course, but Hard Reset also includes plenty of exploding barrels and electro-shock outlets to activate for at least some kind of planning to slow the attack of the robotic horde.

The graphic novel "cutscenes" got me thinking of the classic Dynamix title "Rise of the Dragon." But that's about all they've done so far.

Gotham City Imposters: Actually Played It!

There was a recent patch (a big one) for Gotham City Imposters. I put a lot of hope into that patch -- that the connection issues and finding a game would make it playable. With actual people. And for longer than five minutes.

From my brief play time last night -- full rounds of team deathmatch for a stretch of 30 minutes -- it seems the patch has cleared up the problems I was experiencing. I played for 30 minutes, went from level 4 to (almost) level 8, unlocked a bunch of stuff, but had to to call it a night because the patch took so long to download. (Some of us have to get up and go to work in the morning!)

But the most important aspect is that after that initial rush of "Yay, it's working!" I was actually having some fun with it. And all those ""Team Fortress 2 with grappling hooks and skates" reductions aren't completely out of line, it does feel like the game is trying to carve out it's own identity. At least, so far.