As I stood in line at Gamestop in a queue of thirty plus people at 11 AM, I knew Activision had another hit on their hands. Furthermore, the thirteen year old kid trading in his copy of Battlefield 3 to help pay for the game was almost a metaphor for how the upcoming battle between the titles might play out.

Call of Duty has now become officially a perennial franchise, with a new installment out literally every fall. This causes critics of the series to poke fun at it, and make unflattering comparisons to Madden, where only minor tweaks and adjustments are put into each new year’s release.

But even with these jabs, it was still the case that each of the titles in the Call of Duty franchise were at least new games. Sure, the differences between Modern Warfare’s 1, 2 and last year’s Black Ops were hardly colossal, but there were notable changes that made the games feel like a somewhat new and exciting experience each time.

With Modern Warfare 3 however, the clock has run out. In its current format, it’s becoming clear that Activision has squeezed almost every drop out of this series that it can manage. I’ve always laughed along with the jokes about new COD games being glorified $60 map packs, but in the case of MW3, it’s an undeniable, factual statement.

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A week down of Battlefield 3, and a week to go until Modern Warfare 3 comes out. What will happen when the two collide? Will Modern Warfare squash Battlefield like a bug, and allows its servers to finally breathe as it steals 80% of its players? Will Battlefield hold strong and knock out the giant as it relies on the same tired tactics?

That’s probably the subject for the next installment of this series, but for now, I’m just going to focus on my experience with Battlefield over the last week. What I’ve found is a great game that’s doing everything in its power to prevent me from enjoying it.

I have never played a game with this many issues in its first week of release. The first three or four days after launch, the game was literally not playable during peak hours after dinner. The servers would crash, and Twitter would be flooded with a hundred messages a minute about how shit EA’s servers are. When they did go back online? The problems are far from over.

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Welcome to the first installment of a new journal-style series that will ultimately build up into a full-fledged review of Battlefield 3. Unlike most game outlets, I don’t have a deadline to get my review up on Metacritic the day of launch, and so I can actually take my time with a game, and play it the way it was meant to be played, over time.

Battlefield is uncharted territory for me. I’ve never once played another installment in the series, and therefore come in with a blank slate when it comes to expectations. This new game has a large amount of hype due to its rather insane graphics and the fact that it is positioning itself as a direct competitor to the Call of Duty behemoth, a series that has really never had a worthy adversary in the last few years.

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(Read journal #1 here first)

Yeah, I know, another journal already? I’ve never done a day one and two back to back before, but I’ve been playing a LOT of L.A. Noire and I have too many thoughts not to share, so I decided to come back with another installment.

My time with the game so far has been a rollercoaster of love and hate. What you’ll find below was written over the course of a few hours playing the title, and my emotions swing from immense frustration to complete satisfaction. What will I think tomorrow? Who knows, but the more I play this game, the more I’m appreciating it. It’s not without flaw, but I’m learning from my mistakes.

The next journal starts below, and I’ll try to at least hold off a week or so before I get the next one out.

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It was my birthday last week, and I requested and received the only game out right now that I thought might be worth owning rather than merely giving a rent.

L.A. Noire is being heralded as a shining star for Rockstar, a blend of incredible technology and unique gameplay that’s different than anything we’ve seen before. Deciding to see for myself if these claims are true, I’ve set out to beat the game over the course of the next X amount of days, reverting back to my old “journal” style installments as I do so. You may remember these from some longer titles I’ve reviewed in the past, and it’s actually my favorite way to talk about games as your experience with them often changes as you go.

It’s the end of day one, I’m a few hours in and already 7 missions through the 21 that make up the story. The game is one of three discs, but with only 21 total missions, I’m wondering if they start to get longer, or if they just need a ton of space for all the dialogue and cutscenes in the game. I’m guessing the latter.

You play as Cole Phelps, the exact opposite of a traditional Rockstar hero like Niko Belic. Phelps is a war hero turned cop who is determined to be the only honest officer in 1940s LA. He wants to rise in the ranks of the police force, and to do so he has to get promoted through the departments. I believe there are three; traffic, vice and homicide. I just finished up my final traffic case, and have now made it into homicide where I expect things to get hairier.

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Well I’ve now had sufficient time to digest the meat of Black Ops, and so I’m back with another journal review of the game. I was just starting out before, trying to get a feel for things, but now I’m fully in the groove and in a better position to talk about it.

I’ve beaten the single player campaign, which, I have to say, I’m a bit disappointed in. Yes, I appreciated the covert ops nature of it, and the framing device of Mason strapped to a chair being interrogated by shadowy figures was suitably mysterious, but the game relies heavily on a Fight Club/Manchurian Candidate plot twist that’s meant to shock, but you can see it coming from a mile away.

Black Ops is just less…spectacular than Modern Warfare’s 1 and 2. And really, how could it not be? The first game had your character dying from a nuclear explosion, while the second had you murdering an airport full of civilians and watching Washington DC get taken over by Russia. It’s pretty hard to top any of that, and Black Ops simply doesn’t.

A game needs more than just a ton of bad guys in one place to be actually grand in scale and difficulty. Fighting a line of enemies in various random cityscapes across the world pales in comparison to trying to siege the White House occupied by invading forces, or hold off waves of soldiers in Chernobyl with only a sniper rifle as you wait for evac.

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I wasn’t planning on picking up Call of Duty: Black Ops for some time as Modern Warfare 2 didn’t feel like that long ago and there were better games to purchase. Big mistake in dropping $60 on Fable 3 instead.

But I recently received the game in the mail from some divine benevolent badass I know, and so I get to play and write up my thoughts on the game for you all to enjoy. No epic 3,000 word rant here like I dismembered Fable 3 with. Rather, I’ll be doing a few journal installments as I progress through the campaign and multiplayer. I’ve had the game three days now, and these are my initial thoughts.

I’ll start with the campaign, as that’s relatively easy to cover. Campaigns in nearly every COD game over the years have tried to top themselves in being action packed, and so far, Black Ops has taken the crown from any past entry. There are few moments in the game that aren’t insane massive gunfights, and sometimes it can approach overload and you barely feel like you’re contributing to any of it.

I had thought Black Ops was set in the present day, but it appears Treyarch didn’t quite make it all the way there. Rather we’re stuck in and around the Vietnam era with the Russians set up to be the main villains in yet another war game, despite us never actually fighting them.

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Fable 2 was my favorite game of two years ago. It grew leaps and bounds over its predecessor, offering a lengthy story, better combat and more detailed customization than ever before, and simply, it was a blast to play.

I hadn’t realized Fable 3 was en route already until about a week ago, but naturally I went out and scooped it up immediately yesterday, and have been playing it ever since.

It’s a new era, as we’ve gone from a medieval landscape in the first game to an industrial one here. Nevermind that took like 800 years in real life, this is Fable! They can do what they want.

The changes are mostly cosmetic. There are a few steam-powered machines lurking about, and everyone dresses like 18th century British naval commanders, but other than that, the look and feel of the game is the same. In fact, it’s so much the same, I’m almost having trouble figuring out what’s different.

The plot of course is an evolution of the last two games. Your character from Fable 2, king of all Albion has passed on, and had two sons, one is a dick left in charge of the kingdom, the other is you, who is trying to figure out whether or not to be a dick as well. But when your evil brother forces you to decide between executing your girlfriend and a bunch of random protest leaders, you storm out of the castle, and vow to overthrow him.

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(Read journal #1 here first)

It’s been about a week since I picked Reach up, and I’ve now had adequate time to dive into the game and so we have a lot more to talk about this time around. As it turns out, I had almost beaten the entire campaign on day one, so we’ll only briefly touch on that, and the rest of the time I’ll be discussing multiplayer, the meat of any real Halo game.

The campaign was fine, it was as enjoyable as any Halo campaign that’s come before it, but really did offer nothing new from start to finish. There was maybe one new enemy type at the most (little jumpy guys with shields on their wrists), but other than that, it was more of the same from previous games, which is a bit disappointing for those who wanted something more than what seems to be Halo 3 DLC.

I simply do not understand why everyone was raving about this game’s story so much. There flat out isn’t one. You’re part of a team running around a planet that’s completely fucked, striking minor blows against an overwhelming enemy that you know will ultimately crush you. Bungie describes this as a “tragedy,” I just think it’s poor storytelling.

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The prospect of a “last” Halo game is kind of a sad. Many of us have been playing this series since our early teens or before, and the fact that the series is “ending” with a prequel is a bit disconcerting.

But make no doubt about it, Reach is most definitely trying to be the Halo 4 we’ve all been waiting for. A series like this always needs to change things up in each new outing, while fundamentally keeping things the same, always a tricky prospect. Halos 2 and 3 I’ve felt have done that extremely well, but after one day of Reach, I’m a bit hesitant to say the same. At least not yet.

Keep in mind I’ve played the game for maybe, six hours at this point, so my observations may reflect issues that are resolved as I put more time in, but here are my thoughts so far.

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