Xenoblade Chronicles

Xenoblade Chronicles logo.

The Wii doesn’t get a lot of love, especially amongst self-described “core gamers.” What is a core gamer? A core gamer is someone who owns an XBOX 360 and/or PS3 and only plays games that are First-Person Shooters or have the words “Call”, “Duty”, “Medal”, “Honor”, “Counter”, “Strike”, “Halo”, or “Battlefield” in the title. Core gamers do not play adventure, puzzle, RPG, party, stealth, fighting, or rhythm games. Another important part of being a core gamer is constantly posting on the Internet about how terrible Nintendo is and how each system is a giant piece of crap, without actually owning one of their systems or playing any of their games.

Core gamers have derided Xenoblade Chronicles as a piece of trash because: 1) It’s on the Wii, 2) It doesn’t have high-definition graphics, 3) umm, 4) …

It’s a strange argument to make as core gamers don’t play RPGs in the first place, but let’s not get too technical. Half the fun of being a core gamer is shouting grammatically incorrect obscenities on the Internet about games they’ve never played.

If There Was a Video Game Version of Sucking Balls, it Would Be Called Halo.

About a million years ago I played Halo on the PC. It was one of the hugest pieces of shit of all time. It was repetitive, boring, had lame guns, had an idiotic story, and was about as generic as FPS games can get. I hated it so much that I refused to play Halo 2 or 3, despite the fact that fanboys around the world heralded them as the best things since sliced bread. Which is really saying a lot, since sliced bread is the best thing since sliced bread.

A few months back, three other friends and I got together and it was decided that we should play Halo 3 online. My friend has an Xbox 360 and a huge HD TV, and I was drunk, so I figured, “Sure, why the fuck not?” We played, and it was incredible. It was one of the most fun multiplayer experiences of my videogaming life. Don’t get me wrong, it was no Goldeneye 64, but it was a pretty solid experience nonetheless.

So, after months of playing Halo 3 online with my friends, I decided I would go back in time and play through the single player campaign of Halo 2, with the intent of then moving on to part three. After all, online play was so much fun that the developers must have fixed their mistakes from the previous games, right?

That was a huge mistake.