With most of the issues I disliked about Final Fantasy XIII fixed in XIII-2, adding time travel to it all makes me excited to play FF XIII-2 on January 31st. Now if only I can travel back in time to actually finish the last part of FF XIII…

This new remake has a Castle Crashers vibe with the visuals and it looks pretty good. Warlords is due out this Summer but no pricing as been announced as of yet. Since the 2008 remake was around 400 MS points ($5) I would assume that the 2011 remake will go for 800 MS points ($10).

Here is the first video in the series if you haven’t seen it already. That Cave Johnson is one hell of a salesman.

The other glitch ends up making the ammo counters disappear when you join a match thus giving you infinite ammo. There is no reload animation so you can spam a grenade launcher like it was a machine gun. Even after the match, you are still stuck with this infliction and the only remedy is to disconnect from Xbox Live and reboot.

The private match glitch videos are riddled with bad music so I will not make you sit through them. You can find them on Youtube if you really want to see it. At least the infinite ammo glitch has no music in it.

It’s things like these that make the game not fun to play anymore online. That and the phantom lag and poor matchmaking. Infinity Ward has their hands full with this mess. Let’s hope they can clean this all up and make it fun to play again.

We all loved and adored Call of Duty 4 when it came out 2 years ago. I know I took vacation from work just to play the new maps when they were released. That’s how good it was. Solid story and excellent multiplayer helped this game stay in the top of the XBL charts for all those years.

With Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Infinity Ward tries to top themselves with a sequel to their behemoth of 2 years ago.

The game continues off from Call of Duty 4 in that you are still in search of Vladimir Makarov 5 years later. Makarov was Call of Duty 4′s main protagonist Imran Zakhaev’s lieutenants that is now causing trouble in Europe with terrorist attacks.

You play as multiple people in the game and see the story from multiple sides much like the first Modern Warfare. As I tend to do when writing reviews, I do not want to spoil the story of the game so I will not go in depth about the story.

I will say that Infinity Ward went more over the top with all the action sequences you play it’s almost too much. In fact, I think that is what made me forget about the plot (besides the gaping holes in it) and just scream every 5 minutes “OMG! WTF!” with my jaw dropped to the floor.

The game will take you about 7 hours to complete so it’s right on par with the first Modern Warfare game. This time around for the masochist’s Hardened and Veteran difficulties have more of the inane enemies sniping you with shotguns with only a pixel of your character sticking out. Not sure why Infinity Ward thinks this is a good game design to have the enemies consistently own you with a short range weapon from a mile out. How about making it difficult in other ways instead of super accurate insurgents shooting a piece of my hair that in turn kills me?

New to the series is Special Ops, a co-op mode that incorporates levels from the main story into bite size maps that you have to complete certain objectives on. There are 23 missions total, though you have to unlock levels by earning stars in each scenario. The higher you set the difficulty, the more stars you earn if completed. 3 stars are the max that you can earn in each scenario with a total of 69 for everything completed on the highest difficulty. Most missions you can do solo but there are some that require a teammate to complete.

I found the co-op almost as good as Uncharted 2′s. Yes, MW2 has more to do in objectives but given that Uncharted 2 main story immersed you into that story so well, it actually carries over to the co-op side of the game. The co-op mission I absolutely adored the most was the snow level where you have to make it to the end of the map without being seen. It is a blast counting down to 1 before you and a friend snipe the 2 guards in front of you. I would have liked to see more missions like that. I could, however, do without the “racing” missions. Those felt like Infinity Ward ran out of ideas and decided to throw those in.

Multiplayer is by far the main reason most, if not all, bought this game. There are still people out there that have not played the story mode! Crazy I know but that is how much people love the MP. There are some gripes with MP though. To me, the game seems too busy with everything popping up on the screen whenever you do anything at all. It kind of takes away from fun a little. Also, the phantom lag is still there. In Modern Warfare, the phantom lag was bad but bearable enough to not rage quit. In MW2 however, it seems to be worse. If you are on the wrong side of the lag, you can unload a whole clip into an enemy and they stop, turn around and shot you once and kill you. Watching the kill cam, you see that you got 1 shot off as he laid into you with his gun. Tie that in with the very poor matchmaking and it makes for really dissatisfying play time. Hopefully this time Infinity Ward will fix this since last time they did nothing of the sort.

Despite some of the flaws in MW2, this is still a must have game for any gamer that is a fan of FPS or high octane, Bad Boys like story/gameplay. Now if you excuse me, MW2 is calling me. OUR UAV IS ONLINE!

$55 out of $60

More often then not, we as gamers suffer from Gamer Burnout. You know when you have it when you have the latest and greatest games in front of you and you cannot bring yourself to pick it up and play. I found that stepping away from anything game related and picking up a book or watching some of my favorite TV shows help. After about a week, I am ready to jump back in and immerse myself in all that is gaming.

If you have had this happen to you, what did you do to help you get through it? Maybe you have some great ideas or tips for people who haven’t found a cure for the Gamer Burnout?

I can remember back in the days when you would rush to your latest supermarket to pick up a copy of your favorite game magazine (I use to buy GamePro every month) to read up on the latest games. I would always skip to the reviews first to see what games deserved my money and which ones were better off at the bargain bin or rental. Back then, people had trust in the reviewers working for game magazines such as GamePro and EGM. Not sure what made people stop trusting reviewers but now there is one almighty source for you to see if the latest game is worth your time….Metacritic.

Ever since Metacritic appeared in 1999, they have been building up a mecca of which all game reviews gathered from the top game journalists to a small indie review site and are put into a unknown mathematical formula to come up with a score from 0 to 100. Now you might say that this is perfect. No more buying magazines or visiting your favorite site to see what they have to say about a game. You can just head on over to Metacritic and in seconds you have your answer if the game is worth your money.

I, for one, still consider reviews, previews, etc as personal opinions of the author who wrote it and nothing more. Just cause he or she hated or liked a game, doesn’t mean I will too. I tend to not care if they hate it or not but I look for the reason why they did and if it will affect my fun in playing that game. Having a quick place to look to see how the gaming journalists at large are liking or disliking a game is great. I will still go to the sites that I tend to trust for a deeper look at the game in question.

So I have to ask the inevitable question….does Metacritic influence your decision making in buying games? Or do you still rely on your favorite site/author to tell you like it is?

As we say goodbye to an era, we welcome GAMERadio to the site as the new podcast! Think of this as trading a Mini Cooper for a Lamborghini. You will still hear from all of us, just in a different format. C4 brought up a good idea so that this way, we will hardly ever miss a show and everyone will be happy. Plus more people in the fold means more articles and reviews which is always a plus.

Enjoy the last episode of Handheld Heroes and thank you all who stood by the podcast from the beginning. I hope you like what the future holds for us and enjoy GAMERadio as much as you did Handheld Heroes.

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ODST’s story is about how your team of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers is penned with the important mission of figuring out why the Covenant is invading New Mombasa. While dropping in, your team is ambushed and your squad is separated. Once you land, you try to find out where the rest of your team is located by finding clues as to what happened at their crash sites.

Gameplay and controls are basically Halo 3 but with toned down combat for the most part. There are some areas where you can actually run through without killing anyone. Not sure how that makes people fell but for me it made me feel like the game was paced a little too slow. Not having the Spartan armor is a big factor since you cannot take that many hits. You have stamina which the game treats like a shield but doesn’t last long. The screen goes red when stamina is gone and if you do not let it recharge, you will lose health pretty fast which you can only recover with health packs. It makes for a more tactical game versus running in the middle of enemies and wrecking house. The new weapons that you get to use are the Sub Machine gun and the pistol from the first Halo. The pistol is an epic sniping tool in this game for most of the enemies and my favorite weapon to use.

The story was a little vague and empty feeling with the build up to the end not paying off at all. I think Bungie failed on making the story feel more like a part of the Halo universe when it feels more like a Syfy movie of the month. I was surprised that some of the actors in Firefly such as Adam Baldwin, Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillion who they also used his likeness in the game. The dialogue could have also been better. It seemed either too edited or not fully fleshed out.

Where the game seems to shine is the 4 player co-op mode. I played through on Legendary difficulty with my friend eRock and it felt like playing it solo would be near impossible to complete. There was also a “glitch” with the spawning system that one can use to get past really hard parts of the game which is expected since it was in Halo 3 as well. Not sure why most games incorporate vehicle levels but why do they have to be the most asinine part of the game? The vehicle level felt so broken and made for a hour and a half of cursing and high blood pressure for my friend and I. Also, another “glitch” with the game that I ran into was when someone dropped from our co-op game mid-level, we did not get the achievement for beating the level. With that happening, we beat the last level 3 times without getting those achievements as well until we found out that the one level we played with another friend didn’t show as complete.

The main reason to play ODST to me is Firefight mode. Yes it’s very similar to Horde mode in Gears of War 2 but it really feels about equal in terms of how much fun it is. Some of the maps are INSANELY HUGE and makes for some crazy fights. Everything from the Halo universe is in Firefight and they give you vehicles to use in some of the maps as well. You fight through rounds with 5 waves to complete before moving to the next round. at the end of every round, you go into a bonus wave where you are given 60 seconds to kill as much as you can and get to the point value set to gain a bonus. You don’t respawn if you die during the bonus round so it makes it very challenging to get the bonus. I can see Firefight being the main thing people play for a long time to come and I hope Bungie releases more maps to play as well.

Bungie’s next to last iteration in the Halo universe, ODST, is something that I think people that are not big fans of Halo games can get into. Although the game does feel more like an expansion pack than a full game, which makes sense since it was originally going to be as such before Bungie decided to make it a full game. ODST does come with the full multiplayer stand alone disc for Halo 3 with all the map packs so that does add a value to the whole package. Even with the faults, it’s still worth a play just for the Firefight mode alone.

$40 out of $60

Recently, I have been working part time in a video game store called Gamerdoc. It’s my first time working in the video game retail biz and so far it has been pretty sweet. We have all heard the horror stories of people working at Game Stop and the pressure of getting preorders but nothing like that has happened to me at Gamerdoc. Since it is a franchise store, we have a lot more freedom with what we can do and how we approach customers.

I have always been amazed at how distant and disconnected the most game store employees seem to be in my state. Not a single one seems to understand the mindset of a gamer or at least pretend to know. People go to game stores to buy games and to find out if the new games coming out are worth the money right now. They even look for recommendations based on their taste in games. Why does it seem that game stores do not cater to this? One would assume that working at a game store you would play the games you are selling to give people honest feedback on the game versus just reading metacritic and giving them the score.

I like Gamerdoc for encouraging that we play all the games so that we are better informed to tell customers if the game is something they should play or wait till it goes down in price. I assumed that would be the standard in all game stores but when you have a lock on the market you can do whatever you want to an extent.

So what is it that you look for when going into a video game store? Do you really care about if the employees play the games and are gamers themselves? Maybe you have a story to tell about this? Either leave a comment on the post or send comments/feedback to heroes at handheldheroes dot net.