Now for Nintendo: Holy crap! Nintendo wins E3 2010!

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
We all knew it was coming, Zelda with Wii Motion Plus control. I am a little disappointed that I can’t play with a control pad anymore. I didn’t like Twilight Princess on the Wii because I could never get the sword to swing the correct way and ended up reverting back to the Gamecube version. If what I’ve experienced with the swordplay games in Wii Sports Resort is any indication, then this new Zelda will have that problem fixed with it’s 1:1-ish sword swinging. The new art style looks perfect to me. It sits somewhere in between Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. I would compare it more to Super Mario Galaxy, cartoon candy but still beautiful.

Mario Sports Mix
More Mario sports? Well ok, I’ve generally liked the various Mario sports games and will give this a try. I like that they’ve crammed 3 (or 4?) games in to one.

Wii Party
Didn’t we already have this with Mario Party 8 on the Wii? And the numerous other party/mini-game games? I got tired of the party games a long time ago, so I’m not really interested in this.

Kirby’s Epic Yarn
Sure, it’s very pink and looks like a baby’s blankey, but Kirby games are always fun no matter how cutesy they look. And this will be the first Kirby game to take advantage of the Wii’s controls.

Epic Mickey
I didn’t really grow up on Mickey Mouse and Disney as much as some others might have. My initial reaction was “meh” when they showed it off during the conference, but after reading more in to it, the story is looking really interesting, giving Mickey some welcome darkness. I’m still not sold on the gameplay though. It’s not the first game to let you create and destroy the game world.

Donkey Kong Country Returns
Finally! A proper DK game, and from the same devs that worked the Metroid Prime series. I didn’t see it in any of the videos, but it was said that the game will use motion controls. Hopefully, they won’t be too imposing and lightly used like in New Super Mario Bros Wii.

Metroid: Other M
Just as last year, can’t wait for this one.

3DS
As far as the 3D aspect goes, I just don’t care. I one of those people that has misaligned eyes, so I can only focus on something with one at a time. Because of this, 3D just doesn’t work for me.
So it’s the power of the system itself combined with the line up of games that get me excited. However, I really hope they don’t repeat PSP’s mistake. They need to add a 2nd analog control under the face buttons on the right.

Kid Icarus: Uprising
I’ve never played the original Kid Icarus for more than a few minutes. I just never knew what I was supposed to with it besides jump around and shoot monsters with my bow. The game they showed at the conference looked good graphics-wise, but the gameplay lookeed very generic. And Pit’s voice sounded generic as well. Plus his one liners, such as “Bark like a dog!”, were just plain awful. I’ll have to wait until this is closer to release to decided if I want to give it a try.

Metal Gear Solid 3
I really hope this is going to be a real game and not just a tech demo for the 3DS. I would love to see MGS 1 (GC version), 2, 3, and the PSP games ported to the 3DS. MGS3 is a great start though. It, along with Naked Snake, is one of my favorites because it doesn’t deal with the nano machine and cloning bullshit that gets overly complicated in the other games.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Starfox 64, and other N64 remakes
Again, I hope these will be real, rather than just tech demos. We’ll just have wait and see what happens. I’m sure we’ll also see some other great new games that take advantage of the system’s power and new control options.

Child of Eden
Purdy. Not much else to say about it. I wonder if the shooting it automatic after you lock on to targets or if they guy was actually doing something to tell it to shoot.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
Hell yes. Assassin’s Creed II was my game of the year for the 2009. This direct sequel/spin-off is looking to be just as good, if not better.

Shaun White Skateboarding
If it controls like Tony Hawk, I might give it a try. I tried EA’s Skate a few times, but I couldn’t get used to the controls because I played the hell out of the Tony Hawk games to the point that their controls felt natural to me and I kept trying to play Skate that way without even thinking about it.

Battle Tag
Congratulations Ubisoft, you’ve made laser tag. Even Joel didn’t seem entirely convinced.

Innergy
It’s game about breathing properly that makes you wear a sensor. Joel didn’t look to enthusiastic about this one either.

Your Shape: Fitness Evolved
Copy and paste from my Microsoft post:
Maybe it’s because I’m getting fat in my gut and trying to work it off, but this actually looks really cool and much better than Wii Fit. I like how it has both the slow-paced yoga-type stuff, but also the faster-pace combat-ish looking stuff.

Raving Rabbids Travel in Time
Time traveling dishwasher = hilarious. As always these little trailers and movies are great, but they didn’t say anything about the game play.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier
Shooter with a stealth suit? That totally has never been done before.

Driver: San Fransisco
I don’t get it. You’re playing a guy who’s in a comma, but thinks he’s a wake. Does that mean the whole game is a dream?

Project Dust
Still don’t really know what sort of a game this is. Looks like it’s about some tribes of people that control the elements.

Rayman Origins
This looks hilarious and beautiful. And made by only 5 people? That’s awesome.

ManiaPlanet
I’ve never tried TrackMania, but the QuestMania thing piques my interest. Seems like that will the last one to be released though.

Michael Jackson
We’ve known for a while that a Michael Jackson game was in the works, and Ubi’s presentation today didn’t add anything new. All we know is what we already knew: it’s a Michael Jackson game.

Beyond Good and Evil 2
Where the fuck is it Ubisoft?! You teased us with a trailer 2 years and then haven’t said a damn thing since!

Dead Space 2
I still haven’t finished the first one, but the new looks the same to me. And the guy demoing it looked like he was getting his ass kicked.

Medal of Honor, Battlefield Bad Company 2 Vietnam Expansion, and Gun Club
Blah. Blah. Military shooters. Call of Duty competitors. Whatever.
And I’m tired of having to sign up to developers stupid services after I’m already signed up on XBox Live or PSN. With EA its Gun Club, uPlay for Ubisoft, Social Club for Rockstar, etc.

EA Sports MMA
More games about sweaty men beating the shit out of each other. Why is this even legal?

EA Sports Live Broadcast
Lets say I were in to sports, why the fuck would I want to watch gamers pretend to play sports when I could watch real sports on TV or Xbox Live’s new ESPN thing? I don’t see this thing taking off.

EA Sports Active 2
A sequel to their Wii Fit clone. I think I’d prefer Ubisoft’s Your Shape as it doesn’t require me to wear sensors.

Madden 2011
Just. Don’t. Care.

Sims 3
Every time I try to play these games I start to feel like I’m wasting my time. Yes, they’re addictive, but I’m doing shit in a game that I could be doing in real life instead.

Crysis 2 and Bulletstorm
Just like with the military shooters, these shooters still boil down to one gameplay aspect: Shoot the bad guys. I can only seem to enjoy these games now and days if I’m playing with friends. Otherwise they feel flat and identical to other shooters.

Star Wars: The Old Republic
I already can’t wait for this game. The movie they showed was awesome, but they still didn’t reveal anything new about the game. No beta, no release date, nothing. Sure, there are going to be battlegrounds like in WoW, but that’s not that surprising.

Halo Reach, Call of Duty Black OPs, Gears of War 3:
Meh, meh, and meh. Neither of these over hyped franchises is the reason I own a 360.

Metal Gear Solid: Rising
The bullet-time slicing is pretty cool, but I hope there’s more to the game than that. Otherwise the hack-n-slash with occasional bullet time is gonna get old fast. But in typical Kojima fashion, the trailer didn’t reveal much detail about the gameplay or the insane story that likely goes along with it.

Fable III
Fable and Fable II has been excellent games that I’ve gone back and played again several times. One of my gripes about Fable II was that your choices didn’t seem to affect the main story much, unlike the first Fable. I hope we’ll see that improved in the new game. The trailer puts emphasis in the story of the 2 brothers, the one who inherited the throne, and the one who the player will be controlling to lead the revolution. But it raises a question to me: did they remove the ability to play as a girl? In games wiith a good/evil system, I typically play through with a good guy first, then an evil bitch second, just to see how the games plays in contrast.

Codename: Kingdoms
“Who can stand? Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Who can stand?” Shut up trailer guy. Geez.
Not enough info yet to go on for this one. The trailer was just a pre-rendered CGI of 3 gladiators covered in blood and soot and such.

Kinect
Gimmicky, but still cool. After all, it’s living room motion capture without the suit covered in a golf balls.
Controlling the 360 without the controller is nice, but it’s still a gimmicky thing. Most of the time that I use the 360, it’s going to be to play a game that uses a controller, so most of the time I’ll already have the controller in my hand after I’ve pressed the home button to turn it on. I have a separate htpc running XBMC to do my movies, music, and retro games. And even with the best internet connection available here (aside from buying your own expensive T1 or fiber line), trying to stream video with Hulu, Netflix, Zune Marketplace, etc is painful. Even if I could do it, I’d probably just use the htpc anyway. So controlling media on the 360 with hand gestures has no appeal to me. The video streaming video problem here also applies to Video Kinect, Kinect’s video chat feature. More on Kinect in the various games that will use it below.

XBox Live on Windows Mobile 7 Phones
Not enough to make me want to buy a Windows phone.

ESPN on Xbox Live
To quote @TychoBrahe:
“Hey! Microsoft! I don’t give a fuck about sports! I play videogames! That’s why I bought your console!”
http://twitter.com/TychoBrahe/status/16166929831

Kinectimals
It was cute and kinda funny until the little girl demoing it pretended that the cat had actually jumped on her and was pushing her back.

Kinect Sports and Kinect Adventures
Wii Sports, but with Kinect, which might not be a bad thing. One of the things that Kinect has over the Wii and PS3′s Move is that it actually makes you use your whole body. With the Wii so far, you could get away with sitting on the couch and moving your arms around a bit and keeping your feet on the balance board. Kinect will know if you’re sitting or standing, and also doesn’t restrict you to a small rectangle on the ground.

Kinect Joyride
Um.. how do you brake? Seriously, it looks like your car accelerates on it’s own and you only control steering and the occasional boost. What I found funny thought was the girl demoing it would stick her ass out towards the audience every time she needed to drift around a corner.

Your Shape: Fitness Evolved
Maybe it’s because I’m getting fat in my gut and trying to work it off, but this actually looks really cool and much better than Wii Fit. I like how it has both the slow-paced yoga-type stuff, but also the faster-pace combat-ish looking stuff.

Dance Central
Looks like a lot of fun. But like DDR, I wouldn’t be caught dead playing that in front of other people.

Star Wars for Kinect
Looks like an on rails slasher, similar to the Swordplay Showdown mode in Wii Sports Resort, but with the added functionality of force powers. I can’t see them making a full retail game out of this though.

Forza Motorsport Something-or-other
They spent an awful long time showing off the car with Kinect, but didn’t say anything about the racing.
I’ve still got music from the Dance Central demo stuck in my head.

Xbox 360 Slim
Quieter, provides power for Kinect, built-in N wifi and already out today. Cool… but I already own a 360. $300 isn’t worth it for the extra features. Now if I could trade in my existing 360 for a sizable discount off the new one, then I’d consider it.

The game is running great for me on Windows 7 via Steam.

You can find it here: http://www.samutz.com/blargh/articles/borderlands-custom-starter-saves/

(I couldn’t really decide what do use for the little girl as there are no girls in TF2.)

Last year I ranted about games I didn’t really care for, so this time I’ll focus on what I’m looking forward too.

Assassin’s Creed 2

I loved the first game despite it’s repetitive gameplay (climb a town, save a citizen, save a citizen, repeat). I even tried to get 100% completion, but I seem to be having difficulty locating one Templar. The story was intriguing, the graphics were beautiful, and assassinating your targets undetected was so satisfying.
The sequel looks just as beautiful and provides new assassination techniques, such as a double kill using a blade in each hand. The repetitiveness has been addressed by adding 16 different mission ‘types’ and including missions that have a mix of several types. The world that the game takes place in is supposed to be much larger. One of the developers said there were 5 cities, each containing 5 districts. That’s over double the world space of the first game.

I’ll definitely be getting this for the 360.

Brutal Legend

When I first heard about this on blogs, such as Kotaku, I didn’t pay much attention to it, but after seeing it at E3, I’m wanting to try it out. Jack Black voices the main character, and it takes place in a ‘metal-fantasy world’ based on the various heavy metal album covers featuring skulls, and demons, and snakes, and things of the sort that usually associated with heavy metal and rock. It also features various heavy metal icons, such as Lemmy Kilmister, Rob Halford, Ozzy Osbourne and Lita Ford. Unfortunately Activision, the title’s previous publisher, is now suing Double Fine, the developers, which maybe delay the games release.

Assuming Activision doesn’t completely block it’s release, I’ll pick this up on the 360 if it gets good reviews. Being that it’s a new IP, it’s not one that I want to bet on just yet.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

Castlevania has yet to have great success in the 3D world, but this game is looking good. It looks alot like God of War, with the protagonist’s whip acting much like Kratos’ chained blades, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s also being developed by Kojima Productions and Kojima himself, which is a very good thing. If they can keep some of the original elements that make the 2D games great, such as an open world and Metroid-like progression (eg. you need a certain power/item to reach new areas), and combine that with Kojima’s writing and storry telling, this could shape up to be the first great 3D Castlevania.

Again, I’ll wait for the reviews before I decide to grab this one.

Crackdown 2

Not much has been revealed about this sequel yet, but I loved the first one and will most likely be getting the sequel.

Dragon Age Origins

Bioware makes the best W-RPGs in my opinion, from Knights of the Old Republic to Mass Effect. I would buy just about anything they release.

Final Fantasy XIII

I don’t think I’ll ever stop being a fan of the core Final Fantasy series. I don’t care for Tactics, Crystal Chronicles, or FFXI (I don’t count this as being a core game due to it being an MMO), but I will always love the traditional games.

Last year Square Enix announced at the Microsoft conference that FFXIII would be coming to the 360. That was one of those great “OH SHIT” moments for me. Another reason to avoid the PS3. I was disappointed to hear that they weren’t going to really start working on the 360 version until after PS3 development was near completion. However, this year they’ve revealed that both versions are shooting for a Spring 2010 release.

God of War 3

For fucks sake Sony! PS3 PRICE CUT! NOW!

I want this so badly, but I am not paying $400 for a PS3.

Golden Sun DS

The first 2 Golden Sun games for the GBA were fantastic RPGs. And the DS is perfect for the Psy powers used by the heroes of those games. Fans have been begging for a 3rd game for years, and it’s finally on it’s way.

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

The idea behind it seems dumber than ever, but I’m still a sucker for the Zelda series.

Little Big Planet (PSP)

As I don’t own a PS3, I’ve been missing out on LBP. Hopefully the PSP version will be just as worthy of all the hype as the PS3 version.

Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story

I loved the first Mario & Luigi rpg on the GBA. Partners in Time, however, frustrated me. Rather than controlling just Mario and Luigi, you also had to control the baby versions of the brothers, which I found to be tedious as I’d forget which button controls which brother and would have to be constantly switching between all four of them in some areas. This newest game looks like it goes back to only the two adult brothers, which is perfect to me.

Mass Effect 2

Mass Effect is still currently my favorite game on the 360. The RPG mechanics of the game are what drew me to Bioware’s epic sci-fi masterpeice. However, various gaming blogs who have gotten to try the ME2 demo have reported that the game is more shooter than RPG now, which has me worried that the game is becoming Gears of War in space. And if you’ve read my E3 opinions from last year, you’d know that Gears of War falls in to the military-like shooter genre that I despise on consoles. Hopefully the game will kick major ass all over the face of the galaxy.

Metroid Other M

A Metroid game being developed by Team Ninja, the team that brought us the bloody and brutal Ninja Gaiden and Dead of Alive games? Hell-Yes.

The game looks to bring a mix of the 3D shooter action of the Prime trilogy and the side scrolling action of the traditional 2D games. It’s also supposed to reveal more about Samus’s past and tie up loose ends from Super Metroid’s story. We even get to see Samus as a new recruit/cadet in the Federation army it seems.

Dear Team Ninja, Do not fuck this up. Thanks.

Mod Nation Racers

Basically a Mario-kart style racer with the customization of Little Big Planet. You create your own characters, cars, and tracks (maybe more, but that’s all that’s been announced). They showed off creating a track, which looked pretty basic (dirt road, paved road, some trees, grass, hills), but promise that it’s only a tiny percentage of what the game has to offer. Unfortunatelly, this is for the PS3.

New Super Mario Bros Wii

New Super Mario Bros on thee DS was awesome. Good old classic side-scrolling action. This new game is that plus the added bonus of 4-player drop-in/out co-op. I don’t see why they couldn’t do it on the DS though.

No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle

I just finished playing the first game and loved it. I’m hoping they fix some of the problems plaguing the first game though, such as shitty bike handling. For a game about being an assassin, I did have to spend a lot of time driving around town trying to get the cash to proceed to the next assassination. And oh yea, Travis has been spotted dual wielding beam katanas. Awesome.

Red Steel 2

I had little interest in the first game, but this one looks way better.  The graphics have been changed to a nice cel-shaded, graphic novel style. And the game takes advantage of the new Wii Motion Plus for accurate swordplay.

Shadow Complex

A side-scrolling XBLA title coming from Epic and Cliff Blezinski. Cliffy B pretty much admitted right off the bat that the game idea is copied from the classic Metroid games. I admire devs who openly admit they’re copying another game, even if they’re better known for overrated crap (read: Gears of War).

Splinter Cell: Conviction

I never had any interest in the original Splinter Cell series. Game play looked too slow and I wasn’t in to stealth games much at the time. However, this time around Sam Fisher no longer works for whatever government agency he worked for before and is now out to find the person responsible for his daughter’s death. He’s faster and more brutal than in his secret agent days. Think Jason Borne.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Bioware’s 3rd game at E3, The Old Republic is in some ways a sequel to the excellent KOTOR series, but this time it’s an MMO. If I’m playing WoW again when this comes out, I will drop WoW in a heartbeat.

Super Mario Galaxy 2

Not much to say about it. It’s a sequel to one the best 3D Mario games ever made. Can’t wait to get my hands on it.

The Saboteur

Looks like EA’s answer to Assassin’s Creed. You play as a saboteur (French one, I think) sometime during World War II, sneaking arouund, taking out Nazis and things of the sort.

Some of the games are coming out this year, and some have been announced for Spring 2010 releases. Either way, it looks like we have another great year of gaming ahead of us.

So today I packed up my Wii and PS2 in to their original boxes, not because I’m moving, not because I’m shipping them, and not because I’m selling them, but because I just don’t play them anymore.

While I still like the PS2, and still have a ton of PS2 ISOs I could be playing, I don’t have anything that makes me say “ooo, I need to play that” and instead have been playing old and new games for the 360. Plus I’ve been reluctant to do any DVD burning if I don’t have to. I love how many games now and days can be installed and played without the need to swap out discs constantly, with the exception of the 360, but even then there’s great XBL Arcade games to be downloaded. Maybe if there was some solution that allowed me to play my PS2 games directly from a harddrive without having to burn every single game to a disc, then I would be willing to play the PS2 more (HDLoader doesn’t work on a PS2 Slim).

The Wii on the other hand has just lost it’s charm. I’ve stuck by Nintendo because I love the classic series(-es?) such as Zelda, Mario, and Metroid. But so far there’s been 2 good Mario games (Galaxy and Kart), no new Zelda (TP doesn’t count, I already beat it twice on GC), one decent Metroid game (I didn’t like it much), and one Super Smash Bros that I didn’t find much better than the GC prequel. I have tried 3rd party hits, such as No More Heroes and Mad World, but still ended up not liking them as much as every one else, partly because of the stupid gimmicky controls. There’s just too much focus on family-oriented games now.

So as a friend suggested, I packed them away so they’d stop collecting dust.

I hadn’t played my DS much either until Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars was released. It’s by far the best handheld GTA. While it’s not totally 3D in the the way the console games are, it does finally ditch the fixed top-down view camera from GTA 1, 2, and Advance in favor of an isometric-like camera that rotates 360 degrees. This alone makes the game infinitely better than 1, 2, and Advance.

I gave Fallout 3 another shot last month. The first time I tried to play it (when it was barely released and recieving perfect reviews that made me want it) I botched my character stats and ended up not understanding what I should be putting my points in to. So by the time I decided to give it another try, there had been many character builds written up. I finished the game (and all side-quests) as a good-karma, stealthy, unnamed character. Now I’m playing again a little at time as a bad-karma, stealthy sniper, which is proving to be more difficult as I have to keep ammo stocked and rely on VATS quite a bit. As the unarmed character I only had to sneak up on an enemy and punch them (usually only once) without using VATS to kill them.

I bought Saint’s Row 2 for PC via Steam, but it’s extremely buggy. Like while driving, if the game hadn’t finished laod the area ahead that I was driving to, my car would stop and the game wouldn’t let me do anything until the area finished loading, all while anything chasing me (cops, enemies, etc) could still ram my car (though it didn’t move) and shoot at me. I liked it enough though to buy it for the 360 instead after learning that the 360 version didn’t suffer the same bugs. I finished it and loved it. So I bough Saint’s Row, however, I’m finding that I don’t like it as much as I thought it would. It’s obviously a downgrade from SR2, but at this point I’m only playing it for the story. I just don’t understand how the reviews for SR1 I read scored better than the reviews for SR2.

Playing SR1, SR2, and GTA CW got me thinking about GTA IV and so I start a new game on it today and am enjoying as much as I did the first time I played it.

I started playing Guitar Hero World Tour again. Just as the first time I tried it, I find that I get sick of it after a few songs and just have a craving to play Rock Band 2. Also, my best guitar’s blue fret button has stopped working. That’s the 3rd guitar now. It’s gotta be some kind of fucking scam. If you try to get Red Octane to repair it, they want you to pay to ship it to them. It’s cheaper to by a new guitar.

After the guitar pissed me off, I decided to try singing in GHWT. I enjoyed it in RB2, so I figured it should be the same in GHWT. Also my friends (a family) has GHWT for the Wii, however on their SDTV, it’s impossible to read the lyrics. I wanted to see if this was the same on my SDTV, but with the 360 version. Mine seems to have a different, easy-to-read font. However, the mic is way too sensitive and made me fail too much. I couldn’t find any options to change the sensitivity like in RB2, then got pissed off and decided to sing in RB2 instead. I did a set of 20 songs and was out of breath by the time I was done. I love to sing, just not in front of anyone.

Like with Fallout 3, I’ve been playing a 2nd character in Fable II a little at a time. I’ve got the Knothole Island DLC, and the shop there that has you trade rare items for new rare items keeps taking up my time. But I still can’t find the stuff I need to get Hal’s Rifle (the Halo 3 gun). So I get tired of going from shop to shop looking for the stuff I need and then give up and quit playing.

I’m downloading the Call of Duty 4 demo for PC. I rented the 360 version and didn’t like it. But lately I’ve been wanting to play a good shooter for the PC so I decided to give it one more chance.

I got rid of 10 games. Sold 6 of them to a friend. Traded in the 4 remaining to Amazon. Looking at what I have left, I need to go back and try some of the again. Bully (had stupid glitch that kept me from getting new missions, have to start over), Lost Odyssey (got stuck on a boss, been so long that I forgot story anyway), Lego Batman (got tired of it after finishing good-guy stories, it’s been long enough now), Marvel Ultimate Alliance (uh… I liked it, just never finished it for some reason).

As for what I got rid of: Halo 3 (only got it to play with friends, and we only did once or twice), Forza Motorsport 2 (don’t like racing games much, it came with 360), Gears of War (overrated mediocrity), Mirror’s Edge (frustrated the hell out of me), Rock Band (have RB2 with all the RB1 songs imported, RB1 disc is useless to me), Soul Calibur IV (got sick of it), Dead Rising (controls and tiny text pissed me off), Lego Star Wars (I beat it to 100% on PS2 then again on 360 (1000GS), I never want to see it again), The Orange Box (much better on PC, only got it on 360 to help me get used to 360 shooter controls), Beautiful Katamari (got stuck, not as good as PS2 predecessors).

Ah now that I’ve spent a good hour or so writing all this crap, I actually feel sleepy.

• You can play with your friends.
• Gold and experience you gain as a guest will be transfered to your real hero.

Cons:

• The guest is stuck using a pre-made generic hero, with the same abilities as the host. Lionhead could have done better. I can understand them doing this for the local co-op since there’s only one hero (one save file), but if they can send the hosts’s hero data to the guest online, then they should be able to send the guest’s hero data to the host to allow both unique heroes.
• The camera tries to keep both heroes on screen, but fails horribly. Again, this make sense for local co-op since you only have one screen to use, but not for online co-op.
• Game freezes when one player pauses. I had to sit and wait while the host played with his dyes and clothing in the pause screen. You can’t even see what the other player is doing in the pause menu. You just see a “<Player Name> has paused the game.” message.
• Loading screens seem to last much longer than in single player.
• If you’re not playing with someone online, but see their orb in the game, you can hear them chatting over XBL, even when they’re chatting with someone else that’s not on your friends list. This could be a pro because its easy to quickly communicate with them, “hey, wanna join me?”, but it’s a con beause it’s annoying having to hear them talk to someone else while you’re trying to play on your own.
• The guest can’t just kill anyone at any time. Only the host can turn safety off. So yes, you can kill your friend’s wife, but only if they allow it by turning the safety off.

So basically, they took the Local Co-op, which is crap, then copy and pasted it for Online Co-op, so it’s still crap.