As we approach the end of the year, we also see our final Geekly Review for the year.
It’s always nice to take a look back at the year of gaming and see what we’ve enjoyed playing the most. Last week we posted our favourite games of the year – you can take a look at them here. I think it’s safe to say that we’ve had a pretty amazing year for gaming and next year is looking awesome too.
Over the weekend Xbox put a little tool up that showed you your gaming year on Xbox One. I thought I would share mine with you.
I like being able to see stats like this, I wish every platform did this.
I think it’s fair to say that I’m pretty bad for completing games. I have quite a few in my back catalog and always just end up playing games that can’t really be completed – mostly survival games. But over the weekend I actually scratched one off of my list. Yup, I actually completed Halo 5 Guardians.
There were a lot of people that were left disappointing by Halo 5 – too much Locke, ADS, Sprinting etc… But I actually really enjoyed the campaign. Was it the best Halo campaign? Probably not, but it was still very enjoyable. The only thing I didn’t like so much was that before the game came out the marketing for it went a bit mad. Everything was saying how much of a traitor Chief was and that he’d gone rogue. But (no spoilers) in the final game it just didn’t feel half as bad as they’d made out, which I was slightly underwhelming.
But it got a lot of things right in my opinion – some great open vehicle levels, the weapons felt good and fun to use, they were also nice and varied, it looked great and 343 are releasing regular updates with a lot of free content to boot. I think the most impressive thing though has to be how smooth the launch of it was. There have been way too many games coming out this year that have either been really buggy or had terrible servers which have caused a lot of issues with online play. Halo 5 however was buttery smooth, I haven’t encountered any lag whilst playing and haven’t seen any down time from the games servers either. So Bravo 343 on a great launch and an all round great game. Now to play it again on legendary and collect all the skulls.
Beyond Halo I haven’t actually played much recently, although I did mange to get another sneaky hour on The Division Alpha as the servers went live on Friday for a couple of extra hours. Guess what, I still love it!
Merry Christmas to all you geeks!
-Will
There seems to be a bit of a pattern with regards to my Geekly Review contributions during the month of December, And that is that I don’t get around to that much gaming during the festive month. But that time is spent doing other fun things and that was the case again this weekend. Before delving into the weekend though, just want to touch up on the week as it was one filled with Wrestling. Monday night I watched the WWE TLC PPV with Matt and “2 Kills Kelso”, then Tuesday the biggy, we set off to Cardiff for watch NXT Takeover UK. This was an early Christmas present from my wife. When we arrived we stopped off at Wetherspoons for food and a few drinks. I jokingly mentioned that It’d be cool to stay the night in Cardiff and that way we could all drink. Matt came back with a round of Firebombs and then said we’re celebrating that we’ve got a hotel the night. Matt and 2 Kills Kelso surprising me by having the hotel booked the day after my wife bought our tickets back in August. Such a great night and felt really awesome having people doing things like that for me. Amazing stuff. Wednesday we were back over my house again to play some Thunderbirds board game and watch NXT Takeover London which was an awesome PPV made even better by the British crowd and their football chant mentality. I’d read comments that the crowd were trying to hijack the show, but that’s not the case at all, that’s just British sport fans in general way of appreciating an event that they are at.

Friday night was my work Christmas party, so there was nothing geeky at all there, just plenty of champagne and wine consumed. A respectable finish of 1am in a not too bad state all things considered.
Saturday my wife and I had a sofa day (which is again a common occurrence throughout December). We watched another 6 episodes of DareDevil and thoroughly enjoyed it. We had to stop around 4pm to get ready to make our way to a surprise 30th Birthday party for “2 Kills Kelso”. We don’t think he had any idea bout the party and Matt and I kept Kelso thinking that we were just hanging out playing Thunderbirds Board game (which will be reviewed very very soon).
It went well and he arrived to a massive surprise shout. Once again plenty of drink consumed and dancing away to local band “The Naughties” who I’ve also mentioned on this blog a few times. A good night all round.
Sunday we were up early and headed into town to get some food from the German Christmas market that’s in the centre of Bristol currently. Weather wasn’t on our side and we got drenched when ordering the food, but still enjoyed it all the same. Then back home another festive movie marathon where we watched Arthur Christmas and Fred Clause. Then finished of DareDevil on Netflix which was absolutely amazing. An incredible ending episode to an incredible TV series. Onto Jessica Jones next.
So no more Geekly Reviews for 2015, but we’ll post a few reviews or bits of news as it drops when we can. Have a good Christmas and new year!
– Murr