Firstly, Mix, huge congratulations on the wee one. I hope everything comes out fine and all is OK with your wife. Hopefully your step daughter is old enough not to feel abandoned when the new one arrives.
Second, what I've read about Black Hawk is that for regular XBL hosters, the max will be 24 or so, which in my mind would mean PK could host a good 16-man room. But the dev. has worked it out with MS to host their own, dedicated servers for the big 50-man rooms.
In theory, it sounds like a great thing, but I think in practice, a room of 10 guys might feel pretty lonely on those huge maps. I am definitely curious about this one, and since it's been out on PC for some time, I imagine the gameplay should be solid. They say in the big rooms, your voice chat would work with anyone close to you and anyone on your friends list, which means to me there will be a lot of little inner games going on within the one big room. That could be a really good thing, or it could be a mess, I don't know. If they could utilize some of the party mechanisms that Halo2 has, I think it could work better, but I think it will be the standard XBL thing instead. I don't know.
I do know that I am making a far bigger deal about this end of the GR rainbow than I meant to or want to. Maybe sometime I will try to get a Halo2 Poker Night going, and we can see if we can get a good 10 or 12 guys for some custom games. I doubt I will be getting rid of GR2 immediately, but I may if I choose to get Psychonauts or something.
Marino, I do really like the co-op missions in GR2, especially if we try to actually work together, but those don't seem to hold more than four or five guys with any stability. I guess once we beat the Dam map in co-op, that was it for this game, huh?
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory tonight (4/13)
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