Borderlands is like Marmite. You either love it or hate it, there's no middle ground. I know quite a few people who bought it, and all had the same experience: mild disappointment at first because it isn't as much like Fallout 3 as they'd wanted, and then a few hours in either adoring it for what it is, or abhorring it for what it isn't. That's aside from my brother-in-law Trev, who has verbally masturbated at me at every opportunity he's had regarding the game since well before it's release, I'm not sure he was capable of the initial upset.
I'm of the former. My first day with it was a difficult one, physically as well as mentally because the game is very unforgiving at first and I very nearly met my demise in the first unavoidable encounter with the game's ever-present bandits. I carried on making frequent visits to the game's spawn points (poles with lights on, I was so upset they didn't make the checkpoint noise from Sonic) until I was about level 11, and then I had half an hour or so of plain sailing before there was a level hike in the enemies too, then it was back to the spawn points every 5 minutes again. Now my level is around the mid twenties, and I'm starting to cruise once more. For now.
As always, the mulitiplayer had me feeling a little underwhelmed, my first go was with the aforementioned Trev and his younger brother Ross, and they'd played about 24 hours of it solid and were around level 25, compared to my 13 and I basically sat and watched while they did stuff. They took me to the arena and we had a bit of a deathmatch, but with 3 players in a very small venue, even if I was strong enough to slightly upset the other two, it just felt like we were playing Quake II on the PS1, not a part of my life I want to go back to. But I'm still yet to find a multiplayer shooter that's better than Perfect Dark on the N64. CoD fanboys attack.
The second time I tried MP was with Raz7el, who was in the 'hate' camp, and it was much the opposite experience. I was level 23 I think, and he was level 7. Too easy for me, and he didn't see any action.
Borderlands is also like Marmite, in that it looks like shit. No, it's not a pretty game, and looking at old pre-cell-shading screenshots makes me wish they hadn't bothered. Although it makes a change from all of the other Unreal Engine 3 powered games where all the characters look like action figures. Thing is, the cell-shading isn't actually done properly. A lot of the black lines on the scenery are actually drawn on. A bit cheating, isn't it?
Last night, after realising that all I'd done all week was eat, sleep and play Borderlands I thought I'd reach into my shame pile to add a bit of variety to this week's post, and as I'd finished Wolverine quickly last friday to make way for Borderlands, the next game was Halo 3 ODST. Groan.
Guess what: I like it.
The squad thing going on makes it feel a lot more like Killzone, and I'm not being forced to blow off the Master Chief every few minutes like in the previous three. In fact, in the Hour-and-a-half-ish that I spent on it the big green twat didn't even get a mention. And the romance sub-plot in ODST involves a woman who is actually real, which is a bonus. I'd have preferred there to not be one though, they always seem out of place in this sort of game, see Gears of War 2 for example. I meant Marcus and Anya, not Marcus and Dom. Speaking of romance subplots, who should show up in ODST but Nolan North?
And that's about it. Preordered my copy of Dragon Age Origins this week, and I'm planning on hitting GAME at opening time to get it so I've got a couple of hours with it before writing. And to sign out on a laugh, while cataloging my game collection I came across the German cover for Tomb Raider Chronicles. Dr Dre would be so proud.
Friday 30 October 2009
Friday 23 October 2009
And now I'm the best at whatever it is Wolverine does!
I'm just gonna touch on Uncharted 2 this week, because everyone with a PS3 has been banging on about it relentlessly and nothing I can say will be new and fresh.
I finished it, and all is well with the world. There was literally only one part of the game I didn't enjoy, and that was 'The' train bit. Drake kept doing a Lara and jumping in the entirely wrong direction, wrapping himself around the wheels or something, and It got a bit tedious doing the same thing over and over. All in all though, great game, great ending, worth a second playthrough. And, much like the prequel, a third and fourth.
After that I blasted through Halo 3, picking up a paltry one Achievement all the way through it because I played it on easy. So that's it, three games down and I still don't get it. They are all just average games, the multiplayer must really be special to generate this much interest. I might give it a go, although watching myself respawn for half an hour isn't my idea of entertainment. Halo 3 was my favourite of the series so far though, I still have ODST to play through, which is next on my list actually.
Then later in the week, I transferred all my data to my 120GB Elite hard drive. Everything survived the transfer apart from my Halo 3 save data, so now all I have to show for finishing it is my mere 5 Gamer Points. Shit.
After that was over I moved on to X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Uncaged Edition), again on the XBox 360. Now, I neglected to watch the film, I made it through X-Men and half way through X-Men 2 before wanting to kill myself. But in these celluloid abortions, the one saving grace was everyone's favourite pointy Canadian bad ass, so I was initially interested in a film based solely around him, even more so when I learned Deadpool was supposed to be in it. Then they cast Ryan Reynolds, the highest echelon of annoying douchebags as Deadpool and turned him into Baraka from Mortal Kombat, and my interest promptly blew it's metaphorical brains out.
I tried the demo of this by chance though, as surprise surprise there wasn't anything great on the PSN store that week, and the mix of God of War and Tomb Raider combined with the frankly surprising level of blood and dismemberment were a breath of fresh air, seeing as I was expecting yet another forgettable kiddy-friendly mass-produced movie tie-in.
The game offers very little in the way of variety, it's mainly just ripping people to shreds, a little bit of platforming then ripping more people to shreds, occasionally throwing a spot of "press X to not die" into the mix, but I'm yet to get bored. Actually between typing right now I'm having quite an epic boss-fight with a huge Sentinel in midair. Wait, "press B to not die".
One of the main things to note is the character damage. About half way through the game you meet these robot things with spinning blades on their hands, and the cuts they leave on your body look great, and watching them heal in real time is genuinely impressive. Some bits are silly though, like on a brief moment of losing my healing powers I was still able to explode myself and carry on going with half of my torso gone. And at one point poor old Logan got blood all down the back of his jeans, and had to go through a cutscene looking like he'd shat himself. And his magical vest that grows back after being shredded is plain lack of attention to detail.
And that's about that. I'm off to get a copy of Borderlands in a bit, which I'm looking forward to, paid for with money I don't have. Those game journo types who get games for free don't even know they're born. I think next week's blog will be very much centred around that. For now though, back to Wolverine.
I finished it, and all is well with the world. There was literally only one part of the game I didn't enjoy, and that was 'The' train bit. Drake kept doing a Lara and jumping in the entirely wrong direction, wrapping himself around the wheels or something, and It got a bit tedious doing the same thing over and over. All in all though, great game, great ending, worth a second playthrough. And, much like the prequel, a third and fourth.
After that I blasted through Halo 3, picking up a paltry one Achievement all the way through it because I played it on easy. So that's it, three games down and I still don't get it. They are all just average games, the multiplayer must really be special to generate this much interest. I might give it a go, although watching myself respawn for half an hour isn't my idea of entertainment. Halo 3 was my favourite of the series so far though, I still have ODST to play through, which is next on my list actually.
Then later in the week, I transferred all my data to my 120GB Elite hard drive. Everything survived the transfer apart from my Halo 3 save data, so now all I have to show for finishing it is my mere 5 Gamer Points. Shit.
After that was over I moved on to X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Uncaged Edition), again on the XBox 360. Now, I neglected to watch the film, I made it through X-Men and half way through X-Men 2 before wanting to kill myself. But in these celluloid abortions, the one saving grace was everyone's favourite pointy Canadian bad ass, so I was initially interested in a film based solely around him, even more so when I learned Deadpool was supposed to be in it. Then they cast Ryan Reynolds, the highest echelon of annoying douchebags as Deadpool and turned him into Baraka from Mortal Kombat, and my interest promptly blew it's metaphorical brains out.
I tried the demo of this by chance though, as surprise surprise there wasn't anything great on the PSN store that week, and the mix of God of War and Tomb Raider combined with the frankly surprising level of blood and dismemberment were a breath of fresh air, seeing as I was expecting yet another forgettable kiddy-friendly mass-produced movie tie-in.
The game offers very little in the way of variety, it's mainly just ripping people to shreds, a little bit of platforming then ripping more people to shreds, occasionally throwing a spot of "press X to not die" into the mix, but I'm yet to get bored. Actually between typing right now I'm having quite an epic boss-fight with a huge Sentinel in midair. Wait, "press B to not die".
One of the main things to note is the character damage. About half way through the game you meet these robot things with spinning blades on their hands, and the cuts they leave on your body look great, and watching them heal in real time is genuinely impressive. Some bits are silly though, like on a brief moment of losing my healing powers I was still able to explode myself and carry on going with half of my torso gone. And at one point poor old Logan got blood all down the back of his jeans, and had to go through a cutscene looking like he'd shat himself. And his magical vest that grows back after being shredded is plain lack of attention to detail.
And that's about that. I'm off to get a copy of Borderlands in a bit, which I'm looking forward to, paid for with money I don't have. Those game journo types who get games for free don't even know they're born. I think next week's blog will be very much centred around that. For now though, back to Wolverine.
Friday 16 October 2009
Oh Crap!
If the title of this post didn't give it away, I have been lucky enough to have a few early hours with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves this week, as my preorder with GAME paid off and Mr. Drake plopped gently onto my doormat on Wednesday, a whole 2 days before release. Well, not that gently, it looks like the fucking postman tried to get it through the keyhole first; there's a dint in my shiny Collector's Edition tin. Either way, I got it early and that makes me feel like a proper journalist, even though I still had to pay for the fucking thing.
Now, I could go on all day gushing about it, believe me I could, and I've only had a few hours with Nate and co. The only thing I can think of that's bad about it is that the snow looks like marshmallow and the explosions aren't as pretty as those in Drake's Fortune. The graphics are phenomenal, and so is the animation and voice acting, but then again they were in the original so it goes without saying.
What some people would perceive as a negative point, but it really isn't, is that not much has changed since our hero set off to steal El Dorado from Nazi zombies. Nate's gained a few new moves in classic Lara Croft fashion, including monkey bars and the free-climbing thing ripped straight from Tomb Raider Underworld, and the cinematics have been turned up to eleven with the charismatic protagonist being forced to clamber through a train wreck hanging off a cliff with his intestines hanging out, or leaping through a window of a hotel block that's collapsing (A bit of a change of pace from causing the destruction last week).
Drake's picked up a couple of new friends and foes too, the most obvious of which being Chloe Frazer, Drakes new bit of fluff and all round 'can we trust her?' kind of girl. She's tanned, has dark hair in a ponytail and speaks with a very upper class Australian accent that's not too far removed from southern English. If you squint, it's Lara. Elena has made an appearance though, and it's very much hinted that there's still a spark. Do the right thing, Nate.
And the other main game I've been playing this week, with me virtually stalking Nolan North, is Shadow Complex. In a nutshell, the game is about a guy named Jason, who looks like Drake, moves and dresses like Drake, Can punch harder than bullets like Drake, has the same voice actor and if you say his name in a mock retard voice it sounds like Nathan. His last name is probably Nrake. It isn't actually, it's Flemming.
Anyway, Na... Jason is out potholing with his girlfriend who he's known for about 4 hours and they come across a secret military base full of people who all stole the guy from Dead Space's pyjamas and want to invade America with lots of ATST walkers and stuff. Now Jason's surname must be Bourne actually, because he happens to be an unstoppable killing machine and goes about destroying everything and wiping out about a third of the population.
The game, ridiculous story aside, is an absolutely thrilling homage to Metroid games of old; a 2D side-scroller with 360 degree aiming thanks to the second analogue stick. As you progress through the game you find power ups in the form of new pieces of armour that give you the ability to run faster, jump higher, hit harder etc, and each new area you explore or each life you snuff out gives you EXP to level up, giving the game an RPG element too.
I can't think of much else to write about here, but the game is better than most retail games. The Unreal Engine 3 is showing it's age a bit now though, maybe it's time to think about a new one Epic. But yeah, who cares if the story was written by a homophobic jerk, the story is balls anyway. Get it for the gameplay.
In other news, I went and traded my copy of Street Fighter IV for the collector's edition this week. Raz7el from The Chronicles of Ridiculous convinced me to get it on the 360 so I could destroy him on it, so I did. We are both upsettingly bad at that game. And I downloaded the Demos of Brutal Legend and Star Wars: Republic Heroes, but Mr. Drake stopped me from playing them. He is more important. Now I think I'm gonna go play Prince of Persia, watch Hulk vs. Wolverine and hide in Nolan North's garden.
Now, I could go on all day gushing about it, believe me I could, and I've only had a few hours with Nate and co. The only thing I can think of that's bad about it is that the snow looks like marshmallow and the explosions aren't as pretty as those in Drake's Fortune. The graphics are phenomenal, and so is the animation and voice acting, but then again they were in the original so it goes without saying.
What some people would perceive as a negative point, but it really isn't, is that not much has changed since our hero set off to steal El Dorado from Nazi zombies. Nate's gained a few new moves in classic Lara Croft fashion, including monkey bars and the free-climbing thing ripped straight from Tomb Raider Underworld, and the cinematics have been turned up to eleven with the charismatic protagonist being forced to clamber through a train wreck hanging off a cliff with his intestines hanging out, or leaping through a window of a hotel block that's collapsing (A bit of a change of pace from causing the destruction last week).
Drake's picked up a couple of new friends and foes too, the most obvious of which being Chloe Frazer, Drakes new bit of fluff and all round 'can we trust her?' kind of girl. She's tanned, has dark hair in a ponytail and speaks with a very upper class Australian accent that's not too far removed from southern English. If you squint, it's Lara. Elena has made an appearance though, and it's very much hinted that there's still a spark. Do the right thing, Nate.
And the other main game I've been playing this week, with me virtually stalking Nolan North, is Shadow Complex. In a nutshell, the game is about a guy named Jason, who looks like Drake, moves and dresses like Drake, Can punch harder than bullets like Drake, has the same voice actor and if you say his name in a mock retard voice it sounds like Nathan. His last name is probably Nrake. It isn't actually, it's Flemming.
Anyway, Na... Jason is out potholing with his girlfriend who he's known for about 4 hours and they come across a secret military base full of people who all stole the guy from Dead Space's pyjamas and want to invade America with lots of ATST walkers and stuff. Now Jason's surname must be Bourne actually, because he happens to be an unstoppable killing machine and goes about destroying everything and wiping out about a third of the population.
The game, ridiculous story aside, is an absolutely thrilling homage to Metroid games of old; a 2D side-scroller with 360 degree aiming thanks to the second analogue stick. As you progress through the game you find power ups in the form of new pieces of armour that give you the ability to run faster, jump higher, hit harder etc, and each new area you explore or each life you snuff out gives you EXP to level up, giving the game an RPG element too.
I can't think of much else to write about here, but the game is better than most retail games. The Unreal Engine 3 is showing it's age a bit now though, maybe it's time to think about a new one Epic. But yeah, who cares if the story was written by a homophobic jerk, the story is balls anyway. Get it for the gameplay.
In other news, I went and traded my copy of Street Fighter IV for the collector's edition this week. Raz7el from The Chronicles of Ridiculous convinced me to get it on the 360 so I could destroy him on it, so I did. We are both upsettingly bad at that game. And I downloaded the Demos of Brutal Legend and Star Wars: Republic Heroes, but Mr. Drake stopped me from playing them. He is more important. Now I think I'm gonna go play Prince of Persia, watch Hulk vs. Wolverine and hide in Nolan North's garden.
Friday 9 October 2009
Just when you thought it was safe to switch the PS2 back on...
Firstly, and it occurs to me that I haven't actually mentioned this so far in this blog, I have spent months scouring every videogame shop I've seen for Jaws Unleashed on either the PS2 or XBox, and finally the other day I saw it sat in plain view on a shelf in the newly reopened Playtime in Sheffield for £14.99. And today I sat down with it for the first time, and there's half an hour I'm not getting back.
The game involves eating things, which is what I expected, and fair enough is fun as hell. When you can actually see what's happening that is. The camera spends most of it's time either looking at the side, front or top of the shark, and it pretty much breaks the game. So to say I'm disappointed is an understatement.
I've had quite a bit of spare time this week, and have got a fair bit of gaming done. The first game I played through was Halo 2, as I said last week I wanted to see what all of the fuss was about. Now, I know I played neither Halo nor Halo 2 on their releases, or even in the right generation, so they are bound to feel a bit dated, but neither have really grabbed me. I spent most of Halo 2 slogging through the endless waves of respawning enemies just wishing the game would end so I could stick it back on the shelf and never lay eyes on it again. In fact, by the end of the game I was just running past all the enemies as they fought each other, because it was quicker than having to take down each enemy's shield and then killing them in turn, not to mention scrabbling round on the floor for new weapons all the time because you can't collect ammo for the best ones. And then there was the bug...
Every so often (well, every 10 minutes or so), the background of the level would emboss itself on the screen, obscuring my view sometimes so badly that I just couldn't play it and forcing me to quit out of the game and restart it. I don't know if this was a problem with playing the game on the XBox 360 or not, but I was led to believe that before Gears of War reared it's steroid-filled head Halo 2 was still the most-played game on XBox Live, and I can't imagine that Microsoft would allow such an awful bug in a game that's still being played so much without patching it.
On a more positive note, I had an hour on Halo 3 after I finished it, and that was much better.
The other game I was mainly playing this week was Red Faction Guerrilla. Now, this game is an odd one, because it starts off a blast, genuinely fun to play, but quickly gets repetitive in the middle before regaining the spark at the end. But the middle really is so boring that very few people will actually see the end, and that really is a shame.
The game centres around a bunch of people who go to a recently terraformed Mars looking for a mining job, and when their employers start shooting them, they decide that instead of contacting the Union or simply quitting, they'll hole themselves up in hidden camp sites and emerge every so often to bother them, usually by fucking up a building or something, with the hope of eventually liberating Mars. Not that they'll be anything left of Mars after they've driven a truck through every building on it.
Yes, the story is bullshit. But the gameplay itself is great, every game needs this level of destruction in it. There is no greater feeling than the one you get when you Hijack a JCB and plough through a tower block, or when you steal one of those Power Loaders from Aliens and... plough through a tower block. The only problem is that sometimes the gravity doesn't seem to work, and buildings can be held up by toilet roll tubes and blu-tack, but that's random physics for you.
Also there's the throwbacks to Red Faction, and to a lesser extent Red Faction 2, that suitably send me into a fanboy delight. You even revisit the ruins of the Ultor corporation, although it doesn't have the same feel as returning to Shadow Moses in Metal Gear Solid 4. And it's a bit morbid when you find out that Parker, the hero from the first RF is now a mental hobo and Alias from RF2 managed to die in the martian wastes. You don't expect such things from hero characters.
To finish off, I tried out Shadow Complex finally and today bought some Microsoft Points to buy the full version. I got a 2100 Point card, so I'm torn between either Monkey Island SE or Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta for the rest of the points. Either way, I need Shadow Complex, and I think I have a man crush on Nolan North. The wife also bought me a year of XBox Live today, and I intend to get into online gaming a bit more now. Hopefully ODST will be a good introduction for me. I managed to resist buying Left 4 Dead today.
The game involves eating things, which is what I expected, and fair enough is fun as hell. When you can actually see what's happening that is. The camera spends most of it's time either looking at the side, front or top of the shark, and it pretty much breaks the game. So to say I'm disappointed is an understatement.
I've had quite a bit of spare time this week, and have got a fair bit of gaming done. The first game I played through was Halo 2, as I said last week I wanted to see what all of the fuss was about. Now, I know I played neither Halo nor Halo 2 on their releases, or even in the right generation, so they are bound to feel a bit dated, but neither have really grabbed me. I spent most of Halo 2 slogging through the endless waves of respawning enemies just wishing the game would end so I could stick it back on the shelf and never lay eyes on it again. In fact, by the end of the game I was just running past all the enemies as they fought each other, because it was quicker than having to take down each enemy's shield and then killing them in turn, not to mention scrabbling round on the floor for new weapons all the time because you can't collect ammo for the best ones. And then there was the bug...
Every so often (well, every 10 minutes or so), the background of the level would emboss itself on the screen, obscuring my view sometimes so badly that I just couldn't play it and forcing me to quit out of the game and restart it. I don't know if this was a problem with playing the game on the XBox 360 or not, but I was led to believe that before Gears of War reared it's steroid-filled head Halo 2 was still the most-played game on XBox Live, and I can't imagine that Microsoft would allow such an awful bug in a game that's still being played so much without patching it.
On a more positive note, I had an hour on Halo 3 after I finished it, and that was much better.
The other game I was mainly playing this week was Red Faction Guerrilla. Now, this game is an odd one, because it starts off a blast, genuinely fun to play, but quickly gets repetitive in the middle before regaining the spark at the end. But the middle really is so boring that very few people will actually see the end, and that really is a shame.
The game centres around a bunch of people who go to a recently terraformed Mars looking for a mining job, and when their employers start shooting them, they decide that instead of contacting the Union or simply quitting, they'll hole themselves up in hidden camp sites and emerge every so often to bother them, usually by fucking up a building or something, with the hope of eventually liberating Mars. Not that they'll be anything left of Mars after they've driven a truck through every building on it.
Yes, the story is bullshit. But the gameplay itself is great, every game needs this level of destruction in it. There is no greater feeling than the one you get when you Hijack a JCB and plough through a tower block, or when you steal one of those Power Loaders from Aliens and... plough through a tower block. The only problem is that sometimes the gravity doesn't seem to work, and buildings can be held up by toilet roll tubes and blu-tack, but that's random physics for you.
Also there's the throwbacks to Red Faction, and to a lesser extent Red Faction 2, that suitably send me into a fanboy delight. You even revisit the ruins of the Ultor corporation, although it doesn't have the same feel as returning to Shadow Moses in Metal Gear Solid 4. And it's a bit morbid when you find out that Parker, the hero from the first RF is now a mental hobo and Alias from RF2 managed to die in the martian wastes. You don't expect such things from hero characters.
To finish off, I tried out Shadow Complex finally and today bought some Microsoft Points to buy the full version. I got a 2100 Point card, so I'm torn between either Monkey Island SE or Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta for the rest of the points. Either way, I need Shadow Complex, and I think I have a man crush on Nolan North. The wife also bought me a year of XBox Live today, and I intend to get into online gaming a bit more now. Hopefully ODST will be a good introduction for me. I managed to resist buying Left 4 Dead today.
Friday 2 October 2009
No gun shooting, for Rudy tonight... No retributing, everything is alright...
I'm back!
Spent the last week in Scarborough, having been married and stuff. It was a great ceremony, and aside from a stupidly parked van and some obnoxious wankers in a pub, a great week. But oh, this blog is about videogames, and two weeks have passed!
The first week at home I spent mainly playing through Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, trying to get it fresh in my mind before Uncharted 2 plops through my letter box in a couple of weeks. I don't care what anyone says, in my opinion it's probably the best current-gen game so far, speaking from a single-player perspective. In fact, only the XBox fanboys who are content to do the exact same things over and over again on multiplayer Gears or Left 4 Dead seem to have anything bad to say about it, and that's mainly about a lack of multiplayer, which will change in a few weeks. They seem to overlook the absolutely gorgeous graphics and animation, brilliant voice-acting and the fact that the gameplay, while doing nothing new, is among the best in it's field.
Anyway, ranting aside, I went to Scarborough armed with my PSP, and while I was there I got very much acquainted with Resistance: Retribution. At first I was unsure, with the frankly unconventional controls and Razzy-worthy dialogue and voice-acting, but it ended up dragging me in, and is actually more entertaining than Resistance 2. The main character, James Grayson, is a far cry from the solemn, heroic Nathan Hale: He's foul mouthed, racist and sounds like a mixture of Ray Winstone and Kano from Mortal Kombat. In the opening scenes of the game he stumbles upon his brother, Johnny, half way through being converted into a Chimera, and is forced to kill him for his own good. He then clicks his heels, tips his hat and sets off to kill all of the Chimera by himself, like a Cockney Punisher.
Well, a Cockney Punisher who occasionally slips into an Australian accent anyway. The accents are inconsistent throughout, at one point a soldier went from being Scottish to English and back again in one cutscene like an Oblivion hobo. The game was obviously acted out by a non-British cast. But the one-liners in the game did keep me entertained and had me struggling for a title to this post. My favourite was 'I will rape your skull'. God bless.
It also keeps the feel from the first Resistance, more of a wartime aesthetic, as opposed to the futuristic and very American feel of R2, which in my opinion was one of the things that lost the series' appeal. The other main things that R2 changed were the limited weapon capacity and regenerating health as seen in, well, every other shooter around at the minute, losing the series' uniqueness, and both are back to the retro styles in Retribution too, which is nice.
The game looks gorgeous too. In fact, if you have a PSP just buy it for fuck's sake. Unless you're french, that is; it's really quite racist in places. It's definitely one of the stronger titles on the handheld though.
One of the first things that my new wife did after the day was hand me my ass on Guitar Hero Arcade. Granted, she was playing on easy to my hard, but it was very one-sided. Realising afterwards that it is really just a port of Guitar Hero III, where the hard setting is slightly out of my comfort zone, we had two rematches with me on medium, both victories for me, and another on hard, hers again. Great fun. Afterwards we cooled down with a game on House of the Dead 4, which is strongly in need of a console port.
Also in the arcades we had a go on Outrun 2, which was great fun and reminded me that I still need to get Outrun Arcade on the PS3 or 360. Then we stumbled upon something else...
Paradise Lost is an arcade game from Ubisoft, sporting the artwork and environments from FarCry. You basically sit on gun emplacements and hold the trigger down while knobheads in Crocodile Dundee hats run into your line of fire and collapse into frankly weird shapes thanks to the sub-par ragdoll physics. The best part of the game, in fact, was the fact that in the continue screen you can alter the speed of the countdown by pressing the triggers and grenade buttons. And that is saying a lot. A bit of a read on Wikipedia tells me it is actually supposed to be an arcade version of FarCry. I suppose so. And Susie requests that I tell everyone that, for what it's worth, she had a higher kill count than me, and therefore won.
To wrap this up, my old XBox 360 came back, but the wife bought me an Elite anyway, along with Guitar Hero 5, Halo 3, Halo 3 ODST, Ninja Gaiden II, Prototype, Red Faction Guerrilla and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which should keep me occupied for a while. Also got Halo 2 on standby too, as I have only played the first one up until now, and I'm quite looking forward to hopefully making a late discovery as to what the fuss is all about. Verdict next week.
Spent the last week in Scarborough, having been married and stuff. It was a great ceremony, and aside from a stupidly parked van and some obnoxious wankers in a pub, a great week. But oh, this blog is about videogames, and two weeks have passed!
The first week at home I spent mainly playing through Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, trying to get it fresh in my mind before Uncharted 2 plops through my letter box in a couple of weeks. I don't care what anyone says, in my opinion it's probably the best current-gen game so far, speaking from a single-player perspective. In fact, only the XBox fanboys who are content to do the exact same things over and over again on multiplayer Gears or Left 4 Dead seem to have anything bad to say about it, and that's mainly about a lack of multiplayer, which will change in a few weeks. They seem to overlook the absolutely gorgeous graphics and animation, brilliant voice-acting and the fact that the gameplay, while doing nothing new, is among the best in it's field.
Anyway, ranting aside, I went to Scarborough armed with my PSP, and while I was there I got very much acquainted with Resistance: Retribution. At first I was unsure, with the frankly unconventional controls and Razzy-worthy dialogue and voice-acting, but it ended up dragging me in, and is actually more entertaining than Resistance 2. The main character, James Grayson, is a far cry from the solemn, heroic Nathan Hale: He's foul mouthed, racist and sounds like a mixture of Ray Winstone and Kano from Mortal Kombat. In the opening scenes of the game he stumbles upon his brother, Johnny, half way through being converted into a Chimera, and is forced to kill him for his own good. He then clicks his heels, tips his hat and sets off to kill all of the Chimera by himself, like a Cockney Punisher.
Well, a Cockney Punisher who occasionally slips into an Australian accent anyway. The accents are inconsistent throughout, at one point a soldier went from being Scottish to English and back again in one cutscene like an Oblivion hobo. The game was obviously acted out by a non-British cast. But the one-liners in the game did keep me entertained and had me struggling for a title to this post. My favourite was 'I will rape your skull'. God bless.
It also keeps the feel from the first Resistance, more of a wartime aesthetic, as opposed to the futuristic and very American feel of R2, which in my opinion was one of the things that lost the series' appeal. The other main things that R2 changed were the limited weapon capacity and regenerating health as seen in, well, every other shooter around at the minute, losing the series' uniqueness, and both are back to the retro styles in Retribution too, which is nice.
The game looks gorgeous too. In fact, if you have a PSP just buy it for fuck's sake. Unless you're french, that is; it's really quite racist in places. It's definitely one of the stronger titles on the handheld though.
One of the first things that my new wife did after the day was hand me my ass on Guitar Hero Arcade. Granted, she was playing on easy to my hard, but it was very one-sided. Realising afterwards that it is really just a port of Guitar Hero III, where the hard setting is slightly out of my comfort zone, we had two rematches with me on medium, both victories for me, and another on hard, hers again. Great fun. Afterwards we cooled down with a game on House of the Dead 4, which is strongly in need of a console port.
Also in the arcades we had a go on Outrun 2, which was great fun and reminded me that I still need to get Outrun Arcade on the PS3 or 360. Then we stumbled upon something else...
Paradise Lost is an arcade game from Ubisoft, sporting the artwork and environments from FarCry. You basically sit on gun emplacements and hold the trigger down while knobheads in Crocodile Dundee hats run into your line of fire and collapse into frankly weird shapes thanks to the sub-par ragdoll physics. The best part of the game, in fact, was the fact that in the continue screen you can alter the speed of the countdown by pressing the triggers and grenade buttons. And that is saying a lot. A bit of a read on Wikipedia tells me it is actually supposed to be an arcade version of FarCry. I suppose so. And Susie requests that I tell everyone that, for what it's worth, she had a higher kill count than me, and therefore won.
To wrap this up, my old XBox 360 came back, but the wife bought me an Elite anyway, along with Guitar Hero 5, Halo 3, Halo 3 ODST, Ninja Gaiden II, Prototype, Red Faction Guerrilla and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which should keep me occupied for a while. Also got Halo 2 on standby too, as I have only played the first one up until now, and I'm quite looking forward to hopefully making a late discovery as to what the fuss is all about. Verdict next week.
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