I haven't forgotten to post again, truth be told I've just not been all that arsed about gaming over the last couple of weeks, so I've had little to write about.
I suppose the biggest news is my acquisition of a second-hand Nintendo 3DS, Which set me back a meagre £149.99, less than the proposed price cut and I'll still get the freebies from the Ambassador Programme. Also, the dumbassed previous owners had left an 8gb SD card in the machine, further sweetening my deal. If you're reading this by the way, I deleted your holiday photos.
The only games I've picked up, and indeed the only currently available 3DS games that I'm interested in, are The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition (Yes, I'm fully aware that they are both games I already own, I'll buy what I want, you're not my real dad), and I'm saving Zelda for my week in Wales next week, but I'm suitably impressed with SSFIV. It looks better than I ever expected it to, with character models that look almost on a par with it's PS3 counterpart. The backgrounds don't hold up all that well, being made up of layered, stationary 2D sprites, and it gives the whole thing a look like one of those 3D picture box things from Art Attack. The backgrounds are also very low-res, but that's only noticeable in the cutscene before you fight Akuma in Arcade Mode.
As far as gameplay goes, it's about the best version of SFIV I've played (keep in mind I haven't had a go on Arcade Edition yet), must notably because it's got the unreasonably priced DLC costume packs bundled within. Also, the touch screen displays shortcuts to two of your character's Specials and their Super and Ultra, which takes the skill out of it somewhat, rendering them even easier to pull off than Mortal Kombat's all-too-accessible X-Ray moves, but it makes some of the ridiculously difficult moves like Zangief's Ultimate Atomic Buster actually useful, and the charge moves like Guile's Sonic Boom able to be pulled off without being overly obvious to your opponent.
So yeah, good game. The only other thing I've really been playing, albeit at a snail's pace, is Bethesda's Hunted: The Demon's Forge on PS3, and, well, it's alright. I commented the other week on how every game tries to rip off God/Gears of War, but Hunted is the first game I've played that tries to do both. The two lead characters are each equipped with a Bow for cover-based shooting, and a sword and shield for close combat, with sadistic elf Elara specialising in archery and tribal-covered meat head Caddoc majoring in, well, being a meat head. To be honest, the close combat is that dull, boring and most importantly difficult that I've spent just about all of my time behind the cross hairs of the bloodthirsty elf, partly to take advantage of Caddoc's seemingly unlimited reserves of health when under the AI's supervision, and partly because the ranged combat is pretty fun, infinitely more so than the tiresome swordplay.
Occasionally the game attempts to plagiarise a third genre too, the Dragon Age/Dungeon Siege archetype of RPG, with levelling up, short conversational segments and a magic system that is utterly pointless, as it brings nothing to the table. And to say it prides itself on it's split-screen coop multiplayer, it handles that woefully - the fact that even on a widescreen TV the screen is split horizontally, resulting in neither my wife nor I being able to see pretty much anything even on our 40" screen because our letterbox views were too tiny, is unbelievably under-researched, and to add insult to injury the already sub-par graphics are noticeably downgraded too. As this was my first impression of the game, I can't say I was too delighted.
But after a couple of hours with the single-player game, despite it's faults, I find myself strangely endeared. For a game so destined for failure, a surprisingly deep history has been crafted, reminiscent of that of the Dragon Age series. I keep hearing about towns that I'm unable to visit, and discover myself wondering what they look like, how the architecture looks and so on, and with every hint at the fate of the apparently all but extinct Elven race that Elara hails from, at the hands of the so-far-unseen Minotaurs, I yearn to learn exactly what happened and itch for revenge. Yes, Hunted is an okay game, but it's an okay game in a sea of excellent games this year and as such will fall into obscurity.
So, as a parting note as I head off to the Welsh countryside, I put forward a conundrum that has bothered me for some time: Why is it that Bethesda's grasp of the open-world RPG is completely unrivalled - nobody else even comes close to the experience of games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 - yet they seemingly find it so hard to conquer any other genre?
Showing posts with label Gears of War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gears of War. Show all posts
Wednesday, 3 August 2011
Tuesday, 14 December 2010
We don't speak anymore of War...
As an avid Mortal Kombat fan and an avid God of War fan, I saw last weekend's new trailer for the upcoming Mortal Kombat game unveiling Kratos as a guest character, and promptly went mad. Heading over to the old Mortal Kombat forum that I used to frequent a while back, I found that, to no surprise whatsoever, the franchise's 'fanbase' were less than happy, as they have been for every new MK release since I joined the boards, back in the days of MK: Deadly Alliance.
Upon telling them all they were overreacting, as a response to one guy trolling the threads with Kratos spam-hate and another hypochondriac claiming that this single character addition, who might I add has no bearing on the storyline whatsoever and is simply there as an Easter Egg, had sent the 'good' (obviously ignoring the sales figures and the fans' own reactions to the series for the past decade or so) name of Mortal Kombat 'down the drain', I was informed that I have 'no respect for the series' that I have followed since the age of seven, and have bought and still own at least one copy of each game in the series in some form or another. So, I feel prompted to write in support of Kratos' appearance.
Financially, we'll begin with. Kratos himself is a household name. He's starred in six of his own games over four systems (look it up, there was a GoW for Mobile Phones), and made cameos in others such as LittleBigPlanet, Modnation Racers, Heavenly Sword (in a fashion) and SoulCalibur. Despite being a PlayStation-exclusive series, each God of War game has drastically outsold the Mortal Kombat that was released nearest to it's own date. So really, it's an honour that such a high-profile name should make it into a series which has fallen so far, and the GoW fans it will draw into MK, which no doubt greatly outnumber it's own fans (who all seem to hate the games anyway), will help ensure financial success and spur WB Games into funding the continuation of the series. But of course, if Mr. Ed Boon wants to make any money out of the game, then he's instantly a sellout.
Right then, my second point. Kratos fits in with the Mortal Kombat universe. I'm hard pressed to think of another videogame protagonist that is as brutal and visceral as the War God himself, and MK seems to be trying to push the boundaries of violence and brutality with the new release. Not only that, but Kratos is on a mission to destroy the Gods, and MK features no less than three Gods as playable characters throughout the series. In SoulCalibur he was potentially wasted, because of the lack of gore, and he didn't fit in with the uber-clean and shiny look of an eastern-made game. MK has both bases covered.
It's come to my attention that since the Kratos bombshell dropped, Epic Games' Cliff Bleszinski and Mark Rein have showed interest in slapping a Gears of War character into the 360 version, which is sure to rub salt into the wounds of the pent-up masses. I'm hoping for the Cole Train, not only do I love him almost as much as Kratos, but his carefree, comic relief attitude is sure to ruffle the feathers of many a rectally clenched MK 'purist'. I can't wait.
So, as a little bit of fun, I set up a petition urging David Jaffe to include our beloved Kratos in every game he possibly can from now on. I would love to see him manually decapitating a Chimera in Resistance 3, applying sandal to Hig in Killzone 3, high fiving Lara Croft after helping her uncover some ancient Greek treasure or kicking back and relaxing after disemboweling the Grim Reaper for trying to interfere with his indoor barbeque in the next expansion pack for The Sims 3. You can view and sign the petition here, so go for it, just for a laugh. Get your pets to sign it too, and your gran, she loves a bit of dismemberment.
And to sign out, I thought I'd prepare a little something for you guys.
Not the biggest MK collection going, but not bad for someone who has no respect for the series. See you guys later.
Upon telling them all they were overreacting, as a response to one guy trolling the threads with Kratos spam-hate and another hypochondriac claiming that this single character addition, who might I add has no bearing on the storyline whatsoever and is simply there as an Easter Egg, had sent the 'good' (obviously ignoring the sales figures and the fans' own reactions to the series for the past decade or so) name of Mortal Kombat 'down the drain', I was informed that I have 'no respect for the series' that I have followed since the age of seven, and have bought and still own at least one copy of each game in the series in some form or another. So, I feel prompted to write in support of Kratos' appearance.
Financially, we'll begin with. Kratos himself is a household name. He's starred in six of his own games over four systems (look it up, there was a GoW for Mobile Phones), and made cameos in others such as LittleBigPlanet, Modnation Racers, Heavenly Sword (in a fashion) and SoulCalibur. Despite being a PlayStation-exclusive series, each God of War game has drastically outsold the Mortal Kombat that was released nearest to it's own date. So really, it's an honour that such a high-profile name should make it into a series which has fallen so far, and the GoW fans it will draw into MK, which no doubt greatly outnumber it's own fans (who all seem to hate the games anyway), will help ensure financial success and spur WB Games into funding the continuation of the series. But of course, if Mr. Ed Boon wants to make any money out of the game, then he's instantly a sellout.
Right then, my second point. Kratos fits in with the Mortal Kombat universe. I'm hard pressed to think of another videogame protagonist that is as brutal and visceral as the War God himself, and MK seems to be trying to push the boundaries of violence and brutality with the new release. Not only that, but Kratos is on a mission to destroy the Gods, and MK features no less than three Gods as playable characters throughout the series. In SoulCalibur he was potentially wasted, because of the lack of gore, and he didn't fit in with the uber-clean and shiny look of an eastern-made game. MK has both bases covered.
It's come to my attention that since the Kratos bombshell dropped, Epic Games' Cliff Bleszinski and Mark Rein have showed interest in slapping a Gears of War character into the 360 version, which is sure to rub salt into the wounds of the pent-up masses. I'm hoping for the Cole Train, not only do I love him almost as much as Kratos, but his carefree, comic relief attitude is sure to ruffle the feathers of many a rectally clenched MK 'purist'. I can't wait.
So, as a little bit of fun, I set up a petition urging David Jaffe to include our beloved Kratos in every game he possibly can from now on. I would love to see him manually decapitating a Chimera in Resistance 3, applying sandal to Hig in Killzone 3, high fiving Lara Croft after helping her uncover some ancient Greek treasure or kicking back and relaxing after disemboweling the Grim Reaper for trying to interfere with his indoor barbeque in the next expansion pack for The Sims 3. You can view and sign the petition here, so go for it, just for a laugh. Get your pets to sign it too, and your gran, she loves a bit of dismemberment.
And to sign out, I thought I'd prepare a little something for you guys.
Not the biggest MK collection going, but not bad for someone who has no respect for the series. See you guys later.
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
Hey little sister, who's your Superman?
We haven't forgotten you, oh no. I've been caught up with brushing up on my bass guitar skills (sic) and finally discovering this Facebook thing, and my cohort Trev has been busy playing Guild Wars with his siblings none stop, and there are simply not enough hours in the day (hence our still-present title). In the relatively small time I have spent gaming though, I've managed to polish off a few more noteworthy games.
Firstly, I've had another run through Ghostbusters and Batman: Arkham Asylum, two of last year's best games. I've been itching to replay Ghostbusters since I saw the credits roll the first time around, and as I had just finished watching the two films, it seemed like fate when I opened the shame box (the pile was getting a little untidy) and the digitized faces of Murray, Ramis, Aykroid and Hudson met my gaze.
For the absolutely criminal amount of people who ignored the game upon release, Ghostbusters is a continuation of the movie canon, set in 1991 and focusing on the impending threat of a Gozer cultist intent on bringing the asexual flat-topped deity back to the big apple. You play as an unnamed recruit (I say 'unnamed', you get called everything under the sun during the game), hired to test the team's experimental equipment, and retread some classic environments such as the New York City Public Library and the Sedgewick Hotel in a Gears-style 3rd person shooter.
It's a standard affair most of the time, shoot enemies until they drop, that kind of thing, but it really shines when you come up against 'proper' ghosts, who must be whittled down and trapped, just like in the films. There's a real feeling of weight when you're trying to reel in your quarry, and they are thrashing about and generally being unruly, and it's often quite tricky, and thus rewarding, to finally lock the little blighter away. And the whole thing is carried on the shoulders of the awesome comic stylings of the original cast. Plus, the graphics are still great, a rendered Ernie Hudson actually fooled a friend of the wife into believing it was filmed footage. With it's loyal fan service and easter eggs (dancing toaster anyone?), Ghostbusters is essential for any child of the eighties.
Arkham was more strategically placed in the shame box, as the teasers for Arkham City made me salivate with anticipation. Not going into too much as I've already covered B:AA in the blog, but it still looks amazing and I really immersed myself in the combat system this time around, reversing moves, beating up thugs with their own weapons and silently picking off terrified inmates left right and centre, whereas last time I was just hammering the square button until my thumbs bled. I don't think I've seen a combat system this fluid, except maybe in Assassin's Creed, but compared to Arkham the fights in AC seem lifeless and slow. Bring on Arkham City, and soon.
After tiring of Oblivion once more, after another 100+ hours trudging through Tamriel, I skipped a few games in the box until I got to the first 360 game in there, a lovely little game known as Prey. Prey is a 2006 FPS, focusing on a Cherokee alien abductee known as Domasi 'Tommy' Towadi as he gets up to all kinds of hi jinks on board an alien mother ship as they try to go about their business, the cheeky little scamp. Of course, the aliens' business is naturally the abduction and consumption of entire races, so Tommy's interfering is a noble act.
The game is relentlessly old school, forgetting the two-gun system and regenerating health seen in just about every FPS since Halo, instead focusing on a more Doom-like approach. But before you go into flashbacks of having all of your health sapped by a Cyber Demon and running around screaming, frantically searching for a health pack, Be aware that Tommy, being a Cherokee, is very attuned to the spirit world, which regurgitates him back into the world every time he pops his clogs with a refilled health bar and a warm fuzzy feeling inside. But that's also Prey's downfall, after the first couple of levels death isn't even an inconvenience, and it makes the game far too easy even on it's hardest difficulty setting, on which I was able to polish the game off in 8 hours.
But where Prey is physically easy, mentally it's a very difficult game. The environment is often sickeningly gruesome, with the alien ship's seemingly biological parts glistening as if slimey, and mutilated people, some dead, some alive, litter the halls. Tommy's main objective is to rescue his girlfriend Jen, and when you finally find her, you will probably witness one of the most powerful and emotive set-pieces in videogame history. You can get hold of Prey now for about £3, and I thoroughly recommend it. It's nostalgic to a simpler time in FPSes, but pioneered some features that later games took all the credit for (Portal springs to mind, for one). You need Prey, and I need you to have it.
Last, but not least, after seeing the incredible teaser for Bioshock: Infinite, I decided that it was High Time I returned to Rapture and procured a copy of Bioshock 2, for the tender price of £7.99 from GAME. I enjoyed the first one, but felt it didn't need a sequel, and as such dismissed BS2 as a mere cash-in, but truth be told I'm enjoying it far more than I ever thought I would.
Where BS had you playing as a normal man caught up by chance in the ruined atlantian city of Rature, BS2 straps you into the oversized boots of one of the first Big Daddies, bio-mechanical monsters that stalk the streets with their ghoulish little girls extracting a substance known as ADAM from the lifeless bodies of the ill-fated. The extra strength a Big Daddy commands means that every weapon can be carried in one hand, leaving the other open, meaning that a Plasmid ability (a special power such as Telekinesis or Pyrokinesis gained from rewriting your DNA with chemicals) is always at the ready, eliminating the need to switch between them mid fight and making the battles a lot more streamlined. Aside from that, nothing else has really changed, but I'm still waist-deep in it so I could be surprised like I was with Red Dead, no doubt minutes after I post this. But why fix something that wasn't broken?
Okay wrapping it up. Finally gotten around to downloading Alan Wake's first bit of DLC, titled The Signal, but haven't had a go yet. Will do soon. And I've had a good go on the trial versions of Limbo and Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, both of which are fantastic pieces of software. The thing is though, I only have the Microsoft Points for one of them, and I can't decide which I should get for the life of me. I'm tilting for the bleak, soul-crushing but ultimately beautiful Limbo though, as I think Maybe I could coax official 24HG commenter Paul into a bit of co-op once Lara hits the PS3 next month. Any views on this via the comments section, please and thank yous.
So yeah, we're still here. Trev's possibly going to crop up at some point with reviews of Nier and Castlevania HD (which is shit by the way, as far as the trial goes anyway), and I'll try and make my visits a bit less sporadic. Buhbye xx.
Firstly, I've had another run through Ghostbusters and Batman: Arkham Asylum, two of last year's best games. I've been itching to replay Ghostbusters since I saw the credits roll the first time around, and as I had just finished watching the two films, it seemed like fate when I opened the shame box (the pile was getting a little untidy) and the digitized faces of Murray, Ramis, Aykroid and Hudson met my gaze.
For the absolutely criminal amount of people who ignored the game upon release, Ghostbusters is a continuation of the movie canon, set in 1991 and focusing on the impending threat of a Gozer cultist intent on bringing the asexual flat-topped deity back to the big apple. You play as an unnamed recruit (I say 'unnamed', you get called everything under the sun during the game), hired to test the team's experimental equipment, and retread some classic environments such as the New York City Public Library and the Sedgewick Hotel in a Gears-style 3rd person shooter.
It's a standard affair most of the time, shoot enemies until they drop, that kind of thing, but it really shines when you come up against 'proper' ghosts, who must be whittled down and trapped, just like in the films. There's a real feeling of weight when you're trying to reel in your quarry, and they are thrashing about and generally being unruly, and it's often quite tricky, and thus rewarding, to finally lock the little blighter away. And the whole thing is carried on the shoulders of the awesome comic stylings of the original cast. Plus, the graphics are still great, a rendered Ernie Hudson actually fooled a friend of the wife into believing it was filmed footage. With it's loyal fan service and easter eggs (dancing toaster anyone?), Ghostbusters is essential for any child of the eighties.
Arkham was more strategically placed in the shame box, as the teasers for Arkham City made me salivate with anticipation. Not going into too much as I've already covered B:AA in the blog, but it still looks amazing and I really immersed myself in the combat system this time around, reversing moves, beating up thugs with their own weapons and silently picking off terrified inmates left right and centre, whereas last time I was just hammering the square button until my thumbs bled. I don't think I've seen a combat system this fluid, except maybe in Assassin's Creed, but compared to Arkham the fights in AC seem lifeless and slow. Bring on Arkham City, and soon.
After tiring of Oblivion once more, after another 100+ hours trudging through Tamriel, I skipped a few games in the box until I got to the first 360 game in there, a lovely little game known as Prey. Prey is a 2006 FPS, focusing on a Cherokee alien abductee known as Domasi 'Tommy' Towadi as he gets up to all kinds of hi jinks on board an alien mother ship as they try to go about their business, the cheeky little scamp. Of course, the aliens' business is naturally the abduction and consumption of entire races, so Tommy's interfering is a noble act.
The game is relentlessly old school, forgetting the two-gun system and regenerating health seen in just about every FPS since Halo, instead focusing on a more Doom-like approach. But before you go into flashbacks of having all of your health sapped by a Cyber Demon and running around screaming, frantically searching for a health pack, Be aware that Tommy, being a Cherokee, is very attuned to the spirit world, which regurgitates him back into the world every time he pops his clogs with a refilled health bar and a warm fuzzy feeling inside. But that's also Prey's downfall, after the first couple of levels death isn't even an inconvenience, and it makes the game far too easy even on it's hardest difficulty setting, on which I was able to polish the game off in 8 hours.
But where Prey is physically easy, mentally it's a very difficult game. The environment is often sickeningly gruesome, with the alien ship's seemingly biological parts glistening as if slimey, and mutilated people, some dead, some alive, litter the halls. Tommy's main objective is to rescue his girlfriend Jen, and when you finally find her, you will probably witness one of the most powerful and emotive set-pieces in videogame history. You can get hold of Prey now for about £3, and I thoroughly recommend it. It's nostalgic to a simpler time in FPSes, but pioneered some features that later games took all the credit for (Portal springs to mind, for one). You need Prey, and I need you to have it.
Last, but not least, after seeing the incredible teaser for Bioshock: Infinite, I decided that it was High Time I returned to Rapture and procured a copy of Bioshock 2, for the tender price of £7.99 from GAME. I enjoyed the first one, but felt it didn't need a sequel, and as such dismissed BS2 as a mere cash-in, but truth be told I'm enjoying it far more than I ever thought I would.
Where BS had you playing as a normal man caught up by chance in the ruined atlantian city of Rature, BS2 straps you into the oversized boots of one of the first Big Daddies, bio-mechanical monsters that stalk the streets with their ghoulish little girls extracting a substance known as ADAM from the lifeless bodies of the ill-fated. The extra strength a Big Daddy commands means that every weapon can be carried in one hand, leaving the other open, meaning that a Plasmid ability (a special power such as Telekinesis or Pyrokinesis gained from rewriting your DNA with chemicals) is always at the ready, eliminating the need to switch between them mid fight and making the battles a lot more streamlined. Aside from that, nothing else has really changed, but I'm still waist-deep in it so I could be surprised like I was with Red Dead, no doubt minutes after I post this. But why fix something that wasn't broken?
Okay wrapping it up. Finally gotten around to downloading Alan Wake's first bit of DLC, titled The Signal, but haven't had a go yet. Will do soon. And I've had a good go on the trial versions of Limbo and Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, both of which are fantastic pieces of software. The thing is though, I only have the Microsoft Points for one of them, and I can't decide which I should get for the life of me. I'm tilting for the bleak, soul-crushing but ultimately beautiful Limbo though, as I think Maybe I could coax official 24HG commenter Paul into a bit of co-op once Lara hits the PS3 next month. Any views on this via the comments section, please and thank yous.
So yeah, we're still here. Trev's possibly going to crop up at some point with reviews of Nier and Castlevania HD (which is shit by the way, as far as the trial goes anyway), and I'll try and make my visits a bit less sporadic. Buhbye xx.
Saturday, 10 July 2010
Uhh, so this is your big day, huh? (24 Hour Gamer is 1!)
It's hard to believe, but today marks a whole year since my first post as a fledgling blogger, a three-paragraph effort with very very brief looks at 24: The Game, Assassin's Creed and The Punisher: No Mercy, which, quite understandably, nobody read. With a combination of no paragraph spacing, a lack of the html skills to add pictures (before Blogger improved the user interface) and nothing particularly interesting to say, things didn't exactly look rosey for 24HG, but I didn't mind.
See that right there? That's paragraph spacing. The extent of what I've learned is astonishing. So anyway, with the blog slowly picking up momentum, and readers of course, over the last year, I'm going to go over the good and bad times, some of which will be new to you guys.
Firstly, the most mentioned game over the whole year. I checked a few months ago, and the clear winner was Epic's erm... epic, Gears of War, obviously down to every game that involves a gun chiefly taking place mostly behind a waist high wall. But it has since fallen behind games like The Elder Scrolls, Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect, the latter of which I had actually assumed would be the most mentioned, as I've actually played both ME and ME2 twice each over the last year. But the actual most blogged about game, deservedly so, is Uncharted, with the series' second iteration taking the game world by storm just before Christmas. If I'd have known how terrified I would become of Dragon Age back then, U2 would have most definitely been my Game of the Year.
E-mails. I've taken the e-mail button from the site now, since 24HG is no longer a one-man operation, but for a while it was there and I had a few pretty funny messages. Firstly, an offer was extended to me, following my use of lyrics from 'Borderline' in the title to my Borderlands-centric post, to join a Madonna fan club. I quickly declined, as the version of Borderline that I had in my head throughout the whole 35 hours of play that Borderlands offered was in fact a cover by pop-punk stalwarts Showoff. But the offer was nice. I had an overwhelming amount of e-mails (like, three of them!) asking me to review Final Fantasy XIII, and I still haven't. And let's just say my treatment of Modern Warfare 2 didn't go down well. And finally, I had a very politely worded e-mail asking me to give up the name '24 Hour Gamer' and my login details for my Twitter account. Needless to say, I didn't.
Speaking of Twitter, I set up my account (@Pete_24HG, or follow Trev @TjStan if he ever tweets again) alongside the blog to whore my posts out to anyone who'd listen. It's seen me post about everything from Blockbuster pricing the first Fallout 3 Expansion disk at £40 to awesome fictional metal bands in Alan Wake, but perhaps most noteworthy was my 1000th tweet, which read like a Shakespearean sonnet: "@MarkySharky Kiss my ass :p".
So onwards and upwards then. Hopefully, with Trev on board, 24HG should continue to expand over the next year, potentially with Podcasts, video reviews and joint pieces, maybe even a forum or something, who knows? We're open to suggestions too, anything YOU'D like to see, just pop it in the comments box, tweet at us, or e-mail one of us at the24hourgamer@googlemail.com or thetrevstan@googlemail.com and let us know.
Finally, a big thanks to everyone who's helped out: To Trev 24HG for extending his hand in aid, like Elika catching the 2008 Prince of Persia as he plummets into a chasm for the 4000th time (one day I'll compare you to a male character). To Susie, my wife, who not only actively encourages me to game, but also soundly kicked my ass on Guitar Hero Arcade on our actual honeymoon. To MarkySharky and CtrlAltKill of Twitter, for drilling into me the need to space paragraphs and add images respectively. To Paul and Raz7el, for always offering good videogame chat. To 30-Something Gamer for being my first follower and providing a great blog for me to read. Imagine Publishing's Dan Howdle for inadvertently mentioning the site in his Podcast a few times. The guys at the NowGamer forums. Paul_LFC at VideoGame Space. And everyone who's read and/or commented here at 24HG. It's been a good year.
See that right there? That's paragraph spacing. The extent of what I've learned is astonishing. So anyway, with the blog slowly picking up momentum, and readers of course, over the last year, I'm going to go over the good and bad times, some of which will be new to you guys.
Firstly, the most mentioned game over the whole year. I checked a few months ago, and the clear winner was Epic's erm... epic, Gears of War, obviously down to every game that involves a gun chiefly taking place mostly behind a waist high wall. But it has since fallen behind games like The Elder Scrolls, Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect, the latter of which I had actually assumed would be the most mentioned, as I've actually played both ME and ME2 twice each over the last year. But the actual most blogged about game, deservedly so, is Uncharted, with the series' second iteration taking the game world by storm just before Christmas. If I'd have known how terrified I would become of Dragon Age back then, U2 would have most definitely been my Game of the Year.
Uncharted: Officially the most popular game on 24HG.
E-mails. I've taken the e-mail button from the site now, since 24HG is no longer a one-man operation, but for a while it was there and I had a few pretty funny messages. Firstly, an offer was extended to me, following my use of lyrics from 'Borderline' in the title to my Borderlands-centric post, to join a Madonna fan club. I quickly declined, as the version of Borderline that I had in my head throughout the whole 35 hours of play that Borderlands offered was in fact a cover by pop-punk stalwarts Showoff. But the offer was nice. I had an overwhelming amount of e-mails (like, three of them!) asking me to review Final Fantasy XIII, and I still haven't. And let's just say my treatment of Modern Warfare 2 didn't go down well. And finally, I had a very politely worded e-mail asking me to give up the name '24 Hour Gamer' and my login details for my Twitter account. Needless to say, I didn't.
I'll review it one day. Probably. Possibly.
Speaking of Twitter, I set up my account (@Pete_24HG, or follow Trev @TjStan if he ever tweets again) alongside the blog to whore my posts out to anyone who'd listen. It's seen me post about everything from Blockbuster pricing the first Fallout 3 Expansion disk at £40 to awesome fictional metal bands in Alan Wake, but perhaps most noteworthy was my 1000th tweet, which read like a Shakespearean sonnet: "@MarkySharky Kiss my ass :p".
So onwards and upwards then. Hopefully, with Trev on board, 24HG should continue to expand over the next year, potentially with Podcasts, video reviews and joint pieces, maybe even a forum or something, who knows? We're open to suggestions too, anything YOU'D like to see, just pop it in the comments box, tweet at us, or e-mail one of us at the24hourgamer@googlemail.com or thetrevstan@googlemail.com and let us know.
Finally, a big thanks to everyone who's helped out: To Trev 24HG for extending his hand in aid, like Elika catching the 2008 Prince of Persia as he plummets into a chasm for the 4000th time (one day I'll compare you to a male character). To Susie, my wife, who not only actively encourages me to game, but also soundly kicked my ass on Guitar Hero Arcade on our actual honeymoon. To MarkySharky and CtrlAltKill of Twitter, for drilling into me the need to space paragraphs and add images respectively. To Paul and Raz7el, for always offering good videogame chat. To 30-Something Gamer for being my first follower and providing a great blog for me to read. Imagine Publishing's Dan Howdle for inadvertently mentioning the site in his Podcast a few times. The guys at the NowGamer forums. Paul_LFC at VideoGame Space. And everyone who's read and/or commented here at 24HG. It's been a good year.
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Alice in Wonderland
Hype is a cruel mistress. She waltzes in to a game's life and promises to spread the word, gets prospective fans excited, sends the media into a frenzy, and the ultimately undoes the game by building up a pre-reputation that it can't possibly ever live up to. Haze fell prey to this, with all the 'Halo on PS3' comments, when in reality it couldn't even hold a candle to the first Red Faction, or the PS2 port of Half-Life (Coincidentally two of the first four games I got for the console). Another casualty of hype was Fable, with verbal-diarrhea sufferer Peter Molyneux making all sorts of wild claims about features of the game that the XBox hardware couldn't even handle, and the otherwise fantastic RPG was stricken with a stigma that outlived the game's own lifespan.
I am going somewhere with all of this, I promise you. Alan Wake (a game that not even I had seen coming in this week's blog) has been in development for nine years, and was formally announced five years ago, and in that time, particularly in the last year or so, has fallen for lady hype hard.
I think the stupidest thing I'd heard was "It's like Heavy Rain on the 360", because the game is everything but that. If anything, it's more like Siren Blood Curse. Before I go on, I want to make it clear that I don't dislike Alan Wake, it's just decidedly average. A storyline that is genuinely gripping and involving (at least after a few hours anyway) is buried under a torrent of disgusting voice-acting, one-dimensional characters and graphics and animation that are just not up to the standard of the rest of this year's releases - Alan himself looks like he's having a stroke, and he seems to bare his teeth at people all the time, like a territorial dog. But hey, at least the 'Energizer' logo is clearly readable on the batteries you find lying around everywhere, and that's the important thing, right? In-game advertising? Anyway.
I see your schwartz is as big as mine...
The story goes: Alan Wake is a successful author, leather elbow pads and all, but has suffered epic writer's block since his last novel three years prior to the events of the game. His wife, Alice, attention seeking jerk and scared-of-the-dark woman-child, decides to lure him to some backwater hick town (which has somehow become a tourist trap despite looking like a bad northern council estate) under false pretense of having a quiet holiday, when really she was just trying to muse him into churning out another pay cheque.
The holiday is cut short however, when Alice is taken by dark forces and Wake looses two weeks of his life, only coming back to consciousness when he is involved in a car crash to find that he's written a book that's slowly coming true. And to top it all off, a dark entity is sweeping over the town and possessing the locals. Shit.
Alan Wake plays like a 'best of' from other franchises. Combat, for instance, is played out with a torch, that you must use to burn the 'dark energy' from your foes, before finishing them off with a couple of bullets, almost exactly like ObsCure. Then there's the bit where swarms of birds are attacking you, and you have to burn them by boosting your torch at them, like the driving section in Gears. Not enough? The enemies are all axe-wielding lumberjacks, who approach you slowly and throw their infinite reserves of hatchets at you, literally exactly like Resident Evil 4 (there are even Chainsaw bad guys that take more damage), even the animations could be ripped directly from Capcom's opus. The car crash scene is near frame-for-frame exactly like the first Silent Hill, and the use of flares as weapons is taken straight from the last. And the episodic formula is ripped from Alone in the Dark and Siren Blood Curse. I could go on all day.
But I won't. because Wake has a saving grace in it's story, which seemed pretty by the book until a plot twist turned everything upside down at the end of the third episode, which was where I last switched off, and I'm looking forward to going back to it tonight. Oh yeah, the collector's edition is fantastic too, and only the same price as the game itself at most places.
I've also gone back to the first of last generation's Prince of Persia games, The Sands of Time, in anticipation of the series' 'interquel', being released on friday. Regrettably, the game has aged horrifically, but it's interesting to see now how revolutionary it must have been at the time, and how that just passed me by when the game was released. You can really see how it helped shape games like Assassin's Creed, Uncharted and the last three Tomb Raiders, and other games of their ilk, and it makes you wonder where they would be if PoP never saw the light of day.
Realising you can rewind time: priceless.
As dated as it is I'm loving it, and can't believe that I've never finished it or even played the rest of the trilogy (sorry, quadrilogy now isn't it), because as a rule I love this type of game. Needless to say, I'm going to go out of my way to complete the story in the near future.
And after getting a lump in my throat over braining Sean Paul in Def Jam: Fight for NY the other week, I grabbed a copy of it's PSP port The Takeover last week. It's a little disappointing that the cutscenes are absent and the fighting is limited to one-on-one, but the core gameplay is still there. The great thing about Def Jam is that losing is just as fun as winning. You can always laugh when you realise you just got stoved in by Flava Flav, who happens to be sporting a rather nice tux.
Don't worry about the car, Xzibit was just gonna pimp it anyway.
However, the game employs one of my greatest pet peeves ever. What's the point in being able to customize your character if their skills and stats depend on what they're wearing? It's like 'yeah, you can look however you want, but if you actually want to win fights, you better wear what we tell you to'. It fucked me off in SoulCalibur IV, It's fucking me off now.
On that note I'll put a lid on it. Check back next week for Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands and possibly, just possibly, Metro 2033. Ciao.
I am going somewhere with all of this, I promise you. Alan Wake (a game that not even I had seen coming in this week's blog) has been in development for nine years, and was formally announced five years ago, and in that time, particularly in the last year or so, has fallen for lady hype hard.
I think the stupidest thing I'd heard was "It's like Heavy Rain on the 360", because the game is everything but that. If anything, it's more like Siren Blood Curse. Before I go on, I want to make it clear that I don't dislike Alan Wake, it's just decidedly average. A storyline that is genuinely gripping and involving (at least after a few hours anyway) is buried under a torrent of disgusting voice-acting, one-dimensional characters and graphics and animation that are just not up to the standard of the rest of this year's releases - Alan himself looks like he's having a stroke, and he seems to bare his teeth at people all the time, like a territorial dog. But hey, at least the 'Energizer' logo is clearly readable on the batteries you find lying around everywhere, and that's the important thing, right? In-game advertising? Anyway.
I see your schwartz is as big as mine...
The story goes: Alan Wake is a successful author, leather elbow pads and all, but has suffered epic writer's block since his last novel three years prior to the events of the game. His wife, Alice, attention seeking jerk and scared-of-the-dark woman-child, decides to lure him to some backwater hick town (which has somehow become a tourist trap despite looking like a bad northern council estate) under false pretense of having a quiet holiday, when really she was just trying to muse him into churning out another pay cheque.
The holiday is cut short however, when Alice is taken by dark forces and Wake looses two weeks of his life, only coming back to consciousness when he is involved in a car crash to find that he's written a book that's slowly coming true. And to top it all off, a dark entity is sweeping over the town and possessing the locals. Shit.
Alan Wake plays like a 'best of' from other franchises. Combat, for instance, is played out with a torch, that you must use to burn the 'dark energy' from your foes, before finishing them off with a couple of bullets, almost exactly like ObsCure. Then there's the bit where swarms of birds are attacking you, and you have to burn them by boosting your torch at them, like the driving section in Gears. Not enough? The enemies are all axe-wielding lumberjacks, who approach you slowly and throw their infinite reserves of hatchets at you, literally exactly like Resident Evil 4 (there are even Chainsaw bad guys that take more damage), even the animations could be ripped directly from Capcom's opus. The car crash scene is near frame-for-frame exactly like the first Silent Hill, and the use of flares as weapons is taken straight from the last. And the episodic formula is ripped from Alone in the Dark and Siren Blood Curse. I could go on all day.
But I won't. because Wake has a saving grace in it's story, which seemed pretty by the book until a plot twist turned everything upside down at the end of the third episode, which was where I last switched off, and I'm looking forward to going back to it tonight. Oh yeah, the collector's edition is fantastic too, and only the same price as the game itself at most places.
I've also gone back to the first of last generation's Prince of Persia games, The Sands of Time, in anticipation of the series' 'interquel', being released on friday. Regrettably, the game has aged horrifically, but it's interesting to see now how revolutionary it must have been at the time, and how that just passed me by when the game was released. You can really see how it helped shape games like Assassin's Creed, Uncharted and the last three Tomb Raiders, and other games of their ilk, and it makes you wonder where they would be if PoP never saw the light of day.
Realising you can rewind time: priceless.
As dated as it is I'm loving it, and can't believe that I've never finished it or even played the rest of the trilogy (sorry, quadrilogy now isn't it), because as a rule I love this type of game. Needless to say, I'm going to go out of my way to complete the story in the near future.
And after getting a lump in my throat over braining Sean Paul in Def Jam: Fight for NY the other week, I grabbed a copy of it's PSP port The Takeover last week. It's a little disappointing that the cutscenes are absent and the fighting is limited to one-on-one, but the core gameplay is still there. The great thing about Def Jam is that losing is just as fun as winning. You can always laugh when you realise you just got stoved in by Flava Flav, who happens to be sporting a rather nice tux.
Don't worry about the car, Xzibit was just gonna pimp it anyway.
However, the game employs one of my greatest pet peeves ever. What's the point in being able to customize your character if their skills and stats depend on what they're wearing? It's like 'yeah, you can look however you want, but if you actually want to win fights, you better wear what we tell you to'. It fucked me off in SoulCalibur IV, It's fucking me off now.
On that note I'll put a lid on it. Check back next week for Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands and possibly, just possibly, Metro 2033. Ciao.
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Oh Mickey, you're so fine, you're so fine, you blow my mind.
Where to start? Well, if I said that the last week had been a good gaming week for me, I'd be lying through my teeth. It started off well, with my re-discovery of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which has eaten up about 12 hours of time that I should have spent sleeping this week. I have played Oblivion before, about three times from start to finish actually, so I thought I'd mix things up a little this time. Playing as a Khajiit, an anthropomorphic cat for those who haven't played the game yet (although you really should, it's a very likely candidate for the best game ever made), I've taken it upon myself to make it my goal to hunt and kill every Argonian (lizard people, and historical enemies of the Khajiit) in the game world, after they've served any purpose they might have that is.
Aside from that, this is the first time I've tried playing the game with Light Armour, and only the second time using swords, as I usually go for heavy armour and axes or (my favourite) warhammers. And it's my first time out of the dungeon that I wasn't in the shoes of an Elf too, so a lot of the game is fresh to me this time. But that's the high point of the week over right there.
After the surprisingly great ObsCure, I was eager to fire up ObsCure II on the Wii, and was appalled. None of the atmosphere had survived, the creepy post-Gothic feeling of the original's high school setting had been replaced by a college frat house full of asshole stereotype douchebags with absolutely disgusting voice actors that they must have scraped up off the street. I commented on how Sum 41's 'Still Waiting' failed to set the scene in the first one, but the opening music to ObsCure II (god knows what it was) was comically inappropriate, actually cheerful sounding.
Then you get thrown into the gameplay, and the erratic animation combined with the standard sketchy-at-best Wii controls that make any attempt at a serious game (bar Resident Evil 4) a chore make the game virtually unplayable. The writers seem to have forgotten that our heroes found a cure for their infection at the end of the first game, because now they are having to take medicines to stop it spreading. Also, none of the returning characters look, sound or behave as they did before (our hero Stan has even stopped talking like Vanilla Ice), showing yet more lack of attention by the developers. And after a bad nightmare sequence that shamelessly ripped off Silent Hill and a run-in with the game's very first enemies who can tear about a third of your health away with one hit, it wasn't long before I switched it off. If I ever find it for a decent price on the PS2, I might be tempted to have a go at it with a normal controller, but as it stands I'm just not interested enough to put myself through it.
So I moved on to this week's main event, the infamous Rogue Warrior on the PS3. Rogue Warrior is a supposed true story based on the autobiography of former Navy Seal commander (and tourette's sufferer, if the game is anything to go by) Dick Marcinko. I'm not going to skirt around things here, this game is BAD. But it's not insultingly bad, like Haze, it's laugh-out-loud, piss-hilarious bad. I suppose, if you'd spend £40 on it, then it would be a bit of a kick in the balls, but I only spent £14.99 (I can only imagine how bad the person who sold it to Cash Converters felt, he can't have gotten more than a tenner for it less than a month after it was released. I hope for his sake he stole it).
I'm going to start with the script. Dick, voiced by muscular pensioner Mickey Rourke, must have said about 4 or 5 words before his first 'fuck' broke through, and then never looked back. Apart from the D-grade military action movie jargon I think I heard one line of F-bomb free dialogue in the whole game, and that was a reference to cunnilingus. At one point, close to death, Dick descended into one long, uninterrupted swear word, which went something like "fucknshitbastardcommiemotherfuckinfuck". That's quality writing right there. From his voice, you get the feeling that Mickey's heart wasn't really in it. But you also get the feeling that half of the expletives weren't actually on the script too.
Right, gameplay time. Rogue Warrior is a standard FPS, one man versus the whole of North Korea and the Soviet Union type of affair. It's cover system is like a happy marriage between Killzone 2 and Gears of War, and it feels great until you reload. If you leave cover half way through reloading, the action is cancelled. It's okay though, there's no reason to leave cover, because the enemies will just stroll over and stand at the other side of whatever you're hiding behind, happily firing round after round into the bulletproof barrier, allowing you to use blindfire and just poke your gun over the top and kill him without even aiming.
The enemies take cover too though, and I actually saw one throw a grenade at the cover he was hiding behind, resulting in the explosive bouncing right back and landing in his lap. So it's no surprise that Kim Jong Il's finest pose very little threat to you throughout the game. The only problem comes with the Shotgun carriers, who defy the laws of the world by being able to shoot the hairs off a flea's back at 200 yards. Attention to detail, nothing is spared.
Like with The Punisher on the PS2, I tended to favour the melee kills, which are triggered by moving close to an enemy and pressing the X button. This sends the camera out to a third person view so you can admire you suitably brutal finisher, ranging from turning an enemy's gun on himself to slitting his throat, to the frankly worrying move involving sticking your knife up a poor communist's arsehole. The mind boggles.
It's hard to imagine, that with the publisher of Fallout 3 and the developer of Rogue Trooper and Aliens vs. Predator, that an FPS with such a rich upbringing could go so wrong. Whoever thought it would be a great idea to let people play as a demolitions expert (the game's main aim is to plant explosives on missiles) was sorely mistaken. And who decided that 2 and a half hours was an adequate lifespan of a game was frankly insane. But at least it made me laugh.
And that's about it. I had a quick go on Madworld the other day, and it didn't really grab me. The visuals are headache inducing (reminding me of pictures I used to draw as a child, where I would only colour in the blood), and it seems to me that they had tried to come up with a valid storyline involving terrorists at the start of the game, but then abandoning it and leaving the cutscene in. One minute the president is addressing the nation over a terrorist attack and promising to send in a special agent, the next you're in a violent Running Man style game show. Then it's just hitting people until the game over screen. I'll have another go, but I don't predict I'll fall for it. Speaking of falling for things, I tried the Just Cause 2 demo last night, and I think I'll be bringing the full game home on the 26th. Even though I loved the original, for some reason I wasn't expecting much from the sequel, but was very pleasantly surprised. Gives me something to look forward to.
Check back next week for the DLC special!
Aside from that, this is the first time I've tried playing the game with Light Armour, and only the second time using swords, as I usually go for heavy armour and axes or (my favourite) warhammers. And it's my first time out of the dungeon that I wasn't in the shoes of an Elf too, so a lot of the game is fresh to me this time. But that's the high point of the week over right there.
After the surprisingly great ObsCure, I was eager to fire up ObsCure II on the Wii, and was appalled. None of the atmosphere had survived, the creepy post-Gothic feeling of the original's high school setting had been replaced by a college frat house full of asshole stereotype douchebags with absolutely disgusting voice actors that they must have scraped up off the street. I commented on how Sum 41's 'Still Waiting' failed to set the scene in the first one, but the opening music to ObsCure II (god knows what it was) was comically inappropriate, actually cheerful sounding.
Then you get thrown into the gameplay, and the erratic animation combined with the standard sketchy-at-best Wii controls that make any attempt at a serious game (bar Resident Evil 4) a chore make the game virtually unplayable. The writers seem to have forgotten that our heroes found a cure for their infection at the end of the first game, because now they are having to take medicines to stop it spreading. Also, none of the returning characters look, sound or behave as they did before (our hero Stan has even stopped talking like Vanilla Ice), showing yet more lack of attention by the developers. And after a bad nightmare sequence that shamelessly ripped off Silent Hill and a run-in with the game's very first enemies who can tear about a third of your health away with one hit, it wasn't long before I switched it off. If I ever find it for a decent price on the PS2, I might be tempted to have a go at it with a normal controller, but as it stands I'm just not interested enough to put myself through it.
So I moved on to this week's main event, the infamous Rogue Warrior on the PS3. Rogue Warrior is a supposed true story based on the autobiography of former Navy Seal commander (and tourette's sufferer, if the game is anything to go by) Dick Marcinko. I'm not going to skirt around things here, this game is BAD. But it's not insultingly bad, like Haze, it's laugh-out-loud, piss-hilarious bad. I suppose, if you'd spend £40 on it, then it would be a bit of a kick in the balls, but I only spent £14.99 (I can only imagine how bad the person who sold it to Cash Converters felt, he can't have gotten more than a tenner for it less than a month after it was released. I hope for his sake he stole it).
I'm going to start with the script. Dick, voiced by muscular pensioner Mickey Rourke, must have said about 4 or 5 words before his first 'fuck' broke through, and then never looked back. Apart from the D-grade military action movie jargon I think I heard one line of F-bomb free dialogue in the whole game, and that was a reference to cunnilingus. At one point, close to death, Dick descended into one long, uninterrupted swear word, which went something like "fucknshitbastardcommiemotherfuckinfuck". That's quality writing right there. From his voice, you get the feeling that Mickey's heart wasn't really in it. But you also get the feeling that half of the expletives weren't actually on the script too.
Right, gameplay time. Rogue Warrior is a standard FPS, one man versus the whole of North Korea and the Soviet Union type of affair. It's cover system is like a happy marriage between Killzone 2 and Gears of War, and it feels great until you reload. If you leave cover half way through reloading, the action is cancelled. It's okay though, there's no reason to leave cover, because the enemies will just stroll over and stand at the other side of whatever you're hiding behind, happily firing round after round into the bulletproof barrier, allowing you to use blindfire and just poke your gun over the top and kill him without even aiming.
The enemies take cover too though, and I actually saw one throw a grenade at the cover he was hiding behind, resulting in the explosive bouncing right back and landing in his lap. So it's no surprise that Kim Jong Il's finest pose very little threat to you throughout the game. The only problem comes with the Shotgun carriers, who defy the laws of the world by being able to shoot the hairs off a flea's back at 200 yards. Attention to detail, nothing is spared.
Like with The Punisher on the PS2, I tended to favour the melee kills, which are triggered by moving close to an enemy and pressing the X button. This sends the camera out to a third person view so you can admire you suitably brutal finisher, ranging from turning an enemy's gun on himself to slitting his throat, to the frankly worrying move involving sticking your knife up a poor communist's arsehole. The mind boggles.
It's hard to imagine, that with the publisher of Fallout 3 and the developer of Rogue Trooper and Aliens vs. Predator, that an FPS with such a rich upbringing could go so wrong. Whoever thought it would be a great idea to let people play as a demolitions expert (the game's main aim is to plant explosives on missiles) was sorely mistaken. And who decided that 2 and a half hours was an adequate lifespan of a game was frankly insane. But at least it made me laugh.
And that's about it. I had a quick go on Madworld the other day, and it didn't really grab me. The visuals are headache inducing (reminding me of pictures I used to draw as a child, where I would only colour in the blood), and it seems to me that they had tried to come up with a valid storyline involving terrorists at the start of the game, but then abandoning it and leaving the cutscene in. One minute the president is addressing the nation over a terrorist attack and promising to send in a special agent, the next you're in a violent Running Man style game show. Then it's just hitting people until the game over screen. I'll have another go, but I don't predict I'll fall for it. Speaking of falling for things, I tried the Just Cause 2 demo last night, and I think I'll be bringing the full game home on the 26th. Even though I loved the original, for some reason I wasn't expecting much from the sequel, but was very pleasantly surprised. Gives me something to look forward to.
Check back next week for the DLC special!
Friday, 5 February 2010
I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favourite store on the Citadel!
Ladies and gentlemen, if you don't want to read about Mass Effect 2, then don't bother going any further. It's just about all I've done this week, literally.
When I reported in last week, I had played for maybe two hours, and truth be told wasn't too impressed, but was putting on a brave face in hope that things can only get better. The RPG elements that I'd become accustomed to in my four play throughs of the first one had been neutered within an inch of their life, everything had got a bit sweary (which I've noticed has happened with a lot of sequels, Assassin's Creed II, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Resident Evil 5 spring to mind), and the shooting mechanic has gone for the old copy-and-paste Gears of War method. Couple that with the still ridiculous reloading mechanic, and well, my first impressions were a bit testing, as much as I didn't want to admit it.
Things, however, did get better. 34 hours of gameplay better in fact. And I never once, in all of that time, actually wanted to set the controller down out of boredom. I actually scanned every planet, did every side-mission on said planets, all of the loyalty missions, everything.
For a bit of a story breakdown, after Shepard and his multicultural band of brothers saved the universe from a giant metal squid in 2007, they spent their days flying around the galaxy wiping out stragglers from the ranks of their enemies, the Geth. That is until their ship got ripped in two pieces by a mysterious new antagonist, and thanks to annoying pilot Jeff 'Joker' Moreau (who shows no sign of remorse throughout the game), things ended pretty badly for Shepard.
Then his body was recovered by Martin Sheen, who could rebuild him, He had the technology. He had the capability to build the world's first bionic man. Commander Shepard would be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster. Sorry, lost myself a bit there. Anyway, after two years of being rebuilt, Shep wakes up to find out that humans everywhere are being abducted by crazy bug people, and naturally sets out to round up a bunch of hardasses and do some damage.
At first, as I was secretly not enjoying the game as much as I wanted to, I jumped headlong into the main story with little regard for anything else. I recruited the squaddies, of course, and when I first met Garrus, my joint favourite character (with Wrex) from the last game, and unlike all the other returning faces he actually wanted to join me, I could barely conceal a smile. But it wasn't until about half way through the story, when I was deep in enemy territory and the plot was beginning to unfold, that I got that familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach, the feeling that I was in for something special.
And something special it was. I know there's a lot of people out there who are still knee deep in this, so I will go no further, but a special mention has to go out to my new hero, ME2's krogan, Grunt. He's bloodthirsty, wreckless and at times laugh-out-loud funny. And he's the only squaddie I used in the game that never once needed a medi-gel. I have a new Wrex.
I was a little annoyed that such a good game was out in January though, as I had very little hope of playing another game quite as good as that all year. That was until last night's teaser trailer of Fallout: New Vegas though, and it's ambitious predicted release date of Autumn 2010. The trailer opens with some bizarre TV-headed robot sifting through a mass grave in the Nevada desert, with a surprisingly well preserved Las Vegas in the background. As the camera pans out, a mysterious long-coated character with a New Californian Republic flag looks on. He then turns to the camera, revealing a mask that resembles that of one of Killzone's bad guys, the Helghast. It's going to be a long 7 months or so for me now. Well, I still have three achievements yet to get on Fallout 3 anyway, so I still have a bit of Fallout to keep me going. If they fire out a new Elder Scrolls this year too, I'll be happy as a pig in shit.
I'll try and have more to talk about next week, I'm in the process of trying to get my grubby hands on a Heavy Rain demo, and I'll hopefully get motivated enough to finish Hellboy and start on something else, more than likely PS2 survival horror ObsCure. Bye for now.
When I reported in last week, I had played for maybe two hours, and truth be told wasn't too impressed, but was putting on a brave face in hope that things can only get better. The RPG elements that I'd become accustomed to in my four play throughs of the first one had been neutered within an inch of their life, everything had got a bit sweary (which I've noticed has happened with a lot of sequels, Assassin's Creed II, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Resident Evil 5 spring to mind), and the shooting mechanic has gone for the old copy-and-paste Gears of War method. Couple that with the still ridiculous reloading mechanic, and well, my first impressions were a bit testing, as much as I didn't want to admit it.
Things, however, did get better. 34 hours of gameplay better in fact. And I never once, in all of that time, actually wanted to set the controller down out of boredom. I actually scanned every planet, did every side-mission on said planets, all of the loyalty missions, everything.
For a bit of a story breakdown, after Shepard and his multicultural band of brothers saved the universe from a giant metal squid in 2007, they spent their days flying around the galaxy wiping out stragglers from the ranks of their enemies, the Geth. That is until their ship got ripped in two pieces by a mysterious new antagonist, and thanks to annoying pilot Jeff 'Joker' Moreau (who shows no sign of remorse throughout the game), things ended pretty badly for Shepard.
Then his body was recovered by Martin Sheen, who could rebuild him, He had the technology. He had the capability to build the world's first bionic man. Commander Shepard would be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster. Sorry, lost myself a bit there. Anyway, after two years of being rebuilt, Shep wakes up to find out that humans everywhere are being abducted by crazy bug people, and naturally sets out to round up a bunch of hardasses and do some damage.
At first, as I was secretly not enjoying the game as much as I wanted to, I jumped headlong into the main story with little regard for anything else. I recruited the squaddies, of course, and when I first met Garrus, my joint favourite character (with Wrex) from the last game, and unlike all the other returning faces he actually wanted to join me, I could barely conceal a smile. But it wasn't until about half way through the story, when I was deep in enemy territory and the plot was beginning to unfold, that I got that familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach, the feeling that I was in for something special.
And something special it was. I know there's a lot of people out there who are still knee deep in this, so I will go no further, but a special mention has to go out to my new hero, ME2's krogan, Grunt. He's bloodthirsty, wreckless and at times laugh-out-loud funny. And he's the only squaddie I used in the game that never once needed a medi-gel. I have a new Wrex.
I was a little annoyed that such a good game was out in January though, as I had very little hope of playing another game quite as good as that all year. That was until last night's teaser trailer of Fallout: New Vegas though, and it's ambitious predicted release date of Autumn 2010. The trailer opens with some bizarre TV-headed robot sifting through a mass grave in the Nevada desert, with a surprisingly well preserved Las Vegas in the background. As the camera pans out, a mysterious long-coated character with a New Californian Republic flag looks on. He then turns to the camera, revealing a mask that resembles that of one of Killzone's bad guys, the Helghast. It's going to be a long 7 months or so for me now. Well, I still have three achievements yet to get on Fallout 3 anyway, so I still have a bit of Fallout to keep me going. If they fire out a new Elder Scrolls this year too, I'll be happy as a pig in shit.
I'll try and have more to talk about next week, I'm in the process of trying to get my grubby hands on a Heavy Rain demo, and I'll hopefully get motivated enough to finish Hellboy and start on something else, more than likely PS2 survival horror ObsCure. Bye for now.
Friday, 22 January 2010
Matt Day-Mahn!
You know what makes me awesome? The fact that I buy games that I know to be widely condemned as shit, unplayable smears of filth on a perfectly good BluRay or DVD, wastes of nonrenewable resources used to create the disk, just so I can attempt to entertainingly write about how shit they are for you, the 3 or 4 people who actually read this crap every week. But you know what makes life awesome? When they aren't actually that bad.
Take Hellboy: The Science of Evil as an example. The PS3 version, which is the one I've been playing, received a score of 47% on Metacritic, yet I fail to see what's so bad about it. It's not like Batman, where I'm a complete fanboy, I did love the first Hellboy movie but the second was garbage, the comics do very little to hold my attention and the animated films are a bit on the mundane side, so if I was to be biased I'd be joining them.
The game itself is an enjoyable God-of-War-em-up which places you in the hooves of the titular demonic anti-hero as you (for reasons yet unknown) chase a Witch through a surprisingly atmospheric forest graveyard, bashing the daylights out of everything in your way with your signature massive stone hand, or whatever you find yourself close enough to pick up at the time, from discarded weapons to chunks of a tree to severed parts of enemies departed. As well as the melee combat you also have Red's trusty sidearm, his oversized revolver which can be equipped with various different kinds of ammunition to serve different purposes, from freezing enemies to destroying enchanted doorways.
The game occasionally flashes back to one of Hellboy's previous missions too, the first of which being a trip to Japan which throws quite a few nods to the first of the animated films 'Blood and Iron', with enchanted swords and floating heads, and to bait the fans an encounter with Herman von Klempt and his kriegsaffe, Brutus.
It's good brainless fun, slightly average but not bad, and it will sate my appetite before I get my hands on God of War III, Dante's Inferno and Darksiders in a couple of months. Glad I played Hellboy first though, doubt it would receive such a positive review after the big three.
Also, given this weeks post's title (I couldn't resist even though it's not his likeness), I've hammered through The Bourne Conspiracy on the XBox360, and absolutely loved it.
The game borrows from a lot of others, but the most unlikely (but most apparent) influence comes in the form of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. When Bourne first appeared onscreen I immediately thought, with his appearance being close to Nathan Drake, Shadow Complex's Jason Flemming and Dark Void's William Grey, that he should have been voiced by he-who-shall-not-be-named. But the way he runs, takes cover, flinches from near misses and to an extent fights (he uses Drake's familiar jump-punch move) also echo Naughty Dog's triumph.
The gunplay is what ultimately lets Bourne down, being uninspired copy-and-paste Gears of War style hide and shoot (although with the more realistic weaponry and destructible cover, it also harks back to Uncharted), and as well as being a bit mundane at times it also gets a little frustrating. But the melee combat really shines. Unlike Uncharted, where you could punch and shoot on the fly, when an enemy engages Bourne up close the game shifts into a Shenmue style fighting mechanic, in which combinations of heavy and light attacks can be used, and when an on-screen 'adrenaline meter' reaches the appropriate level, the B button can trigger 'takedown moves' which immediately incapacitate between one and three enemies in a true-to-the-film cinematic fashion, often making use of the environment in typically inventive ways.
Speaking of cinematics, some of the cutscenes are hauntingly close to the film, particularly the failed assassination attempt on the boat and the Paris apartment attack, which was without a doubt a highlight of the game for me. And taking to the streets of a very destructible Paris in a very indestructible Mini Cooper in a Burnout meets The Italian Job frenzy was an absolute thrill-ride. I had hoped the driving mechanic would pop up again somewhere, as it was fantastic fun, but it never did. Anyway, I whole-heartedly recommend this to fans of both the film and the genre, it's available at most preowned shops for around £7 and won't eat up a lot of time, but it's a very rewarding experience.
It's a rare game that challenges a player to question his or her own sexuality. Curiosity led me to Google Dragon Age: Origins' man-on-man sex scene, and I unwaveringly decided it wasn't for me. Yet Band Hero, which the wife brought home on Sunday, had me worried at times at just how much enjoyment I was having with it, not only was I fearing for my heterosexuality but at times, bopping along to No Doubt's 'Just a Girl', I even began to wonder about my actual gender.
I know I commented on the demo, saying it was arse, but the full game actually proves itself to be more fun and actually slightly more polished than Guitar Hero 5. The series' cast is back in full force, but they've been bastardized to fit the game's X-Factor aesthetic. Gone is Johnny Napalm's Mohican, tamed to blond spikes. Goodbye Judy Nail's piercings, she's resorted to the awful Avril Lavigne 'mosher' template. And what did they do to Axel Steel...
The band also play a more visible role this time, when a track features a female vocalist the game provides you with one, so you aren't watching a butch metalhead squeal out a girlish ballad. Also, in the case of Evanescence's angst-ridden abortion 'Bring Me To Life', the bits where the guy sings were performed by my avatar, the guitarist. "Ha ha, you're the fat one" the wife pointed out. Her words cut deeper than any knife. I did resent the fact that, when playing 'Wannabe' by the Spice Girls, the camera panned to me for the line 'Easy V doesn't come for free'. Not only does it insult my sexuality, now I'm a hooker too. And a real lady, apparently. It makes up for the insults in a very realistically obtainable achievement worth 490 points (seriously) though.
Okay, to wrap things up: Having a bit of a break from Sam and Max after a barmy (yet equally genius and hilarious) song and dance routine about war performed by a bunch of presidential aides just about melted my brain, and have decided that ACII Discovery isn't as good as it first seems, as it's all to easy to wind up stuck between two guards and with the blocking reversals from the other games somehow forgotten about this surely means certain death. And have decided to spend the XBox time between now and Mass Effect 2 hoovering up the last few achievements on Fallout 3, including collecting the Bobbleheads, which I epic failed at when I blew up Megaton without collecting the one from Lucas Simms' house and forgot to save beforehand. I had to go back to the previous save before that, which lost me about three hours' play. And a warning to anyone else starting afresh, don't try to do Operation Anchorage at level 5. It's unforgiving. Ciao.
Take Hellboy: The Science of Evil as an example. The PS3 version, which is the one I've been playing, received a score of 47% on Metacritic, yet I fail to see what's so bad about it. It's not like Batman, where I'm a complete fanboy, I did love the first Hellboy movie but the second was garbage, the comics do very little to hold my attention and the animated films are a bit on the mundane side, so if I was to be biased I'd be joining them.
The game itself is an enjoyable God-of-War-em-up which places you in the hooves of the titular demonic anti-hero as you (for reasons yet unknown) chase a Witch through a surprisingly atmospheric forest graveyard, bashing the daylights out of everything in your way with your signature massive stone hand, or whatever you find yourself close enough to pick up at the time, from discarded weapons to chunks of a tree to severed parts of enemies departed. As well as the melee combat you also have Red's trusty sidearm, his oversized revolver which can be equipped with various different kinds of ammunition to serve different purposes, from freezing enemies to destroying enchanted doorways.
The game occasionally flashes back to one of Hellboy's previous missions too, the first of which being a trip to Japan which throws quite a few nods to the first of the animated films 'Blood and Iron', with enchanted swords and floating heads, and to bait the fans an encounter with Herman von Klempt and his kriegsaffe, Brutus.
It's good brainless fun, slightly average but not bad, and it will sate my appetite before I get my hands on God of War III, Dante's Inferno and Darksiders in a couple of months. Glad I played Hellboy first though, doubt it would receive such a positive review after the big three.
Also, given this weeks post's title (I couldn't resist even though it's not his likeness), I've hammered through The Bourne Conspiracy on the XBox360, and absolutely loved it.
The game borrows from a lot of others, but the most unlikely (but most apparent) influence comes in the form of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. When Bourne first appeared onscreen I immediately thought, with his appearance being close to Nathan Drake, Shadow Complex's Jason Flemming and Dark Void's William Grey, that he should have been voiced by he-who-shall-not-be-named. But the way he runs, takes cover, flinches from near misses and to an extent fights (he uses Drake's familiar jump-punch move) also echo Naughty Dog's triumph.
The gunplay is what ultimately lets Bourne down, being uninspired copy-and-paste Gears of War style hide and shoot (although with the more realistic weaponry and destructible cover, it also harks back to Uncharted), and as well as being a bit mundane at times it also gets a little frustrating. But the melee combat really shines. Unlike Uncharted, where you could punch and shoot on the fly, when an enemy engages Bourne up close the game shifts into a Shenmue style fighting mechanic, in which combinations of heavy and light attacks can be used, and when an on-screen 'adrenaline meter' reaches the appropriate level, the B button can trigger 'takedown moves' which immediately incapacitate between one and three enemies in a true-to-the-film cinematic fashion, often making use of the environment in typically inventive ways.
Speaking of cinematics, some of the cutscenes are hauntingly close to the film, particularly the failed assassination attempt on the boat and the Paris apartment attack, which was without a doubt a highlight of the game for me. And taking to the streets of a very destructible Paris in a very indestructible Mini Cooper in a Burnout meets The Italian Job frenzy was an absolute thrill-ride. I had hoped the driving mechanic would pop up again somewhere, as it was fantastic fun, but it never did. Anyway, I whole-heartedly recommend this to fans of both the film and the genre, it's available at most preowned shops for around £7 and won't eat up a lot of time, but it's a very rewarding experience.
It's a rare game that challenges a player to question his or her own sexuality. Curiosity led me to Google Dragon Age: Origins' man-on-man sex scene, and I unwaveringly decided it wasn't for me. Yet Band Hero, which the wife brought home on Sunday, had me worried at times at just how much enjoyment I was having with it, not only was I fearing for my heterosexuality but at times, bopping along to No Doubt's 'Just a Girl', I even began to wonder about my actual gender.
I know I commented on the demo, saying it was arse, but the full game actually proves itself to be more fun and actually slightly more polished than Guitar Hero 5. The series' cast is back in full force, but they've been bastardized to fit the game's X-Factor aesthetic. Gone is Johnny Napalm's Mohican, tamed to blond spikes. Goodbye Judy Nail's piercings, she's resorted to the awful Avril Lavigne 'mosher' template. And what did they do to Axel Steel...
The band also play a more visible role this time, when a track features a female vocalist the game provides you with one, so you aren't watching a butch metalhead squeal out a girlish ballad. Also, in the case of Evanescence's angst-ridden abortion 'Bring Me To Life', the bits where the guy sings were performed by my avatar, the guitarist. "Ha ha, you're the fat one" the wife pointed out. Her words cut deeper than any knife. I did resent the fact that, when playing 'Wannabe' by the Spice Girls, the camera panned to me for the line 'Easy V doesn't come for free'. Not only does it insult my sexuality, now I'm a hooker too. And a real lady, apparently. It makes up for the insults in a very realistically obtainable achievement worth 490 points (seriously) though.
Okay, to wrap things up: Having a bit of a break from Sam and Max after a barmy (yet equally genius and hilarious) song and dance routine about war performed by a bunch of presidential aides just about melted my brain, and have decided that ACII Discovery isn't as good as it first seems, as it's all to easy to wind up stuck between two guards and with the blocking reversals from the other games somehow forgotten about this surely means certain death. And have decided to spend the XBox time between now and Mass Effect 2 hoovering up the last few achievements on Fallout 3, including collecting the Bobbleheads, which I epic failed at when I blew up Megaton without collecting the one from Lucas Simms' house and forgot to save beforehand. I had to go back to the previous save before that, which lost me about three hours' play. And a warning to anyone else starting afresh, don't try to do Operation Anchorage at level 5. It's unforgiving. Ciao.
Friday, 4 December 2009
This is a tomb, I'll make them feel right at home.
What makes a game 'bad'?
This week I've been playing, and enjoying, a game widely percieved as bad: the ironically titled Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard (ironic as it's his first ever IRL videogame).
The game revolves around a premise that videogame characters are played by actors, much the same as in motion pictures, who are then uploaded digitally into games. One such actor, the titular Mr. Hazard, enjoyed huge success in the 1980s with a series of self-titled side-scrolling shooters, but his career faded out when he started expanding into other genres such as Kart Racing. Now, twenty-odd years later his studio, 'Marathon Games' has been taken over and the new CEO approaches Matt offering him a starring role in a new next-gen shooter. Unbeknownst to our hero (but knownst to us), the plan was to kill him off in the first act in a twist of M. Knight Shyamalan proportions and replace him with Sting Sniperscope, an Austrian space marine sharpshooter.
Thankfully, Matt has a guardian angel in the form of a mysterious woman known only as 'QA', who hacks into the game just as Matt is about to be executed and provides him with the means to live on. But somebody else is hacking all of Matt's previous enemies into the game to help finish him off...
The game for me sits in the same boat as Dark Sector and Fracture, third person shooters that aren't inherently bad, they just lack the polish and shine of certain other franchises (coughgearscough) that seem to have set the bar for the competition, in the eyes of the general gaming populace at any rate. So I believe at any rate, that the game may have been given a slightly better score if four foul-mouthed rhoid monkeys hadn't curb-stomped onto the scene back in 2006.
Another thing that came with Gears of War is a reliance on a cover system, and Eat Lead's is actually really well done. While in cover, as well as the given option to poke out and shoot and the optional extras of blindfire and vaulting over, you can also point the reticule at another barrier and hit the triangle button and Matt will automatically move up to it fairly quickly, particularly good for when you are under sniper-fire. It's so well implemented, Hazard himself even comments on how good it is.
Of course, the main drawing point of the game is the parodying/paying homages to other franchises. Matt Hazard, as a name, is an obvious reference to Duke Nukem, and this is further evidenced in the game's intro when he mentions his debut FPS: Matt Hazard 3D. Enemies so far have included cowboys, russian soldiers and zombies, not particularly symbolic of any series but all staple enemies, but one has stood out in particular.
There are female enemies, known as Dexter's Darlings as a homage to Charlie's Angels, and one of them is a twin gunned lady in shorts with a ponytail...
Tomb Raider Legend has seen a bit of action this week too. It's hard to believe it's been nearly a year since I last sat down with Ms. Croft for a bit of adventuring, as I snapped up Tomb Raider Underworld on boxing day and finished it in the following week. I tell a lie actually, I found the original Tomb Raider in Gamestation for a quid and played through the first level about 5 months ago, but that doesn't count.
But I had an upset, in that after a couple of hours play and doing about half of the game, my save corrupted and I had to redo the flashback scene in Peru, all of Japan, Africa and Kazahkstan. I'm even surprised at myself for doing it. Anyway, I replayed the entire game and it still holds up well today, if a little ropey as a follow-up to Uncharted 2.
The only real problem I had is that it was the first time I'd played the game on a High Defenition screen, and it is in all fairness a last generation game. The square edges of the scenery were a little too noticeable. There are no straight lines in nature.
And the only other game I played this week was a quick finish of Monkey Island SE. It's amazing in games like that how different you percieve things to what was intended by the developers when you haven't got optimal graphics and sound effects. For example, I hadn't noticed that you can see the food inside the ghost pig's belly as it ate, and I had never really had the Monkey Island Cannibals down as homosexuals in my naive youngster's mind. It just goes to show how much we used to rely on our imaginations to fill in the blanks.
And finally, there was upset this week when Tesco Entertainment listed Left 4 Dead 2 at £15 on their website, and a bunch of the guys from the forum I frequent and I all ordered it, only to be shot down in flames with a nicely worded email explaining their mistake. We did all recieve £2 vouchers for our mental anguish though, and as Monkey Island layed the groundwork for a Point and Click renaissance in 24HG towers, I think I'm going to put mine towards Sam and Max Season 1 on Wii. I'll let you know how that goes.
This week I've been playing, and enjoying, a game widely percieved as bad: the ironically titled Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard (ironic as it's his first ever IRL videogame).
The game revolves around a premise that videogame characters are played by actors, much the same as in motion pictures, who are then uploaded digitally into games. One such actor, the titular Mr. Hazard, enjoyed huge success in the 1980s with a series of self-titled side-scrolling shooters, but his career faded out when he started expanding into other genres such as Kart Racing. Now, twenty-odd years later his studio, 'Marathon Games' has been taken over and the new CEO approaches Matt offering him a starring role in a new next-gen shooter. Unbeknownst to our hero (but knownst to us), the plan was to kill him off in the first act in a twist of M. Knight Shyamalan proportions and replace him with Sting Sniperscope, an Austrian space marine sharpshooter.
Thankfully, Matt has a guardian angel in the form of a mysterious woman known only as 'QA', who hacks into the game just as Matt is about to be executed and provides him with the means to live on. But somebody else is hacking all of Matt's previous enemies into the game to help finish him off...
The game for me sits in the same boat as Dark Sector and Fracture, third person shooters that aren't inherently bad, they just lack the polish and shine of certain other franchises (coughgearscough) that seem to have set the bar for the competition, in the eyes of the general gaming populace at any rate. So I believe at any rate, that the game may have been given a slightly better score if four foul-mouthed rhoid monkeys hadn't curb-stomped onto the scene back in 2006.
Another thing that came with Gears of War is a reliance on a cover system, and Eat Lead's is actually really well done. While in cover, as well as the given option to poke out and shoot and the optional extras of blindfire and vaulting over, you can also point the reticule at another barrier and hit the triangle button and Matt will automatically move up to it fairly quickly, particularly good for when you are under sniper-fire. It's so well implemented, Hazard himself even comments on how good it is.
Of course, the main drawing point of the game is the parodying/paying homages to other franchises. Matt Hazard, as a name, is an obvious reference to Duke Nukem, and this is further evidenced in the game's intro when he mentions his debut FPS: Matt Hazard 3D. Enemies so far have included cowboys, russian soldiers and zombies, not particularly symbolic of any series but all staple enemies, but one has stood out in particular.
There are female enemies, known as Dexter's Darlings as a homage to Charlie's Angels, and one of them is a twin gunned lady in shorts with a ponytail...
Tomb Raider Legend has seen a bit of action this week too. It's hard to believe it's been nearly a year since I last sat down with Ms. Croft for a bit of adventuring, as I snapped up Tomb Raider Underworld on boxing day and finished it in the following week. I tell a lie actually, I found the original Tomb Raider in Gamestation for a quid and played through the first level about 5 months ago, but that doesn't count.
But I had an upset, in that after a couple of hours play and doing about half of the game, my save corrupted and I had to redo the flashback scene in Peru, all of Japan, Africa and Kazahkstan. I'm even surprised at myself for doing it. Anyway, I replayed the entire game and it still holds up well today, if a little ropey as a follow-up to Uncharted 2.
The only real problem I had is that it was the first time I'd played the game on a High Defenition screen, and it is in all fairness a last generation game. The square edges of the scenery were a little too noticeable. There are no straight lines in nature.
And the only other game I played this week was a quick finish of Monkey Island SE. It's amazing in games like that how different you percieve things to what was intended by the developers when you haven't got optimal graphics and sound effects. For example, I hadn't noticed that you can see the food inside the ghost pig's belly as it ate, and I had never really had the Monkey Island Cannibals down as homosexuals in my naive youngster's mind. It just goes to show how much we used to rely on our imaginations to fill in the blanks.
And finally, there was upset this week when Tesco Entertainment listed Left 4 Dead 2 at £15 on their website, and a bunch of the guys from the forum I frequent and I all ordered it, only to be shot down in flames with a nicely worded email explaining their mistake. We did all recieve £2 vouchers for our mental anguish though, and as Monkey Island layed the groundwork for a Point and Click renaissance in 24HG towers, I think I'm going to put mine towards Sam and Max Season 1 on Wii. I'll let you know how that goes.
Friday, 6 November 2009
I am Dungeon Master, your guide in the realm of Dungeons and Dragons!
Three Hours. That's the time it took me to complete Halo 3: ODST.
Fair enough, it's not a real game, just a glorified expansion pack. But three hours? Going by the recommended retail price (according to Play.com) of £39.99, that's £13.33 an hour, nearly twice what I earn. I happened to get my copy free with my Elite, but that's not the point.
And it's not even a full game. Just when you find this bizarre squid-cow thing with the potential to end the war, just when the romance subplot seems to be going somewhere, the game abruptly stops. It's not so much making way for a sequel, it's just cutting half of the game off so they can sell us the second half in a year or so.
Aside from that though, ODST is in my eyes the best Halo so far. You get more of a feeling of war, not just racial extermination in a Motocross helmet like the main trilogy, and as with games like Gears of War or Killzone, you start to get to know your team-mates and genuinely give a shit about their back-stories. Just wish it was a bit longer. But there's the multiplayer disk, which includes all the Halo 3 DLC, which I suppose gives it a bit more longevity. I can't be arsed with multiplayer though.
I've not had a good time with game-endings this week, as Borderlands' ending was, in the words of fellow blogger Raz7el, "a sack of horse shit". All of Borderlands' storyline seems to take place in the last hour, as if Gearbox realised they were having too much fun and needed to wrap things up. But I digress, the game is great, I'm just in a complaining mood. I'd be inclined to carry on playing it and mop up the remaining side quests if it wasn't for the fact that today is the day that Dragon Age Origins was finally released.
I've had two hours with the game, and it seems to be shaping up quite well. It seems to me like a healthy marriage between Mass Effect and Guild Wars, taking the movement and conversational style from the former, and, well, everything else from the latter.
I opted to play as the Human Noble, the good all-rounder, and so far it has been a typical tale of betrayal and family deaths, and I've been scooped up by the Grey Wardens, to Dragon Age what Spectres are to Mass Effect, to save the world from evil things and claim revenge on my Judas.
The most obvious comparison to Guild Wars, in my eyes, is the combat. Clicking an enemy will start your character attacking, and he/she will carry on until the enemy is dead or you tell them otherwise. Potions can be used on-the-fly and will queue until your character has finished any current action and so on, and you can flick to any party member and issue them orders too, like Knights of the Old Republic in fact. Or you can command the whole party at once, although I haven't tried that. I must confess I was hoping for the combat to be a bit more Fable to be honest.
And that's as far as I've gotten with it. No doubt I'll have more to say next week, hopefully more positive than negative, and it's looking that way. Is it a good game? So far, yes. Is it better than Oblivion? No. But then again, I don't think anything short of The Elder Scrolls V will be.
And that's that. Before I go, check out 30-Something Gamer, a great blog, and he's been playing all sorts of things that I haven't at the Eurogamer Expo. Oh, and try out Trine on the PSN store, it's really good. More on that when/if I buy the full version.
UPDATE: You can probably tell by my hasty scrawlings that my Dragon Age time ate a little bit into my 'going to work' time, and I had to rush the blog a bit. In the rush, I forgot to mention a couple of things. Firstly, after finishing Borderlands and ODST with a couple of days to spare before Dragon Age came out, I decided to casually play a bit of The Secret of Monkey Island: SE on the XBox Live Arcade. Apart from possibly the original Silent Hill, I don't think I've ever completed a game as many times as Monkey Island, so this had me wanting to play it just to see the graphics rather than discover the story. The graphics, while good, suffered from the same troubles as Street Fighter II HD Remix, they've updated the sprites but not added any extra frames, it makes the jerkiness in animation very noticeable. It's an excellent winding down game at the end of the night though.
And finally, I tried the Left 4 Dead 2 demo the other night, and while it is good, I want someone to explain to me how it's in any way different to the first one? I didn't buy the first one (although someone gave me a copy for my PC, which can barely run it) because I didn't want to shell out £40 on a game made for multiplayer when I'm essentially a single player gamer, and just when the price starts to drop, the second one's out and nobody will be playing it anymore. Anyway, it was a very fun game, but unless it depreciates in value faster than the first, It's not for me. Right, NOW I'm done.
Fair enough, it's not a real game, just a glorified expansion pack. But three hours? Going by the recommended retail price (according to Play.com) of £39.99, that's £13.33 an hour, nearly twice what I earn. I happened to get my copy free with my Elite, but that's not the point.
And it's not even a full game. Just when you find this bizarre squid-cow thing with the potential to end the war, just when the romance subplot seems to be going somewhere, the game abruptly stops. It's not so much making way for a sequel, it's just cutting half of the game off so they can sell us the second half in a year or so.
Aside from that though, ODST is in my eyes the best Halo so far. You get more of a feeling of war, not just racial extermination in a Motocross helmet like the main trilogy, and as with games like Gears of War or Killzone, you start to get to know your team-mates and genuinely give a shit about their back-stories. Just wish it was a bit longer. But there's the multiplayer disk, which includes all the Halo 3 DLC, which I suppose gives it a bit more longevity. I can't be arsed with multiplayer though.
I've not had a good time with game-endings this week, as Borderlands' ending was, in the words of fellow blogger Raz7el, "a sack of horse shit". All of Borderlands' storyline seems to take place in the last hour, as if Gearbox realised they were having too much fun and needed to wrap things up. But I digress, the game is great, I'm just in a complaining mood. I'd be inclined to carry on playing it and mop up the remaining side quests if it wasn't for the fact that today is the day that Dragon Age Origins was finally released.
I've had two hours with the game, and it seems to be shaping up quite well. It seems to me like a healthy marriage between Mass Effect and Guild Wars, taking the movement and conversational style from the former, and, well, everything else from the latter.
I opted to play as the Human Noble, the good all-rounder, and so far it has been a typical tale of betrayal and family deaths, and I've been scooped up by the Grey Wardens, to Dragon Age what Spectres are to Mass Effect, to save the world from evil things and claim revenge on my Judas.
The most obvious comparison to Guild Wars, in my eyes, is the combat. Clicking an enemy will start your character attacking, and he/she will carry on until the enemy is dead or you tell them otherwise. Potions can be used on-the-fly and will queue until your character has finished any current action and so on, and you can flick to any party member and issue them orders too, like Knights of the Old Republic in fact. Or you can command the whole party at once, although I haven't tried that. I must confess I was hoping for the combat to be a bit more Fable to be honest.
And that's as far as I've gotten with it. No doubt I'll have more to say next week, hopefully more positive than negative, and it's looking that way. Is it a good game? So far, yes. Is it better than Oblivion? No. But then again, I don't think anything short of The Elder Scrolls V will be.
And that's that. Before I go, check out 30-Something Gamer, a great blog, and he's been playing all sorts of things that I haven't at the Eurogamer Expo. Oh, and try out Trine on the PSN store, it's really good. More on that when/if I buy the full version.
UPDATE: You can probably tell by my hasty scrawlings that my Dragon Age time ate a little bit into my 'going to work' time, and I had to rush the blog a bit. In the rush, I forgot to mention a couple of things. Firstly, after finishing Borderlands and ODST with a couple of days to spare before Dragon Age came out, I decided to casually play a bit of The Secret of Monkey Island: SE on the XBox Live Arcade. Apart from possibly the original Silent Hill, I don't think I've ever completed a game as many times as Monkey Island, so this had me wanting to play it just to see the graphics rather than discover the story. The graphics, while good, suffered from the same troubles as Street Fighter II HD Remix, they've updated the sprites but not added any extra frames, it makes the jerkiness in animation very noticeable. It's an excellent winding down game at the end of the night though.
And finally, I tried the Left 4 Dead 2 demo the other night, and while it is good, I want someone to explain to me how it's in any way different to the first one? I didn't buy the first one (although someone gave me a copy for my PC, which can barely run it) because I didn't want to shell out £40 on a game made for multiplayer when I'm essentially a single player gamer, and just when the price starts to drop, the second one's out and nobody will be playing it anymore. Anyway, it was a very fun game, but unless it depreciates in value faster than the first, It's not for me. Right, NOW I'm done.
Friday, 30 October 2009
Just try to understand, I've given all I can, 'cause you got the best of me...
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.
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, 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.
Friday, 4 September 2009
Transcending history and the world, a tale of souls and swords eternally retold...
How did I get so far in life without the Killzone franchise?
Yes, Killzone 2 is now over, and I loved every minute. Even the bits that were so brutal it hurt, like fighting the ATAC on the roof, or the final assault on the palace, were both great set pieces.
I really don't know what to say about the game, other than it was awesome. The sheer chaos that was experienced during gunfights is unmatched, Gears of War's skirmishes seemed really tame in comparison. To quote a friend of mine; "Killzone 2 really depicts well what happens when the shit hits the fan", and I think that about sums it up.
Since Killzone was over, I've been playing SoulCalibur Legends, which I picked up a while back for a fiver from Blockbusters. After all the negativity, I was expecting the game to be virtually unplayable. Now, while it is shit, it's not offensively so. It's like a PS1 game that you remember fondly, or a mini game tacked on to a 1-on-1 fighter like Tekken Force, or indeed SoulCalibur's own Edgemaster Mode. And part of me is certain that it was originally conceived as the latter.
The game starts you off as Siegfried, and as you progress you pick up stragglers and other Soul Series mainstays. So far I've been latched on to by Sophitia, Astaroth and Dead or Alive reject Ivy Valentine, the latter two I have always perceived as being bad guys. I could have been wrong. Just seem to be strange choices when there's awesome people like Mitsurugi in the wings. Oh, and I decked Cervantes, but he wasn't up for joining me.
The voice acting is hilarious as expected, and every battle can be won pretty much by sellotaping the Wii Remote to an epilepsy sufferer and making him watch anime, but it's fun, and that's what counts. Whether it will still be fun later in the game, time will tell.
Of course if I'd parted with £40 for it, I'd be mortified, but for a fiver it's really not that bad. Could be worse, could be Golden Axe: Beast Rider.
When I tried my wireless PS2 pad finally, it didn't work. Turns out my PS2 had blown a fuse, typically the fuse that supplies power to the Dual Shock 2's motors and any wireless joypad's receiver, so I had to get myself a new PS2, and get rid of the old one. Well, I didn't have to, but y'know. Long story short, if you're going to trade a console in at CEX, be prepared to wait half an hour for them to test it, and bring some ID. And if you get served by the same girl that I did, smack her in the eye, the surly cow.
What else, what else... Oh yeah, tried Guitar Hero III on hard the other day, seeing as I can cruise through World Tour at that difficulty. Failed the first encore. That game is so much harder. And had a go at Motorstorm on multiplayer last night for the first time in ages to christen my mate's new PS3 Slim. There was a guy teleporting. If you have to cheat to enjoy a game, what's the point? Oh yeah, and I'm indifferent to Dissidia. The Final Fantasy VII freak in me will no doubt buy it though.
Yes, Killzone 2 is now over, and I loved every minute. Even the bits that were so brutal it hurt, like fighting the ATAC on the roof, or the final assault on the palace, were both great set pieces.
I really don't know what to say about the game, other than it was awesome. The sheer chaos that was experienced during gunfights is unmatched, Gears of War's skirmishes seemed really tame in comparison. To quote a friend of mine; "Killzone 2 really depicts well what happens when the shit hits the fan", and I think that about sums it up.
Since Killzone was over, I've been playing SoulCalibur Legends, which I picked up a while back for a fiver from Blockbusters. After all the negativity, I was expecting the game to be virtually unplayable. Now, while it is shit, it's not offensively so. It's like a PS1 game that you remember fondly, or a mini game tacked on to a 1-on-1 fighter like Tekken Force, or indeed SoulCalibur's own Edgemaster Mode. And part of me is certain that it was originally conceived as the latter.
The game starts you off as Siegfried, and as you progress you pick up stragglers and other Soul Series mainstays. So far I've been latched on to by Sophitia, Astaroth and Dead or Alive reject Ivy Valentine, the latter two I have always perceived as being bad guys. I could have been wrong. Just seem to be strange choices when there's awesome people like Mitsurugi in the wings. Oh, and I decked Cervantes, but he wasn't up for joining me.
The voice acting is hilarious as expected, and every battle can be won pretty much by sellotaping the Wii Remote to an epilepsy sufferer and making him watch anime, but it's fun, and that's what counts. Whether it will still be fun later in the game, time will tell.
Of course if I'd parted with £40 for it, I'd be mortified, but for a fiver it's really not that bad. Could be worse, could be Golden Axe: Beast Rider.
When I tried my wireless PS2 pad finally, it didn't work. Turns out my PS2 had blown a fuse, typically the fuse that supplies power to the Dual Shock 2's motors and any wireless joypad's receiver, so I had to get myself a new PS2, and get rid of the old one. Well, I didn't have to, but y'know. Long story short, if you're going to trade a console in at CEX, be prepared to wait half an hour for them to test it, and bring some ID. And if you get served by the same girl that I did, smack her in the eye, the surly cow.
What else, what else... Oh yeah, tried Guitar Hero III on hard the other day, seeing as I can cruise through World Tour at that difficulty. Failed the first encore. That game is so much harder. And had a go at Motorstorm on multiplayer last night for the first time in ages to christen my mate's new PS3 Slim. There was a guy teleporting. If you have to cheat to enjoy a game, what's the point? Oh yeah, and I'm indifferent to Dissidia. The Final Fantasy VII freak in me will no doubt buy it though.
Friday, 28 August 2009
When I need to sate, I just accelerate, into Oblivion...
Well, it's not been a full week since I last posted so not much has gone on.
I finished Killzone, it was entertaining to the end and a surprisingly long game too. Suddenly realised while playing that the Helghast were actually an entire army of cloned Alan Partridges, which made the game infinitely more fun. Although now I have an unsettling urge to kill Steve Coogan.
Killzone 2 was the order of the day straight after that, and it's fucking fantastic. People complain about the clunky feel, but I like it. And the cover system is great too. Beats the shit out of Gears of War's.
One problem I had with the first Killzone is that the enemies didn't really feel evil. Seemed to me that they had been oppressed a bit, and very British. And they never swore either. Compared to the ISA, who were kill-crazy arseholes bickering amongst themselves, who gave the impression that they couldn't out-think a jam sandwich, they didn't seem that bad.
In Killzone 2, they're foul-mouthed violent bastards though, and tougher than a Boxing Day turd. Killing them doesn't seem so bad. The ISA are still D-Bags though.
I tweeted about a problem my girlfriend had with Oblivion earlier in the week, allow me to explain, with possible spoilers. In the quest "Lost Histories", you have to get a job in a prison to give you access to a prisoner, Amusei, as the guard won't let you see him. You can't pick the lock and sneak in undetected, as the guard is looking right at the door. After that you find him gone and have to follow a trail of blood through a secret doorway. Anyway, the guy who gives you the job decided to throw himself from a bridge and die, which stopped her in her tracks. At a loss, she handed me the Dual Shock 3 and went in the bath.
After a bit of pondering, inspiration struck. I spoke to the guard, gave him some (of her) cash until his disposition was maxed at 83, and then went and picked the lock with the Skeleton Key. Before he got me, I dropped all of my armour and weapons outside the cell, then picked the lock of the cell and ran inside, dropping the Skeleton Key on the floor. The guard followed me into the cell, and I yielded, which worked as he liked me so much. He then tried to arrest me again, and I chose to go to jail.
Now because the guard was in the cell with me, he just unlocked the door and walked out, leaving it open for me to collect all my gear and escape through the secret door! Hurrah! I got Amusei, killed the Pale Woman and made like Maiq the Liar and got the fuck out of there. When Amusei was safely outside of the prison, I turned myself back in to the guards and did my time, to avoid their wrath the next time I was in town. And it's the way that you can do things like that that makes Oblivion and Fallout 3 awesome.
Bethesda aren't all good though, I tried the demo for Wet the other day and it's fucking disgustingly awful. And I can't quite explain why, it's just ugly, boring and repetitive. Stranglehold or Max Payne please. Also tried the demo for Colin McRae DiRT 2, and it is actually dirt. It's more like a Tony Hawk game in presentation, and gameplay wise Motorstorm does it much better. It's definately not the homage to Colin McRae that was promised. In fact, if I was related to Colin, I'd be pretty pissed. Downloaded the Dissidia demo today, but not had time to try it yet. Will Tweet with the verdict.
In other news, seeing as my PS2 has been re-promoted to the house's main gaming set up (with all the current gen consoles and the, ahem, Megadrive), I decided that wired pads had to go. I bought a Mad Catz Wireless Micro-Con from Play.com. Or at least that was the plan, I opted to go for the slightly cheaper one from a Play Trade seller, and when it turned up today it turned out to be a full size Mad Catz controller, and instead of being black like in the picture it was transparent blue. Blue is my favourite colour, so it's not a major problem, but black would have matched the aesthetic better. At least it's wireless, that's the main thing. Haven't tried it yet due to no AAA batteries, but I had a wired Mad Catz controller on my XBox which I actually preferred to the official S pad, and it uses 2.4 ghz radio waves as opposed to the shitty infra red wireless pad I had before, so I know I'll be impressed anyway. Wow, this actually turned out to be a pretty long post.
I finished Killzone, it was entertaining to the end and a surprisingly long game too. Suddenly realised while playing that the Helghast were actually an entire army of cloned Alan Partridges, which made the game infinitely more fun. Although now I have an unsettling urge to kill Steve Coogan.
Killzone 2 was the order of the day straight after that, and it's fucking fantastic. People complain about the clunky feel, but I like it. And the cover system is great too. Beats the shit out of Gears of War's.
One problem I had with the first Killzone is that the enemies didn't really feel evil. Seemed to me that they had been oppressed a bit, and very British. And they never swore either. Compared to the ISA, who were kill-crazy arseholes bickering amongst themselves, who gave the impression that they couldn't out-think a jam sandwich, they didn't seem that bad.
In Killzone 2, they're foul-mouthed violent bastards though, and tougher than a Boxing Day turd. Killing them doesn't seem so bad. The ISA are still D-Bags though.
I tweeted about a problem my girlfriend had with Oblivion earlier in the week, allow me to explain, with possible spoilers. In the quest "Lost Histories", you have to get a job in a prison to give you access to a prisoner, Amusei, as the guard won't let you see him. You can't pick the lock and sneak in undetected, as the guard is looking right at the door. After that you find him gone and have to follow a trail of blood through a secret doorway. Anyway, the guy who gives you the job decided to throw himself from a bridge and die, which stopped her in her tracks. At a loss, she handed me the Dual Shock 3 and went in the bath.
After a bit of pondering, inspiration struck. I spoke to the guard, gave him some (of her) cash until his disposition was maxed at 83, and then went and picked the lock with the Skeleton Key. Before he got me, I dropped all of my armour and weapons outside the cell, then picked the lock of the cell and ran inside, dropping the Skeleton Key on the floor. The guard followed me into the cell, and I yielded, which worked as he liked me so much. He then tried to arrest me again, and I chose to go to jail.
Now because the guard was in the cell with me, he just unlocked the door and walked out, leaving it open for me to collect all my gear and escape through the secret door! Hurrah! I got Amusei, killed the Pale Woman and made like Maiq the Liar and got the fuck out of there. When Amusei was safely outside of the prison, I turned myself back in to the guards and did my time, to avoid their wrath the next time I was in town. And it's the way that you can do things like that that makes Oblivion and Fallout 3 awesome.
Bethesda aren't all good though, I tried the demo for Wet the other day and it's fucking disgustingly awful. And I can't quite explain why, it's just ugly, boring and repetitive. Stranglehold or Max Payne please. Also tried the demo for Colin McRae DiRT 2, and it is actually dirt. It's more like a Tony Hawk game in presentation, and gameplay wise Motorstorm does it much better. It's definately not the homage to Colin McRae that was promised. In fact, if I was related to Colin, I'd be pretty pissed. Downloaded the Dissidia demo today, but not had time to try it yet. Will Tweet with the verdict.
In other news, seeing as my PS2 has been re-promoted to the house's main gaming set up (with all the current gen consoles and the, ahem, Megadrive), I decided that wired pads had to go. I bought a Mad Catz Wireless Micro-Con from Play.com. Or at least that was the plan, I opted to go for the slightly cheaper one from a Play Trade seller, and when it turned up today it turned out to be a full size Mad Catz controller, and instead of being black like in the picture it was transparent blue. Blue is my favourite colour, so it's not a major problem, but black would have matched the aesthetic better. At least it's wireless, that's the main thing. Haven't tried it yet due to no AAA batteries, but I had a wired Mad Catz controller on my XBox which I actually preferred to the official S pad, and it uses 2.4 ghz radio waves as opposed to the shitty infra red wireless pad I had before, so I know I'll be impressed anyway. Wow, this actually turned out to be a pretty long post.
Sunday, 23 August 2009
What the fuck is a Shakespeare?
OMG. late post, sorry.
First things first, I finished No More Heroes. The game got very tedious later on, even more so than when it started. There were a few shining moments when it ended though, like the reference to Duke Nukem Forever.
There's a section near the end where a cutscene is played in fast forward, to avoid it's rather adult nature, and as I went on YouTube to watch it slowed down I discovered the glorious violence that was featured in the NTSC release. So I re-watched the whole game's cutscenes. Taking away the violence from the game, as over the top as it was, actually took away the Tarantino-esque style of it, and I'm confident that the game would be more enjoyable for me had it been left in.
After that, I moved on Viking: Battle for Asgard, and after an hour and a half of running around in circles and not achieving anything, I gave up. It had the same problems for me as Morrowind and Two Worlds, not explaining my tasks enough and just dropping me in the dark. And when I did venture out into the harsh world, I was faced with literally armies of enemies, not standing a chance on my own. Sensing that I was looking at another Overlord, where I was dependant on my colleagues, I stopped right there.
God of War II was next on my list, and I quickly polished it off. It was enjoyable from start to finish, but I'm going to have a hard time parting with 40 beans for GoWIII if it takes three days to finish like it's three prequels. Three three three.
And so it's on to Killzone. For those of you who missed it, it's about a war between the earth's forces: The ISA (one letter away from USA), who are made up by the biggest D-Bags that America has to offer, and the Helghast (quite similar to Helmand, a province in Afghanistan), who are English. And MONSTERS. They are also pretty much the Nazi Party.
The game is great, all annoyances aside. There are problems, like the one-dimensional characters and repetitive speech ("COOOOOOME OOOOOOON!"), but all things considered it's a good game. The characters, not unlike Gears of War, are taken straight from that paint-by-numbers buddy war game/film hand book. There's all round great guy, token woman who may have a thing with great guy, angry wise-cracking and foul mouthed black guy and member of the opposition working for you as a spy and who's trustworthiness is questionable. His name is Hakha, by the way, and he's also a hacker. And all of them are able to use a variety of weaponry expertly, yet can't jump or open doors. Standard. But I am enjoying the game immensely. Take comfort, Sony, in knowing that at least I prefer Killzone to Halo.
First things first, I finished No More Heroes. The game got very tedious later on, even more so than when it started. There were a few shining moments when it ended though, like the reference to Duke Nukem Forever.
There's a section near the end where a cutscene is played in fast forward, to avoid it's rather adult nature, and as I went on YouTube to watch it slowed down I discovered the glorious violence that was featured in the NTSC release. So I re-watched the whole game's cutscenes. Taking away the violence from the game, as over the top as it was, actually took away the Tarantino-esque style of it, and I'm confident that the game would be more enjoyable for me had it been left in.
After that, I moved on Viking: Battle for Asgard, and after an hour and a half of running around in circles and not achieving anything, I gave up. It had the same problems for me as Morrowind and Two Worlds, not explaining my tasks enough and just dropping me in the dark. And when I did venture out into the harsh world, I was faced with literally armies of enemies, not standing a chance on my own. Sensing that I was looking at another Overlord, where I was dependant on my colleagues, I stopped right there.
God of War II was next on my list, and I quickly polished it off. It was enjoyable from start to finish, but I'm going to have a hard time parting with 40 beans for GoWIII if it takes three days to finish like it's three prequels. Three three three.
And so it's on to Killzone. For those of you who missed it, it's about a war between the earth's forces: The ISA (one letter away from USA), who are made up by the biggest D-Bags that America has to offer, and the Helghast (quite similar to Helmand, a province in Afghanistan), who are English. And MONSTERS. They are also pretty much the Nazi Party.
The game is great, all annoyances aside. There are problems, like the one-dimensional characters and repetitive speech ("COOOOOOME OOOOOOON!"), but all things considered it's a good game. The characters, not unlike Gears of War, are taken straight from that paint-by-numbers buddy war game/film hand book. There's all round great guy, token woman who may have a thing with great guy, angry wise-cracking and foul mouthed black guy and member of the opposition working for you as a spy and who's trustworthiness is questionable. His name is Hakha, by the way, and he's also a hacker. And all of them are able to use a variety of weaponry expertly, yet can't jump or open doors. Standard. But I am enjoying the game immensely. Take comfort, Sony, in knowing that at least I prefer Killzone to Halo.
Friday, 7 August 2009
Where does he get those wonderful toys?
I didn't go on to play any of those games right away, instead opting to play Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles. I know, I know, more Resi. Well believe me, this has put me off for now. When I play a Lightgun Shooter, I expect to be able to shoot as fast as I can pull the trigger. On Umbrella, you fire one bullet for every four or five pulls, it shoots at the same speed as a pistol would in one of the old Resi games. If I can pull a trigger that fast, then so can a trained member of a Special Forces team. And this is a game-killing problem, believe me.
The game also had me struggling with whether it's canon or not. The bits based on older games most definitely aren't. It was cool seeing what Wesker was up to though, and playing as him too. And the end of Umbrella Section was okay-ish, even if all of the monsters created exclusively for the game looked arse.
Imagine a world where the slightest tap of the left analogue stick sends you legging it into a wall. Imagine a world where enemies are hit square in the head with a giant spinning shuriken, and just shrug it off. Imagine a world where you can still hear the rain falling after it's stopped. This is no ordinary world. This is Dark Sector's world.
What an absolute shambles. I only started playing last night, so I'm still in the 'benefit of the doubt' phase, although in the hour or so that I played it I got through three chapters, and if the Achievements are anything to go by there are only 9 or 10. My wireless 360 pad has a small fault, in that if the left stick is slightly to the left, it sticks. Normally this isn't a problem, because when it happens your character just slowly shifts across. But Dark Sector only has two speeds; walk fast and leg it. So if I'm behind a wall reloading or something, and accidentally knock the stick, the floppy haired prick just strolls out into a hail of bullets. And respawning enemies in this day and age?
Which brings me to another thing. The cover spots are so obviously placed for a reason, that after you've shot an enemy using one, a new one will appear and run over to the exact same spot. In a gunfight you might as well just line up your crosshairs, sellotape down the right trigger and go read a book or something.
The game is basically the outcome of Gears of War having a drunken one night stand with Resi 4, who then went on to do a lot of crack throughout the pregnancy. Whilst on holiday in Corby. But I'm reserving judgement.
I tried out the Trial version of TMNT Re-Shelled on XBox Live Arcade last night, and it's actually really good. The game still has a very old-school feel, and captures the essence of the old cartoons perfectly, Pizza obsessions and Cowabungas intact. during the trial I had run-ins with a super-size General Krang and Baxter Stockman, and the memories came flooding back. I will be purchasing at some point.
Also, I've just finished the Arkham Asylum demo on PS3, and it's good. Not excellent, but good. The camera view is a bit too close, and Bruce's pointy head always takes up about a quarter of the screen. And, while Mark Hamill is amazing as always as The Joker (ZOMG it's not Heath Ledger he was definitive!!!!!1), Kevin Conroy's heart doesn't seem to be in it fully. Also, the inmates make the Genome Soldiers from Metal Gear seem like they have perfect 20/20 vision, as I was able to sneak up on one virtually from right in front of him. Let's hope Eidos sort this things out before release, but I'm sure they won't this close to the day. Two weeks today boys and girls.
The game also had me struggling with whether it's canon or not. The bits based on older games most definitely aren't. It was cool seeing what Wesker was up to though, and playing as him too. And the end of Umbrella Section was okay-ish, even if all of the monsters created exclusively for the game looked arse.
Imagine a world where the slightest tap of the left analogue stick sends you legging it into a wall. Imagine a world where enemies are hit square in the head with a giant spinning shuriken, and just shrug it off. Imagine a world where you can still hear the rain falling after it's stopped. This is no ordinary world. This is Dark Sector's world.
What an absolute shambles. I only started playing last night, so I'm still in the 'benefit of the doubt' phase, although in the hour or so that I played it I got through three chapters, and if the Achievements are anything to go by there are only 9 or 10. My wireless 360 pad has a small fault, in that if the left stick is slightly to the left, it sticks. Normally this isn't a problem, because when it happens your character just slowly shifts across. But Dark Sector only has two speeds; walk fast and leg it. So if I'm behind a wall reloading or something, and accidentally knock the stick, the floppy haired prick just strolls out into a hail of bullets. And respawning enemies in this day and age?
Which brings me to another thing. The cover spots are so obviously placed for a reason, that after you've shot an enemy using one, a new one will appear and run over to the exact same spot. In a gunfight you might as well just line up your crosshairs, sellotape down the right trigger and go read a book or something.
The game is basically the outcome of Gears of War having a drunken one night stand with Resi 4, who then went on to do a lot of crack throughout the pregnancy. Whilst on holiday in Corby. But I'm reserving judgement.
I tried out the Trial version of TMNT Re-Shelled on XBox Live Arcade last night, and it's actually really good. The game still has a very old-school feel, and captures the essence of the old cartoons perfectly, Pizza obsessions and Cowabungas intact. during the trial I had run-ins with a super-size General Krang and Baxter Stockman, and the memories came flooding back. I will be purchasing at some point.
Also, I've just finished the Arkham Asylum demo on PS3, and it's good. Not excellent, but good. The camera view is a bit too close, and Bruce's pointy head always takes up about a quarter of the screen. And, while Mark Hamill is amazing as always as The Joker (ZOMG it's not Heath Ledger he was definitive!!!!!1), Kevin Conroy's heart doesn't seem to be in it fully. Also, the inmates make the Genome Soldiers from Metal Gear seem like they have perfect 20/20 vision, as I was able to sneak up on one virtually from right in front of him. Let's hope Eidos sort this things out before release, but I'm sure they won't this close to the day. Two weeks today boys and girls.
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