Still Alive! Laptop took a bit longer than I would have liked to get repaired, I touched on the late collection by the courier last time I posted. Well, after it was collected a week late, another 10 days later they sent the fucker back untouched, claiming that the damage wasn't covered by the warranty (I did have a look in the warranty booklet, and indeed accidental damage is not covered, which gave them a small point in their favour until I realised that they'd given my a Hewlett Packard warranty booklet when my laptop is a Packard Bell machine, derp), despite the fact that they knew what was wrong with it before it even left my house. And to top it all off, some pikeys got hold of our details from the Curry's system and called us twice trying to rob us.

So I ended up getting an independent repair company to do it for me at my own expense, although I won't divulge how much here because they guy was really helpful and did a great job, and, let's be fair, gave me my life back after about 5 weeks of being bored and having to use the Internet browser on my Nokia N97. Moral of the story: don't buy anything from Curry's, they're arseholes.

So, with the gap in posting, where do I start? I've got Dead Space 2, Dragon Age II, Diabolik: The Original Sin, Bionic Commando and Killzone 3 behind me with Red Steel 2, Wii Sports Resort and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit in progress. I also wanted to talk about the fantastic Mortal Kombat demo and the not-so-fantastic Motorstorm: Apocalypse demo, a small anecdote about BlazBlue and maybe a mini unboxing of the Killzone 3 Helghast Edition. Thanks to a bonus from work I've also got Two Worlds II, Doctor Who: Return to Earth, Dead Space: Extraction (both versions in fact), Prince of Persia Trilogy, LittleBigPlanet 2, Bulletstorm, Arcania: Gothic 4 and Motorstorm: Arctic Edge all lined up for the coming weeks.

It's also been my 26th birthday in the last week, which has allowed me to upgrade my personal gadgetry with the Samsung Galaxy Player MP3 player and the HTC HD7 mobile phone, powered respectively by Android OS and Windows Phone 7, and both respectable gaming platforms in their own right, especially the phone, which is XBox Live compatible and plays a bunch of XBLA games, achievements and all. That's still on it's way to me though, but watching gameplay videos of Need for Speed: Undercover, Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles HD and Earthworm Jim HD have me very much excited. So it's all go at 24HG towers at the moment.

I suppose I'll start with the games that haven't left enough of an impression with me, less to write about, so I can get more in. Diabolik: The Original Sin wins the prize for the most aptly titled game ever, as playing the point-and-click crapfest was like spending a short time in hell. The graphics are piss-poor, like a high-end PS1 game, the voice acting is primary-school-nativity standard and the logic of some of the puzzles is frankly baffling, and this is from a man who finished Secret Files: Tunguska. Finally, the inventory system is terrible, especially with the copious arsenal of gadgets that your protagonist is equipped with before you even start. Diabolik? 'Dire bollocks'.

Bionic Commando wasn't much better, combining a bog-standard shooter with a rubbish version of the PS1 Spider-Man games. The visuals are nice, a bit Metal Gear Solid 4 reminiscent, but that's the only redeeming feature about the dull, uninvolving game. If you want to fly about on a grappling hook, Just Cause 2 does it better. Come to think of it, it does shooting and melee combat better too, and a ton of other things that Bionic Commando doesn't even attempt. What was I talking about again?

I'm going to leave it there for now, but I'll probably post again before the end of the week with a more in-depth look at some of the bigger games I've played. I think Trev's working on a new video too, so it's business as usual again here at 24HG. See you soon.

Is that a cartoon pig?

First things first:

Yeah, I left the price on intentionally. The more awake of you will remember I reviewed MW2 on the arse end of 2009 with full intentions of hating it, but actually ended up quite enjoying the game, as far fetched and Bond-like it was (which causes me to diverge and note that while playing GoldenEye on the Wii the other week, my immediate reaction was that it was like 'a shit Call of Duty'. Back on track). I had all intention to pick the game up once it hit the fabled £10 mark, but for that price with a pair of actual Night Vision Goggles I couldn't really pass it up. It was from Morrisons if anyone's interested, but I doubt you'll find any now. Our store only had four copies sent.

The goggles themselves are great. They look and feel a bit plasticky, after all they are made of plastic, but once I got the buggers on I was incredibly impressed. They are able to switch between long and short range, have adjustable eyepieces and manual focus, and even let you apply a green filter to your vision, just like in the movies. Now it's just left for me to find a suitable use for them, instead of following my cat around in the dark. I can't wait until I next go camping.

I've had a better time with The Sims 3 now I've learnt to cheat (press start and hold all shoulder buttons for those interested). The port is actually pretty faithful (I say without actually playing the PC version of The Sims 3), and the fire hazard meter is a lot more forgiving than on previous generation consoles: I was able to move into the biggest house in town and fill it with junk and barely even scratch the surface. Sure, I'm not getting any Trophies for my troubles, but it's hardly having a negative impact on my enjoyment of the game, whereas having to cope with poverty and finding a job while still trying to keep myself entertained and happy, well, it's a bit too much like real life.

I finished Fable III with my evil princess, and with a bit of patience (and leaving my XBox on all day to earn as much as I can) I think the next time I should be able to play through it as a benevolent character. I intend to do the trilogy fairly soon, as Fable III really got me in the mood to redo the first and, through my rose-tinted spectacles (I actually own some once, found them on a wall in Derbyshire, true story), best in the series. Been playing Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions too, which is a nice little distraction. A standard God of War clone, the game sees you step into the shoes of four Spider-Men from varying Marvel Earths to battle evil and reclaim fragments of a broken stone tablet with the power to undo all realities, all the while quipping to yourself in a typically carefree way.

It's mostly a standard brawler affair, with the occasional Force Unleashed II style freefall section in the Spider-Man 2099 bits, but the action is broken up by the Spider-Man Noir levels. Set in the 1930s, Noir sees an incarnation of Spider-Man as a darkly-dressed vigilante stalking the night, clinging to the shadows and striking terror into the cowardly, superstitious criminal element. Totally not like Batman. In fact, the Noir sections are nothing but a homage to Arkham Asylum, in which you swing around rafters silently picking off your enemies and fleeing to the shadows when spotted. Even the Spider Sense mode is a bit like Batman's Detective mode.

Having reached the Nolan North powered Deadpool level last night, and hearing the man himself deliver probably his best role since last year's Uncharted 2, I am inclined to think that I've possibly reached the highest point in the game, for me anyway. But at no point have I been bored with it, I just haven't been blown away. It's a solid game, and a lot better than Spider-Man 3. Actually thinking of picking up Web of Shadows at some point now. I heard you can decapitate Wolverine in it. Sweet.

And finally, I've conquered my fears of Fuck Off Dragons and restarted Dragon Age: Origins, the time the Ultimate Edition on PS3, in anticipation of March's Dragon Age II. A Dalish Elf this time, I'm determined to play all of the DLC too. I completed Leliana's Song before starting the main game, and it was pretty good, if a little shallow and pointless. It just tells how Leliana, our Orlesian Rogue, was betrayed by her mentor Marjolaine, as she touches upon in conversation in the main game, mainly through combat, which wasn't DA:O's strong point. It only took a couple of hours to finish anyway, and it was fresh and new, so I can't complain.

Alright, so, my Top 10 of '10 has been ultimately drafted, and I just have one more game to play from last year, so expect next week's post to be a bit of a 2010 recap of the 25 or 26 games that didn't get into the highest echelon, followed by the Top 10 the week after. I'll probably recap last year's 10 too, as it was never posted on this site. Bye for now.

I'm Super, thanks for asking!

It's amazing, that in this day and age, if a linear game takes more than six hours to complete it outlives it's welcome. GTA IV, Fallout 3, that's fine. They've got plenty of things tucked away for the ADHD generation to stumble across, and it's easy to poddle off and play something else for a few weeks and drop back into it if needs be. Yep, £40 is perfectly acceptable for six hours of disposable entertainment.

Take Darksiders for example. One of the finest games so far this generation, capturing the feel of absolutely classic games like Soul Reaver and Primal, and throwing a gripping and engaging storyline and at times jaw-dropping visuals to boot, but after 16 hours of game time, spread over the course of two weeks, it had dragged on a little bit too long.

So when I finally dropped the last enemy last night (enemy is the only word I could use which is still accurate and doesn't give anything away) and laid my pad down, I breathed a sigh of relief. Don't get me wrong, it is a fantastic game, but I was aching for something new.

"I'm a fuckin' Demon!"

But I will at least remember it fondly, and shit, I'm going to recommend it to anyone that will listen (I started that last night by passing the word on to my Elder Scrolls freak sister). As I said, the graphics are stunning in places, with vibrancy in colours on a par with Uncharted and Just Cause 2. And the voice acting is absolutely fantastic, with Mark Hamill and Moon Bloodgood leading the D-list way and Liam O'brien (me neither) doing his best Simon Templeman impersonation as the lead character. The boss fights mostly play out like N64 Zelda bosses, but it does have a go at the 'Epic Boss' style of God of War, without quite pulling it off. I also noticed that, when dismembering an enemy, the wounds are just hollow and red, no meat or bones, which is a bit of a letdown, but doesn't mar the experience and is only really noticeable in some of the larger enemies. Speaking of larger enemies, the end boss is a Fuck Off Dragon. But it's considerably easier to kill than the one in Dragon Age.

The preceding game on my shame pile turned out to be InFamous. For those who don't know, InFamous is a PS3 exclusive free-roaming Superhero game. You play as Cole McGrath, one of those annoying Parkour messengers who was unknowingly delivering a bomb to somebody when it went off, levelling half the city. Being at the epicenter of the blast, Cole naturally develops super lightning powers instead of getting vaporized. But when a plague breaks out, the city is locked off, and gang crime becomes rife. So Cole decides to become the people's protector. Or a public menace. yeah, the game has a karma system.

If you take the evil route, you actually become a Sith Lord.

Well, I've only played for like half an hour so far. Honest first impressions? well, it's a bit... shit really. Surprisingly ugly for a PS3 exclusive, and the fiddly climbing and jumping and hand to hand combat without any kind of lock-on function make it seem no better than Spider-Man 3. The only moral choice I had to make was when I found a food drop, and I could either let the citizens share it amongst themselves or take it all for myself, and sit atop my tower feasting, laughing at the starving peasants below and zapping anybody that comes near. Very black and white. So far, it's not a patch on Prototype, which I can't help but compare it to.

Moving on, Super Street Fighter IV arrived last week, much to my joy. This update to SFIV boasts ten extra characters, a new ultra combo for each character, the return of the car/barrel smashing bonus rounds, redone intros and endings and a bunch of extra multiplayer modes including 8-player team battle and a winner-stays-on type of affair, again for up to 8 players. So the fact that it wasn't just DLC is kind of justified.

Ibuki is a force to be reckoned with.

The characters are a mixed bunch. There's Adon from Street Fighter, and Cody and Guy from Final Fight (or all three of those from Street Fighter Alpha if you prefer), T. Hawk and Dee Jay from Super Street Fighter II, and Makoto, Dudley and the awesome Ibuki from Street Fighter III making a return, along with two all-new fighters. Firstly, Juri is an agent for the evil S.I.N. organization, using Taekwondo and drawing power from a 'Feng Shui device' in her prosthetic eye. Rather than give her the power to arrange furniture, it actually lets her kick fireballs at people, go figure. The second is Hakan, a Turkish oil wrestler who lubes himself up before each fight. I'm telling you, you can't make this stuff up.

Played a few rounds against Raz7el online too, and aside from quite a bit of lag, the game remains pretty tight. I also don't like to brag, but I handed his ass to him on more than a few occasions. Dan Hibiki is awesome.

Well, that's about that. Expect more of an opinion on InFamous next week, and a look at Borderlands: The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned. See ya!

Today must be my lucky day, baby, you are the Prototype...

My name is 24 Hour Gamer, and my wife is addicted to Dragon Age Origins.
She decided to give it a try last Friday, and subsequently spent eight hours straight playing it. Like me, she's struggled with the complexity of the game but as an Oblivion veteran the setting appeals to her.
I'm not going to go too much into Dragon Age this week, I've been on about it for the last two weeks, but without spoiling too much, I had a 'Wrex moment' last night, that I wasn't very happy about. I'm getting the feeling that by this time next week I'll have finished the game and be able to give a final verdict on it, and I'm tempted to name it my game of the year. No other game this year has kept me going for 29 hours without me getting bored, Borderlands took me 27 hours to finish but is nowhere near as deep and rewarding. And there's still probably a few hours left to do on Dragon Age.
I decided that leaving the 360 version of Alone in the Dark alone was probably the best idea, before it destroys my interest in a buggy mass of glitches, and the PS3's Inferno has now established itself on my Christmas list. Instead, I've opted to play Prototype as my secondary game this week.
Prototype does nothing new, instead it's like a 'best of' collection of aspects of other superhero games. It has the jumping of Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, the climbing of Spider-Man 2 and it's sequels, the combat of Wolverine, the gliding from Arkham Asylum (if you want to get anal about release dates, Batman Begins then), Car Throwing from Crackdown, and (I may be clutching at straws here) Venom's absorbing people for health from Ultimate Spider-Man. But it does all of that very well indeed.
The game places you under the omnipresent hood of Alex Mercer, who begins the game on a morgue slab, about to have an autopsy. He wakes up from his apparent death, and after the initial panic of narrowly avoiding dissection realises he has complete amnesia, and the ability to do, well, whatever the fuck he wants to thanks to a virus he's contracted. With the help of his sister, Dana, he finds another infected person, and sets out to free her from her prison, only to discover she's completely mental and wants to infect the entire city. So it's your job to stop her.
Alex, while being very much a hero in this story, is not a very nice man. There's none of the "don't hurt the civilians" from other superhero games, Mercer can and does indiscriminately murder anyone he feels, to the point that it's actually physically difficult not to kill any innocents (as I've already mentioned, you need to consume them for health). They always see to fly into a panic, and instead of running away from you, they just scatter in all directions and quite often end up between your claws and an enemy's throat.
And aside from that, killing them is actually really entertaining. It's great fun sprinting into a crowd and grabbing a passer by before they've even seen you coming, running up the side of a building without even breaking stride and tossing them to their doom, or picking up a car and, again, sprinting through a crowd watching the bodies fly. Strangely enough though, every time I do grab a random New Yorker, they always seem to be female, and there's no safe way to let them go. All you can do is throw them and hope they don't decapitate themselves on a lamp post during their flight.
I tried out the demo for Band Hero. Although a rocker at heart, I thought playing songs like Walking on Sunshine would be great fun to play, but said song is on the demo and it really wasn't that great. Guitar games have gotten so stale that it doesn't even matter what you're playing, it's all just pressing buttons and strumming in rhythm. So DJ Hero must breathe new life into the series, right? No, I played it in Gamestation this week, it's shit. Also had a bit of a go with Mini Ninjas, which is forgettable (and I couldn't help but notice that they stole the enemy death effect from Zelda: Wind Waker) and Galaga Legions, which very nearly sent me into an epileptic seizure. I don't recommend it.
Finally, everyone sign up to Playfire. I have a profile on there, and it's a great networking site for gamers with an addictive award scheme which is like a cross between Achievements and Trophies. Check it out.