It's been a busy week boys and girls, but not in a good way. I've hardly had any gaming time at all this week, with the candle being burnt at both ends and all that, it's all caught up to me and as soon as the evening comes round I'm out like a light, when I would normally be gaming.
So I'm still knee deep in Darksiders, although now I'm more used to the gameplay and combat system It's gradually getting a bit easier. I'm not going to bore you with that though. I did however polish off Gay Tony (almost a double entendre, but not quite), so I moved onto another 360 title.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback is a 2007 FPS, and is perhaps most well-known for it's extreme violence. Hell, that's the only reason I bought it. It's a standard Modern Warfare style romp through various Middle Eastern and Chinese locales, the point of which is to rain down American one-man justice on everybody who doesn't fly the Stars and Stripes on their front lawn everyday, or 'terrorists' as they are commonly referred to.
I want to make it clear: This is a BAD GAME. Probably worse than Rogue Warrior. But, it is playable, due in no small part to the absolutely hilarious and over-the-top violence and piss-awful script and voice acting. Each level is just you plugging bullet after bullet into the natives of whichever country you happen to be in at the time, occasionally pausing for some banter with the female operator through your headset, usually dropping more one-liners than Arnold Schwarzenegger, and then back to the slaughter.
Nearly every shot fired severs a limb too. I was once outflanked by a marauding freedom hater, who hit me in the back with the butt of his (rather stereotypical) AK-47. In retaliation, I produced my trusty standard combat knife, and in one fell swoop, decapitated him! The comical level of violence makes carrying on worthwhile, although when I came up to a small escort section, the buddy AI resulted in more mission failures than I had patience for and I placed it back on the shelf. It had served it's purpose.
Sensing that I would have nothing else to write about this week, I hurriedly downloaded a few demos. The first of which was Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction. As ashamed as I am to admit it, this is my first experience of Splinter Cell, despite owning Chaos Theory on the PS2 and never playing it. I don't know why.
The game, as far as the demo shows, is very similar the The Bourne Conspiracy, just with more refined shooting and less interesting takedowns. The interrogation at the start was fun, with a lot of detailed, if a little unbelievably OTT environmental damage, but the rest of the game failed to grab me. I might grab it a bit later on, but the fact that I have four games to catch up on first makes it a little daunting.
I also tried out Blur, which is a very old-school feeling arcade racer. It's pretty much WipEout or Rollcage, only in normal licenced cars. And CSI: Deadly Intent, which is a contender for the worst game I've ever played, with it's patronising tutorial voiceover and the graphical quality of a PSP game. It's the sort of thing you'd expect to find as a free download on the CSI website, a boring point-and-click evidence finder game, which is about as emotionally gripping as cleaning your kitchen floor. And if I was Laurence Fishburne I'd be pretty pissed about how overweight my character model looked.
Oh yeah, I won the NowGamer.com Podcast competition! At the end of each Podcast, they play a piece of music from a videogame (usually remixed or distorted in some way), and whoever identifies which game the music hails from, and is chosen from the other correct answers using the curiosity of a cat, of all things, wins a box of assorted junk from around the NG office. I answered correctly with Laura's Theme from Silent Hill 2, and was lucky enough to be drawn. I'll post over on VGSpace detailing my haul when the postie drags it to my door.
Well, short but sweet, eh? Next week I'll have a report Super Street Fighter IV, and I'll try and get Darksiders out of the way and make a start on InFamous. Tata for now.
Showing posts with label WipEout. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WipEout. Show all posts
Tuesday, 27 April 2010
Friday, 11 September 2009
What are you dense? Are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think I am? I'm the goddamn Batman.
A couple of factors have seen me disband my Shame Pile this week; The first being my XBox 360 rudely flashing three scarlet beacons of hate at me on Monday morning, and most of the games left on it were 360 games, the other being that I finally gave up holding out and went out and got Batman: Arkham Asylum, thankfully on the PS3.
After blagging some free Dissidia promotional postcards from the nice man behind the counter at GAME, I gleefully skipped home to open the box up (Got the Collector's Edition), and was actually really disappointed. Not only was the Batarang made of cheap plastic, as opposed to the metal one I was told I would get (although in retrospect people would die if it was metal), but it doesn't come off the stand either. The second disappointment came with the 'digipack' cardboard sleeve. If I'd got it on the 360 I wouldn't have been bothered, because the sleeve is DVD case sized, but on the shelf with my PS3 games it looked retarded. One click on eBay later and all was rectified, a PS3 game case was winging it's way across the country to me and plopped into my hand yesterday.
The game is actually really good, the demo does it no justice, and when I got it home I spent about 8 hours straight on it, nearly completing it, which I did a couple of days later, the second time I played it. I have no regrets though, the game was fantastic, with the only exceptions being Poison Ivy's Dual Shock 3 throwingly annoying boss fight and the samey enemies. They sorted out the problem with Batman taking up two thirds of the screen too, it zooms out nicely when you're running or fighting, and The Riddler's... erm... riddles are a nice touch, which will definitely see me returning to it to clear them up.
I also got SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny on PSP, which at first seemed disappointing but with perseverance I got into it heavily. Made a surprisingly good Kain (from Legacy of Kain) on the Character Creator feature (which is a bit watered down from SoulCalibur IV's, but impressive on a handheld none the less), using the move set of Siegfried, and am slowly but surely starting to kick ass on it. The difficulty level is harder than the other SCs though, without the option to lower it.
My initial disappointment was mainly with the long-awaited cameo from God of War's Kratos. He isn't actually that good, his moves aren't as fluid as they are in his home turf, although if they were he'd be unbeatable. And I guess that, because he's in that, we won't see him in a 'proper' SoulCalibur game.
And Burnout Paradise, the third and final game I acquired this week. When I initially tried the demo I hated the game, I have a bit of a stigma with sandbox racing games as one wrong turn can prove costly, but I'm having great fun with it. It's possibly to do with the fact that the Ghostbusters Ecto-1 style car I purchased from the PSN store in Fanboy-fuelled delight has better stats than I should have at that point in the game, it might be due to the fact that Burnout Dominator's soundtrack has made it through pretty much unscathed, including annoying-as-fuck anthem 'Girlfriend' by flappy headed mess Avril Lavigne, which is ironically perfect music to smash up a car to. Either way, it's great.
And the rest of the week briefly: Spent a lot of Tuesday night playing Lego Batman, Burnout Paradise and Wii Sports with my 3 year old nephew, which is always fun. He's really starting to get the hang of games now, it would bring a tear to my eye if I wasn't such a hardened perfect male specimen. TESTOSTERONE!
During the week I watched Street Fighter Alpha: The Animation, which was pretty good. I loved the fact that out of his two fights, Dan Hibiki got cut to ribbons by Vega (That's 'Claw' if you're a pretentious fucktard), and failed to Gadouken Birdie and was pulverised for his troubles. Oh, how I laughed.
And the 'dynamic themes' hit the PSN Store last night. I tried the WipEout one, because it was free, and was indifferent. It was completely overshadowed by the two Arkham standard themes, of which the Batman one is gracing my Home screen as we speak.
After blagging some free Dissidia promotional postcards from the nice man behind the counter at GAME, I gleefully skipped home to open the box up (Got the Collector's Edition), and was actually really disappointed. Not only was the Batarang made of cheap plastic, as opposed to the metal one I was told I would get (although in retrospect people would die if it was metal), but it doesn't come off the stand either. The second disappointment came with the 'digipack' cardboard sleeve. If I'd got it on the 360 I wouldn't have been bothered, because the sleeve is DVD case sized, but on the shelf with my PS3 games it looked retarded. One click on eBay later and all was rectified, a PS3 game case was winging it's way across the country to me and plopped into my hand yesterday.
The game is actually really good, the demo does it no justice, and when I got it home I spent about 8 hours straight on it, nearly completing it, which I did a couple of days later, the second time I played it. I have no regrets though, the game was fantastic, with the only exceptions being Poison Ivy's Dual Shock 3 throwingly annoying boss fight and the samey enemies. They sorted out the problem with Batman taking up two thirds of the screen too, it zooms out nicely when you're running or fighting, and The Riddler's... erm... riddles are a nice touch, which will definitely see me returning to it to clear them up.
I also got SoulCalibur: Broken Destiny on PSP, which at first seemed disappointing but with perseverance I got into it heavily. Made a surprisingly good Kain (from Legacy of Kain) on the Character Creator feature (which is a bit watered down from SoulCalibur IV's, but impressive on a handheld none the less), using the move set of Siegfried, and am slowly but surely starting to kick ass on it. The difficulty level is harder than the other SCs though, without the option to lower it.
My initial disappointment was mainly with the long-awaited cameo from God of War's Kratos. He isn't actually that good, his moves aren't as fluid as they are in his home turf, although if they were he'd be unbeatable. And I guess that, because he's in that, we won't see him in a 'proper' SoulCalibur game.
And Burnout Paradise, the third and final game I acquired this week. When I initially tried the demo I hated the game, I have a bit of a stigma with sandbox racing games as one wrong turn can prove costly, but I'm having great fun with it. It's possibly to do with the fact that the Ghostbusters Ecto-1 style car I purchased from the PSN store in Fanboy-fuelled delight has better stats than I should have at that point in the game, it might be due to the fact that Burnout Dominator's soundtrack has made it through pretty much unscathed, including annoying-as-fuck anthem 'Girlfriend' by flappy headed mess Avril Lavigne, which is ironically perfect music to smash up a car to. Either way, it's great.
And the rest of the week briefly: Spent a lot of Tuesday night playing Lego Batman, Burnout Paradise and Wii Sports with my 3 year old nephew, which is always fun. He's really starting to get the hang of games now, it would bring a tear to my eye if I wasn't such a hardened perfect male specimen. TESTOSTERONE!
During the week I watched Street Fighter Alpha: The Animation, which was pretty good. I loved the fact that out of his two fights, Dan Hibiki got cut to ribbons by Vega (That's 'Claw' if you're a pretentious fucktard), and failed to Gadouken Birdie and was pulverised for his troubles. Oh, how I laughed.
And the 'dynamic themes' hit the PSN Store last night. I tried the WipEout one, because it was free, and was indifferent. It was completely overshadowed by the two Arkham standard themes, of which the Batman one is gracing my Home screen as we speak.
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