This week has been an eventful week for me where gaming's concerned.
On Friday, after blogging I went to work, and was asked if my locker could play host to a friend's copy of Modern Warfare 2, to which I obliged. He then went home without it, and seeing as Saturday was my day off he let me take it home and have a go.
Over the course of Saturday I played through the campaign, choosing to ignore the multiplayer as it really isn't my cup of tea. At first I wondered what I'd let myself in for, listening to gung-ho American troops whoop with delight every time one of them drops an ethnic minority of their choosing, but once I got to the covert ops, with CoD4's protagonists Cpt. Soap McTavish and later (spoiler) Cpt. Price, the game actually got quite good.
Yeah, as with CoD4 the game is split up into two teams' different perspectives. On one side you have the US Army Rangers, lead by The Arbiter from Halo and struggling to understand why they're killing people but happy to do so anyway, and on the other there's the Special Air Service, going behind the scenes and rescuing hostages and whatnot.
Oh yeah, and then there's 'the' airport bit. It's not as bad as you think, you aren't forced to kill any innocents (although I did) and the game even gives you the option to skip the section in case any of you can't tell the difference between games and reality and decide to take up arms in Gatwick or something. Another case of the Daily Mail panicking.
And in related news, I heard this week that EA are planning to rejuvenate their Medal of Honor franchise with Medal of Honor: Modern Combat. No doubt it follows central protagonist Cpt. Radox McTaggart as he trawls through Iraqistan looking for people to suppress. I look forward to it.
And yes, Dragon Age Origins is finally over! The last boss is the single hardest thing I've had to do all year, gaming wise. I thought it would be a great idea to take my Rogue and two Mages with me, to attack from long range and heal me as I did the heroic work. Well, my healer, Wynne, ran out of mana about 12 seconds into the fight from healing everyone who so much as stubbed their toe, and 15 seconds in all three of them were dead. Not a problem, I thought as I hacked away at the ArchDemon (who happens to be a fuck-off Dragon), it seemed really easy at first. Then the bastard flew out of reach and send his army after me, and I had to ballista him, while fighting off the Darkspawn, until he came back into the fight. I finally remembered I could call an army to my aid too, so I did, and while they held back the Darkspawn I took on the Dragon. But he had decided to fight back this time, and before long I was down to my last few Healing Poultices. In a last ditch effort to win, I ran back to the ballista and spammed it until he dropped. I'm really not an RPG gamer though, so maybe it won't be as hard for others. And to clarify, as I said last week, DAO is most definitely my game of the year.
And the day after I finished Prototype. It's possibly a little bit too long, clocking up at 11 hours (but put at least three of those down to aimlessly slaughtering civilians), but it was fun none the less. Hoping to get InFamous soon too, as Prototype gave me a taste for that kind of thing.
One thing I did notice about Prototype though, is that Alex Mercer isn't exactly that original a character. If you watch the movie about how he becomes what he is, and then watch William Birkin's origin in Resident Evil 2, there are some very coincidental similarities.
Rounding things up, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysey does not work properly on XBox360, which pissed me off as I can't be arsed to get the old XBox out. The speech is virtually inaudible, and the FMVs bounce around so much that you can't even see what's happening. So I scratched that off my list along with Ninja Gaiden II, which I simply couldn't be arsed to play after the stress of the ArchDemon. So now I've decided to reacquaint myself with lady Lara Croft and play through Tomb Raiders Legend, Anniversary and Underworld again. And, gaming event of the century, I bought Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard on PS3 for £5.99 on Play.com, which is all lined up for after the Tomb Raiders. As bad as it's supposed to be, it looks like it might be appealing to me.
Friday, 27 November 2009
Friday, 20 November 2009
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.
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.
Friday, 13 November 2009
We feel the pain of a lifetime lost in a thousand days, through the fire and the flames we carry on!
My name is 24 Hour Gamer, and I am addicted to Dragon Age Origins.
It's always daunting for a non-RPGer to take his or her first tentative steps into a Role-Playing Game, they blind you with stats and classes and items with all kinds of different names (why can't a healing potion be called a healing potion in every game?) until before you know it you find yourself curled up in a foetal position fully clothed in the shower, sobbing, with the names of various plants and what kind of healing properties they have Sharpied all over the walls. Just me?
I've been playing light RPGs for the last couple of years, games like Oblivion, Fallout 3, Borderlands, Fable 2, Mass Effect and (cough) Two Worlds, all of which I can still play like an Action/Adventure or FPS if the mood takes me, and foolishly I thought I would be ready for Bioware's latest epic. "It can't have the combat system that made me cry like KOTOR, surely" I thought. "Bioware has learned with Mass Effect that real-time combat is the way to go, it'll be like Fable" I thought.
"Oh, fuck." I realised as I played it. But I'd spent £45 of my hard earned cash on this, I wasn't going to just give up like I did with Star Wars, so I persevered, and now, a week later I am beginning to obsess over Dragon Age, like I did with Oblivion before it.
I'd like to talk about the party members. I picked up my last one last night, a Dwarf called Oghren with the best moustache I've ever seen. They don't just chip in every now and then with conflicting emotions regarding choices to be made like in Mass Effect, everything you do influences what they think of you, whether they like you or not. It's like a violent version of The Sims. But I've not really noticed anything interesting about the characters, there isn't a single Garrus or Wrex among them, nobody I find interesting enough as a person to keep them with me. Shale, the stone Golem was okay, but he was that strong he was getting all of the kills and thus all of the experience points, so I had to drop him from the team. So I opted to just go with all the characters that wanted to nail me, because it made the dialogue between them interesting; Morrigan, the witch from the swamp, Leliana, the redhead assassin and Zevran, the male elf. Yes, there are gay sex scenes, nipple sucking intact. I'd love to see what the Daily Mail has to say about that one.
I've had another dip into my shame pile this week and dipped my toes into Alone in the Dark, expecting to retract them straight away as a wayward turd floats up to me. But as it happens, my expectations were so low that I was pleasantly surprised. The visuals especially are noteworthy, quite reminiscent of The Darkness, and the cinematic effect of being in a crumbling building almost rivals Uncharted 2. Almost. The main problem I had was with the controls and camera view, and apparently there's a driving section that reduces grown men to tears. But I've read that all of these issues were resolved in the PS3 version, subtitled Inferno, so I may just throw the 360 copy back on the shelf and try and find the PS3 one cheap.
And that about wraps it up. Had a quick go on Aliens vs. Predator 2 on the PC in the week, and it's hard to imagine ever being scared by the sub-PS2 graphics, but once upon a time it terrified me. But saying that, so did Silent Hill and Dino Crisis on the PS1 so what can I say? And had a quick go on Guitar Hero World Tour on drums with my Wife and my friend Paul over XBox Live, and half an hour of it nigh on killed me. I am so out of shape. Maybe I ought to try that Wii Fit that's collecting dust in the corner.
It's always daunting for a non-RPGer to take his or her first tentative steps into a Role-Playing Game, they blind you with stats and classes and items with all kinds of different names (why can't a healing potion be called a healing potion in every game?) until before you know it you find yourself curled up in a foetal position fully clothed in the shower, sobbing, with the names of various plants and what kind of healing properties they have Sharpied all over the walls. Just me?
I've been playing light RPGs for the last couple of years, games like Oblivion, Fallout 3, Borderlands, Fable 2, Mass Effect and (cough) Two Worlds, all of which I can still play like an Action/Adventure or FPS if the mood takes me, and foolishly I thought I would be ready for Bioware's latest epic. "It can't have the combat system that made me cry like KOTOR, surely" I thought. "Bioware has learned with Mass Effect that real-time combat is the way to go, it'll be like Fable" I thought.
"Oh, fuck." I realised as I played it. But I'd spent £45 of my hard earned cash on this, I wasn't going to just give up like I did with Star Wars, so I persevered, and now, a week later I am beginning to obsess over Dragon Age, like I did with Oblivion before it.
I'd like to talk about the party members. I picked up my last one last night, a Dwarf called Oghren with the best moustache I've ever seen. They don't just chip in every now and then with conflicting emotions regarding choices to be made like in Mass Effect, everything you do influences what they think of you, whether they like you or not. It's like a violent version of The Sims. But I've not really noticed anything interesting about the characters, there isn't a single Garrus or Wrex among them, nobody I find interesting enough as a person to keep them with me. Shale, the stone Golem was okay, but he was that strong he was getting all of the kills and thus all of the experience points, so I had to drop him from the team. So I opted to just go with all the characters that wanted to nail me, because it made the dialogue between them interesting; Morrigan, the witch from the swamp, Leliana, the redhead assassin and Zevran, the male elf. Yes, there are gay sex scenes, nipple sucking intact. I'd love to see what the Daily Mail has to say about that one.
I've had another dip into my shame pile this week and dipped my toes into Alone in the Dark, expecting to retract them straight away as a wayward turd floats up to me. But as it happens, my expectations were so low that I was pleasantly surprised. The visuals especially are noteworthy, quite reminiscent of The Darkness, and the cinematic effect of being in a crumbling building almost rivals Uncharted 2. Almost. The main problem I had was with the controls and camera view, and apparently there's a driving section that reduces grown men to tears. But I've read that all of these issues were resolved in the PS3 version, subtitled Inferno, so I may just throw the 360 copy back on the shelf and try and find the PS3 one cheap.
And that about wraps it up. Had a quick go on Aliens vs. Predator 2 on the PC in the week, and it's hard to imagine ever being scared by the sub-PS2 graphics, but once upon a time it terrified me. But saying that, so did Silent Hill and Dino Crisis on the PS1 so what can I say? And had a quick go on Guitar Hero World Tour on drums with my Wife and my friend Paul over XBox Live, and half an hour of it nigh on killed me. I am so out of shape. Maybe I ought to try that Wii Fit that's collecting dust in the corner.
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.
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