Still Gamers

A creed you should pay attention to

2009-12-17T21:04:00.003Z

Get ready to don the cowl of an Assassin and become a killer for hire in a tale of treachery, revenge and a machine that can see genetic memories in peoples DNA. Assassin's Creed 2 is here.

Taking off right from where the first game left you, Assassin's Creed 2 has you jump back into the Animus to witness the birth of our new main character, Ezio. Desmond Miles is the character who we view the memories through, but it is the Assassin's themselves who are the protaginists in this tale. However right after the birth of Ezio, you are out of the Animus and trying to escape your captors. Pretty soon you are in a new base and you are about to use another Animus machine, dubbed the Animus 2.0, but this time you go in voluntarily. Soon you are in Ezio's shoes an a young man in Florence, Italy. What happens for the next hour or so is an extended tutorial that actually feeds the plot to you at the same time. In fact I would say for most of the game you are learning new tactics and gaining new weapons and accessories to help you in your sneaky sneaky stab stab fun. After an hour and half into the game Ezio finally dons the cowl of the Assassin and its time for Ezio's life as a killer to begin.

The story of Assassin's Creed 2 is a huge improvement over the first gamer, now I did not hate the first game like most, I quite enjoyed some of it but as far as your motivation went with AC1, it was pretty bare bones. In AC1, you played as Atlair, a disgraced Assassin who was stripped of his rank and made to start from the bottom and work his way back up to the top. The reason you were disgraced, because you liked killing and then broke the core rules of the Assassin's, their creed if you will. You accepted it at the time, but once this game begins and the story unfolds, you'll look back at the first game and go "pfft, digraced assassin indeed, that story sucks". This game has you start off as a spoiled son of a noble, you run around the rooftops for fun, you engage in street brawls with your enemies and you bed the sister of your enemy but its all in the name of fun. Then when tragedy strikes, you learn that your father was an Assassin, you don his old cowl and his weapons and strike back against the men who betrayed your family. Things get more and more complicated from there and you soon learn to become an Assassin and uncover a vast conspiracy that will have you travelling to different cities and learning skills that will leave the memory of Altair as a joke.

The controls are fluid, free running, as always is easy to do, the combat remains the same. You rely on counter attacks when it comes to sword fights but when it comes to Assassination, your choices vary.

But instead of running the gambit of what you can do in this game, let me describe a series of events that happened in AC2 that shows what you can do.
In a small Italian town, I run towards a pidgeon coop, inside I take out a pidgeon and read the note attached, it is from my contact in Florence, he wants me to kill four guards in this town as they are planning treason, however he asks that I do so without weapons if possible. I track down the first guard, he is browsing stalls in the local market, I walk through the crowd, come up behind him and strike, my blade slides into him, it administers poison to him once injected. I step away and walk on, no one has noticed a thing, except for the victim. The poision works fast, he starts to get dizzy and halucinates. I blend into the crowd, watching from a distance as he draws his sword, spins on the spot, swinging the sword and then softly falls to the ground and dies. The next 2 guards force me to use weapons, but the last guard is up high on a wooden perch, I climb up quickly, behind him and once again slide the poision blade between his ribs, then I am gone, down on the ground. The guard staggers, he also starts to hallucinate, he starts to draw his sword as he steps back, over the edge of the structure and falls to the ground below. My job is done, not exactly as requested but the job is complete. Next I meet my contact who informs me that they have tracked one of my targets, linked to my family's death. He has locked himself atop the tallest tower in the city, he has gone mad and now just shouts scripture down to the people below. However, he may have gone mad but he is not stupid, he has positioned archers on all the higher towers around this building to guard him. I will need to take them all out before I go after him or trying to get to him will be very difficult. I spend ten minutes circling the area, getting a look at every approach from every angle. I could just climb the highest building but it would put me in view of the archers and I cannot out climb a barrage of arrows. I noted a few of the towers had ropes connecting them, I could use them to get easy access to each tower. Another problem surfaced, the climbing relys on handholds and its not a straight climb up the towers, some handholds means I have to climb around towers to go up, again some of them lead to me getting in view of the archers, so to stay out of sight I would need to pick my first target carefully. My scouting made the traversal to my target easier, I was able to take out all the archers on the towers and eventually climbed up to my target. He was facing away from me, I slid in behind him, used the poision blade and watched him turn to face me, he was staggering, I moved forward again and used my wristblade and stabbed him. I wanted him to see me before he died.

Those 2 examples show that Assassin's Creed 2 has evolved from the first game, you cannot run blidly into a situation, scouting must be done, and there is a variety of ways to do things within the game. The poision blade, to me, is one of the best additions I have seen in the game, it allows you to do those kills where you watch from afar and cannot be implicated.
They have improved this game from the original in every way, the setting is more vibrant, your actions have meaning and they have filled every map chock full of stuff to do. One of the most interesting additions, which happens only a few times mind you, is hunting for the tombs of former assassins, you need to find all six tombs to... well that would be telling. But to find these tombs you actually end up in some excellent Prince Of Persia style platforming. And I am talking about The Sands Of Time Prince Of Persia, not the new guy who seems to wrapped in too many scarves. I have went through three of these tombs and had a blast each time, no doubt that in Assassin's Creed 3 they will put more of these in because these are one of the biggest highlights of the game. I am barely halfway through the game and already enjoying it.

Assassin's Creed 2 is a great game, even if you didn't like the first one, this game fixes all its mistakes and puts a greater emphasis on the player having a good experience. I have said so much about it but haven't even mentioned the commerce system, your own villa in the game, the glypsh and weird puzzles and the counter and disarms moves that are a big focus of the game. Its huge. My biggest seal of approval that I can stick on this game is that the other night I was about to turn off the game, I pulled up the map and saw I had three viewpoints left to get in this city, so I figured I would get those three completed before I turned the game off for the night. One hour later I am still there playing the game because whilst getting those viewpoints I found myself getting sidetracked by finding hidden loot, finding a glyph, hunting down a thief and then buying some new armour and weapons. The time had flown by and it was well worth it.
This is what the first Assassin's Creed should have been.

The post where Ed falls asleep

2009-12-17T21:02:00.002Z

Once every 400 years the Darkspawn cause a blight against the world, and only if all the armies of Ferellden stand together, can it be stopped. As a Gray Warden, you are tasked with getting the armies to stand together and stop the blight, but with the land of Ferellden torn apart by greed, duplicity and corruption, it's not going to be an easy task. This is Dragon Age: Origins.

Bioware go back to their roots with this new RPG and new franchise that has launched on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. Set in a fantasy world filled with all the usual suspects: ancient evils, dark sorcerers, trolls, dwarves, elves etc this game harkens back to the old RPGs Bioware made. There is more Baldur's Gate than there is Mass Effect to this game.
Instead of taking a world already created, like Dungeons and Dragons mutliverse, Bioware went about creating a fantasy world all of their own, this world is rich with lore and dripping with atmosphere.

Why is it called Dragon Age: Origins? What is with the Origins part? Well the game focuses on the origin story of your character, you can choose from 6 types of character to start your Origin story. You can choose a Human Noble, A City Elf, A Dalish Elf, A Noble Dwarf or a Dwarf Commoner. Then you choose a class for your character, Mage, Warrior, Rogue are the three types. Each class is open to all races except Dwarves who have no magic affinity and cannot be Mages. As you modify your class your decisions send you into one of 6 origins story, each one leads to the same point but its how you get there and what you do in the beginning that will have an effect on the game as a whole, seemingly small and simple decisions you made at the start of the game will have an impact of later parts of the game. This game is about choices, the choices you make as your character will affect everything including the world around you and your party. Nevertheless your quest remains the same, unite the armies and fight the Darkspawn.

Combat in the game is a tactical affair, unlike Mass Effect where its action based and you are in complete control of every gun shot and every biotic you use, Dragon Age goes for the Dungeons and Dragons approach, you initiate combat, choose specialities for the character to use and he will use them, like shield bash, but the game relies on the dice roll system, dice are rolling behind the scenes determing if you hit the target and for how much damage. To cover this the game bathes you in blood, blood sprays from all the enemies, splattering your armour and any exposed skin. A nice effect, but it is to a persons taste and interestingly enough, you can turn it off in the menu.

Right lets cut to heart of the matter because Ed has accused my posts of being too long. I love this game. I first played it on the PC, my starting character a human noble in a tale of true betrayal and the desire for revenge. Right away I jumped in and immersed myself in the world, I had good fun and got involved in the stories that played out. My decision to play on the PC was cemented, or so I thought. Then the Xbox 360 Special Edition in Game caught my eye, if you buy this version you get the full game, a bonus DVD but also you get some added DLC. The downloadable content that comes with the special edition is a full pack containing a new character for your party, a large section of new land, plus loads of new voiceovers and dialogue choices because of this new character and what he does. This pack contains a new questline to follow. Along with this pack you get 3 exclusive DLC items that only can be downloaded with the special edition and cannot be purchased. And finally you get special Dragon Age blood armour, along with the blood armour is code to have a version of the blood armour available in Mass Effect 2! Damnit I was in at that point, I want Mass Effect 2 and getting some neat armour in the game, that suits me down to the ground. Long story short, too late, my wife went out and bought me the special edition of the game for Xbox 360. I started a new game, this time choosing a City Elf Rogue, and damn the City Elf storyline is brutal but very very good. Like I said all stories lead to a story point called Osteggar where King of Ferelden decides to make a stand against the Darkspawn. Pretty soon after this you have a party and choose where to go next to unite the armies, but it will take you at least four to five hours since starting the game to get to this point. Now stop and think about that second, four to five hours to really get the game started. I have played games where four to five hours in and they are just about to ready to start wrapping up for a big finale. Hell the game of Wanted is only about six hours long so four to five hours to get started is pretty damn impressive.
Combat is fun in this game and given that you can pause combat, jump into the role of another party member and order them to use certain attacks, you will find that this is a more tactical affair. Or you can let them do their own thing, its entirely up to you. Be warned, if you leave them to do their own thing, battles will not go well for you, so it is best to use the system Bioware set up that pretty much lets you program the AI of your party members during battle. Like the system in Final Fantasy 12, you give your character traits for example, one trait is : If Health <75% use healing potion, or if party member health <75% use healing spell. There are so many choices that if you spend the time and effort into using this system you could have your entire party acting like you want them to without having to take direct control.

Dragon Age also has the Codex system, which I was first introduced to in Mass Effect. Whenever you come across a new race, ship, person, system, or hint at back story your codex is updated. The codex is all the information you need about the game. You can read it or ignore it. I have started reading it and if your into Fantasy fiction but are playing the game, then I'd skip the codex, otherwise you are in for a treat, every entry in the codex is informative and builds up your appreciate for not only the game but the entire world that Bioware have created.

I consider Dragon Age: Origins a triumph because by being put onto 3 platforms and the large amount of press and PR EA have invested into it, Dragon Age has caught peoples attention. Now on the PC you can change the camera angles to have a top down view like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights but on the consoles you have the fixed 3rd person view, a few people are annoyed about that but I think thats a good thing for console owners. The argument has been made that you can plug usb keyboards and mice into the PS3 and 360 so surely you could have a top down view for the consoles, but seriously if you are that desperate to play the game in that view point then get yourself a PC and play the game. This game does not require a super PC with Crysis like stats to run. One thing Bioware have done right in this game is the difficulty slider can be adjusted at any point, so say you are finidng a part of the game too difficult, go into options and lower it, finding another part too easy, back into options move the difficulty up. By doing this your more casual players are likely to stick around more because they don't want to keep attempting something to the point it gets frustrating, they will walk away, but by adjusting the game to make it easier for themselves they can get past a harder part and continue on with the game. Incidently if you are interested in the game but you wont be buying it just yet, then check out the Dragons Age: Journey website, this is a browser based game Bioware created to promote Dragon Age. This game is actually a fully fleshed RPG in your browser. The combat is a tile based combat system but I had some fun with it and I will go back to it and invest more time in it, it is a lot of fun and has hours and hours of content in it but best of all it's free. That's right, to promote their upcoming game Bioware created a fully fleshed out RPG to be played in the browser, the graphics are basic but stylised and the combat mechanic takes a few turns to wrap your head around it, but if your an rpg nut then check both these games out.

Wow, just wow!

2009-12-17T21:00:00.002Z

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune was one of my favourite PS3 games, it still is. I loved the feel of it, it was like a movie that you took part in, everything about it worked... except the end boss fight which became a Quick Time Event, that kind of sucked. Ever since the ending of that game, I had been looking forward to Uncharted 2, well I didn't have to wait for long because Uncharted 2 was released and I got myself this game as soon as I could.

The game begins with Nathan Drake waking up in a train, he looks bad, like he's been through hell and then he winces, he's been shot in the side and is still bleeding. As he takes in his surroundings he realies he is still strapped into his seat, when he undoes the seat belt he falls, the train carriage he is in is dangling off a cliff. Nathan grabs a rail before he tumbles completely off the train and to his death. The game starts you right then, you have to climb up that train and onto solid ground. Talk about starting with a bang, your already questioning what is happening and why. Why has Drake been shot? Who shot him? How did he end up hanging off a cliff? The game tells you everything in a sequence of flashbacks which take up the biggest portion of the game, thankfully you play those flashbacks. This is where Uncharted excels, instead of showing a cut scene with cool shit happening (yes Metal Gear Solid 4, I am looking at you), Uncharted 2 lets you do the cool shit and the cut scenes are there for brief exposition and do not last long, I think the longest cut scene in the game is four minutes and that is really pushing it. You'll recognise 2 faces from the previous game apart from Drake himself, you'll see Sully and Elena again and as always the writing in this game is sharp. The characters have conversations as they go through the levels and Drake will talk to himself at points, muttering as things happen. At one point on you are progressing through a speeding train, on one of the open top carriages an attack helicopter suddenlys bears down on Drake, shooting at him. Up ahead 3 guys appear and start shooting at Drake, I took cover and Drake shouted to the guys head, "Can't you assholes see the helicopter chasing me?!". Things like that add the personality to the game that it has, its little touches that you notice and think "that's pretty cool" but when you think about it compared to other action games out at the moment, Uncharted 2 just does everything that bit better.

The core gameplay mechanics of Uncharted 2 are the same as the first, you climb and explore ancient ruins and other such Tomb Raider-esque stuff for some of the game, but the biggest portion of the game is combat, you take cover and fight off numerous enemies, thankfully they fixed the combat in this game. It no longer takes 2 full clips from a pistol to take down one single enemy, but combat isn't easy, your constantly pushing forward trying to gain ground because pretty soon your ammo will run out if you remain in one position, you can scavenge ammo from your dead foes so trying to push forward is key. Now let me stress something about the combat, you will die.... a lot. The combat is solid and you need to think through every fire fight, you just cant shoot and hope for the best, at times you need to pick when to take time to aim a head shot and other times you just need to get to a different angle to shot the gas tank beside the group of soldiers. Grenades fly thick and fast in this game, both from you and the enemy so your always wary of your surroundings and make sure you have sufficient space to dive out of cover if a grenade lands next to you.

The puzzles in the game are not head scratchers, they are basic and you have help, but personally I think that is a good thing because it keeps the pace of the game going and you don't grind to a halt at every puzzle, you'll take a few moments to look around and check the notebook that Drake carrys and then you're off solving the puzzle.

The game takes about 10 hours or so to finish and there is not a better 10 hours you could spend using your PS3 at the moment, Uncharted 2 is the new barometer on which action games should be measured against because nothing out on any platform beats this game for sheer action and fun.

You know you're getting old when...

2009-11-28T09:24:00.004Z

... a seminal 3D game that you spent much of your late teens and early 20s playing til 3am most nights has been ported... to Flash. And it's perfectly playable, if, like Robert and I, you were a late adopter of mouselook and don't mind looking like a demented pianist while playing it.

Behold, Quake 1, in Flash.
http://www.freewebarcade.com/game/quake-flash/

My What A Big Gun You Have....

2009-11-16T19:07:00.002Z

Diablo and Diablo 2 are the two loot dropping games that got people addicted and some are still addicted to those games today. The premise of the games is simple, you fight enemies for the promise of the loot they will drop, the loot being new weapons, money and health potions or special items. Seems simple enough, but what happened was that they crafted weapons you would only find through the loot drops, a vendor didn't sell all those items, but they bought them from you. So as you completed quests, you found loot, sold the loot and gained money to buy what you needed and levelled up to venture into other areas with bigger enemies to get more loot. A simple hook took you through the game, it didn't drag you or leave you floundering, it was there subtely guiding you with the promise of a better sword or crossbow if you killed the next mob of enemies. The people who thrived on these games affectionatly became named loot whores. Loot whores are at home in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, where items that are dropped can be sold on the auction house for gold. In Warcraft Loot has a huge impact on the in game economy, an economy that works, much to the doubters surprise. The feeling of getting an item which is a "rare drop" is a thrill, a small thrill but that thrill is enough to drive people through loot driven games.

Despite the simple appeal, the imitators that try to make these games never really deliver. Many imitators sprang up right after Diablo and Diablo 2, the closest anyone came to being on par was Dungeon Siege. 2 games that have tried to bring the loot whore game to a different perspective are Hellgate: London and Too Human. Hellgate: London let you go into first or third person perspective depending on the class of character you play. A gun based character focuses on first person play, but a character who uses swords and melee weapons goes into a third person perspective. Hellgate: London suffered from a myriad of problems, not the first of which was being subscription based. I wont get into how stupid an idea that was, but that model they presented did drive a way a lot of people who were interested in the game, me being one of them, I had been hyped for Hellgate for a long time. That was not the only reason the game failed however, the game failed because it was too unweidly. Also it could not decide whether it wanted to be an MMO or not. They went on and on about their randomly generated levels within the game, well I had a chance to play Hellgate for a few months, the levels may be random, as they claim, but what the main is they have 6 or 7 level structures and the game chooses one, tosses it in and switches up the pallete so you know if your in a sewer or if you are outside. A lot of the levels I played were the same no matter what character type I played as. But the big problem, like with most loot based games, it dispensed too much loot. You would get a fantastic gun or sword and weild it, it would look cool and deal epic damage, suddenly a few minutes later there is something better and you switch out that weapon, the same with armour. In fact the game dropped so much loot that you were overwhelmed within the first hour of playing it, your inventory was always full and you were constantly selling stuff to the vendors, but you never felt good about this, you felt quite bad, because you knew there was at least 20 or 30 other items you left lying in one level and you can't go back and get them. Hellgate: London flopped and the servers for the Multiplayer section closed their doors earlier this year as did the company that made the game.
Too Human, by Silicon Knights, was very high concept. It mixed Norse Mythology with science fiction and had the gods of Norse Mythology mixed into a techno-punk style future. To try and explain the story in simple terms is not something I feel I could do and personally I feel the makers of the game got wrapped up in their own little bubble and didn't realise that the story itself was utter drivel.
The game was a third person perspective games, you went into long dungeons, killed everything that moved and got loot. Simple, huh? Well not so fast. Too Human flopped as well.
Why? Numerous reasons. First of all Too Human was in development for too damn long. Almost ten years of development for this game, and they hyped it to holy hell. Secondly, the control system. For this game, the developers decided to do something you should NEVER do in a third person perspective game, they moved combat to the right stick of the controller.
Lets take a break for a second, okay here is a simple lesson when it comes to game design. If you are making a game in the 3rd person perspective for consoles, here is a simple design rule you must follow: For movement control, the left stick on the controller must be used and for control of the camera, the right stick must be used. When these 2 things work together you generally have a good control system, the noteable exception is God Of War, they never put the camera in your hands, but they didn't map combat to the right stick either. However in a weird move they mapped gun combat to the triggers on the control pad. So imagine this situation, your playing this game, robots are swarming at you from all angles, you are firing your guns at them, suddenly your character is shot at from the right from something off screen, instincitevly you hit the right stick to swing the camera round, instead your character performs a sword attack to thin air. So not only were you fighting robots, you were fighting the game's controls. It didn't work. But they took the Hellgate London loot problem to a new level. In Too Human you could customise your armour and your armour had lots and lots of parts, down to the shin protectors to the shoulder pads. The loot that would drop could be those parts themselves or runes that could boost these parts. It was all very involved and was meant to mean you could customise your character as much as you wanted and it would be as unique as you wanted your character to be. This created a problem because the mobs of enemies would drop loot all the time and it was always better loot, so you spent a lot of time in the menu screen attaching that loot and having to drop things you didn't want or need. It got the balance too wrong, to the point where it was silly. Every time you picked up loot you had to jump into a menu and see if it was better than what you already had, then futz around with that to make sure you always had the best stuff equipped. The problem being that you picked up loot a lot.
Too Human flopped, it was planned as a trilogy and if we see a Too Human 2 in development we can consider Silicon Knights dead in the water because it would kill their company dead to make that game.

So why all the took about loot based games? Simple, the new contender to the throne of next gen loot based games is here, and it is called Borderlands.

Set in the desert world of Pandora, you play one of four treasure hunters searching for a fabled alien vault that is said to hold wonderous treasure for whoever finds it. Finding it wont be easy so you need to make friends, get yourself a good weapon and be prepared to fight a lot of bandits and alien creatures along the way.

The game starts you off with a very brief introduction and then has you choose your character, you can choose from one of four characters: A Hunter, a Soldier, a Spell caster and Melee Specialist. Once you choose your class, your dropped off at Firestone, where you meet the loveable robot Claptrap. Thus starts a brief tutorial that seamlessly gets you into the game but also sets you off on your without any real hassle. You defend Firestone from bandits, meet the local doctor and your soon killing skags and bandits whenever you can.
Skags are the local wildlife, small four legged alien creatures that's head literally splits apart into a giant mouth. The best way to kill the Skags is wait until they roar at you and shoot them in the mouth.
The game from this point becomes grindtastic, you are constantly grinding levels, taking quests and finding guns and you will find a lot of guns. The tag line for the game jokes about 87 Bazillion Guns, but trust me there is a lot because the guns are procedurally generated. What is helpful about Borderlands is that when a gun drops, a bubble comes out the top of it on your HUD and it tells you right there if the gun is better than the ones you are already carrying and using. So you don't need to leap into a menu and figure things out, your inventory space is limited but thankfully you don't bemoan leaving behind weapons because money is everywhere, you are never struggling to buy anything. Maybe in the first couple of hours its a tight squeeze for somethings but after then the money is never a problem.
The gunplay in this game feels good, the sniper rifles have a satisfying feel to them and machine guns have the nice almost out of control feel that you believe they should have. As the games main focus is the gunplay it is a relief to know that they got it just right.

The look of Borderlands apparently changed rapidly in the past 12 months, now I remember picking up a PC Magazine and seeing Borderlands and to me to looked like the new iD game Rage. A desert wasteland that is very grey and brown, and everything looks very... well Unreal 3 engine. Granted the Unreal 3 engine powers this game but they changed the art direction and style in the past 12 months to give it a semi-cell shaded look. In doing so they put Borderlands apart from all the Unreal 3 engine games that are out there right now. It looks bizare, like a Gorillaz music video but with a bit more detail.

My experience of the game has been positive, I played and leveled up a Hunter to level 15 then started a soldier. The reason I started a new character was due to a troublesome boss I had encountered. I will go back and try again as the Hunter at some point but I really want to play as a more frenetic class, the Hunter relies on long range sniping and fire fights tend to be quite slow affairs but as a soldier I can get into the thick of it without having to worry too much. The solider has a special ability of throwing down a turret that has some shields for you to take cover behind, you can bolster this turrent in a number of ways. The turrent can be used to heal, or if you pour points into one aspect, it actually distributes bullets of the gun you currently hold.

But back to this troublesome boss. I was having problems, numerous attempts to take him down had led to failure, I knew I needed to level up some, but I wanted to take one last run at him before I went on a grind fest. On a whim I took the game online and left it open, right away someone leaped into the game, he was a couple of levels higher than me and instantly started dispatching bad guys. Right away my thoughts were "right on, he's going to help me out" but extended play time with this guy revealed he was not AS good a player as first hoped. He packed some punch in his shots but he was aimless, I had to slow down a lot to get him to follow me and a lot of time he would stop and stare at me as if to say "what now?". Well eventually, after he stole not only ammo, but first aid I vitally needed, we made it to the boss only for me to get killed right away. I respawned not far and as I ran to the boss again I could see the other guy's health meter, it was doing okay. I got to the boss and just as I got there, the other guy died. The boss came charging at me, it's health lowered, I aimed with the sniper rifle, causing critical hits, the boss hit me and the screen started to go black. I was in a phase that is called "Fight for your life". This happens when both your health and shields are dropped to zero you have a short amount of time as the screen goes to black to shoot at the enemy that killed you, and if you are able to kill it before you black out then you get what is killed "Second wind" and this regenerates a quarter of your health and also full shields to continue fighting. So the boss is coming at me as the screen goes to black, I am firing for all it's worth, its too late because the screen is almost completely black, I pull the trigger one more time in frustration and suddenly "Second wind" appears on screen, and the boss lies dead in front of me. I had done it! I scooped up all the loot and revelled in the glory, when the other player arrives he sees what is happened, he must be pleased because he doesn't abandon the games. Well we ventured outside this small dungeon and back into the wilds to be joined by two other players and what happened next was 45 minutes of chaos, a lot of fun and so many enemies on screen that the PS3 actually couldn't keep up for a few brief seconds, this is the only time I have ever seen the PS3 struggle with anything.

All in all Borderlands is a great game for the casual player like myself or the loot whore because it appeals to both ends of the spectrum. I could walk away from Borderlands for weeks upon end and come back and pick up where I left off with no problems at all, or I could spend every night getting better gear and better weapons and exploring every nook and cranny of Pandora looking for that alien bunker, either way I would be having fun and that is all that matters when it comes down to it.

Laying The Smackdown, Properly

2009-11-12T18:44:00.002Z

The WWE games have been notorious for being very ho-hum every single year. Since we got Smackdown on the PS1 the makers of the game have tried their hardest to put you in the middle of the wacky action that takes place in the WWE. But in reality the Smackdown games quickly became a yearly franchise where it jumped leaps and bounds from the first to the second game, then the jump from PS1 to PS2 pushed the boundaries of what they could do in a game and for 2 years they cranked out 2 very middling games then released the best Smackdown game to date : Bring On The Pain. Soon the games were rebranded Smackdown Vs Raw and since then its been a yearly franchise with very little changing. A new control scheme was implemented in the midst of all this but it didn't fundamentally change the game. I have played every single iteration of the franchise to a good extent, all except for Smackdown Vs Raw 2009, which I messed around with on the Wii but was unimpressed with the horrible control scheme.

Smackdown Vs Raw 2010 is out now, and I have my grubby mitts on a copy of this game for the PS3. I have tinkered with it for a while, right away I am impressed. The level of customization and depth in this game is staggering. Gone is the boring GM mode and instead we have a new mode that I will go into in depth later on. The career mode is still there, you fight matches towards a belt depending on who you choose, its just a series of matches with no story in between. However if you want your dose of story led action then look no further than Road to Wrestlemania, a story based slice of wrestling action that has customised stories for characters in the game, but only for certain characters. Its interesting but I need more time for it.

The graphics from this game have taken a HUGE overhaul, everything looks better, the entrances are smarter with shorter load times. So you play, for instance Smackdown Vs Raw 2008 and have a match, you do some chops to your opponent, yeah it fine. But in this game, you do some chops to your opponet you see the red marks on his skin from the impact of the chops. Your opponents chest gradually gets redder and redder. Also most of the on screen indicators are gone, there is no action bar at the top of the screen, instead a small circle around your wrestler's feet is the Smackdown meter, it allows more realism into the game. Blood has been improved, though you may not think it at first, you might think it looks like a blob of red on your wrestlers face, but as a match progresses the blood will spray onto the mat, your opponents chest and even your wrestler's chest from impact. They have taken everything up a notch with this game.

Controls, its still the old right stick to grapple controls that I am none too happy with but you get used to it and once you have the knack you can string togethers moves pretty fluidly. Certain controls have been changed about and I have not had enough time to fully invest in learning the controls so my first couple of matches I found myself repeating a lot of moves, that can get quite boring so as I spend more time with the game I will figure out how to learn the controls 100% and string together fun matches.

Now the big thing I was talking about is a story creator mode. It allows you to create storylines and scripted events within any or all WWE shows. You more or less can create a full storyline going from week to week, deciding how a match should go and why. You know those wacky cut scenes you see in the season mode of the previous games, well you get to write the script for those scenes and then direct them. Its a long process, a time sink that requires patience and an idea of where your crafted story is actually going.
The story mode is actually very simple, you have a calender interface that shows you when each show starts, you choose which show to start your story on, saw you choose Raw. Once you've made that choice, you now edit the show. You choose to have a match or a "segment" which is those wacky cut scenes we talked about. There is a HUGE list of cut scenes, but that is not to say there is everything there, you'll create a story and think "if there was a scene like this, it would be perfect," then you realise there is no scene like you require, so you make do with something else. So you choose a scene, now each scene has a set number of peope, you can't add people to add a scene but you can remove people from some scenes. You can choose how long the scene is, what music plays during it, any titan tron video that needs to play, what the crowd are chanting and even the copyright sign at the end of a show can be thrown up on screen for that mark of authenticity. In the advanced editor, which you need to use to add text, you can adjust the camera angles and the emotions the chracters use in the scene, its limited but it is a sign of things to come. If the makers of Smackdown expand on this feature in the future, we can expect bigger and better things to come out of the comminity.
But let me stop for a second, the community is a big part of this feature, if you connect to the net over PSN or Xbox Live you can download created storylines or peoples own created wrestlers. Within a couple of days of the game being released there was already Hulk Hogans, Kurt Angles, Brock Lesnars and Stings flooding the network, also some initial created stories too. I didn't download any stories at first. I stuck to getting some Wrestlers into the fold.
But a couple of nights ago I downloaded a few created storylines, honestly I wasn't impressed. A few of them didn't make sense, others were just a mess and I think only one of them was actually playable without cringing.
If you think of this mode in terms of Little Big Planet. When Little Big Planet was released a lot of people created levels, people still do and they upload them, the levels range from terrible to amazing. That is the way it is going to be with the stories uploaded. You need to sift through them, rely on user reviews and find the good stories to download, because potentially if the story mode is a hit, then there is unlimited free content for this game. Currently I am working on a storyline for the game, I have written it out on paper to transfer to the game, in total the story takes place over 22 in game weeks. The next story that is planned after that is shorter and runs over 8 in game weeks. During each of these stories there will be numerous matches and fun content to witness.

Each year Smackdown iterates on the previous generation, sometimes it is small tweaks and other time it is huge changes. Smackdown Vs Raw 2007 was the controls changeover, right stick was grapple. In 2008 it was the tweak of character types, Hardcore, Super Heavyweight and each of these characters had a particular perk to them, in the case of Hardcore, once you get busted wide open it made you spring back to life and have a finishing move ready to use. In 2009 the makers really emphasised Tag Team matches and scrapped the season mode and introduced the more focussed Road to Wrestlemania mode.
Now in 2010, the control system is still in place from 2007, from 2008 the character types are now perks that you can add to existing wrestlers or add them to your created wrestler, and from 2009 Tag Team Matches are actually fun to play and Road to Wrestlemania is a highlight of the game. 2010 has given us the story mode, which is the best thing to happen to the series in a long time, I know the makers add and remove things from the Smackdown series in every iteration, but if they remove this mode like they removed the dull GM mode then they are just stupid.

Honestly the Smackdown series was not worth buying for 3 years, From 2007 onwards there was no reason, I owned 2007 on 360, then saw 2008 going for £5 last year and I didn't bother with 2009. But this story mode made we want Smackdown again, the game has re-invigorated my love for Wrestling again, and with a good community supporting this game, it could be entertaining us right up until Smackdown vs Raw 2011.

Inmates Running The Asylum (Arkham Asylum that is)

2009-10-11T23:31:00.004+01:00

The room is silent, only one person is moving and he is nervous, in fact he is terrified. Nervously he fingers the shotgun he is weilding and mutters to himself. A noise behind him makes him spin round and open fire, it was just a boiler letting off some steam. This man is nervous because 5 minutes before, he and his 4 friends had been shouting to each other in this large room, egging each other one. His four friends now lay unconscious around the room and he is all that is left. He is your prey to take down because you are Batman. Your perched on top of a stone gargoyle and your prey walks under it, suddenly you flip upside down on the gargoyle and zip down on a grappling ling and grab the bad guy. Its all over, 5 guys taken down without being spotted.

Batman: Arkham Asylum was released a couple of months ago to a lot of fanfare, the hype for this game grew very quickly in a very short time. Previews and reviews were suddenly glowing and people expected this to be a huge turkey, like mostly all the Batman games had turned out to be. Not so for Arkham Asylum. Why?

Well lets start with the story. This game disregards all the movies, completely ignores them and pulls all its lore and information from the comic books. You start off the game having just captured the Joker and you take him back to Arkham Asylum. You start controlling the game as you lead the Joker down to his cell, he has been strapped to a gurney and has an armed escort. You walk Batman down these corridors as you listen to the Joker crack wise and come off as mentally unstable as he is supposed to be. Brilliant voice work from Mark Hammill makes the Joker the best character in this game. However things suddenly go wrong when the Joker manages to free himself when he is out of Batman's reach and challenges Batman to chase him. You soon find out that the Asylum has been taken over and The Joker now has the run of the place. So you set off into the Asylum to regain control. A lot more happens in the story and I dare not spoil it but you run into a whole slew of Batman's enemies along the way.

The gameplay of this game is amazing. First off you have freeflow combat, which is contextual depending on where you are and what enemy you aim for and it feels solid. It doesn't feel like a bunch of animations that don't quite fit. You wont throw a punch then hit another button and suddenly the animation jars together and it doesn't look right. Everything about the combat flows, it looks like he is puting up a hell of a fight and the counters slip into the combat so well. You will soon find yourself fighting up to 8 guys at a time and if you are good at the combat you can fight all 8 without taking one hit, and they don't all line up to get hit one by one, they come at you as and when they please.
The combat is easy to pick up but hard to master, but master it you will simply because it is so fun.
Next up we have the biggest selling point of the game, the stealth aspect where you must hunt your enemies. The classic scenario is you get into a large room, stone gargoyles line the ceiling are and you use these to survey the surroundings and take out the enemies with the room, the enemies are most likely armed with guns, and even though you are Batman you can't take a lot of bullets before its game over, so you must hunt them down and try not to get spotted or you will be shot down. This section of the game can take anywhere between 1 minutes to 10 minutes as the men will often times group together for safety and they don't follow strict patterns in their patrols, they change it up, stop and talk to each other. These sections are the highlight of the game and the makers obviously put a lot of thought into these sections and it shows. But they do also mix it up and at one point I found myself going back into one of the rooms I had cleared a few hours earlier during one of the frequent backtracking missions you will do, it was repopulated with guards but they had also set the gargoyles with bombs. So if you landed on one of them, a 3 second timer started and it exploded. So suddenly you found you couldn't use the Gargoyles to survey he surroundings like you had been accustomed to. There are multiple ways to traverse the rooms and take out enemies and hours and hours of replay value in these rooms alone.
There are some other aspects to the game, one section where you are forced to use stealth to not been seen and not take out any enemies either. And another section where its a side scrolling platformer.
You also get a load of Battoys to play with in the game, a grappling hook, Batarangs, Batclaw, a sonic disrupter and explosive gel which you spray as a batshape on weak surfaces to get through.
Its all distributed over the course of the game at a fairly even pace.

Speaking of Pace!
I want to take a few seconds to talk about the pacing of this game. When it comes to games in general you need to be able to pace things well. If you get a game that is a one trick pony, like the new game Wet, the big thing about Wet is the stylistic way to kill people. Now any time you engage an attack with guns everything goes in slow motion, that to me gets really annoying. Now I like bullet time, but I like to have control over it, some games demand bullet time to help you survive, like Max Payne, but you control because sometimes you don't need it. Wet takes the control of bullet time away from you so your always going in slow motion when you attack and I only played the demo and I became bored of the slow motion before I finished the demo. So Wet throws that feature at you time and time again,.
Batman: Arkham Asylum is quite possibly one of the best paced games you will ever encounter. I am not saying that as a knee jerk reaction, I have had the game for at least a month and a half and played it on and off since then. Currently I feel I am at least 90% of the way through the story and the pacing is perfect. How can I say this?
Well let me give you an example, you will come into a section where you have to fight some bad guys, so you will take down say 8 bad guys and then find yourself in a wide open section, there are some bad guys around but you can get round them using the enviroment or take them on head on. So you make your choice and find yourself in a stealth section and you need to take down the guys one by one. Then you will find yourself solving devilish puzzle of exploring Arkham island. The game mixes it up so your not really sure what is coming next and it also does something a lot of other games don't do. It doesn't let you do something for so long that you get tired of it. You do just enough so you can look forward to doing it again but it never goes overboard. The story itself is paced really well and you feel yourself moving along with it at breakneck speed and nothing feels too drawn out.

Graphically the game looks good, Unreal 3 engine, surprise surprise, but it looks really good. It captures the look and feel of Batman perfectly and also has a neat feature that basically is an x-ray vision of everything. You click this on and visor come down over Batman's eyes and get can see through walls, find weakspots and see enemies through walls beside, above or below him. You see the enemies walking around as skeletons. This visual feature is so useful you will use it a lot and sometimes forget to turn it off, which in itself is a shame because the game looks so good.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is an awesome game, it makes you feel like Batman as you use your enemies fear against them, it looks great and plays even better and has huge replayability with the Riddler challenges everywhere in the game it will keep completists coming back to this game until they get 100%. If you don't have this game and own a 360 or PS3.... shame on you.

Inmates Running The Asylum (Arkham Asylum that is)

2009-10-11T23:31:00.001+01:00

GOD DAMNIT!

2009-08-05T21:49:00.004+01:00

Damn it to hell, I mean seriously you guys, I'm seriously pissed off! And I just realised why, no its not because the last batch of Fallout 3 DLC has been released and there wont be any more, and no its not because a million and one games were delayed till the first half of next year and no its not because of Activision's devious plot to raise all game prices around the worlds by 10 whole pounds on a "test" using a game that is guaranteed to sell FUCKING MILLIONS. (Activision, it is not a test when you try a new strategy on a game that is guaranteed to fly off the shelves!)

No I am pissed off because I miss World of Warcraft. I have been cold turkey on that game for a number of months now, at least 4 months of no Azeroth interaction. It was for the best, it was a drain on my bank balance at a time when all the money coming in was required for bills and food and other such necessities. Things have not changed, money is a tighter resource due to 2 weeks of unemployment, also my time to play game is constrained, I get a set time to play games and take every chance I get to squeeze in 10 minutes here and there but to invest my time back into Warcraft is to steal the time from other games.

Since leaving Azeroth behind I have completed 3 games that I would not have done had I still been a slave to Blizzard's life stealer. I completed Uncharted in an epic 2 hour gaming session on a sunday afternoon. Had I been still in WoW, I would have no doubt spent that time playing WoW with my iPod on listening to podcasts and Uncharted would have sat on the shelf collecting dust, I may have picked it up for a half hour and gave up, WoW guilt would have kicked in and I would be back in Azeroth instead of leading Nathan Drake to Eldorado and finding out the secret behind the island.
With Uncharted behind me, I started playing Mass Effect again, really investing a lot of time into it, getting behind the characters and really loving the world created by Bioware. Then one monday evening I sensed things were coming to a head in the game and I sat down and decided to power through to the end. I did and it was the most satisfying ending to a game that I have ever seen, I loved it, every damn second was well spent. Had I been on the digital crack that is Warcraft, that monday evening would not have transpired as such, more than likely I would not have invested even a third of the time I had put into Mass Effect and it too would have lingered on my shelf waiting for me to pick it up and then I would shrug, WoW guilt would kick in and I would be back in Azeroth once more.
And a few weeks ago I played through Metal Gear Solid 4, I did a lengthy post about that game recently, whilst not being exactly happy with the game I am glad its done. It took 2 solid days of playing to get to the end but I did and as I said before had I still been a subscriber to the 11 million strong army that Blizzard now commands, those 2 days wouldn't have happened and MGS4 would been on my shelf I would be convinced it was a good game, but its not and I know the truth.

Recently I have spent a lot of time in Morrowind and have had a blast, my save is still ongoing and new quests are opening up all the time, I do think I need to do some more exploration in the game but it has been fun. Another game I have spent a lot of time in the past 6 days playing is the PC game Space Rangers 2, if you haven't played this game it is hard to explain. Its like a top down elite game with RTS elements and choose your own adventure style text segments. Its a wacky game and once you get sucked into it, it holds onto you.
On the console side of things I finally completed Half Life 2 and am currently playing through Half Life 2 Episode 1, I got back into Fable 2 with disasterous results (a post on that is in the making, trust me), I got Wanted: Weapons of Fate for the PS3 which has been fun and my save on inFamous is ongoing. The game I have spent the most time with recently has been Fallout 3, I am utterly hooked on that game, the wasteland has drawn me in and my evil character roams the wastes, looking out for no one but himself and making as much cash as possible along the way, if that means selling a child to slavery for 300 caps, all the better.
Recently I started playing Gears of War 2 and instantly felt this game is a HUGE step up from the first game, namely in combat, I felt the stop and pop combat has been improved 10 fold since the last game.

The moral of the story is that I have been having a great time playing all these single player games, I have even dabbled back into Battlefield 1942 for a bit which has been fun. But I still miss World of Warcaft.
Something about that game was just so damn good, it was familiar, it was fun and they had built a world you were guaranteed to have fun in. They knew how to keep you playing and keep you entertained, sure there was grinding in sections but the levelling process from 1 to 60 has been so streamlined that grinding is at a minimum, in fact by pure questiing alone you can get to 60 in no time. Sure you wont have a lot of gold and have crappy gear but you'll be level 60.
I miss World of Wacraft, will I ever go back to the game? No. I wont.
What is this post about?
Its my farewell to Azeroth forever, I can finally admit I will never go back to WoW, there is no reason for me to return to that world. My gaming time is too limited now for WoW and in the future if my wife and I have kids it will be even more limited so there wont be time for WoW.

Farewell World of Wacraft, you magnificent Bastard of a game! I salute you!

Metal Gear Solid 4, Spoileriffic End Game Comments

2009-07-20T09:10:00.001+01:00

I have been on a bit of a kick recently by finishing off a few games, Uncharted, Mass Effect and now Metal Gear Solid 4.

I have been a fan of Metal Gear Solid since the first game, I got a PS1 late to the party, when everyone had been spooging about this game on its release I was playing a PC that could barely run anything new and really didn't want to spend a huge amount of money upgrading it. So I invested in a PS1 and some games. Since then I have been a complete console junkie, forget upgrading my PC, get a console and I don't need to worry about "upgrading" to play any games in that generation, I put them in my console and we're rocking and rolling!

So with my PS1 I rented Metal Gear Solid from a video shop, not knowing ANYTHING about the game, I put it in my playstation and started the game, it gave me a few bits of information in the intro and I started to play. My first thought was that I was playing as this soldier Snake and no doubt I would have a few missions, the first of this being in this Artic base, Shadow Moses, yeah this is just the first of a few in these games. What I didn't realise that the game is just the one mission. So after I played through a small section of the game, I eventually bought the game. Then I spent time looking through the menu before you start, in this you get Snake's backstory and a full briefing section, I spent time with these and realised what I was fighting for and what I was actually doing. I was no heavily invested in the story and took it to the end. I took on Metal Gear with a rocket launcher, I had that bare knuckle fight with Liquid Snake on top of the ruined Metal Gear. (They ruined the impact of this fight by having Liquid appear in the chase at the very end) And I watched as the Fox Die virus finally killed Liquid. As the game drew to a close you hear a final conversation between Revolver Ocelot and someone else, and the conversation ends Ocelot says "Of course, Mr President" and WOW I was stunned. The game was an experience I will never forget, I felt like I was playing an action movie, it had all the ups and downs of a classic actiom movie and finished with the bare knuckle fight. I knew I needed to play Metal Gear Solid 2 on the Playstation 2 as quickly as I could.

This led to play Metal Gear Solid 2 and it was quite good, it did not have the impact of the first game, mainly because you don't play as Snake and it felt overly familiar, the layout was different but I felt I was playing the first game but with some differences, I wanted the next step in gaming and they pulled it off in a lot of respects but I felt the game was too similiar to the first one. Also the game suddenly became too invested in its own plot, there was overly long codec conversations sometimes dealing with the plot and other times dealing with Raiden and his annoying girlfriend Rose. Then came the over long cutscenes, sometimes running over 5 minutes as someone explained some weird plot point and explain about a group of people called The Patriots. I wasn't even really sure what the point of the game was, then as I got towards end game they told me it was to rescue The President. But the most jarring thing about the game, the one thing that everyone remembers, is that you don't play as Solid Snake in this game, you play as Raiden. Yep the game that everyone was waiting years for, to see Snake return and fight the good fight, all the trailers showed Snake at his best and in a swerve you end up playing as Raiden, a fox hound trained soldier who in essence follows Snake through the mission. Throw in Revolver Ocelot from the first game, he had his right hand cut off the first game but comes back with a new hand, claiming it is Liquid Snakes hand, then it looks like Liquid posseses Ocelot and takes him over. The game finishes with a sword fight between Raiden and Solidus Snake (yes we have another Snake, another clone) and the game ends with more of a whimper than the first game. By this point I was losing faith in the Metal Gear Solid franchise.

Metal Gear Solid 3 was announced, I watched the trailers, it was interesting to watch. It was set during the cold war, you were Big Boss before he became Big Boss, your codename was Naked Snake. The plot was again convoluted and messed up but I didn't play through this Metal Gear, in fact I felt it was the weakest of the games, yet others claim it is the best. I didn't like this game, I felt the reliance on outdoor enviroments in the first main section of the game was its weakness and lost interest in the game because it wasn't answering on the questions asked in the second game. (However now, after completing the fourth game I see that MGS3 was required for Hideo Kojima to round off this mess he calls a plot).

I didn't watch any of the trailers for Metal Gear Solid 4, in fact I avoided them, not out of any reasons other than I wasn't interested in getting hyped for a game I wasn't going to play for a long time. I saw snippets hear and there, I avoided reviews, skipped podcasts where they discussed the game and generally avoided as much as I could about the game. I knew a few things about it, that Snake was old due to accelerated aging and this was his last mission, so they pretty much confirmed Snake was going to die. But how was he going to die, would it be in a hail of bullets? What heroic act would he perform that would lead to his death? So when I finally got a PS3, it was time to find out.

So you put in Metal Gear Solid 4 and you need to an install, this takes about 10 minutes, but I must warn you this install, albeit a shorter version happens for every one of the five acts in the game. I played the game, but nothing in it gripped me to the point where I said, "this game is amazing and I need to run it through to the end". It was okay and some parts were entertaining and it was primarily an action game. The shift in play styles helped the franchise evolve. The game however was trapped in Hideo Kojima's sweaty grasp, so we had overlong cutscenes and mindless exposition where it was not required. When I finished the game it said I had played the game for 16 hours, of actual playtime I would say it was 9 hours where I actually controlled Snake and PLAYED the game. The rest of it was exposition and cut scenes that had to fill in all the gaps, plot holes and tie up all the loose ends from Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2, Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2, Metal Gear Solid 3 and Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops. All the loose ends were tied up. But it was a mess.

I am not going to try and explain the plot in any detail, but I will talk about 3 sections in the game.

First off, the Bosnia, Iraq looking street section where you are walking around a battlefield. That was hyped to holy hell in the trailers. You saw Snake running around behind cover, helping direct the course of a battle, choosing which side to fight for. In all honesty you could only fight for one side, they claimed you could choose, bullshit, you couldn't choose. That was okay, I didn't feel engaged in the game, but it was the main selling point in the trailers. So that was a bust.

The second part of the game I want to talk about is a huge revelation in the game, you have to go back to Shadow Moses. When this section of the game starts the game loads up and suddenly you are faced with PS1 graphics and the first section of the game when you come off the lift. The helicopter pad is there with the search lights and guards are patrolling the grounds. You have to play a specific section of the first game until Snake wakes up in the helicopter on his way to the old base. When you finally get to Shadow Moses, it is actually a really good section of the game, as you explore the old place, snippets of the game echo as if Snake is hearing them in his own head. If you have played the first game through as many times as I had this section would be epic and it is. I loved this entire section of the game, minus the boss fight halfway through, and the payoff for this section of the game? You get to control Metal Gear Rex! Yes! The robot you fought in the first game, you get behind the controls and take Rex outside of the base, he is your escape. Then once you get outside you have to have a showdown with Liquid again, this time Metal Gear Rex from Metal Gear Solid 1, takes on Metal Gear Ray from Metal Gear Solid 2. Despite being a great battle in concept, in execution it was too easy. I did not feel challenged in any way in this fight and I think I should have been. Metal Gear Rex was a wreck, barely salvaged after the battle in the first game and Metal Gear Ray is a the newer model, more agile and better equiped and I wiped the floor with him.

The 3rd section of the game I want to talk about is the end, so I throw in this final spoiler warning. SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS!

In the final section of the game, you need to reach a computer core to upload a virus, this virus will destroy an AI network and that is the entire point of this game. However to get to this AI you need to get through a corridor that bombards any intruders with microwaves. So Snake, near death enters this corridor and falls to his knees and you control the slow agonising crawl by furiously tapping the triangle button, you are willing him to move and get to the end of the corridor. The screen then splits in two, it lets you see the action going on in other sections of the game, Raiden fighting a horde of enemies and keeping them at bay for you, but he is outnumbered and its not going well. Meryl and her boyfriend Johnny, fighting off enemies but running low on ammo and luck, Mei Ling on board her ship commanding the battle that got you here in the first place. Everyone is relying on you to do this one last act, get that virus uploaded and you will save everyone!
It is something that is a great moment. If they had ended the game here, as you complete this section, as Snake's final act I would have been satisfied.
*sigh* But no, we still have some loose ends to tie up, such as Liquid Snake. So Snake survives this encounter with deadly radiation and is about to be airlifted to safety when Liquid appears and takes Snake to the top of the ship for one last fight. So you engage in a fist fight to finish off the game. They allow Snake to fight by injecting him with nanomachines to help him get into fighting form. So the big question that needs answered in the game is that how does Liquid take over Ocelot just by an arm transplant? Well truth be told he doesn't. Its all down to some silly plot twist. But you have the epic fight and put down the controller, the game ends here. Snake wins, yay!

What happens once you put down the controller? Well you sit on your ass for 1 hour and roughly fifteen minutes as you watch an end sequence. Yes, 1 hour and fifteen minutes. Let that sink in, you know if you watch 2 episodes of CSI, or 24 or Burn Notice, that is how long this end sequence lasted. EVERYTHING was tied up, whether you wanted it to be or not. We saw Snake go to the graveyard he visited at the start of the game, put a gun in his mouth, the camera pans up as the gun goes off. But wait around 15 more minutes and we fade in on Snake, not dead, he pulled the gun out his mouth at the last minute. This is followed by a revelation that Big Boss is alive, only for him to die 15 minutes later after he has filled in all the last plot holes, so he turns up for no real reason but to fill in the cracks in the mess of a plot. The game ends with everyone getting the happy ending, Meryl gets married, the colonel makes up with her and walks her down the ailse, Raiden re-unites with Rose and his son after the revelation that she never married the colonel like believed and it was all a ruse to keep her and her son safe. Otacon and Sunny continue to live together and Snake joins them. Snake is no longer dying from the disease he had at the start of the game, miraculously he is cured and his accelerated aging has stopped so he can continue to live for now. It all gets wrapped up in a big nice bow.

I felt pissed off with this game when I was finished. Really pissed off. Unlike Uncharted or Mass Effect were I felt elation and contentment at the same time, I just felt pissed off with this game. I had followed its covoluted mess of a plot through all these years and I had to sit through a mess of a game and actually watched a huge chunk of it rather than play it. Some of the best sequences in the game are when Raiden as a super ninja, fights walking metal gears and Vamp. He flips all over the place and does epic attacks, that is when you want to play as Raiden. (Obviously the makers agreed because a Raiden game is coming out, set before MGS4 covering when Raiden becomes the super ninja. Hopefully more action and less plot makes this game a must have.)
Like I said before, over 16 hours in total clocked in, and I played only 9 actual hours at best guess. It was a stupid mess. It actually lowers my opinion of the first game now, knowing what the first game leads onto. I have heard lots of praise heaped upon this game, I don't know why. Some of the game mechanics are okay, the octo camo can be fun and there are some gameplay moments you will remember but seriously the game is a mess. I doubt I will do a second play through of this game, in fact I know I wont. I know how much I would have to sit through and watch, and honestly I am not prepared to do that.
For instance, in Mass Effect there are cut scenes but these are short and to the point. Most of the exposition is done in game and you control the flow of information, you can control how much you actually learn about backstories and the threat of the reapers, this is because the makers are catering to people who want as little information or as much information as possible. It was a good decision and definetly worked.
In Metal Gear Solid 4, they shove that exposition down your throat whether you want it or not.
If you have never played a Metal Gear game and are thinking about picking up this one, don't. This is strictly fan service for MGS fans, and even then I find it truly terrible. I think Hideo Kojima was stoned when he wrote these games and he had no idea that Metal Gear Solid would be the raging success that it was, the first game is an action movie in game form. The second game is the game that starts the conspiracy theories that drags the MGS franchise to the mud.
Stay away from this game unless you really really had to, I really really had to and feel no better for it.
Now I need to go play something mindless and fufilling to wash away the stench. Wanted: Weapons Of Fate on the PS3, here I come!

Side Boob, the best bit of the boob?

2009-07-16T09:10:00.004+01:00

So lets talk about boobs and Mass Effect, and I refuse to make any jokes about my mass becoming errect.....damnit.

So my last play through of Mass Effect I really spent time exploring the story, getting to know the characters and found myself getting immersed in the universe. The game is just too immense for words, you will sink into this story and get caught in its grasps, it holds nothing back in making you feel like you are part of the story. You will control Commander Sheperd has he makes the decisions no one else can make, its up to you to save the Galaxy. Cut scenes are movie quality and during key action scenes in the game the music swells to match your actions.

But controversy followed the game after the makers announced that a sex scene was within the game, in fact a number of sex scenes depending on your method of playthrough. Play as a male character and you could have sex with either a human female or a alien female, choose a female character and you would be able to have sex with a human male or a female alien, so alien lesbian sex was abound in Mass Effect, or so people started to believe. As the game grew close to release (oh good, I need to watch my wording), people outwith the game industry got hold of the story about sex scenes with the game and a scandal erupted. Sex within video games? How dare they! Wont someone think of the children!
Fox News led the charge, getting a child psychologist on to talk about the matter and also getting Geoff Keighley, a game's journalist who is well know and well liked within gaming circles, to come on and defend the game.
The news report was abysmal, truly terrible, watch it on youtube if you dare. Basically they call Mass Effect a porn game, and Geoff Keighley basically asks if they have played it, both the psychologist and reporter scoff at this and I think Keighley realised at this point that no matter what he said they had made up their minds. He defends the game saying the sex scenes are a result of the relationships you build within the structure of the game and that they are far from explicit. But he is cut off and the report ends with them condeming the game and Keighley just shaking his head, its like he wants to laugh at their stupidity but to do so would show gaming journalists in a bad light so he kept quiet. As the reporter for Fox News turns to a panel about the game, one of the panelists refers to Mass Effect as "Debbie Does Dallas Meets Star Wars" which I think is the plot of "Star Whores" in the movie "Zack and Miri Make A Porno." The psycholohist later stated that she watched someone play Mass Effect and said it was harmless but she still looks like an idiot going on the news and decrying the game. Hell someone got in touch with Jack Thomson (sp?), the lawyer who will sue any games company if he feels they are doing something wrong in any way. The man sued Rockstar numerous times and has been disbarred due to firvilous lawsuits, he stated that Mass Effect was harmless, if Jack Thomson thinks it Harmless then its friggin' harmless!
Realisitcally Mass Effect IS harmless, there is nothing explicit in the game at all, also if you want to see nookie in the game you HAVE to play through at least 12 hours of gameplay and build a relationship within the game with the character you want to have sex with. It's not something that just happens, in fact if you spend all your time playing the plot and not investing in the side storys and relationships in the game, it is entirely possible to play through the game without having any kind of sex. Bioware took a risk with Mass Effect in structuring the game in such a way that as an adult you can invest time in a relationship that leads to sex in a way that is believable, and even when it reaches the point where the relationship can go to the next level, there is still the option to say "no" and it doesn't happen.

Well in this playthrough I invested the time in a relationship within the game, two actually and through my own handling of the game in a believable and normal way I ended up forming a strong relationship with the Alien character Liara T'Soni, whereas in reality I had been trying to form a relationship with Ashley Williams, a crew member. However her views conflicted with my own so some disagreements led to the relationship not progressing as it should.
So one night when playing the game I realised where the game was going, I saw that the relationship with Ashley was essentially closed off and my character was engaging more with Liara I figured I would go with it.
So, when I finished playing that night, my wife had been out on a night out with some friends and come home a little drunk. I engaged her in conversation about the game and in my own silly way of explaining things I told her that I was probably going to nail a blue chick in Mass Effect, which is a shame because I actually wanted to nail the other human chick. What happened next took my by surprise, my wife slapped me. Yep, a slap right across the face. In her drunken state she perceived the desire, in game, to have sex with another character, building and fostering a relationship that would lead to sex, as cheating. The next morning when she was sober she was embarrased and even appologised for the slap. After that it became a running joke for the both of us, if she saw me playing Mass Effect she would ask if I had had sex with the blue chick yet, and I would say "not yet, I'm working on it, don't hit me!".

My wife, Gemma, has an odd habit of sometimes sitting watching me play a game, she'll watch the action on screen like it is a tv show or movie, she took to watching the first couple of hours of Uncharted because she found it interesting and will occasionally sit and watch me play other games. A couple of weeks ago I put on Mass Effect and started playing. Gemma was in the spare bedroom on the internet whilst I played through the game, a couple of hours passed, the game was ramping up and Gemma came into the living room and sat down, I told her the game was getting really good. About fifteen minutes later, the game had reached the juncture where you could have sex or not. Of course I said yes and the sex scene played out, my wife in the room and it lasts about thirty seconds, if that. Once it was over I was sort of confused, "is that it?" went through my mind and Gemma voiced this by saying "is that it?" and I just nodded. The scene is tastefully done, in that you see nothing, a blue butt cheek and a bit of side boob. Sometimes, depending on the situation or picture, side boob can be good, unless it's Peter Griffin's side boob, then we're in all kinds of wrong territory. The thing is I like side boob, I am all for it, long may it continue to be shown to us, but what sticks in my craw is Fox News, I mean really? Your whole fuss was about side boob? Or should I say, side boob and a buttcheek? Really? No one, I and I do mean no one, could be aroused by that. Even a 13 year old who gets turned on just by flipping a light switch would be hard pressed to reach any kind of arousal by the sex scene for Mass Effect.

I loved Mass Effect, the game was just amazing to play through a finish, I had invested myself fully in the story, I had read the prequel book, I intend to read the follow up book and I even downloaded the iPod Touch/iPhone game Mass Effect Galaxy just to get more of the back story of the universe. I can't wait for the second game to come out, especially considering that you will import your save from the first game into the second game, so evey choice you made, every avenue you went down and action you took will resonate into the second game. So for instance, if you made the choice to allow one team mate to die, then in the second game that person is dead, dead and gone, they don't come back. Even minute decisions that you made, such as snubbing a fan in the first game, will come back to haunt you in this game. Also you will carry on Sheperd's story into the third Mass Effect game porting the save over once more, or you play events out in Mass Effect 2 that will lead to Commander Sheperd's death and when you purchase Mass Effect 3 you start off as a new character instead of taking Sheperd through the game. The possibilities and promises Bioware are showing is getting me excited about how this series of games is going to progress and if we get more books and smaller games to help create the universe then I will be there to support them.

Now though, I think Mass Effect deserves a second play through as a female Sheperd, for some Lesbian Alien sex.
*slap*
Or maybe not.

Morrowind, ah to be on it's treacherous grasp once more!

2009-07-15T16:08:00.003+01:00

(Shortly after the entire debacle with the Demon Fence in the previous entry, I started to lose interest in Morrowind, I think it was due to the lack of direction I felt in a quest I had been given. I was asked to find some "scrap metal" from any ruins in the area. The lack of clear direction to any specific ruin just any ruin made this feel directionless in its nature, like a quest added at the last minute to padd out the Thieve's Guild questline. In looking for other quests to do I went to join one of the Elven Houses that were squabbling over Morrowind. The quest I was offered was lacklustre, another null quest as I started to call them. Go into the Apothocary in Vivec and steal her formulas, however the room she occupied was a rectangle and she could see me no matter what I did. No matter what you do on this quest, you are going to be attacked or on the run for being such a bad thief. It is an awful quest that I am going to have to do at one point but at this point I just didn't want to face it. So I decided to try out one of the quests in the main plot, and found myself in some Dewmer ruins, I got what I needed and scarpered. Last night in my boredom, I decided to pillage the aforementioned ruins and get back in good graces with the Thieve's guild.)

I woke in my house in Balmora, the true owner of the this house was dead, not by my hand but definetly dead. They had not returned to this house so I used it to store my goods. I left the house and into the sunshine of Balmora, after finishing my last job for my contact with the guild in Aldh-Ruhn I was told that to make myself useful I was to raid some old ruins for some scrap metal to make some old Dewmer artifacts work again. To say I was slighted by this was an understatement, but my contact placated me by mentioning it was just until another job came along and it would pay 1000 gold, not that I need the money mind you but 1000 gold is good money for running around some tombs. Lately I had visiting some out of the way ruins that bandits had holed up in, it was to recover an artifact for Cauis who was helping me get settled in Morrowind. That ruin would have some scrap metal. I set off on my way, the ruins were a short jaunt away, and very quickly I approached the bridge to the ruins, a bandit stood at the other end, I had forgotten about him. I cast my invisibility spell, I had 60 seconds that get past him and out of sight, so I ran across the bridge and slipped by the bandit without him even knowing I was ever there.

The musky air of the tomb met me as I stepped through the stone doors, my eyes were accustomed to the darkness immediatly and I began my search of the ruins. They were larger than I remembered, and I had not fully explored them, some bandits remained, they were dealt with and I found some scrap metal, I also filled my pockets with Dewmer artifacts, the trader in Balmora paid well for them. I had three pieces of scrap metal and was told that four pieces was required so as I went further into the ruins I heard a clicking sound, from around the corner came a mechanical creature that I had never seen anything like it before. It was on four thin legs, the legs came to points, the legs came up to a solid base but on the base was a fleshy mass that kept inflating and deflating like a balloon. It sensed I was there and came at me, spraying a gas out to harm me, I stepped back and then struck at it. After a few blows I took it down and as it hit the ground, one last piece of scrap metal fell from it. I now had all four pieces, I heard more clicking from the corridor this beast came from, that was enough for me, I turned on my heels and ran out the ruins as quickly as I could. Rather than travel by Silt Strider, I decided to walk back to Aldh Ruhn, and along the way I came across an aimable fellow on the road. He was just standing there, I walked past him, but turned round and decided to talk to him. He introduced himself then said he had a proposition for me. Now, I like to think of myself as a Khajit of the world, but being propositioned by dark skinned elves on darkened roads is not my idea of a good time. Nevertheless, I decided to ask him about this propostion, I could always refuse. Well it just turns out the guy wants to mug me for 50 gold coins. His proposition is I give him 50 gold coins or he cuts me up. The fool, I was holding 10000 gold coins at this point in time, I think I need to keep some in my house rather than carry it all. Anyway, I tell him, politely, to shove it because I am not giving him 50 gold coins. If he had asked nicely or even come up with a convincing story to get 50 coins from me, I would have done it, just because there was genuine effort there but instead he went the low route and tried to shake me down. So quick as a flesh I cast my fear spell on him, causing him to view me as a towering beast of fury that would surely kill him dead, and he took off running, I gave chase, slashing at him until the spell wore off and turned to fight, but too late, the blow I hit him face on was a final blow and he fell to the ground dead. He had a 100 gold on him and some armour, I just swiped the gold and continued on my path. As time wore on, I found myself in Aldh Ruhn and handed in the scrap metal. I met my contact and handed him the metal and he gave me good news (and 1000 gold), another job had come up, a proper job. I was to sneak into one of the manors in the rich district of this town, get into the guard quarters and steal some enchanted arrows, as long as I got 1, it was fine, but there is at the most 4 in the manor and I should try to get them all and if I want I can use them, just as long as I get 1 back to my contact. Score.

I went back to Balmora for some sleep and contemplation, the thieve's guild is one of the only homes I know now in Morrowind, and I will continue to work for them, but I feel I can improve my status and bank balance even more by working for one of the houses, will these two career choices conflict? Can I keep them seperate? I do hope so. My mind buzzed with these things as I went to sleep.

(So Morrowind, seeming bare and directionless suddenly became full of possibilities again. I also have started formulating plans for the mission where I steal the formulas, I am going to purchase a teleportation spell and swipe the formulas then teleport away. If this works there will be more here. Big props to Rock Paper Shotgun for bringing my love of Morrowind back to me.)

More than Famous....inFamous

2009-07-15T15:57:00.003+01:00

A common practice among the stores called G-Force in Scotland, is that you can take an old game for your consoles, (Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii) and "swap" them for another game. So say you have a copy of Resistance: Fall of Man on the PS3 and have finished with it, take to to G-Force, pay £5 and you can choose another game. Not just any game, however, you need to choose games in a specific number range, number 1 is the newest games, number 2 is popular and newer games, number 3 is the budget popular games and number 4 is the oldest and possibly unpopular games on the console. Resistance falls into number 4, so you would choose a number 4 game. If you have a number 1 game and want one of the newest games out there, sometimes the swap is for £10. Now that this practice has been explained as best as possible lets begin.

I have been a staunch defender of Prototype, I truly believe it is a great no frills action game that comes right from the Michael Bay school of presentation. Lots of stuff explodes, giant creatures run around and pretty soon there is so much stuff happening on screen that you are not sure whats actually going on. The only way to determine where your character is on screen is by making him jump and glide for a few seconds. That being said, after five hours of gameplay I had become tired of the game, it had not offered me anything new to experience, I felt like the game had shown me its hand too early, shot its wad too soon if you will. It was now a chore to play, destroying helicopters with cars, was now too common place and easy that it did not have the punch it had delievered the first time I had done it. I had encountered a boss battle which just involved fly kicking a guy at least 20 times before eventually he just rappelled out the building, then without warning the game took away ALL your powers apart from, jump, glide and disguise. So you could still jump, fly and turn yourself into other people but had nothing else to defend yourself. Then it throws you into missions in which you NEED your powers, I tried this mission around 15 or 16 times before I put the controller down, I had not touched the game in about a week since then and decided on saturday to trade it in at Gamestation.
So game in hand I walked into the shopping centre, G-Force was the first video game shop you see on your way into the centre so I stopped inside just for a look around and there was the PS3 exclusive inFamous in the band 1 Swap tray, and also beside it was Prototype. So I could swap Prototype for inFamous, the decision was made and I swapped the games over. On saturday, sunday and monday I have played inFamous and completed the first island 100% and am now on the second island. Its fair to say I have played a fair portion of the game.

Let me start off by saying I had played the demo and it was good fun, but the demo does not show just how awesome this game truly is. inFamous places you in the hands of Cole, a delivery man who is at ground zero of an explosion, he wakes up mostly unharmed and soon finds he has super powers, he can control electricity. He can fire it from his hands and needs it to sustain himself, if he takes damage he can leech electricity from nearby devices to heal himself. Cole can also fall from great heights and survive and finds his parkour abilities greatly enhanced, yes Cole can free run. Unlike Prototype, this type of free running is not seamless and just running over obstacles, this is all about climbing, if you should be able to grip it in real life, Cole can grip it in the game. The city becomes a giant climbing frame, and you will need to get used to it because free running is a big part of how to play the game.

So long story short, the city you live in was at the epicentre of a bomb, even the outlying burroughs and islands away from Ground Zero have been affected. The power is out almost everywhere, a plague has broken out and the US Government have sealed off the city so no one can get out and no one gets in. Your powers are growing and the city needs a saviour.
The game's tutorial is a few missions in the game that introduce all the essential plot elements, the first mission has you running to the town square, a plane has dropped food supplies into the town. The package gets snagged on a statue in the sqaure, so you use your abilities to climb up and free the package and then your introduced to the first gang in the game, the reapers. Red robed gun toting freaks who just want to cause chaos and despair and they have come for the food packages. So next your introduced to the combat, use L1 to aim and R1 to fire electricity at the reapers, if you shock them enough you incapacitate them, one more shock after that and they are dead. Once the reapers have been dealt with a moral choice is thrown at you, the people are gathered around the packages and you think to yourself there is enough food here to keep you, your friend and your girlfriend fed for months, however if I don't share some people may die of starvation. So you have a choice, shock a few innocent bystanders to keep them away from the food or let them have what they want. The game has these choices littered throughout the game making you choose where to play as good or as evil, you could cheat the system and play as a mixture of both and keep yourself on the borderline but in doing so you miss out on the real reason to play the moral choices to favour one or the other. You unlock specific powers in the game by playing either good or evil, and the choices vary depending on your style, unlike Prototype that has a HUGE menu of moves and stuff to unlock, inFamous keeps it tight and contained and doesn't give you everything right away. The powers are unlocked as you complete specific mission objectives too, and these are integral to missions in the game and add to the different way to complete side missions.

By the time you have gotten through most of the first island you will be able to grind on electric lines and train tracks to help you get around the city, by the time you have completed the first mission on the second island you can control your fall by "gliding" using electricity. Your moveset just continues to improve as you progress, the game rewards you with better and cooler powers as you progress and by making the moral choices down one path you get cooler powers.

The game has a wealth of side missions, let me throw out the Prototype comparison one more time, the side missions in Prototype are a mixture of races, gliding missions and consuming missions to improve your driving abilties or shooting abilities. You never feel like they are necessary. inFamous gets round this by offering side missions that are benefitting the city as a whole or benefitting yourself. You have a choice of normal side missions, good side missions or evil side missions. If you choose and complete an evil side mission, a good side mission is locked out and vice versa. An example of a normal side mission is as such: The Reapers in the city are using a black tar like substance to poision the populace, they are attaching dispensers of this stuff to water towers around the city and a side mission asks you to destroy one of these dispensers within a certain area. So you need to take to the rooftops, the first time you go in a straight line, climb up to find a horde of reapers guarding the tower. After a fruitless attempt at an attack you are cut down by gunfire. The next time through you scout around and approach from a different direction, tossing some sticky shock grenades and keeping under cover. The game lets you play with tactics like that.

The city in inFamous is Empire City, split into 3 islands, the city was created by the developers Sucker Punch for maximum fun. There are lots of electric lines and rails to grind on, you spend a lot of time on the rooftops and a fair amount of time in the sewers getting the city's main generators up and running. If you enter a sector of the city where the power isn't running, Cole's vision blurs and it is harder to perform all your moves, the ambient electricity is what keeps Cole running. Also I should mention, there are certains things Cole cannot do, he cannot get into a car because if he does the static electricity from his body will cause the car to explode, and he cannot weild a gun because the stactic in his body will cause the gunpowder to ignite also Cole cannot enter the water, because electricity and water do not mix. Comparison time again, Prototype, you can weild guns which is pretty damn cool at times, firing rocket launchers and machines guns whilst running around the city like a steam train kicks complete and total ass! But Alex Mercer cannot get into cars, why? We're not told, maybe because there is no reason to get in a car if you can run around like he does, but still the abiltity to do so might have added to the game. inFamous explains why he cannot do this, Prototype does not, inFamous maybe thought the whole premise out some more, Prototype suffered from so many stalls and I get the feeling its not as polished as the makers wanted it to be and a lot of ideas were scrapped at the last minute.

inFamous is a fun game, and a game that requires two complete play throughs, once as evil and once as good. My first playthrough is on the evil side, so I do feel like a bit of a dick as a run down the street, people are lying on the street injured from my last huge battle with the reapers, I could stop and heal them using my powers but that would push me to the good side so I run past then, deaf to their cries and pleads knowing that on my replay of the game I will be be stopping to heal them and help them any way I can. I started the second city last night and after completing the first mission to restore some of the power just spent some time running about and experimenting in this new section and I honestly really enjoy the climbing element in this game, more so than Assassin's Creed because this feels more "free" for lack of a better word. Comparisons to Prototype are not completely valid, I know I did it here but I swapped one for the other so I think comparisons in this case are valid. If you have a PS3 and enjoy third person action games, inFamous is a must have, it is a lot of fun and does not shoot its wad early, the first island is like a giant tutorial for the rest of the game and I guarantee it is so chock full of things to do that you will never be bored.

What to do... what to do....

2009-07-08T15:31:00.001+01:00

A normal monday night turned into a night of awesomeness, I was playing Mass Effect, my 20 hour + save was going well and as I went on with the story, something was building in the story, I could sense things were happening. It was leading to the climax of the story, like in Star Wars when they launch the final attack on the Death Star. The game was getting progressively more awesome with every second. Three hours passed and I watched as the game drew to a close, I did that! I completed it. (Yes I did see one of the infamous sex scenes within the game, the game has a 12 certificate here in the UK and its not because of that scene, it is so tame, no worse than what you see in a James Bond Movie intro from the 70s) Now I was struck with another thought, what now? Mass Effect 2 wont be out until next year, what do I do in the meantime? I have finished Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and finished off Mass Effect, what do I do now?

This is probably a problem a lot of gamers face at one time or another, but in all honesty, it doesn't happen to me because I rarely finish a game, if at all. I get so far into a game and wander away from it, never to return or I wander back to it after a long time and have to restart the whole game again because I have forgotten most of what has happened.
So now the pondering begins, what do I play? Let's run the list shall we (and I include only 360 and PS3 games in this list):

360

Mirror's Edge
Far Cry 2
Spider-Man: Web Of Shadows (already out due to being a podcast game only)
Fallout 3
Fable 2
GTA 4
Saint's Row 2
The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion

PS3

Dead Space
Resistance: Fall of Man
Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction
Metal Gear Solid 4 : Guns Of The Patriots
[Prototype]

Now let me pick apart that list

360

Mirror's Edge- I need to start that game from the beginning again because it has been so long since I played it, I need a run through of the controls and play a few levels just to get the flow of the game working again.
Far Cry 2 - Awesome fun, but just too damn hard. And the respawning enemies can be a problem, you know that every road you travel down you will pass at least 1 jeep which you will need to fight and encounter 2 or 3 checkpoints which will be heavily armed. Its a constant battle of drive, stop, shoot and drive again.
Fallout 3 - Being a 40 hour plus game, you don't really feel yourself running into a end game within Fallout, it will always be a game you jump into for a few hours, progress but never finish.
Fable 2 - Despite being great fun, Fable never really compels you with a story, sure the main storyline has some fun points but it never hooks you and pulls you in, you could care less about half of the stuff that happens in it, just as long as you and your dog are happy.
GTA 4 - The story of Nico Bellic is a long tough one and is very much like Fallout in that it is so big that you will jump in for a few hours then jump out, also people calling you up all the time is quite annoying.
Saint's Row 2 - The madcap style of Saint's Row is that it is a pick up and play game for a few hours of fun, but it doesn't have a story that you want to follow through to the end.

PS3

Dead Space - I think I will need to start this game all over again, I have spent too much time away from it. Plus it is scary, it can only be played in short bursts so to get through it would take tremendous patience on my part. Whether that happens or not we do not know.

Resistance: Fall of Man - Meh. Its an average FPS that has a story so boring I fall asleep watching the very brief cutscenes, it does nothing new and I only stick with it for Multiplayer.

Ratchet & Clank: Tools Of Destruction - This is a big game, I will play it in small bursts but also its story is so comedic that it doesn't have that urgency that other plot driven games have to drive you towards the end and finish it off.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots - Hooo boy, I can only take so much of guys pooping in trash cans, smoking monkeys and tanks with feminine legs, and and old codger who can now change his face to look young. Its a mish mash of game play styles and wacky plot that suffers for being what it is, also being so full of plot threads that need tied up, you wince as they have over long codec conversations and cut scenes were NOTHING is tied up so you know there is going to be more cut scenes to go. I know Otacon is going to get screwed over by Niaomi, I know that Niaomi never wears a bra just to get everyone's attention and I know Snake is going to die, but surely you don't need the 20 hours of the game to have it all happen, the plot moves at a plodding pace, when really it should be faster than that, this game should be a Michael Bay type of game, explosions happening, plot lines tied up quickly and shit being crazy just for the hell of it.

[Prototype] - After Edward's dissection of the game when he was over one weekend, I have not went back to Prototype and have felt nothing hooking me back in, I think I have wrangled out all the fun I will ever have with this game.

So there we have it, lots of games to play, but which one will win, I don't know.
Despite all my arguments above, I love all the game I have listed, even [Prototype] but faults lie in everything so I weed them out.

Ban This Sick Filth

2009-07-02T09:30:00.004+01:00

So once again I try to make myself unpopular, last night when I had some free time I decided to try out Shadow Of The Collosus on PS2, this was after listening to this weeks Listen Up podcast where they procrastonate about how great this game is.

I booted up the game, watched the slow opening as the young hero travels to a distant land on horseback, he turns up a temple and places a girl, who is quite obviously dead, on a plinth. Suddenly a god like being talks to him, notices he has a legendary sword and asks what the hero wants. The hero says he wants the girl brought back to life and the god like being says he will do this but only if he kills 14 of the Collosi that roam the land beyond the temple. The young hero nods and sets off on his quest.

So you start off on your quest, you and your horse ride out onto the barren lands looking for the Collosi, and to find them you must hold up your sword and light will shine from it, if you point it in the right direct the light beam becomes more focussed and your controller vibrates. Travelling on the horse is slightly clunky and I had a lot of issues with it. So I pinpoint the first Collosi, ride across the plains, not feeling entirely comfortable with it and get to a set of cliffs and walls that I need to climb up.

Next comes the next problem, the controls, everything about the controls feels wrong. Triangle is jump but you also must hold down R1 to grab onto something. Coming off games were the controls are simple and fluid, this game feels ackward, like they thought about the controls last and focussed more up on the look of the game.

Whilst I digress, the look of the game is fantastic, everything about it is pleasing to the eye and when you finally catch sight of any of the Collosi you are very impressed.

So I climb, ackwardly, up the cliffs, falling a few times because the damn controls wont behave. At the top of the cliff, the game suddenly takes control for a few seconds as you watch the large Collosus walks by. It is a huge lumbering beast that is carrying a club, but it is just walking along. It's not bothering anyone. Hmmm, anyway I run after it and jump and grab some fur at his ankle, the sword I hold reveals weak spots on the collosus and luckily this one has one weak spot on his ankle so I hack at that spot and the beast stumbles to one knee, this puts his body at an angle that I can now climb his huge body. That's another thing the Collosi are make of skin and stone, their bodies built in such ways that they have platforms and ledges. You need the ledges because you have a grip meter and when it runs out, you lose your grip. So I climb the beast, it takes a while, I fall off a number of times and die twice but I hoist myself up his back, the Collosus trying to throw me off it's body, but I get to the top of his head and see the weak spot. I charge up my strike and drive the sword into the top of it's head. Black blood sprays out, the energy bar goes down by a third, the Collosus howls in pain and range but does nothing else, so I charge another blow and strike again, more blood flies out and it howls again but does nothing more to get me off. The energy bar is now only one third full, one more strike but I am holding back, I could strike one more time, end this and go after the other one but it is difficult. Eventually I strike the final blow, the beast falls and I roll off it, now I just want to go on my way but no the game makes me watch the beasts death throws and then something happens to the character and he wakes up back at the temple.

In the temple I am told to go after the second one, but I am torn at this point, how selfish a character is this guy? I mean I have played anti-heroes but dude, you are killing 14 rather peaceful beasts just so you can do the mattress mambo with this chick? You make me sick! These creatures aren't terrorising anyone, in fact the lands that they occupy are EMPTY, there are no villages being destroyed, no people under threat and no big baddies to destroy, your only "enemies" are the 14 collosi and they don't know you are coming for them. They are minding their own business and along you come, the evil Don Juan, climbing their bodies and striking down these beasts for other reason except to get your nuts wet. So with a heavy heart I went after the second beast, which I finally found on a large sandy plain, it was on four legs and looked like a Collosi approximation of a dog. OH COME ON! You want me to kill a dog?

That's it!

The game is off now and I refuse to play it again. People go on at length about how beatiful and wonderous Ico and Shadow of The Collosus are, I haven't played Ico so I cannot comment, but Shadow of The Collosus is a game that makes you feel bad! Not like Manhunt which makes you feel dirty and unwash, but bad in the fact that you are a selfish prick who kills some beasts to get sweaty and squelchy with some dead bint. You know what dude, move on! There are plenty of other girls out there, and if someone tells you to go out and kill 14 peaceful beasts to bring her back, then that person is messing with you. The people who love this game, LOVE THIS GAME, they are fanatical about it and if you speak out against it then "you didn't get it". Get what? Get that you play a selfish dickwad who is a sociopath and his sole motivation is do go balls deep in some dead broad? Well if I don't get that, then GOOD! If you want me to feel good about killing these beasts FUCK YOU. This game is horrendous in its motivations, I hate it. It's not a "bad" game by any standards, it looks nice and the theme of it is odd but it just makes you feel wrong. I choose not to kill these beasts and I have deleted my save, I wont be going back to this game ever, its sick and its wrong.

On another note, killing small animals is the first sign of a serial killer, he is killing an approximation of small animals in Colossus form, that means this guy is going to be the biggest mass murderer we have ever seen, don't encourage him!

Curse you Demon Fence, Curse you!

2009-07-01T13:17:00.002+01:00

(Inspired by the "A Fool In Morrowind" diaries in Rock Paper Shotgun, I have created one off Morrowind diary of my adventure last night. It has a point so stick with it.)

I enter the tavern, closing the door on the warm muggy air outside. I can hear some laughing downstairs but I am not here for rabble rousing, instead I head down the corridor and spot my purpose at the corner of the stairs. My contact in the Thieve's Guild is waiting for me, I hurry over and ask about any jobs going. My contact thinks about this and then informs me of a fellow thief who has been imprisoned and we want him out, the only way to do this is to sneak into a merchant's house, steal some illegal dewmer artifacts and blackmail the jailor using this artifact. It turns out the jailor and the merchant are running a black market in these artifacts and a word in the wrong ear could bring the whole operation down. I mutely nod to my contact and leave the tavern and step out on the warm street.

Many thoughts run through my mind now, am I ill equipped for this? Do I have what I need? What if I run across some trouble? Can I handle it? I am okay in a fight, I have killed some slavers and dispatched any wild animals who picked the wrong person to fight but still I dont want to have to face any armed guards, or unarmed guards. Also the road to the town where my fellow thief has been jailed is a long one, I could get some transport to the nearest town and walk from there, this would be preferrable but maybe I should walk and get the exercise. All of this spins through my head in a brief second then I set off to the silt strider.

At Seyda Neen I disembark from the Silt Strider, the animal gives off a low rummbling howling noise, which I am told is it's song but I ignore it and walk down the hill until I am on even ground and the path to Pelgraid is before me. To my left is Seyda Neen, the town where I was dropped off by the Imperials only a few days ago, apparently I was tossed into Morrowind to help the Emperor in some mission, screw that. I was in prison for a crime I didn't commit and now the Emperor wants my help? He wouldn't help me when I proclaimed that I was innocent and wrote him an impassion letter six months ago so why should I help him now.

A little history about me, I am McEwan Swiftfoot, a Khajit from the North, and I spent many a year working as pickpocket in the Imperial City in Cyrodill, my skills got noticed and pretty soon I was working for the Thieve's Guild, under instructions from the Grey Fox himself. I stole and made enough money to live and worked to help train other Thieves, I was happy. That all changed when Imperial Guards burst into my shack on the waterfront and dragged me to prison. I quickly found out that a person I had robbed had been murdered, a mounted head on his wall fell on him, people thought it was an accident but it turns out someone had loosened the head so it would fall on the poor man. That very same night I had snuck into his house, before his death and stole some items. The thing was, I kept to the ground floor and did not venture upstairs, that is where his manservant was, cleaning, I got enough time to swipe some silverware and get out. For six months I was kept in a cell, beaten by the guards on a regular basis as they told me to confess, I never did. What I did do was write a letter to the Emperor proclaiming my innocence and admitting I had robbed the man but not killed him, I did not reveal my affiliation to the guild. That all changed a few months ago when I was dragged from my cell and thrown onto a ship, only to be dumped in Morrowind and told to do some work for the Emperor. Once I was free to go on my way, I realised I was back to square one, I could not contact anyone from the Thieve's Guild, communication back to Cyrodill was nearly impossible and also my old contacts would be wary of talking to me because I was suddenly released from prison, they may have thought I had turned on the guild to save my own skin.

A stranger in a strange land, I had to adapt, I need to get some people on my side and start a new life here and once I had the power, money and influence I would travel back to Cryodill under an assumed name and gain an audience with the Grey Fox to explain what had happened, he would believe me. But here I was, Seyda Neen to the left and Peligrad to the right. I was a long way off from power and influence but I had money, life had been good to me as had my nimble fingers. So money was no real issue with me in this land, anytime I found myself running a little short I knew what to do, stealing and selling was my livelyhood and damnit, I was good at it. I started along the path to the right, Peligrad was waiting as was it's demon fences! The road was long and not much of note happened, along the way I scooped up some fungi and some flowers, the Mages Guild was always buying this stuff so I might as well grab what I could when I could, I was not above selling stuff like this legally and above board, money is money. Movement to my right made me stop in my tracks, I turned to see Guar lapping at a small pond, the large scaled two legged beast turned to see me, then returned to lapping. Guar are fickle creatures and sometimes attack without any provocation, this one was happy to just drink its water, so I went on my way, to see Peligrad just up ahead. It was a smaller town than Balmora, one main street leading up to the fort and some huts for the poorer villages off to the sides, but the town was too small for any true thievery to be done effectively.

In Balmora there are side streets to get lost in, guild houses to hide in and three taverns to get drunk in and recently a bath house to bathe in after a long day stealing from others. I walked up the main street, a few commoners glanced my way, a nobleman brushed past me aggresively, I did not flinch and merely moved to the side before he could bang elbows with me and try to start something. That is when I noticed the merchant's dwelling, he had turned his house into his shop, so I ducked inside. There were four of us in the shop now, the merchant, a guard and another customer, they all glanced in my direction and I started browsing the shelves, they went back to their business. I needed to get upstairs without being seen so I could look around, so I slid off into a corner at a pretence of looking at some armour and as I slid out of view I cast my invisibility spell, I had 60 seconds of invisibility, so I quickly and silently made my way to the stairs and leapt up them silenty, at the top of the stairs I breathed a sigh of relief and began to search for any Dewmer artifacts. The locked box on the shelf drew my attention and I slipped the lockpick into my hands and quickly made it an unlocked box, now it was an empty unlocked box as I slipped the Dewmer Artifact into my pack, getting downstairs was easy, as I was halfway down I jumped and landed on the floor and against the wall, everyone looked to me and I pretend to have stummbled. I muttered a sorry and left, no one was any the wiser, it was hard not to smile as I stepped onto the dark street, night had fallen pretty quickly.

The Fort was imposing, it was built to repel invaders and rumours on the street said it was home to a cult, I slipped inside without anyone batting an eyebrow and found the jailor standing by a table of armour, polishing it up. As I approached him he turned to glared at me, an orc, not always the easiest in the world to get along with. I decided not to beat around the bush and told him I had the Dewmer artifact, he quickly accused me of stealing but I countered by asking how did he know I stole it when such artifacts were illegal anyway and if he had knowledge they should be turned in and not in the hands of merchant. The Orc was confused but eventually admitted the merchant gave him kickbacks to help with the blackmarket operations. I told the jailor to release my fellow thief and we would say no more about it.

Satisfied I walked out of the fort and leaned against the fence beside the tavern to think over my victory, and then it happened! The fence had me! I was stuck, I couldn't escape. I cried out for help but all were ignorant to my crys, the fence would not let me go, I jumped, ran, attacked it with my sword but I was stuck in that spot, the fence holding me in place. It couldn't end like this, given a second chance only to be foiled by a demon fence! Sobbing I sank to my knees, or tried to, the fence held me up, blast and damn it, my future was set in stone, I had it all planned out and a demon fence stood in my way. I would give anything to get away from this fence. A thought came to mind, it is something that can be done if you are desperate, a deal with the devil, but needs must. All I know is that it is called the mystical "reload" and to invoke it can be deadly. But I closed my eyes and invoked the reload.

I enter the tavern, closing the door on the warm muggy air outside. I can hear some laughing downstairs but I am not here for rabble rousing, instead I head down the corridor and spot my purpose at the corner of the stairs. This all felt very familiar. Like I had done this before, a snippet of me leaning against a fence came into my peripheral memory then dissapeared. I shrugged and moved on.

(So my adventure which I had much fun roleplaying and felt satisfied as I had been pretty lucky in my lock picking and sneaking was cut short when a glitch within the game stuck me to a fence to which I could not escape. Nothing could break me free from it, so I had to reload and in doing so erased all of my previous deeds, that would teach me for not saving often. )

We Have All The Time In The World

2009-06-30T14:41:00.003+01:00

We Have All The Time In The World

When is a game too long? It's a question for the ages, some games require hours of time invested and you barely scratch the surface and others are simple pick up and play for ten minutes.

Back in the days of Super Mario Brothers on the NES, the game was limitless in the time you would invest because it was so damn hard, but if you had the skills you could breeze through the full game in about an hour and a half, if you used the warp points even less than that. I saw a video on youtube in which a guy finished the game in under five minutes. Also on the NES you have games like Final Fantasy which are huge investments of your time and required hours of grinding just to make you powerful enough to engage in hour long dungeon crawls. All the time you invest is geared toward pushing you onto the next section of the game, but when you reach that next section, you need to grind again because you are underpowered for this next section. This is standard for the Japanese Role Playing Game, you spend a long time taking characters through the enviroment, engaging in random battles and your characters level up and suddenly beasts that gave you trouble before are wiped out easily, it's a piece of cake and you feel like a complete badass, wander into an area you have never been to and suddenly there are new beasts that laugh at you in your cardboard armour and wooden sword. As your shorts fill with liquid fear you quickly run back to the previous area and spend some time lording it over inferior enemies until such time you feel you can stand toe to toe with the other guys.Lets put this into a context everyone can understand:

You live in a small village, you have done all your life and you shop at a small local shop. Every day you go into that shop, except on sundays because the old bat that runs it refuses to work on the sabbath, and you do your shopping. This goes on for quite some time, then someone tells you about a supermarket, it is in the next village. So one day you venture to the next village and enter that shop, the size and immensity of this shop hit you like a ton of bricks, there is simply too much choice. You break into a cold sweat and hurry back to your own village and continue to shop at the village store until you feel you can work up the nerve to shop at the supermarket. Eventually you start shopping at the supermarket, three weeks later. As time passes and you feel comfortable at the supermarket, then someone tells you of the new bigger supermarket two villages over. You go and investigate but the sheer size and amount of choice involved has you struck dumb with fear and you run back to the supermarket and continue to shop there as you work up the courage to shop at this bigger store.

It doesn't really work does it? No, but that is the standard for JRPGs and that is why you hear such bold proclomations as 40+ Hours of Gameplay, because a lot of those 40 hours are the hours you will put in grinding levels. Persona 3 is a perfect example, it is a game I was very much into, I have blogged about it previously but I have not talked about it since, why? Here's why:So I am happily exploring Tartarus and I get told about a new monster that I must defeat before we can go any higher in the tower. So we face the boss, kill it and are able to move on. Our first battle on this new floor we are wiped out pretty quickly. The enormity of this situation hit me, here I was playing a unique JRPG that had a lot of modern elements thrown into a fantasy setting and it felt very un-JRPG like for the most part due its aesthetic and everything about it was turning its nose up at conventions, but then suddenly in this one event I realise, its just a bog standard JRPG that wants to me to run around in the lower levels for a bit to level up before I venture up to the higher levels. Okay I get that, but explain one thing to me, how in the name of Zuul did we defeat a boss monster easily and suddenly the first random creature in the next floor provides a battle in which we die easily? It doesn't make sense, a boss creature should be a step above the rest. So I stopped playing the game that this point, I don't want to grind for hours in Persona, I want a game that pushes me along a story if I am going to invest that much time into it.
So if you are a huge JPRG fan and need to play them all, then you need a lot of free time because each games is around the 30 to 40 hour mark, a notable exception being Kingdom Hearts, you COULD invest 40 hours finding everything but you could push through the main game and hear the story told in around 20 hours, probably less if you are good at the game, unlike me. But your Final Fantasy games you need to put aside 40 hours per game for each. So say you are a completionist and for arguments sake all Final Fantasy games are 40 hours long, and we'll only take the games from the numbered series, 1 to 12, excluding the online game 11. 40 x 11 = 440 hours. So you need 440 hours to play all the Final Fantasy games to completion, take that into days and its just over 18 full days of Final Fantasy to complete but also take into account the times you will die in boss battles and we'll round that up to 19 full days of playing games. 19 full days of playing JRPGs with plots that make very little sense but are held in great esteem by hardcore fans. I don't know about you dear reader, but I don't want to spend 19 days of my life playing the Final Fantasy series, that is 19 full days mind you, I think in my entire life I have probably invest 2 full days maybe in the Final Fantasy series.

Western RPGs have a time issue too, but in a different sense. Lets take some of the more popular examples, first off The Elder Scrolls series. Elder Scrolls Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind and Oblivion are all western RPGs where you are dropped off in a world and told "go". Time passes, you scratch your bum, sniff at your fingers then turn to the game and ask "go where?". The game thinks about this and then says "go anywhere, honestly go wherever you damn well please"and again you think about this and shuffle off in one direction, this will normally lead to death so when you start again you will try something else and pretty soon you will find yourself learning the nuances of the game, there is a plot line running through these games but it is not important, what is important is that you have fun. My experience of these games comes from both Morrowind and Oblivion, I have never experienced Daggerfall or Arena so we'll take them out the equation for now. In Morrowind there is lots to explore and lots to do, you are dropped off in Morrowind by a prison ship, why you were in prison remains a mystery and you are taken through a unique character generation systems and quickly set off on your merry way, what happens next is up to you. The sheer depth and breadth of Morrowind yields over 40 to 50 hours of gameplay if you experiment, you could probably breeze through the main missions in a few hours if you really work at it but the entire point of Morrowind isn't the main missions, its about creating a unique roleplaying experience. What you don't do in Morrowind compared to Japanese RPGs is grind, you never go out and find enemies to fight just to level up, you CAN if you wish, but you never NEED to. So if you are a completionist lets say Morrowind has 50 hours of gameplay, but that is if you play as one type of character, play as another and you have another experience altogether. So you start off as a sneaky type and play as a thief, you will play some side quest differently than others, play again as a warrior type, going for brute force rather than stealth and you'll play out the same side quest in a different manner. Then lets throw spellcasters into the mix, and you have different kinds of spellcasters too, Morrowind is HUGE and 40 to 50 hours as 3 different types of character, its a lot. But lets be realistic, most people aren't going to play through all the same quests again and again with different classes, because not all quests are that good, so we can say the game roughly has 60 hours of gameplay. Right we'll agree on that for now, is it time to move on, hmmm not quite, Bethesda, the makers of Morrowind, the cheeky rogues that they are were not content to rest on their laurels and came up with 2 expansion packs, Tribunal and Bloodmoon. So new content abounds! Tribunal adds another 10 to 15 hours of gameplay and the next expansion Bloodmoon provided a new island and another 20 hours worth of gameplay inside. So add all that up, say 50 for Morrowind, another 15 for Tribunal and 20 for Bloodmoon and that makes 85 hours all in for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. So over 3 full days of gameplay. Now lets throw into the mix the mod community, Morrowind has a rabid mod community who have been fixing bugs in the game, adding content and making texture updates to bring the game bang up to date. The amount of mods and content added to this game is unfathomable so we wont even count that in hours, so core gameplay wise we have 85 hours, but with mods it could be double, even triple that and all of that without the grind.

Moving on to The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion which is much like Morrowind in that you do anything you want and follow side quests or just wander the lands on horseback or on foot. You start off again as a prisoner but this time in a cell in the imperial city, through happenstance your cell just happens to hold a secret exit out the city that is used by the emperor as he tries to escape assasins. This game takes you through a brief tutorial and puts a bigger emphasis on the main quest line but you can ignore it and go on your way. The game is again HUGE, with side quests galore, some can happen just by listening into a conversation in the street, some will have people run up to you and some you can trigger quite by accident (the noteable one being the introdution to the Dark Brotherhood). If you have a penchant for exploring underground ruins and tombs then there are plenty here to see. Oblivion, like Morrowind, is a game you will lose yourself in as you become an Assasin, or a Thief or even a vampire hunter there is always something to do and someone to talk to. The game features the Arena where you can fight for honour and gold, people talk about investing 100 hours in this game and I can believe it because not only can you do quests but you can take up alchemy (as you can do in Morrowind) and mix potions of your own creation and self your wares around the land. So there is a lot of time to be invested in this game, the main quest itself is around 10 to 15 hours long and throw in the numerous side quests dotted around along with quests that you will just run into, the game will keep you going for a long long time. Bethesda again did not rest up on their laurels and released an add-on pack called Knights Of The Nine which introduces a whole new questline for the game, however truth be told the quest line is probably 6 hours of play if that. To complete the questline you first must go on a pilgrimage to visit 9 shrines around the land and pray at them. I did the whole quest line in a small amount of time and got pimped out in spiffy armour and sword only to be told that once I joined the Dark Brotherhood I was no longer worthy to wear the armour. However if I did want to once again take up the mantle of the Nine and wear the armour and wield the sword of the Nince I would have to journey to the 9 shrines and pray at them for forgiveness once more. Shortly after this Bethesda released the next and last expansion for Oblivion, titled the Shivering Isles. This expansion has you travel to the land run by an insane god and you must complete a series of quests and explore this strange and twisted land. This adds about 20 hours of gameplay to Oblivion so you wont be short of more things to do. So all in all over 120 hours worth of things to do in Oblivion. Throw in a rabid mod community like that of Morrowind and you have yourself a lot more time in this game than at first glance.

Bethesda are also the makers of Fallout 3. Now the Fallout franchise is an RPG franchise that is well loved among PC gamers, because it is a post apocalyptic open world RPG where you can go about your business of exploring the remenants of the world at your leisure but it is extremely difficult for new players to get into. Again these are games with countless hours you can invest and Bethesda bought the license and went about creating the latest chapter in the Fallout story in Fallout 3. Fallout 3 uses the same engine as Oblivion and shares some of its traits, you get released into a big world after a brief opening chapter that plays as a small tutorial then get left to do what you want in an open world. This world is not a fantasy setting, it is Washington DC 200 years after a nuclear war. In Fallout there is lots do, hundreds to see and lots of sidequests that start off seeming like a fetch quest (go to here and pick up X, then deliever X to person Y) but suddenly span off into epic questlines of their own. You will find yourself attacked by raiders, deciding the fate of a town full of people (will you blow it up or not?), visit a wrecked aircraft carrier that people have turned into a floating city and even meet a dog who will become your companion if you help him. Fallout 3 has at least 40 hours of gameplay, but I have been told the main quest can be breezed through in no time. Bethesda again are not ones to rest on their laurels and have created Downloadable Content for Fallout 3, so instead of full blown expansions they have created small nuggets of gameplay, each one having between 5 to 10 hours of gameplay each and being released in shorter timeframes after the release of the game. So far we have had Operation: Anchorage, The Pitt, Broken Steel and Point Lookout all released and with a 5th announced DLC not yet released we still have plenty to look forward to. There is no word if there will be more DLC after this 5th pack, judging by the sales of DLC for Fallout 3 I would be surprised if it was. One thing can be said for sure, for a Wasteland, there sure is a lot going on.

If you look at PC Gaming you can see there are numerous games that yield more hours of gameplay that you can shake a stick at, with RPGs with player made expansions, total conversions of shooters commonplace and Turn Based Strategy games that have 100+ hours now the norm, PC Gaming is a heddy place to enter for gaming, but being a "console weenie" I turn my gaze to the console market. The Grand Theft Auto series on the consoles one series that demands your time, Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City and San Andreas all boasting huge playgrounds to have some fun in, but the story of the game can be played through in about 12 hours, but Grand Theft Auto 4 has expanded that by giving us a small playground, with more in it and the main quest is over 20 hours long with a DLC pack already released with another 10 hours inside and another DLC pack announced, Liberty City is city with a lot happening.

So when is a game too long? What mark do we use as the cut off? 20 hours? 30? 40? 50? I personally like to think it is too long when it stops being fun, my entire reason for walking away from Person 3 is that it stopped being fun for me. But on the flip side, when is a game too short?

Recently the movie Terminator: Salvation came out to huge acclaim, and with it a game was released, a game that costs £40+ in the shops and yields 5 hours of gameplay. Is it worth it? No. Then you have the game of Wanted: Weapons of Fate which has about 7 hours of gameplay, worth it? Some people have said yes, because it is a lot of fun. But lately the trend in gaming has been for a game to be within a magical 3 hour gap that makes it worth the price of buying a game. If a game is 7, 8 or 9 hours long it is worth your money, anything above those 3 hours and you get "great value" for your money and anything under 7 hours at full price is a crime. Most games that are cranked out now have a 10 hour gameplay time if it is linear, and a lot of games offer replay value, even if it is just because the game was so good that it deserves another play through. What strikes me as odd is the backlash some games have received for their gameplay length though, certain games have come under fire for being so short, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune had about 8 to 9 hours of gameplay and people stated that it was too short, give me a break! The game was the perfect length for the story it told, to stretch it out anymore would have been overkill and sometimes a game that short is perfect. If you only get a select time to play games, sometimes you want a short game to play for a couple of months, then finish the story off and be satisfied with it. Games with 100+ hours are great for dabbling into every now and again, but sometimes you just want to play through a story and see it through to the end, there is nothing wrong with that. If the story is well told and you have fun in the game, then what is the problem with 8 hours, that 8 hours has lasted a few months.

But the main game that a lot of people criticised was Mass Effect. A lot of people shook their fingers at Bioware and tutted when they read that the epic sci-fi RPG was a mere 12 hours long. 12 hours, Bioware were creating a universe, a book was released pre-ceeding the game to build up hype, videos of the game showed action and dialogue unparralled in most RPGs but you could finish it in 12 hours. Is that a bad thing? RPG fanboys cried foul, "we demand more grinding type things, give us lots to do" they demanded. But lets stop for a second, the game IS 12 hours long IF YOU PLAY THE MAIN PLOT ONLY! This is a situation where a "reviewer" gets the code and has to finish a game for the review and barrels through the main plot and finishes it up as quickly as possible then looks at his save game time and sees it at 12 hours and laments the amount of time for such a heavily hyped game. The fact is Mass Effect is an epic game that has a very direct plot but it also allows you to land on other planets and explore and you will find yourself engaging in side plots, some connected to a the main quest (investigating and destroying Geth facilities on remote planets) and some not connected at all (investigating why a group of scientists are being murdered one by one and by whom). The game is big, its not HUGE like Oblivion or Morrowind like I think some people expected, but it is big and deep. It has its flaws but you go into that world you will be immersed for more than 12 hours. I have been playing Mass Effect and have come just over midway in the game and have clocked in 12 hours then I installed the DLC which adds over 90 minutes of gameplay and have just polished that off too, so I currently sit at over 13 hours and the end is not in sight yet, I have become invested in the game and spent time with the characters and learning about their world. So those who tutted and clucked their toungues and played Mass Effect for 12 hours and that's all, they missed out and didn't get the whole experience.

More and more RPGs are being transferred to hand held systems, be it the DS, the PSP or now even the iPhone or iPod touch. With this wave of RPGs have come the remakes, old JRPGs now being available on the DS with their 40+ hours of gameplay now in handheld form. I think this is actually a good thing for the fans of these games, because they are the perfect platform for grinding, turn on the game, spend half an hour or so grinding levels as you travel on the bus or train to work. You have an hour lunch and your bored? Put on your DS or PSP and play a game for half an hour, level up some characters then go about the rest of your day. Honestly most handheld games are immune from the curse of "this game is too short" because on a hand held system you expect a short game and when you get a long game, it is something special (or a remake of a JPRG). As handheld gaming evolves I think this curse will transcend to the handheld market and soon handheld games will be blasted for being too short, its a small thing that is happening now but not as much, but it will grow.

So the debate over whether a game is "too short" or "too long" really depends on how you look at it, I think the fact is if you spend your money on a game and enjoy yourself then it is money well spent. But the reason all this came to mind was when I saw Final Fantasy 7 on the Playstation Network and a memory came to mind of playing through FF7 for the first time, I got 12 hours into the game and my save corrupted so I started again. This time I got up to section where I had to fight a monster called Weapon who was heading for Midgar and I hadn't grinded enough levels or found the secret super duper materia and characters that are supposed to be in your party but only if you run round the world 4 times singing "I'm a little teapot" in Japanese and then breakdance to "Funky Town" whilst Sephiroth beatboxes at the same time. I gave up on FF7 at that point. However when I saw it was on the store, a little troll on my shoulder said "buy it, we wants it, we covets it". I can't bring myself to buy the game, sure it is epic and yes I love the follow up movie and the prequel, Crisis Core, but the main game I can do without. If I buy it, I'll never finish it and an image that haunts my nightmares is me sitting as an old man playing the new console hawtness and playing Final Fantasy 7 and lamenting on how I can't get past the Midgar Zolom and the damn Chocobos are annoying me.

That I can do without.

Set up to fail

2009-06-26T13:29:00.004+01:00

I installed ZAngband last night, after reading about it over at RPS, thinking that I could totally get into it, given that it shares a lot with my much beloved (and maligned by Robert) DF.
ZAngband is a variant of Angband, an old Lord of the Rings themed Roguelike.

Here is how I got on.

Character 1:
Endek, a Dwarf Rogue.

Dead within 30 seconds, after I tried to talk to a grizzled old war veteran in the starting town and instead punched him because I hadn't grokked the controls.

Character 2:
Endek II, a Dwarf Rogue.

Dead within 2 minutes after I got poisoned by something wormy in a basement under the starting town.

Oh, balls.

Judging by the comments of people on the RPS forum, this is a game where I will fail a lot, repeatedly.

This appears to be a trend in Roguelikes that is not shared by any mainstream games at all.

Can you imagine if, say for instance, Fallout 3 had procedurally generated random content, and after spending 2 weeks playing the game, your character was really strong and had the best equipment, you got killed because you stepped on a pressure plate which you couldn't possibly have foreseen and had to start from scratch, would you:

a) Restart the game
or
b) Rip the DVD out of the drive, smash it into smithereens and then throw it out of the window in a fit of rage like I did with an utterly worthless Generic Tomb Raider Sequel several years ago?

Oddly enough, good ZAngband players seem to relish the challenge of trying again, constantly learning as their series of characters encounter all sorts of random phenomena which kill them in new, unique and interesting ways. And we're not talking about a lunchtime roguelike where you've lost at most 20 minutes of play when a character dies, a ZAngband runthrough can last for weeks.

Prototype on Trial

2009-06-22T15:57:00.000+01:00

Since it's release a few weeks ago, Prototype has been unfairly judged and even dismissed by a lot of people. There are a few reasons for this, the first being that a similiar game called InFamous was released before Prototype and was a HUGE success on the Playstation 3 and rightly so. So with the Prototype being released about a month later, people just dismissed Prototype with a wave of their hand as if to say "we've seen what you can do, InFamous does it better" but I feel this judgement was passed to quickly. These two games are not the same.

The other reason Prototype has been dismissed is because it is hyper violent, but there is a reason for this. As Alex Mercer you are gaining control of your powers and looking for revenge, so there is going to be a mess and there is going to be blood and violence. You are not part of a noble cause, you are pissed off and wrecking machine on two legs.

The third reason people have dismissed the game is they feel if there is that much happening on screen and you have all these abilities in a free roaming enviroment then something must have suffered, namely the gameplay. This is not true, the game is bursting at the seams with gameplay, you have the missions and then you have all the side missions, then if you get bored drop down into a military held area and unleash some claw fury and just get ready for a fight.

The game is about balls out action, its the Michael Bay of action games, you don't need to think about it, just have some fun and when your finished, turn it off and go about your business and when you get bored, turn the game back on and have a blast. Its like they said in Penny Arcade, you can karate kick a helicopter, what more do you want?
This game relys on your ability to just thrown reason out the window and have fun. Its not trying to be realistic, you can fly for christ's sake.

So what I am saying people, is cut Prototype some slack, it is truly an awesome, dumb, fun experience that allows you to thrown cars at helicopters and make massive spikes come out the ground and impale people JUST BECAUSE YOU WANT TO! Don't think too much about it and just have some fun.

F***ng Dwarf Fortress!!!

2009-06-21T18:41:00.003+01:00

Who needs crack cocaine when you can boot up a game at 2pm on a Saturday to quickly test a theory about locking your dwarves in self-sustaining biodomes, and still be sitting there, 65 dead dwarves, 6 game years, and several human sieges later, at 3:30am?

I swear, that game is the single worst time-sink I've ever encountered. It makes Civilisation "Just One More Turn" or Medieval 2 "One more battle, need to wipe those Frenchies off the map before I go to bed" look like games to appeal to twitchy Halo-fanboy youths with ADD and a Dr. Pepper addiction.

WHERE HAS MY WEEKEND GONE???

Bustin' Makes Me Feel Good! Ghostbusters On the Wii

2009-06-18T10:26:00.000+01:00

When you think back to it, Ghostbusters is one of the most near to the knuckle horror comedies to ever be released in the 80s. You look at it now and think "psshaw, it's more of a kid's movie really", well actually no it's not. There are so many jokes and references and scary moments that it is not a kid's movie, it's a movie that kids like but its more adult than you might think. My proof? Well for instance, in one dream sequence Ray imagines a ghost hovering over him, suddenly the ghost goes invisible and we see is fly being opened and it cuts up to his face as he closes his eyes in pleasure, as a kid you don't think about it but as an adult realisation dawns and you think to yourself "oh THAT'S what's happening." The language in the film is also more adult than one might think, like a scene with Walter Peck in the mayor's office, Ray calls him "dickless" in a throw away line and then Peter repeats the joke by saying "it's true, this man has no dick". And let's throw in the Gatekeeper and Keymaster for a second, the Gatekeeper and Keymaster must "join" to open the door for Gozer, by join what do you think they mean? They bump uglies of course. The film is also a scary movie, the beginning sequence is creepy and then when they run at the ghost and it transforms, when you are between six and ten years old that is a scary moment, also the hound like creatures that are in the movie are really scary when your young.
Yes the movie isn't terrifying all the way through, you have the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, Slimer and lots of funny moments throughout the movie and that is what balances it out.
I was a HUGE Ghostbuster's fan, I loved the movie, the cartoon series, I had a home made proton pack before you could by the plastic ones in the shop, I had the Fire Station, Ecto 1, The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, the plastic figures from the show, Slimer and a whole load of other toys. I had three three hour video tapes just full of episodes of the tv show The Real Ghostbusters that I watched constantly, the show was creepy in sections and had a great vibe to it, my favourite moments in the TV show were always near the end when the final moments of their latest adventure was about to take place and suddenly in the background you would hear the Ghostbuster's theme tune playing. The makers of the show knew how to keep kids hooked. During it's height we heard that a second movie was being made and the hype machine started rolling, I was desperate for any information about the movie and stayed up late some nights just to watch an American TV show that listed the 10 ten films in America and it had a trailer for Ghostbusters 2 in it. Any information I could get about the movie I got it and just got engrossed in it, I had the novelisation, the picture novelisation which included pictures from the movie all throughout. When the second movie came out, I was there the first night of opening, my dad had gotten tickets and I loved it. It was more Ghostbusters, sure people compare the two movies and the second is more kiddy and doesn't have the sharp wit and dark humour of the first movie but it wasn't trying to do that, they knew their audience.
A third movie has been talked about for a long time, however Bill Murray has always held back from doing it, not wanting to do a cash in and dilute the franchise. However about a year and half ago rumours circulated of a new Ghostbusters game and then it was confirmed, a new game was in production. Then we found out that Dan Ackroyd was helping pen the script for the storyline and the original cast had signed up for voice work including Bill Murray. With the game's dialogue recorded it was said that the actors were now keen on doing a third movie and its in pre-production now, whether it actually comes out or not is another matter but if it does I'll be there to see it in the cinema, any excuse for more Ghostbusters is a good thing.

All that being said, we have Ghostbusters The Video Game out now, I have not played or seen the Xbox 360 or PS3 versions of the game but I have played the Wii version.

So to kick off, we have the story, or what I know of the story from my first play through, you play as the new recruit for the Ghostbusters, and in a short cut scene as you are about to give your name Peter interrupts and says "No names, we don't want to get too attached, remember what happened to the last one." Right away they get around the fact that they will be referring to you as "Kid" or "Rookie" or "Sport". Its a good touch and makes immersion easier. The story starts with a new surge in Ghost activity and Slimer, who you have kept captive, escapes and goes back to the Sedgewick Hotel. So your first mission is to recapture Slimer, but there also other Ghosts in the hotel that you need to capture.

Next up the graphics, they choose a unique art style for the Wii version because it can't do the high def graphics of the PS3 and 360 version and in doing so have got a great style going, it works in perfectly. Characters are more Cartoon like and things are more "simple" is the best term but its all part of the style to compensate for the processing power of the Wii.

Controls, ah controls, the double edge sword of the Wii. The game is in third person view, you control your Ghostbuster with the nunchuck, aim with the Wii remote and press A to fire your proton pack. It takes some getting used to because your in complete control of where you look and its very loosey goosey, you do spend a lot of wrangling the proper direction to look that it can make you feel a bit sick. But forget the camera and where your looking and lets talk about busting some ghosts. So you aim with the Wii remote and fire with A, if you hit the ghost you see its energy meter and you have to bring the Ghost's energy down to nothing, which allows you to fire a capture beam. Next you spend time wrestling the ghost in the beam so arrows will flash on screen and you need to flick the Wii remote in the desired direction to bring down its second health meter and when this is at zero, press Z on the Nunchuck and fling it forward to throw out a trap, next you guide the ghost into the trap. Perfect Wii Controls for this game I feel. Capturing Ghosts is fun and there will be changes to what your doing in the game, as you test experimental technology for the Ghostbusters.

The levels are my major gripe and this may be a problem with the Wii version of the game only, the levels are so small. You spent a lot of time running around the level and less time catching ghosts and the levels are split up into small chunks with long loading times. Its a hassle when you feel it should all be one long level instead of being broken up. Just as you are getting immeresed and getting into a groove of the game, suddenly there is a loading screen.

The sound of the game, perfect. The voice actors are brilliant in their roles, its the Ghostbusters back again and we're happy. The music for the game is right from the movies and fits in perfectly, the Ghostbusters theme is used sparingly and at the right moments, and not constantly throughout the levels, as you walk through levels and hear background music from the movie, it brings a small smile to your face. The sound effects of the proton pack as you fire at a ghost, the small smile you had splits into a grin as you wrestle the ghosts and throw out the trap. The makers of the game are obviously fans because they have done everything they can to get the feel and sound of the game just right.

The Ghostbusters are back and this time you are part of the team and if you have a Wii and a fan of Ghostbusters why aren't you buying this game? Personally I don't think I will be playing this a lot, and its not a fault with the game, the game is awesome, its more a fault with the Wii. When I want to play games I want to sit down with a controller and chill out and the way my living room is set up, the couches all are side on to the tv, not directly facing the TV unless you are lying on the couches (which I do on many an occasion) so to play a Wii game I have to perch on the edge of the couch facing the tv and am not relaxed at all. I can't sit back and aim at the screen because its not comfortable. It is the main reason I play the Wii less and less, in fact I mainly use the Wii for Wii Fit than anything else. But if the Wii is your main console and you can relax and play it, strap on your proton pack and get ready to bust some ghosts.

Prototype - One pissed off dude in a hoodie

2009-06-14T17:30:00.003+01:00

The city below me is under threat, armed troops patrol the streets and tanks are commonplace. The public can only guess what the threat is, little do they know that the threat is me!

I step off the roof and plunge downwards, as I fall my arms turn into huge claws, razor sharp and thirsty for blood. I hit the ground hard, the concrete cracks beneath me and the shockwave sends some people off their feet. The troops run at me but I moved quickly, slashing, the first slash cuts the soldier in half, the second takes two of them apart, I am unable to tell which part belongs to which soldier. The tank trundles round and takes aim at me. My claws turn into huge masses of a stone like matter, creating fists of a solid material, I leap over the 2 cars in my way and land beside the tank and start destroying it. Four hits later and it explodes in my face, a noise catches my attention, a soldier across the street is calling in a strike team, I turn my arm into a tendril and fling it out toward him, too late, the strike is ordered. The tendril grabs the soldier and pulls him toward me, I slice him and two and get ready for the strike team.

Two attack helicopters come flying in toward the street where I am situated, I grab a car from the side of the road, hoist it over my head and as the helicopter swings into the street to aim at me, I throw the car. The explosion catches everyone off guard and the second helicopter has to pull back to come in for another run. Already I have another car and start running up the side of the building, the helicopter is coming right for me, I crest the top of the building staring the helicopter pilot right in the eyes and I softly say "boo" and throw the car at him. He is able to cry out "Jesus" before he is destroyed in the explosion. Sated from my destruction of army forces I take off across the rooftops looking for more troops to make pay for what they did to me.

(Seriously though, Prototype kicks major ass just for running about causing chaos.)

Sneaky Sneaky Steal Steal

2009-06-03T14:54:00.003+01:00

(This is going to be the first of a few blogs placing me into the headspace of the character, first game= Thief: The Dark Project)

It's night time, the dimly lit streetlights show my way ahead and I feel a sense of unease about the whole situation, something doesn't seem right. Slowly and carefully I walk down the street, to my left I hear snatches of a conversation."Oi'm going down the bear pits tumorrow.." is the first audible line I hear, not stopping to listen I move on, casually looking back, three guards all standing stock still as they talk. Again something isn't right. I weave my way down the streets of this town, unsure of the direction I am to take, but hoping that whatever road I pick is the right one. My mind flicks back to before I started this, someone told me to steal something, that's all I know. So I continue walking down the street, I hear someone coming and slip into the shadows. What walks past could not be called human, it was a gross mis-representation of a human being, walking like its legs might shatter if it put too much pressure on a single step and looking like it was cut from paper by someone with parkinson's disease. I watch in horror as it walks past, not seeing me but what passes for its head is too deformed, I don't think it's eyes work properly anyway. My path continues and once again someone is coming, I slip back into the shadows, another of these things walks past, this time dressed as a guard but still gives off the sense that it's not a proper person, something is wrong with it. The horrendous creature passes by without a second glance and I continue my path. I turn a corner and see one of them, he is directly in front of where I am supposed to go... I think, I mean the only place I can go is through the doorway behind him. This thing, once again dressed as a guard, is not denying its retarded, brain damaged nature and blithers incoherent things and waves its sword randomly about, I walk right past it without even bothering to try and conceal any movement and steal the key it has rounds its waist. Part of me wants to slit its throat to put it down, but I hold back, murder is now what I am here for. So I slip through the door behind this creature and find a pit, I look down and see water... having no other option I jump in and luckily there is a sewer system that leads to my destination... I hope. Before I started nothing was made clear to me, I am following a path of natural progression in the vain hope of the theory of "all roads lead to Rome" and that I will eventually get there.
The sewer system leads to a hole in a wall, which leads me into the manor of some such lord, I have been told to get to the top floor of the mansion to steal a precious thing and get out without being seen. My hope is that none of the mutants I have seen are waiting for me inside. Inside a wine cellar I kept to the shadows and overhear actual attempts at conversation, two of these beasts are attempting to mimick conversation, but they haven't quite got it right, in fact I am pretty sure they are making up words. What's a taffer?It doesn't matter because they lope away from me and I continue on my path. The next half hour is a slow tedious process, as I slide from shadow to shadow, keeping out of sight of these beasts, there are so many of them I start to feel like I have broken into a test laboratory as the subjects have gotten free. I find myself in a darkened room and pause for a few seconds to think things through. I am inside someone's house, trying to nick their stuff, I have no idea why I am to do this or why the place is littered with mutants, yet here I am, with no sense of where I am to go, I am thinking it's time to exit stage left. Too late, one of them has sniffed me out using their bizzare sense of smell and comes at me with a sword. So ends the adventures of Garrett, a Thief with no concept of who he is or what he is doing. He's dead, dead by mutants and will not be missed.

Lady Croft, you are looking your age.

2009-05-28T14:19:00.000+01:00

Lady Croft, you're certainly looking your age

Tomb Raider.
Okay so what was the first thing that came into your head?
Let me guess, boobs? Of course it was. Tomb Raider the franchise is built on boobs.
But before anyone argues about how great the games are and how it's not about that, let me start by saying bullshit.
Tomb Raider would not have been the success it was, had some marketing genius push the boobs of Lara Croft to the forefront.

Let's jump back in time, I was at the cinema, 16 years old and some adverts were playing. All of a sudden a large breasted model was on screen wearing short shorts and a tight blue top, she was running and jumping, general movements to cause maximum jiggling and then we're told it's for a game called Tomb Raider. After that I didn't think much of it, sure the advert was.... entertaining but I didn't feel any compulsion to find out more about Tomb Raider.

Then through some unconvential means (yarr) Ed and I got our grubby mitts of a copy of Tomb Raider and gave it a bash on the PC. Tomb Raider is the story of Lara Croft, an adventurer who loves's nothing more than killing endangered species and giving young boys embarrassing erections. She jumps all around pulling switches, making leaps of faith and showing off her wonderfully pointed boobs that people who didn't know any better masturbated furiously over.
So yeah sure the game was okay, I found it's first section tediously long and dull but when combat ensued and Lara Croft pulled out those two boobs... I mean guns (and I mean pistols, real guns) and rapid fire dispatched some enemies, I instantly liked the combat. Saying that, any game where you duel wielded pistols was appealing to me at that point, I had just discovered John Woo movies and dual wielding pistols me was the shit. Needless to say I gave up on Tomb Raider fairly quickly, long empty levels filled with puzzles might sound interesting but I felt in Tomb Raider it wasn't executed very well at all and honestly the control scheme for PC didn't work well.

Time rolled on and when my family was in the Playstation phase and my sister played Tomb Raider for the first time, she was hooked. The long empty levels fit perfectly into her style of play, she was new to gaming and found herself enjoying the game a lot. So much so that she got Tomb Raider 2 and 3 and played through both of them.
I had a bash at both games and once again found them tedious, the second game had a more action-orientated slant but still I just wasn't that in to Lara.

Meanwhile, it seemed the whole world was into Lara, the first game was a runaway success and suddenly she was in games magazines in provocative poses, then she moved to other magazines with less and less clothing. No actual naked pictures of her appeared but there was enough there for people, sad pathetic people, to fantasize about. Hackers were also keen to help those losers out and provided the Nude Raider patch for the PC game, apply this patch to the game and Lara played the entire game naked! Shock Horror, badly drawn pixilated boobies! Lets forget they were the wrong shape to begin with, the fact that people did this is just beyond belief. Well the Tomb Raider games were really getting the sales but by the third game, a lot of the audience felt things were becoming stale and also the large focus on action rather than puzzles was taking away from what the game was really about... boobs... I mean treasure hunting. Rumors began to circulate of a Tomb Raider movie being planned and then the makers of the game announced a new Tomb Raider game, titled The Last Revelation, this was going to take the game back to basics, so we were told. Well it didn't really, it was still a mix of lots of action and some puzzle solving, sure it did it better than the rest of the Playstation games out there but Lara was getting old to the public. During the making of the sequels the makers of the game spent a lot of time increasing Lara's chest size, making her breasts bigger and bigger with each sequel, to the point that in The Last Revelation, a woman with her figure should not have been able to do the things she did. The game was released in 1999 and people bought it thinking we would see a return to the formula of the first game, but alas we didn't. My sister got the game, and finished it with no problems and said it was okay but not great. I tried it out, got 3 levels in and found something better to play. Then rumors about the ending spread around magazines, Lara died at the end of the Last Revelation, that was it she was dead. But Eidos announced a new Tomb Raider game was coming called Tomb Raider Chronicles but would have all Lara's friends gathered at her funeral and tell stories about her, these stories would be levels in the game. This led to levels in which Lara was dressed in different and sometimes overly skimpy attire. Chronicles was a complete bust, too short and made no sense to anyone. Released in the year 2000 it was a footnote in the Tomb Raider series, and the ending of the game had Lara return, she wasn't dead after all. Everyone knew this by now because the makers of the game announced that they were working on the Playstation 2 Tomb Raider, which would be dubbed Angel of Darkness. They claimed it would be released to coincide with the movie starring Angelina Jolie and would be the first part in an epic storyline that would see Lara on the run from police and in very different environments.

During this time I had never bothered with the Tomb Raider games, finding them boring most of the time and found myself more immersed in the story of Solid Snake and Metal Gear. In 2001 I got a Playstation 2 and was very happy with my purchase but also thought from the way people were describing the new Tomb Raider game, it might be worth buying. Just before the film was released, the magazines announced that Angel of Darkness was being pushed back because it wasn't finished yet. The film was a dismal failure; it got people in but was slated by everyone who saw it. Instead of making the movie a simple treasure hunt movie, they made up a silly plot involving Lara's father and the Illuminati who appear to be the defacto villains of most conspiracy movies or games these days. Teenage boys watched the movie eagerly as Angelina Jolie went for a shower and then walked away from the screen with no clothes on and you saw the hint of a side boob and the top of a butt cheek, they must have sprayed their shorts in joy at the sight, others felt it was added for no reason at all.

Time moved on and the PS2 began to get some good games behind it, it began to gather some steam behind it and Tomb Raider was all but forgotten. 2001 made way for 2002, glimpses of the Tomb Raider game was seen in magazines and we were told there was another playable character in the game but still nothing about a release date. Then 2003 arrived with still no Tomb Raider, the sequel to the movie was due to be a summer release and finally we were told the game was about to drop at the same time. Magazines got excited about it, and the hype machines was starting to get things moving for Tomb Raider. Lara was coming back with a bang and we would love it!

It was terrible. Truly awful. An abomination. Those words describe the game and the movie. Both blamed the other for poor sales of tickets and sales of the game. The sequel to the Tomb Raider movie was a horrible mish mash of mythologies and Angelina Jolie in different outfits to show off her curves. The game Angel of Darkness, wow, where to begin with this one. The game starts off with your mentor being killed and you being framed for his murder. Right away the game drops you in a dingy alley and tells you to run from the police. In this alley section you will die at least 10 times whilst you do trial and error and also try and get used to the controls. You spent a lot of time traversing urban areas as you find money and anything else to help you, the game's levels are broken up by long and frequent loading screens, you will play for hours and no tombs will be raided, not a one. Instead you'll talk to people in a faux RPG style game play and climb around an empty nightclub.
Everyone should have seen it coming, during interviews about the game the makers talked about the grandiose story and how you would see Lara do things you'd never seen before. Teenage boys imagined Lara doing unspeakable sex acts on screen as they tugged away their eyesight and the rest of the gaming population wondered what they meant. They came up with this huge story for Lara to be part of, however they forgot the 2 main words in the title, Tomb and Raider. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider does not need a complicated plot to follow, give her any flimsy excuse to run around in underground caves in the dark and she will take to it like some hideously deformed top heavy mole. The makers also introduced another character into the game Kurtis Trent, who they hoped would spin off into his own series of games. There were no Tombs to raid in this game with either Lara or Kurtis. Once again the makers inflated Lara's boobs again and also made them jiggle realistically, good to see they focused on what was important, the game play is fundamentally broken but at least her fun bags react when she jumps up and down on the spot as you try to reach that frustrating ledge.

The world forgot about Lara Croft, she reached her peak back in 1996 when her first game was okay, people kept feeling the need to improve on what already work and in doing so destroyed what people enjoyed. Documentaries had been done about Lara Croft, a book written about her, they had made a comic, a cartoon series was worked on and the internet was awash with fan art (dirty and clean alike) and fan fiction about the chesty Indiana Jones (again dirty and clean alike). Lara Croft was a gaming icon, but not in the way that Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog are gaming icons. Mario and Sonic became gaming Icons because of a track record of games behind them, Super Mario Bros 1,2 and 3 cemented Mario as Nintendo's Mascot and the rabid adoption of Sonic The Hedgehog as Sega's mascot was cemented by three excellent Sonic games. Lara Croft had one game under her belt and was pushed to the forefront so people could ogle at her boobs. Marketing departments made Lara an Icon, but she wasn't a beloved Icon like the previously mentioned plumber and hedgehog, no at first she was a curiosity. Should people think a video game character is hot? Its a strange question, but when that video game character is a thin busty female, lying naked on her front on some bed sheets, you can't make out anything too rude but you know she's naked and she's staring at the camera with a small smile, her hair tousled like she's being have some hot and sweaty sex. Everything about the picture is to grab the male who looks at it and brings to mind sex, because sex sells. If Mario had been in that picture, well it would have been wrong and if it had been Sonic we'd have the people who made this picture carted away from some serious psychiatric help, but because it was Lara people didn't mind. Soon Lara was in the famous pose from the cover of the movie Scandal, in which the actress Joanne Whalley Kilmer sitting reverse style on a chair, she is naked but the back of the chair covers her. It was a very startling movie poster and it sticks in your head, suddenly on the front of a magazine there is Lara Croft in that pose. People took the time to render Lara Croft in that pose! Once again it sold magazines because as I said, sex sells and Marketing were selling a sexualized Lara Croft like crazy. Lara was everywhere, clothed or unclothed, at one point the energy drink Lucozade became Larazade for a while just to tie in with Tomb Raider.
What they could have done, and the Lara Croft phenomenon might not have exploded like it did, is have Lara as a properly proportioned female doing these dangerous tasks, not have her in these sexualized photo shoots, they could have created a female gaming icon that female gamers, young and old could look at as a strong woman represented well in games. Instead most women look at her with scorn.

With the Angel of Darkness now a memory, the search was on for the new Lara Croft, someone to take her place as the new hot chick in gaming. People tried, first we had Bloodrayne, the half vampire Nazi hunter who dressed with the concept less is more. So the less clothing, the more we saw and the more people would buy the game, right? Not really. But undeterred work began on Bloodrayne 2 and to promote this Bloodrayne, the game character appeared topless in Playboy (no joke) along with some other video game vixens, none of which ever reached the notoriety of Lara Croft. Everyone tried to get that spot, hell Pamela Anderson released a game based on her flop of a show VIP, and she was touted as the next video game vixen, but the game flopped worse than the show and that idea was shelved.
3 years passed after Angel of Darkness, and the company Crystal Dynamics were handed the reigns of Tomb Raider and told to re-invigorate the franchise. Crystal Dynamics are best known for the Legacy of Kain series of games and with Tomb Raider they went back to basics. Crystal Dynamics looked at the title and saw Tomb and Raiding as two important parts of the game play and also scrapped the Angel of Darkness storyline, shrunk Lara's boobs to an acceptable size and started fresh with a new look and feel. And in 2006 Tomb Raider: Legend was released. Lara was back; she looked good and played well. But.... something wasn't right. It took me a while to figure this one out, I played Legend for a bit on my PS2 and tried really hard to get into it and despite all the "innovations" they were making to the series, something wasn't sitting right with me. When I finally figured out what it was I was amazed, the reason Tomb Raider didn't sit right with me was because I had played Prince of Persia Sands Of Time, that game blew Tomb Raider out the water. The Prince running around pulling switches, pushing blocks and navigating around underground caverns was much better and more fluid than Lara Croft ever could be, even on her new engine. The game couldn't measure up. But the reviews for the game were high and optimistic for the series and after Legend was finished a remake of the original Tomb Raider, dubbed Anniversary was released and it was the first game in the new engine. Everyone cheered, yay Tomb Raider was back on form. Just in time for "next gen" because the Xbox 360 and PS3 were looming and a port of Legend made it to the 360 with no graphical improvements, it was just the same game. The real "next-gen" Tomb Raider was titled Tomb Raider: Underworld and on November 2008 it was released to PS3 and Xbox 360. The game has not done well at all. Edios have crowed that it was doing well but the sale figures failed to meet the expectations. With Square-Enix know owning Edios, who knows what direction Lara Croft may go in next, or if she will go in any direction at all, the price of producing a game is outweighing its sales figures at the moment and if any game series should just give up the ghost, its this one, Lara Croft has raided enough tombs, its time to hang up those short shorts and toss the sports bra in the bin. In a series of 8 Tomb Raider games, only 4 are hailed as truly great games, and 2 of the games are the same game, Tomb Raider and the remake Anniversary, that to me is not great odds, Lara Croft was a product of the times, in the late 90s when lads mags and pint drinking and wankers shouting "oy! oy! love; show us your tits" were seen as cheeky and laddish things to do and Lara was a game character for the lads to ogle at. In today's social landscape, Lara Croft is a joke, no longer interesting or even desirable to your average gamer. We have been given a whole host of female video game characters who are strong and not pimped out to every magazine they can find, we had Faith from Mirror's Edge, Jade from Beyond Good and Evil, Meryl from Metal Gear Solid 4 and now games are giving you the choice to play a strong female character by choice, games such as Fable 2, Fallout 3 and Mass Effect all give you the option to play as a woman and a strong woman at that. The only way to bring Tomb Raider back to the forefront is to completely re-invent Lara Croft and they need to do it in a Battlestar Galactica kind of way, make things darker and more realistic, make the game for adults but not in a smutty way. Until then we watch the same tired old girl get dragged out onto the stage and dance for us, and like a stripper past her prime, she's showing her age.

State Of Play

2009-05-21T12:53:00.002+01:00

Okay so I freely admit, I have been severly neglecting my blogging duties in the past 4-6 weeks, mainly due to the fact that I was unemployed then re-employed and also a lot of family things springing up. Also my PC up and died on my at the worst possible time, meaning the last podcast that Ed and I recorded and I was in the process of editing was all lost along with 3 blog posts in notepad form that were typed up and ready to be posted. My pc is now back up and running and I have tried in the past fortnight to start posting as usual again and am now trying to catch up with other blogs as time goes on. I admit at one point I was close to just walking away from the blog and not bothering posting again because my time was becoming so constrained but I don't want to do that and I wont do that. I am having fun posting and reading other peoples blogs and think I finally found my writing tone that I want to keep for future posts, my Madworld post being perhaps the best example of how I want my posts to sound from now on.

So the posts will keep coming but bear with me during this time as I am trying to get everything back on an even keel. This is just an update to keep you all informed.

Jumper: Griffin's Story - This Game Kills Kittens

2009-05-18T20:36:00.001+01:00

The movie Jumper is based on a science fiction book about a boy who can teleport, its a simple premise really, once he has been somewhere he can then teleport back there at will. The movie is an action packed film which was snubbed by many because of the star, Star War's Hayden Christensen, but was actually really good fun. The book is a more indepth affair and the film doesn't even bother following the framework, I think its because the book itself would not translate well into a movie. To co-incide with the movie, a video game came out, titled "Jumper: Griffin's Story". This tells the tale of the other Jumper you see in the movie, the hard nosed and slightly crazy Griffin who wants to kill all the Paladins (the bad guys) he sees because they killed his family. The game was released with little fanfare and quickly buried because the movie itself flopped. For months I had seen it on the shelf of the Gamestation that I visit, it was always reduced in price and I considered picking it up for the Xbox 360 for the longest time, surely it couldn't be that bad, could it?

So Gamestation also do an offer on PS2 games, 5 Games for £10, which is a bargain consdering some of the games on offer. I picked up 5 games and one of which was Jumper: Griffin's Story for the PS2. Last night I decided to give this game a try, I was bored and looking for a game to get immersed in for an hour or two, my wife had comandeered the TV in the living room so playing anything on the PS3, Wii or 360 was out as they were all in there, so that left me the PC, the Xbox or the PS2 and I opted to try out Jumper.

The game starts with a rather well done cutscene, it is comic book like in it's presentation, reminiscent of the Watchmen cutscenes from "The End Is Nigh" downloadable game and I quite liked them. Then the game begins. Right away your thrown in a bland level, graphics that look like an N64 game at best and you control Griffin, suddenly tutorial boxes are popping up telling you how to port, you hold R1 and a reticule appears on screen and you use the right stick to move the reticule and then let go of R1 and you jump to that destination. After a few trys at this I realised this was a really cool game mechanic and the wheels in my head began spinning, this game was going to be awesome, I could teleport all over levels, using my power to stealth my way through a level and if someone got in my way, I teleport beside them, grab them and port over somewhere high and drop them then port back. Okay so the graphics were poor because the game mechanic would allow you to do all those things, I could accept that. Okay here we go, my first group of enemies have entered the level, its stealth time! Wait no, they are running right at me despite the fact I was standing out of sight of them, suddenly another box pops up explaining combat. Ah right! I get it now! Combat is where this game will excel, my wind flittered back to the illfated X-Men game that came out around the time of the god awful X-Men 3 movie. In that game you played some levels at Nightcrawler, and you teleported in that game but what was the best thing about Nightcrawler was his combat within the game. You mixed your teleporting with you attacks, meaning you jumped behind or to the side of someone during an attack and it was really really good. The rest of the game was really really bad. The controls for the combat in X-Men were actually really good as you had a lot of control over the ability to teleport and during combat you chose when to teleport.
In Jumper, you hit the attack buttons and Griffin teleports all over the place, which I am sure the makers of the game thought was cool but would surely cause an epeleptic fit on anyone watching screen that it flickers so much. There is no control over combat, none at all, you can't even work on combos because you have no idea where the combat will port you so one punch might be in front of him, the next behind them and then the next to his side, its inconsistent and no skill is brought into it at all.
Slightly deflatec I pressed on, okay combat was terrible and the graphics were poor, maybe just maybe there is something redeeming about the game because the port mechanic is still pretty cool. I'll just port up on that ledge and take a look at the level, go on then, damn it reticule move up! I said move up! What is going on here? I am a Jumper, I should be able to teleport wherever I want, yet this game limits you to things on ground level or maybe a foot off the ground. Sighing I scrammbled for another thing that might save the game, okay maybe the game has little bits of combat but has some puzzle elements for you to work out using your teleporting powers. As I progressed through the level the first puzzle section appeared, a lot of water had spilled and had been electrified, right here goes, wait what are you doing game? No, stop it! Stop showing me the path through this puzzle, I command you to stop! Argh! You ruined it! The one thing that could have redeemed this game, ruined because they show you the way through these parts of the level, rather than allow you to do it yourself. They do it for every single part of the game!
After replacing the controller on the PS2, breaking the other one in sheer frustration, I set about seeing my way through at least 1 level of the game. So, tedious combat is something I want to avoid, why don't I jump past everyone and can speed run the game! Yeah that would work. Well it WOULD work, and it SHOULD work, but it doesn't. The game doesn't let you away from any level until you fight and defeat every single enemy. It was as I was doing this I encountered the first huge mistake or glitch or something about this game, I was battling a paladin and bashing the buttons when suddenly my character grabbed the paladin. This was new, what was I to do now, well nothing apparently, I triggered a small animation where I threw the paladin to the ground dead. I think I was supposed to have snapped his neck in that animation but it didn't look like it. But before I go on, let me explain the first level, its set inside the Colliseum in Rome, the levels are running around in the ruins, yet when I triggered this animation suddenly I am on a street somewhere urban with a official building behind me. Had I jumped? No, I hadn't jumped because when the animation finish the game showed me tossed the man to the ground beside me in the ruins. I hadn't jumped, there was no indication of this, the game was just bad.
I was on the verge of a wanting to destroy this game, take it from my PS2 and literally destroy it. I wanted to snap the disc in half, then blend the parts until it could never be put back together, but then I would put the bits in a bag and jump up and down on them until I could barely stand and then I would set fire to the bag. That is what I wanted to do, but I didn't. I was going to see this level through to the end. I entered a new area, four paladins were there and I beat them up and walked to a fence, the fence had what was supposed to be a door attached to it, the graphics were so poor it was hard to tell. The door didn't open, how am I supposed to get to the next section? I had given up on teleporting through sections because running was easier, so I tried teleporting beside the fence to see if I ended up on the other side, nope, it didn't work. So I ran to the other end of the room, nothing, no switches or anything, so I teleported back to the fence and suddenly the door opened. So the game doesn't respond to you running anywhere, but if you teleport they are fine with it, what kind of logic is that? Yes teleporting can be cool and some people will find an hour or so of fun with it, but shackling players to it is a huge mistake. So I eventually got to the end of the level to see a small in game cinematic, a helicopter appears and starts shooting at him, he jumps to beside a nearby police car, revs the engine, speeds forward then ports the car and himself in the air falling toward the helicopter, he then teleports out as we watch a bland explosion. Hmmm, if you had been given the ability to do things like that maybe the game would have been better. Then the level ended and I turned off the game. I doubt I will ever turn the game back on.
Jumper: Griffin's Story is horrible, it has no redeeming features about it whatsoever, its horrible to look at, horrible to play and horrible to even be in the same room as it. The feeling you get playing it is when you are waiting for a lift, the lift arrives and about 5 or 6 people file out and you step in alone, the doors close and you realise someone farted in there and now your trapped with it. When you buy Jumper on any system, your trapped with a smelly fart that you cannot escape. The thing is, the concept of the game is sound. You play a teleporter who uses his powers to get through levels and also for combat, on paper it sounds good. The game feels rushed, so rushed to the point that it doesn't feel like it was ever finished, nothing feels polished. Now if the makers have given you huge levels and your teleporting ability and let you run wild, people would have had a blast with this game. Take a look at Crackdown, you are an agent who has to boost his powers and they tell you to go explore. The makers pretty much tell you: "on you go, have some fun, the plot will still be here when you get back" and so you run around the city, occasionally getting in cars but mostly climbing buildings and running around the rooftops, and if you decide to use the Keys To The City cheat pack, you will spend a lot of time just messing around with the city. Leaping tall buildings in a single bound, picking up huge tankers and throwing them into the air, firing a rocket at the tanker then watching as it all explodes. Your not "supposed" to do that as part of the plot but you will do it because its fun. Had the makers come to Jumper with that point of view, they could have made an awesome game, they didn't and my best guess for that would be because they were probably handed the game at the last minute and did their best to create a finished product in time for the movies' release.
Avoid this game at all costs, it is truly horrible and you will feel rage, sadness and even apathy as you play this game, it has the ability to ellicit conflicting emotions and none of those are good emotions. The game doesn't look good and it doesn't handle well at all, there is nothing redeeming about the game at all, honestly I play lots of bad games and enjoy a lot of them, but this game, it goes beyond the "so bad that it's good" factor and sinks to the bowels of hell itself.
However, I do recommend watching the movie, it is good fun and tells an interesting story, the only problem is that it left the door wide open for a sequel, no scratch that, the ending pretty much demanded a sequel which I have heard is in the works but it could turn out to be just high hopes. The book of Jumper is interesting too and is a completely different story from the movie, so if you liked the movie, I would advise picking up the book, it is fun and not like the movie. Stay away from the game at all costs, if you need more reason to stay away from the game then here it is: Jumper: Griffin's Story kills kittens for fun. There you have all the reason you need not to pick up this game, not even out of curiosity like I did, don't do it. Even if it is a bargain bin for a price you can't believe, there is a reason it is in that bin, leave it be! God willing someone will round up all the copies of this game abnd bury it in the desert beside the Atari 2600 cartridges of E.T.
Now I need to go take a shower and wash the stink of this game off me.

THI4F is gonna be gr4at!

2009-05-17T18:06:00.003+01:00

I am a very long-term fan of the Thief Series, particularly the first two games.

I picked up a demo shortly after the first game, Thief : The Dark Project came out, but it was inexplicable, too dark to see where I was going, I couldn't work out what to do or why the game would end if the two guards walking away from me saw me.

Bear in mind that this was 1998 and the stealth genre at that time did not exist so such notions as "stay out of sight and track the baddies" were alien.

I then abandoned it, until I picked up another demo in 2000 or thereabouts, which was a demo of the Training and Lord Bafford's Manor missions, and I instantly fell in love with the game, the atmosphere, the intensity and the immersion.

To this day no game can grip me like Thief can.

At the moment I lack for an internet connection at home, so this blog is somewhat outdated, but after a long period of "is it-isn't it" by Eidos Montreal, they have announced that they are working on the fourth game in the Thief franchise, the horribly named THI4F. Honest to goodness, if their judgement is so appalling as to give it that name, then I greatly fear for what is going to follow for poor Garrett, who to date has suffered the twin fates of getting his eye plucked out AND appearing in the godawful Thief : Deadly Shadows.

This news has given me the impetus required to do a complete playthrough of the trilogy to date, which I will start when work has calmed down to the point where I have such things as weekends...

Crisis Core - The Prequel to Final Fantasy 7

2009-05-17T11:06:00.002+01:00

When it comes to Final Fantasy 7, I am really at odds with myself. On the PSX I played this game to a certain point then could not proceed because I had not levelled up enough to defeat a boss, but I had invested the time and experienced the moment people still talk about in gaming today: I watched in horror as Sephiroth killed Aeris, slowly she fell over and a materia ball bounced down the stairs and as that happened the makers of Final Fantasy then put in the music, Aeris theme, and the entire moment brought tears to my eyes.
With Final Fantasy 7 being the mega success that it became, the makers announced an event called Final Fantasy Tenth Anniversary as an event based around the world of Cloud Strife and friends, the event would last ten years. This would lead to spin off games and 1 move and 1 animated short movie based around this universe. The movie was called Final Fantasy: Advent Children. Honestly a lof the movie doesn't make any sense and feels like a lot is missing, its a bit of a mess but I have watched it numerous times and every time I watch it I still love it. Just released in Japan on Blu-ray is Advent Children: Complete which is uncut and new version of the movie and I cannot wait to see it so I can finally see the movie uncut.
As part of the anniversary a few spin off games were released, the firsty of which was a mobile phone game exclusive to Japan about The Turks. The second game was a 3rd Person action game about the character of Vincent Valentine, a character I never encountered in Final Fantasy 7. The game, called Dirge of Cerberus, is reminiscent of Devil May Cry but without the melee attacks, so your acrobatic as hell firing your gun but there's no sword for the heavy hitting finishing attacks. The game is enjoyable for the first level but it quickly becomes tiresome, in Devil May Cry you were always upgrading your weapons, gaining new weapons and abilities as you progressed, Dirge of Cerberus does not have this. Fan reaction to the game was lacklustre, people were dissapointed with this game but it did well on sales due to the tie in to the Final Fantasy 7 name.
The second spin off game was released on the SPS with a lot of hype behind it. Crisis Core was to tell the story of Zack, the unsung hero of Final Fantasy 7 and fill us in on events leading up to the start of the original game. The hype of the game was not misplaced, the game's creator held off from production until he could get the crew he wanted to help bring out the game the fans craved and deserved.
The story of Crisis Core places you in the shoes of Zack, a SOLDIER for Shin-Ran as you struggle to beome a Soldier First Class like your mentor and friend Angeal. Angeal is one of the three top SOLDIERS along with his two friends, Genesis and Sephiroth. The game hits the ground running and sets you off at breakneck speed as you go through a training mission then leap straight into your duties from this point the plot opens up but I wont spoil it. All I will say is that along the way in this game you will meet characters from Final Fantasy 7 in very different circumstances.
The game is an action RPG game that has you battling through waves of enemies using melee attacks with your sword and ranged attacks using materia (magic) based attacks. Tapping X executes an attack, using L and R scrolls between your standard attack or magic based attacks. The action is frantic, fast and in short bursts which lends itself perfectly to the PSP system which is played, normally, on the go in short bursts. One of the better aspects of the battle is the ability to dodge all attacks using the dodge button, meaning you can dodge nearly all magical attacks. Also during battle, on the top left corner of the screen is the DMW, a set of fruit machine style reels constantly spinning with pictures of characters you meet in the game. If you match up 3 like faces, you upgrade an attack and pull of a special move for extra damage, if you match up 3 pictures and also 3 7's on top of the pictures, this causes Zack to level up. It may seem random, but the levelling process isn't, its dependant on your XP gained. Its a nice touch to the battle system and stops things from getting boring and can also save your skin during some battles. The DMW also adds summoning to the game, but these are rare, but there is some times when the DMW switches from game characters to summonable creatures, but you need to unlock them and if you match 3 unlocked like creatures you will summon that creature to the field for a huge attack. The attack system can seem daunting and overly complicated at first, but honestly it is easy to use and very quickly you'll be a master at it by the time you have levelled up a few times.
The sound within the game is fantastic, with voiceovers that are in over 50% of the game and each voice suited to the chracter. The music is a mix of new music and music from the original game, re-recorded and updated. Hearing the boss theme as you battle through enemies is an awesome experience. Or for me, the best moment so far, is hearing One Winged Angel performed by an orchestra playing during an epic cutscene that was rendered by the team that made the movie Advent Children, it sets the hairs on the back of your neck on end.
The graphics for this game? That's easy, the graphics for Crisis Core are the best graphics on the PSP. There it has been said. God Of War had great graphics but Crisis Core beats it hands down. The pre-rendered cut scenes are breathtaking, you will be amazed to see them running on your psp. The ingame graphics are also amazing, everything looks detailed and it all runs smoothly. At no point in the game have I encountered any slow down, its consistent even with a lot happening on screen at the same time and the graphics are up there with some of the best on the PS2.
All in all Crisis Core is the must have game for anyone with a PSP, it doesn't matter if you are a Final Fantasy fan or not, you will get caught up in Zack's story and will have fun playing the game. Also with up to 200 side missions to work through, you'll never find yourself short on action. If there was ever a game that should sell PSPs, it is this game. Nuff said.

Kicking the Habit (Or How I learned to quit The World of Warcraft and learn to love single player gaming)

2009-05-16T18:16:00.002+01:00

I love World of Warcraft. There I said it, I love the game, it is the best MMO for me to play. It is user friendly and rarely frustrating, sure there are times when it feels like a grind but power through those times by questing or exploring and that feeling will dissapear. WoW gives you a whole world to play in, a world rich with lore and full of fun little easter eggs and also the added bonus of seasonal events. Creating a character and levelling them from 1-60 or 70 or even now 80 is a challenge and a grand adventure. You will experience epic battles, explore ruined cities and even venture deep into the underworld of Azeroth, all of this awaits you and more if you sign up and joint the largest MMORPG ever.
Like I said, I love World of Warcraft, and just recently I quit playing it and cancelled my subscription. This was a difficult decision for me to make, I have invested a lot of hours (not to mention money) into my characters and have become attatched top them but from May 5th, the doors to Azeroth were closed to me. The way to completely kill the WoW habit would have been to delete my character, however I could not bring myself to do this and the door is still ajar for me to restart my subscription again and go back to my characters.

However the question hangs in the air, why did I quit the World of Warcraft? To understand why I quit, I'll take you back to the moment I made the decision. I was on a one week hiatus from work, leaving one job and starting at another. I had some free time to kill and decided to get some gaming in. I parked myself in front of my PC and booted up Morrowind. I was playing for about twenty minutes when I realised I was feeling guilty, guilty for playing Morrowind and not playing WoW. This was a normal feeloing for me when I am playing anything except Warcraft because I am paying a monthly fee for WoW so I should be trying to get my money's worth from the game. This feeling was really prevellant during my playthrough of Morrowind that day. So I turned off Morrowind and logged into Warcraft that day and got pissed off, really pissed off. I had been enjoying Morrowind, my character was a thief under the name McEwan The Swift and was rising in the ranks of the Thieve's guild and, damnit, I was having fun, lots of fun. I wanted to make my character a master thief and see what else I could in the game, instead I was back in WoW because I was paying for it. This thought and others like it were racing around in my head, and other examples of this feeling when I was playing console games and had turned them off to play Warcraft.
So the more I thought about it, the more I realised I had a lot of games to play and my gameplay time is limited. I am married, I have a job and my wife and I are looking to start a family so I don't have lots of time to play games and taking a chunk of that time to play Warcraft then spending the rest of the time feeling guilty when I am playing other games is now what I wanted to do anymore. Let me give you a brief overview of the games I am curently playing:
Xbox: Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic, Oddworld Stranger's Wrath and The Godfather.
Xbox 360: Fable 2, Fallout 3, Saints Row 2, Mass Effect and Godfather 2.
PS3: Burnout Paradise, Dead Space, Sega Mega Drive Collection, Penny Arcade: OTRSPOD Episode 1 and Metal Gear Solid 4.
PC: Morrowind, Stalker and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.
PS2: Persona 4
That's a lot of games, not including my handheld systems, and all of them require an investment of my time and if I am playing whilst thinking "I should really be playing Warcraft right now because I am paying for it" it detracts from the other games and lessens the enjoyment. For instance, in Fallout 3 I have started over and am slowly building up a new character and really starting to explore the DC Wasteland but was struggling to enjoy it because at the back of my mind I am thinking I should be investing that time into Warcraft, not because I want to because I HAVE to, I paid for it.
Well that has all ended, I have thrown the shackles of Warcraft off and am now playing games without any guilt over what I should play. At some point I may, and probably will, go back to Warcraft but it wont be a long time. In the weeks since my subscription ended I have had a lot of fun in my other games, not thinking about WoW at all. If your playing Warcraft and having a good time then that is cool, but if like me you were playing it and feeling guilty if you spend time away from it in other games, then maybe like me you should take a step away from Azeroth for a while and enjoy single player games and the story they will tell.

Retro Time

2009-04-24T19:49:00.002+01:00

Okay, so with me starting a new job, and the recession in full swing I have been unable to get any new games for the PS3 or 360, I have however found myself going back to the Xbox and PS2 and playing older games but also I was able to pick up some bargains, so the next few posts on this blog by me will be about games from the last generation of consoles because those are the games I am mostly playing.
Expect blogs about:
Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic
Oddworld: Strangers Wrath
Galleon
Socom 2: US Navy Seals
Prisoner Of War
and a few more retro delights.

Speak Quickly Outlander - My return to Morrowind

2009-04-21T19:56:00.002+01:00

Last weekened, Ed and I recorded a podcast and during a discussion on this podcast we talked about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The podcasts will be posted in the coming weeks, hopefully, but during our discussion of Oblivion I mentioned Morrowind which is the Elder Scrolls game that preceeded Oblivion.

My first encounter with Morrowind was on the original Xbox when I got the game preowned in Gamestation and when I booted the game up and started playing I was at a loss as to what I was supposed to do. I wandered around a bit, talked to some people but large boxes of text appeared and my interested in the game started waning....waning and 10 seconds later it was gone. The game was traded in for something else a couple of weeks later.

Next time I played Morrowind was in the run up to Oblivion, people were excited about it and I was reading a PC magazine at the time who mentioned how good Morrowind was, I was confused because I remembered Morrowind being not very good. I got the game for the PC a while later, and decided that I needed some help to start me on my way and downloaded a beginner's guide to Morrowind, a small FAQ to get you acclimated with the game and understand how it works. Once the game was installed I slowly worked my way through the FAQ and it was like a veil was lifted from my eyes, and Morrowind lay before me. The large boxes of text were irrelevant, you could skim them or just get the important bits at the end and soon I understood that Bethesda wanted you to explore Morrowind and have fun, and if you wanted, there was a main plot in the game but don't let such a silly thing like a game's plot spoil your fun. And as I played the game, I joined guilds, found quests in the strangest places and even found myself a targert for assassination at one point. The game was deep and rich and full of dungeons, monsters and a cast of characters all with their own quirks and mannerisms. The land mass in Morrowind may be smaller than that of Oblivion but it most definetly has more in it. I became deeply entrenched in Morrowind for weeks, rising in the ranks of the Theives guild and also working as an agent for an elven Great House in the realm. The choice in the game is huge but you need to get over that first hurdle in the game and that is learning to play it. But then Oblivion was released and I got lost in that game and eventually I uninstalled Morrowind because the thought of going back into the world after such a long time away was daunting.

Now I am back in Morrowind and starting off from scratch again, some would consider it boring but I definetly don't, I am getting used to the world again. So far in my few days of play I have become a thief, raised a lot of gold, killed an assassin, freed some slaves and murdered a wealthy elf lord to steal the keys to his mansion. None of this is connected to the main plot line, in fact I think I only completed the first objective in that quest line and that was to meet a contact but I only did that so I could use his bed to rest in. But as I play Morrowind now, many things are apparent to me now, Morrowind is where Bethesda created a true fantasy world, Oblivion was rather generic for a fantasy realm, plucked right out of Lord Of The Rings or a David Eddings book, it was very ho hum. Green, lush and full of generic fantasy stuff, don't get me wrong, some of the quests were epic and the Dark Brotherhood questline is probably the best line of quests in any game ever but the world itself was plain for a fantasy world. Morrowind is different, the world is strange and bizzare, you'll be walking down a path to see a mushroom three times the size of you, or as you walk into a town you see a giant creature called the Silt Strider, these are used to ferry you from town to town for a fee if you don't want to walk it. One town you walk into is strange to view at first and then you realise all the houses and buildings are made out of the carcasses of giant crabs. The architecture and land of Morrowind is graphically not as impressive as Oblivion but on a visual scale it is more pleasing to the eye as a fantasy world.

I recommend Morrowind to any rpg fan but try a beginners guid FAQ to get you through the first town, and as you complete these quests in the first town you will see the depth of Morrowind for your own eyes and see the layers of the game. Step into Morrowind and become whatever you want, I guarantee a good experience if you can get past that first hurdle.

Now on Twitter

2009-04-10T18:28:00.001+01:00

So now I am on twitter, if you want to follow me on twitter and see my inane ramblings pop up, catch me at
http://www.twitter.com/Robertmc80

Shader Model 3 - A blight on PC Gaming's landscape

2009-04-06T16:15:00.003+01:00

One major downside of being a PC Gamer instead of a console weenie like my erstwhile colleague Robert is that, While progress marches ever on, those of us with older machines are left in the dust.
While it is both inevitable and predictable due to Moore's Law that your PC hardware will be rendered increasingly incapable and eventually reach obsolesence for running new games, what really grips my shit (isn't that a wonderful expression?) about the whole thing is that system requirements for PC games now have a large, arbitrary block on them, in the form of Shader Model v3.0.

My PC, while now a couple of years behind the cutting edge, is not a weak gaming rig (it runs Fallout 3 decently at medium settings). The main problem I now face is not that games run slowly and painfully grind towards slideshowhood, I could tolerate that as a natural function of hardware senescence; my problem is that I do not have a Shader Model 3 graphics card. I instead have an ATI X800; not a great graphics card by today's omgwtfcrysislols benchmarks but it's maybe 2 years from being cutting edge, still performs well with good framerates for pretty much every game I throw at it (with the exception of Armed Assault, which sucks donkey balls). For almost all games that it can play, it produces the level of fidelity and quality required for a good, immersive gaming experience.

The best example of how arbitrary this SM3.0 requirement is can be found withinBioshock. Bioshock. Released without SM2.0 compatibility, to the enraged reaction of Angry Internet Men. I bought it, like an asshat. Tried to play it, and was met with black screens and some fire sprites, but with no other graphics. Bioshock.

Something like two days after the game was released on PC a third-party patch was released by some clever people in the gaming community who rewrote the shaders in the game to use SM2.0. After a couple of weeks this had evolved to the point where it was practically visually identical to the SM3.0 version. I then played the game and didn't like it, felt it was up itself too much and bought into its own culture, and that the developers had forgotting that 1. it wasn't very interesting and 2. it wasn't actually a game as you couldn't die.

Simply put, some nerds with no access to the main source code of the game were able to make it work, in less than 2 weeks, on a set of hardware that was far from obsolete but had been deemed not worthy of support. SO WHY THE FUCK ARE DEVELOPERS ABANDONING SM2.0 WHEN 2 WEEKS MORE WORK WILL INCREASE YOUR USER BASE?!

And why haven't nerds with no access to the main source code of other games made other SM3.0-only games work in SM2.0? :(

I bought Far Cry 2 but haven't been able to play it. I installed 4 or 5 demos (one of which was Burnout Paradise) the other day from a magazine coverdisc, and ONE demo worked (Evochron Alliance). Not one of the games said "oh by the way you need SM3.0 to play this" during installation. Only once installation was complete (in the case of Burnout this was like 20 minutes later) was I told "ERROR! SHIT HARDWARE DETECTED!".

Sort it out, developers.

I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad.... Madworld - First Impressions

2009-03-30T22:27:00.004+01:00

If you haven't heard of Madworld let me fill you in.... *deep breath* Madworld is a game on the Wii that hardcore gamers have been masturbating furiously about in their wildest dreams because they believe it to be the saviour of gaming on their Nintendo games player and they wish to welcome this new messiah of hardcore gaming to the world in a torrent of gushing praise that would drown a small village if it that praise was actually water. Its hyper stylised, hyper violent and hyper active action gaming with adults in mind and its tounge so far in it's cheek it has burst through the other side. The hardcore gamers want this game in their collection so badly that they pre-ordered it before it even had a release date and told all their friends to buy it, because it will be "teh awesome".

So the story is about Jefferson Island being locked off from the public by gangs and now a sick TV show is in place where people fight their way through the island killing everyone they can see. Think Battle Royale or The Condemned but in black and white and cell shaded to look like a comic book. You play Jack, Just Jack, as you take place in this show, your motives to why you take part are not clear but I am guessing things will unravel as the story progresses. Jack is basically Ron Perlman, that is who he is moddled after, if Ron Perlam were jacked up on so many steroids that Chris Redfield would be put to shame. Also Jack has a small attachment to his right hand that makes a chainsaw blade shoot out and be used as a weapon.

First off the game looks good, for a Wii game it looks pretty incredible, the graphics of the game are done so well and it suits the Wii. Had this been brought to the 360 or PS3 people would be shitting on the graphics because its blocky and too stylised but on the Wii it seems to fit. The game is entirely in black and white, except for the blood, the blood in the game is the only colour and when an enemy is cut up with a chainsaw, torrents of blood are unleashed and it turns the drab screen into something more colourful.

I have played through the first level, and 3/4 through the second level of this game, so I have had some experience with how it works. You use A to punch, hold down B to bring out your chainsaw blade and swing the nunchuck to start slicing. You could go through the entire game just doing combos with A and B and occasionally a finisher (and the finishers are pretty much finishers like those in Manhunt 2, gesture based kills, yet they pass by the BBFC no problem.... hmmm). But if you did what I said, just going through using A and B, then you miss out on combos and the entire point of the game, this game is all about score. How well you perform a kill has an effect on your score. So you will be pulling up sign posts from the ground and impaling them through people's necks, you'll then pick these people up and throw them onto a wall of spikes, sometimes you'll just toss guys in front of a moving train and get a bonus for it. I held one guy up in front of me and walked right up to the edge of the platform and watched as he got ripped apart in my hands by the speeding train. The game wants you to perform the most gruesome kills you can think of and rewards you for experimenting. Sometimes you'll get surrounded by guys because you've been exploring or experimenting and you can always pull out the chainsaw and wildly swing the remote about, tearing apart everyone on screen and knocking your shoulder out the socket at the same time, but it doesn't matter your "teh hardcore" right? If you rack up enough points you'll be able to take part in a Bloodbath Challenge, which is a mini game where you have to kill goons using a set piece in the level, the first level is a jet engine which you have to throw goons into and you get rated on your body count each time you do it. These challenges are introduced by a huge pimp character called The Black Baron, a foul mouthed character who ultimately is killed by his own designs in every cut scene. Once you rack up enough kills and points in each level you then can take on the boss, the first boss I encounted had me just holding down B and swinging the Wii remote around so much that I thought I was playing Wii Sports or some Ubisoft mini games collection. What makes this game different from others is it's style, the fact that it is points based, meaning you need to experiment and get the combos and style points because if you don't, a level will take three times as long as it really should.

The question is though, is it any good. Well let me relay my experience, I played the game, got to the first couple of goons you come across and messed around with the controls, punching one guy, throwing another, then I held down B and swung the remote, and watched as the chainsaw sliced a bad guy in half in a torrent of blood and I thought, "hell yeah" and spent 10 minutes just doing chainsaw kills and finishing moves with the saw. The game then gives you a brief tutorial on how to perfrom different types of kills, and its fun. Your tossing guys onto spikes and torrents of blood are unleashed and in the background two commentators are talking you through the action, now those two guys are genuinely funny and I get the feeling a lot of what they said was adlibbed. I took part in the first bloodbath challenge, the aforementioned jet turbine engine and then went onto the train station and took much delight in throwing enemies in front of trains, tossing them onto spikes, tossing them into dumpsters that halved them in two, cut them up with my chainsaw then took on the boss that made me feel like I was in Wii Sports. The only downside I had the entire first level was a finisher that had me pull the Wii and Nunchuk away from each other as part of the gesture based kill, when I did this the nunchuck fell out of my grasp and landed just a fraction of an inch away from my clackerpack. The thought of it actually connecting caused me to wince.

So with much glee I went into the second level, and cut people up with my chainsaw, tossed them onto spikes and into dumpsters that halved them in two and.... wait hang on, this is all the same stuff I did before. Very soon the violence became samey and, well, rather boring. I never thought a game could desensitise me to violence but Madworld has done it. Granted I have only played through 1 and 3/4 of a level and yes the minigame Bloodbath Challenges do add a little bit of nuance to the game but most of the time you are doing the same things over and over again. You'll get frustrated to the point where you will do continual chainsaw kills just to get on with the plot. Also the so called "lock on" system the game applies does not work like it should, if you lock on to someone, it should be like Zelda, you lock on, your focus and the camera's focus is on them, but no, Jack looks at them but the camera is more concerned with what is happening away from who you are locked onto.

I was dissapointed in this game on my first playthrough and I hope when I go back to the game proves me wrong and opens up to me and shows me that its not just the same 4 or 5 gruesome kills over and over again. The idea of playing a bad ass character who uses a chainsaw as standard sounds awesome, I played through hours of the Public Domain Amiga game Texas Chainsaw Massacre again and again because it was all about the Chainsaws. I played the Evil Dead games, as bad as they all where, because you got a chainsaw as standard, and I really thought this game would be the one that had me playing my Wii again for a prolonged period, but after playing Madworld for a bit, I turned it off, and went to the spare room and ended up playing Yakuza on the PS2 for over an hour and a half.

Madworld for the Wii is the game that Jack Thomson warned the world was coming and its here and no one cares. There is no outcry over this game and that is because its not made by Rockstar and maybe if it was it would be more fun. Its stylised over the top violence gets bland after a while and I found myself wondering what else I could be playing as I worked my way through level 2. If this is the game that Hardcore gamers are after, then they can have it and I count myself lucky not to be a harcore gamer because man those guys must be boring as hell.

All in all I would not recommend picking this game up unless you really really want to play it, otherwise steer clear, its not as good as they are making out. I guarantee you this game is only getting is praise and review scores because it is on the Wii and its the first "real game" to come out on the Wii in a long time, its not a shitty port or shitty movie tie in or even a mini game collection, its a real honest to goodness game, and its not a very good one, but its a game so they score it higher than it should get. Don't believe they hype, Madworld is boring and not even that much fun to play.

The first Podcast

2009-03-26T21:23:00.002Z

So 2 weekends ago Ed and I recorded the first Still Gamers Podcast, we want to try and do more of these as time goes on but the first one is edited and ready for download. The links will be supplied below. This is our first attempt at a proper podcast and due to time constraints and life getting in the way, it has taken me til now to finish editing it.
The topics we cover in this podcast vary from what we've been playing, Peter Molyneux, unfinished games pushed for release, judgemental dogs, cash cow publishers and where gaming has been and where it is going.
So without further ado, here are the links for the Still Gamers Podcast, episode 1.

Still Gamers Episode 1 Rar File:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=JBRPRSD0

Still Gamers Episode 1 MP3 File:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=AECGDAF0

So if you download it and like what you hear in our insane ramblings leave us a comment.

Playstation Home WHAT THE FUCK

2009-03-23T20:32:00.003Z

Okay, so on my PS3 I have the Home Beta installed, not for any reason other than, it was there. Home is a big pile of shit, in all honesty it sucks because it does not do what it was supposed to. It wants to be Second Life on the PS3, the reason it isn't second life is because it cannot stream off the Hard Drive, you start off in your own room in Home, so to get out to the main square you have to go the door, then download the full file for the square, so you download that, it should be streaming then right? Wrong! To move from one area to the next you have at least a one minute load time even if you have already downloaded the appropriate files, it still takes a minute.

Well today on home, they publicised a big event in Home, a new HUB that is hosting a game. A game within home where you have to complete tasks, no one knows where its going, and lots of people are excited, well I'm not! I'm not excited because I want Sony to make up their fucking minds! Is Home a social networking place for PS3 owners or is it just a flashy version of the cross media bar where I can marvel at watching trailers at a slower speed than I would on my PC? What is it Sony? Then you decide to turn a section of it into a game? Are you nuts, people are pissed off about Home not living up to expectations as it is, why turn some of it into a game? Your basically giving up on the social networking idea and saying "look console owners are too dumb for this Second Life style shit we wanted, instead lets give them a shitty game".

Well because I am the curious type lets talk about the game I played. You find a piece of graffiti in the Main Square of home, trust me you wont have a problem finding it, looking for the biggest group of people you can see and that's where it is. So you spend 3 minutes downloading the file for the HUB and another minute and a half for it to load, once loaded your treated to a voice over, hinting about big things to come. But the voice over asks you to collect 3 parts of a torn up note for him that is in the HUB, okay the first part is fairly easy, you find that no problems, the second part same again, some looking around. However the 3rd part is nowhere. I ran around that HUB for over 10 minutes trying to find this 3rd piece, it isn't anywhere, its like the game forgot to generate it, I spoke to at least 5 other people in the same shoes as me. However there are others who have found all 3 pieces but the assholes wont tell you where it is, why? They wont say because they are assholes. I was running around for ten minutes looking for this part when I thought, to hell with this shit and logged off.

This new "game" in Home is truly a bad idea and if it works then good for Sony, but I can't see it working because right now I can tell you Home is bad. Horrible to control, you need a keyboard to get any sort of social experience out of it, and the loading times are a killer. If Sony want Home to be a success they need to scrap the Beta and start again, make it totally streaming off the net and get rid of the loading times. Make Home what they said it would be from the start.

Rant Over!

Mass Effect - Bioware's best opus?

2009-03-16T21:23:00.002Z

Mass Effect
I have had Mass Effect on the 360 for a long time, and my first save I played right through to the last world in the game and then stopped to go on holiday. When I returned from holiday I found it hard to pick up where I had left off. I have tried to create another save but again this didn't go very far. The reason for this is because I play this game using my own sensibilties and I try to appease everyone in the game, try to resolve things without conflict where possible. And I think the big thing that shows I am playing this game all wrong is that I keep choosing a class that doesn't use pyschic powers. (Which is The Force under another name)On my first save I used an infiltrator class which specialised in long range tactics and electronics specialisation. On my second save I choose a soldier who was an expertise in gun combat and heavy armour but no powers or specialisations.
So last night, whilst bored and looking for something to do, I popped Mass Effect in and decided to start a new character. I choose a character who this time was able to use guns, shotguns and pistols, and also had powers to use. (At this point I don't think a character soley using powers is the best one to use) Then I had to choose a background for my character that would be referenced in game, again I went against my instincts, choose an Earth Born Ruthless individual who did what he needed to do to get the job done. In my mind I was painting a mental picture of who this guy needed to be, he needed to be the Jack Bauer of the galaxy.
So the game starts off and quickly I slip into the role, I hear two guys mouthing off about an alien who had just left the bridge and I tell them to cut the chatter. I am giving everyone attitude because I am the one who is going to be on the front line.
The three man team is dropped off on Eden Prime, the first world, to halt an attack by an unknown force. As we progress through the level I start levelling up, I pour a lot of points into intimidation skill and I get my first chance to use it quickly after this.
We come across a sealed storage shed, as I go to open it, three people open it from inside and walk out with their hands up. They claim to be farmers, who witnessed the attack and ran for cover in the storage shed, but I didn't buy it, so after some pressing, the leader of the three reveals he is part of smuggling ring run off of Eden Prime. They use a contact on the docking ring to get some things smuggled on and off this world. He offers me a pistol in return for not telling anyone. Again I am not happy with his and pull a gun on him and tell him to give me everything he has or I will make him a corpse. AWESOME!So he hands over an good weapon upgrade that he was holding back from me.The game is showing how good it is to be a bad ass, but I also know that if I worked on my charm and went diplomatic it may yield other benefits, it could work out that I get different, better upgrades.
The guys who made Mass Effect, Bioware, are the same people who made Knights Of The Old Republic and if you played that game you will remember the Dark Side/Light Side slider that showed your alignment depending on your actions within the game. If you moved into the Dark Side, certain Force powers would be unlocked that only Dark Jedi could use, the same could be said of Light Side. However, what could happen in KOTOR is that in the first world in the game you could be a complete dick and move your slider toward the Dark Side and on the next world be a complete saint and the slider would move back to the light side and effectively cancel out your bad actions before. That is not to say that KOTOR is a bad game, it's probably one of the best, if not the best, Star Wars game ever made. It evokes the atmosphere that you relate to the Star Wars universe and has a great story, good gameplay and a whole host of side missions that will keep you playing the game numerous times just to figure out different ways to complete these missions. You will never see all that KOTOR has to offer on one play through. So there is a lot to praise KOTOR about, and rightly so, but the Light Side/Dark Side slider shows how you can manipulate the game to get what you need to give you an advantage. This is not so for Mass Effect.
Mass Effect has its own version of Dark Side and Light Side. Its called Renegade and Paragon. If you do things the noble way and show compassion, you gain Paragon points, showing you as an upstanding citizen, but if you are a no holds barred, take no prisoners kind of ruthless bastard who will do what he needs to to get the job done and some extra money in his pockets, you get Renegade points. With these points that you gain through the game, these points stick with you, and people remember what you did. So if you were a dick to one guy then went off and did everything you could to be a nice guy to everyone else, this other guy will still remember you as a dick and would treat you as such. It doesn't matter if you have done everything in the game to be a saint, you were a dick at this point and it remembers that.I like this feature, it shows that no matter what you do, it will have an effect in the game and it can't be erased by "cheating" the system. Also depending on your response to some people, you could effectively end a quest line, cutting it off at the knees because of your response, again this is a good thing because it means you can't do every single mission no matter what.
In my current save I have been made a SPECTRE, a special agent of the galactic council, charged with hunting down a rogue SPECTRE know as Saren. Saren has convinced an AI army to work with him and find ancient artifacts by an extinct race called the Prothians, in the hope to find something called The Conduit. I am only on the second world of the game, the first open world I have encountered. The first World Eden Prime is essentially a dungeon in the game, the second world if like the main town in a standard RPG, you get some side missions and get a reason to go outside this town and fight in other dungeons and visit other towns.
The biggest feature that was touted with Mass Effect was the conversation branches, basically you have a wheel at the bottom of the screen and you tilt the left stick to one of six directions to choose the next topic in the conversation that you will talk about. It may seem like a "so what" kind of situation, but what Bioware have done is really smart. First off the conversation wheel pops up a few seconds before a character finishes speaking, what this does is allows you choose something else to talk about before they finish and let the conversation flow, just like a real conversation rather than what we're used to in games. It adds to the immersion in the world rather than you sitting reading what your reponse will be, also you choose what branch the conversation will go, but what your character says is not what you choose, the tree is more your feeling rather than what you will say. Secondly, in almost 90% of situations, whatever you choose on the wheel, be it, pissed off response will always be in the same place. So for instance, if you are going the pissed off solider route, then every response (to stay in character) will be titling the stick down and to the right. If a situation occurs where you need to make a hard choice, 2 new branches open up, up and to the left is the blue choice, the Paragon choice and down to the left is the renegade choice. But to unlock these you must level up your intimidate and charm talents in the levelling screen.
Outside of conversations and talent trees, you get combat. In KOTOR combat was turn based, it didn't look like it and flowed in real time, but you choose what your character would do for each turn just before the opposing characters turn ended. The game tricked you into thinking the battles were in real time, and it worked superbly. However, Mass Effect being the game that it is could not work in real time. Your playing a space marine who will be taking place in huge battles and fighting for your life, so doing these as turn based would make the battles stilted and not exactly realistic (for a better word). Bioware made the decision to do the battles in real time, but also allow you pause the action battles at any point and issue commands to give some leeway for the hardcore RPG players who want control of everyone and every move. Battles using your guns are very simple, it has a Gears Of War feel to it, which is not a bad thing, it breaks up the game really well for me. You have the RPG elements in major towns and in any conversations you encounter, then you enter battles were you take cover, use careful aim and watch your shields and health just like an action game. RPG elements work their way into the battles too, in regards to weapons. Certain classes are untrained in certain weapons, the class I am currently playing is completely untrained in assualt rifles, which means if I use an assualt rifle in battle, the aim would be terrible and damage would be miniminal, however if I pore my skill points into my pistol or shotgun skill, if I use either of these two skills I will be lethal with these weapons. A pistol may not seem like a good weapon in a firefight, but if I have enough skill points into it, it is better in a fight that using an assualt rifle would be. Cover is essential in big fights, your shields don't last long against a barrage of bullets, and it takes time to recharge so you need to use your shields for when you pop out of cover to take some shots.
The other feature in the game is Biotics, Bioware's version of the Force. If you take on a class who can use weapons and Biotics you get to use the most basic version of these powers. That is the class I use, so I have access to Warp (which sends a burst of energy out to an enemy), Barrier (which provides a small energy shield around me for a short time and Throw (which allows you to pick a target or object up and throw it). These can be invaluable in a tight punch and other classes rely solely on these powers. I have used the Biotics sparingly at the moment, but this is more due to the fact that the battles I have had, I have been too busy ducking for cover but as the game progresses I can see me using them more and more.
The other play section in the game is The Mako, a small roving tank similiar to the vehicle in Aliens that the marines drive around in. The Mako is what you drive around in on planets that have no docking station and also hostile areas. Also in unexplored planets or uncolonised planets, if you want to touch down on the ground and take a look around, you take the Mako out for a spin. At first it feels clumsy to control, you start to think they have really messed up the controls, but as you get accustomed to using the rockets under the Mako to clear any debris, you find it easier to control. Of course, they could have come up with easier controls, but it is a small gripe and usually vehicle sections are quite long so you find yourself using the Mako for a while and getting used to the controls. Combat in the Mako is a downside, you need to get used to it and be ready to die a lot, because coupled with the weird controls, combat can be a bit of a fight with the controls rather than a fight with the enemy. If they fix these controls for Mass Effect 2 it will make the Mako sections a lot more fun.
There are graphical glitches in the game, some textures take a while to load, even during cut scenes and this is due to the hardware of the 360 more than anything else. Bioware created an engine that can run on the 360 but it sometimes struggles, there's no slowdown in framerate but it takes longer for some textures to load, this can be the textures in a wall, or armour and sometimes in cutscenes the texture of an alien face.
Mass Effect is a deep game, if you want it to be. If you want to barrel through the main plot, not explore and just complete the story and be done with it, you can do so in about 12-13 hours depending on the difficulty and class you choose. You can treat the game like a shooter and pure action game, you can do all that, it's your decision. However, if you spend time with Mass Effect and get immersed in it's rich world that Bioware have created, you will find a game with hours and hours of gameplay that is aside from the main story. There are plenty of systems to explore, with planets to survey and also planets to explore. Side quests pop up as you fly through space to a destination, the Alliance will contact you and ask for help and you can choose to do so or to ignore them and continue on your path. There is so much to do in this game, but only if you want to do so, if this does not interest you and you just want the story the game doesn't punish you for this. Unlike Morrowind and to a lesser extent Oblivion, the game doesn't drop you in a world then say "go" and you say "go where?" to which it responds, "I don't know, anywhere you want". No Mass Effect tells you a rich story and gives you sections where your in control to continue the story or go exploring and maybe find some side quests along the way. Sometimes you can overhear conversation and then speaking with one of the people in the conversation will open up a questline. If you have a 360 and like RPGs and have not picked this game up, then give it a bash and alternatively if your a fan of shooters like Gears of War and want a story to go with your game, then give this a try. If you were to compare Mass Effect to a swimming pool, you could stay in the shallow end, do the shooting and that's it, or you could do the shooting, maybe dablle in side quests, taking you to the middle of the pool or you can do right in at the deep end and get caught up in the Mass Effect universe. If you want to get caught up in the lore, there are 2 novels to go with the game, the one to read first is called Mass Effect: Revelations and details the events leading up the first game.

Top 5 gaming moments Redux

2009-03-15T18:16:00.007Z

Robert recently posted an article about his top 5 game moments of all time, and, never one to miss an opportunity for oneupmanship, I thought I would compile my own list of top 5 gaming moments.

5) Stepping outside for the first time (Oblivion, PC)
For the first half hour of Oblivion, you are in dank sewers and a ruined dungeon killing rats, the occasional member of our undead brethren and rubbish assassins, and then, suddenly, you burst forth into blinding daylight, and once your eyesight has returned, you can see in the distance, beautiful craggy mountains, lush forests, rivers, lakes, ruins, in fact an entire massive world ripe for exploration. I think the sheer impact of this moment made this the best moment in the entire game.

Bethesda did the exact same trick in Fallout 3 when you emerged, blinking in the weak sunlight, from Vault 101 and were confronted by the brutal devastation of the Capitol Wasteland, and it was almost as effective.

4) Bang bang you're dead (Cannon Fodder, Amiga)
Ahh, sweet nostalgia. How I love thee. Cannon Fodder by Sensible Software was a fantastic game. The atmosphere, the cutesy tiny graphics that were Sensi's hallmarks, the awesome music and sound effects by the late Richard Joseph, and the refined and perfected gameplay.

The game's strong anti-war undercurrents were ignored by the sensationalist tabloids and the Royal British Legion because of their satirical use of the poppy as the game's emblem and the mantra "War has never been so much fun".

One of the more subtle ways the game pushed it's anti-war theme was the way that as your raw recruits stood on Boot Hill waiting to get recruited to the front line, they stood by the graves of your dead soldiers. At first, the hill was empty, but as you approached the endgame the sheer volume of graves grew to be overwhelming.

Your soldiers were individually named and carried on from mission to mission, and after a successful mission, any survivors got promoted, which meant that they could shoot further and faster, and their individual kill counts were carried on, thus you grew attached to them as they survived level after level.

It was fairly easy, starting with the first two recruits in the game, to keep them alive to the seventh mission, by which time they had become generals and were unable to rank any higher, but then the eighth mission represented a vast difficulty spike; it was a four-phase mission, the second phase of which "Bang Bang You're Dead" was arguably the most difficult level in the entire 26 mission game, so one (or both) of your generals would invariably bite the bullet on this mission, which, after having played through countless scenarios with them, was legitimately traumatising. The game would show a list of all soldiers who had bought it after a mission; seeing your generals up there was like a sucker punch to the heart.

3) Tentacle Demon in the Blast Pit (Half-Life, PC)
Where to begin? The original Half-life remains in my top 5 games of all times, simply because it was fun, had a strong sense of place, pacing, drama and suspense, narrative and flow. Every area was hugely distinct, your objectives were always clear, be it simply to survive, get to the surface, get to the far side of the BMRF, etc.

One of the early middle parts of the game had you taking a shortcut through an abandoned missile testing facility. Unfortunately, some of the aliens had taken up residence inside the main blast chamber in the facility.

A group of monstrous, blind tentacle creatures, which, while they could not see you, they could hear everything and would home in and kill you instantly if you so much as put a foot wrong. The first time I encountered them, I had never seen anything like these before, and even on my extremely elderly PC (even by Half-Life's standards), my jaw dropped open, and I unconsciously held my breath so as to avoid making any noise as I snuck my way around the interior of the silo, occasionally using grenades as a distraction, while they tapped on sections of walkway trying to find me through echolocation. An absolutely classic, groundbreaking moment and the one moment I think of when I think of Half-Life.

2) Return to the Haunted Cathedral (Thief: The Dark Project,PC)
I have been a Thief fan from the very beginning, when Garrett's dry introduction ("I was a kid, no parents, no home, running errands and picking pockets to keep my ribs from meeting my spine") immersed me in his world, the cloak and dagger world of professional thievery in a quasi-steampunk medieval city.

A lot of people are quite critical of the supernatural elements in Thief, preferring instead to rob rich fat noblemen (a great cause in it's own right), but I personally felt that the supernatural elements added to the game's aura, rather than subtracting from the core gameplay mechanic of depriving rich noblemen of priceless trinkets.

After the first few missions, you discover that someone has put a hit out on you, and you have to trail the failed assassins back to their employer, a guildmaster named Ramirez. Of course you pay him back in kind, by relieving him of his influence, his gold, and, if you are at all like me, his life.

As a result of this, you gain a reputation as someone who is not to be fucked with, and the storyline kicks off, which I will briefly summarise below.

A woman named Viktoria hires you to steal a magical sword from an eccentric nobleman named Constantine who lives in an almost Alice-in-Wonderlandesque mansion (the company who made Thief was called Looking Glass Studios so it's not surprising that some Lewis Carroll mythos made an appearance).

This mission turns out to be a test, and that Constantine wanted to see if you were as good as your reputation said you were. He then gives you the job of a lifetime, 200,000 gold to steal a trinket called The Eye from an abandoned cathedral in a ruined, burnt-out, walled-off section of the city. You vault over the wall into the ruined Old Quarter to find the place awash with the undead. You eventually reach the cathedral (after an awful lot of creepy-as-hell zombie-dodging), only to find that the door is locked by four sigils, the talismans of which are scattered throughout the land. You climb a wall and look inside the cathedral and you hear spectral laughter and the rattling of chains, a scary scary sound indeed, before the Eye itself talks to you and tells you to go and find the talismans.

You then go off and retrieve the talismans through your normal means (although personally, a talking gemstone telling you how to steal it would probably put me off somewhat).

With the talismans(talismen?) in your pocket you return to the cathedral and enter a world of abject terror and some of the scariest sounds in gaming history, as you sneak past Hammer Haunts (easily the scariest monsters in gaming before Thief, and the top 3 since), ghouls, zombies, and various other creepy funsters to retrieve the eye. You then try to escape the way you came in, and OH NO ITS A TRAP!

Yahtzee recently posted a retrospective video review of Thief, and I am awfully glad that he agrees with me that it's one of the finest games ever created. Robert doesn't like Thief; Robert sucks.

1) Defending White Forest (Half Life 2 Episode 2, PC)
While I enjoyed Half-Life 2 as a standalone game, I never thought of it as a true sequel to the original Half-Life. Too many continuity errors, retcons a-go-go, and a huge change from derelict top secret research facility to a depiction of a fairly generic Orwellian near-future dystopia.

Episode 2, in my mind, put right a lot that I had felt was wrong with HL2, namely, insipid, uninspired enemies (Combine overwatch soldiers, available in any colour so long as it's white, blue or grey, with the occasional ~~martian tripod~~ Strider, and headcrab spam.)

Episode 2 represents Valve at the peak of their game, they know exactly what they are doing and never put a foot wrong any more, as you can tell by listening to the developer commentaries scattered throughout. I am reluctant to post spoilers here, but the latter half of Episode 2 takes the form of an epic road trip, and it is one of the most polished and well-paced pieces of gaming ever, culminating in a huge open-ended battle to defend the last human refuge (White Forest) from a vicious all-or-nothing Combine onslaught and certain destruction.
No Combine Overwatch Soldiers here - only Striders and the new magnificent beasts, Hunters.

The fact that you have a supercharged V8 Dodge Charger with which you must defend the last bastion of hope simply makes it all so much cooler.

Ratchet and Clank: Tools Of Destruction and Naruto on PS3 (Last Naruto Post, Believe It!)

2009-03-05T21:29:00.005Z

Ratchet And Clank: Tools of Destruction

I was a Ratchet and Clank fan on the PS2, to the point where I put a lot of hours into the first game, but I got to a point in the first game where I couldn't progress, and I gave up. I still have the save point on a memory card and every now and again go back and try again. But my nephew, David, is a Ratchet and Clank whiz. He has played and finished every Ratchet and Clank game to grace the PS2 and he still completes them all just for kicks every now and again, I think its the huge arsenal of weapons that he enjoys. Suffice to say he is a huge Ratchet and Clank fan. I like the series and have always said I would play them in order, so I wouldn't start part 2 until I finished part 1. But that has gone out the window now, because I have
Ratchet and Clank: Tools Of Destruction for the PS3 and it is awesome!

Ratchet and Clank tells the story of a Lombax and a small robot thrust together to fight evil across the galaxy. Ratchet wears Clank on his back like a backpack
and this allows him to glide across gaps with Clanks propellor atachment, and Clank can store muliple weapons that can be shrunk down to mini size for him to hold onto. In some sections you control Clank in the games but these sections are relatively small. The cut scenes in the game are a highlight because the conversations between Ratchet and Clank is priceless.

The game on the PS3 starts without you having to know anything about the previous games and puts you straight into the action. Your home planet is suddenly under attack and you recieve a message from Captain Quark (a character from the previous games who everyone thinks is a great superhero but is a coward who relies on Ratchet and Clank to do his dirty work) for help. So the entire first level has you trying to get to Captain Quark as enemy forces try to eliminate you. The level is a good introduction for players new to Ratchet and Clank and also experienced players getting a feel for the controls again. After this level you visit other planets and complete objectives, gain new weapons and meet new characters. Its more or less the same type of game, except they have made the graphics a lot better, given you larger levels and delievered on good
gameplay content. This is a game that shows off the power of the PS3. A Xbox 360 may be able to do some of what this game does but it would struggle, there would be a drop in framerate, but the PS3 has no struggle.

The gameplay in the game is good fun, you start off with two weapons but as you continue through the game you will gain new weapons, which upgrade as you use them, you will buy new armour and also items to help you through the game. One of the items fires a disco ball into the air, and as funky music plays, all your enemies stop on the spot and start disco dancing. This gives you a chance to take them down. Also you get weapons specific to where you are. For instance level 2 is on a planet producing some kind of slime, you get a gun which fills up on the slime and when you fire the gun, it shoots out a cube of green slime that you use as a trampoline to higher platforms, if you fire one cube then fire at it again, the cube gets bigger and lets you leap higher. In certain areas of this you have to be quick because creatures that like this slime will run up and start eating the cubes and making it smaller. You also use these cubes to make
platforms as a bridge across rivers of the green slime. Then at the end of this stage you empty the slime into a vat that opens the door. As of the third level I have not used this gun again but I do hope to again.

So if you have a PS2 and you want a game to show off your PS3 and is good fun then Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction is for you, however be aware that Insomniac made an add to this game called Ratchet and Clank: The Quest for Booty and this takes place AFTER this game and has about 4-6 hours of gameplay so is at a lower price, it used to be download only but is now for sale in the stories so make sure you pick up the right one, because you might be mistaken and think you are getting a great deal on a full game when all you are getting is a small add-on to the full game. It will run on its own but does require knowledge of TOD to get a grasp on what is going on.

Add on Note: Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm
So I got Naruto on the PS3 on the strength of the demo, it was a hard game to get. The game is like the Xbox 360 game, Rise Of A Ninja, in that you have the Hidden Leaf village to run around in and get missions but honestly the graphics for this Hidden Leaf village make it look cold and stark, whereas the 360 version makes it seem warm and... busier is the best word for it. The PS3 version seems lifeless whereas in Rise Of A Ninja, everyone is going about their business, in this game they seem to be waiting for you to do something. The fighting system is good but because the areas in which you fight are so huge you spend so much time just trying to get in close to your opponent that they will have hit you with their jutsu three times. The game has no real cutscenes to speak off and all missions are introduced with text intros and all character
conversations are in text rather than voice overs. This to me is a fatal flaw in what could have been an awesome game.
On the Xbox 360, Nartuo Rise of A Ninja covers episodes 1 to 80 and the follow up game The Broken Bond runs from 80 to 135. Ultimate Ninja Storm boasts that the game covers episodes 1 to 135. However story arcs are missing, characters are missing and there are no cut scenes so there is no real story to speak of. This game is a big dissapointment on all fronts, the 360 version, developed by Ubisoft, does everything in the game better than the PS3 version. It has a colourful and vibrant hidden leaf village, its story progression is well done, through in game and also animated cut scenes lifted from the show. The fighting system is more in depth and a very tricky. The PS3 version does animate the fights better but the 360 version gives you more to play with in it.

Okay let me explain one main difference.
In Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm you must gain Mission XP. To gain Mission XP you must complete missions, simple eh? Not so fast Junior, not just any missions will give you XP, only some will. Well which missions give you XP you ask? ...

Well there is no real way to tell, just complete them and see. Also you can only play certain missions if you have enough XP. AND get this, you have to go into the pause menu to access a mission. In the 360 version you need to go to a person or specific point relevant to the mission to start it, in this version you can be anywhere, hit pause and choose the mission and off you go. Last night I was browsing the missions in the log and saw one missions completion status was: Play the game for more than 2 hours. Wait, I had done that, so I pressed X on it and it came up: Mission Complete and gave me 5XP points. Wait, hold on? I got XP for playing the game for 2 hours? Then the mission right beside it, Take 5000 in game steps? I pressed X on that, Mission complete and 5XP later and I am getting annoyed. The mission beside that is Break 200 breakable objects. I had been doing that to collect cash and was only 10 things away from it, so I break 10 more things and 5 more XP! This is getting ridiculous. The game's structure is disjointed and not making much sense, taking missions from the pause menu is sloppy, the village is stark and lifeless and all in the game feels like it could have been much much better. But due to the way the Naruto license has been handled on the consoles, Ubisoft can only make Naruto games on the 360, so those 2 games, Rise of a Ninja and The Broken Bond will only show up on the 360. Also I get the feeling that the developers of the PS3 version did not get the rights
to the music of the series because the music is definetly not from the TV show, it is some generic music they threw together and drags the whole product down. Whereas in the 360 version it is bursting with Naruto music, from the opening screen to running about in the village, you will recognise the tunes and find yourself humming along.

I think I will be trading in Ultimate Ninja Storm because nothing is compelling me to play it other than the graphics. And if I want a Naruto fix in game form, I am more likely to pick up Rise Of A Ninja than Ultimate Ninja Storm. So Naruto fans, despite my previous raving about the demo, avoid this game at all costs and pick up the 360 versions, you will have a lot more fun.

Peggle on the DS

2009-03-05T21:26:00.003Z

The phenomenon of Peggle on the PC passed me by. I never really saw it anywhere and heard about it in various podcasts and read about it on websites but only fleetingly. I know it was made by Popcap games who made the Bejewelled Mod for World of Warcraft so that I can now play Bejewelled on those long Griffin flights from Ironforge to Stormwind. So when I heard Peggle was out on the DS, I was curious. The first time I played the game was on Sunday morning, my wife and I were having a lazy sunday, so I was lying in bed and popped Peggle into the DS and started playing it. My wife glanced over and soon I felt her head on my shoulder as she watched with interest as I played the first 6 stages of the adventure mode. She offered advice on what pegs to fire at, cheered when I won and was definetly getting into the game. The above scenario had happened before with Puzzle Quest on the DS. I heard about Puzzle Quest and tried this game too, and I lay in bed one night playing Puzzle Quest and soon felt my wife's head on my shoulder as she watched me play the game, pretty soon she had her own save in Puzzle Quest and left me behind in the dust. She became bored with the game eventually and I rarely went back to it, and when I did I saw her character was at level 33 and my character was at level 8. When she plays a game, she plays a game. She finished Professor Layton and the Curious Village within 2 and a half weeks of playing it. For those unfamiliar with Peggle, the game is simple, you fire balls in a reverse version of breakout, the ball hits off of pegs that are scattered around the level. The game tells you which pegs you need to hit and it is generally between 10 and 15 orange pegs that need to be hit with 10 balls, however there are lots of blue pegs in the level as well and these can block your shots, once you hit a blue peg, it will dissapear after 5 seconds. So the game is all about where the ball will go during rebounds. Once the ball falls to the bottom of the screen that is it out, however there is a paddle at the bottom of the screen that moves from left to right and if your balls fall in that paddle, then you get an extra ball. That is Peggle in its simplest form but it gets more nuanced as the game goes on, the first 6 levels introduced different features but it was still the same game. Doesn't sound that interesting to hear people talk about it, but trust me, start playing this game and you will find yourself looking forward to playing it. When you clear a level, the game slows down and the game zooms in on the ball flying towards the last peg and the moment it hits, "Ode to Joy" starts playing and the ball falls toward a highscore total and gives you some last minute bonus points. Each round ends in such a jubulant manner that you cannot wait for it to happen again. I put down Peggle about half an hour later, satisfied with what I had played and looking forward to playing it again, I can see why people said it was addictive, because it most definetly was. My wife said at about half past 2 if she could play Peggle, so I gave her the DS and she started her own save. At half 4 she stopped playing for about 30 minutes then went back to it until we had dinner at 6. After dinner watched TV wil just after 9 and again she was back on Peggle, even when we were watching TV she had started. (I don't blame her, we were watching a pretty bad episode of Numb3rs and I had picked up my PSP at that point.) Again she played the game relentlessly, I went and played World of Warcraft for an hour and only after I had logged off and was browsing the internet she came through and said she was going to bed. She then told me she had completed Peggle and unlocked Peggle Nights. My wife doesn't play games a lot, hardly ever in fact. The only games she really plays is games we play together on the Wii or more recently Buzz TV Quiz on the PS3. So for her to find some games on the DS that she will play is something special. No doubt she will complete Peggle Nights and maybe play a few quick games after that and put it down but I will just have to find something else for her to play after that. On a side note, my wife has become interested in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and not in playing it. She is enjoying watching me play it. And last night, I was playing Drake's Fortune and had gotten to a scene where I was riding a Jetski and Gemma walked into the room, didn't see the controller and said, "What are you watching?". She honestly thought I was watching a film, that is how realistic Drake's Fortune really is.

2009-03-05T21:20:00.002Z

"So Long Baby" My Top 5 Gaming Moments Of All Time.... so far

This top 5 is MY top 5 gaming moments of all time, these are the moments in gaming I remember because of how good they were. When someone mentions gaming memories these are the 5 top memories that spring to mind. These are not my top 5 games, far from it, but something that happened in this game is ingrained in my memory.

5) Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PS2) - "So Long Baby"

I was always looking forward to GTA: Vice City, since details emerged about Vice City being set in the 80s and licensed music would be used in the radio stations. I love cheesy 80s music, and the radio stations were one of the best features in Grand Theft Auto 3. So when Vice City was released, I played the first 45 minutes of the game until I got to go out on my own, I found a motor bike and "Billy Jean" started playing and I drove down the strip by the beach as the sun set over the ocean. That memory almost made it on the list, because it was so iconic to what made Vice City awesome to me. I still throw Vice City in the PS2 every now and again and just drive around. But the memory from Vice City that takes precident over that one is the first time I showed Ed Vice City running on the PS2. Ed had come over to my house to pick up some PC games that I had borrowed, before he left I told him how good Vice City was, understandably he did not believe me. So I popped in Vice City and let him see for himself. I drove around in the game for a bit and as it was dusk, some 'ladies on the night' were out, so I picked one up to show Ed the much touted 'regain health from boinking a hooker' function in the game. Looking for somewhere private I drove the car to the top of a multi-storey car park, there were no other cars there and I waited. What should have happened is the car should have been creaking and shaking as if the two people inside were getting nasty, but that did not happen because it was still too public a place. Annoyed at this I looked around and spotted a small ramp at the edge of the roof of the car park. So I drove the car so that the passenger side door was pressed against the concrete and could not be opened and I hit the gas. The car sped forward toward that ramp that would lead to the car sailing off the car park and would land in a fiery explosion below. Just before it hit the ramp I tapped the triangle button on the control pad and Tommy leaped out the car and as he did I said out loud: "So Long Baby" as the car flew through the air. Ed pretty much lost it there and then, I almost did too. A completely unscripted user made moment of hilarity that is impossible to re-create seriously ever again. That sticks with me because both Ed and I still talk about it to this day.

4) Metal Gear Solid (PSX) - Brother Vs Brother

I have said it numerous times to numerous people, Metal Gear Solid was awesome to me because it felt like a movie, plain and simple. I am a huge movie buff, I love watching movies, I remember stupid facts about movies and 80s/90s action movies? Forget about it! I love them all. So as I played Metal Gear Solid I got more and more immersed in the story, I realised this was playing out like a movie. Okay a 8/9 hour movie maybe but a movie nontheless. You have the gruff action hero, who is soldier who is tired of war, the possible love interest in the female sidekick who the hero has to save. The cast of villians that would be put Jerry Bruckheimer to shame and epic plot twists that are a staple of some great action movies. Everything about this game screamed "I should be a movie". No moment said this more than the gaming memory that comes in at number 4. As the game comes to a conclusion, Solid Snake's brother, Liquid, has tricked Snake into activating Metal Gear Rex and faces his brother in the walking tank. You fight Liquid using guided missiles and just when it looks like its all over for you, Grey Fox comes to your rescue, however an explosion knocks you out. When you come to you are on top of the destroyed Metal Gear Rex and your facing your brother. You must face Liquid in a bare knuckle fight to save yourself but also to save Meryl, the niece of the Colonel, your commander. I loved this moment, the last battle in an epic tale as you battle your own brother. This could have been done in a cut scene but instead they give you control of this moment and it is epic. And this moment sticks in my memory because it felt like I was playing the climax to Lethal Weapon or the climax to Commando, any film where the hero and villian face off in a fight to finish, this game put you in that position. Sure Metal Gear has flaws, lots of them, but it will always be up there as one of the best games ever in my opinion and supplied me with one of my top 5 gaming moments.

3) Sid Meier's Pirates! (C64) - Open world gaming

The first game system I had was an Atari 2600 but that relied on me getting access to the TV when no one was watchiny anything. My family were really accomodating, there was never a fight about when I could and couldn't play the Atari. In fact my sister and my mother played the Atari as well, my sister loved Centipede and my mum became addicted to Jnr Pac-Man, no joke. But when I got my Commodore 64, an old portable TV that no one wanted was given to me to hook the C64 up to in my room. And when I got the C64 I was playing lots of games I had never played before. One such game was a game that was recommended to me, Sid Meier's Pirates. The first time I played the game I was confused, I didn't get it. What was I supposed to do? But then a friend sat down and played the game in front of me for a bit, sailing around, naval battles, sword fights and treasure hunting. I said to him, "When does the game end?" He just shrugged and I realised the game ended when you wanted it to. This was the first game I had played that was open world, nearly every game I had played up until now had an end goal, a way to progress to a next level. In Pirates you were left to your own devices, in the Spanish Main, to make your fortune as you pleased. You started a game and choose from 3 factions to play as, English, Dutch, Spanish or French. Then you choose a difficulty a difficulty and time period. The first thing that happened is you led a mutiny of the crew of the ship you served on and when you defeated the Captain, you were made new captain and led your crew to adventure and riches. It was then up to you to choose where you went, who you fought and who you served with. But who you alligned with also had an effect on the game, if you were english and were at war with the french, it would be dangerous to try to sail into a french town, they may fire on you. However if you sank a few english ships and sold into the town, the govenor of the town would commend you for helping the war effort. As you sailed the seas, your man in the crow's nest would spot other ships and tell you what flag they were flying and you could choose to attack them, hail them for news or sail away. If they were allied to you, and you hailed them for news, they would pass on information of the last town they visited, prices of goods and soldier numbers, but if they were not allied and you hailed them for news, they would open fire with their cannons. This game is huge, once you realise how complex and how many layers there are too it. You could have a small crew and sail from town to town as a trader but as time goes by your crew get restless and either a mutiny will take place or men will desert the ship. If you want a happy crew then you must pillage and get gold amassing in your hold, because your crew look forward to the day you sail into a town and divide up the plunder. Other things have an effect on the crew, if your an english captain and have been getting crew in english towns and are at war with the french and take on more crew mates in a french town, this will lead to the crew growing unhappy and more and more crew mates deserting the ship. If you have a fleet of ships you need to keep the crew numbers high or you can't keep all your vessels and it can lead to you having to abandon a vessel and losing precious cargo and cargo space. In towns you can get new crew mates in the tavern and sometimes speak to a mysterious stranger who will sell you treasure maps. Now you may be mistaken and think the game has no plot, well it does have a plot but it is a very thin plot, probably added as a side diversion that you can do if you please. The plot is to find your sister who has been missing for years and you will find information relating to your sister and a map leading to her whereabouts, when you find her you get a treasure reward and go off on your way to get more riches. Also as you progress you can woo the daughters of the governors of towns and eventually marry them, when you do this you end up with gifts from them that enhance play and also they give you information on ships with lots of gold that you can go after. Once you do decide it is time to divide up the plunder you have amassed you sail into a town, choose the divide up the plunder option and the gold is split among the crew and you get 10%, You then have a few options, you can retire from privateering, which ends the game, you can choose to advance in difficulty or you can set sail again. The game then speeds up time by 5 months and sets you off again with one ship and a bare minimum crew and the gold you made from your last adventure and you start again. That may seem like a bit of a cop out but its not. The game progresses even with you, towns that once had the english flag may now be spanish due an invasion, and you need to choose your alliances carefully and try to amass a wealth again. All of this game was presented in simple graphics, nothing about the game's look would amaze you and if you played it for the first time you might get turned off by how open it is and never play it again, but play it and peel back those layers and you will lose hours, days and even weeks in this game. When I realised how open this game was, it blew me away, and I did lose time in this again, so much so that when I got an Amiga 600, I made sure I had Pirates for that system too, then when I got a PC, I made sure I had a version of this too. Sid Meier, brought out a new Pirates game for PC and Xbox which is essentially the same game but with a graphical upgrade and some new minigames thrown in to expand the game. It is good and it is the same game, basically, but I feel that in the need to make some of the game better, certain game mechanics were tweaked and this left bugs in the game. Such as a glaring bug in the "missing sister" plot. You uncover information about your sister and that the Evil Baron Raymondo has information regarding your sister's whereabouts, so you track him down, defeat him in a duel and he gives you a piece of a map that shows your sisters location, however you need three more pieces to actually know where she is. So once you have done this you sail into a town and find out that once again The Evil Baron Raymondo knows something about the whereabouts of your sister and you track him down three more times and get segments of the map. Why didn't he give you the whole map? Also another glaring bug was in the original game, if you captured a vessel that was transporting a new governor to a town, if you took him to your own governor he gave you a reward for capturing him. In the new game, it's not even a factor. Even if you capture a vessel that says they are transporting a governor, its not brought up when you go back to your won allies. So it has these huge bugs in the game. But in essence, Sid Meier's Pirates is the first open world game I played and it was a game I remember fondly.

2) The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past (Snes) - Finishing the game.

When I had a Snes I had two games, Super Mario World and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles In Time. These two games were awesome. But the third game I got had the biggest impact on me when I played it, and it was The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past. It was coming up to my birthday and my mum told me that my gran said to pick a game from the catalogue as a present. The catalogue in our house didn't have a lot of Snes games, so I choose Zelda, now knowing anything about it. When the game arrived I sat down and read the instructions and looked at the map inside. Also there was a small booklet that was sealed and it contained hints to help you through the more difficult sections of the games, only if you needed it. I played the game and was instantly caught up in the story, saving the princess was standard fare but after the third dungeon the game exploded open, 2 huge over worlds, multiple dungeons and a feeling of complete wonder at how much there was to do in the game and everything to find. The game held many secrets and side quests for you to discover and find. You also had the plot that nudged you forward at your own pace and always gave you a target to aim for. I got stuck many many times in this game, its fiendish dungeons and epic boss fights were well done and the world hopping mechanic to get to previously unreachable places were sometimes real head scratchers. I played this game like there was no tomorrow, and a few months later, one day after school, I defeated the evil Ganon. I had been fighting Ganon for what felt like weeks, it was really only 8 days, but for those 8 days he was undefeated and I put on Zelda that day just to give it another go and not thinking I would do it and when I landed that final sword stroke I was completely surprised. Then I witnessed the end sequence for the game, It was a first for me, I had never played a game that much, invested that much time and effort in a game and finished it. The end sequence went all over the map and showed you all the people you had met along the way and a feeling of complete satisfaction washed over me. I had done it, the game was complete. Then it was a feeling of almost loss, the game was over. The story had ended. Its like when you read an awesome series of books and it ends and you know there wont be any more in the series. There have been other Zeldas that I have played and enjoyed, but A Link To the Past is the only one I have completed and the only one that I felt invested in more than any other. Finishing Zelda will be a memory that sticks with me.

1) Kingdom Hearts (PS2) - A Perfect Blend of Disney and Final Fantasy

I am a huge Disney fan, anything Disney and I will take a look. My Honeymoon was in Walt Disney World Florida, every Christmas my wife and I watch lots of Disney Christmas movies and cartoons. However, most Disney games, not so good. On the Genesis there was a few good platformers with Mickey Mouse and some not bad movie spin offs like Aladdin and The Lion King. However there has never been a truly great Disney game. Then Kingdom Hearts came to the PS2, a perfect blend of Final Fantasy and Disney coming together in an epic RPG. You play as Sora, you live on Outset Island with your two friends, Riku and Kairi and you dream of setting sail on a raft to go on an adventure. You help your friends get the raft together and are ready to set sail for adventure the next day. However that night your island is attacked by strange creatures called The Heartless, suddenly a strange object appears in your hand, a giant key. You use this to battle the heartless but is all for naught and you black out. You wake up in another world with no idea what is going on. Pretty soon you end up teaming up with Goofy and Donald Duck as they search for King Mickey who has gone missing in his search to find the reason behind the Heartless. The three of you travel between different worlds to stop the Heartless and save the different worlds from destruction. Each world represents a Disney movie. You'll visit Wonderland, Agrabah and Neverland to name a few places, Monstro the whale, from the movie Pinochio will swallow you whole in another instance. Throw in some Final Fantasy characters, such a Cloud, Tifa, Squall and Aeris and the whole blend comes together brilliantly. Also the makers of the game realised the turn based battle system of Final Fantasy may not appeal to everyone so they made the combat real time, you are in complete control as Sora swings his Keyblade and unleashes lightning, fire or ice magic from his fingertips. The gameplay is great fun and there are plenty of heartless to deal with in every world and huge bosses to take down at the end of every world. (And I do mean Huge! The boss behind the Little Mermaid world, Ursuala, grows to giant size that all you are able to attack is her head) The game is great for a wide range of ages, younger children may find the gameplay too difficult but older children and adults will be able to get into this game with ease and it never becomes a "kids" game by talking down to the player. There is a strong theme of friendship throughout the game, Sora searches for his two friends Riku and Kairi and becomes firm friends with Donald and Goofy along the way. There is about 20-30 hours of gameplay in the game for completionists. Playing this game evokes strong memories in me, I had never played a game that blends two stong franchises too well and creates a compelling and fun game along the way. Seeing these two together is my strongest gaming memory. The game has 2 follow ups so far, Kingdom Hearts: Chain Of Memories takes place right after the first game and originally the game came out for the Gameboy Advance but a remake for the PS2 has been released in the US and the rumour of a European release is very strong. And Kingdom Hearts 2 came out on the PS2 and follows on from Chain Of Memories. So the saga of Kingdom Hearts sprawls over 3 games, and with the PS3 starting to pick up the pace, the rumour of a Kingdom Hearts 3 is almost a dead cert. I personally love the franchise and will complete the saga on the PS2 eventually and when it comes to PS3 I will complete that as well because Kingdom Hearts will supply more gaming memories for me and many others for years to come.

Another Naruto Post? Believe It!

2009-02-28T14:28:00.002Z

Naruto Review Continued – Further into Rise of a Ninja and Naruto Ultimate Ninja Heroes on the PSP

Naruto: Rise Of A Ninja

In my last review I heaped praise on Rise Of A Ninja and honestly it still deserves it. I have not played a game that makes you feel like you are in a cartoon series more than Rise Of A Ninja. I have played this game a lot more now and there are a few annoyances. The first annoyance being bandits, you will fight the same 4 bandits over and over again as you venture outside the Hidden Leaf Village. It quickly becomes tiresome. The second annoyance is your team mates, the first time you fight your team mates is part of the story mode and you are pretty evenly matched against them but you still need to use skill to come out on top. Once you enter the free roaming aspect of the game and approach a team mate to spar, they are suddenly 200% harder than before and even with skill you cannot beat them, so you need to level up your skills and abilities before you think of taking them on again.

The fighting system in the game is showing deeper layers the more your progress through the game. At certain points in the story you gain things called memory points, when Naruto falls in battle he will remember something important to him and this gives him the strength to get to his feet and keep fighting and they have implemented this into the game via Memory Points. When you are defeated, you choose a memory point (an example is his sensei saying he is proud of him) and then you rapidly press A to fill up his health meter and Naruto gets to his feet to finish the battle. This just adds to the immersion in the world of Naruto.

The Jutsus in the game also level up to deal greater damage to your foes. The trick in the battle is knocking down your opponent to get enough time to build up your Chakra to unleash the Jutsu but as you become more proficient with the game this should be less of a problem.

Naruto Ultimate Ninja Heroes – PSP

Speaking of problems, I really wanted to like this game, I really did. Naruto on a handheld, for those long train or bus journeys, that would be awesome. But this game falls short.

It is a fighting game, simply that is what it is. There is no story mode to speak of, the game’s main focus is team mode. In team mode you choose 3 ninjas from Naruto’s world (you don’t have to choose Naruto himself in this) and then go through an endurance test where you fight other teams until all 3 of your ninjas are knocked out. Its not a compelling enough hook to keep people playing. What I thought would be the hook would be the training and upgrade mode. You choose a ninja and level them up by competing in fights and meeting certain criteria and as you level up you unlock more combos, jutsus and even some extras. But, and this is a big but, before you begin that mode you need to have played the team survival mode and the Vs CPU mode for a while and gained some scrolls, because scrolls are the currency required to unlock the training/upgrade mode. To me, that is just stupid, it forces you to play the other modes first whereas I would prefer learning to use a character by levelling him and training him, then taking him into Team Survival mode and VS CPU mode. Instead the developers got it ass backward.

The fighting system is spot on, perfect for all comers. If you are a newcomer you can just button bash and get by, but if you are a player who wants depth in his fighting game then if you persevere with this game you will find the hidden layers in Naruto Ultimate Ninja Heroes.

The graphics for this game are not the best I have seen on the PSP but it gets the look of the characters right and the action on screen is always fast paced and full of bright colours. It’s a shame it suffers from long loading times just to show us these graphics.

Naruto Ultimate Ninja Heroes is a problem, I wanted it to be good, I really tried with this game and at every turn it disappointed me. Had they gotten the game modes right it would have compelled me to play the game and suffer through the long load times, but right now the game is a chore. There is a sequel to the game on the PSP and apparently it has a proper story mode too so it is something I will definitely look into for the future, but Naruto fans should stay clear of this game and non-Naruto fans probably wouldn’t look twice at it anyway.

Achievement Unlocked - The New High Scores Of This Generation?

2009-02-28T14:22:00.003Z

Achievements and Trophies – The High Scores of a new generation?

The launch of the Xbox 360 brought something with it that changed gaming and the way people play games, it brought achievements. The concept of achievements is simple, if you do something noteworthy in a game it “unlocks” an achievement and then gives you points for this achievements, each game has a total of 1000 points per game. These points all gather on your Gamer Profile which can be viewed by others online via Xbox Live. This creates competition by having people compare their achievements and gamer scores with their friends online and they strive to one up each other and also compare achievements. But what if you are not playing online, is it really important? Gamer score wise you can compete with your friends offline, but ultimately there is a strange sense of satisfaction when you unlock an achievement, it sets off a small feeling of pride and accomplishment inside you.

A friend of mine said he was opposed to achievements as they took him out of the game experience. There he was, totally focussed on a game and then did something spectacular and suddenly a banner pops up and totally removes him from the experience. I personally like that but I can see his point of view, it can distract you when it happens.
Achievements, at first, were an interesting and quirky thing that went with 360 games, developers weren’t sure how to handle achievements and the achievements that came first were pretty terrible (Perfect Dark Zero is notorious for its horrible online only achievements). But as time went on, developers saw the potential to mix humour with the achievements process. Suddenly games were rewarding you for experimenting in the game and unlocking funny achievements in the process. It also gave completion-ists justification for going through a game 2 or 3 times at different difficulties, this allowed them to get the complete 1000 points.
As developers embraced the achievement implementation, fans became caught up in the hype and a new breed of 360 fan came onto the scene, the achievement whore. The achievement whore is the gamer who played the games for the achievements and wanted those 1000 gamer points from every game. Websites sprung up for the achievement whores, where they swapped tips on hard-to-get achievements and even advised the easiest games to get 1000 points from. In the forums of these websites people speculated on what achievements may be in future games, and even what the gamer score might represent in the future.

Sony’s Playstation 3 has not been a huge hit since its launch, it is t he better hardware choice but is hampered by a large pricetag and limited set of exclusive games at the moment. As the popularity of achievements grew, Sony realised something, if a game comes out on both the PS3 and Xbox 360, a large percentage of people would end up buying the 360 version based solely on the fact that they would get achievements with it. They had to come up with their own form of achievements and with a lot of time and effort, Sony fired back at achievements with…. Trophies.

Trophies are Sony’s answer to achievements, and they come in three categories: Gold, Silver and Bronze. The Trophies are obtained exactly like achievements, Bronze for easy achievements (for example in Buzz: TV Quiz gives you a Bronze Trophy for playing a game using user generated questions), Silver for slightly harder achievements (for example in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, you get a Silver Trophy for getting 50 headshots) and Gold for the hardest achievements (having not got a Gold Trophy yet I cannot provide an example). Unlike achievements you do not get any points with a trophy but they are integrating the Trophies with Sony’s Second-Life-a-like, Home. In Home you will have a trophy room where you can see all your trophies and your friends on Home will be able to see them too. Trophies are becoming popular but have not taken off like achievements have.

The online sensation that is World of Warcraft has watched what is happening with the Xbox 360 and Blizzard, the developers, have now added achievements to the game. Instead of going Sony’s route and coming up with a new name for achievements, Blizzard just stuck with the name achievements and implemented them into the game. It has been met with a mixed response, at first a lot of WoW purists were appalled, claiming it made the game feel too much like a console gane but as a few weeks have gone by they have realised achievements are in WoW to stay and have accepted it. The more casual WoW fans, like myself, have found Achievements as another good addition to the game, it adds more to the game and if you complete all the exploration achievements in the game (exploring all of Azeroth, Outland and Northrend) you get a title on your character name, for example if I did it, the name would read as “The Explorer Chernoble”. So Blizzard has added a new twist to some of the achievements that they mean something in the game rather than just being a score. It also gave long time World Of Warcraft players more things to do, you could browse the achievements and find out what to do to unlock them, even the obscure ones. An example of this is the achievement entitled “Make Love, Not Warcraft” and to get this you must hug the corpse of a player of the opposing faction before they release their spirit. If you play WoW you know what I am talking about, if not that means very little. Incidentally the title of that achievement is the name of the Warcraft episode of South Park.

Achievements really have changed the way a lot of people game and I think this will continue to the next generation of consoles, whether or not Nintendo will start using achievements remains to be seen. In the meantime it is safe to say that achievements and trophies are starting to, and have become the high scores of this generation. Connect to your friends online and you see what games they play and their achievements to date and this also gauges on how far they are through a specific game. So when you see an online friend has got an achievement for collection all the agility orbs in Crackdown it can connect with your competitive side and suddenly you’re are playing Crackdown and striving to get this achievement and also trying to beat your friend. Talking over achievements can lead to “How did you get that achievement” conversations which will lead to more experimentation in games which is always a good thing.

So in conclusion, something that started off as a quirk for the 360 has grown and evolved into something in gaming that is here to stay. The fact that people talk about achievements and that game developers have got firmly behind this is proof that it is something that works. What does the future hold regarding achievements? I don’t know for sure, but to hazard a guess we will see plenty more games using achievements to their advantage and future generations of consoles will have more achievements and more trophies to keep us playing for a long, long time.

New Posts Incoming - I Promise

2009-02-24T23:02:00.002Z

Sorry folks, had a bit of a time of it recently. I have been job hunting for a while and suddenly out of nowhere a new job sprung up and have been frantically trying to find that balance between work, play and net time. But whilst in work I have been thinking of posts and even penned a full post whilst I was bored, so that will be incoming too. The first post incoming is a follow up to my Naruto post.
The second post is one I am working on titled - Achievements and Trophies : The High Scores of This Generation which I have had a lot of fun working on.

So there is more incoming from me and I am sure Ed will be working on a post about Thief... or at least he better.

So there is more content incoming, just getting a job again threw me whole routine off.

Naruto: Great show and good game..... Believe It!

2009-02-07T12:59:00.004Z

I have recently stummbled upon the Anime sensation that is Naruto. I had heard of it in passing but shrugged it off as Japanese animated nonsense but my curiosity got the better of me and I sat down and watched the first half of Season 1, from then I was hooked.

The Show

The show is about a village in Japan, the Hidden Leaf Village. 12 years ago a Demon using the shape of a 9 tailed fox attacked the village, the villages Shinobi attacked the fox and held it back until the village's Hokage (greatest ninja), the 4th Hokage took on the fox and sacrificied his own life to seal the fox in the body of a newborn baby. That baby is the orphan, Naruto Uzimaki, who as he grew up was looked upon with fear and distrust among the villagers. Not knowing why, Naruto acted out and became labeled a troublemaker. Naruto was never told that the 9 tailed fox was sealed within him.

Naruto starts training to be a ninja and with one pledge, he will be the next Hokage and then everyone will have to respect him. The first episode has Naruto learn of the 9 Tailed Fox within him but he also stops being the loser everyone thinks he is and learns a complicated Jutsu (ninja techinique) known as the Shadow Clone Jutsu, this allows him to create multiple clones of himself temporarily to aid him in battle. After proving to his Sensei that he is a good person and also an able ninja, he is awarded with the Hidden Leaf headband and goes on to be a ninja in training. From here the show follows Naruto in training as he is paired with 2 other students and a new instructor who will lead their team. The show has a compelling story arc, great characters and the fight scenes are out of this world. At first I thought this was a kid's show, like Pokemon but after a few episodes you quickly realise it's not. The fights are violent, brutal but not excessive like other Manga and Anime, and people do die in the show. I have watched just under 80 episodes and during that time 3 main story arcs have taken place and one still is taking place but in that time, numerous other characters have been introduced and their backstories have been explored in a intelligent way. The animation for the show is great and shows off the fights in a fluid and exciting way, there have been too many shows and films were the fights are just boring, but Naruto beats that by having the ebb and flow of the fights exciting to watch. Where the show really excels is the music, the music for Naruto is amazing, you don't realise it is there at first, but suddenly your watching a fight and the music builds and you're on the edge of your seat just becuase the music is telling you something big is going to happen.

If you've never watched Naruto and you want something exciting to watch, I recommend getting a look at the first season of the show. The first episode is great, the second goes back to kiddy style themes but it is essential to the story so stick with it after that because by episode 5, you'll be hooked.

The Game - Naruto : Rise Of A Ninja (Xbox 360)

Naruto: Rise Of A Ninja is the first Naruto game to be released on the Xbox 360 and this time developers Ubisoft have taken the reigns. But before I tell you what's good, a brief history of Naruto in games needs to be explained a little.

Naruto has been around for a little under 9 years and in that time countless games have come out on numerous consoles. There have been side scrolling beat em ups on the GBA, 2D fighting games on the PS2 and even a turn based RPG on the GBA and DS. In that time, mostly bad games have been trotted out, or when I say bad, I mean mediocre, they took a look at the show Naruto and did not know how to translate it well to a console. Lately they have been getting better, the demo I played of Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm on the PS3 blew me away and Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Heroes on the PSP has been keeping me entertained for a while now.

Rise Of A Ninja on the 360 is Ubisoft's first real stab at next gen Naruto. And they have gone back to basics with this game, just open up the manual and it tells you that the game follows the story acs of Naruto from episode 1 to 80. So in essence, episode 1 is the tutorial to the full game. Combat is performed by using the Y button and the X button, with B being block. If you time a block right you automatically perform the substitution jutsu which teleports you behind your oppenent and places a wooden log where you used to be. It's a nice touch as this is used all the time in the show.

My first comparison is that Naruto: Rise of A Ninja is like Assassin's Creed. Okay wait a few seconds whilst that sinks in. Yes this game is like Assassin's Creed in that you have a huge city to explore and you do that by climbing to the top of buildings and exploring for hidden things all over. You do not use any parkour moves in this game but once you start playing you instantly get that Assassin's Creed feel. So your dropped into the world of Naruto after a brief tutorial, this teaches you combat and the Shadow Clone Jutsu in which Naruto creates copies of himself. After this tutorial your left to your own devices, little bits here and there help you build up your knowledge of the game. But your told by the Hokage to go help people out in the village, they may start to like you if you help them.

The whole village hates you, just hold down the Y button and a scroll opens up, showing a large amount of angry faces and through story missions and side missions, its up to you to turn those angry faces to happy faces. And you start by helping out people in side missions, these missions vary but not by much, its a simple game and the first heaping of side missions has you tracking down ancient coins that are spread out around the village. So you spend some time running around collecting these coins. So I did this for a while and I did some story missions to progress but I felt underwhelmed to be honest. Naruto was slow at running around, his jumps were lame and the Shadow Clone Jutsu could only break down some wooden fences. The stuff Naruto does in the episodes is amazing compared to this. Suddenly I felt I had been ripped off, but I kept going and boy, am I glad I did. As your progress you learn new skills and power ups, suddenly Naruto is running through the village at awesome speeds and his jumps are higher, his Shadow Clone Jutsu is more powerful and he can now run up walls. I even encountered of my favourite mid mission mini games, you have to speed through the tree tops by leaping through the markers and your doing it at a fast pace just like in the show. I loved this bit and can't wait to do it more.

Frequently in the game you will encounter enemies and when you face them, it will be one on one and the game turns into a 2D fighting game at this point. You use jutsus, throwing weapons and some tricky combos to defeat your opponent and this is where the game really excels. You play through these matches like your supposed to, get your opponent backed away or on the ground long enough to perform a Jutsu and you feel like your in the show. New combos are purchased from your trainers and shortly into the story you unlock rage mode, when Naruto takes enough punishment, he unlocks the power of the 9 tailed fox and can unleash huge damage if you activate rage mode. The combat in this game is fierce and is always a challenge, mastering the fighting mode is essential and a lot of fun.

The graphics in the game are great, Ubisoft put their all into this and you can tell, the look of the show is represented in great 3D, most of the voice actors are present, some are impersonated but you don't notice a lot of the time and of course the wonderful music of Naruto is there too and that to me is a huge highlight.

All in all, this game is awesome, and if you're a Naruto fan you need to play this game and if you are not a Naruto fan, you need to become one because the show is awesome, Believe It!

My PS3 and Me (Includes mini Resident Evil 5 Demo Review)

2009-02-02T15:54:00.006Z

So yes, I now have a PS3, like I said before it was inevitable.

The Console

The Console itself is a beast, its huge and rather heavy too. In it's design it looks rather smart, if a little too bulky and it runs whisper quiet so far and doesn't sound like a plane taking off which is what my 360 sounds like. As a Blu-Ray player it is pretty smart but I know I wont get the full benefit of the PS3's Blu ray capability until we purchase a HD Television.

The Games Part 1 : Little Big Planet

This was the first game I popped into my PS3 and from the first moment I saw Sackboy I loved this game. It's fun, plain and simple. The game's concept is that when people dream, their dreams float up into the sky and end up in Little Big Planet, and as Sackboy you visit Little Big Planet and explore. This takes you through many levels in the Single Player Campaign as you traverse some unique and well thought out platform game fun like you've never seen before. The game is 3D but it is also side scrolling, see Sackboy can move into the foreground or background and you find yourself a little confused at first but after an hour or so you are doing this with ease. The game looks superb, it has a quirky style all of its own and Sackboy has a charm about him that you cannot deny, and that is due to the fact that he is fully customisable as well. You can dress him up in a tuxedo and top hat, or have him in a pink dress with bunny ears, or numerous combinations. People are making up new costumes all the time. You can also purchase costume sets from the PSN store but I don't see me spending money just to get Sackboy costumes, I don't mind downloading the free ones but the paid ones is stupid in my book.

Where LBP really shines is online, you hook up your PS3 to the web and you can play with others in the Single player campaign or you can take a look at levels created by others and that have been uploaded. So you can create your own levels and upload to the web and see what others think, and I honestly have had a blast playing some of the levels, there have been Mario themed levels, I have played a LBP level based on Dead Space and there are many more that I haven't had time to even look at. If you are thinking of getting a PS3 but are not looking to go on the web, I would give LBP a miss because although the single player campaign is great, it may be a little short and after that there isn't much else for you to do, but if you are going to get on the net with the PS3, this is must buy for pure platforming fun!

The Games Part 2: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots

On my personal blog I have made my feelings known about Solid Snake, he is a legend and to only have 1 game where you play as him in his prime is just scanadalous, so it is with trepidation I approached this game. I love MGS1 and MGS2, MGS3 not so much but I knew I could skip it because its a prequel to everything that happened and I really only need to know what happened in 1 and 2 anyway. The game starts you off in a war torn country and you are being sent into this warzone to find your brother Liquid as he plans an insurrection against the Patriots. (If you have been following the story of MGS this makes perfect sense, if not this is all gobbledygook) You have been sent to eliminate liquid but to do so you need to find him, so you have to meet up with your contact first.

Right away you can tell the difference from the previous Metal Gear games, this game is more an action game than it is stealth. The controls feel better and tighter and things have been vastly improved to appeal to western gamers this time around. But lets be honest, if you have never played a MGS game, you wont pick up part 4 because it tells you on the back that this is Solid Snake's last chapter, its more or less saying "this is for the MGS fans only" and so it should be.

Visually the game is breathtaking, the vistas you see are incredibly and it does the usual Metal Gear trick of doing cut scenes with in game graphics but considering the graphics are so good anyway it doesn't matter. As Snake you have a piece of gear called the Octo-camo which changes colour to help you blend into the surroundings. So if you lean against a brick wall and wait a few seconds, your suit changes colour to match the wall and you blend in, this comes in handy when you are crawling past enemies and they spot something, lie flat and tap triangle and stay still the your octo-camo blends in and the guards don't see you.

Everything about this game is a step up from the previous games, I have only gotten to act 2 so I can't say for sure if the game holds up to the end but so far I have loved every second of it.

The Games Part 3: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

Move over Lara Croft, there is a new boss in town and his name is Nathan Drake. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is a game like Tomb Raider (I hesitate to use the term Tomb Raider clone because it is so much more) where you play as a treasure hunter as you seek out Sir Francis Drake's coffin and this leads you to the search for El Dorado.

The game looks awesome, visually stunning but when it comes to PS3 games you have to expect that now. Playability wise the game is an action game, it's a cross between platform/exploration and a 3rd person shooter. In the levels you will go between solving small puzzles to open a door in some ancient ruins or look for a way to get to the exit of a room using the surroundings then it will change to you finding cover and taking out lots of heavily armed bad guys. A few games have tried this in the past and the problem has been the balance, rarely these games get the balance right, and from what I have played of Uncharted, they have gotten the balance right.

The main character of Nathan Drake is actually a likeable guy and you could easily imagine him on the big screen because this game desperately wants to be a movie, so much so that the old cliches are there in spades. But that's not a bad thing, the developers Naughty Dog knew what they were doing when they made this game cinematic, it feels like your playing the lead in an Indiana Jones/Sahara type movie and being a fan of these types of movies, that suits me down to the ground. Without flinching I can say this is my favourite PS3 games so far.

If you have a PS3 and want to get a good game, this is the one for you and in the shops now you can pick it up at budget prices.

The Games Part 4: The Demos

Once I had my PS3 connected to the wireless network in the house, I went about the process of downloading lots and lots of Demos for the PS3, let me give you the quick rundown:

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

Ratchet & Clank: Future, Tools of Destruction

The Lord Of The Rings: Conquest

Heavenly Sword

Haze

Resistance: Fall of Man

Warhawk

Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm

So let me do my quick reviews on each:

FEAR 2 - This is a very odd one, I loved FEAR and playing this one reminded me of the first game but I felt the demo was very disjointed and it didn't make me want to go back and play the first game or even pick up this one, so all in all very mediocre. Play the demo and decide for yourself but this has stopped me picking this title up.

Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools Of Destruction - Awesome, right from the start this is fun. Hordes of enemies running at you and you are kitted out with some cool weaponary right away. One weapons fires a disco ball into the air and this causes funky music to play and all your enemies to break into a disco dance as you pick them off. The level in the demo is fluid and fun to run around in, and I want this game badly.

The Lord Of The Rings: Conquest - Taking the Star Wars Battlefront framework and applying it to LOTR is an interesting concept, but the execution of it I played was very very flawed. I found myself fighting with the controls more often than not and the classes were not very interesting or unique to play. Avoid this game at all costs, you need to be a die hard LOTR fan to want to play this for more than 10 minutes.

Heavenly Sword- Meh! This game bored me to tears, it wants to be God of War but lacks the balls (literally) and feels very lacking. I hear the game is about 5 hours long so I wont be buying it and the demo will probably never be booted up again.

Haze - Bad, very bad. The demo for this game was awful, because this is a game that needs a proper tutorial and to drop you into a level where you have to fight it out in the jungle, that's a mistake. I hope the full game has a proper tutorial so you can get to grips with the complex and strange control scheme that it employs.

Resistance; Fall of Man - Touted as the best FPS on the PS3 for a long time, I didn't find myself enjoying this very much. It's probably the problem I have with a lot of demos, the context. To immerse myself in a game like this I need to know the backstory, this demo drops you into a battlefield with no backstory. I want to give it a chance so if I saw the game going cheap I would probably pick it up.

Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm - I have recently become a big Naruto fan thanks to the Video Game Outsiders Podcast, and I downloaded this demo to see how they transferred it to the PS3 and I was very very impressed. The game only allows one fight and you can choose from 2 characters but I had a lot of fun with this demo, I have played it numerous times, experimenting with the different fighting styles and move combinations. I definetly want to get the full game of this. However if your not a Naruto fan you will not enjoy it as much.

Warhawk - I downloaded the trail version of this game, Warhawk if you haven't heard of it is like Battlefield 2 in the sense that you are a solider dropped into a fight against other people and you can get in any vehicle and use any weapon. It has no story and the game is online only. The trial version lets you play one map and one mode and I have played this a lot and really enjoy it. The games are short and frantic, the different weapons and vehicles means lots of variety as you play Capture the Flag and the fact that you are playing other people makes this all the better when you pull of a kill. The full game is 14.99 on PSN and it is a definite bargain for the people out there who like online games. This is on my must get list.

The Games Part 5: Resident Evil 5 Demo mini review

So the demo of Resident Evil 5 was released on the PSN today, I downloaded it to take a look because I enjoyed Resident Evil 4. First off I think that Resident Evil is not a game that is suited to demo form so I think that anyone who is put off by the demo should still consider picking up the game unless they 100% hated the demo.

The game gives you the choice of 2 levels to play through and naturally I have tried both. Right away if you have played Resident Evil 4, you will feel at home in this game, except for 1 thing, Chris Redfield is so god damn huge that he takes up a huge chunk of the screen, so I was annoyed at that for a start. You AI partner will sometimes run in front of you when you are trying to get your bearings but she knows when to heal you so that works out fine. I found the shooting to be pretty much the same as Resident Evil 4, you can take the time to aim for headshots, but your not sure how that will go so its best to pick and choose when to take those shots. Your partner handles herself pretty well in the fights, calling for your help every now and again but mostly taking care of business herself so that is burden off your shoulders (huge broad, jacked up shoulders) but the control scheme for the game, my my my. A lot of people criticise this control scheme, others praise it. The ones who praise it say that it is sticking to its surivival horror roots, not being able to run and shoot at the same time. I fall on the other side of this, I think the evolution of this game should have been to adopt a control scheme likened to that of Gears of War, you should have been able to walk and shoot at the same time, and whilst they were at it take the camera from GoW and add that because the camera in this game is too close to Chris so that he takes up too much of the screen. At one point I wish I had a mouse so I could run the mouse wheel back and pull the camera back for a bit just to get a better look at what was happening.

All that being said, I did not dislike the game, it felt very Resident Evil to me. It's not an evolution of ther series like part 4 was but again I don't think it was meant to be. The demo I will probably play a few more times and get myself used to the controls and see if I warm up to it more. If you have access to Xbox Live or PSN, I recommend giving it a look at least and then make your mind up.

So that's me signing off for now, more reviews, thoughts and musings coming soon, Believe It!

Say Hello to Sackboy

2009-01-26T12:21:00.002Z

It had to happen, it was bound to, there was no way around it.

Saint's Row 2 > GTA 4? Dare we find out?

2009-01-15T16:15:00.002Z

Saints Row 1

I never liked the first Saint's Row game, I found it to be a disjointed mess, too ingrained the in the "gangsta" sentiment and rather boring to boot. What I do remember about is that the game starts off with you being recruited into the Saint's gang purely by accident and from there you take quests from different gang members and start a hostile take over of the mythical city of Stillwater. So far so very GTA, right? Well yes and no, to take missions you have to gain respect, and to get respect you have to do side missions and the side missions varied in their fun and replayability. And you have to get enough respect to take a mission each time. Luckily if you build up enough respect you can do 2 or 3 missions before you have to fill up that respect meter. But I felt Saint's Row was very lacking in a lot of respects, controls were loser than GTA, gun play was different because you had no lock on, you free aimed everything and the cut scenes were bland and uninispired. Also what the game was lacking severely, was the razor sharp humour of Grand Theft Auto. The publishers may have thought they were making the game with a sense of humour running through it but you had to dig hard to find it, sure the side missions were a littly loopy but you never felt it was really funny. So I didn't really like the first Saint's Row.

A Bargain
Saint's Row 2 is a game I was interested in because apparently the makers of the game have decided to have more fun in the game this time. It popped up for sale in my local Game shop at a quarter of the price for it anywhere else because it was pre-owned and the box was mission, all you got was the disc and instructions. I snapped it up and decided to give it a bash.

A Saint Reborn

Saint's Row 2 begins where the last game ended, with you blown up and in a coma. 2 years pass and you wake up in the hospital ward of the Stillwater Prison. The fact that you were blown up gives the game makers a premise of character generation, it doesn't matter what the guy looked like in the first game, he's been more or less "reborn" for this game. So you create a new character, looking however you want and it can be as cool or as ridiculous as you want. In Saint's Row, your character never speaks (well I know he speaks in 3 cutscenes and only says 1 line each time) so he's never had a voice, in this game you choose which voice you want your character to have. You have the cockney, the gangsta and the latino voices for the men and same for the female characters, what's that? Yes, you can play as a woman. With your character reborn in the hospital wing, he hooks up with a fellow con to break out of prison and this is your tutorial, so you learn how to play the game by breaking out of prison. Within 5 minutes of the first cutscene in the game ending I was dual weilding pistols and gunning down guards, it was freaking awesome. As a side note, the game had a glitch during this mission that meant I had to kill myself and restart from the checkpoint just to continue on, this did annoy me but I was having fun also so I am able to forgive it for this. Once you break out of prison and make it back to Stillwater, the game essentially says "off you go" and you can either start the story arc or run about in prison civvies and cause chaos. I choose the story arc, which has you dress your character up and go about the business of finding out what has happened whilst you were out of comission.

Story? Incidental?

A lot has happened since you were last walking around Stillwater, the city has been developed and new gangs have taken control. The Saint's no longer exists and the city is now a different place from when you owned it. So you start off the game by finding out the last remaining Saint is on trail for over 300 murders and will probably be going to death row and you have very little time to make it to the courthouse and break him free. All this leads to the reformation of the Saints and from there you go about the business of retaking the city by eliminating the rival gangs. Each gang you have to take out runs certain sections of the city and is a story arc in itself as you go about killing them and you can do it in any order you like. If you want to take out 1 gang you can play through that entire story or you could play a mission for each arc, its really up to you.

Lets make the first is it better than GTA point.
Is the story better than GTA 4's story? No it's not. The story of Nico Bellic in Liberty City is an interesting one, and it involves you, plus Nico is likeable. But the story in Saints Row 2 is damn fun, the characters are likeable too, to an extent and they are pretty messed up. The big difference is that the story in Saint's Row 2 is one of insanity and mayhem, whereas GTA4 is a story of redemption, revenge and in the words of Roman Bellic, Nico's cousin, "big american titties".

Gameplay

The gameplay in Saint's Row 2 is very similiar to the first which means you must gain respect to play story missions. But the main change from the first game is that Saint's Row 2 is totally batshit crazy. The missions are off the wall, the side missions are more so and just playing the game is fun, remember fun, that thing people used to have when playing games and not procrastonating over how "Dead Space redefines the horror genre" or that "Left 4 Dead is a genre advancing co-op experience that makes you rethink how to play a first person shooter". So whilst you play these games and have experiences that are mediocre but your spooging over Valve's latests achievement too much to see that it is only okay, you could pop in Saint's Row 2 and spray buildings with excrement to drive property prices down or dress up as a cop and beat up litterers and gun down flashers for a tv show. You do things that are fun in this game. Yes it has glitches, it has minor bugs and looks like Saint's Row 1 all over again and does not compare graphically to the powerhouse that GTA4 is, but hands down Saints Row 2 is more fun. You will have more fun in the first 2 and a half hours of Saints Row 2 than you will after 8 hours in GTA 4, how do I know this, I am 8 hours into GTA 4 and 2 and a half hours into Saints Row 2 and I have had a blast. GTA 4 to me is still an awesome game, but it drags out the fun and tries to stay more grounded in reality and that allows Saints Row 2 to take the total insanity route, and it does it well. What other game has you ride around on a quad bike, wearing a flame retardent suit, on fire and being told to cause as much chaos as possible? Saints Row 2 is the only game that does this.

Is that "Take On Me" I hear?

Saints Row 2 is fun, its not a clever game, it does not challenge you mentally and it doesn't make you think, but what it does do is allow you to take off all your clothes and run up to old ladies in the street and wave your tackle at them for points. But my main surprise in this game came from the in game car radios. In Saints Row 1, the radio stations played nothing but generic shit gangsta rap that meant I spent more time with the radio off rather than on. I figured it would be more of the same for this game, but no, when cycling through the radio stations I heard Hall and Oates "Out of Touch" playing and now I put the in game radios to that station because its all 80s all the time. 2 moments stick out in my mind, the first being when I had a mission in which I drove a tow truck into a cementary to tow away the hearse at a funeral, all the while "The Final Countdown" was playing. Then in a mission to drive across town with another gang member in the car, he criticised my taste in music and turned the radio station over, when I turned it back my in game character warned that if he touched the radio again that you would shoot him. Awesome!

In Conclusion

I was trying to figure out the best way to sum up the question of in Saint's Row 2 better than GTA 4 and I think it comes down to this:

In one cut scene in Saints Row 2 a fellow gang member is arranging a robbery of a casino, he has built a scale model of the casino and has come up with a careful plan that involves split second timing and will take careful precision just to get it right. Then your second in command Johnny Gat suggest they scrap that plan, walk in the front door and shoot everyone who gets in your way to the money and that's exactly what you do.
If this had been GTA 4 Rockstar would have had you go for the careful plan and you would have followed it to the letter, whereas in Saint's Row 2 you go into the casino and shoot everyone who is in your way.

The best comparison I can make is, if you want simple uncomplicated sandbox fun, play Saint's Row 2, if you want an epic tale of redemption and revenge and have at least 20 hours to spare, then GTA 4 is for you.

Personally I love both games, but Saint's Row 2 is what I will pick up when I have a spare half hour to spare, GTA 4 will be for when I have a lot of time to spare.

Shin Megami Tensei..... bless you!

2009-01-07T16:43:00.005Z

The title of this post is in reference to a joke Ed cracked when I was trying to tell him about the Persona series. I said Shin Megami Tensei, he said bless you, granted it's not a very funny joke, but it was Ed that cracked it.

Anyway, moving on, Shin Megami Tensei is a series of Japanese RPGS's that has many offshoots and none are really linked. You have the Persona Series, The Digital Devil Saga and the Demon Summoner series to mention a few. Recently they have become very popular thanks in part to Persona 3 and Persona 4.

Persona 3

Persona 3 is the story of a young boy, who you play, and he has transferred to a new high school. Upon arrival he finds himself embroiled in a strange convoluted plot that involves demons, a dungeon that has hundreds of floors to explore and a strange being with yourself that you can summon called a Persona. Long story short (too late), there are demons called Shadows and they only appear in the secret hour, an hour that happens after midnight that only a few people can experience, the shadows attack these people and when the secret hour ends, these people are more or less braindead. A group of those who can see the secret hour have banded together and decided to fight the shadows, it turns out that some of them can summon Personas. To summon a Persona, you must use a gun like object called an Evoker, shoot yourself in the head with it and the Persona will appear and you are unharmed. The main character, you, is special among these people because he can summon multiple personas of different types and can create new personas, whereas everyone else only has the one Persona, they cannot be changed.

Now the Shadows come from the aforementioned dungeon Tartarus, that appears during the secret hour, and it appears at your school. And you can choose to venture into Tartarus every night and climb the floors to find out the secret of the Shadows. Unless of course your too tired. Tartarus is randomly generated so its never the same floor twice and after every 5 floors you can save your progress in the climb and teleport back there so you don't have to start at the bottom every time you go there. Tartarus is also effected by the phases of the moon, if there is full moon, a boss creature appears and you must defeat it.

Aside from all the demon bashing you will be doing, you also have a social life to look after. You go to school mondays to saturdays and you must guide your character through his school days, creating friendships, joining clubs and even getting a girlfriend. You do all this because as you create more social links, you gain experience, you Persona's get powered up and it also increases some of your own stats to help you are you fight in Tartarus. Its all linked together.

The gameplay is surprisingly simple, during the day you make choices that have an effect on your social life and is both simple and complex at the same time. I think the best way to describe it is that it is as complex as you make it, you can just go through the game making choices that you want to make depending on how you are feeling, or you can check you social links menus and see who you need to build a better relationship with and this will power up a certain type of Persona. At night you explore Tartarus, and as I said this is randomly generated and you will wander the halls, the game thankfully does not have random encounters, you see the monsters roaming the floor and you have a moment to strike first and if you do, you get the advantage when you enter the battle screen. The battles are turn based in typical JRPG style, the difference I have found (especially if you are used to Final Fantasy games) is that you only control your character. The other members in your party act independantly, now this could have been a really bad idea, especially if your party's AI was bad, but credit to Atlus, the party AI is awesome and if you weaken an enemy, they will finish him off. I have never gotten frustrated with my party, they all act in the best interest of defeating the enemy, and also they know when to heal you and when you will heal yourself.

The graphics for this game are truly great, it has an anime/manga style for the characters and nothing seems badly textured or done wrong, it looks good and when you summon the Personas, the graphics really shine. Several cut scenes in the game are actual anime animation especially created for this game and are great fun to watch, but they are not very frequent and come in at the right times.

The sound for the game is an odd one, normally in most RPGs unless its a Final Fantasy, I turn down the volume, pop on my ipod and just play the game whilst listening to podcasts, with this game its totally different. There are voiceovers for a good portion of the game and the characters are well voiced, but its the music that is the odd thing. It's a strange mix of JPop that is actually really really good. The bouncy tunes and upbeat nature during the day mixes well with the darker tunes at night when you are in Tartarus.

All in all Persona 3 is a must for RPG fans, especially those with a penchant for JRPGs. And with Persona 4 already out and apparently better than this game, if you like this game you'll love 4.

Both games boast at least 40 hours of gameplay and with the special edition of Persona 3, called Persona 3: FES adding on another 20 hours of gameplay, you wont get bored battling demons.

Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine

World of Warcraft is the worlds number 1 MMORPG, eleven and a half million subscribers are playing the game, so you cannot dispute this fact. The Shin Megami Tensei team have decided to step up to the plate and take a swing at the MMORPG genre and they have done so with SMT:Imagine, of which an open beta has begun. The story takes place in the original Shin Megami Tensei lore, it has no links to the Persona or Demon Summoner or even Digital Devil Saga series and is set in the future. The world has been devestated by nuclear wars and demons run rampant. As the last of the human race you take on the role of a Demon Buster (hunter) and you start off on a quest to help make the world habitable once again, but with the Demon population on the rise, things are not always what they seem.

The guys at SMT have decided to try a very eastern concept when it comes to the MMO marketplace, instead of charging you monthly or quarterly fees, they have decided the game will charge by micro transactions. So if you buy anything in the game that is cosmetic, then you are paying with real money. So the game is to all intents and purposes, free. Just as long as you don't want to buy any of the new clothes and looks in the game. However it also means you can purchase in game cash which can be used for weapons or armour upgrades, so if your willing to pay the cash you can buff your character out, if not, your going to have to grind to get those weapons and armour. Its a very Japanese concept and works in MMOs over in the far east, it has yet to work here in the west.

But is it any good? Well, if you have played WoW and got used to the control scheme and have an expectation of how a MMO should work then some things will be familiar and some wont. You get quests to gain experience, you level up and you grind. In the game you also try to befriend Demons to fight beside you and you either do this by threatening them or talking to them, however be ready to spend a good hour or so actually getting one to fight beside you because most wont. I found the camera a bit tricky and the controls were not as tight as I would have liked, everytime I did a succesful attack the enemy would go sliding out the screen and I found myself wildly flailing the mouse about trying to get my viewpoint to where I could see what was going on. The game engine chugs along, it's quite slow and I think is made to be that way so that people with bottom of the range PCs like my own, can run the game with no problems.

I installed the beta, logged in and created a character and then played 2 hours of the game, that was 2 days ago and since then I have not thought of a good reason to turn the MMO back on and log in. Nothing has compelled me to step back into that world, whereas WoW is compelling and I do get drawn back into there. And that is the problem, Blizzard have spoiled me, I have played the best MMORPG out there, the controls are tight, the visuals are great and the quests are interesting and varied. Sure it's grind-tastic but what WoW does is try to vary the grind, so your not spending hours attaclking creatures and not questing, you will find that in WoW, your nearly always running one or two quests at the same time. In SMT: Imagine, the quests I have completed have been boring and flat compared to the starting quests in WoW. I think if and when I go back into Imagine, it wont be for long. If you want to play a MMO but don't want to pay a subscription, this may be the choice for you, there are plenty of people in the beta and they all seem pretty chatty but this is no WoW killer, but it was never meant to be.

The one praise I can heap upon this game: in the holodeck section you are introduced to a main character and as I looked at him I thought to myself "he looks like a character out of Persona 3.....man I should go back and play Persona 3 that game was awesome."
10 Minutes later I was playing Persona 3 on my PS2, so the game launched me back into Persona 3, that is the one praise I can give the game.

A Sad Day, a minute's silence if you please....

2009-01-04T22:00:00.003Z

The gunshots ring through the air, the grenade I threw has thrown dirt into the air and has created a dust cloud that I cannot see through. Bullets are whizzing in my direction but missing me as I dogde left and right. A muzzle flash to my left pinpoints one of my agressors, I turn and fire 3 bullets from the silenced pistol and there are no more gunshots from that direction. However the machine gun sounds in front of me tell me that this is not over. The dust and smoke clears and I see my buddy walk, hands against his midsection, he stumbles to his knees and then falls down on his side. He calls at me for help, I take down another mercenary then run over to Paul. Paul Lefranc, my buddy in my FarCry 2 adventure, is on the ground in front of me. Surely he will be okay, I have a first aid kit, I adminster the first shot to him but he says he needs another shot, it's not working. So I do the only humane thing, I inject the 3rd shot, a fatal shot, that allows him to die without pain. And slowly his eyes close and his hand that was gripping my forearm slumps to the ground. No more will Paul offer me advice during missions, no more will he come to my aid when I most need him and I wont see him leaning against the bar in the local mercenary drinking hole, Mike's Bar. I stand up and try to take a moment to get my bearings and figure out what to do next when another Mercenary comes running around a rock with his assualt rifle pointed at me, a second later he is dead by my hand.

So Paul is dead and gone and this was rather shocking for me. More shocking that Aeris death in Final Fantasy 7 (but not more heartwrenching, Damn Square and their music that makes me tear up....) because this could have been avoided, this wasn't a scripted event, it was just that I was too damn slow. If I had been about 5 seconds quicker to the battle I could have prevented his death. My tactics in FarCry 2 lately have been drive close to a battle, get out my car and try to find some highground and use my Sniper rifle to take down some guys from a distance. If I had just gone in with my M60 instead of the Sniper Rifle, Paul would be alive in the game, but because of my actions, he's not.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying you will cry when a buddy in this game dies, you wont but you will be annoyed and probably frustrated, the simple fact is that your mercenary buddies are integral to the core game, you need them and to make sure they will help you, you have to spend time doing jobs for them. And for the past few hours of FarCry 2 I have been doing a side mission after every story mission and it has always been for Paul because he had saved me more than anyone else in the game. I had invested time in keeping a good relationship with Paul and because of my own stupid fault he is no more and that time was pretty much wasted. Now sure, I could go back one save and charge into that battle with my M60, but that would be like cheating to me, I want to play on from this moment and see what I have to do next.

So now I have to continue with the game, build up new friendships and make sure I look out for my buddies from now on, and think through my tactics clearly before taking to the high ground and trying to snipe someone. One thing is for sure, Africa will never be the same again.

Off-topic: On why 2008 was the worst year ever

2009-01-02T19:33:00.003Z

2008 was the rubbishest year ever. Very very little good happened in 2008.
That is all.

Quick bulleted summary of good things and bad things that happened in 2008 to me:

Good Things
March 11th : Achieved Independence and lived alone for the first time
August 1st: Erm... had the day off... ?
September: Started a great new revolutionary diet. Dust!
October 22nd : Started a new job as a web developer! Yippeee!
December 31st : Like GlaDOS in Portal, I am still alive

Bad Things
March: Moved into a new flat. Got locked out on my first night. Rode 15 miles with a flat tyre.
April: Put my back out. Was out of commission for what felt like forever
June: Final Written warning for being too awesome.
July 1: Handed in my notice, double underlining and ending a substantial era of my life.
July 31: Riding home when a car hit me from behind, an independent witness declaimed any driver error. No cashpennies for the mouth full of ruined teeth, written off bike, or mental trauma. Clearly it was my fault for riding backwards at -30mph into the front of the car!
September: Ran out of money. Starvation is a hoot and a holler. UK government sucks ass.
October: Felt woefully inadequate at new job :>
November: Worriment in the family after a relative's health scare.
December 31: Like GlaDOS in Portal, I am still alive.

The Obligatory post christmas post

2008-12-28T22:45:00.004Z

Christmas has been and gone, during the festive period I received one game as a present and then with money given to me as a gift I went out and purchased 5 more.

So the game I received as a gift was Wii Fit. This was given to me by my inlaws, normally I would have taken this as an insult, but considering how hard it is to get your hands on a copy of this game, I was rather impressed.

The list of games that I purchased are:

Army Of Two

Too Human

Lost Odyssey

Condemned: Criminal Origins

Condemned 2

I have had previous experience with Condemned, about a year ago I got the game in Gamestations ill fated 4 Xbox Games for 20 Pounds deal that lasted all of two months. I played Condemned for about an hour, then took the game out of the xbox, put it back in its case, put the case in the gamestation bag, put the bag in my backpack and put the backpack in another room and then placed a bible by the door to that room for fear that the game would come to life and kill me. Condemned was a scary game, I played it that miniscule amount and it scared the life out of me, so what has changed I hear you ask? Nothing, but I do feel the need to go back into this world and see the story through to the end.

Army of Two, is about the 2 biggest dickholes on the planet, that's it. The game features 2 main characters who are just beyond awful, you do not like playing as them and if that is what the makers of the game were trying to accomplish then we should appluad them. However I do believe they were trying to create likeable characters to play as. When your controlled character pulls of a Bill & Ted pretend air guitar shread after killing a whole load of dark skinned enemies, you feel dirty.

Too Human is a mix of norse mythology and cyberpunk culture and throw in some Diablo style dungeon hack combat and your on the right track. So far I have played about 20 minutes of gameplay in the whole game and experienced about 10 minutes of cinematics and I have no fucking idea what I am doing. Nothing is being explained, but I have killed about 100 robots and struggled with the camera for most of the playtime. I do want to keep going because Silicon Knights, the makers of the game, have been working on Too Human for 10 years, so I want to see where all that development time went, obviously not on the camera, but we'll see what happens.

I have not played Lost Odyssey but I do know some of the guys behind the Final Fantasy series have made this game and it looks similiarly epic in scope to the lastest FF games. I will get into it soon, I just have not had the time in the past couple of days.

Updates: Including World Of Warcraft, Mirror's Edge, GTA4 and FarCry 2

2008-12-18T17:12:00.009Z

Its been a while since I posted, mainly due to the fact that there has been a lot of gameplaying going on. So lets begin:

Mirror's Edge

As I said in a previous entry, I had played the demo and the game looked really interesting, the controls were strange at first but when you got used to them it became fun. So now I have the full game, does the demo live up to the expectations? Yes and no.

The game is set in the near future and you play a runner who trades information whilst free running around a very clean city. Honestly though, nothing is explained to you during the game, about the authority, the government or how exactly people are being supposedly oppressed. It feels like the plot of the game is a mere afterthought and the game is all about the free running. And it is. You run around mostly the rooftops, climbing, jumping and balancing on walkways to get where you need to go. I'll be honest, I am about halfway through the plot line of this game and I have no clue whats going on, all I know is my twin sister has been framed for a murder she did not commit and suddenly the police are very keen on shooting all runners rather than arrest them.

This game is about momentum, the game wants you to get in a groove when your free running, so that your momentum will carry you along. And when you do it, it feels really good, there are times playing levels where I will be nonstop running, jumping and climbing for a good 10 or 15 minutes until the game brings you to a halt for one reason or another. Knowing you nailed specific sections perfectly and are still running is a great feeling. On the flip side, you die.... a lot.

Remember games on the Megadrive or Snes where you had 4 lives and you would go through them quickly because the game was hard? Well Mirror's Edge is the 3D first person version of those games, except you don't only have 4 lives. This game is very unforgiving in the levels, if you mess up your momentum at some points you just have to restart because momentum is what carries you across some jumps. This would all be for nothing if the controls didn't get it right, but they do. The controls, once you get used to them (LB on the 360 controller is jump, that takes some getting used to, I still find myself pressing A at times), are very fluid and work. You get a good sense that you are Faith, and you are doing these impressive stunts that she is performing. A lot of people have complained about the gunplay in the games, that once Faith gets a gun that the game falls short, whilst yes I can agree to an extent, the simple answer is this: you're not meant to have guns. You disarm your opponents and you get their gun, the best thing you can do is simple tap Y and toss the gun away. Faith is slower, she is not accurate with the gun and is pretty much useless in that sense. People are critical of this, I applaud DICE's decision to go this route, it makes you think differently about how to tackle sections of the game. For example, I had a section where I entered a construction site and had to get across the site, meanwhile 5 armed officers with shotguns were searching the site for me. Logic would dictate, take the shotgun from one officer, then use that to take down the other 4. Instead, I played cat and mouse with 3 of the officers, not firing one shot, then leapt up onto some containers and ran to the other side of the site, leaping over the fence and through the door. So instead of killing them and spending a lot of time on needless combat I took out the main problems and got the end of the section without a problem. The same thing happened later on when SWAT officers on a rooftop tried to corner me, I disarmed them, knocked them out and went on my way.

The graphics in the game are sublime, the cities look very clean and I haven't seen any glitches or flaws in this game yet. The cut scenes are a strange animated style but still keep you engaged, despite the fact that I have no clue what is going on in the game. When your on the rooftops and you make perilous jumps to other buildings and you catch a glimpse of the street below, you feel like your up high, vertigo kicks in. Its an amazing feeling in a game.

Overall, your enjoyment of this game will depend on how much you enjoy the free running in it, if your after a first person shooter, this is not for you, but if you want a unique first person experience I highly recommend you check it out.

FarCry 2

FarCry 2 continues in its awesomeness. I have really been sucked in by the game and the whole idea of being a mercenary. This game is just plain fun, if you get into it. I have heard split reviews on the game, some people like it, others hate it and I can understand why some people hate it. It does try some new things, there is no aiming reticule so you have to rely on the sight of the gun, shooting from the hip is not acurate. The weapons you get from fallen enemies are rusted and degraged and will jam or completely blew up on you, so you need to get new weapons from an arms dealer. As you unlock new weapons your armoury expands.

But when you play this game, you need at least a good hour to complete the tutorial and get your bearings and then when you go back to the game set aside at least 45 minutes each time you play it. You will need the time, because the game is hard, just travelling down the road to an objective can turn into a huge gun fight if you cross some militia on the road.

The main game has you taking missions from both sides of the war you are embroiled in. The missions differ in their complexity, some are just simple assisnations, others ambushes, sometimes you just have to tag enemy supplies so they are picked up by the opposition. However after you accept a mission from either of the 2 sides, one of your mercenaries buddies will call you and ask you to meet them, they have some suggestions to make your mission a little more interesting. My advice if you have this game, always go meet them. They can turn an average mission into an awesome one. Your buddies are the equivalent of an extra life in the game, so it is a good idea to help them out with side missions from time to time. I had one buddy who I helped out a few times and he came to my aid numerous times in battle, then I found out yesterday he had been killed. So he was gone from the game, finished, not coming back. I am pretty sure he was killed when he saved me one time, but I can't be sure. So now I have to make sure all my other mercenary friends are happy with me, because if I fall in battle, I need one of them to come help me out or its time to reload the save game.

I absolutely love this game, it has struck a chord with me and I am not sure why, I wasn't a big fan of the first FarCry and I never really followed any of the previews for this game, and never got hyped for it any way. In fact I can remember watching a preview of the game on TV and thinking to myself "I don't like the look of that game at all". Some will like this game, some will hate it and others like me will dive right in with both feet and get everything they can from it.

Grand Theft Auto 4

I am continuing on with my second play through of this game, and its still more enjoyable this time around. The game has just completely opened up to me, all three islands are now accessable in the game. It has thrown a couple of moral choices at me, for instance, there is a section in the game were you confront a friend's ex girlfriend and her new boyfriend, they stole from your friend and your there to get the money back. The guy jumps on a bike and runs, leaving the girl behind. You have the choice to kill her or not. I choose not to. Also later on, 2 people who give you missions want the other one dead. So it comes down to a choice of who you kill and you need to choose which one you think should be left around. Personally I killed Playbox X because he was the biggest idiot of the two.

I also just got a mission that there was a lot of hubbub about, the bank job. This is the mission were you actual take part in a bank heist. A lot of people have talked about how hard this mission is, and that you will need a couple of play throughs before you can get this mission done, I did it on my second try and it was really really fun. A lot of fuss was made last year about the game Kane and Lynch and how one section in that game would be reminiscent of the film Heat. There is a bank heist in that game where you were supposed to feel like you were in that movie, and it would feel epic. Well the game failed at that, it pretty much failed at everything. Grand Theft Auto 4 on the other hand, totally felt like Heat. As you run down the street with an automatic rifle in your hands, mowing down the police, taking cover, getting away from the police safely. Everything about this mission screamed Heat.

So I will continue with this game and I look forward to seeing the story of Nico Bellic unfold further.

World of Warcraft

Yes, I play World of Warcraft. I recently resurrected my account six months ago and got back into the game with a vengance. My new character, an Orc Hunter called Chernoble has been my focus in the past 4-5 months. I have World of Warcraft plus the first expansion pack, The Burning Crusade fully installed so really all I have wanted to do is get a character to level 60 and start exploring the expansion pack contents, Outland. So my main focus has been levelling Chernoble and 4 days ago I reached 60. So now I am currently in Outland levelling.
One thing worries me though, I have reached 61 in Outland very very quickly, and I figured it would take me a while, it definetly hasn't and at this rate I will be 70 in no time, but at least that means I can visit Northrend.

The Wrath Of the Lich King is on store shelves, and has been since the beginning of November, right now it is still at full price, around 25 pounds but that same thing was said for The Burning Crusade and shortly after release it dropped in price to 10 pounds so I am not making that mistake with Wrath Of The Lich King. I did notice that Blizzard is now allowing a free 10 day trial of Wrath so I am definetly taking them up on this offer. But I must sign off for now, with the two words that Ed hates me to say in Messnger:

TO AZEROTH!

Mercenaries 2 Vs FarCry 2

2008-12-06T15:11:00.010Z

Recently I got 2 new games for my 360 that are so similiar in concept I decided to do one post about both. Those 2 games, as you can guess from the titles are Mercenaries 2: World In Flames and FarCry 2.

First Mercenaries 2, this is a sequel to the console game Mercenaries that came out on the PS2 and Xbox in 2005. You played as one of three Mercenaries taking advantage of wartorn North Korea. It was a sandbox style game in which you had to capture or neutralise 52 high level targets and also complete some mission and make some money. If you saw a vehicle, you could steal it and if you wanted to call in airstrikes to help you with a mission, you could but it cost money. The game was fun, action packed and was something a bit different from GTA as the whole game you were in a constant war. You took missions from different factions, sometimes attacking people who you had worked for only a couple of hours earlier, but you were a gun for hire and these things happen in that lifestyle. Or so the makers of the game, Pandemic, would lead you to believe. Mercenaires was a fun game, it had its moments were you just loved blowing stuff up and that was the whole point. However after a couple of hours it got very samey and then you felt a lack of direction in the game. The fact was it was too open ended, it was rare that someone played it through to the end, running around causing chaos was fun for an hour or two but you were never compelled to finish the game, and with no centralised home base, the game never grounded you. You just kept going until the whole "deck of 52" were caught.

But the game sold really well and garnered good reviews, a sequel was pretty much gauranteed.

Mercenaries 2 was released in August this year and took a different kind of slant to the game. Now you had a plot to this game, instead of hunting a deck of 52, you were out for revenge. You start the game off working for a local businessman in Venezuela, Ramon Solano, he asks you to rescue a general of the army who has been imprisoned for planning a coup in the country. This is your tutorial mission, so of course you do the job and return to Solano only to find you're being double crossed and Solano orders you killed. You escape but not before taking a bullet, in the ass. Yes, that's about as funny as this game gets, you get shot in the ass. I am convinced the writers in the game thought this was hilarious at the time, or were really really high. So now the game starts properly, you decide to set up base in Venezuela and work toward taking down Solano for getting you shot in the ass.... oh and you didn't get paid last time. However you need to get information on how to get Solano and that means networking with different factions within the country allowing you to complete new missions and gain money and access to weapons, airstrikes, new vehicles and new ways to blow shit up. As the game progresses you realise that you are dependant on 2 things in this game, money and fuel. Thankfully they are always in plentiful supply around the country, in fact huge crates of money are littered all over the place and when you get a helicopter to pick stuff up for you, all you need to do is tag the money and signal the pilot with a smoke bomb. He'll come and grab the money and you get a little richer. The same goes for fuel and also airstrikes. Yes ballistic missiles are all over the place in Venezuela, I can drive more than 2 minutes in the game before 3 or 4 pop up on my mini map and I just need to drive off the road and there is one hidden in the bushes.

The combat in the game is sketchy but not bad enough to put you off. Sometimes it can be really good and feels right and other times it is just plain horrible. You can either aim normally, shooting from the hip or aim down the sight by pressing the right trigger, however shooting from the hip is more accurate than aiming down the sight, which I find odd. Also despite the amount of gunfire you are under in the game, which is a lot, sometimes 5 or 6 people shooting at you at once, you will find it pretty easy to stay alive. Sometimes your health will drop down to 3 and flash red, but if you find some cover for a few seconds it soon regenarates and very quickly, or you'll be able to find a first aid pack somewhere, your enemies drop them almost all the time.

Mission types vary but more of less you are either destroying a building or capturing a base but the game gives you the freedom to do it as you wish and the game pushes you to experiment with the different ways to complete the missions. I am not sure about the length of the whole game, I have played it for a little under 2 hours and the game progress meter is showing 25% complete and I feel like I have done hardly anything in the game. I think I have completed maybe 3 missions I have worked for 2 factions so far. I don't feel like the game's plot has progressed at all. I'll wait until I play it some before I talk about the length of the game, it may surprise me.

But now I am going to talk about 2 flaws in the game, the first is the numerous graphical glitches and bugs that appear, the game feels rushed and sometimes buildings pop up right in front of you, other times it is from far away and looks great. Also I have been shot by invisible enemies who only appear when I look at them from a certain angle, and once a car I was driving dissapeared after I exited it and reappared a few feet behind my character. These are random occurances and do not detract from the game, but the biggest flaw of the game does certainly detract from it, the camera.

The camera is this game is truly terrible at times, and at other times it is really good. It is really good when you are on foot, but when you are driving it is awful. The default angle when driving is tilted down so you can only see the car and about 4 feet of the road in front of you, you are constantly adjusting the camera to look up and see what is in front of you. This became a huge annoyance when I was on a timed, race style mission and controlling a monster truck, these are hard enough to control in games at the best of times, but the timing in this race was so tight that even a few seconds stopping could cost dearly and I had to replay this mission 7 times, 4 of which were due to wasting 10 seconds in all fixing the camera. Sometimes you have to watch what your doing in the car and suddenly the camera tilts down and you need to slow down a little to fix the camera and before you know it 3 mounted guns on other cars are shooting at you.

The game feels rushed as a whole but I have heard a patch is in the works and if they fix the camera they will have fixed the worst thing about the game.

All in all Mercenaries 2 is a fun ride in short bursts, it isn't a smart game and doesn't want you to think latterally when it comes to solutions to problems, it does as Vin Diesel says in xXx, "Dude, you have a bazooka. Stop thinking Prague Police and start thinking Playstation. Blow shit up!"

And that is what you do, you blow shit up and have fun doing it.

FarCry 2 was released in October this year on the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. Although it is billed as a sequel to the original FarCry, it has no ties with the original game at all. In this game you are a government agent sent to Africa to find an arms dealer known as the Jackal and eliminate him. He has turned a tribal turf war of no consequence into a full scale military action due to him supplying arms to both sides. You arrive in Africa and contract Malaria and it causes you to be in your bed in a fever when The Jackal finds you, he tells you at you are not going to kill him and that you have been fired from your government because you failed your mission. You are now a gun for hire and of no consequence to him. You fall unconcious again and when you wake up your hotel is under attack. The Jackal left you a machete and a pistol, both of which you use to get to the streets where you are attacked and almost killed. You wake up in a slaughterhouse where a general tells you that you now work for him. He gives you first aid kits to fix yourself up and arms you with some new weaposn and gives you a mission to complete. Once you complete a mission from him he lets you go on your merry way and this starts you on our road to glory. You are a mercenary in this game, taking jobs from whoever offers, but your main goal is to hunt down The Jackal and kill him. And you have 50km of Africa to play around in.

First off this game is fun, right from the start. It keeps you in constant 1st Person view like Half Life and makes sure you never come out of it, it immerses you in the world by doing this. When you get in a car, you are still in 1st person as you drive instead of going 3rd person like some games have done in the past. The landscape is very interesting, you have 50km of Africa to explore but for the most part at the beginning of the game you will stick to a couple of key areas just to get some practice at combat in the game.

As the game progresses you meet up with other Mercenaries and they become your buddies as the game goes on. This means that if you lose all your health in battle they will come and rescue you and basically give you enough time to recover to get back into the battle. But this wont happen all the time. Also your buddies while give you intel on any missions you have been given, the intel will almost always give you a better way to complete a mission so you look good to your employer and maybe get paid more. Speaking of which, we come to the currency in the game, diamonds, uncut diamonds. You use these to purchase weapons from an arms dealer.

Your enemies drop weapons all the time, so why would you need to purchase weapons? Well because your enemies weapons will suffer from degradation and rust and will jam or misfire on you after a while. Especially if go swimming or have a firefight in the rain. Your new weapons have less of a chance of any of this happening and it is always best to get some new weapons because you don't want to rely on a gun that might misfire when you need it most.

The combat in the game is frantic and the game does not have a target reticule like most FPS or 3rd Person shooters, so to get an accurate shot you need to aim down the sight and fire. This adds to the immersion and you find yourself trying to conserve your ammo and make sure you have good cover when you get in a gun battle.

Your health in the game is 5 small bars at the bottom of the screen, if any of these bars lost health but not completely they will regenerate, but if all the health is gone from one bar it will not regenarate at all. And when all 5 are empty, you are dead. To recover your health you need health packs, you carry up to 5 with when you are out and about and to recover your health you tap the LB button and your character sticks a needle into his arms and this brings his health back up.

I talked about cars earlier and this game makes good use of the cars because you will use the cars a lot of the time, especially on missions. The game has such a huge area in it, that to get from point A to point B, driving is the best way to go. No one will walk the distances, first of all because it would take too long and secondly because it is so dangerous in the wilds. Roaming gangs drive around on jeeps with mounted guns and will open fire on anyone unknown and armed and that means you.

Farcry 2 looks great, everything the game has been polished and special care and attention put to the game before release. I have had fun playing this game and it makes me feel like more of a Mercenary than the game Mercenaries 2.

So in regards to both games, if you are after a fun action game where you see things explode and you can level entire buildings without building up a sweat, play Mercenaries 2, but be warned about the dodgy camera.

If you want a realistic, visceral experience where you need skill and a good head on your shoulders, then play FarCry 2.

Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go...

2008-12-02T00:12:00.001Z

This will be my third attempt to write a blog about Dwarf Fortress. Every time I do, something always comes up to stop it from being posted.

DF is one of those games I always wanted to /get/, to understand, to be in the circle of people who play it and appreciate its obvious genius, but for the longest time the interface repeatedly repelled my attempts to crack it.

A quick summary is needed; On the surface, DF appears most like a Rogue-clone, but with additional civilisation and building options.

In true "i'm not a journalist" mode, I will attempt to make the usual connection;
DF is like Nethack meets Dungeon Keeper and the Sims round The Settlers household.
--
By now, everyone on earth with an interest in indie gaming should have read the Boatmurdered saga by now. If not, why not? It is an epic on the scale of Lord of the Rings, but without the two dozen fake endings wrapping up every character's storyline. Boatmurdered, by way of comparison, has but one ending. Fiery death! :D

It is the culmination of one of the finest threads ever created via the medium of internet message boarding, it was a community game on the somethingawful forums, where each player would take a turn in charge of this fortress (Koganusan, transliterated in the game universe as Boatmurdered) for a year of the game, creating writeups of their experiences and documenting the unfolding stories that took place under their watch, before passing the save onto the next player at the end of the year.

This story sold me on DF far more than any word of mouth or geekgasm could. I realised that a lot of it would probably have been the authors filling in the gaps, but that if even a tenth of the stuff written about was actually derived from events in the game, then the game would have a far greater scope than anything else I'd ever played.

So, I hopped over to bay21games and downloaded the latest version.

Silly me, the latest version, while technically far more impressive than that which BM was run on (it has proper engineering, fluid motion, a 3 dimensional world, far more flexibility in choosing locations, mechanics, bla bla bla), lacks for something.

The old, 2D Dwarf Fortress is ALL about the stories. You build a society for your dwarves, and they repay you by living their lives out, while you vicariously manipulate their puppet strings abstractedly. These are not just little smiley faces, they are little sim-esque people with complex emotions, desires, wishes, needs, and personalities all of their own.

This game, therefore, is The Sims multiplied a thousand fold, with additional gore and elephants.

What is lacking in the new fangled 3-dimensional world space, is a sense of story. Too much focus has been moved onto how you set up their utopian society, how you build it, zoning, irrigation planning, all that sort of jazzy shiny stuff. This is all borderline SimCity2000 material. Somewhere along the line they lose the humanity (dwarvenity?) of it all, and it turns into a text mode Garry's Mod. Shame really.

So me and Patrick have been playing DF lately. I decided to start a new save on the 2d version to check out a theory I had about building in glaciers. About 12 hours later (not in a contiguous block) I stopped after most of my population was killed in a steam explosion. (lava + ice = steam; steam + dwarf = broiled dwarf; that's storyline for ya!).

The next time I loaded this terribly addicted crack-like game, on Sunday past, was an attempt to use my newfound knowledge from the failed glacier fort to build a viable society, and after a 14 hour session, it appears to have stuck. Unfortunately I feel like I only played it for 5 minutes. Time has no meaning in the land of DF. Ultimately it has probably cost me my job but that's for another thread entirely.

What? The Force Unleashed again?

2008-12-01T22:15:00.003Z

I know I did a small post about this game a while back, but stick with me on this one. Over the weekend, I traded in a bunch of Wii games I was not playing to my local Gamestation to get some store credit, in doing so I was able to get enough cash together to get Mercenaries 2: World In Flames and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. both on the 360. Now why did I get The Force Unleashed on the 360 when I already had it on the Wii do you ask?

Well I had heard the 2 games were radically different. I am here to tell you they definetly are different.

Okay so both games roughly follow the same plot, you play as Darth Vader's secret apprentice, code name Starkiller. You have been trained in the dark side since you were a child and Vader is training you to stand with him against the Emperor to rule the galaxy.

Lets start at the beginning, the first level has you playing as Darth Vader, you have travelled to the Wookie homeworld to find one of the last Jedi and to kill him. On the Wii version you land at night and follow a rough path fighting Wookies as they come at you, they always come in 2s and you waggle your way through the level using Force Powers to clear some wreckage here and there. This level really lets you experiment with Force Powers for the first time, you are playing as a fully powered up Darth Vader so its quite interesting to muck around with.
On the 360 version, Vader lands during the day and walks right into an active warzone as the Wookies are rushing Stormtroopers, and they are not coming in 2s, this time. I saw at least 10 rushing me at one point. The level is a lot more open, the path isn't completely straight and your powers are a lot more impressive. I walked out onto walked looked like a wooden tunnel leading up, it had been carved out and was impressive. I used the force and tore it apart and killed about 5 Wookies who were running down it toward me. Then I walked up through the rubble. At the end of a level you fight a Jedi Master and in the Wii version I just waggled the Wii Remote until I won, in the 360 version I had to use all my force powers to my advantage.

After you defeat the Jedi, you find his son and his son has a strong bond with the Force. Some stormtroopers arive and Vader strikes them down and takes the boy away before anyone see's him. In the 360 version the scene is a bit more indepth, you see the Stormtroopers line up like a firing squad to eliminate the child, whereas in the Wii version you don't even see them take aim.

The game jumps ahead to you as an adult, Vader charges you to take out a Jedi Master in Nar Shadda and to eliminate everyone as there must be no witnesses, so that means Imperial troops as well. The levels in the games are completely different, the Wii version has short levels with some mini-bosses that take you to the Jedi Master and another saber fight. In the 360 version, the levels are huge, more detailed and a lot more fun to use the force in. However your Force powers are weak, you are still an apprentice and as the game progress, you gain experience and level up, you can level up your Force Powers as you go. The same goes for the Wii version, except in the Wii version all your Force Powers are available to be upgraded. In the 360 version in each new level you learn a new power and can level it up as you go.

Here is where the 2 games part ways. In the Wii version, in the battle with the Jedi Master, you use the force and send him out a window, and that's the last we see of him, for now. In the 360 version, you push the lightsaber against his eyes and then throw him through the window. That made a lot more sense to me, when I saw him later in the game and he was blind.

Also whenever you complete a level in the Wii version, you go to the Jedi Temple on Coruscant and complete a trial. This has not happened so far in the 360 version and I don't think it is going to happen. The cut scenes are more indepth in the 360 version, almost like this is the REAL Force Unleashed and the Wii version is kind of half assed. Don't get me wrong, I have had a blast playing the Wii Version. Throwing a stormtrooper around with the force is awesome no matter what machine you play it on, but put the games side by side and you feel that the studio handling the Wii version were phoning it in for most of it.

I'll give you an example:

In a scene that happens in both games, you wake up after being almost fatally injured (I wont spoil how it happened but it was awesome) and Vader suddenly lands the big twist of the game on you. Vader is speaking to you through your robot Proxy. Vader gives you some orders then cuts all contact with you. So the level opens on an imperial star destroyer. You tell Proxy to get your ship prepped for take off. Now on the Wii version you run around an empty ship looking for someone before you get off the Star Destroyer and only then do you see the Destroyer is heading for a sun! It made no sense to me at all. On the 360 version I run out onto the corridors to find Stormtroopers and alarms are going that the ship is heading on course for a sun and all systems are offline so it cannot be stopped, you find out your robot hacked their systems and set the course.

That is all explained, yet on the Wii version they explain nothing.

And just a quick word on the contols, the 360 control pad does a pretty good job with the Force Powers and it quickly becomes easy to do combos and use Force powers. The Wii version, not so much. You see as you upgrade your powers and more combos are unlocked, the way to pull off the combo becomes more complicated. So where a move was: Press Z and Swing the remote up, the later combos are more like: Press C, Z then swing the Wii remote over your head like a lasso three times, then press A + B. So I didn't bother with the higher combos and sticked with the early moves that worked for me.

I was talking to Ed about this today and I think how I explained it to him, sums up the differences best. The Wii Version of the Force Unleashed is the Fisher Price version of the game, dumbed down and not as brutal as the 360 version. I think it was sanitised because it was going to the Wii which means more kids would play it. So if you have the choice, I highly recommend the 360 version because it feels like the true version. Beating 4 rancors using Force Lightning never felt so good.

Curse you, Dwarf Fortress.

2008-12-01T14:03:00.000Z

A blog shall shortly be forthcoming, on why Dwarf Fortress stole 27 hours of my life this weekend.