Posts tagged ‘games’

A month of xbox live for a dollar. That’s value I can’t refuse. You, however, may decide to refuse it when you find out that buying it gives MS the right to charge you for a year’s membership when the month ends unless you make a nice long call to a guy in India who can’t understand why on earth you’d want to cancel something so wonderful as an xbox live gold membership.

I also couldn’t refuse Guitar Hero 3 with a wireless guitar for $74. Possibly not the best course of action for someone trying to pay off a credit card, but I felt like the gods of Buying Day were smiling on me when I got home and found the Halo 3 theme free to download for GH3.

I’ve played two minutes of Red Faction: Guerrilla and I think I’m in love. Ever since playing UFO: Enemy Unknown I’ve longed for a physics-based fully destructible world to smash up. Buildings in UFO could be destroyed but parts of the building would be left hanging unsupported in mid-air. It tended to break the immersion.

But not this game. My first action in game was to walk up to a concrete wall and smash a hole in it with my hammer. Sweet, I think as the wall leans and falls on top of me, pinning me to the ground. This is going to be excellent.

When the dog bites, when the bee stings, I simply remember my favourite things. And recently, many of them have been joining together, presumably for extra “not feeling so bad” goodness. BioWare are making an iPhone Mass Effect game. Gillian Anderson might be appearing in Doctor Who.¹ There’s a Tom Baker style costume available in Rock Band. The Cosmic Machine have made EventBox, which combines Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader and a few other things.

Also, the combination of me and a lack of swine flu is particularly gratifying.

1. Although, she’s rumoured to be the Rani; perhaps the most sucky returning villain in Doctor Who history. ↩

Coming from ‘band mode’ in Guitar Hero World Tour to Rock Band is like trading your ASUS Eee PC for a MacBook Air. Let me count the ways. Spoiler alert: there are five.

1. The band you are in does not change depending on the band leader. You have a specific band which you choose from a list.

2. Being in a band is more meaningful than some different words on banners in the animated backdrops. You have fans, you have vehicles, you earn your money together, you unlock things specific to your band.

3. Downloaded songs turn up while you’re playing sets in band mode (and probably, solo mode, I just can’t verify that yet). Compare and contrast to the Guitar Hero World Tour method, where they languish in the background, only available in custom sets.

4. The interface: it’s prettier, which is subjective, and faster, which is not. Much quicker load times and such.

5. The songs. This is key really. There’s a far better selection of music. I guess this is subjective too, but let’s put it simply: Rock Band has Radiohead and GHWT does not. Or, if we compare band-specific releases, Rock Band has the fricking Beatles and Guitar Hero has Aerosmith.

And now, one way in which Guitar Hero World Tour kicks Rock Band‘s arse:

1. Hitting the hi-hat and cymbal at the same time is a more satisfying way to activate star-energy-power-thing than waiting for specific phrases to turn up.

In my effort to post all the links in the notables thread, I’ve neglected the review column so here’s a blog post to rectify that. It’s been a conficting month. This quote from Eurogamer sums up my feelings “it’s now perfectly possible to love Sonic and wish he was dead at the same time.”

Dawn of War 2 is fun, and I haven’t even tried the co-op yet. I like the new focus on action, the rpg leveling up and no base building, but I have pangs of longing for the classic rts style.  The missions are faster as a result, since you no longer have to build a base before leaping into the action.  This makes multiplayer tougher, because there is now more emphasis on getting the right starting build and keeping your units alive. Lose a couple of squads due to poor unit selection or inattention and you won’t have the forces to take back the Strategic Points before the match ends.

Squads are treated as one entity like the first DOW, which makes handling large numbers of troops easy, unless one of your heavy weapons units gets involved in close combat. The rest of his squad then un-deploy their weapons and walk slowly into help him so their squad can entirely be involved in melee, because they’re the three musketeers apparently.  Given that they have no qualms firing into a close combat fight at other times and that their firing damage is so much higher than their melee damage, I find this vexing.  Telling a squad to teleport to an area that is out of the range of part of the squad can confuse them too.

The game is pretty, but it’s been some time since I played the first one, so it’s difficult to compare.  There are some techinical issues though.  The game would crash after every other mission, after the autosave had kicked in, so you wouldn’t lose anything except the time taken to restart the game.  While only mildly annoying, that’s been patched out thankfully.  Any remaining crashes are the fault of my computer.

Also the install screen looks like this:

My chair’s broken, and when I sit on it, it sinks all the way to its lowest point. Consequently, I’ve not been writing much recently, as it’s not that comfortable. Oh, and I’ve been addicted to Fallout 3, too. But I’m clean now. I’m giving that shit back to Jackson. I won’t touch it no more, or at least, not until it gets some more DLC.

Anyhow.

It feels a little odd reviewing a seven year old TV show, so I won’t be. But permit me some waffle. I picked up the first season of The Wire from JB Hi-Fi the other day, for the princely sum of $15. Having heard Tony Martin go on about how awesome it was on ‘Get This’,¹ I decided it was probably safe to make the investment. Three episodes in, In a shock twist, it turns out that it is awesome.

It tells the story of the drug trade and the police in Baltimore, Maryland. I went there for two days once, so I know all about it already, but it’s nice to get some extra perspective. It’s certainly more entertaining than Underbelly: A Tale of Two Titties.² Perhaps partly because it’s not burdened by telling a real story, the characters are genuinely involving, on both sides of the law. And because of this, it’s gripping. I’m desperate to see if the noble but kind of pathetic Detective McNulty gets to actually bring down his target. Likewise, I can’t wait to find out whether D’Angelo will be able to improve things, or whether he’ll just stop caring.

And there’s no annoying voiceover, either. I’ll stop the Overbellly³ comparisons there, because it’s not strictly fair. They’re very different beasts. The Wire just feels a lot more mature. Or real. Or something.

Disappointingly for me, the later seasons are now trading at closer to $50. But to be honest, if they’re anything like the first season, then they’re worth it.

1. Oh, how I miss ‘Get This’. And Richard Marsland in general. ↩
2. Do you see what I did there? Fnar fnar. Yuk yuk. ↩
3. Zing! ↩

I likes me some Prince of Persia. I have a soft spot for all the parts the Sands of Time trilogy, even if they did manage to screw various things up royally in the sequels. I’m very keen to play The Sands of Time again should they ever get around to releasing it on Xbox Live. I’m nostalgic.

So, do I hate this crazy new Prince, with his illustrated body, big scarf, and strong american accent? Well, no, because Ubisoft seem to have the knack back. After two sessions I’ve been won over; mostly due to the care they’ve taken with the dialogue between the Prince and his new friend, Elika. Someone over there has clearly found wherever they wrote down the secret of charming, simple, entertaining and amusing storytelling before they lost it for Warrior Within.

The platforming is simpler in many ways, but unlike some I don’t think that necessarily translates to easy, or at least, not to bad easy. Yes, some of the obstacles are removed by having you simply jump at a wall to wall-run, rather than holding a thumbstick towards the wall. But those obstacles were the obstacles of irritation and not the obstacles of working out where the hell to go next. Meanwhile, the game takes the surprising move of having collectables which actually have a story function — meaning that when I do eventually scour the kingdom for all 1001 of them, I’ll have the dubious excuse that not all of them have been collected in the name of obsessive compulsion.

Finally, and I’m not sure it’s even necessary to point this out, it’s a beautiful game. After the gorgeous visuals of Assassin’s Creed I’d have been disappointed if it wasn’t, but it’s its own crazy kind of illustrated, fairytale beautiful, with the beautifully animated Elika the icing on the cake.¹ If you leave the game alone for a bit, it’ll even pan across some of its soothing landscapes, just to make sure you realise that it’s very, very nice indeed.

It’s kind of easy, but it’s kind of nice. Certainly, after playing Left 4 Dead and constantly being brutally slaughtered by legions of hideous zombies, this hits the spot.

1. Clearly someone’s learned the value of subtlety at some point since Warrior Within. ↩

As I write this, there are 79 minutes left in November, which means I’ll need to average something like 10 words per second to finish NaNoWriMo in time. Maybe next year.

Several things got in the way of it, but one of the most enjoyable was Fable II. After previously giving up on Fable in irritation after a gaggle of annoying villagers called me “Chicken Chaser” for no reason I could sensibly work out, I didn’t expect to enjoy the sequel, but a bunch of good reviews persuaded me to give it a chance. I was happy I did; though the villagers are still annoying in that they’ll swarm you the second you come into the village,¹ the generally malleable nature of the world is highly entertaining. Any game which claims that you can make your own destiny will always be lying to some extent, but Fable II’s major decisions and consequences are usually interesting, and occasionally hilarious.

Another thing was Gears of War II, a solid if unremarkable sequel to the solid if unremarkable original. I’m playing through the campaign with Andy and with housemate Andrew at the moment, which avoids those awkward moments when you shout out the wrong partner’s name during a particularly intense bit.

I moved house recently, and was given a chilli plant. Having gotten over my initial disbelief and excitement at learning that I suddenly controlled the means of chilli production, I almost forgot I had it. Luckily, it still appears to be alive.

They’ve released a Deluxe Edition of Casino Royale, the bastards. It’s not even remotely fair. Most films don’t even have one Blu-Ray release, and here’s Casino Royale getting two. I’ve gotten some practice at palming off DVD copies of films to friends when I want to upgrade to Blu-Ray, but it’s harder to find people to palm old Blu-Rays off to.

I’ve been meaning to write one of Andy’s “And Now, Five Things”, but then, I’ve been meaning to do a lot of things.

1. And, occasionally wander into your bedroom while you’re sharing a special moment with your wife. ↩