OneOutnumbered

World of Tanks

2011-05-28T12:19:00.000+01:00

Since my last post I've encountered the delights of tear-arsing around Ibiza in Test Drive Unlimited 2, I've finally prestiged in CoD Blops and I've tentatively dipped a toe into the 14 day free trial of Star Wars: Galaxies. But it is World of Tanks that has really captured my imagination, and hoovered up hours of my gaming time. I bought L.A. Noire, but it sat unopened on my shelf for three days because I was having so much fun pottering about in my little tank.

World of Tanks (WoT) is described as an MMO, but it isn't like any MMO you will have come across before. It's 100% PVP for a start, and instead of an endless roam-able world the gameplay is limited to short instanced battles of 15 a-side. In fact it seems to have more in common with the Battlefield's and Call of Duty's of this world than the Everquest's and World of Warcraft's. The main difference I can see between WoT and Modern Warfare 2, for example, is that everyone is on the same server so you never have to worry about finding a populated server with a good ping playing the game-type you want etc, etc... You just select the tank you want to use from your garage, make sure there's ammo in it and click join battle. Hey presto, 29 other folks who have also just clicked Join Battle will be thrown in with you and off you go!

When you think of a tank, you think of a huge armour plated behemoth with a massive gun on the front, so when you jump into WoT you expect to be this invulnerable machine of mass destruction and while you sort of are, you really aren't at all. I shall explain. The tanks, even the little tier 1 vehicles that are little more than an upturned tin bath with an air-rifle stuck on top, feel big and powerful. The sound effects of roaring engines, creaking and clanking tracks and thundering guns, coupled with the lovingly recreated models of WWII era tanks really do make you feel like you are driving this hulking metal monster of death. The fact that everyone else is also driving one however, kind of brings everything back down to the realms of your normal FPS, it's very rare, at least until the heavy tanks are introduced at around tier 5, that you end up sat slugging it out for ages with an enemy tank, bouncing shells off each other. Two or three good hits are usually all it takes to finish off a tank of a similar level to you, and the fact that you are often in matches with tanks two or three levels higher than you can often make you feel very squishy indeed! Killed within the first minute of the battle? No matter, you can choose to wait until the battle ends, spectating the action from the viewpoints of your surviving team mates, or you can hit Escape, select leave battle and go back to your garage. The tank you just lost will stay in that instanced battle until it finishes, meaning you still get any XP or credits awarded during the fight, but leaving you free to pick one of your other tanks and jump straight back into the action.

And best of all, this fantastic diesel-powered destruction is absolutely free! WoT is calling itself an MMO, and as is the current trend with that genre it has adopted the free-to-play cash-shop model. This means that all you have to do to play is go along to www.worldoftanks.com and download the client. The whole game is free and can be played fairly unimpeded without ever spending any money at all. The game uses two kinds of in-game currency, the first are called credits and are accumulated in game by participating in matches, the better you do, the more you earn. These credits can be spent on upgrading parts for you tank, and eventually buying new tanks, tank destroyers or artillery. The second type of currency is Gold and this can only be bought from the online store for real money. Gold can then be used to buy premium tanks, none of which are particularly better than the regular tanks, but it removes the need for you to grind out loads of credits if you fancy trying your hand at a higher tier. It can also be used to buy premium ammo, which I'm not so sure is a good thing, as it is definitely more powerful than regular ammo, and I'm not happy about anyone being able to 'buy' an advantage on the battlefield. However, ammo soon runs out, and it would prove very expensive to keep re-supplying with premium ammo! There are a few other uses for Gold that I feel are far more useful:
Extending your garage - allowing you to have more than four vehicles to your name at once.
Converting XP to 'Free XP' - You gain XP in battles which can be used to research upgrades for your tank, once everything is researched the tank keeps gaining XP, but can't do anything with it. You can use Gold to convert this tank-specific XP into 'free XP', allowing it to be spent on any vehicle, very handy later on when research starts needing loads of XP even for the most basic of upgrades.
Purchasing Premium Gametime - Increases the amount of credits and XP you earn in battle by 50%. It may not seem like much, but this boost really makes a difference, especially when saving up credits for your next tank!

A few downsides for balance, and the main one is, ironically, balance. Tier 1 is fine with everyone roaring around in tier 1 light tanks and the occasional tier 2 medium tank, but when you get to tiers 3 and 4 you often find yourself in with tier 5 and 6 heavy tanks, and as a general rule, a tier 3 light tank can't damage a tier 5 heavy tank no matter how many times it shoots it, and a tier 5 heavy tank will one-shot a tier 3 light tank almost every time. This does get annoying, but you find ways around it, becoming more of a scout, picking out heavies for your artillery to take out, whilst simultaneously hunting down the enemy artillery yourself. My other bug-bear is that it can feel a bit grindy, especially when you are trying to get the credits together to buy a tank from the next tier up. At the moment I'm enjoying the game, and it's still fresh and new enough for me to not really care, but I think as I near tier 10 it could become more of an issue. Also the fact you can only play with friends in groups of three, or full platoons of 15 seems a bit restrictive, but I haven't gotten involved in that side of things too much yet to be able to say properly how it works, maybe being in a clan enables the game to put several groups of 3man teams from the same clan into a match together, I don't know.

On the whole then, I'm having a blast in World of Tanks, and at the recession busting price of FREE there's no reason why you shouldn't give it a go as well. Just remember to buy some gold if you enjoy it, games like this still need to turn a profit, and the cash-shop model seems to fit this title like a glove.

A Quick Catch-up

2011-04-16T18:17:00.000+01:00

Hello blog. Yes I know, six months without an update is probably not the best way to build or maintain a readership, or even be able to remember which password I need to get in to you. Let us never speak of it again.

So, a lot has happened in my little corner of the gaming world since I was last here, not least of which would be my involvement in the open beta and subsequent release of Trion Worlds grand new MMO 'Rift'. The game that went into open beta was a finely honed and polished product that appeared to have already been tested to within an inch of it's life. So good was it in fact that even before it was released it was of a far higher quality than many games that had already been running for a number of years! I used the time in beta to try out some of the different classes in the game, and to familiarise myself with, (and test the limitations of), the
new Souls system of class building that the game introduced. At first glance it would appear to make for an incredibly flexible way to get the balance of Healing, DPS and Tanking ability that anyone could want. You start off by choosing your base archetype, Warrior, Cleric, Mage or Rogue. Each of these classes then gets to pick three Souls (basically skill sets) from a list of eight with which to build the character you want to play. Warrior souls are mainly defensive tanking or strength based offensive DPS, Clerics are mainly healing with some ranged or melee DPS, Mages are mainly ranged DPS with some healing, buff/debuff options, etc, etc... To start off with I chose a Warrior with Paladin, (classic sword & board tank type skills), Voidknight, (a kind of resistance tank, vulnerable to melee but impervious to magical attack), and an offensive soul which i can't remember now. I figured this would give me a nicely rounded offensive tank with plenty of resist and block ability, and it worked, to a degree. What actually happened though was that out in the wilds versus trash mobs I was a one man wrecking machine, but in really tough fights I wasn't offensive enough to kill the mobs before they killed me, and I wasn't defensive enough to withstand their attacks for very long. Fortunately there is another really nice mechanic in the game which means you can run several different soul combinations at once, with a button on your hot-bar to toggle between skill sets. You can also clear out any of these 'roles' at any time and slot in different souls as you see fit. Eventually I gave up on the all-rounder tank and went for a more traditional setup, with Paladin and Warlord as my main souls and the recipients of most of my skill points. When the game launched and I joined up with my clan mates I decided to roll a healing biased Cleric and have been steadily slogging away ever since. I think being involved in the beta for an extended period before the game actually launched my have shortened the games lifespan a little for me, because even though my Cleric is only in the mid level-20's ,(out of a current maximum of 50), I've started to drift away from Rift, even though it is a fantastic game that I'm really happy to have been involved with from such an early stage. I still enjoy my time in there, but the times I'm in there are becoming fewer and farther between as the months go on. I'm determined to reach level cap with at least one of the 10 or so characters I've got in there, (DAMN YOU, accursed alt-itis!), but it may take a little while yet as there are so many other games to play at the moment! I look at my shelf of unopened Xbox games and despair!

But, rather than opening one of those, i've decided instead to get back into the multiplayer side of Bad Company 2, still a fantastic game, if a little frustratingly one sided at times. As with all online FPS's you are only as good as the rest of your team, and I do seem to end up surrounded by useless muppets a lot of the time in that game. Still, it's good fun, especially on Team Speak with friends, and I've finally unlocked all of the weapons so can now just relax and play whatever class I fancy at the time, rather than constantly chasing the next unlock.

There's also been a little PlanetSide action recently, following the announcement that a PlanetSide sequel is well and truely on the way! Will it be the saviour of gaming as me and my outfit mates have been praying for these past five years or so? Only time will tell. Until then though a few of us have ventured back into the creaking husk of the original for one last hurrah. The strain is beginning to show to be honest. It's still a damn fine game, but the low, frequently drastically unbalanced populations make it an often frustrating and thankless chore rather than the sweeping epic it once was.

Console wise there's been Assassins Creed Brotherhood which I'm yet to finish, the massively disappointing Homefront , which i'm probably never going to finish, and the outrageously excellent Bulletstorm which I did finish and thoroughly enjoyed. There's also been a fair bit of jumping about like an idiot after getting Kinect for my birthday, but that seems to have been a fairly short-lived fad as I haven't used it in a good few months now.

And that, I think, brings us about up to date. Hopefully the next update won't take another six months as I intend to do more frequent "What I've been playing" type posts just to keep my hand in and to get me used to writing again. And with that I think i need a lie down. My brain hurts.

Like a kid in the worlds most expensive sweet shop

2010-10-30T13:38:00.000+01:00

All summer long there was barely a single game release that made me feel like I had to have it. Now, it feels like the pre-Christmas floodgates have been flung open and all the goodies that should have been gently trickling into my shopping basket throughout the year are pouring out in a tumultuous cascade. I'm swamped in triple-A releases that I have no way of keeping up with.

I've plucked a few choice items from the swirling torrent over the past few weeks, mainly 'Halo: Reach', 'Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock' and 'Castlevania', but so much else has gone sailing by! Games like 'Enslaved: Odyssey to the West' and 'Vanquish' have really piqued my interest, and if they'd been released back in the great game drought of the summer I'd have snapped them both up on release day. But when I'm having to leave games like 'Medal of Honour' and 'Fallout-New Vegas' on the shelf because I simply can't afford to buy any more games this month, what chance do the smaller, less well known releases have?

Yesterday was a prime example of launch scheduling gone mad. Three of the most anticipated games of the year (for me at least) were released on the same day. 'Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II', Fable 3 and of course, the one I've been waiting for with bated-breath, Rock Band 3. Just the games alone would set me back somewhere in the region of a hundred and twenty quid, but when you consider the fact that the big selling point of RB3 is of course the instruments then things just start getting silly! Amazon is selling the Keyboard peripheral bundled with the game for £99.99, the new multi-buttoned guitar controller is going for £109.99 and the new souped-up cymbal-bedecked drumkit goes for another £99.99. So just for Rock Band I'm looking at £309.97, add to that another eighty quid for the other two games and I'm looking at a layout of almost FOUR HUNDRED POUNDS! For COMPUTER GAMES! IN ONE DAY!!!

Thank you games industry, your infinite wisdom has decreed that no-one is going to buy games in the summer, but everyone is willing to shell out hundreds of pounds every week in the run-up to Christmas; and as a result, many of the games I've been waiting months to play will now have to wait many more months. Hell, I may even be tempted to start shopping second-hand.

What a bunch of jerks.

Halo: Reach (Contains spoilers)

2010-10-29T15:28:00.000+01:00

"Remember where it all began. Remember... Reach."

This was the mantra of the advertising campaign that ran up to the launch of one of 2010's most anticipated games, along with some very powerful, live action trailers of regular folks living on Reach going about their daily lives, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that is about to befall them. Unfortunately all of this was wasted on me, because I am probably the only gamer in the 'verse who had no idea that Reach was a planet, let alone it's significance in Halo lore. At least I didn't before playing this.

The first two titles in the Halo franchise passed me merrily by without troubling me in the slightest. I never had an original Xbox, and the little I saw of the PC version of Halo: Combat Evolved didn't exactly make me want to rush out and buy it. So when Halo 3 launched on the 360 I stumbled into it with a vague idea of who Masterchief was and very little else. Being dropped straight into the middle of an ongoing story with no idea what was happening, really hard fights, confusing maps and an impenetrable plot, I quickly got bored. I put the 'Chief back in his box, set him on the shelf and was quite content to leave him there safe in the knowledge that Halo wasn't for me.

When Halo: Reach launched in September, I was tempted by it. I'd been hearing good things, and it was after-all going to be (developer) Bungie's last foray into the Halo universe, so it was pretty much guaranteed to be a decent game by anyone's standards. I was still in two minds about buying the thing or not right up until the point I slipped the disc into the draw of my Xbox. And as I started playing, I suddenly "got it". I was starting from scratch, playing a prequel without foreknowledge of what was to come which made the whole thing more exciting for me, I believe, than for a Halo devotee who would have known exactly what had happened on Reach.

The game starts on a reveal of the helmet you just chose from the armour selection screen sat in the middle of a scorched wasteland, sporting a huge bullet-hole in the visor. Ominous, yes, but I'm not nearly fatalistic enough to jump to the obvious conclusion of YOU ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!! I mean, I didn't realise from my hour or so of playing Halo 3 that Masterchief was the LAST Sapartan! How could I have known?

The game breaks you in gently enough, with a mission to investigate the actions of a local rebel group, which turns out to be a small expeditionary group of Covenant, the coalition of alien forces intent on wiping out humanity. The fights and set-pieces get tougher and more spectacular as the game progresses, until you finally discover that it's not just an expeditionary force, it's a full scale invasion! Cue some of the most jaw-dropping battles I've ever seen in an FPS. The mission to knock out a sensor jamming station is just awesome, with you tearing along in your trusty Warthog flanked by dozens of others and with huge ships thundering overhead, like flying battleships, pummelling the enemy with enormous ordnance. There's a nicely handled space battle thrown in for good measure, lots of varied vehicular sections and some of the best on foot running and gunning I've had the pleasure to encounter. Another highlight for me was the point where you get back onto Reach from the Covenant mothership. You find yourself alone in a city which at first glance looks normal, all clean lines and white buildings, but then you start to notice litter everywhere, and here or there the unmistakeable slumped form of a dead body. As you progress through the level things get dirtier and darker, smoke and fire start appearing, just glimpsed in the distance at first, but getting closer every time you pass a window. It's exquisitely done, and just helped suck me into the game all the more. The game is driven along by a beautifully written and acted series of FMV set pieces that really ramp up the tension and sense of hopelessness.

The campaign really got it's claws into me, so much so that I finished it in three sittings, (make sure you stay for the post-credits sequence, it's awesome!) The way Reach ends leads me to believe that Halo: Combat Evolved takes place immediately after, and it left me wanting to see how the story continues. Take note Bungie, I think an Xbox Live Arcade launch of a pimped up HDified Halo 1 and 2 would make you a killing off the back of Reach! Anyway, without having access to those first two games, I made do with playing through ODST, which I also thoroughly enjoyed and completed, and now I'm back in Halo 3 and about half-way through the campaign there two.

Halo:Reach. Simply the finest campaign in any first person shooter to date. Now for completing it on Legendary in co-op!

Game Cinematics: The New Hollywood?

2010-08-14T11:23:00.001+01:00

I've been neglecting this blog again lately, mainly because I'm still in a place where I'd rather be spending time playing games than writing about them, which I think is a good thing. My free time is being taken up at the moment with a return to Warhammer Online on the PC and on the console it's Rock Band 2, complete with a shiny new drum-kit.

But I've not come here today to talk about what I've been playing, I thought I'd do something a little different for a change. I spend a fair bit of time online perusing YouTube when I'm not actively playing a game, and one of my favourite subjects are the increasingly sophisticated trailer videos for upcoming games. Like Hollywood in miniature, these two minute masterpieces deliver massive bang for your buck with all the excitement and action of a summer blockbuster movie, only in 100% CGI. I thought I'd take a few minutes here to share a few of my favourites.

First up is the trailer for a game I've had an on-off relationship with since it launched, Mythic's Warhammer Online:

Like most of these trailers, this is utterly useless if you were hoping to see if the game itself would appeal to you, as there is no actual gameplay footage in it whatsoever. But that's not really the point of these videos. After seeing that, who wouldn't want to have a go at being a Shadow Warrior, (the athletic, dual sword wielding Elf), or a Bright Wizard, (the pyro-maniacal ginger), or an impractically under-dressed Dark Elf Sorceress? It's a pretty epic piece of cinema, even at four and a half minutes.

Next up we'll stick with the Warhammer theme, but this time moving on to the Warhammer 40,000 franchise and the trailer for next years Space Marine:

As things move on, and technology is improving we're starting to see a blurring of the lines between Full-Motion-Video and gameplay footage. It's a little hard to tell, but I think the Space Marine trailer actually contains a fair amount of the latter, and man does it look GOOD! I'm really looking forward to this one.

Finally for this entry I'm going to go with a game I'm not particularly looking forward too, but who's trailers thus far have been absolutely superb, Star Wars: The Old Republic:

That's just a really good cinematic. Well scripted, well acted, well choreographed, jaw-droppingly good looking... why couldn't they have let theses guys do the Star Wars prequels and kept that oaf Lucas out of the way?!

Considering the level of sophistication we are starting to see here, merely to advertise a computer game, I'm starting to wonder why we aren't seeing more in the way of fully CGI movies at the box office. Pixar and the like are doing wonderful things with the CGI equivalent of cartoons, and Cameron had a decent stab at it with Avatar, but even he wasn't bold enough to go all in and make a 100% CGI movie for adults. Why not? That movie proved beyond doubt that CGI characters can carry a film to enormous success. The lucrative teen-to-mid-30's male audience has grown up on computer games, and the recent massive successes of games such as Modern Warfare 2 and GTA IV proves that there is a market for computer generated entertainment. A movie that I'm hoping is going to prove this point, (but it won't because it's too niche), is the forthcoming Ultramarines movie, which makes this post nicely cyclical.

Movies of computer games are notoriously rubbish, maybe it's time we let the guys who make the computer games have a go at making their own movies!

If anyone reads this (unlikely I know) I'd love you to leave a comment on some of your favourite game cinematics. cheers,
Dok.

Turbine and Twisted Pixel work on "Secret MMO"

2010-06-30T07:30:00.001+01:00

I was talking gaming the other night with my friend Welshtroll, as happens quite often, and he pointed me in the direction of this article on joystiq.com. A statement from Twisted Pixel, (Splosion Man, Comic Jumper), confirming that they had been contracted by MMO giants Turbine, (DDO, LOTRO), to work on an as-yet unannounced console MMO! So, this got us thinking as to what this game might be.

For the MMORPG genre to finally make the jump to console it's going to need to be something that lots of people want to play, including, or should that be especially, people who have never had the slightest urge to play an MMO before. Star Wars already has an MMO out in the form of SOE's Star Wars Galaxies, and another one on the way, BioWare's hugely anticipated Star Wars: The Old Republic. Another massive franchise that already has an MMO is Lord of The Rings, which, like the Star Wars games, is only available on the traditional MMO platform, the PC.

The only IP I can think of that carries enough clout to finally bridge the gap between the hardcore PC gamer and the casual console user is, of course, Harry Potter.

There are a few clues in the statement that would back this up. For the game to be in or nearing a state of completion, the full arc of the story needs to already be known, but for an almost finished game to have not even been announced means that the publishers/developers are waiting for something to happen to time their announcement to. The Harry Potter franchise fits this bill perfectly. The series of books came to a close a few years ago now, giving Turbine all the story, background and world detail they need to make the game; and with the release of the final film later this year there is the perfect event to tie the announcement in with. Also, the fact the final film is being released in two parts is an ideal marketing situation for any tie-in game. If the announcement is held off until the launch of part one in the autumn, Turbine can piggy-back on the massive Hollywood publicity machine, and ride the hype all the way through to the summer of next year when they can launch the game to coincide with the release of the final movie in the series.

The other major clue is Warner Bros. recent purchase of Turbine. At the time, it looked like this was a move to ensure Warner had the rights to all of the Lord of the Rings game franchises, but the fact that Warner are the studio behind the Potter movies seems to now reveal ulterior motives behind the acquisition.

So there you have it. Turbine will announce Harry Potter as their next MMO title sometime around November 2010, and will release the game on PC AND console somewhere around July 2011.

Catch-up.

2010-06-20T04:49:00.000+01:00

It has been many long months since I graced this blog with an entry. Mainly it would seem because I am currently a happy and contented gamer, and as a rule happy contented people don't need to blog about stuff. Also, between work, my burgeoning hobby as a photographer, and actually playing games, I've had very little time to actually write about playing games. So for tonight I'll just run through a brief re-cap of what I've been up to, and then over the next few days I'll hopefully get around to focusing more closely on a few of the areas that have caught my attention recently.

Last time I was here I was extolling the virtues of the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 single player campaign. After that I moved on to Batman: Arkham Asylum, a game I'd been looking forward to playing for quite some time. It's a nicely atmospheric, story lead third-person action game, set in a world that is exquisitely realised and suitably dark and brooding. A delightfully mischievous Harley Quinn and a fine performance from Mark Hamill as The Joker give you some interesting and unusual villains to go up against, and there are the regulation big fights against the likes of Bane and Killer Croc. It's a fine game, but for one reason or another I ended up moving on before I'd completed it. Silly of me really as I know I'm not very far from completing the main story arc... I 'll definitely go back in though, Arkham Asylum's Batman is a hugely enjoyable character to play, it's a fun universe to visit, and I'd like to see how the story ends before I forget what it was about in the first place! Definitely one for the to-do list.

Next up was a brief sojourn into the world of Gears of War 2, again, a great game on first impressions. Mad, relentless action, huge set-piece battles and more fire-power than you can shake a (boom)stick at. My time here though was cut short by the announcement of a free week in Lord of the Rings Online, a game which I have played and enjoyed, on and off, for about 2 years now. I rolled two new characters during the week, a Champion who I managed to get into the mid level 20's and a Warden that I got to about level 17 or so. I won't go into LOTRO to much here as I'd like to do a few more in-depth posts on it in the future, but, suffice it to say, I enjoyed the week enough to be tempted by the massively reduced Lifetime subscription offer that was running at the same time. I'll also definitely be heading back into Gears 2 at some point. It was a lot of fun and I'd have probably played it through to the end if the new shinys hadn't gotten in the way.

My journey through Middle Earth was soon halted by my old clan mates making a return to my all-time favourite all-time game of all-time - PLANETSIDE! PlanetSide is one of those games that, as long as I have friends playing it, I can come back to time and time again. The website count-down to the games 7th anniversary event was the main reason everyone had signed up again, and as with all things PlanetSide over the last 3 or 4 years, it turned out to be a massive let-down. But, the old gang all back together in the old stomping ground was priceless. When you've got a good bunch of friends all on voice in that game and things are going your way on the battlefield, I don't think there's anything out there still that can rival that experience. After the let-down of the event people started drifting off again, and after missing a few weeks due to a busy work schedule I found myself back in the land of the console again. Though I am still subbed to PlanetSide for now, and hopefully we'll get some more sessions in before my sub runs out.

Back in console land I found myself taking on the role of Rico Rodriguez, secret agent, regime-change specialist and all-round ice-cool Latino bad-ass in Just Cause 2. This is 100% the MOST fun single-player game I've ever played. EVER. A huge open world to explore (400KMsq to be precise) and cause chaos in. A living, breathing country full of civilians, revolutionaries, corrupt police and military and one mad ruthless dictator. And your job is to run around blowing stuff up and killing bad guys in the most comedic ways possible. Probably another game I'll do a more in-depth look at as there's just so much to say about it, so for now I'll just say, if you are looking for a fun single player experience, look no further than Just Cause 2.

JC2 is now nicely wrapped up, although there's still plenty to see and do even after the main story is complete. I can see myself dipping into that one for a long time to come, but not before I've finished my current game, the almost equally awesome Red Dead Redemption form Rockstar Games. I'm currently having a blast roaming the not-so-old west as retired gunslinger John Marston, in a quest to find and kill a member of the gang I once rode with. The story so far is fantastic, the characters are believable and increadibly well realised. But the biggest star of the show is the world itself. It is staggeringly well made. Every time I play it I feel like I'm in an old cowboy movie. The light is perfect, the landscape is stunning, the place is alive with wildlife, the interaction between your character and the locals feels real and believable, and there is just so much to see and do. I'm 25+hours in and just over 50% complete; and that's before we even start on the multiplayer aspect of it all!

So, that's pretty much what I've been up to, and if you read all that, well done! Between LOTRO, PlanetSide, Just Cause and Red Dead, there's enough material to keep me blogging for months. They are all fantastic games in their own right, all unique in their own way and all fine examples of where gaming stands as this century heads into it's teens. PlanetSide is the old man of the group, a dying game with an ever dwindling playerbase, but with ideas and mechanics decades ahead of its time that needs to be learned from. Lord of the Rings Online, a traditional MMORPG very much of the old-school, but currently being injected with new life as whole new subscription and "free-to-play" models are being introduced. Just Cause 2 and Red Dead Redemption are at the forefront of gaming, to the point where they almost feel like a hybrid of traditional games and MMOs. A Massively-SINGLE-player game if you like. These are turbulent and exciting times for the games industry, and I for one can't wait to see where it goes next.

Completeion Update: Battlefield - Bad Company 2

2010-04-10T04:31:00.000+01:00

After starting several games which fizzled out after only a few sessions, (namely Dirt 2 and Red Faction Guerrilla), I finally found a single player game good enough to hold my attention. I wrote yesterday of how Bad Company 2 has saved my online multiplayer soul, and now it seems it's done the same in single player campaign mode. I'd already bought the console version before I got the message to try it out on PC, so when it came to the campaign I figured I'd try and get some of my moneys worth by playing through the campaign on the XBOX, giving me the added bonus of all that lovely gamer score!

The game starts off with the obligatory training mission, presented here as a World War II based prologue to the main story. The tutorial is pretty much spot on for what it needs to do. There's plenty of action without ever overwhelming the player, and the gameplay guide is well integrated into the mission. From this promising start the game just gets better and better. The rest of the campaign is set in the present, as you take control of Pvt. Preston Marlowe, part of a four man team who in turn are part of "Bad Company" as they head off into the jungles of South America to try to stop a rogue Russian colonel getting his hands on a piece of secret and deadly weapons technology that could spell disaster for the good ol' U.S of A. Ok, so the story is about as unoriginal as it gets, but it never takes itself too seriously and it certainly makes a hell of a lot more sense than the plot of Modern Warfare 2's single player campaign! A smart and funny script, (including some cracking little jibes at MW2's expense), and some fine voice talent in the four main characters makes it easy to overlook the shortcomings of the plot itself.

The game is played out over a variety of terrains, from steamy jungles and snowy mountains, to barren deserts and ruined city's; mostly on foot, but often gunning helicopter mounted mini-guns, driving tanks or racing ATV quad-bikes. There's plenty to see and do, and, despite the generally linear gameplay, usually several ways to do it. The obligatory collectibles come in the form of weapons that you take off fallen foes or find lying around the maps, ticking one off on your collectibles chart every time you pick up a gun you haven't encountered before. A neat little feature also sees the guns you find added to your weapons caches that are placed at the beginning of each level, and at other useful points along the way. Thus enabling the player to try out new weapons combinations if the one they are currently using suddenly becomes useless for the task in hand. The other type of collectible hidden throughout the game are the M-COM satellite uplink stations, (pictured below), which need to be destroyed. There are 24 of these hidden throughout the game, and despite their rather large size they are indeed well hidden! I got about 15 of them on my first play through and had to go back in with the aid of a guide to find the last few... I know, I know... I feel bad about it, don't look at me like that.

The achievements are split 30/20, with the former being campaign based and the latter obtainable through online multiplayer. I managed to pick up most of the campaign based ones on the first run through, which is always nice, and coupled with the fact there are no "Kill 10,000 enemies" or "Find 500 pointless things" type achievements, it's good incentive to play through again to try to pick up the ones you missed first time. Fortunately the game is fun enough, and the campaign short enough, for this to not feel like a huge waste of time as it so often does in other games. One small gripe would be that the campaign feels a little short, but it's probably a couple of hours longer than the one in MW2, and like that game, the meat of BFBC2 is its massive online multiplayer. Having some achievements tied to multiplayer isn't always a good idea, but there aren't any here that are too outrageous, (such as "Beat one of the Development Team in a race" Yes Dirt 2, I'm looking at you), and i think they'll probably have the effect of enticing a few people who wouldn't normally touch a multi-player FPS with a barge pole into giving it a bash. I don't feel the need to espouse too much on the virtues of the online experience, as I've already hailed it as my savior of the genre in my last post.

Taken as a whole, this is a hell of a game. EA/DICE really did a fine job with Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and if you are even remotely interested in the First Person Shooter genre then you really should play it. Bring on the new Medal of Honor game I say, and let's see if these two companies can bring something new and exciting to the table once again!

Anger Management

2010-04-09T08:32:00.000+01:00

I seem to be keeping up my past record of starting well and quietly fizzling out when it comes to blogging. Though to be fair this blog hasn't been helped much by the fact I became so utterly addicted to Modern Warfare 2. There's only so much you can write about it after all, and the fact I've now come to realise is that I wasn't actually enjoying it all that much! No enjoyment = no motivation to write about it! That's not strictly true, I still enjoy it enough to drop in every now and then, but I came to realise that I'd end up rage quitting the damn game almost every time, several hundred percent angrier than when I started. Computer games are meant to be a source of fun and enjoyment, not of ulcers, embolisms and broken control pads! I was so determined to get better at the game and to race to tenth prestige that I lost sight of the fact I was meant to be enjoying the game along the way. I was putting in at least four hours a day, almost every day, and if I wasn't getting positive kill/death ratios in every game I was getting down on myself. I'd get ridiculously angry if I got killed in a suspicious way, ready to call anyone and everyone who killed me a cheating c*nt as soon as look at them!

Then, one of my old PlanetSide outfit buddys got in touch to let me know that a bunch of those guys were playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on PC and having a blast, and that I should go join them. So I did. And I instantly saw what I was missing in MW2. FUN! Playing with friends FOR A LAUGH, not for competition. BFBC2 is a very different beast from MW2, so much so that I don't think it's really fair to even compare the two. BFBC2 is so much more squad centric, it's also slower paced and played out over much bigger maps, all of which means that deaths rarely reach double figures, even though the matches last about twice as long as a MW2 match, (in which it is quite possible, and even usual depending on the game type, to die thirty or more times!) On the whole it's a much more relaxing game to play, despite the fact that it's still a full on first-person-shooter, full of action and explosions and tanks and helicopters!

It's given me the opportunity to take a step back from my MW2 obsession and take a look at what I really want from the game now. I'm still going to get to tenth prestige, (I'm currently level 45 of fourth prestige), but I realise now it's a marathon, not a sprint. I can afford to take my time getting there, and enjoy playing with my friends as I do, not trying to race them to the finish.

I'll leave it there for this update, but there's plenty more to come now that my gaming life has become so much healthier. I've even dipped my toe back into the world of MMO's that I'd become so disenchanted with and I'm really enjoying it!
Until next time, gentle reader...

My Week in Gaming

2010-02-08T04:51:00.000Z

This week I have been mostly playing BAYONETTA. And Modern Warfare 2 of course. A quick MW2 update first then. This last week has seen me rocket up through the ranks to hit level 52 of second prestige, unfortunately it's at about this point that the grind really sets in and level progression becomes a real chore. Hopefully a few 10K challenges will expedite matters. I've still got my trusty silent assassin load-out but it's not my primary role now. Since unlocking the ACR assault rifle I've decided to try and max that out for the shiny gold title it'll give me. It's going well so far, all I need now are the 40 bullet penetration kills with FMJ's equipped to finish it off, unfortunately that's going to take quite a while.

So, onto the main focus of the week, Bayonetta! A mad story driven romp about a 500 year old witch who uses her magical hair as clothing and kills angels to prevent herself being dragged down to Hell! Or something. The story is a badly told, convoluted mess that makes very little sense, but the script is smart and funny and the characters are like-able enough. The game is as cool as it is odd, Bayonetta herself is a ludicrously overly sexualised creature, complete with perpetual lollypop sucking and getting nekkid at the drop of a hat, and your angelic foes are increadibly well designed and realised. The boss fights, which seem to happen every 5 minutes, tend to end in a series of immersion-breaking quick-time events, but are on the whole good fun. The cinematic sequences are fun and quite watchable the first time around, but I imagine will get very tiresome on subsequent playthroughs, playthroughs that will be required if you want to get all the achievements on offer.

My biggest gripe is with the difficulty settings. I started off playing on normal mode which was fine at the beginning, but once I'd gotten passed the initial low level baddies I started getting so much damage during the fights that I was spending every penny (or halo to be precise) that I earned on health boosting lollypops, meaning I'd never get a chance to buy the advanced techniques, weapons or equipment from the store. The amount of damage I was taking also meant I was getting 'stone' awards after every boss fight, which is basically the games way of telling me that I suck! This was starting to make me not want to play anymore, but fortunately you can alter the difficulty setting on the fly, so I dropped down one level onto Easy mode, and lo and behold, it's way too easy! I finished the rest of the game with nothing lower than a bronze medal, and that I got for fighting the end game boss, who is, for all intents and purposes, GOD! I mean, ok, maybe I do suck, I've never played a game like this before and maybe with a couple of playthroughs I could do ok on the normal difficulty setting, but COME ON! The difference between Easy and Normal is just colossal. It was fun on easy, but the lack of any real challenge meant it wasn't as fun as it could have been, and the constant deaths after about level 4 on normal meant that it just wasn't fun at all. Surely the 'Normal' difficulty should have been called 'Hard' and 'Normal' should have come somewhere between the two?

On the whole though, the difficulty disparity and the confusing story are only minor drawbacks compared to the magnificent whole. Loads of class and character, plenty of ingenuity and a big pile of laugh-out-loud fun. A fine way to start 2010.

Next up I'm getting my RPG on! I've just spent a few hours immersed in Dragon Age: Origins, and so far I'm thoroughly enjoying it. It's like a movie crossed with one of those choose-your-own-adventure books! I've played a few MMORPG's before, but never really tried a single player one, so, like Bayonetta, this is another new gaming experience for me, and so far, I like!

Completion update 2

2010-01-31T06:17:00.000Z

Just a quick update on how my quest to complete my back-catalogue of games is going. The short answer is that it isn't. I'm still engrossed in Modern Warfare 2, hitting 2nd prestige earlier this week and already soaring my way up the ranks to the mid level 40's. I'm pretty much concentrating on a small set of weapons this time round as opposed to my usual 'level-up-as-many-guns-as-possible-for-the-XP-bonuses' method. My main weapon of choice is the UMP45 sub-machinegun, with two different setups. The original one which I don't use much any more had marathon, lightweight and commando as the perk setup. This arrangement is great for getting around the maps quickly and getting in for the up-close and personal kills. I used this setup to unlock all the attachments for the gun, earning a nice shiny title for my trouble; I even maxed out my throwing knife kills using this loadout, picking up a bunch of bonus XP and some sweet titles and emblems along the way. Once I'd unlocked everything though I changed tac, switching to a more accurate and stealthy approach. First of all I switched out the marathon perk for the bling perk, allowing me to fit two attachments to the gun in exchange for losing the ability to sprint permanently. Then the lightweight perk got dropped in favour of cold-blooded, a perk that makes you invisible to enemy radar and airsupport, and the commando (enhanced melee range) perk was dropped for Ninja, which makes you invisible to enemy heartbeat sensors, and once leveled up enough will grant me silent footsteps. The Bling perk allows me to use the red-dot sight for better accuracy as well as fitting a silencer, which combined with the cold-blooded and ninja perks makes me a very sneaky bugger indeed. Coupled with the Thumper grenade launcher as a secondary weapon and claymores in the equipment slot its become a very versatile loadout. I'm really enjoying the stealth play so far, though weather I'll be able to stick to it until the end of the prestige remains to be seen.

As a change of pace for when I get stuck in a rut of dying a lot, or for playing on wasteland, one of my favourite maps, I have a loadout with my trusty Barret M107.50cal sniper rifle set up. The beast itself is silenced and is complimented by the PP2000 machine-pistol as a secondary; with marathon, stopping-power and steady-aim as the perk set it becomes a highly mobile, highly effective long and close range setup.

When I'm not playing MW2 I can usually be found behind the wheel of a fantastically expensive car in Forza 3, (currently a Koenigsegg CCGT). I'm now into the 5th season of racing and at driver level 41 (out of 50), meaning I'm very close to "completing it". That statement is massively wrong on two levels however. Firstly, although season 6 is the last one you get an achievement for, the seasons just keep rolling over, basically repeating season 6 over and over again, plus there's still loads of races that won't have been raced during the previous seasons as you can only race one of the three offered each month, meaning there's plenty more to do in the 'race events' menu. Secondly, even assuming the completion of season six is the ultimate goal, it's still going to take aaaaaages to get there as the races are starting to get very long indeed. Not only that but there are more of them for each event now meaning it could still take weeks to reach my goal!

As an added hindrance to my goal of completing all my old games, I seem to be buying lots of new ones! Probably more in the last two months than in the last year combined! For Christmas I got Batman: Arkham Asylum, then I bought Mirrors Edge, Colin McRae Dirt 2, Fuel, Red Faction Guerrilla (which I haven't actually played since claiming it would be my next completion target last week), Saints Row 2 and Brutal Legend because they were all dirt-cheap and it would have been rude not to; then I got Dragon Age for my birthday and just this last week I've used up old clubcard vouchers and some left over birthday money on Mass Effect, Bayonetta, Gears of War 2 and Dead or Alive 4! I've had about two hours in the company of Bayonetta, (which was immensely enjoyable) and about six hours on Red Faction, but haven't even had time to open the boxes on the others! Damn special offers and tempting new releases! How on earth am I supposed to keep up with all that lot AND find time to play games I've already got!

Modern Warfare 2: Glitchers Paradise

2010-01-25T09:07:00.000Z

Since the beginning of time man has looked for the easy option. We're like water, we look for the path of least resistance and then exploit it as best we can. When it comes down to it, it would seem that hundreds of thousands of years of refining our competitive edge means that when there is no-one there to keep order, our natural instinct is to cheat.
Imagine what a boxing match or a premiership football match would be like without a referee.... Welcome to the world of Online First Person Shooters!

I've just been playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It's a fine game. The single player campaign is dramatic and exciting, but the meat of the game is in the multiplayer. Get online and fight with and against fellow gamers from around the globe in a test of skill, tactics and blind luck! A huge array of game types, more weapons than you could shake a stick at and the mother of all stat-tracking systems... rank up your character, level up your weapons, unlock new guns and equipment, adorn yourself with rare and collectible titles and emblems! All this over various and diverse maps, from the deserts of Afghanistan to the snowy wastes of Siberia, from close quarters house-to-house combat to the snipers realm of open farmland.

There's so much to do you'll never get bored! And if you aren't very good at it, don't worry, Infinity Ward have made the code so full of holes that you'll just be able to glitch your way to the top! First there was the Javelin glitch. This involved running around with the Javelin Missile rocket launcher equipped and performing some shenanigans with switching between it and the equipment slot, then, once you died the missile would explode in your hands taking out any nearby enemies, so what did a seemingly endless stream of people start doing? That's right, running around with the Javelin equipped, combined with the Lightweight (sprint faster) perk and just rushing into the middle of a group of enemies. Hey presto, get shot, blow up the entire enemy team.

Fair play to Microsoft who were whaling on people with the ban-stick during this whole episode, and to Infinity Ward who quickly implemented a patch to stop the glitch from happening. A patch that also fixed the less often seen glitch of getting inside a wall so you could shoot people without being seen.

But then, no sooner had that been fixed than some enterprising young scally realised that if you ran around with a care package grenade equipped instead of a gun you could actually move faster than the server could keep track of you, meaning you jerked from place to place on your opponents screen making it incredibly difficult for them to shoot you. Combine this with the Commando perk, which increases the range of your knife attack, and you need never carry a gun again! Again, IW were quick to get on top of this and a patch including a fix is winging it's way through the system as I write this.

Earlier this morning I was listening to the Vanhemlock News Show which included an article about how some people had found a way to hack the system resulting in anyone they killed losing experience points, which is a fairly sinister turn of events; a glitch that doesn't give the glitcher any benefit, but that exists solely to annoy and upset others.

Then, as dawn was breaking and my nightshift friends were getting home and online I decided to fire up MW2 myself, only to be confronted with a brand new and blatant glitch in the very first match I entered! Pissed off with this we left that lobby and joined another of a different game type and guess what, the same glitch was being exploited in there as well, only this time by someone on our side so I was able to watch what he was doing. It seems that repeatedly changing weapons while doing something else i won't mention here so as not to give anyone any ideas, will grant you with a free 'Emergency Airdrop' killstreak reward. You get killstreak rewards for getting a set number of consecutive kills, eg, 3 kills gives you a UAV, which highlights the enemies locations on your radar, 6 kills in a row grants you an airstrike to call in where and when you want, etc, etc. For 8 kills you get to call in an Emergency Airdrop, which consists of 4 crates dropped from a C130-Hercules plane which can contain any of the other killstreak rewards. So you can basically call in several high powered killstreak rewards without actually having to kill anyone, whenever you want, as often as you want. An 'Instant Win' button! Brilliant! My research done I promptly reported his ass to Microsoft, I just wish I'd taken note of his gamer tag so I could name and shame him here. Hopefully a ban will be finding him soon enough.

After quitting that lobby, joining yet another lobby and finding the same thing going on in there I quit out completely and booted up Forza. I'm not going to willingly pad the stats of some cheating prick. I just don't understand the mentality of people who feel the need to do stuff like that.

If you can't win on your own merits then either practice more, live with it, or get the fuck out.

Turtle Beach Earforce X1 Gaming Headset

2010-01-25T05:20:00.000Z

With the remnants of my Christmas and birthday money I figured I'd treat myself to a Turtle Beach headset. After all, the majority of my XBOX time is spent playing Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer and everyone says that to experience the game properly you need Turtle Beach! Their exponents promise great things from them, not least of which is being able to hear when someone is coming up behind you, something I could really use! Let's just say that my deaths outweigh my kills by quite a significant amount, which really isn't ideal! So in my hunt for non-hacking, non-glitching ways to get the edge and try to improve my stats I figured I'd give a set of these bad boys a try.

What you get in the box is a well made set of over the ear headphones with a built in mic that is substantially larger and much more positionable than the standard XBOX one. You also get a profusion of leads which enable the X1's to overcome the biggest problem with gaming and headphones. You see, if you want to get the 3-D sound experience without shelling out for a home theater sound system, or you just want to play late at night, then headphones are the obvious answer. Unfortunately, if you've got a set of headphones on for the game sound, what are you going to do with the XBOX headset? How can you talk to your mates over the in-game chat? Answer: You can't wear two sets of headphones at once, so it's one or the other buddy! The way the X1's get around this is by a clever system of interconnecting leads.

The headset itself terminates in the traditional green and pink (speaker and microphone) jacks traditionally found on any PC compatible headset, which means that the Turtle Beach's are PC friendly straight out of the box. When connecting to the XBOX though, the green jack plugs into the end of a stereo splitter lead. First up, you take the red and white audio leads that run from the console to the TV and you unplug them from the back of the TV, then you plug the stereo splitter lead into the red and white sockets on the TV and then plug the red and white leads from the console into the back of those. So now you've got the audio signal coming out of the XBOX going straight to the earphones and straight to the TV, so you get no sound quality loss by going through the TV's headphone port. The second clever bit is that there is now a third cable that connects between the X1s and the XBOX controller in the same way as the regular XBOX headset does. You've got seperate volume controls for the voice chat and the game volume so you can get the balance just how you like it. Also, the quality of the mic and the fact that the live chat comes through the X1's built in amplifier means that the usually weak and crackly voice signal comes through loud and clear.

The first time I used them I played on the Favela map, (a small section of a shanty town in Rio de Janeiro), and the overload of sound had me playing like a total n00b for a while as I adjusted to my new and vivid aural surroundings! What was once just a cacophony of gunshots and explosions was suddenly enriched by myriad ambient sounds! Birds singing in the trees, dogs barking at all the noise, the distant murmur of traffic as the rest of Rio went about it's daily life in the background. I was quite shocked at the depth of sound design I'd been missing thanks to not wanting to turn the TV up too loud.

Overall the sound quality is very impressive. It's a little bass heavy, which I personally like, but which may not be to everyone's taste. You end up feeling totally immersed in the game as all outside distractions disappear once you have the headset on and the volume up. Since getting the X1's I've even started watching DVD's through the XBOX, something I would never normally do as the machine itself is so loud it would ruin the movie, but the X1's not only drown that noise out, but enhance the movie audio to the n'th degree. I saw Transformers 2 in the cinema and was very much underwhelmed by it, experiencing it again with the X1's I was (almost) blown away!

It's quite astonishing the difference fully realised audio can make to the gaming (or movie) experience, and if you can afford one I would thoroughly recommend getting a Turtle Beach Headset. That is the key issue here however - if you can afford it. They aren't cheap. The X1's are the bottom of the range and don't actually offer positional 3-D sound as I thought, (though the high quality stereo is still very useful), they weigh in at a hefty £50. As you head up the range and go wireless with surround sound you are looking at over £200 in some instances! Availability is something of an issue in the UK as well as they are an American product aimed mainly at an American market. I had a lot of trouble finding one online, with many reputable retailers having them listed but all of them were currently out of stock. Good old Game came to my rescue though. You may be lucky enough to find a set in your local Game shop (ask at the counter, they don't seem to want to put them on display for some reason), or failing that the Game website seems to have an abundance of them.

A brief round up

2010-01-17T23:52:00.000Z

Just a quickie to take note of the last few days games:

Modern Warfare 2 - Standing proud at level 66 at the moment. No chance of hitting second prestige by the time I go back to work though, which was my original goal, mainly because of playing too much of the next game...

Forza 3 - Just hit level 36 and a little over halfway through season 3. The races are starting to get a bit long now, lucky to find one under 15 miles, nearly all taking well over 10 minutes a pop.

I was going to make Forza my next target for completion, but I think it's going to take way too long, plus I think it may get a little tiresome if I play it too intensely. I think I'll pick at it over the next few months, just dipping in now and again when I fancy it, similar to what I'm doing with MW2 really. As such I nominate Red Faction Guerrilla as my new main game. Been playing it on and off for a couple of weeks now and finding it quite enjoyable, so I think I'll step it up a gear and see if I can get it finished.

To PC or Not To PC, That Is The Question

2010-01-17T23:25:00.000Z

I think I'm finally ready to admit that the PC is not a good gaming platform. First of all I must profess my love for my PC, it's seen me through thick and thin for several years now with hardly any complaint. It's been my main gaming platform for most of that time too; I may have had an XBOX 360 for two years now but I've only really gotten into it heavily in the last few months. Most of my PC gaming experiences have been positive ones, until recently anyway, and I have some very fond memories of nights in front of the Keyboard. From the original Unreal Tournament and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, through MMOs such as PlanetSide, LOTRO, Warhammer Online and City of Villains, it's been a blast. But the shine is starting to wear off. I first noticed that something my be wrong when I tried to play Section 8, a futuristic first person shooter that played well, looked stunning and had some fantastically innovative ideas that would have brought new life to the genre.... only no-one played it. Yes it didn't do as well as it could have on the consoles either, but there appeared to be NOBODY playing it on PC. Not a good sign for a multiplayer centric game. I tried several times to get into a match and failed every time because there just wasn't anyone else online.

I recently bought the new Ghostbusters game off Steam... ah Steam, both a blessing and a curse, incredibly useful for buying games whilst being utterly infuriating as a means of playing them. So yes, Ghostbusters, for a start it took something like seven and a half hours to download. What the hell is the point of the "convenience" of a digital download if it takes longer than it would take me to drive the 20 miles to the nearest game shop, buy the disc, drive back again and install it myself? And that's assuming Steam doesn't crash while it's downloading. Sorry, I was tangenting there, Steams quirks aren't meant to be the focus of this post, although they do have a bearing on it. Anyway, Ghostbusters on PC, it looks wonderful, but even with the graphics settings minimised it runs like a lame pig, even on my not-inconsiderable gaming rig. Terrible frame rate when there's any kind of on-screen action, long load times, freezing... it's not fun. It takes what could very well be a great game and makes you notice all the bad things instead. Would I have got this on the XBOX version of the same game? The graphics may not be quite as pretty as a PC running it all in high detail, but then again, I couldn't run it in high detail anyway.

I've been using the XBOX a hell of a lot recently and as a result I haven't really touched the PC for weeks. Today though I thought I'd have another crack at Ghostbusters as I'd like to finish it so I can get on and free up the 11Gb it's currently hogging. I turned on the PC, all fine and dandy, I sat back and waited as Steam and Xfire automatically ran their updaters, no point trying to play a game that already struggles by itself, let alone if the processor is busy doing other stuff, while that's happening. So fifteen minutes and a restart later I was all ready to go, only as the game was starting up Steam crashed out on me and locked up the whole system. Right, ok... another restart, Steam launched without complaint, the game (eventually) loaded up to the menu screen and I clicked "resume game". And then nothing happened for ages. I ALT/TAB'd out and opened task manager to find that 'Ghostbusters is not responding', so I ended the task and again nothing happened. Then after a few more minutes of not being able to click on anything the screen went blank and I was booted back out to the desktop. I'd spent almost half an hour in front of the keyboard by this point and still hadn't got to play anything, while all the time thinking how much simpler it would have been if I'd bought it on XBOX instead! All this on a machine that runs Left 4 Dead smoothly and sweetly and without complaint, (most of the time). It just seems to be the fickle nature of the beast.

I really miss keyboard and mouse controls for 1st person shooters on the xbox, and I'm still dying too often in MW2 simply because I can't use the controller properly, but that sacrifice is a small one compared to the benefits of the simplicity and reliability you get from a console. I've recently bought Mass Effect for PC, (the reason I wanted to get Ghostbusters finished and uninstalled to make room!), but I'm seriously considering giving it up as a bad job before even installing it and picking it up for the 360 instead.

Getting My Money's Worth

2010-01-16T04:27:00.000Z

Why don't I ever complete games? And in this day and age of achievements, side-quests, collectibles and online multiplayer goodness, what does it even mean to complete a game? I suppose the standard definition for most games would be to get to the end credits, playing through the main story arc of the game and seeing it to its conclusion. I've managed this a few times in recent years, most notably on all the Guitar Hero games. Though while I've seen the end credits on all of them, there are still plenty of achievements outstanding, I've never finished a tour on expert difficulty or more recently completed the tour for every instrument, so can I really say I've completed any of them?

Some other notable "completions" in the last few years have been Prototype, (still a dozen or so challenge missions to do and loads of orbs to find), and the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series. In the case of these last two, the single player campaign is finish-able in one (admittedly long) session, but getting all the achievements involves playing through on Veteran mode, which is so hard the game stops being fun. Then there's the HUGE multiplayer aspect to the series! Can I truely feel comfortable saying I've finished the game without trying it? Without hitting level 70? Without going into prestige mode at least once? Without hitting 10th Prestige? Without leveling up all the guns and completing all the challenges and earning every single title and emblem the game has to offer? The scary thing about the online play in these games is how much of a time-sink they become, a fact pointed out quite blatantly in the online leaderboards. For example, in MW2 I'm coming towards the end of 1st Prestige and I've spent a total of FIVE AND A HALF DAYS getting there. That's a measure of actual online gaming time mind you. Five and a half of the finite number of days allotted to me playing one computer game. Getting to the end of 10th Prestige is going to take over a MONTH of actual online time at this rate! That's quite a frightening prospect.

Of course, my most recent game completion has also been my most... er, well, complete. Assassin's Creed II saw me finish the main storyline, complete several collecting quests and earn every XBOX achievement along the way. It's still not 100% complete though. There are still a few side missions left in some of the cities, a race here, an assassination there; and that's not to mention the scores of treasure chests left littered about the place. But the question then must be, 'Can I be bothered?'. There aren't any achievements hanging off any of them, and there are plenty of other games sat on my shelf that I'd like to be playing, and as we've already seen, some of them are real time-hogs!

If I look at this list of completions and then look at my shelf of games it strikes me that the completed titles are heavily outweighed by the uncompleted ones, some of which (yes Halo 3 and Gears of War, I'm looking at you) I actually got with the console over two years ago! This then begs the question 'Have I got my money's worth out of these titles?', and the answer surely has to be 'No'. Some of these things are forty quid a pop! That's a lot of money to spend on something that's played once and then put on the shelf never to be touched again.

I'd been thinking about this for a little while anyway, but then I was inspired by Jon Shute over at www.Vanhemlock.com to actually do something about it. He's set himself the goal of completing all his old games by the end of the year, setting complicated targets for achievement percentages and stuff, and he's got hundreds of games so it's quite a daunting prospect for him. I on the other hand only have 20 or so games in my 'to-do' list. so here are my goals:

By the end of 2010 I aim to have:
end credited all of my old games,
achieved roughly half the achievements for each (100% where possible),
got to the mythical 10th Prestige in Modern Warfare 2.

From Firenze to Forza

2010-01-15T00:06:00.000Z

My adventures in 15th Century Italy are over. No longer can I cry "My name is Ezio Auditore Da Firenze. You killed my father. Prepare to die!" before stabbing an Archbishop in the face.

Yes, Assassin's Creed 2 has been completed! I finished the main story a few days ago, including finding and deciphering all the glyphs and discovering all of the assassin's seals and unlocking the armour of Altair. It took me a little longer, (and the help of an online guide - gah! Unclean! UNCLEAN!!!), to locate all the feathers though. I finished that particular quest yesterday which unlocked the 'In memory of Petruccio' achievement and also granted access to the Auditore cape, the wearing of which in each city also granted me the 'Show your colours' achievement taking my gamer score for Assassins Creed 2 up to 995 out of a possible 1000 points. The achievement I'd missed? 'Flyswatter', where you need to kick a guard while using Lonardo Da Vinci's flying machine, which just happens to be specific to the final part of the 8th mission. There's no way of going back and re-playing individual missions so for the sake of FIVE gamerscore points and my very first 100% completed achievement list I spent most of today running through the whole game again from the very beginning!

What is remarkable about this is that I enjoyed it almost as much second time around as I did the first. There is just so much depth and diversity that it never gets boring. The acting is of the highest quality, the main story is gripping and entertaining, and running over the rooftops of Florence or Venice will never ever get old. Assassins Creed 2 is an astonishing milestone in gaming history and not just because it's the first game I got all the achievements for! It's my nomination for Game of the Year 2009. (Although I haven't played Arkham Asylum yet).

After all that excitement, and some food, I was hankering for some multi-player online action. I'm right up to my neck in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) at the moment and at the start of play today was at 1st Prestige - Level 60. For those unfamiliar with the prestige system, after hitting the maximum level, level 70 in this case, you get the option to carry on playing with all of the weapons unlocked or you can take the plunge and enter Prestige mode, essentially putting you back to level 1, with nothing to show for it apart from the "prestige" of having a nifty little emblem next to your name. So first Prestige level 60 is effectively level 130 (70+60). Hit level 70 again and you get to make the choice again, right up until you get to the Holy Grail of 10th Prestige, or level 770! Anyway, I like to try and make at least one level every time I play, which from about level 50 up can be a bit tricky as the number of points needed to level gets greater each time. But with the help of a few ten thousand point challenge unlocks, (namely ACR Veteran I, ACR Marksman VI and .50Cal Marksman V), I managed to get two whole ranks under my belt and walked away an hour or so later happy to be at level 62.

Finally in today's gaming marathon (all this snow makes me not want to go out much, and there's bugger all on telly) I returned to another fantastic game from last year, the mighty Forza 3. The greatest racing game ever made? I think so. And right up there with AC2 as a contender for game of the year. I've been dipping into this monster of a game regularly for a few months now and today saw me hit the half-way stage by completing my third season of races and reaching driver level 25. There's some beefy gamerscore rewards hanging off these two milestones, but they are nothing compared to the beautiful Lamorghini Reventon that's unlocked for hitting 25. No idea how it drives yet, but I could just sit and look at it all day long.

The Obligatory First Post

2010-01-14T23:11:00.000Z

Hello. This is a blog. More specifically this is my blog. Even more specifically, taking specifics as far as it is possible to take them in fact, this is my blog about my life in and around video games.

Computer games have been a part of my life since I was a child, some 30-odd years ago now, and I can vividly recall some of my first gaming experiences. From the hand-held delights of Space Invaders, (a big chunky piece of yellow plastic with a cool turned steel control stick and a big red fire button), and two player pac-man; through the arcades of the '80's, the ZX Spectrum, the SNES, Playstation, PS2 and the PC, right up to my console of choice in today's next-gen market, the XBOX 360. I'm not a professional gamer, I'm not even a hard-core one. I'm more what you may think of as a keen amateur. I believe the term is a 'casual gamer' although that sounds more like some sort of dress code to me. Still, I'm finding myself playing more and more these days and I thought I'd share my experiences, triumphs and disasters here on the interwebs.

This is a bit of an experiment for me. I've had plenty of general, non-specific blogs in the past and they've always failed, mainly because I'm too bloody lazy to keep them updated, but also because I can never think of what to fill them up with. Hopefully that won't be the case here as the topic is always there at my fingertips.

2009 was a good year for gaming, let's hope 2010 can better it.
Cheers,
Dok