Like a kid in the worlds most expensive sweet shop

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)

"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?

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"

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.

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

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

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...