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• 31Oct 09

  This Month is Octover!

  It is currently Saturday October 31st, All Hallow's Eve and I'm in pretty high spirits on this cool autumn evening. Unfortunately I have been suffering a little from the flu this week and while it's not been as bad as it could have been it has cut down my gaming time. I've been playing more of Brutal Legend this week though and have found all the motor forges, collected all the solos and unlocked a bunch more achievements. I have a bit of a dream of going after 100% completion on that game but I'm not sure I'll ever reach that. It doesn't matter though, I still stand by what I said last week; I think it's a great game. It's only two months now though until Assassin's Creed 2 hits which looks like another very well-made action-adventure game but I guess I'll have to add that to the pile of things I wish I could buy next to Borderlands, Arkham Asylum and The Ballad of Gay Tony.

  This week one of my university assignments did require me to download a game off the internet which my parents courteously paid for. Our task was to play and review an indie game we'd never played before and I was excited about my assignment and don't think I did a bad job. My review for indie title Osmos is already written but I'm not uploading it until Tuesday, sometime after midday, for fear that otherwise my lecturer will believe I have simply ripped it from the internet. I also downloaded League of Legends this week as the open beta went live on Monday, but whadda ya know? Another game my university internet connection is blocking the ports for. At this point I'm a little bummed out with this whole port blocking thing because even after I've registered my Xbox 360 with them they're still restricting my connection with that too.

  But this is the week of Halloween and what does that mean? That's right, in-game events! Valve pulled off a great and unexpected Halloween event by putting out a new map, two new hats and five new achievements. The new map was actually a modification of a community map by the name of Harvest. Valve took it and added a more halloweeny environment, a ghost which randomly appears and scares characters into not being able to use their weapons, changed the health packs into sweets, added special pumpkin powerups that give you a crit on your next shot and generally made the map great fun to play on. I've also had a bit of an excuse to play World of Warcraft again, given that it's All Hallow's End in the world of Azeroth. I've got up to level 46, spent some time in Warsong Gulch and run back and forth across the world collecting Halloween treats. I even now have my Steam and WoW accounts synched with Giant Bomb so everybody can see how badly I'm doing with my achievements as well.

  But, I think that's enough of a catch up for this week. I hope you're all having an awesome time and I'll leave you with what Giant Bomb aptly called the craziest GTA trailer ever (viewer discretion is advised).

  -Gamer_152

  • Posted Oct 31, 2009 12:57 pm GMT
  • Category: Games
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• 25Oct 09

  A Tale Most Brutal

  It is currently Sunday 25th October and I did cave this week and get Brütal Legend. What do I think of it? In one word: Brilliant. Maybe it's best I back up for a moment. You see last week I was rather unconfident that this game would actually have any solid gameplay and wondered if the whole problem of the game trying to blend RTS and action-adventure elements or the numerous side missions would get in the way of me having fun. Despite this I scooped the game up without a second thought at the first opportunity I got and was only too eager to experience what the game had in store as I played for the first time. I'd played through the demo before and seen more of the game from video of it that Double Fine had released, but I played through the first 15-30 minutes content enough. From then on my excitement began to grow and a few missions later I was already enjoying the game greatly. After a fair amount of time with the game I turned off my 360 believing that although I'd had an enjoyable time with the game I wasn't that desperate to go back and play any more of it. Oh, how wrong I was. Absolutely itching to play more of the sweet metally goodness I jumped back on my console the next day, played all the way up to the final mission and loved every minute of it. After completing the game I still wanted more and have spent this weekend glued to my TV, going after every achievement, unlockable and hidden item I can get.

  So what did I find so unbelievably amazing about Brütal Legend? I'm not sure I can entirely put my finger on it right now. The game seems almost greater than the sum of its parts. Of course the characters, environments, lore and general aesthetics of the game are extremely well done and though it has been criticised I thought the main story was compelling as well. The voice acting was not only great due to the personalities from the world of rock they had cast in this game, but was also very well-delivered and made all the more effective by the body animations and facial movements of the character models in-game. Although I wasn't overly-enthusiastic about the soundtrack it was still a great compilation of metal classics and the original music score for the game was a solid component as well.

  Now we get to the gameplay and while I can wrap every other aspect of the game up in a neat little bow, this is the part I find really hard to assess. I can pick out various small grievances I have with the game such as technical issues with the checkpoint races or how you can't set your destination marker to anywhere on the world map but that's not to say that the gameplay as a whole is some kind of perfect blend of elements. There is nothing that original about the side missions or extra collectibles or even the action-adventure side of the game in general, the strategy portions of the game don't control too well on a console and the game is a tad on the short side. Now I'm not a big lover of side missions; when playing Red Faction: Guerrilla I found that after a while they could get quite tedious and the checkpoint driving missions in that game became almost torturous. I'm also not too much of a fan of collectibles; I don't usually go that far out of my way to get them and I don't think I've ever come close to 100% completion on any game before. However my completion rate is already sitting at 83% and I'm ravenous for more. Maybe the world of Brütal Legend really is enough to make me forget about anything else, maybe I've suffered some kind of fatal mental damage from listening to too much of the in-game radio, but whatever the case I love this game and think Schafer has done a brilliant job.

  This week I've also become a part of the preview programme for the new Xbox 360 update and from what I've experienced it has its ups and downs. Just trying to remap the navigation and use of a system that would usually be handled by a keyboard to a controller is not a process that you can expect to go smoothly in the first place, but the main problem seems to be with Microsoft trying to cram the existing features of the websites they're working with into UIs that are just plain unsuitable. The worst of the social networking tools seems to be Facebook which has been warped from its simple and compact browser-based version into the NXE user interface that is used on the rest of the Xbox's menus. The Twitter system also seems somewhat lacklustre in relation to its browser-based parent but the difference between the Twitter and Facebook UIs does beg the question, if they created a new interface for Twitter why didn't they do the same thing for Facebook? Last.fm doesn't seem to have come out of this whole thing too bad, probably because although they have once again tried to cram the whole thing into the NXE panels it still does what it was meant to do pretty proficiently: Play music. The branding of the new video marketplace place as the Zune marketplace feels very tacked on as it actually doesn't have anything at this time to do with Zune, but although I haven't experienced the 1080p video streaming myself they do seem to be running a very good service there. All in all the navigation of the new features of the 360 update are a bit of a shamble and I can't imagine who at all would want to use the social networking features, but as far as streaming media goes the console so far has been doing a good job of it.

  That's gonna be it for this blog. I'm going to try and somehow resist the urge to buy Borderlands over the coming weeks (as I just can't afford it) and get back to playing more of Brütal Legend. I'll leave you with this little trailer from the rock gods themselves.

  -Gamer_152

  • Posted Oct 25, 2009 2:47 pm GMT
  • Category: Games
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• 20Oct 09

  A Legend is Born

  It is currently Tuesday 20th October and Brütal Legend has finally hit shelves. It's a game I've been excited about for a long time and I've loved everything that I've seen of it. The game's been getting some good reactions from critics, with the lowest review score I've seen so far being a 3/5 from Giant Bomb and even that isn't that low. Although I must admit my expectations for the game have been skewed by the Giant Bomb review a little, I don't want them to be but despite what everyone else is saying, after hearing Ryan Davis talk about how flawed the gameplay of Brütal Legend is, it has pulled my confidence in the gameplay of the game down a bit. That might not be a bad thing though, with my lowered expectations it may mean I enjoy the gameplay all that much more and whatever the quality of the rest of the game the art style and general atmosphere of the game are looking as thrilling as they ever did. So you may be wondering if I'm so hyped for the game, why don't I have it yet? Well I'm still waiting for my university maintenance grant etc. to come through and so I've been trying to keep costs down and considered buying Brütal Legend too much of a luxury, however I think I may just reach a point where I really do want this game badly enough to pay all that money for it even under current circumstances.

  I haven't played a whole lot of games this week, mainly because I've had university work for a considerable portion of the week, my sleep pattern has been all over the place and Friday, Saturday and Sunday were spent either making the journey back to my family's home, staying there or making the journey back. Getting to and from there cost a total of £53 and took over 12 hours but it was very well worth it to celebrate the 18th birthday of my mind-blowingly awesome friend xCompanionxCubex.

  Getting back on topic I did play quite a few game demos last week which I didn't write about in my blog because there wasn't realistically enough space but now that I have plenty of room to fill let me regale you with tales of my time trialing Xbox 360 titles. I was expecting brilliant things from the Batman: Arkham Asylum demo and even then it delivered more than I was expecting, the combat, stealth, environments, voice work, graphics and characters in that game are all brilliant and it's just a shame that's yet another game I can't afford to be buying right now. One game that did surprise me was WET because I hadn't heard a great deal of positivity towards that game so I didn't presume I would find the demo that enjoyable, but I was won over by its sty*e, music and general madness. I have heard however that the demo is not entirely representative of the full game and for this reason I'm assuming that if I actually did play the full version I'd probably run into a lot of the flaws people have been describing, which didn't seem so distinguished in the demo. Then there was South Park Let's Go Tower Defence Play! which definitely had some great South Park humour in the enemies, achievement names etc. but even in that short demo I kept hearing voice clips taken from the show repeated too many times and there's not really anything which can disguise the fact that this is just another in a stupidly long line of tower defence games already created. Lastly there was of course the Brütal Legend demo which I strongly encourage you to try if you have any interest at all in the game.

  And that's all folks. Thanks for reading, keep playing those games and I'll leave you with this breath-taking display of DDR skill. Peace out.

  -Gamer_152

  • Posted Oct 20, 2009 7:33 am GMT
  • Category: Games
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