• 30Dec 12

  2012 in review: In which I hardly mention Skyrim

  Hey guys welcome back to my review of 2012. Sorry about the delay in making this blog I was distracted by Christmas, my bad. Anyway last time out I talked about how slow the start of the year was for gaming. But I forgot to mention the best thing that happened in March: the Welsh rugby team winning the grand slam for the third time in 7 years. But that has nothing to do with gaming so lets move on.
  
  April is a bit of a confusing month. There were a lot of good releases but none that really stood out. Prototype 2 was April's top seller. An open world action game, Prototype 2 has you play as a new protagonist as you attempt to stop a second Mercer virus outbreak and the evil plot that comes with it. While it was very well received by critics, Prototype 2 didn't gain huge popularity with a broad commercial audience (as stated by publisher Activision) which resulted in Radical entertainment, the games creator, suffering job losses. Tribes Ascend and Blacklight retribution were the years first major free to play games of 2012. Tribes offered a high speed multiplayer experience whereas blacklight gave a more traditional multiplayer experience; both at the low price of £0.00 (Although tribes does offer experience boosts and early unlocks at a cost). Indie game Legends of Grimrock showed us what RPGs are missing today as it gained success using old school mechanics. Other notable releases included Trail: Evolution, a favourite of the gamespot staff, the darkness 2, a very well received sequel which was let down by a short campaign length and a lacklustre multiplayer, and the first episode of the walking dead, a game I'll talk more about in a latter blog. Then there was Kinect Star wars; which I like to think was a warning that Lucas arts were planning on selling the franchise to song and dance loving disney. Otherwise it won't be mentioned again.
  
  May, what can I say about May. We were another month closer to finding out how the awful the opening ceremony of the London Olympics would be, surprisingly good as it turns out, another American pie film graced our cinema screens, this time starring the original cast, and Blizzard finally released Diablo 3. Yes for the second time in as many years Blizzard released a game that wasnt Warcraft related, with the diablo series being the lucky recipient this time out. After being announced four years ago and spending a whopping 11 years in development (that's long even by R* standards) Diablo 3 became one of the most anticipated Pc games of all time as it broke many pre-order records and claimed the record for fastest selling Pc game of all time; selling 3.5 million copies in just one day. The game also received a lot of positive reviews and looked set to oust Skyrim from its throne. So why didnt it?
  
  Three words: Always online DRM. This little feature came under criticism after it was found out that an online connection was required even for the single player campaign. While its nice to know that publishers are doing all they can to fight piracy, it wasn't nice for fans to find out they would not be issued refunds if they were unable to play the game for any reason. This coupled with lag in the campaign, a glitch with the Templars shield, and online PvP not yet being implemented ruined what should've been an amazing experience; especially after having to wait all those years. But for those who dont play Pc games; Dragons dogma offered a great fantasy RPG adventure, great combat, and some marvellous boss battles. Ghost recon: future soldier and Max Payne 3 offered a less fantasy-related experience; with the latter being the better received game.
  
  With June came the biggest gaming event of the year: E3 2012. The show which promises to show us what to expect from the industry in the near future, most of the pre-event talk was about how we were going to be showered in news about the next generation of consoles. While Nintendo gladly spent time showing off the Wii U, it looked like Sony and Microsoft didn't get the memo. They decided to talk about their gimmicks instead. Although they did show us some interesting games being released in 2013: The last of us, Devil may Cry, crysis 3, Dead Space 3, Injustice: Gods Among Us. Looking away from the future and more to the present Junes releases weren't spectacular. Sins of a solar empire: rebellion was an expansion which brought many improvements but didn't add the campaign which most fans were screaming for. Lollipop chainsaw was a typical hack and slash with a half-naked teenager on the box art. Spec ops: the line provided a chilling story but lacked the better gameplay offered by other third person shooters.
  
  July had a console release of Risen2: Dark water, an XBL release of spelunky, and a sequel for indie game orcs muct die! that game one of the Yogscast members made a video series for. Otherwise July wasn't full of inspiring games at all. Which brings me to the end of the blog. Now I did plan for this to be a three part blog series, but after looking at the games released between October and December alone I realised that its going to be impossible without it being a boring read. Anyway thanks again for reading and I'll see you for the next instalment.
  • Posted Dec 30, 2012 12:31 pm GMT
  • Category: Editorial
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• 22Dec 12

  2012 in review: The frightning beginning

  Hey there people and welcome to another one of my blogs. Seeing as its nearly the end of the year I've decided I should probably knuckle down and write my thoughts of 2012. First of I'd like to start by saying Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you all and I hope that the New Year will be an amazing year for all of you.
  Now I found 2012 to be a year that took a while to get started. To be fair I think a lot of gamers were still in skyrim fever until the end of January, I know I was, so any major releases would've probably have had a Fus ro dah to the knee from consumers (that was the on-going skyrim joke, right) anyway it wasn't until February that we saw the first contender for skyrims throne: Kingdoms of Amalur. While it had good gameplay its world was not as gripping as skyrims. More sadly its developer, 38 studios, went bankrupt only three months later. This was only the start of the doom and gloom.
  As we arrived in March, so did mass effect 3. A game which promised gamers a thrilling conclusion to Shepards trilogy, that every in-game decision made would affect the games numerous outcomes, and so on. But this contender turned out to be a false pretender. From my experience of the game it had great gameplay and its story started off well, but it soon became long winded. The online was fun at first but then it got very repetitive, making me wonder if ME 3 really needed an online mode. Overall I thought it was a good game; it made improvements from its predecessor but it also took a few steps back. But thats just my opinion and the gaming community definitely had a different one. As it happened ME 3s ending was the most controversial subject of the gaming year; as Im sure most of you remember. Most who played the game found the three ending to be very similar and none of them made true the promises made by Bioware. Most importantly the endings lacked proper closure for the player. This sparked fan outrage unlike anything Ive ever seen and caused Bioware to release a free dlc which expanded on the three endings. But the damage was done and ME 3 will always be remembered for the amount of controversy it caused.
  Mass effect 3 was not the only game to disappoint. Both Silent Hill: downpour and RE: operation racoon city received mixed to negative reviews. Neither game, both of which were the latest instalments of successful horror series, was able to scare gamers enough to keep their thoughts away from the ME 3 scandal. TW: Shogun 2: fall of the samurai and Tekken X Street Fighter fared much better; but a surprise package was able to take the gaming world by storm: Journey. Made by thatgamecompany, Journey stole the hearts of gamers by taking them on a spiritual adventure of the senses; if that makes sense. Rather than use recognised gameplay; Journey used landscapes, music, and the sense of wonder to craft a unique and fascinating experience for players. I believe that journeys biggest achievement, however, was showing us that unique ideas can create prosperous gameplay and that moving away from the norm can be a fruitful endeavour. For these reasons Journey proved to be the standout game of the beginning of 2012 and definitely the most serious contender for GOTY.
  And that concludes part 1 of my end of year blog. The next instalment will take us from April through till July or August. I have more things to talk about in the next blog, not just games, anyways thank you for reading and see you for part 2.
  • Posted Dec 22, 2012 5:00 pm GMT
  • Category: Editorial
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• 17Nov 12

  Defying History

  Hey people it's been a long time since I blogged, or spent any proper time on this website, so I just thought I'd let you know why I haven't posted on pretty much anything lately. It all started a few weeks ago when I started to get bored of using gamespot. After spending a few months on the forums I started to realize that the threads all followed a similar pattern, with a few exceptions, Start select was all but cancelled and its replacement, feedbackzilla, hasn't really appealed to me, my blog series never took off, I stopped playing minecraft a few days after deciding to start it and I couldn't find a way to make reading a guide very interesting or entertaining, and the unions which I was a part of started to become barren except the UEU and the randomness union (which itself presented a bigger problem of having conversations that were hard to follow). The final straw which pushed me away though was fuse breaking down again. Not being able to access notifications took all the fun out of using fuse and made it pointless posting on other peoples statuses. So after all that I decided to actually do what most other people on this site do, play games. So I took a break and bought empire total war, a game I knew was going to keep me preoccupied for days on end and I devoted most of my time I'd spend on gamespot playing it instead (and trust me its been time well spent) but I still checked in every other day to see what was going on, which is when I noticed that the universal entertainment union started to get more posters, big yay, and the randomness union evolved into a truly mad and random place while sport spot remained rather empty, big nay. So this brings me to why I'm here writing this blog, because I've decided to devote more time to the UEU and to get sport spot back up and running. But its not all good news because I've decided to leave the RNU, I had a great time with you guys but I think the union has moved on and doesn't need me spamming "Vote for me" anymore.
  I've also decided not to write the minecraft blog series but I have decided to spend my time writing a different kind of series. What is it you ask? well I'm not going to say but I will tell you that it has a lot to do with TES 4 but will not only contain content from that game... confusing right.
  Anyways hope you enjoyed that read, sorry for the bad grammar and if you have any thoughts please write them below. See you guys around
  • Posted Nov 17, 2012 2:23 pm GMT
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