• 23Aug 08

  Big few months coming up...

  In a few months we have some big PC games coming. To give you an idea here are some box shots of most of those top tier games from sept onwards.

  

  

  

  Not a bad list of upcoming games I must say COD World at War could be there, but I'm not sure it will make 08?

  Tomb Raider underworld looks good. They announced a new Lara Croft model, Allision Caroll, gymnast She fits the role very well, esp her moves. The Red Alert 3 cast trailer rocked, nice to see some great cheesy FMVs are back, some big actors. And I am thankful that they seem to be making cutscenes for the Rising Sun faction.

  Which games are you guys excited about? Buying, Preordering even?

  

  As for me I finished Lost Planet, it was ok, not fantastic, had some good boss fights and nice dx10 graphics. I got online and tried some of the GFW Live gold for free. Coming from a PC server background the setup is a bit different, you first join a lobby, then wait (AND WAIT) till 16 players join or the host starts. Then you play, this is not too bad. But what was stupid was as soon as you finish a round, you basically get booted all the way back to the menu, and have to search for servers again. Same goes if connection is lost or server is full. You must refresh them again.

  

  Now the actual MP isn't bad, it has a few game modes, lots of nade spam. But for me it was completely unplayable, Really the best I could get was a Japanese (probably 360 hosted) server, and there was sersiously a few seconds delay when I pick up a weapon. I could really only get kills by spamming grenades. So that ends that escapade. The game did a great job masking lots of the lag, like you could move freely and shoot easily. But I could tell there was a very high latency.

  

  

  Bionic Commando Rearmed, got it from Direct2Drive, but you can also get it on gamersgate. It's a sidescroller with 3d graphics (good too) and it's a bit of fun, you use a grapple to swing about, good for the price ($15). nice music + sound.

  

  Have fun guys

  By the way if anybody wants a guest pass to TF2, I have one available

  • Posted Aug 23, 2008 12:24 am GMT
  • Category: Games
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• 2Aug 08

  August gaming stuff

  Today in Australia, on the East coast they let everybody get the full Spore Creature Creator for $2 with a newspaper, EA pushed it quite big here and I think it will be huge. I got my copy, but may give it away to somebody.

  Giantbomb was launched a few weeks back, I was pretty crazy on the editing thing for a week or so then got quite sick of having to wait so long just to do minor updates that were replaced by other peoples edits because of the delay. Once you get to 1000 points you can do as you wish though. It's obviously going to be a bit more detailed than wiki is. The forums are not pleasant to navigate.

  --Gaming--

  

  Bought Condemned in THQ's gamers choice range, finished it in about 5 hours. Game had a few disturbing sections and some good shock scares. I was quite disappointed with the ending, basically you have a "boss fight" only the fight is repeated about 6 times where you kill the boss.

  
  ***SPOILER***

  You get to kill this demon type guy with these fast pole things, he's pretty tough but you can usually just time your blocks and attack him.
  
  First you kill him in the field, he lies dead, then you continue on, a few big fat flame guys block your path
  
  Then you kill him after the glasshouse, he lays dead.you continue going, more lackys
  
  Then you kill him in the barn (the fast poles do well here), rip out his shoulder. Lots of mobs in the barn.
  
  Then he jumps above you and you kill him again and rip out his spine.
  
  Then you go into this nightmare world and you rip out his jaw and that's the end.
  
  Ridiculous honestly, nearly ruined the game for me. The whole end sequence felt overly long, not only that but it totally killed the tension.
  

  
  
  

  

  I also finished Assasin's Creed, the last assasination battle was hard, but the boss was pretty weak. The game as you may know features this sci-fi experience out of these animus generated memories, it actually helped it from getting too repetitive. In fact in small doses of 1 hour I thought it held up nicely, the combat improves as you progress and unlock more weapons and items, I think they did a pretty good job with the game really, the game doesn't really end though, outside the memories the game is not resolved at all.

  

  I picked up Lost Planet Colonies, played a little bit and actually I don't mind it, It looks good, plays pretty well, some of the voice acting is questionable at times, but it was basically half price of a full new game so it's doing well for me. It has 360/PC play and live too. I don't really know what tweaks they made to this edition, the demo levels were fairly similar to what I remember.

  Quakecon brought some cool news, Doom 4 (which we knew about) is going to be more like doom 2. Rage is mutants with vehicles. Sounds a bit like Stalker/Oblivion/Doom 3 mix, sad about the T rating - lucky PC gets mods for blood

  Saw The X-Files movie, was alright - felt like a run of the mill extended x-files episode, which honestly can't be bad as a fan of the series.

  • Posted Aug 2, 2008 6:58 am GMT
  • Category: Games
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• 4Jul 08

  What I've been up to.

  Sorry for not making a blog sooner. Last few weeks I've been pretty busy, and I've been tired so I've been going to bed early (10:30pm) and not always getting a full night sleep (5am), which is frustrating me a bit. I did have a bit of a nasty cold last week for a few days that left me really lethargic so I think I'm still getting over that.

  

  As for games, I finished both GRID and Mass Effect. I may at some stage write a review for them. GRID sadly dragged on after a certain point, redoing the same races, same cars, same annoying sounds being repeated. I avoided all the drift races and came out on top of the ladder and the team ladder after about 17 seasons. Le Mans was boring after the 5th time, especially with the audi, but good game overall.

  

  Mass Effect was also quite good, very cinematic, great story and brilliant acting/dialogue. I only really wish that some of the gameplay was better, in particular the enemy AI and the missions seemed below par for a game of today. Based on one playthrough I think The Witcher is the better game, not by a huge margin though.

  

  I picked up Call of Juarez for $10 on Steam during the weekend sale, hard to resist those steam sales. I'm about 5 hours in and I must say it's prooving to be a very good game, the slow motion gun fights and bow/arrow fights are very enjoyable and graphically in dx10 I'm quite impressed. Even compared to ME, the voice work by Reverend Ray is superb.

  

  Along with COJ I picked up Assassin's Creed which sadly is not doing much for me. I'm really not very far into the game (got my weapons back) and I'm already a bit tired of the game. If they didn't allow me to walk around like a fool during the boring cutscenes I'd probably have fallen asleep by now. I really like how you can just run and leap over objects with ease though.

  

  Finished FEAR extraction point, it was 4 hours long, but compared to the original (7 hours) it was quite good. I think it actually did some really good scares, and built them up along side action as good, if not better, than the original FEAR. I had no idea what was going on with the story, and a bit more polish would have been good but as far as expansion packs go this was up there with the best.

  

  As everybody knows D3 was announced a few days back (it has about 7000 people tracking it, rank #1 all games) and it has me quite excited. For those interested. Diablo was really my first online game that I spent a serious amount of time on, Dealing with PKers who had 50 ears in their inventory, questing with very cool people, and just having fun is still some of the best times I've had on PC. Diablo 2 was great also, but I didn't play much online because I was horribly lagged when I tried to play. I suspect I'll be playing D3 quite a lot, it will be a big game (and it's PC only!)

  Next game on my WTFBBQ list is. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky. It comes out late August, it's also coming to Steam if you are interesting in digital copies. Check out the latest trailer

  http://youtube.com/watch?v=TKb-LHP0g-w

  • Posted Jul 4, 2008 4:12 am GMT
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