• 12Nov 08

  Console Polygamy

   

  Mario is back in the INKling household in the form of my brand spanking new Nintendo Wii. I have been thinking about getting one for ages and now that I have paid off my San Francisco holiday (God, that was back in April!) and got a bit of overtime money I thought I would treat myself to an early Christmas present (the ones you buy yourself are always the best).
  
  Amazon have a pretty good deal on at the moment so I now have Mario Kart Wii and Mario Galaxy jostling for attention with Far Cry 2 and Dead Space. It really is a light and dark approach to gaming. Turn on the 360 and I can expect dark menacing corridors and violent landscapes whereas the Wii is all bright charming colours and harmless puffs of jaunty fire. It's all good. The sad thing is that there aren't enough hours in the day what with this pesky job taking up all my time!
  
  I am really in two minds about Far Cry 2 at the moment. From a technical perspective the game is great. Vegetation sways in the wind and the various scruffy towns and outposts look and feel suitably windswept. The problem is getting around. Every guardpost will attack you on sight and even guys randomly tearing around the countryside are from the "shoot first ask questions later" school of militia. This means approaching each mission as a series of stages but there are plenty of save spots around the place and my best bud Josip is always ready to bail me out.
  
  However, even with all these games I still want more! No More Heroes, Warioware, Gears 2, Mirrors Edge and Ace Combat 6 are all on the inevitable list. Am I a victim of media pressure or just a greedy gamer? Probably the latter....

  • Posted Nov 12, 2008 6:50 am PT
  • Category: Games
  • 7 Comments
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
• 24Oct 08

  Dead Space: First Impressions (and further reading)

  It's scary, just plain scary and I'm loving every minute of it.
  
  Yesterday was a bit of a cracker for top releases with quality titles like Fable II and Far Cry 2 jostling for my hard earned beer tokens but for me Dead Space was the outside winner. I almost went for Far Cry but my enthusiasm was tarnished when my girlfriend noted that "it looks like every other game." She had a point.
  
  Shooters are often guilty of being generic and even though I will definitely be getting Far Cry 2 at some point I realised I was crying out for something a little different as all those miles of desert made me feel a little, well, tired. Braid filled a little hole but it was like eating a fun-sized Mars Bar as slowly as possible. Dead Space is a bloody steak that you can tear into. The USG Ishimura is a giant haunted house with monsters lying around every corner. Leaping around in zero-g or stomping around in a silent vacuum is really atmospheric and if anyone has an interest in horror then I say go for it.
  
  My opting for Dead Space seems to be a little symptomatic of my game choices at the moment. Whether it's because I feel I have less time or I am more impatient, I am just not inspired by the idea of working as an Albion blacksmith for a couple of hours. After finishing the story in GTAIV I have hardly touched it whereas a couple of years ago I scoured the whole of Vice City looking for hidden packages. Crackdown seemed to be an exercise in repetition and although you could say that almost every action game boils down to "fight monster, get object, fight monster, use object" at least Dead Space does it in bone-chilling styIe
  
  Currently there seems to be a greater emphasis towards larger and larger environments as if bigger is always better but to me that can harm a good narrative. Although the idea of a linear experience seems a bit unfashionable at the moment, surely (if done right) it's much better than just chucking in a load of extra land. If I was being really controversial I would say that the sandbox is the greatest illusion in modern gaming - that's right, I went there

  • Posted Oct 24, 2008 7:46 am PT
  • Category: Editorial
  • 16 Comments
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
• 17Oct 08

  What next?

  Anybody into Braid? I just clocked it the other day and it's best described as "small but perfectly formed." We all know that 1200 microsoft points is a bit on the steep side but it sure beats the hell out of all those Live Arcade games I have demo-ed and subsequently deleted. The presentation is great - the visuals, story and music all have a sort of fairy-tale like quality that really lifts the game and for puzzle fiends the timebending mechanic is used in so many neat little ways that there is never a repeated idea used in all 60 puzzle pieces.
  
  Unfortunately it means I am floating in gaming limbo at the moment. After Braid I have 900 points left and nothing that takes my fancy. I downloaded the demo for Megaman 9 and almost wept. I mean, I like a bit of a challenge (and completing Ninja Gaiden shows some credentials surely) but it was just excruciating. I know it's supposed to be old school but there is a reason why games are a bit more forgiving these days. When I finally made it to the top of a ladder only to be instantly squashed by a giant rubber ball sneezed out by a mechanical elephant I decided this wasn't for me. Shame.
  
  There are quite a few big releases over the next month or so like Fallout 3, Gears of War 2 and Fable 2 but I am suffering from a bad case of sequel-itis and the numbers are putting me off. The only other game that has me excited (completely out the blue) is Dead Space which has reviewed so well that I can't wait to get my grubby mitts on it. It ticks all the right boxes for me as you can't make a sentence with the words survival, space, horror, zombie and shooter in it without giving me a little tingle in my nethers!
  • Posted Oct 17, 2008 7:29 am PT
  • Category: General
  • 8 Comments
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg

See Previous Blog Posts »