Yes so I moved over to Giant Bomb. Mainly because everyone else is but also because not 90% of the users on Giant Bomb are complete morons that suck up to the 90% of clueless moderators. I'll see you there. Username is the same letter for letter: ChestyMcGee.

The site is a little slow but it's worth it.

Oh yeah, and you can swear without getting a mod knocking on your virtual door with a letter of complaint.

If you read my last blog, you'll know I was happily suprised to be payed £50 for my work experience. With this money, I made the abetary decision to buy Battlefield: Bad Company (Gold Edition). This came about after playing, quite seriously I must add, the demo online with Matt and working together really well as a team in the two-seater vehicles (like the helicopters and tanks).

Anyway, the first thing I must say is I'm very pleasantly suprised by the singleplayer campaign. I expected just to have a playthrough of the campaign, find it mind-boggingly average, and then move immedietly on to the multiplayer. Bad Company is just plain fun. It removes all those things that other games have started doing for realism purposes, for example the reloads in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (where-by reloading a clip not entirely spent you don't have to pull any bolts, thus making the reload faster...I will add though that CoD4 banged on about this when the game was released but Rainbow Six has been doing this since 199. Instead, the reloads are overly long, exagerated...and absolutely fantastic.

I think the game that can be compared most to Battlefield: Bad Company the most is definitly PS2 and Xbox's Black - a game that attempted to recreate terrible 80's action films brilliantly well with an excessive amount of explosive barrels, loud guns and lots of swearing. BFBC does this too, and it almost feels like compensation that it appears Criterion have given up making Black 2. It's pretty much Black with better destructable environments and a less serious storyline.

This brings me on to the so-called great destructable environments. Some people have tried to compare this game to the likes of Crysis. Don't believe them. Basically, walls can be "destroyed", though basically all that means is when they're hit with a grenade or shell they kind of dissapear in a cloud of smoke and are replaced with clumps of rock and other rubble. This is nothing like Crysis, where small building such as sheds and the like are actually built like real buildings, and as such fall apart in a physics-based engine that makes it look very realistic indeed. However, BFBC's engine doesn't require a science-fiction super-computer to run and as such, every building can have its walls and roofs destroyed. The way trees fall down is exactly the same in both games and works on a 'gib' system. This is a simple method of having a model split in a fairly scripted way when it takes a certain amount of damage, another example of this is when you kill an Antlion in Half-Life 2 with a powerful weapon it explodes into little bits. Now, I've just moaned a lot about how bad it is...but it's fantastic. Sure, it's not the most technolgically spectacular engine but the implications of it in the sheer immersion in battles is great. It's a truely great feature that makes the fighting feel truely hectic and exciting. It's genuinly exciting to sprint through a building, the walls exploding behind me in a cloud of smoke as a main battle tank launches 120mm sabot-shells at me in a desperate attempt to remove me from the gene pool. Awesome.

Wow...for first impressions that was pretty long, but it's not really an average first person shooter. The thing that must be said about it is, when I was giving my first impressions of Metal Gear Solid 4 I said, "you have to play this game seriously", or words to that effect. With BFBC however, I must stress that you have to play this game for fun and for nothing else. Even I can manage to play through it not thinking about "oh, those grenades couldn't blow up a wall of that density" or "the reload for that Colt M16A4 is completely wrong; the bolt should snap back automatically and the release switch above the magazine should be all that needs to be slapped"!

So, I'm...well...I have no idea how far through the game I am but I reckon it must be about half way at the least. So, once I've played the online for about a month or so you can expect a review. So far (basing it on what I've played on the demo online and the game on singleplayer) I'm expecting to give it around an 8.0. "Just plain fun"!

...is a mixed but interesting experience.

For those who don't know, I'm working for five day week (starting last Monday, 23rd June) at GBM, who, as I've said to people in order to avoid confusion, are a graphics design company. In actual fact, GBM does work on the designs of others...okay, this is hard to explain. Basically, GBM are given design work off other companies, usually in Adobe Illustrator or Acrobat format and then GBM make fine changes to the designs and set them up for numerous printing, cutting and finishing techniques as specified by the client.

My first day started with a short tour of the buildings before I was handed over to some member of the computer team. They came up with the idea of me creating a poster for something. Already ideas were forming in my head. The second I was asked, "so what do you like?" the words "Video games" were coming out of my mouth before I could react. As a result, I was soon at work on a Mac making a, yes you guessed it, Metal Gear Solid 4 release poster. It used the background and message of this wallpaper. The two characters on the poster were taken from in-game screenshots from the game. The logo in the top right corner was made entirely from scratch on Adobe Illustrator. Likewise, the title in the bottom right corner was made on Illustrator with a downloaded font. Sadly, because the logo and writings were made using vectographics (they can be scaled to any size without any distortion what-so-ever) the low-res screenshots and background look quite tacky in comparison. Beggars can't be choosers though, and these were the best screens I could find on the 'ol tinter-web.

The next day I printed off this poster on multiple mediums using a huge ink-jet printer and with a large Lambda printer (in the Lambda Complex, OMG Half-Life!) which uses a modern version of emulsion printing. For this I had to work in a dark room...which suprisingly wasn't the dark red room I've seen on TV, in fact it was completely pitch-black and I had to work blind!

Today wasn't that much fun in comparison to the days before. I was basically working like a factory, assembling and cutting and using various machinery in a fairly repetetive nature. All of the tasks were interesting at first but got dull as time passed. One of the pieces of machinery, the cutter, was quite cool, it was a large knife on a conveyerbelt with a camera attatched. I got to control the camera to line it up with dots that are detected because they're a perfect magenta (CYMK colour, all settings on 0 except for M on 100) and then it cuts out any shape perfectly, following the magenta dots.

So, I'm not exactly sure what I'll be doing tomorow but I think later in the day I'll have a chance to cut out the characters from myposter to make some desk-side stands of Snake and Liquid. This depends on how busy the cutter is, however.

UPDATE:

Thursday was me standing in one place for eight hours framing prints. Much fun.

UPDATE:

Friday was odd jobs and watching people work for the morning, then finishing off all my Metal Gear stuff. So I now have three or four A2 cutouts of Snake and Liquid with a picture-frame stand on them (so you can put them on your desk or what have you) and eight or more A2 Metal Gear posters on various mediums. Coolio. Best thing about Friday though which can only be described in the wise words of 50 Cent in 50 Cent: Bulletproff: "Pay day mo-f****!" Yay! I got £50 on a HMV card which was completely unexpected. MY superviser dude said it was the first time they'd ever payed a Work Experience person because I had helped them meet a dealine with those terrible prints on Thursday. Huraah!...now I might go and buy Battlefield: Bad Company - yeah I know I said I hate it but I went on with a mate and we worked as an awesome team (both getting the top scores) in the two seater vehicles (tanks and choppers) and it was amazing.

NOTE(S): If you're reading this blog any time soon after 18:30 and wondering what the hell I'm going on about with this poster because you can't see any pictures of it, don't worry, I'm on my Dad's laptop right now but when I get home I'll have the file up and ready on GameSpot.

After you've read this, stay tuned: I'll probably be posting a new paragraph or so each day to update you (as if you're interested) on the day's goings on.

Oh yeah, and now anyone else who's on work experience has to do a blog too (Ben, Tom, Jonny, David etc).

I finished MGS4 this morning after starting the game on Friday afternoon (one day after relase) and I must say it is easily the best game I've ever played.

I'm not saying it's the best game in every single respect but with all its attributes collectively it definetly is in my opinion.

What I mean by this, for example, is the 3rd-person shooting mechanics are good but not as good as Gears of War, similarily the 1st-person shooting mechanics are good but not as good as Call of Duty 4. This is perfectly acceptable though as MGS4 is not either of these two types of games, it is a sneaking action-adventure, or whatever you want to call it, and as such the shooting isn't going to be as good as a game based around that one purpose.

The first thing I'll say about the game is that it has been heavily 'Westernised' in terms of gameplay (not story). By this I mean it is perfectly easy, easier than sneaking in fact, to simply run and gun through the game like any 3rd-person shooter. This isn't exactly bad but it's very clear that the game punishes you far less than the previous enstallments for killing enemies and getting spotted. I play it like this, and I feel this gives you the best experience of the gameplay, combining both stealth and action together in a healthy mix:

If one guard is on his own, take him out with a shot or two to the head with a silenced weapon.

If two or more guards or together, or taking out a guard will alert others before you can hide the body, do your best to sneak around or through them, avoiding confrontation altogether.

If the militia are in combat with the enemies, help them; it makes the game a lot easier and gives you a welcome break from sneaking around. It also gives you a chance to do some real gunplay and use the huge selection of weapons on offer.

I heavily recommend playing the game with these little rules, it's really how the game is supposed to be played and you'll enjoy it a whole lot more, and it'll be a whole lot more rewarding, if you play it like this.

On a more serious note, the graphics are years ahead of everything else and anyone who was still sceptical of the power of the Playstation 3 should see this game in action. It's phenominal. If this game were to be on the Xbox 360 the textures would have to be far lower res, a lot of sharp and clear text that is on some objects would have to be blurred out, many particle effects would have to be thinned out and even with all this the game would probably run at half the framerate. Also, even on PS3 the game has to install at the start, and do a one minute install inbetween every chapter.

The sound effects are also amazing and it's the little details that count. For example, when you put a silence on a gun it is still pretty loud when fired in first-person, not because of the firing but because you can hear all the sounds of the gun working when the muzzle noise has been eradicated; the bolt clicking back after everyround, shells ejecting and hitting the floor, the next round being loaded into the gun is all heard. On a related note, the animations are far ahead of anything else and aswell as beign eye-candy for all us gun-nuts it also helps with building up the characters. For example, the reloads are amazing, right down to the detail of when you reload a clip that isn't spent, the bullet that was ready to be fired pings out of the chamber when Snake pulls the bolt. In contrast though, the animations on the characters are great, the lip-sync isn't as realistic as the one implemented by the Source Engine (Half-Life 2 etc.) but it looks more natural. Little details in the characters like Otacon's nervous shuffle of a walk really helps emerse you in the experience.

And emersion is what MGS is all about. It's not a video game as such, it's an interactive film. For this reason some people might moan about the cuscenes that are anything from one minute to more than an hour (at least you can pause them now!). If you don't like that sort of thing then don't buy the game, simple as that, go and play a more action-heavy game and that's fine. But MGS is for the gamer that allows themselves to take the storyline of a game incredibly seriously, even mabye more so than they would take the storyline of most films. Without doing this it is impossible to enjoy the game fully. Word of warning then! Don't play in an environment where you can be distracted! Don't play with your mates around you, especially if it's your first time through. Don't play with your own music in the background! Enjoy the game as a film and as a work of art!

Because that's what MGS is. A work of art. The character design, the acting and the direction is better than most Hollywood films. I would even go as far to say that Hideo Kojima is as good a director as that famous, God-like Steven Spielberg of the eighties and early nineties. For this reason, since Metal Gear Solid 2, MGS has always been a bit lacking in the gameplay field. What was amazing in 1998 wasn't so good when MGS2 came out and sure they added a few new features but it wasn't really enough and I feel that MSG3 was also a big let down. This wasn't because the gameplay was bad, not at all, it was just that there was so much stuff in the game you could do...but never had to do; you could just run through with a silenced tranquilizer gun and never get spotted. For the first time in ten years though, I can safely say that Metal Gear Solid's gameplay easily matches up to the amazing storyline.

In conclusion then, I can safely say that I will give MGS4 a ten out of ten in my final review. I'm not sure that if Gamespot still employed the previous system for scoring it would get a ten, probably a 9.9 but with the new system, 9.5 is just too low.

PS. Sorry for this incredibly long and rambling blog. I'm just really shook up after playing this game. It's amazing. So amazing my usually well thought out, well written, well spelt, well punctuated and well constructed blog-writing has had to take a backseat for a slightly more insane style of writing.

I'm going to go for a lie down now!

To celebrate yersterday's release and the fact that I should begin playing it sometime today, here's my Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots Cinematic Trailer compiled in the way of the Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty intro video. Enjoy!

OMG! MGS!

...are both pretty rubbish (they should put both games together, that I'd like to see!).

Firstly, Battlefield: Bad Company is an incredibly dissapointing game. It's main focus is the fact you can "shape the battlefield" how you wish with the use of "Tactical Destruction". Considering this is the only thing, apart from some rather dull vehicles, that sets it apart from any other FPS, is very saddening. When you grenade a wall (by the way, fragmentation grenades would do no more damage to a wall that your average bullet anyway), boringly geometric squares get cut away from the building in an unrealistic way. Also, when I blew up some random explosive barrles at the bottom of a grain silo the whole thing just turned into dust and dissapeared, which is just pathetic. To be honest, the whole destructive cover system is worse than the partly physics-based one in the PS2's Red Faction and only marginally better than the scripted one in the PS2 and Xbox's Black.

Now don't try and argue "yeah well a truely physics based destruction system will never happen on current-gen" then you're an wee bit of a simpleton because the new Red Faction 3 will have one in, Crysis has one for smaller buildings and for the trees and bushes and World in Conflict has one for vegetation, all buildings and even on the ground. Aside from the destruction system, the game is just dull and unexciting and it's only real high-point is the fact the cutscenes are well written, well acted and are actually funny.

Secondly, I've played the Ninja Gaiden 2 demo and it's not dissapointing, because I wasn't expecting it to be good. The only thing that makes it better than Devil May Cry 4 is that it's got really fun and over-the-top gore. But that's it. Other wise it's exactly the same game that even has the same sound effects and the same graphical style. The thing that sets it apart from Devil May Cry, apart from the gore however, is that the graphics are rubbish. All in all I find this genre of gaming a waste of current-gen systems' power.

UPDATE: I've played a wee bit of Bad Company online and I have to say it's classic Battlefield. In other words I'm sure it's great online but I'll probably never know because it takes about half an hour to get into a game, then the game is either fantastically laggy or you disconnect due to an error and then EA blames you for it. Oh yeah, and these are the worst controls in any FPS ever; who's great idea was to put crouch on the right stick? And which imposile is responsible for the helicopter controls. Man, the helicopter controls in that Battlefield 1942 mod Desert Combat were better...and a tiny team of like five guys built that part of the engine from scratch and it was so good EA bought it off them!

Wow, I wish something truely good would come out, even in the cinema just to stop me writing ranty blogs. I enjoy a rant but to be honest I'm getting a bit sick of them. Oh yeah, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots comes out next week! Huraah! And then The Dark Knight soon after! If I was playing Counter Strike: Source right now I'd probably say something like "WOOT"!