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• 9Nov 09

  Boats and Scopes

  It is currently Monday 9th November and I'd hoped to have this blog up over the weekend but things were a bit... Busy. Tomorrow is the big release of Modern Warfare 2 and I must say with all the hype surrounding the game I occasionally feel a little bit like a stranger in the world of gaming. Not only is the internet abuzz with talk of Infinity Ward's next great game but even people around my university are constantly questioning who is and isn't getting the game on launch day and most of the time I don't seem to be met with much understanding when I tell people I never really got into the Call of Duty franchise. Still, gaming goes on and I'm happy for all those who are super-expectant of the game's release.

  This week I've managed to get myself hooked back on World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2. Considering the addictive nature of WoW I thankfully haven't got too obsessed with it this time round but it's been nice to do a few quests and participate in the odd battleground match, although it might be nicer if the Alliance won more often. I also did experience a very odd glitch the other day where I was standing at the end of the pier on Booty Bay when the ship arrived and my character seemed to get stuck on a bit of the ship's outer geometry and it started pushing me along. This was kind of cool so I just let it run its course but when the ship sailed off for faraway lands my client refused to load the next area, forcing me to log out and in again. When I logged back in my character appeared to be underneath the game world, falling downwards and after a minute or so he just dropped out of view, lost all his health and the game asked me if I wanted to resurrect. When I did I ended up in the Hillsbrad Foothills, a ridiculous distance north from where I started. It really was the weirdest glitch I'd ever experienced in the game.

  On Team Fortress 2 I've been trying my luck with the Sniper this week which has been a bit of a daring move as I have a bit of a history with just plain sucking at sniping in shooters. However, even if I may still not be that good I'm surprised by how much I've improved in such a short space of time, practice really does do wonders. Now if only I could do a half-decent job with the Spy and the Scout.

  As promised last week I did upload my review of indie game Osmos to Giant Bomb this Tuesday and I've also filled out the Geometry Wars 2 review on Giant Bomb which was lost in a posting glitch a while back. I may have more reviews on the way in the near future and I look forward to any writing I get the time for. That wraps up this (relatively) short blog for this week. I will leave you all with a video that brought me great amusement. May I proudly present Laddergoat.

  -Gamer_152

  • Posted Nov 9, 2009 7:44 am PT
  • Category: Games
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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 PT
  • 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 PT
  • Category: Games
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