Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.









I'm bored of Left 4 Dead, back to Team Fortress 2 I guess.

It's been a long time since my last proper blog post, 3 months now in fact. A lot has happened gaming-wise since then so I thought I would give a quick update.

Game Purchases
I bought a fair amount of games mainly because it was Christmas which means lots of cash as well as January sales, all in all I was happy with my purchases but some of the games really didn't meet my expectations.

Far Cry 2 - The only real reason I bought this was because it was £20 on Amazon which in my eyes was a great deal. I had heard some great things about this game but at the same time I heard it was flawed and many people were disapointed with it; I became one of them. The idea of free roaming around a 50km sized map with an open ended storyline sounded great but having to drive for 10 minutes to get from place to place really is not fun. The missions are pretty much all the same, you either assassinate somebody or you blow some building up or if you were like me and wanted that 30g achievement you always met up with your buddy first which adds to the length of the mission. The graphics are absolutely beautiful and so is the gun mechanics but I am afraid it's the gameplay that really matters. In the end I was finding it too much of a drag and I gave up after completing only 10 missions which is a great shame, it could have been an amazing game.

Fable II - I had been wanting this for a while before I bought it, it was one of the major releases inside the short period of time when we were flooded with games so I had never got round to purchasing it but I really do regret not purchasing it earlier. This game is a whole load of fun. I love games which let you do what you want when you want so this really satisfied me. It is a game that is easy to pick up and play seeing as you have more then one mission to complete whilst you can also do side missions or jobs if you choose to. I chose to take my hero down the 'Good' road which worked just fine for me, I've heard that becoming evil makes most towns look crappy but I'm not too sure oh and speaking of graphics this game really does look great and most of the civilians look quite humorous. The voice acting is spot on, it's great to see the British have a major part in a big game for once and when they do they seem to do it very well :P

Of course Knothole Island was released which further extended the time I played, the missions were quite disapointing due to the length of them but the shiny knight armor and extra 250 gamerscore was worth the price.

Mirror's Edge - This game didn't interest me a lot until I played the demo which I had a few hours of fun with. But to be honest, if you've played the demo you have basically played the full game. The gameplay makes little change throughout the story and it was good that it ended when it did because I was very close to being completely bored of it. But still it's fun to jump from building to building and run up walls; the only chance I will ever have at successfully doing so.

Mount & Blade - This was reduced to £5 or something low like that as a weekend deal on Steam so I thought I may as well take the deal whilst it's there. Was it worth it? Well it was definitely worth £5, but not worth the usual price tag of £20-£30. It's hardly a full game yet, you can't really call the campaign mode a campaign and there are few skirmishes. The textures are fugly without the texture enhancement mod and you basically will get little out of the game without installing any mods which is why it's not worth the price it usually is. I don't expect to have to download mods to get more then 3 hours out of a game of that price. Still, I like the idea and a couple of major updates should help it out.

Brother's In Arms: Hell's Highway - The most recent game I bought and actually was fun...well the singleplayer was; the multiplayer seems dead, I found 1 match and that had 4 people including myself but I only bought if for the singleplayer anyway. I played Road to Hill 30 (the first in the BIA series) and loved the whole "Four Fs" thing it had going on so I knew I would enjoy this - I also have a weird love for WW2 movies and games which I have no idea why. You once again play as Sgt. Matt Baker who seems a nice guy, the game really makes you feel for the soldiers as you become so close to them due to the long cut scenes and as Ryan said in his review it seems as though you are watching a TV series. Unlike other First Person Shooters you can't just run in alone and kill every enemy and still have 90hp left, you need your squad and you need to command them well which is a nice change but at the same time you kinda feel you have to babysit them. I update the wiki article because it was a few months out of date, check it out!

Audiosurf - This was a part of the Steam holiday sale, it was £3 so I knew I couldn't go wrong seeing as I had already played it and found it to fill some time for 10 - 20 minutes.

Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl - Another game I bought off Steam, I had seen many people praising this game and a lot of friends said it was a whole bunch of fun. I liked it kind of, didn't finish it and barely started it. The game didn't have much of a tutorial so I was just left to wonder about and follow my map to the next mission which I didn't feel like at the time. It was Christmas so I had a lot of other things to do...I'll finish this when I am bored some day.

Movies and TV
I bought the Band of Brothers boxset just after Christmas, Band of Brothers is a 10 episode TV series made by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg shortly after they finished Saving Private Ryan. It follows the men of Easy Company and is a true story of how they fought through WW2. Basically, if you enjoyed Saving Private Ryan you will love this; each episode is 1 hour long and was recently shown on BBC 1 which is where I first saw it. It takes a closer look at the soldiers and the bonds they formed with each other but at the same time has great actions scenes.

I haven't watched a lot of new movies, I have mainly been watching ones I have seen before again such as The Dark Knight. But I did manage to watch Sweeney Todd and The Wrestler. Sweeney Todd was a lot of fun, it was funny yet serious at the same time, the idea of a barber chopping up his customers just made me laugh especially when it's Johnny Depp who was awesome by the way.

The Wrestler was good too, didn't really know what to expect but I also didn't think much of it after. To be honest I don't really know what to think but yeah it was enjoyable.

Other crap
Apart from all this I have been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead, Valve finally announced the new 'Survival' update which is a bit disapointing due to the small size of it but hopefully the new campaigns and gamemode entertain me for a while. As well as this I have been playing a small amount of Team Fortress 2 which is also getting the Scout update any day now. Oh, thanks to the people who went to the TF2 Bombing Run this evening it was a lot of fun. The past few days I have been pissing about with localhost web scripts for no reason, editing themes and scripts for Wordpress is strangely fun.

A lot of Giant Bomb users have been setting up Twitter accounts so I decided to tag along, mine is located right over here: http://twitter.com/MinimanUK. Feel free to follow me ;)

The GTA IV DLC, The Lost and Damned, is being released on Tuesday which I am of course going to buy. I just hope there is a decently long storyline which seems to be a problem with DLC these days. This DLC should make me reach 25,000 gamerscore, currently around 24,900.

So yeah, thanks for reading if you did so. I might make a blog on the GTA IV DLC or maybe on the TF2 update but I also may not, who knows.

Yeah...see ya.

P.S. I couldn't be arsed to proof read this blog post so have fun trying to de-code any grammatical errors.

No work/school for us Brits thanks to the wonderful creation of SNOW! We don't get a lot of snow here in the UK, pretty much once a year so it's quite special when it does happen. Still snowing pretty heavy so i'm hoping for tomorrow off as well.

Left 4 Dead has been a title that I have been looking forward to for a long time now, everyone loves to shoot down zombies but shooting down zombies with 3 friends is so much more satisfying and finally it's almost here, less than a week away.

The demo was released on Tuesday on PC and on the Xbox Live Marketplace, so far i've only played it on PC and it is nearly everything I expected it to be. The demo has only 2 chapters of the 'No Mercy' campaign so you would think that you would play through it once or twice and then never play it again but no, It is one of those games that you will keep playing over and over again. The game runs on the excellent Source engine, if you're familiar with games such as Half-Life 2, Counter Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2 then you should pick up Left 4 Dead quite quickly as it all follows the same control scheme and has the same feel (movement, aiming...etc). The only complaint I have about it is the matchmaking system which the PC now uses, it can sometimes take about 15 minutes to find a server unless you host locally which means you are going to be lagging if the host doesn't have some super 10GB internet connection.

Yeah, so today I decided to pre-order the full game (as seen in the image to the right, when maximized) which is released on Tuesda y next week and I really cannot wait to play through the full four campaigns, it's going to be so much fun; I will probably be playing this for a very long period of time, I just hope Valve don't abandon it and release new content such as new campaigns and possibly new weapons/zombie classes. If you haven't already downloaded it I highly recommend you do and if you can then, get some friends together who have mics as it will really increase the fun of it all and it will also remove the rage factor when all four of you are wiped out in a matter of seconds.

Got it one day early, yay me. Sorry for the shitty camera quality, I used an eyetoy...

















(P.S. It's awesome.)


Update: Couple more screenshots for the people who thought I photoshopped it. Don't see why they would seeing as many other people also got the game one day early.