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

It is currently Sunday 25th October and I did cave this week and get Br ütal 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 Br ütal Legend. I’ll leave you with this little trailer from the rock gods themselves.

-Gamer_152    

It is currently Tuesday 20th October and Br ütal Legend has finally hit shelves. It’s a game I’ve been excited about for a long time and I’ve loved everything that I’ve seen of it. The game’s been getting some  good reactions from critics, with the lowest review score I’ve seen so far being a 3/5 from Giant Bomb and even that isn’t that low. Although I must admit my expectations for the game have been skewed by the Giant Bomb review a little, I don’t want them to be but despite what everyone else is saying, after hearing Ryan Davis talk about how flawed the gameplay of Brütal Legend is, it has pulled my confidence in the gameplay of the game down a bit. That might not be a bad thing though, with my lowered expectations it may mean I enjoy the gameplay all that much more and whatever the quality of the rest of the game the art style and general atmosphere of the game are looking as thrilling as they ever did. So you may be wondering if I’m so hyped for the game, why don’t I have it yet? Well I’m still waiting for my university maintenance grant etc. to come through and so I’ve been trying to keep costs down and considered buying Brütal Legend too much of a luxury, however I think I may just reach a point where I really do want this game badly enough to pay all that money for it even under current circumstances.

I haven’t played a whole lot of games this week, mainly because I’ve had university work for a considerable portion of the week, my sleep pattern has been all over the place and Friday, Saturday and Sunday were spent either making the journey back to my family’s home, staying there or making the journey back. Getting to and from there cost a total of £53 and took over 12 hours but it was very well worth it to celebrate the 18th birthday of my mind-blowingly awesome friend xCompanionxCubex .

Getting back on topic I did play quite a few game demos last week which I didn’t write about in my blog because there wasn’t realistically enough space but now that I have plenty of room to fill let me regale you with tales of my time trialing Xbox 360 titles. I was expecting brilliant things from the Batman: Arkham Asylum demo and even then it delivered more than I was expecting, the combat, stealth, environments, voice work, graphics and characters in that game are all brilliant and it’s just a shame that’s yet another game I can’t afford to be buying right now. One game that did surprise me was WET because I hadn’t heard a great deal of positivity towards that game so I didn’t presume I would find the demo that enjoyable, but I was won over by its style, music and general madness. I have heard however that the demo is not entirely representative of the full game and for this reason I’m assuming that if I actually did play the full version I’d probably run into a lot of the flaws people have been describing, which didn’t seem so distinguished in the demo. Then there was South Park Let’s Go Tower Defence Play! which definitely had some great South Park humour in the enemies, achievement names etc. but even in that short demo I kept hearing voice clips taken from the show repeated too many times and there’s not really anything which can disguise the fact that this is just another in a stupidly long line of tower defence games already created. Lastly there was of course the Brütal Legend demo which I strongly encourage you to try if you have any interest at all in the game.

And that’s all folks. Thanks for reading, keep playing those games and I’ll leave you with this breath-taking display of DDR skill. Peace out.

-Gamer_152    

It is currently Tuesday 13 October and my course in computer games programming continues, as does my gaming itself. The programming on my course is pretty much still all stuff I already know but I don’t mind. In my ludology class I’ve been given a 10 hour assignment to create a simple video game using GameMaker and I don’t think I’ve done a bad job; my game involves moving a bullet-firing mouse around space and destroying the various enemies flying around the screen. The one thing I cannot get my head around though is the maths. I think we’re a long way from applying the maths we’ve learnt to any actual programming but I cannot for the life of me understand some of the mathematical concepts we’re being taught. Maybe it will all become clear eventually.

I have finally got my games consoles set up and working though. This week I’ve been playing Fable 2 which I’ve picked up some nice new achievements on and Burnout Paradise which is still great fun. But of course being the Halo nut I am, the highlight of my week has been finally being able to play Halo 3: ODST and the new Halo 3 multiplayer maps. I don’t think that ODST is as good as any of the games in the Halo trilogy but you know what? It’s still awesome! The game is good-looking and I thought the lighting was especially good. The setting was one of my favourite things about ODST and it was great to see the whole thing play out in the huge, dark city of New Mombasa. The new SMG and pistol were weapons that I thought were very well integrated into the game, it was great to headshot a few grunts at a time with the pistol or unload a stream of bullets into the nearby enemies with the SMG. The limited stamina and health of the ODSTs also did make for an experience where it felt like you were much more vulnerable and had to be more cautious in the way you approached fights and I do think that ODST was harder than any of the games in the trilogy. I thought the story held up well and one thing that I think has been overlooked greatly in the game is Sadie’s Story, the story told via the audio logs; I thought it was great to have a story told in that form and it was a nice little throwback to I Love Bees. One of the most interesting observations I’ve seen about this story though was from a thread on the Bungie.net forums and compared the story of ODST to Dante’s Divine Comedy. It sounds like an insane theory at first but if you actually take a look at the things said in the thread (warning: contains spoilers) it starts to make sense.

Firefight has been pretty cool as well but I think it’ll be better once I have the chance to play it with some friends. One major complaint I know a lot of people have had about the game is that the campaign was too short and that they don’t think they got the amount of content that they paid for. It’s interesting to see how many people are measuring whether they got what they paid for by amount of content and not by the quality of that content but I understand their complaints. It’s also interesting to see how many people are willing to trade the game in for a fraction of their money back and forgoing having free access to the Halo: Reach beta next year but if that’s what people wanna do they might as well go for it. I’m not gonna pretend the campaign wasn’t quite short because it was but I knew what I was getting going into this game and I was impressed with all of it. Oh and one more thing I feel I have to say before I move off of the subject of ODST: There were points in the game where I just could not ignore the fact that Dare’s face looked freaking weird. All the other characters looked and sounded good, but Dare? I tried to ignore it at points and just go with it, but even if only a trivial matter it was something that stood out for me.

I think Bungie have done as good a job as ever on the new maps for Halo 3. My favourite map at the moment is Longshore but they’re each great in their own way. The only problem is that I have a strict NAT and it has been seemingly impossible to play Halo 3 online with friends. This is almost certainly being caused by all the ports that are blocked on my university connection.   I have a very strong suspicion that this is gonna be a problem for all my 360 games and if it is that really sucks. In fact the number of ports they have blocked has already meant that I can’t log onto my old puzzle-based MMO Puzzle Pirates or update my Champions Online character editor to use that. What is life if I can’t have virtual pirates?

But I think that about does it this week. This weekend I’m going to be going back home to celebrate the 18th birthday of a very special friend which is gonna cost me about £50 and take over 8 and a half hours to get there and back but it’s gonna be well worth it. I hope everybody reading this is having a great week and I’ll leave you with the very final episode in this series of Giant Bomb’s video game movie review show TANG.

-Gamer_152    

It is currently Monday 5th October and I have now completed my first week of education in computer games programming. It’s been a pretty interesting week and for the most part I’ve enjoyed it. At the moment my timetable consists of five classes: computer environments which deals with how to properly communicate with other people about computers both in a verbal and written manner, software development 1 which deals with the basics of computer programming, ludology which is basically the study of video games, computer architecture which deals with how computers work and basic maths tech which deals with all the basic mathematics required for computer programming.

Computer architecture and software development have really so far only been going over what I already know but I still enjoy even simple programming and it’s always good to refresh your knowledge of things. Computer environments is a class I really wasn’t expecting and I don’t quite know how they’ve built an entire module around it but I can see why it’s there and if it’s what is necessary to learn how to be a good games programmer then I’m all for it. Basic maths tech has definitely been the most difficult so far as I was expecting a simple slow-paced introductory lecture but they threw us right in at the deep end with a two hour lecture on powers, algorithms and algebra and while I did manage to understand all of this it very much suggests that this is going to be a very hard subject. For one thing they are trying to pack an entire a-level maths course into one semester of my CGP course. My best lesson so far has been ludology where our main assignment has been to produce a three minute presentation on one obscure video game and while I’m not the first to jump at a chance for public speaking in front of a bunch of strangers, making a presentation on Geometry Wars has actually been the most fun part about my course so far. I look forward to next week.

One notable thing about my experience at university so far is that my sleeping pattern is all over the place. Maybe it will regulate itself eventually but I will fall asleep or wake up pretty much any time of the day, regardless of when it is or what my sleeping pattern for the day before was. For most of the week university can start at any time from 9:00 to 12:00 and finish at any time from 12:00 to 16:00. But the thing that really throws me is on Wednesdays, right in the middle of the week, I have a single lesson from 19:00 to 20:00. It also doesn’t help that as I live in the university halls of residence, loud music can come blaring through the walls at almost any time. I guess this is just something I’m going to have to live with.

As for playing video games there hasn’t actually been a whole ton of that going on this week. I hoped to have completed Halo 3: ODST by now but things haven’t quite gone according to plan. I’d like to thank my parents very much for bringing up my Wii and Xbox 360 but when I went to set up my brand new TV I discovered the manufacturers hadn’t put in the power cable they should have and so for the past week I’ve still had to stick to PC and DS gaming. I’m getting a replacement cable mailed to me which should arrive tomorrow which I’m very excited and very relieved about.

Thanks to all of you who have been reading. This week I’ll leave you with what is, in my opinion, one of the funniest Giant Bomb quick looks so far, this quick look at Darkest of Days. Enjoy your gaming everybody.

-Gamer_152