Hey all, sorry for the long absence in blogging activity, I've been pretty busy with university although as of yesterday I'm finished forever and even have my grade! I managed to get a 1st which I'm very happy with. 
 
Anyway, here is just a quick run down of what I've been playing lately and my thoughts on them.
 

Just Cause 2

The original Just Cause was a bit of a guilty pleasure for me when it first released in late 2006 and when I heard Just Cause 2 was on its way I assumed the sequel would be to, and well, it is.

The graphics in Just Cause 2 fall between impressive and pretty mediocre, with the view of the islands while flying, or more likely falling, being a highlight. There are some odd graphical issues however, try standing Rico next to one of the heavier enemy types and you’ll see that he doesn’t even come up to their shoulders, or the texture that is overlaid on rico’s clothes when he is in either the snow or sandy environments.

The grappling hook is the best part of Just Cause 2, and with enough practice and application it can make getting around very easy, it comes in especially handy when you piss off the AI, which is very easy to do. This is because Just Cause 2 has no proper scale of determining cause and effect and by this I mean, blowing up a single item will usually result in an overkill of constantly spawning enemies and a sky full of attack helicopters wishing to rip you a new one.

The enemies themselves however are beyond stupid, never taking any cover and very rarely making a dash for an armed vehicle or mounted gun. Instead they chose to stand and take the brunt of any onslaught you throw at them, which always results in their demise.

Currently I sit at around the 65% completion mark and have only races and a lot of villages/bases left to concur, when I sat to write this blog, I began to question if I thought I had got my money’s worth with Just Cause 2, after all it is criminally basic in its game play and incredibly repetitive. Having you stomp from base to base destroying anything with red and doing the same few faction missions cant stay entertaining forever, but then I realised I’d spent almost 40 hours playing it, 40. That is more than I even managed in Final Fantasy XIII.

Skate 3

Skate 3 shares a lot of remarkable similarities to Lost Planet 2 in that both games were built for what seems to be exclusive online play. Depending upon how you approach the game and your fondness of online play this is either a great choice for them or a bit of a misstep and for me it’s the later.

I was really excited for Skate 3, it’s easily my favourite sporting game at the moment and when it came out, if I’m being honest I was a little disappointed. The game feels underwhelming, like it was rushed out to make it to market on a yearly sports cycle. The graphics and engine are identical to that seen in Skate 1 and 2 and have seen very little tweaking.

I was looking forward to exploring the new city of port caverton, especially as it would be the first game in the series to take place outside of the original city of San Van, however, rather than another exciting and expansive city, what we have been given is 3 very small areas that have no connection with each other what so ever, the difference in style is nice, and it’s nice to see the game attempt to take on the more grimy element of skating with the docks area but the city feels dead, with a lot of annoyingly empty areas that could of been filled with things to skate. Far too often you’ll find yourself on a piece of flat land, with only about 4 benches between you and the horizon and it’s just depressing. It’s also annoying to navigate, in previous Skate games the city was for the most part a large hill, with a lot of variation from top to bottom that could be worked into a very long run, if desired. Here it’s essentially just navigated by a series of menus that take you from challenge to challenge. This wouldn’t be such a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that it stops you ever getting a sense of how the city fits together in anyway.

The story is one of the worst aspects of the game, with very little effort put in at all. They set you up with the premise of starting your own board company and with the goal to sell 1,000,000 boards. This seemed like an exciting prospect at the start but you quickly realise nothing you do has any relationship with the increase in boards. There is no decision making to be done, no logo or deck designing to be done, unless of course you wish to hand over your email details to EA and use their awful and 9/10 broken logo creator. Once you’ve set up your company Redda, the camera guy from skate 1 and 2, immediately leaves the game essentially and hands the camera over to Shingo who remains almost silent for the rest of the game, sure this is a welcome change, especially as Redda can be one of the most annoying voices in video games. But it all just reeks of no effort.

 It’s also criminally short. I managed to rack up 1,000,000 board sales in around 5 hours, and the rewards given were not what I had hoped for. It’s also incredibly glitchy, with your skater falling all over the place at a moment’s notice. In the short time I’ve been playing I’ve lost count of the times I’ve managed to hit a pedestrian and immediately fly 30 to 40 at speed away from them. This also comes into some of the challenges as well, with some gaps in particular registering even when you fail to make them, or in more annoying cases, the other way around.

The playlist was flat out annoying to listen to, not because the music is bad, but because anytime you start a new challenge or teleport to a new area it decides to change the track, after about 3 hours of listening to the first 30 seconds to a minute of each song I decided to just turn the music off entirely. 

 
The final, and most worrying problem I had with Skate 3 is that it felt a lot more arcadey than previous games. A lot of the challenges required you to perform mamoth leaps and high speed jumps that would of killed most real skaters, and while these can be fun and very rewarding, they are best suited to the end challenges of the game as they were in Skate 1 and 2, this way they feel special still, rather than the norm. Because to be fair, if it becomes the norm, Skate becomes the new Tony Hawks.

Over all, Skate 3 is a bit of a letdown, it sounds like I’ve been very harsh in this review but only because I can already see Skate turning into Tony Hawks, and when you see a game that came onto the scene to basically end a monopoly of a bloated and past its prime game begin to go the same way... it’s frustrating. 

3/5
 

Also...

Soap

Hey guys, 
 
As of typing this I'm attempting to write up my dissertation for my final piece of work at university, finishing it will give me a degree in Video Game Design and hopefully a chance at getting my name and games into the hollowed pages of Giant Bomb's database.
 
To finish it however I've had to create a survey about DLC and digital distribution.
 
If anyone on the forum would do me the honour of participating in it I would be forever grateful.
 
Here is the link for those that wish to help. 
 
And remember, to anyone who takes the survey let me know, and i will offically owe you one.
 
 http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22A9T7DSQYG
 

Inventory Management/ Over Encumbrance

Preorder Bonuses

Zombies

Wastelands / The Post Apocalypse

I’m a pretty big fan of the site, if I ever get some free time, I’ll usually hit up GB to see what’s happening, one of my favourite parts of the site however, is the Bombcast, two hours of my week is taken up by some of the funniest (and more often than not) pointless conversations to be heard and I couldn’t be happier.

So about 3 weeks ago after listening to the latest Bombcast I realised I didn’t want to wait for the new episode, I got to thinking about the classic arrow pointing down podcasts and felt the need to listen to the first episode.

Since then I’ve been listening to the old episodes nonstop. If I get a free moment in my day I’m listening to the Bombcast, so far I’m up to 07-07-09 and I’m hoping to be completely up to date again before the year is out.

So let’s break it down a bit.

In 3 weeks I have listened to 97 Bombcasts back to back, with a total running time of 6 Days, 19 Hours 19 Minutes and 26 Seconds.

That is essentially an entire week of time.

Overall however, I’d say it’s been a laugh... listening to older bombcasts is enjoyable for a different reason than it was the first time around, especially when it comes to hearing predications that are either spookily spot on, or way off the mark.  

I’d like to start by saying the future of GTA is at this moment, pretty unclear. Other than a teaser image that was printed in the back of the manual to the episodes of liberty city retail copy we have nothing to go on. For the sake of this blog I’m going to be explaining my predictions as well as something that might as well be a wish list of things that could really make the next GTA a classic.  
  
To understand my ideas and thought process you should probably know something about me, and my history with GTA. I’ve played a lot of GTA through the years. I initially rented the original GTA and GTA London when I was pretty young and had a blast with them, mostly for the anarchy I could cause. It’s safe to say I never came any were near close to finishing either. GTA 2 to this day is pretty much a mystery to me; I tinkered around with it a little bit at a friend’s house but no more than that really. 

After the success of Vice City I was even more excited when San Andreas was announced, I even went as far as to create my own personal calendar and piggybank so I could save up for it while all the time counting down the days. To this day I can count the times I’ve been as excited as I was when I started San Andreas on one hand. San Andreas wasn’t what I had hoped for however, I’d like to make this clear, in no way am I saying San Andreas is a bad game, but it simply didn’t have half the charm of either GTA3 or Vice City. 
 

Rockstar had bowed to fan pressure and increased the size of the playing area drastically. This meant that most streets had no defining characteristics and were simply repeated houses (copy and paste style) which really took away some of the character from the game. The feature list was jam packed, to the point where the game was bursting at the seams with things to do. How is this a bad thing I hear you say? Well, just because you can throw every feature in including the kitchen sink, doesn’t mean you ever should.

This leads me onto my main theory about GTA, one I’m pretty sure most people have come to for themselves and that is that GTA works in cycles. Create an original game on a new more powerful engine ( GTA 3/ GTA 4) expand on it with interesting concepts, adding depth to the world as well as being incredibly stylised ( Vice City) and then to finally throw everything they can find into the dying engine ( San Andreas) before starting again.

If we assume that this cycle is correct then we should be about ready for the Vice City of this generation of GTA’s, a more stylised game built on the GTA 4 engine with even more depth than GTA 4. This is all good and well but I also have a second theory, and that is that as technology has advanced, the cycles can become slightly smaller, rather than throwing a whole game development cycle for each game, use DLC. If we take this into account, The Lost and the Damned becomes the Vice City of this cycle, a game that is incredibly stylised towards biker lifestyle with a grittier soundtrack and even a grainy filter over the screen while playing, while The Ballad of Gay Tony is the San Andreas, with bright and over the top characters and over the top activities added into the already busy world. If this is the case, then what ever is next to come should be going back to the more simple style of GTA 4.

So what do I think should be next?

It suddenly struck me while I was playing through the Ballad of Gay Tony. I walked into maisonette 9 as a customer, to see what the clubbing scene of GTA 4 had to offer, as I walked down the stairs to the main area of the club Luis began to bob his head to the music, his swagger became more exaggerated and he was even more blatant when checking out passing women. After a brief dancing mini game I hit up the drinking games upstairs, after winning Luis was pretty drunk and as I walked back down the stairs he fell down them. He lay there for a moment before pulling himself up, as he did however he managed to knock into a walking woman who made a comment about how she was, let’s say, less than pleased. Rather than ignoring this like usual however he slurred out some drunken insult towards her. As I left the club I saw people throwing up and even crying outside and this is when it struck me.

That experience I had just had in the club was the most realistic and relatable experience I’ve ever had with a GTA game. That’s not to say I’m some club junkie, but it’s the closest observation of real life and society that I’ve ever seen in GTA. It invested me a lot more into Luis and his lifestyle, to the point were now he is one of my favourite GTA main characters (Even though most people really don’t like him). This is what GTA needs to do.

In GTA 5 (or whatever comes next) they should work more upon the smaller interactions between characters, about making the world as deep as possible. I’d much rather has a very small, very detailed, very alive city than a massive open empty environment. Playing through both DLC packs back to back also gave me the conclusion that the next GTA should be playable from the perspective of multiple characters, even on different sides of the same conflict. Seeing the conflict from the other sides, i.e. how Tony Prince was desperately trying to get the diamonds back, not because he was a selfish rich asshole as he appeared in his brief cameos in GTA 4, but because he was a desperate man trying to not get killed by some of Liberty Cities most dangerous men.

I hope this blog has been an interesting read and has at least got people thinking about what they would like to see out of the next GTA game, please feel free to give your feedback or even just tell me what you want out of a future GTA.

Thanks

Simple, just combine a PSPGO with the Iphone and I'd be all over it, a music player that is a phone and plays legitimate games on it? I'm there.

Hidden Packages, Blast Shards, Orbs, Treasures, call them what you will. There curse has spread its way over gaming in ways that I never thought would happen.

My first experience with this was during Grand Theft Auto 3, it was the first truly open world game that I had ever played and collecting the hidden packages was actually kind of fun. The reward of being able to pick up free weapons and power ups from outside of your house was greatly appealing and really helped to make the end of the game pretty easy.

I’m not sure if this was the first game to include such an idea, but as with most things in Grand Theft Auto 3 it was certainly one of the things that caught on in a big way, not just in future Grand Theft Auto games, but also in other sand box games and eventually it even spread into more traditional games.

As the generational shift of games consoles happened this became more apparent than ever, and now with trophies and achievements it’s gone from being something optional for in game benefits to something that is usually required to complete if you want to truly finish a game to 1000 gamer points, or to unlock that platinum trophy. This in turn has made it incredibly frustrating, why does every single sandbox game need these? Why do they have to be so obscure? And why do I always have to always have one missing by the end?

This problem has come into effect for me in a massive way recently, and when I say recently I mean within the last 24 hours. Don’t get me wrong I’ve had a problem with these damn things since Crackdown but within the last 24 hours I have collected all 179 treasures on Tomb Raider Underworld (twice, as one of them glitched towards the end of my first play through) all 350 Blast Shards in Infamous and all of the 1001 light seeds from the Prince of Persia.

Other than for purely extending the play time of their games, I can’t understand why developers continue to include them in their products. I personally believe they can actually ruin the game by making you very aware you are playing a game. That first moment when you find number 1 of however many is a moment I dread as I then have to make the decision. Do I collect them all as I see them, and hope they are in an easy enough place that I can collect them all by the end of the game, without missing any? Or do I avoid them like all holy hell so that when I do finish the game I can use the only method I find to be truly effective and to systematically check every single location using some kind of map, checking off each location as I find it.

In my experience I haven’t found a single person who doesn’t dread the “hidden package experience” as I call it, so why do they keep this stuff in games? As games shift and change into the modern versions we see today, how is it that this incredibly archaic way of doing things has managed to survive so long?

I have full respect for which ever open world game takes the plunge, and is the first to omit this dark side of gaming forever.

Thanks for reading.

Ok, so I'm hardly an Insomniac, but it's currently 4:04AM and I can not sleep for the life of me. No matter how much I try I've got this burning sensation of guilt at the back of my mind that I just can't purge.

The reason?  I think it's time to give up on gaming.

Now, I know this sounds rash, and it sounds harsh but I havent really been properly enjoying my gaming for at least a good year now. I've mostly put it down to an increasingly poor quality of games being released nowadays combined with my increased jadedness towards gaming/life/well, everything.

I'm a student, (of games design funnily enough) so I have a lot of time on my hands to kill and only today did I sit down and work out that I play on average around 60 hours a week, which is the equivilent of a job! I remember I used to game for fun, but now I only really seem to bother for trophies and achievements. I know this is stupid, and it's a habit I should be able to break but I can't. For example,  I'd love to go back and play some more fallout 3, but with 100% of the trophies to be earned on there earned, I really don't see it as an option worthy of my time. Instead I'm forcing myself through all kinds of crap, just to increase a small digital number that no one but me really cares about.

Congratulations me, I offically have an E-Penis equivilant to Level 11 on PSN and Almost 40,000 Achievement points on Xbox live, but at the end of the day what is the point in it all? As time goes by I'm beginning to find myself becoming more short tempered, and not just games but also with my family and friends, I've put on weight for the first time in my life, weighing 15 stone at 6 foot 1, making me according to my BMI at least, overweight. It's also an expensive habit, I haven't actually gone into the figures, but in the last year alone I wouldn't be suprised if I had spent well over £1000 on gaming, which is an expensive habit for a student with no job.

I could be doing such more productive things with my time, learning how to cook properly, how to look after myself better physically and also increasing my skills as an artist and 3d Designer, something which should be my main focus in life if I want to get ahead in this career.

Now I'm not saying I should give up forever, but I should maybe cut down to about 6 or 7 hours a week at the very tops and at least have the self respect to play games purely for the fun of it. Fuck the figures, Screw the trophies and achievements, I'm going rouge.


I'd like to apoligize if this doesn't make much sense, or even read very well but a lot of what is written is all just pouring out of my brain at once, and it's pretty tough to get it all down, let alone in any kind of readable english (plus it being 4am probably doesn't help lol).

Anyway, thanks for reading this, if anyone has any advice on what I should do, or any words of encouragement I'd be more than happy to hear them.


Soap

Before you read any further please be aware that this is not news, it's just an idea I would love to see come true (hence the Dreamy Days title)

Final Fantasy VII was released on PSN this week, I'm pretty sure it's going to sell very well, especially for people who legally want to play Final Fantasy VII on there PS3/PSP/PSP Go (in the near future) but now that it's in downloadable form, wouldn't it be awesome to see some trophies for it? I'm pretty sure that would also drastically increase the amount of people willing to download it as well.

Ok, so I was bored to day at work and came up with a few trophies for it, feel free to give me your feedback on it or make your own up if you feel the need.

Final Fantasy VII Trophies

Bronze -
                  Finish Disk 1

Bronze - 
                 Finish Disk 2

Silver -
                Complete the Game

Bronze -     "Full House"
                 Have all characters in your team (Including Yuffie and Vincent)

Gold -         "Weapon Master
                Defeat all Weapons (Ultima, Emerald, Ruby, e.t.c)

Bronze - 
                Stop the Train in North Corel

Silver -     "On the Ladder"
               Purchase the house in Costa Del Sol

Silver -    "Arcade King"
               Beat all the Highscores in Gold Saucer

*Secret* Bronze -
                                Be chosen to spend the night with Don Corneo


Thats all I've got for now, Obviously it wont happen, but don't you think it would be pretty cool?

The Xbox 360 has been out for almost FOUR YEARS now, you can no longer even find Gamecubes or original Xbox games/consoles in shops anymore (and PS2's aren't far behind)...

So can we finally stop calling it Next Gen!?

>_>