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...a second hand copy of Alice in a music store, discs were in good condition so I picked it up. Best 10AUD I've spent in a loooooong time.
Far Cry: Instincts (Xbox)
A quick rant first: I'm tempted to dock a fair few points off this game simply for the fact that you are forced to sit through an unskippable 5 minute advertisement every time you start - Even if you are 8 hours into the game and want to continue from your latest save point you still have wait for this advert to finish every time you switch on the console. That said, here's my quick review - I'm assuming not many people have played this game on here, so I'll mention some differences between this and the PC original. Instincts is basically a totally new game designed from the ground up to work better with the Xbox's ageing hardware. It shares the engine, and I guess a lot of the assets, but the gameplay is very different. The game is linear as hell, but you do get some very wide paths to move around in, giving you many different ways of approaching an enemy camp. Stealth is important in the early part of the game, and you can adopt three different stances that affect your movement speed and visibility in the undergrowth. You can sneak up behind enemies for silent stealth kills and you can set a sprung branch trap around any tree, and lure enemies towards it by hiding and throwing stones to distract them. You can do other gimmicky crap like go prone and roll onto your back to shoot enemies in the balls from underneath wooden huts. I would say that this early part of the game, where you are left seriously outgunned to enforce the stealth approach, is kind of underdeveloped, and often overly difficult and frustrating. You soon throw all this stealth bollocks out the window when you get your hands on some decent guns though. It's not long before the game's other main gimmick comes into play and you slowly acquire your Feral Abilities(TM) - your health now auto-regenerates, you can run fast and leap huge distances, you can "see" scent trails (this looks pretty cool), and you get an insta-kill melee punch that can smash infrastructure. Most of this shit costs adrenaline though, so you can't use it constantly. The difficulty level is completely fubared. First off, there are no selectable skill levels whatsoever (and no auto-adjusting of difficulty seems to be in play either). It starts off hard until you get decent guns, then it becomes a knife-through-butter run-and-gun fest for the larger part of the game, which is pretty damn good, before turning to shit in the last couple of levels, which are about as enjoyable to play as having sodium hydroxide solution squirted up your urethra, and yes, it all boils down to the distance between checkpoints. Life is too short (and sanity too fragile) to continue playing a game where the player systematically fails to get past the same checkpoint after about 16 attempts (because he has to escort a mission-critical NPC across a massive section of terrain - an NPC who has some cover-taking autonomy but equally will quite happily plough forward into a horde of enemies before you have had a chance to kill them). Don't even get me started on the endgame boss *_* Overall: Definately the best FPS I've played on the Xbox so far (I've played three: this, Halo, and Halo 2). Oh yes, graphics are awesome, and vehicles are pretty cool too. Been playing The Movies Demo, pretty fun so far even though I haven't actually been able to make my own movies yet. So far so good.
Quit playing WoW, just got boring. Looking forward to the GuildWars expansion, and definitely Warhammer Online. Sweet stuff. to quicksave in Enclave?
Getting picked up by archers and the less frequent checkpoints is annoying me. Dear Vondur.
I hate strategy games and oh boy do I hate this one. I blame you. And Kinn (for good measure). Yours faithfully, cz-I haven't even been close to winning a single fucking scenario in this stupid fucking game. Maybe I just fucking suck.-g but here's one for Quake
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/quake/review.html It's not like everyone plays every single game so they're always up to date. Some people haven't played older games. So eat my ass!
Beyond Good And Evil (Xbox)
Another 2003 game - oh noes! :P Anyway, in case you haven't played it (and I would imagine most people here haven't) this is a fairly jolly Zelda-inspired romp in a Futurama-esque sci-fi cartoon world, where you play a female photographer/reporter who has to save the planet from evil aliens with the aid of various anthropomorphic animals, burly men in turtleneck sweaters and lisping holographic sidekicks. The game's pretty easy - a simplistic stealth mechanic is used more often than combat, but it's kinda cool. Vehicles are rather groovy and integrate nicely with the rest of the game. Missions mostly involve sneaking around various interior environments, navigating all sorts of cunning security mechanisms (with a fairly heavy emphasis on the laser-themed variety), and taking pictures of dodgy shenanigans without alerting the guards. The game has high production values - Graphics and art style etc. are all rather tasty - music is good, voice acting is great. I guess if you like the modern Zeldas, you might wanna check this game out, but it is a fairly short game and you might be surprised when it's over so quickly (like I was) Black (Xbox)
I bought the latest overhyped Xbox shooter yesterday, and I reached the final room in the game today. Because the checkpoints are not hard saved to the console, it will take well over an hour to reach this point again from the beginning of the level should I want to switch the machine off and try again later. I've done this three times now, dying each time in the final room, and it's unlikely that I'll try again anytime soon. It's basically a big fat gun-wank, where you shoot terrists in the face across a variety of generic urban locations, using realistic weapons etc. The main gimmick is that there is a somewhat above average amount of destructable scenery in the game (but not quite as much as the marketing hype would have you believe) I had some fun with this game. It looks really good (for Xbox lol) and I like shooting people, and there are a lot of opportunities to shoot people in this game so that was cool. By far my biggest complaint is the distance between checkpoints, which is utterly retarded and unfair. You will typically have to plough through 30 minutes of gameplay before you reach the next checkpoint (which usually split the hour-long levels down the middle). As I previously mentioned, mid-level checkpoints are not hard saved if you turn off the machine, which only adds to the retardedness. As long as you can avoid dying, this is a rather short game, clocking in at around 6-8 hours if you just want to blast through it without doing any of the secondary objectives. Very immersive second word war 2 game, very impressive, very realistic, but too short IMHO (I finished it in normal in 20 hours...). Nevertheless, it was very very enjoyable.
The game is composed of 5 episode (Stalingrad, north Africa desert, France D-day, Belgium, and Germany). Each time you are either a russian soldier (was it a special vondur's request ?... 8D...), or british, or american... it depends on the episode, and in reality it doesn't matter at all, it is just the weapon type that changes. You have to progress with your combat unit, and teamplay is very well executed: I save my friends' ass as often as they did it for me ! Well, it is really worth to play: I will try it as veteran soldier now... I guess it will be much much more difficult ;P No I go back to mapping :P Quit wow recently, got really bored with doing the same old stuff and then discovered Anarchy Online which, if you don't upgrade to the expansions, is totally free (you get some ads but there implemented quite well). It's alot of fun and has a sci fi theme and if you can look past some of the graphics being naff then you will discover a great game, kinda like SWG was it was actually good. Also you can upgrade your free account to all addons for just $9.95 but then you incur monthly fees of around $10
If you wanna try some MMORPG stuff you can check out Silkroad Online at
http://www.silkroadonline.net/. Korean game (I think) which is all about the connection between Rome, the Islamic world and China, and combines/hybridizes all three into a single mythology. Free client and no monthly fees, I've read good things about it at www.mmorpg.com. Just in case anyone was interested in something like this. I fucking hate that game. My friend is glued to it. The reason I hate it is because of it's interface - it's overwhelming, but even worse is the control scheme is just plain wacked. Else I might've cared more to get through it a little.
Shadow of the Colossus (PS2)
After playing Ico, I had a feeling the team's follow-up game would be good, but I wasn't quite expecting something as transcendantly awe-inspiring as this. I'm just going to come out and say that playing Shadow of the Colossus was the most intense, enthralling, satisfying and emotional game experience I have ever had. There simply is no other game like this. I'm still staggered that there is so much to experience from such a relatively simple concept. The clarity of purpose is such that there is little more to the game than finding the next Colossus, working out how to get on it, clambering around it, and clinging on to its furry bits for dear life as it tries to stop you repeatedly stabbing it in its weak spots. But My God, the experience of it all... There is no unnecessary cruft to to bog this simple concept down, the game is just that pure. As a result (but in no way to its detriment) it is not a particularly long game, taking me about 11 hours to beat it the first time. The game is essentially sixteen massive boss fights played in sequential order. It just happens that these are the most astonishing, immersive, tense, rewarding, and visually stunning boss fights ever made. (On the subject of immersion, it's worth noting that to hang on to anything in this game, you have to simulate the act of "gripping" by holding the right trigger button; it's quite visceral to feel your finger aching and literally slipping off the trigger button in a particularly gruelling struggle just to stay in control as a Colossus whips you around hundreds of feet up in the air). Like Ico, the world these beasts inhabit is beautifully realised, yet at the same time empty and desolate. It's just you and your horse for companionship. The design, art direction, animation and music in this game are all mindblowingly good, and witnessing the awesome ending sequence makes the struggle of slaying the final Colossus more than worthwhile. And yes, I'm man enough to admit that I cried. But American PCG gave it 95%. I'd like to get it, but I don't have a good enough computer, I don't have 3 years available to play it, and my attention span is sho
i'm looking forward to playing it, too. haven't orded it yet, though. but i'm not sure if i should do it, either, since i know it will definately distract me from all duties and mapping in particular...
i recently finished morrowind. by and large, it wasn't as long as i expected and as everybody said. it all depended on how many side quests one was willing to take (i'd say i took some 60% and discovered more than half of the map). so i don't expect oblivion to be all that long. but still... I heard the controls and camera were a bit shit though
As someone who is usually very critical of these things, I had absolutely no problems with either of these aspects of the game. In fact, the control system struck me as being particularly intuitive and responsive.
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