Some housekeeping...

For both of you who care, and maybe even one of you will notice, I've been bloody quiet for the last 3 months. Well, I've been busy trying to either get a real job (failed, but I guess I impressed someone at ReadyUp.com seeing as I made it into the top 20 of over 700); I've also had to move my parents to and from Ireland, got my driving test nailed down now (I'm all grown up with a licence, fuck you Yahtzee Croshaw) and I've also decided to go back to university doing something I know something about.

Anyway, gaming news and stuff:

• the DSi will be out some time this year, for those of you with more money than sense and there are offers for knocking about already. I.e., for the 7 or 8 people who bought the PSP-3000: you can trade it in and get the DSi for £70
• 360's are still breaking uncontrollably but we still love our Gamerscores
• PS3's are still expensive but reliable - probably because no one can afford to play anything on them
• 360's play .avi files once you download the media update (for all you nasty media pirate types)
• I'm 90% sure that JJ Abram's Star Trek is an expansion on the TNG episode Reunification
• If you call that a spoiler, cry me a river. I figured it out myself
• Lego's awesome
• The Wii is not
• The new Prince of Persia is pretty good
• Far Cry 2 isn't technically bad, but it's boring as fuck
• GTA: The Lost and The Damned has a Road Rash-esque minigame which is work 1600 MS Points in my opinion
• I get RSI from playing Guitar Hero World Tour sat down
• The Fuzz minigame on Saint's Row 2 had me in stitches
• I mean it this time, I'm not going on /b/ anymore
• I'm not going to help you find it, even if you did a coca cola bottle and need help

That's about it. If anyone really cares, I'll start posting bitesize reviews for games, but I've essentially got three jobs now so bleh.

Fallout 3

(Brace yourselves, I've been playing a Bethesda game).

As of late, a lot of my entries have opened by immediately picking on a developer or publisher in order to adequately pad out my reviews and look slightly more intelligent and professional – or at the best get a cheap laugh or two. Whether it’s been working or not is entirely up to you, but nethertheless; puppies. Puppies are a perfect way to decide how much of a miserable bastard someone is by asking them if puppies are cute, adorable and generally some of the nicest things in the known universe (considering for a moment that caramel doesn’t exist), or if they realise that as cute as they may be, they’ll still piss and shit all over your favourite material possessions and inevitably grow up to be vicious figures of teeth and muscle.

Should you have read any of my previous work ever, you’ll know I’m the latter, which is why I know what Bethesda Games Studios is, and that getting my hopes up for anything they’ve ever played part in is about as wise as calling a grizzly bear a great big, lazy, two-bit puff. Take Star Trek Legacy; then place it carefully in the middle of a busy road and wait until someone eventually runs it over, because as pretty as everything looks, that’s all it’s really good for. Then there’s Oblivion, which you can use to test belt-sanders with in order to indulge in the delicious irony of teaching it how things really get damaged when you rub them together.

I’ll admit, I nearly did call a big furry killing machine gay in a manner of speaking by initially thinking that Fallout 3 could be one of the best games of the year, overlooking the fact that it was being made by people who don’t know what “fun” means. Eventually I saw the light before launch, spotting the Oblivion engine a mile off and decided Fallout 3 could disappear down a toilet somewhere along with Bethesda and go fuck itself. After a lot of badgering I decided the best thing I could do was play some games I was still actually looking forward to and then burn some money on an almost completely unnecessary RAM upgrade.

My world didn’t get turned completely on its head until I watched the Fallout 3 Zero Punctuation video. Surely Fallout 3 must be worth my attention if the only other person on Earth who knows what’s wrong with Oblivion likes it? I swallowed my pride, did a wee bit of research and decided to try justifying my shiny new computer.

Something I should say about the original Fallout is that it’s an idea that interests me immensely for some reason and also that anyone who complained about the difficulty curve of Dead Rising is a great big sissy and would literally die if they ever came into contact with a copy of Fallout 1. Sure, I was murdered time and time again and never actually got anywhere because I was continually stalked by giant scorpions and Lady Luck, but that’s ok because I fear I wouldn’t survive longer than 3 breaths in a post-nuclear apocalyptic wasteland before splitting into two separate and very physical personalities and redefining the words “killing oneself”.

From my understanding, Fallout 3 shouldn’t really have the “3” at all, considering I’m pretty certain it’s basically a remake of the original but apparently no one else gives a shit.

Research ends, review begins; God help me.

I give immediate credit to Fallout 3 for having probably one of the weirdest openings to a game ever (and I’ve played Rez) in which you start the game literally straight after you’ve been born. So instantaneously in fact, that no one’s actually managed to clean the afterbirth off you yet. And I must also say that for once I believe the NPCs who say I’m destined for great things on the basis that my character seems to have been born with a higher IQ then his father resulting in him picking his own gender, name and future physical appearance. Well, after dicking around with the appearance options for a while, I realised I was pretty limited to more or less the same very tired looking drifter with different styles of hair. And that’s about it, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing considering I’m sick of having to build my own character from scratch in every motherfucking game I’ve played for the last 2 years. You see, this is why I like Fable 2 so much: you can pick your wife and your clothes but you can’t pick your nose. Some divine force picks your nose for you depending on how much you eat, who you rob and who you kill, leaving you with just your hair and hair colour at your disposal.

Having decided that Oblivion was the most unforgiving, stuck up pile of wank I’ve ever wasted time on, I decided that with Fallout I was going to turn my back on the gallant hero for once and play my first playthrough of a game as the coldest and most badass bastard a possible. I was impressed at how often Fallout presented me with the opportunity to insult, threaten and swear at NPCs, then allow me to rip their faces off with a plank of wood full of rusty, irradiated nails. As such, I decided to do all of the aforementioned to anyone who met the following criteria:

- they weren’t going to fuck up the story if they died
- they didn’t have bigger weapons than me

Having run my character’s evil arse down to the point of exhaustion from all the murdering and bullying, I decided it was time to grow up and play the game properly. Or at least commit genocide properly. After wandering into the town of Megaton, I cocked an eyebrow to the thought that this being a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland, there was surely an obvious reason for it. Of course, I was right and did everything I could to rig the big bastard nuclear bomb to explode – completely ignoring the reasoning of the guy who gave me the tools to do it, instead following my own reason: I wanted to blow shit up. After much hard work and procrastination, I found my way to a safe distance, detonated the bomb and watched the most awesome explosion I’ve ever seen.

It was probably because I’d just annihilated one of the larger cities in Fallout that resulted in me spending the rest of my time with the game scrounging around for ammo and having my pure evil arse used as a gun rack for super mutants. Whatever the reason, I struggled to survive in the Fallout world yet again, but at least it was for a reason that allowed me to forget Bethesda had anything to do with it and it left me getting sucked in and appropriately neglect my friends who wanted me to join them in Team Fortress 2.

I guess what I’m trying to do is cause a quantum singularity that will destroy the universe by saying Fallout 3 is a good game and each line of the conversations was recorded in the same day, as opposed to in Oblivion, in which I’m pretty certain the voice actors had a habit of dying after each line. Laser guns are fun, and any game that allows me to fire a mini nuke deserves merit. Then there’s the fact that when you’re getting your arse handed to you, you can usually use the VATS system to pause time and drop a grenade directly under your aggressor’s testicles bouncing-betty style.

Left 4 Dead

Yes Valve, we see what you did with the name, very clever. Should you muster up the strength to see past lethal pun / text-speak jammed in the middle of the title, you’ll find that this is Valve’s latest game and pretty much designed to be played with four people so you can all gang up on helpless zombies and reduce waves of the flesh eating bastards to a cloud of blood and a splattered mass of rotting meat. Unless you ditch your friends, in which case you’ll get eaten.

Left 4 Dead has one massive hurdle to overcome before any zombies can be murdered and that is that gamers are amongst the most antisocial beings on the planet, second only to that particular branch of gamers that play first person shooters to an obsessive degree. Actually, that’s a blatant lie; the most antisocial beings on the planet are people who write about games. Anyway, as such, an FPS that forces players to stay together and co-operate is either so over-ambitious that it causes Peter Molyneux to go “pfft”, or completely fucked.

I decided to grit my teeth, shovel dangerous levels of Paracetamol down my throat and bare socialising with something other than a series of webcomics and bring you the review that no-one will ever actually read. It is possible to play Left 4 Dead on your own, leaving you with 3 bots to save your dopey arse and if the original Halo was anything to go by, it probably wouldn’t be long until one of those bastards decided that the best place to store their Molotov cocktails was up said dopey arse. Also, in the interests of science, I had to discover if Left 4 Dead could change real people, or just have them act uncomfortably similar to every other bot I’ve ever encountered.

I can report that while the majority of the time I wasn’t on fire, there are still a lot of people who can’t be arsed talking online anymore and there are also quite a lot of people who don’t quite understand that a long narrow corridor is probably the worst thing to ignite when you’re supposed to be co-operating. I may be one of these people, I’ll have you know.

After being burnt, shot and pillaged by my dear team-mates several million times, I eventually got matched in a party in which I was consistently the worst offender for friendly fire (a feat, by the way, I am equally proud and ashamed of) and things started to get awesome. I honestly can’t think of anything more awesome than standing in a corner, laughing with a team-mate while firing into a vast blinding blaze, full in the knowledge that lots of zombies are dying (again).

Having decided to take advantage of the “versus” option, I decided to see exactly how much fun the zombies were having. The answer is “not much”. It was an interesting idea, the likes of which I haven’t really seen since Turok 2 let you munch on your friends as a Raptor… or when they took the piss out of it on Conker’s Bad Fur Day, but shut up. Anyway, as a Zombie, you get to die a lot but that’s ok because you respawn every 20 seconds, but I can assure you that catching the bullet express to spectatorship gets very old after it happens a few hundred times in one game.

Screw it though, the main idea of you plus 3 people against a horde of easily killed zombies is so much fun you can easily gloss over the option to play as one of the unfortunate walking targets. The more nerdy of you will be dying to wondering how well “The Director” works. I honestly don’t know, all I can guess is that’s the reason why I could never find ammo when I went out looking for it while my team-mates were usually tripping over the stuff. What I can say is that the scripted dialogue is pretty good, should it not get completely and utterly on your tits after the unavoidable repetition and at least if you’re playing with more sociable people, you can have a laugh at it – a key example being the “Left 4 Bed” video.

There’s not really much else to be said; Left 4 Dead uses the Source engine which is both pretty and silky smooth, killing zombies is always fun and the story has been pretty much fired out of a canon into the centre of a very bright star with the only remnants are “get from A to B, kill everything in the way”. If you’ve played Portal, you’ll also be expecting some very clever hidden jokes and you wont be disappointed so long as you look hard enough, and if you haven’t played Portal then what the fuck do you think you’re doing reading my blog?

Call of Duty: World at War

All I've to go say is that I thought Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was really really good, even if every dickhead from here to the fucking moon with a current generation console has been mercilessly bumming it's online capabilities for a year straight. It was up to date, original and brilliantly executed. Then all those dickheads condemned World at War before it was even close to launch just because it was being developed by people who cocked up Call of Duty 3 by trying to make about 4 different games in a very limited time frame.

Personally, I think it was a stupid idea but I respect the fact that they still managed to finish those games even if they were shit, and I've been saying that World at War may very well live up to Modern Warfare because the developers were actually concentrating this time. I got shouted at and then these dickheads cheered and heckled me when World at War was actually launched. I don't understand either, but after all, these are dickheads, we're not supposed to pay any attention to them. Anyway, in order to convince my manager to buy a 360 after he'd agreed to sell his as a Christmas present, I had to buy myself a copy of World at War and all I've got to say is this:

FUCK OFF. I'm so sick and bored of playing WWII games that I could only just manage finishing the first level. Yes, I know. Bouncing Betties, flame-throwers, napalm etc etc, hernia. I've had enough. You can praise the bollocks off it all you want if your a fanboy or if you're being paid to review it; right now I'm neither so it can go fuck itself.

If I have to play a war game, it has to have guns that are modern. AT LEAST. War, like most things, is more interesting with lasers. Do you live with a black and white TV until you're bored of it, then upgrade to a modern TV that has a serial number for a name to watch Star Wars on it, praise it's bollocks off then screw with the settings to make it look really old?

NO YOU FUCKING DON'T. So don't make an awesome modern game, then follow your success by doing exactly what everyone else has been doing for the last 15 years. I've played, I've judged, I'm not going back to the 1940's.

Dead Space

I think EA hate me. Well maybe be not considering there doesn’t seem to be a death count on Dead Space which will make the biggest embarrassment to my friends and frankly the whole games industry. They may have killed me a lot, but at least they had the good grace to not keep count. I’ll admit that I’ve been looking forward to Dead Space because it’s a game by EA that isn’t a sports game nor does it have “Need For Speed” in the title, so that’s enough to forgive it for blatantly ripping off Event Horizon so much that I even recognised some rooms from it; and that’s impressive considering that I haven’t seen Event Horizon since it was new.

Due to a number of factors, I decided to play through Dead Space using only the Plasma Cutter – primarily because that sounds like the best item ever in a game that is dangerously obsessed with removing limbs, but also because one of my friends managed it and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be outdone (I mean on Saint’s Row 2 I launched my character through a plastic surgeon’s window on fire while my car exploded for fuck’s sake). I managed to get surprisingly far during my trial of Dead Space but I did discover more than enough to make a fair judgement; one of these judgements being that there really are a lot of severed limbs. I know I mentioned that already but fuck me, it’s like someone decided to cross-breed Goro with a millipede, make an army, then shove them through a woodchipper.

Something I can’t forgive Dead Space for is patronising me with a button that paints a big blue line to where it wants me to go and then telling me how to beat 90% of the puzzles. Not only did it patronise me to the point where my IQ dropped about 20 points, but it also decided to randomise all the items I came across which genuinely left me in a room with the biggest monster in the game and barely enough ammo to neuter a housecat. So I died. I took this onboard and spent all my money on an obscene amount of ammo, shot the bollocks off this thing and died again. And again, and again, and again. After I’d almost had my share of running out of ammo and seeing Isaac being torn into exactly the same few pieces over and over, I eventually decided to abandon traditional logic in favour of “fuck it, it still has limbs”, as this seems to work with everything else, and that big bastard was dead before you could make some toast.

Considering that particular battle was in zero gravity, I’ll give Dead Space a nice thumbs up and big cheesy grin in praise of the zero gravity moments because they are very cool, pretty original and brilliantly executed. If that statement could be applied to anything else then it’d be safe to assume that Dead Space is one of the all-time greatest games. Event Horizon did everything else a long time ago and it did it better and even I, who only played Resident Evil 4 for about 5 minutes, can say that it beat Dead Space to everything else a few years ago. And also, IT’S NOT FUCKING SCARY. Even if in I lived in an alternate reality where everyone who ever heard of Dead Space didn’t ask me about the dead bodies coming back to life, I would have picked it up damn quick from the name “NECROmorphs” – i.e., death, morphing? Seriously? Even if I was so brain-rattlingly stupid that I still hadn’t figured it out, I’ve played enough games in general to kill anything that moves immediately even if it’s supposed to be dead already.

There are some more pretty cool bit in Dead Space, like when occasionally a big tentacle will thrust out of the wall and drag you to your death leaving you with a few seconds to panic while you try shooting it in half from an awkward camera angle. Ok, that’s a lie, the camera angle does what it’s supposed to do but some arsehole decided to make my life even harder by having bits of the environment getting in the way of the only part of the tentacle you can hurt. The lie I was referring to was that the being dragged to your death while genuinely panicking is the only other cool bit, everything else is either clichéd of just outright shit. Like gravity gun puzzles. That’s Half-Life territory and besides, no one fucking told me I could fire items I was holding until about 2 hours after it would have been useful.

It’s not scary, but it is ridiculously gory.

And while I’m giving it a kicking, why did anyone think it was a good idea to have Isaac look and move like a robot and repeatedly try stapling messages from his wife to him? I don’t give a shit about him or his family – he’s my remote controlled one-man army and that’s the end of it. Although, the brilliance of the zero gravity environments comes back into play whenever I make Isaac run in it; while it should just irritate me, it strangely warms my heart to see him uncharacteristically jog like some form or retarded streaker when no-one’s watching.

I did however abandon Dead Space around the point where it gave shoved a deadly loop up my arse which caused me to keep respawning on the pointy end of a psychopathic alien’s, well, body. I suspect that after 20 minutes of me dying immediately that he was as bored as I was, so I gave up and here I am. After thinking about it for a while, most of Dead Space is incredibly repetitive and leaves you going to and from the same places a few times or sends you to different places that look exactly the same to do the same thing a few hundred times. Why the hell would you put grinding into a game that is undoubtedly action and marketed as horror? Maybe it’s to hide the fact that it’s like Resident Evil 4 but really predictable. Example: A big room has the only oxygen refill station on the ship, which immediately plants the idea that there’s going to be a hull breach there eventually and you’ll need it. Sweet Jesus, I couldn’t have been more accurate if I actually read the script beforehand.

What else can I say about Dead Space? If you haven’t already, watch Event Horizon, it’s pretty much the same but unlike Dead Space, it’s actually scary, even if it doesn’t have the same really cool zero gravity environments. Maybe EA were saving the really good stuff for Mirror’s Edge. I may as well safe you a few hours; it’s all because of a religious artefact in the cargo hold. It made people go mental, then they turned into the monsters on the ship and religion’s all to blame. I’m also willing to bet a substantial amount that the doctor you run into right in the middle of the game royally fucks you over in the last chapter.

It’s times like this that I really miss Star Trek; and don’t get me started on that think J.J. Abrams is working on because it isn’t Star Trek, it just uses the same names.

EDIT - 360 Dashboard

You'd think with the length of time they've been working on this bloody thing that they'd have ironed out all the bugs, and failing that at least have squished the big bastards. Mine keeps crashing when I try getting out of my friends list!

Although it's probably just my 360 slowly dying of asthma again.

The New Xbox Experience

Fuck off, it's a new dashboard, not something I'd call an "experience". If you have any idea what I'm talking about then you already know that Microsoft has stolen Nintendo's Mii avatar things, even though I'm not entirely sure why.

That's the most obvious change, along with completely changing the menu again which personally confused the shit out of me and it took me about 10 sodding minutes to figure out how to start the game already in my 360. Shut up, all the boxes look the same. While I'm talking about the games/box, I'd like to point out that Microsoft have set themselves up to be royally screwed up the arse by any half-decent hacker with a Blockbuster membership. If you fancy using up some more time and HDD space, you can now choose to install your games onto your 360.

As anyone who owns a PS3 will know, installing games is exactly what we all want because of the noticeably quicker loading times. Ow, it hurt so much to write that blatant lie.

Yes, it's nice and colourful now but the new avatars seem completely pointless - just like real Mii's. If you could take control of your virtual you and go fuck around in the deepest recesses of your 360, or even just mercilessly beat the shit out of your friends' avatars, I'd be much happier to have them but at the minute they're just animated gamer pictures. I also have an issue with the customisation: I made my virtual me without seeing any of my friends' and by taking quite a bit of care to make him actually look like me. Within two hours we all had pretty much the same avatar with slightly different hair colour.

Who knows, it could be interesting in the future (most likely when someone exploits it, see "Rules of the Internet" number 15), but at the minute it's just more colourful and otherwise point.