Tuesday, 28 June 2011

Stuffs...

A few things...

New Flat. Time to start buying furniture.

Played a few new games. I'm going to endeavour to do more "what makes games good". Some games deserve in depth analysis, others that I play I'll just right about 4 or 5 paragraphs about what really stands out. This is useful because some of the games I was going to go really into depth with I can hardly remember now, but the bits I do remember are pure solid gold... probably.

Expect to see (some old ones I was doing in depth but will just do a "what I remember of them") Hydrophobia, Singularity, Grey Matters, and some recent Infamous 2, Alice: madness returns.

Glad to see Duke Nukem is dying a bad death. I will never purchase anything from Gearbox again after this misogynistic tragedy. A shame, because I actually liked Borderlands.

Bit disgusted by Elizabeth's cleavage from the upcoming Bioshock Infinite. Poor, pandering sex appeal in an otherwise well rounded character is the hallmark of the underconfident designer, thinking they need tits to appeal to the lowest common denominator and up their sales. There's a reason why such bawdy crap wasn't present in the original Bioshock, these new developers are obviously floundering at such a large task. I'll probably still get it, but I really am getting fed up with this "we have a female character, better sex her up" aspect, it detracts from anotherwise good character to use her in such a way. Especially seeing as Elizabeth looks about 12...

And then there's Catwoman... That's a whole other kettle of dumbed-down laziest stereotyped fish. Actually put me off the game. Maybe it won't be so apparent in the game (but seriously? Kiss move?!) so again I blame a bad marketer.

That's about it for now!

Saturday, 14 May 2011

Sony Ericsson, Xperia PLAY

Aka. the "Playstation Phone".
Been batting it around a while now but I genuinely think I'll be getting this when my contract comes up for renewal (around October, so only a few months wait).

Why? Well, I can tell you now it's not for the playstation suit. Unless some absolute ball-busters come out on that (FF's, some of the weirder ps1 titles that never made it to europe eg. Chrono Cross) I can't really see myself going in for it.

No, I want it for the emulator ability. As the Xperia runs android; one of the hundreds of old ROM emulators should be able to run on it. Then it's just a case of grabbing a ROM image of said old game and bobs your uncle, an entire legacy catalogue of old games on my mobile. Lectures will never be so fun again.

See, I currently have an HTC Hero. It suffered a lot in the upgrade from android 1.5 to the 2.3's, but mostly I've come to realise that a solely touch screen device kinda sucks for gaming. Sure, there's a few titles that were made for touch screen and as such work well, but it's not an ideal gaming platform for when your palms are sweaty. So, emulator, ps-one style controls and whatever takes my fancy. Boom.

This fills a deep requirement for me. I was born in 88, so I feel that I missed out on a lot of the better old school games. I had limited fundings, so only had my mega drive and whatever I could save up for or my parents bought me, a lot of which turned out to be utter crap. But as a kid you don't care. It does mean that now, with the invent of the internet, ROM image copying and

So expect in the future a lot of analysis of whatever I've decided to lug around in my pocket.

This has however had a negative knock on though.. I kinda feel like I don't want to play the old games just yet, save it until I get the PSphone... Ah well, I'm sure there are greater dilemmas in the world.

Wednesday, 4 May 2011

Recently...

Took part in Valve's ARG and got the golden potato. Currently reviewing the 13 potato pack games.

Been replaying Fallout 3, good fun, but starting to stagnate. Will leave it for a while, though it's reaffirmed my belief that it's pretty much infinitely superior to New Vegas.

Played and completed Portal 2, both single and Co-op. Good, suffered a little in the co-op where only really one person was doing anything. Suffered from classic portal "oh, this is starting to get really, REALLY good... shit, there's the credits" syndrome. Especially the co-op where they finally started throwing decent simultaneous tasks at us and then it ended. Will try to do a decent in depth analysis again soon.

I'm going to knock a large number of other games off my list.Included are the original Fallout, Fear 2, Planescape Torment, and quite a few others. I'll probably do some quick-fire reviews.

Still not gotten DA2 despite (recently and briefly) reduced price, because I simply don't care anymore. GOTY maybe, but it doesn't look good enough to justify it.

Recently played a cute little game called Recettear. Good fun, I highly recommend. Might do an analysis of it soon.

I'm also starting to think that these big scary text dumps aren't neccessarily the way to go... The more I watch video reviews and quick-fire bits of info, listen to podcasts etc, the more I think I need to get some video software and start making ZP-esque exposition dumps. At least it'll only take 5 minutes and I can give you some nice bits and pieces of info.

 This is especially true for my "the way I play" which is starting to feel more and more like a fan-fic. This isn't what I want to do, I want to discuss my character, how they become who they are and why, based on the mechanics of the game and the environment they're in, I play them the way I do. Maybe a large biography a la a wikipedia page. Not this in-depth epic of story I'm currently writing.
I don't want to end up like tolkien and give too much info, you don't need to know every time I pick up a gold piece...

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Tuesday, 22 March 2011

Wednesday, 16 March 2011

Today


A comment on Facebook about Yahtzee's recent review of Killzone 3.

That is all.

Friday, 11 March 2011

Games I'm looking forward to

Dragon Age 2 - Demo was dreadful
More New Vegas DLC - Hopefully give some more plot to this bad-boy!
Skyrim - Nuff said
Deus Ex 3 - Interested to see what direction they take it, and if the Squeenix backing will push it forward
Portal 2 - Always good fun
Uncharted 3 - Been nothing but impressed with this dumb yet incredibly well executed series.


Possibles:
Witcher 2 - despite the horros of witcher 1 I'm wondering if they've taken it in a newer, better direction.
Tomb Raider - I'm still on the fence as to whether you can turn what was essentially the lads mags/page 3 girl of video games heroines into a respectable individual. The old games were genuinely quite good, just the terrible marketing of lara. If anything this shows that the industry is changing.

Dreading
Dragon age 2
Duke nukem forever - Misogynistic trype that should have been burried in the backward 90's, lost so much respect for gearbox reviving this ass.