My weekend. Reviews Tuesday.
I wonder if those avatar facial expressions are hints to the overall review?? 😉
My weekend. Reviews Tuesday.
I wonder if those avatar facial expressions are hints to the overall review?? 😉
Dedicating myself to one game is something that used to happen a lot as a young boy. It started with Elite, a game made to get lost in through it’s near infinite universe to explore in an endless trek for profit and glory. But even games without such expansive a game world could hold my attention for weeks and months on end. I recall a time even, when at university in the early 1990s, playing nothing but the demo of Settlers over and over for weeks.
Of course a lot of this was probably born out of necessity, there were just less games around then. Couple that with the meager funds of a school goer or student and it made sense to ensure I was getting the most out of a game. But I don’t ever recall it feeling like that, it always felt far more like it came from a desire to immerse myself so completely in an experience, to live the game even if actually completing it back then was far from the norm.
But not so in recent years, flitting from game to game has become the standard, a couple of hours one night speeding around the hillsides of far away lands, the next I’m strapped into Lycra and beating up criminals. In fact, ignoring my years involved with World of Warcraft, I’ve probably not played the same game every night for a week in quite some time. There are advantages to this of course, I get to see far more game styles, and I also get to be involved in discussions of the latest games as I can bang a few hours into a new release and then jump on Twitter to take part in the days hot topic. I also have a house full with a cornucopia of games I could fire up at a moments notice as the whim take me. But I can’t help feeling I’m missing out on one of the best aspects of gaming, the aspect which is not shared by other mediums, the ability to actively partake in another life. And I don’t think you can get that from a few hours of play now and again, I believe it can only come from committing oneself to a given game for the long haul. Now not all games are suited to such an undertaking, some are designed from the get go as quick blasts to break the stress or monotony of the day, but plenty of games are open to it.
Recently my wife and I have found ourselves returning to a more immersive play style, dedicating ourselves to long hours of play in only a couple of games. I spoke a couple of posts back of our return to Red Dead Redemption, and another game has been ongoing for us since launch. Helped by a good supply of DLC, but mainly by willing friends joining us for Horde or more recently King of the Hill verses AI, Gears 3 has been fore-filling this role for months now.
Perhaps many would think Gears too shallow a game to allow for such long term play, and perhaps as a solo venture it would be. But working with others towards the various goals of achieving ribbons and medals, ensuring one person gets the most revives whilst another spends the most time in cover is actually a very rewarding experience. Bonding with our fellow players and perfecting our team dynamic over countless situations, working towards our own self set goals provides more than enough fun to keep us coming back night after night.
I’ve found my desire to play new games all the time has been waning, replaced by a wish to get the most out of each game in our existing collection which allows for this extended cooperative play.
In many ways it feels like a return to the feelings which got me involved in this whole entertainment form in the first place.
Approaching Whiterun by night.
So now that this is Free to Play is anyone trying it?
I played the beta long ago, but it was very buggy at the time, often spawning as a ship for away missions which was funny the first time, then quickly a major annoyance so I left it behind and once it went subscription I found little draw to pay.
However after downloading the client the other night I’ve now put a couple of hours into commanding my own star ship and crew but it is much as I remember. The away missions are a little dull, and uninspired, but I do enjoy the slow methodical space combat, adjusting power setups to boost shields, angling the ship to protect weakened areas, making use of your command crew’s special abilities to turn the tide of battle. The sound of releasing a photon torpedo barrage is still cool.
Frankly if the game was all space combat I would much prefer it, maybe saving the on foot sections for just story progression and interaction minimising ground combat.
Still for free it’s worth a try if you ever liked playing the old Bridge Commander or perhaps even the original Star Trek pen and paper RPG. And if you happen across the U.S.S. Stexington on your explorations of strange new worlds and civilisations then be sure to hail me. 🙂
Finally finished my three player play through of Dead Island with Linda and old school mate Woodoggies. Have to say we found the whole thing very enjoyable. The scavenging for parts and in-your-face melee combat worked so well in co-op, creating a real feeling of being a small group surviving the outbreak. I feel it’s very much like Borderlands, a game which only reaches it’s greatness when played with others. We still have a lot to do in the game though, various fun and some grinding achievements to try and obtain, but given how much we enjoy the experience I can’t see any of them being too much of a hardship.
If you can find a couple or even three friends to play with I highly recommend it.
*Title courtesy of Last Save Loaded/Chris O’Regan
With a recent lock out on my XBOX/Live account meaning I was unable to play any 360 games online, I found myself spending more time back with the PC, and in doing so reviewing my Steam games list. I have a fair few games on there. One hundred and thirty nine to be precise. 139! Now fairs fair, I bought the Pop-Cap collection at one point which had a lot of games in it, and as much as I love the jump in fun of a Pop-Cap game I don’t consider them games that I would sit down and play through from start to finish. But even discounting them I’m still rocking around the 100 games mark. Less than ten of these are games I have actually completed. It’s those damn Steam sales of course that so many of us fall foul off, offers that are just too good to refuse.
“Oh look, I can get Portal 2, wait.. there’s a pack with Portal 2 and every other Valve game, now I’ve got most of them but I don’t have Left 4 Dead 1 & 2, well not on PC, I should get this. I should get this now!”
Foolishly I had about 50% of these games installed, leading to what is commonly known as the Steam ‘What should I play” Impasse. You sit there looking at all these games you could be playing trying to decide which one you are in the mood for, only to eventually close Steam and go look at porn read the internet.
Well I’ve had enough of this. Both never completing anything and having an ever-growing backlog of great games to play on Steam. Thus I took drastic action! I uninstalled all but five unplayed games. These five games must be completed before I allow myself to spend money on another one game/collection. I even turned away from this weeks offer of Oblivion for £3.49!
So which five game are on my initial to play hitlist? Well, these:
A hefty selection on their own! Now Tropico and Dirt are games I have ploughed a few hours into already, so shouldn’t
take too long to ‘finish’ though Tropico will probably remain installed for years for it contains its wonderful sandbox mode, which kept me playing its first incarnation until 2010! If you are interesting in Tropico, version 4 has recently arrived. Frankly I could ignore Saints Row 2, however I want to have a good understanding of the game for when GameBurst talk about it on their excellent podcast. GTA IV and Titan Quest are both daunting prospects given their associated expansions (DLC for console types) are included, but also are well respected games which I should get a lot out of.
So there you have it. A game plan is in action, now I just need to see if I can actually stick to it!
This past weekend we had a good sort through our XBOX 360 collection in order to update our Pile of Shame/To Play lists for this site. A few of the games we had borrowed from a good friend some 18 months past and decided to bring these titles to the fore so as to be able to return them to their rightful owner. First amongst these was Resident Evil 5.
My personal history with the Resident Evil/Biohazard series is patchy. I tried to play some of the early games on friends PlayStations without ever catching the bug, and then actually purchased Code Veronica for our Dreamcast but didn’t get too far with that either. And so I have ignored the whole franchise, labelling it as a game style I just didn’t like. I have no real problem with doing such things unlike many, with so many quality games about I rather like being able to ignore some and allow more room for others to flourish.
The advantage RE5 had for getting an actual play through was of course our favourite feature, co-op play. And specifically, with only having a single borrowed copy, split screen co-op. Admittedly this has some drawbacks in RE5, the engine clearly struggles to handle the two viewpoints and the split screens are not full width, so it resembles playing split screen on an old 4:3 display with just a slight offset the spare space around just black not even used for the minimap display or collectables. Also the 360 implementation seems to suffer from some of the worst screen tearing I’ve witnessed on the console, perhaps I’ve just been lucky or maybe the port was just a little poorly handled assuming the game was developed primarily for the PlayStation which may be entirely wrong.
The game play however took us by surprise. At first we did struggle having jumped into this game, with little experience of the series and even more importantly having ploughed many hours into Gears 3 over the past couple of weeks. We kept trying to clear rooms and take out all the enemies, only slowly coming to the realisation that in many cases it was just about surviving and staying out of trouble for a set amount of time, or finding an escape route. Also the hot topic of ‘turret’ style shooting reared it’s head. I can see why the game needs to not have you running and gunning, it wouldn’t be a Resident Evil game if you could, however I could see the game allowing some slow side stepping whilst aiming without breaking the style or atmosphere. Either way we did eventually adapt over the course of the first chapter of the game and started to really understand how the game wanted to be played. The addition of collectables, as always, lit up Linda’s eyes and so we would spend a good deal of time finding the treasures and emblems as we went, although this effects your rankings at the end of each chapter given time is one of the criteria so that seems a little counter productive.
By the start of Chapter 2, of the 6 in the game, we were really starting to enjoy ourselves. I should point out we were playing through on Amateur which is the lowest difficulty in the game. Perhaps this means in some ways we are not really playing a Resident Evil game, that it makes the ammo supply better and thus less management is required, I’m not sure. But having a fun time is really what gaming is about for us, second only to having a shared experience. What it did allow though was for us to finish the game without ever hitting a real stumbling block. Sure we had a fair few downs, and more than a dozen full deaths but we always knew what we were doing and how to progress building our skills as we went as well as upgrading out chosen weapon specialisations. Myself favouring Handgun, Shotgun and heavy weapons, whilst Linda went Handgun, Machine Gun, Rifle.
The game had a satisfying conclusion, and despite this being our first encounter with Wesker we were more than happy to see the Matrix aping fool dealt with, though clearly this had happened previously also and in true villain style had survived so who know eh? We’re now replaying through the sections required to get the emblems and pick up various treasures and achievements we missed so it’s fair to say the game has risen in our expectations and we would now look forward to another in the series, provided of course the co-op play is maintained.
It’s always nice to have a game take you by surprise in this way and rise above being just play through and become an experience.
As a side note the new Cane and Rinse podcast has chosen Resident Evil 4’s HD remake as it’s topic for episode 2 and due to it’s in depth coverage handles the entire RE series so is well worth a listen to anyone with more than a passing interest in the series, or who just loves a good meaty games discussion.
Despite what EA would like you to think with regards to their Origin digital distribution system it isn’t, nor will be, a grand competitor to Steam. Steam has a virtual monopoly on PC games sales, and monopolies are things we are taught to fear, however that is only the case when the system in control is or becomes corrupt, and over exerts it’s reach on what is available and how much it will cost. Valve has never shown even a hint of this, despite having had no real competition in the past few years. We trust them because they trust us, we’ve bought into the idea of what Steam represents, and we as a community of gamers are resistant to having the PC gaming world fragmented to the point where you need to install an application for every publisher you wish to buy games from.
This is why Origin has met with responses from ‘Meh’ to boycotting. It’s trying to give us what Steam already does, but for such a subset of games that it fails to even come close. Sure EA has the might to just push on with it, and having their games removed from Steam sets up Origin as the only place to get most EA titles, and certainly the upcoming Old Republic MMO, not that I really have much interest in that anyway.
Other providers have found niches to extract value from. Good Old Games, specialising in many abandoned titles have found a way to make money whilst offering games DRM free by keeping the price to the customer low enough for people to not worry about paying compared to copying the games. $5 or even $10 for a game and an assortment of collectibles like wallpapers and sound clips is a good bargain in most peoples books.
But as for taking on Steam, there is unlikely to be a system that could directly.
And that’s where Onlive comes in. Essentially it’s providing the same product. Games, from various publishers, to end users. But the system is so different to what Steam is offering that it will find itself a place. It can offer the same, brand new, cutting edge games but sell them to people who don’t want to, or can’t afford to keep up with even the slowed PC tech arms race of recent years. Grab yourself a £200 laptop and away you go, you can even hook it up to a TV screen with a £3 cable and be playing the latest PC games on your 50” screen for next to nothing. This represents the true threat to Valves dominance, by not taking Steam on directly and offering a totally different approach, but with the same end result. Both services are just as volatile, should either go out of business you will lose all those games irrespective of whether they had been downloaded or just streamed.
So what could Valve do about this situation? Other that just shelling out for OnLive? Well how about they introduce their own streaming service, not to replace the downloads but to run along side them in a shared ecosystem? Imagine that for a moment.
You’re at home, you have Space Marine installed from Steam on you high powered home gaming nirvana. Glorious actual 1080P gameplay streaming into your eyeballs via your carefully selected gaming rig. But then sometimes you are not at home, no access to that £500+ gaming beast. But you do have your laptop with you, or even a tablet device. Fire up the Steam app on either and you can be playing the same Space Marine experiance, continuing from where you saved via Cloud Saves, the game not hobbled by your mobile device, but steaming OnLive style giving far better quality of visuals than would otherwise be possible. You haven’t bought the game twice, just purchased the licence to play that game either via download or streamed content. Surely such an idea has already occurred to Valve, a way to remain up to date and relevant, providing the same great service as ever, yet enabling a much wider audience to join in the regular wallet emptying that so many of us already partake in in Valves favour.
So, as an update, we caved in and picked up a second copy of Dead Island. So we’ll soon be able to let you know what we think of it as a co-op game. Our hopes are for a Borderlands style adventure with the quest based gameplay, and we’ll be trying out the alternative combat system also. We picked the game up at BestBuy who are becoming our go to people when it comes to picking games up there and then, prices are quite standard, but they will price match other retailers, including Amazon, up to 30 days AFTER your purchase. Good to know 🙂
After the disappointment of the lack split screen in Dead Island, we found ourselves without a new co-op game to play. So as we have started to do more and more recently we turned to the XBOX Live Arcade for help, in between grabbing levels of Gears of War 2 😉
After trying a few demos which show promise for future purchases, namely Toy Soldiers Cold War and Space Marine Kill Team, we decided on the dungeon crawler Crimson Alliance. The pay structure is a little odd, the game itself is free and then you pay for character packs, which are even more oddly done in that a single character is a rather hefty 800 MSP whilst the all 3 character pack is just the usual Arcade game price of 1200 MSP. Given there is an achievement to completing the game once with each character type I’d advice most people to go for the full pack. Another oddity is there are three characters but the game is set up for four player teams, perhaps a sign for future character types to be released?
The game play seems fun, if relatively standard fare. Linda took on the role of Assassin, which was an easy choice given it’s the only female character (seriously male/female options for all classes would be nice if it became a standard feature in games) and I took on the caster role. Our friend @Woodoggies will become the tank like fighter once he has the game downloaded. Linda and I played through the first five or so levels to get a good feel for the game, the combat is quick paced and the block function essential yet tricky making building up a multiplayer tough. So far we’ve managed a x5, somewhat short of the x8 required for the achievement. Loot drops are controlled by finding chests rather than killing enemies, and in general are less impressive than the items you can buy from the occasional caravan stop, and we seemed to have more than enough money to buy the best item at each stop.
There are also some puzzle sections, however from what we have seen so far they require all the brain power of a clever mouse, so we’re picking up health boosts and ‘soul anchors’ at a quick pace but presumably these will increase in difficulty. They may hinder a solo play through though, as some favour being in a multi person party so worth baring in mind it you plan to play alone.
All in all a jolly fun game, including what appears to be some replay value with score attacks and leader boards being present and correct and a medal system for rating each dungeon run you make with an achievement based incentive to gold them all.
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