Zombies, Zombies, Everywhere!

Over this weekend I’ve killed my fair share of zombies, and completed quite a good reckoning of achievements too.

Some were the normal achievements for completing a campaign, but others were a bit more involved.

Clownd was the first I grabbed, and without really trying – I just thought the noise was funny when I melee’d the clowns 🙂
Gong show – load up on adrenaline and whack the gong (then prepare for the horde) and Stache Whacker – easiest done with a katana, were another pair from Dark Carnival.

My favourite though, had to be Guardin’ Gnome.

I don’t know how many times I went back for that damned gnome.. especially during the rollercoaster section!   The first time I did it, I made the mistake of putting him down in the helicopter, so I could help out my team mates with a bit of sniping.  They ended up incapped though, and the helicopter took off – but because I wasn’t holding the gnome it didn’t acknowledge that I’d saved him!

So yeah.. keep the gnome in your hands on the plane, and let your team mates look after themselves for that one.

After playing the demo, I had thought this game wouldn’t be as creepy or intense as the original, but actually, it is just as good a game.  The new infected add a little more risk to the old strategy of sticking closely together, and as for witches – well.. they’re not quite so easy to sneak past anymore!

Left 4 Dead 2

After Left 4 Dead, it was inevitable that I’d end up getting this one too, though I had thought about waiting for a deal somewhere.. but I ordered a couple of days back, and today it finally arrived in the office. 🙂

Now to get my hands dirty! 😀

Bit of a rant, really

Bit of a rant, really..

No Russian
I knew there was to be a potentially shocking, disturbing, upsetting, whatever, section to MW2.  I saw the little warning screen, asking if I was happy to see something that might upset me, and I clicked OK.  It’s a game.  If it comes to it, and I really don’t like it, then I’ll think about skipping.

Now.. I was thinking this would be a torture scene, as in a previous game, with captors beating a tied-up victim.  I played my first few hours of the game, and while I felt cruel shooting the people in the airport, it didn’t strike me that this was such a bad thing – you are playing the part of an undercover agent, who has infiltrated a terrorist group.  You’re meant to be doing cruel things.

I completed that mission and went on to the next – not realising that this had been the potentially shocking, disturbing, upsetting section of the game.  Am I overly hardened to in-game violence?  Maybe – but it’s a GAME.  I wouldn’t shoot civilians in an airport in real life, though, any more than I’d speed down the road, smashing through barriers and mounting pavements, followed by fleeing the cops, orthan I would  join a gang and shoot up the neighbourhood, or sneak around thieving from people’s houses.  You know, like in other GAMES.

To add to this, there are some ridiculous politicians getting involved, and just highlighting the fact they don’t even understand gaming in the first place.. one thought PS3s were something that kids walk around with in their hands.  Yeah.

So, they’d like violent games banning, because we might go and copy this violence in our everyday lives.. there’s more violence on the news.  Via news channels, I have seen somebody shot in the head, and seen the bodies of troops massacred by terrorist groups, in far more grisly detail than in a game, which I know to be simply fiction.

Parents – bitching that these games are training the nation’s kids to be terrorists – why are you letting your children play an 18 rated game?
I’m in a fairly ranty mood today 😉

This one came up at the office: length of games.  Some games are a decent length, and you feel you’ve had your money’s worth.  Others are just too short, and it seems that we’re losing length and gameplay for the sake of a bit of shiny graphics.  Sure, some have replayability, or multiplayer to carry it on, but other story-driven games are pretty much done after the first play through.

The one this really hit me with was Half Life 2: Episode 2.  I felt that I was really getting into the game, only to see it finish after just a few hours.  So instead of “wow, what an awesome game”, I was left with a sense of disappointment – as well as some anger that I’d just spent the amount of money I had to get the game.
Bundling other games in with it is not, in my view, a reasonable excuse for the price, or the shortness of the episode.  I wasn’t given the option to purchase Episode 2 by itself, so instead had to buy a bunch of games for other people with my purchase, because I already owned them.  And guess what?  Most of my friends are also gamers, and already had the games, or were buying the pack too.

Modern Warfare 2

This is actually the first game since Fallout 3 that we’ve picked up on Day 1 (not counting gifts and promos here).  I tried ignoring the hype across the web over the recent weeks, but it gets harder to ignore when you find out the game is only £28 at Morrisons, and the boss offers to go to the shop to fetch it (while getting copies for half the office too).

We ended up picking the PS3 version up because the others at work were going for PS3 too.  We’d decided it was a toss-up between PS3 and 360, because if we were to choose PC, we’d have to buy two copies.  I prefer shooters on the PC, but I can see we’re going to increasingly move to consoles as we don’t want to pay for a game twice.

So – MW2.. I can see why people have been raving; it deserves the hype!

Controls-wise, it feels very like COD 4: Modern Warfare, so quite easy to pick up and get into.  Graphics, wow.  There’s an amazing level of detail, blood effects and lighting seem bang on.  Sounds seem perfect, fitting the environments, and the voice acting particularly is really well done.  More gravelly voices 🙂

So tonight I enjoyed sneaking around in the snow with a heartbeat sensor, picking off guards..  followed by a mad dash in the snow mobile section after a confrontation with some guards and a bit of a scrap.  No trophies though, which seems to be something affecting a few others too.  Tim got his, so I’m not sure quite what happened there.

For me, the single player missions need to be done first, before playing with other modes.  This does mean at my pace, which is on the slow side, but I’d rather take my time and enjoy it than race through but not really take in all the details.

After that, maybe some online, but definitely some co-op 🙂

Left 4 Dead 2 Demo

I’ve just had my hands on the Left 4 Dead 2 demo, after looking forward to it most of the day 🙂

I pre-loaded this last night, so I’d be able to play once getting home from work.. glad I did as I hear the Steam servers are struggling – oh, what’s new?  I’ve come around to Steam and the whole digital download thing (getting at my games from multiple locations helps!), but seriously, the servers really need some work.  Every time there’s an update, add-on, free weekend or demo of anything fairly high-profile, chug, chug, chug..
As for chugging, I think I need to reinstall my machine.. performance isn’t great at the moment, and it was really noticeable when I loaded up the demo.

So, as to the demo..

It feels like a completely different game to the first, more like HL2 and episodes.  It feels less serious, less creepy.  I think that’s due to the daylight – but it probably isn’t helped by my current pc performance issues making me turn the settings down a touch.  Other than that, the bodies seem to disappear too quickly, which again makes it feel less serious.  I’m glad I don’t live in Aus though, with the censorship issues going on there at the moment.  I’m not a fan of censorship used in place of parenting 😉

I don’t know how much the demo can be relied on as a sample of the full game – the new specials were interesting, and I was relieved to see that the old ones were still present – but has the tank been downgraded a bit?  It seemed a bit too easy to kill, somehow.  One fun instance already though – being jumped by a jockey while entering a maze and fighting off a small group of infected: the jockey quickly dragged me round a corner, and I was taking a bit of a beating till my team mates fought their way round the corner too.

Looking forward to versus mode!

Back from Holidays

Just spent a fantastic 10 days with friends in the Netherlands, seeing the sights, eating out, and relaxing, watching a bunch of TV shows and playing some games on the PS3, including Guitar Hero, all on the projector which took up a large portion of one wall!  Our 26″ TV feels small now..

There were also some new shows for me to sink hours on: Big Bang Theory, Chuck, and How I Met Your Mother.  I don’t know how I missed these, but I’m going to catch up, time permitting.  We also caught up a bit with Heroes, and spent many hours watching House, curled up on the couch with a cozy American quilt and sometimes a small tortoiseshell handwarmer too 🙂

Quite enjoyed playing Worms on the PS3 too, getting a little competitive but still loads of fun.  We’ll be picking that up shortly ourselves, but otherwise we’re putting spending on hold for a bit.  We spent rather a lot 🙂

We also have some more outgoings, though due to a much less fun reason than holiday..
We arrived home at midnight, to find our boiler has packed in – no hot water and no central heating!  One very cold house.. and to cap that, when it came to calling the gas man, we found the landline isn’t working either..

Earliest we can get anybody out to either the boiler or landline is Monday!  So till then, we might well be playing more Wii games to keep warm!

Old Games are still Good Games

We’ve been playing Gears of War again this last two weeks.  Having started the co-op campaign over a year ago, we ended up with more games, and more games, and just never got round to carrying on till now.

I forgot how much fun GoW is. I love the ugly, scarred face of Marcus, the oversized arms and impossible armour – that stuff would weigh too much to be able to run around all day!
I love the cover system, peeking out and shooting, and just hiding a little bit to recover from damage.

I don’t love running out of ammo, of course – or accidentally throwing away the Lancer for some other weapon.  I guess some of the other weapons may be better to use.. but they just don’t have the chainsaw bayonette!  My only gripe with the game is the split-screen – I just don’t feel like I’m getting enough of a view, especially when throwing grenades and looking for where they’re going to bounce.

We finished the co-op mission we started – Tim as Marcus, me as Dom, and instantly started another on the next difficulty, switching roles again.
Cue us both messing up loads as we kept looking at the wrong bit of the split-screen at crucial moments!

We have a copy of Gears of War 2 – this was bought last year – but so far remains untouched as we were going to finish the first game before starting the second.

Did I mention we have too many games? 🙂

PES 2010 Online Test

Following a few years in which players of the game have criticised the online mode, Konami have developed an online demo specifically to test this aspect of the game!
Data is gathered via the server, monitoring the games played, and from surveys filled out by those who had a chance to play the demo.  Like me 🙂

I’ve never been a huge football-game player.. I played PES in the office a few years back, but haven’t really had a lot of interest in the years between.
But this demo is a lot of fun – the first few games I played had no lag that I saw, and when it did appear, it was just a quick freeze, though I did hear some people saying they didn’t fare so well.  If this is anything to go by though, I think there’ll be more PES played in the office at lunchtimes.. that’s gotta be better than playing Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, no? 🙂

For members of PESFan, there’s an exclusive opportunity to get in on the online demo action here.

Why I canned my Aion sub..

Well.. I tried to get in Aion tonight and there it was.. a 40 minute queue.
Last time I tried to play the thing was so laggy I couldn’t even turn my character on the spot without grinding my teeth..

I’d seen an “open letter” from one of NCSoft’s execs a couple of days back – reported here on Eurogamer, and wasn’t too impressed (but still willing to give the game a go, should it actually work for the rest of the free (included in game purchase) play time.

What their exec, Lance Stites said was pretty much this: there’ll be no waiving of sub fees, even temporarily, for those players who haven’t been able to get on –

Err.. if you’ve paid for a service, and haven’t got it, the least they should do is offer you some free time.. I’d have expected the second month to be free considering the mess…
But no.  Their “solution” appears to be that next month, there’ll be an opportunity for a free, one-time character transfer.. pay for another month’s sub despite not getting much service so far, and move your character to another server where hopefully, it won’t be so busy..

Aion looked beautiful, and the tiny taste of flight I had was awesome – but I’m not paying for something I’m not getting.  Sub cancelled.. and from the comments I’ve seen elsewhere, I’m not the only one.

Guitar Hero 5

After the odd Guitar Hero World Tour night round at a few friends, we decided we just had to get Guitar Hero 5.

For now we’ve only got the guitar, because of moving house and not wanting yet more things we’ll have to pack – but have discovered you can use the Xbox headset as a mic.

The thing I like best about GH5 is that there’s no more failing a song if one person doesn’t know it.. instead just that person gets a short time-out.
I find the songs included in the game aren’t always ones we all know, so this is a real improvement.  Keeps the game going for the rest of us 🙂