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Assassin's Creed II (2)
The highly anticipated follow-up to Assassin's Creed features a new hero, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a young Italian noble, and a new era, the Renaissance. Ezio befriends Leonardo da Vinci, takes on Florence's most powerful families and ventures throughout the canals of Venice where he becomes a master assassin.
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CoD:MW2 - Biggest selling launch in Entertainment history
I have not seen anyone on my Xbox Live friends list play anything other than Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 since it came out at midnight on Tuesday the 10th. I am not surprised by that though as it has often been touted as the most eagerly anticipated game of this decade, and it doesn’t fall short. It is brilliant.
Yesterday Major Nelson posted a message to his Twitter stating that they had just hit a new Xbox Live record with over 2 Million people connected to the service at once. I read that message 27 minutes after it had been posted and had just fired up Modern Warfare 2, I was then a little shocked to see that half of those people were online playing MW2.
Over 1 Million people playing this game online, at the same time? Unbelievable!
Also yesterday news broke that Activision Blizzard estimated that they sold 4.7 Million copies of the game in the first 24 hours, raking in a cool $310 Million. In the UK & US alone! Thus making it the biggest selling launch in Entertainment history.
To put that in comparison The Dark Knight previously held all of Hollywood’s money making speed records. It took them 10 days to get to $300 Million!
596 Words - 23 October 2009
Forza Motorsport 3
I do not know many that have not been biding their time waiting for the release of the much anticipated follow up to the super successful Forza 2 racing title. Just released today and already I feel the need to write about it, so take this as a precursor to a final and proper review once I have completed Forza Motorsport 3.
Forza 3 pushes forward that same awesome driving experience that we all know and love, one that makes just about any other racing title seem inferior – Forza’s controls feel perfect. The graphics in this edition are vastly improved if you can believe that, the car models are simply stunning and I’ll never tire of seeing the car roll up to its starting grid slot at the beginning of each race, absolutely gorgeous!
With 400 cars this edition caters for everyone, from out and out race cars to 4×4’s there is something for everyone to enjoy. The new tracks that are included are both great to look at and great to drive, from some made up locations to old stalwarts like Silverstone and Laguna Seca to awesome new additions such as the Circuit de Catalunya (Spanish Grand Prix) and the Circuit de la Sarthe (24 Hours of Le Mans).
Whilst the addition of these new tracks is very welcome I keep finding myself trundling around Maple Valley and Sebring from the original, which is fine now and again but seeing as I just started my career 4 laps around the full Sebring in my Fiat 500 Abarth make for 10 minutes of serious scowling on my part.
It’s not all smiles and thumbs up, the much anticipated in-car camera view which has been around in other games for many a year is rather disappointing, if the developers are going to spend countless hours perfecting the interior of the Bugatti Veyron the least they could do is let me look around the cockpit and enjoy the whole experience as I’m not sure I’ll ever likely sit in one. This is where Need for Speed: Shift I think excelled just a few months ago, the in-car cameras were outstanding and small details such as exhaust flames and backfiring (which is common place in race cars) as well as the heat haze coming out of the exhaust and engine bays were real delighters.
You are still limited to 8 opponents in Forza 3 which has its ups and down, while overtaking is fun I do tend to keep everyone in my rear-view mirror. The unlimited amount of rewinds is also rather generous, first introduced in Grid these are now becoming rather common and while I think they have their place, I do not think Forza (a racing sim) is that. I’ve already found myself relying upon it when in years past I would have simply taken that spin off track on the chin and battled my way through the field again.
Finally, the achievements are, quite frankly, dull – infact, I have already completed 60% of them on the first day! The rest are likely to take a fair bit of time to achieve (and are worthy slightly more) but they really aren’t very inspiring.
All in all, my first day with Forza has heralded a return to the best racing sim on the market and while it isn’t everything I wished it could be, it smokes anything else in this category. Hands down.
11 pet peeves game developers need to fix
- Do not ask me to select where my saved game is located when I only have 1 storage device attached – it’s pretty obvious where it’s going to be
- Do not tell me you are loading my profile, fade that message off screen, then fade another message on screen telling me you are now loading my profile elements – do it all at once and spare me the transition time
- Do not make me sit and wait while you attempt to connect me to your online network – EA are perticularly bad at making you wait while the game attempts and all too often fails to connect to their network, background task that please
- Count me back in after I unpause my game – having a few seconds to get my hands back into position on the controller would save a lot of missed notes in music games and off track excursions in racing games
- Let me skip cutscenes, you may have lovingly crafted them and spent many an hour perfecting them but once is enough – if I just want a quick game don’t make me sit and wait
- Conform to standard controller layouts – even if your biggest competitor came up with said controller layout first it will help gamers transition to your game easier and not get frustrated
- Give me a visual progress bar when loading, a non-descript spinner is no good – I need to know if I can make it to the kitchen and back before I’m thrown into battle with a dry mouth
- Allow me to cancel loading screens and go back to the main menu – seldom done but accidentally hitting the wrong menu item can incur a frustrating few minutes of load, pause, quit, wait for main menu to load, then selecting correct menu item
- Stack your difficulty achievements – I ain’t playing it on Easy and Medium after I already completed it on Hard
- Do not outsource the Multiplayer section of your game – I bought the game primarily for the single player campaign, once I’m used to that I’ll expect the same experience from the multiplayer and if it’s all kinds of different I ain’t going to be happy
- Let me skip the end credits – I don’t watch them at the cinema and I don’t expect to have to sit through them after I complete the game, you want me to play it again right?
These are just some of the things that regularly get on my nerves. Are there any I have missed?
Remember September '44
Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway was released on the 26th of September 2008 a week after the anniversary of Operation Market Garden – the largest airborne operation of all time that ultimately ended in failure – this was also the storyline of the game as you again played as Matt Baker of the 101st Airborne Division.
BiA: HH was a solid tactical FPS that I thoroughly enjoyed, the cover system was well thought out, being able to direct fire of bazooka and machine gun teams helped your strategy and the action camera made for some intensely exciting and gory moments during a fire fight. Looking back I’d probably give this game a rating of 3.5 out of 5. It wasn’t perfect, the multiplayer was a serious let down unfortunately.
Today is the 17th of September 2009, the anniversary of Operation Market Garden and one of the achievements from Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway was to play the game today for a cool and rather easy 50G. While I appreciate that a lot, it has to be said the massive losses in this operation to the British 1st Airborne Division is something I couldn’t overlook, some 8,000 men died here alone.
I truly do love a good FPS, and am a big fan of the WW2 genre of FPS as it’s a part of history I am genuinely interested in, but the people who lost their lives shouldn’t be forgotten.
470 Words - 29 August 2009
Wolfenstein
I was massively excited when I heard that a Wolfenstein game was being made for the Xbox 360 – I absolutely loved Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory the free PC multiplayer game, as well as being a fan of the original Return to Castle Wolfenstein and of course, Wolf 3D!
The single-player campaign in Wolfenstein is a familiar one yet I found it massively enjoyable. You play as B.J. Blazkowicz fighting off not only the feared German SS but a vast array of supernatural villains that at times will have you backing up in fear. Upgradeable weaponry through collectable gold allows you to modify your standard WW2 weapons such as the MP40, Kar 98k, MP43, Panzer and Flame-thrower to be more accurate, more powerful and ultimately more deadly. The addition of some supernatural weapons is a nice touch, electrifying and vaporising the Wehrmacht has never been so satisfying.
Isenstadt the fictional town the game is based in has a semi-open world environment, you can walk the streets, find side-quests and collectibles through-out but it is by no means a true open-world game. The missions are however very good and played out in some brilliant scenarios, I played through the SP campaign on Hard but never at any point found it particularly difficult. Sound effects, environmental features and not to mention the Veil and it’s four powers you posses makes for a truly enjoyable single player game that’ll keep you entertained for around about 10 hours.
The multiplayer portion of Wolfentsein was not created by Raven Software but by Endrant Studios and you can tell, it’s of inferior quality, rather limiting, laggy and has some poignant bugs that don’t save your stats after each game, making for a frustrating and short lived MP experience.
That said, the story mode isn’t without its major issues either. I was near 80% completed and decided that before I headed off to defeat the final boss I would make my way back around Isenstadt and the various missions where I hadn’t collected everything necessary… only to find out their is a serious freeze bug that now stops me from loading the finale just because I replayed some past missions. Fucking ridiculous, Raven need to get their finger out and patch that before Wolfenstein joins an ever expanding collection of games on my dusty shelf.
Sadly because of this and the poor multiplayer Wolfenstein only gets 3 stars out of 5 from me, it pains me to write that as I love this franchise, and was thoroughly enjoying the single player campaign until I and many others stumbled across these annoying bugs. I hope in the future that Raven Software realise the public are not their beta testers!
The problem with Multiplayer Achievements
Multiplayer achievements have a limited life expectancy, if you’re as much of an achievement whore as I am – and I mean that in the sense of completing games more than boosting my gamerscore – you quickly come to realise that after the initial buzz from a new game wears off, people head back to their regular haunts leaving servers desperately empty.
Take a look at some of the titles from the Xbox 360 Top Live Activity List: Gears of War 2 – almost 1 year old, Grand Theft Auto IV – 16 months old, Call of Duty 4 – 19 months old and even Halo 3 which is 2 years old next month. These games are what people know, what they love, and each has a solid community behind it that people aren’t going to abandon on a whim.
Developers filling their games achievement list with a multitude of online achievements seems like a gimmick to get you to use it and fill up server slots. Instead they should focus on making an awesome multiplayer that people will enjoy playing, there is nothing worse than having half of your team focused on ranking up and whoring objectives to gain their achievements before buggering off.
PS4 and Xbox 720: why we're in for a long wait
“Accessible, intuitive gameplay is key. Historically, the jump to the next generation has been driven, at least partially, by the need to offer gamers the latest technology: I believe that the latest technology is now the controller, not the visuals or underlying technology.” – via TechRadar
I dislike the idea that casual games through technology like Project Natal are going to be the way forward, the Xbox 360 started life as a hardcore gaming console but with the dominance of the Nintendo Wii we are now getting inundated with crap that apparently appeals to the wider casual market – the new Avatars for instance.
Microsoft need to not only focus on the wider-audience as a whole, but the hardcore niche market that made the Xbox such a success in the first place.
368 Words - 21 August 2009
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood
The idea of a Western themed first-person shooter really got my attention when I first heard about Bound in Blood, a prequel to the original Call of Juarez, and I’ll be honest, it surprised me on many levels.
The wild-west environment of Bound in Blood is absolutely stunning, what impressed me most was the seemingly never ending horizon, I’m not clued up on how the Chrome Engine works exactly but there appeared to be no skybox in sight. Lush forests and baron wilderness make this an enjoyable foray away from modern or WWII based environments.
While short the story of the McCall brothers and their adventures across North America set in the Cival War period was worth the ride. The two free-world chapters were rather limited with both only having 3 real missions and some collectibles to find, however I found the intense shootouts, duels and stagecoach chases in the varying other chapters certainly made up for that.
The weaponry I found well balanced for the period, depending on your chosen character for the mission you either find yourself with a trusty lasso or some rather powerful dynamite, combined with a vast array of pistols, shotguns and rifles you never find yourself short of ammo or firepower. Duel-wielded quickshooters really do give you that authentic feel of western style combat while throwing knives and bow & arrows keep the rather lacklustre enemy AI in check.
My brief stint of multiplayer action didn’t disappoint, there are various game-types many of which felt refreshing: Manhunt sees you gain a bounty on your head based on the amount of kills you rack up making you the enemies prime target and the objective based Wild West Legends mode harbours even more team-based combat.
The achievements from Bound in Blood are easily attainable if you fancy pumping many an hour into the multiplayer, most are story based and several will have you grinding your teeth trying to complete. All in all I thoroughly enjoyed Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, it proved to be an exciting shooter that was helped along by a good story, stunning graphics and gruelling 1v1 showdowns.