Trigger Finger

Well I got this on rental and its a good job I did.

The main thing that was so special about the MoH series used to be multiplayer…. its freaking awful now! It cant be just me when late sunday evening there are only 90 players online and 4 games!! The games are too short, the games take too long to find, the games are only 4 v 4, and when you are actually playing it is disconcerting to know some kind of auto aim is on. I accidentally fired my sniper rifle when pointing a good 5 metres wide of my target… yet I got a headshot. I thought it was some kind of lag-fluke and experimented a little. Dissapointed to see that aiming vaguely in the area of anyone with a sniper rifle will in fact kill them.

Add to the fact that the other 7 players on the server are probably armed with the rocket launcher and its incredible blast radius of about 10m …. the game lacks any sense of skill or achievement. The single player is better, but the use of save points is pretty terrible and makes some of the more difficult missions just a royal pain in the ass.

Having said that I LOVE the flexibility of the cover/peeking system. By far the best i have ever seen. Overall though…. meh 6/10

METHOD 1 Break one of its most innovative and fun components continue reading »

Nine years in the making and it felt like 20! But at last Team Fortress 2 was released and the game that truly baptised me in Multiplayer gaming had a worthy and enjoyable successor… at least on the PC.

On the Xbox 360 it is a giant steaming turd. I have much to rant about and only a short amount of time so here we go:

continue reading »

One thing that still never ceases to amaze me is the addictive nature of the simple feature called ‘Achievements’ on the Xbox 360.

Let me begin by saying I pretend to not care about gamerscore, that arbitary number attached to my gamercard that indicates nothing more than how many games you have had, and then played enough to achieve a gazillion goals set by the developers of the games. I know it has no relevance to the universe, it doesn’t indicate ability in any way, and has little kudos attached to it even amongst gamers.

Yet I find myself chasing these achievements relentlessly, I have bought Xbox Live Arcade games purely because they had easy sounding achievements, I have fought for hours in RS6 Vegas with a sniper rifle on maps totally unsuited to sniper rivals in order to get that 50 headshot kills achievement, and worst of all (and my moment of realisation!) was last night buying up all the French and Korean cars in Forza 2 for achievements that give 1 damn gamerpoint!! Thats a new level of insanity… I would never buy a korean car in real life, and definitely never a french one. Yet here I was hungrily gobbling up cars not worthy of pissing on if they caught fire with my hard earned in-game money.

Despite the relatively high number of games I have played, despite the endless hours I have spent chasing these imaginary successes, my gamer score stands at a pitiful 11,000 something! Yet I am so attached to it I refused create a new gamertag to ease my payment issues with having a UK account and a swedish credit card, which would be understandable if my gamerscore was great… but it’s not.

There are one-handed, one-eyed, deaf, dumb and mute 8 year old girls with better gamerscores than me after having played less than half the games I have! But then as the next time that little grey rounded rectangle pops up on my Xbox 360 game saying I have achieved 12gs for ‘Shooting someone with red hair whilst the wind was blowing in a south-westerly direction’ proves again and again… achievements are an elixir of gratification that are unexplainable to any normal rational (non-gameplaying) adult.

For anyone who has never visited GamersWithJobs , do so now. It’s quite possibly the best kept secret of the internet for gamers who are older than… well school age! Listening to their latest Conference Call (podcast) they opened this good old can of worms and it spurred me to write something (yeah I know the first time in a while! jobs… weddings… moving…. blah blah!).

I have touched on this before on this site here and here. Like someone in the CC said, my heritage is in PC gaming. If it wasnt for the likes of Quake, TFC, Tribes 2, AO, Eve Online, Planetside, Delta Force, and more…. I probably wouldn’t have my IT knowledge (gained mostly from building PC’s and screwing about with drivers and operating systems trying to get these games running at a good framerate!) and thus even my current job!

Skip back to the pre-xbox years and I laughed openly in the face of anyone who tried to argue a console was superior in any way. Then Xbox and Live came along, and brought a lot of the things the PC had a monopoly on to my living room and the big comfortable sofa. Internet multiplayer, voice comms, community, and so on.

Now I would say probably I spend 50% of my time playing on my Xbox 360, and the other 50% on the PC: The huge differentiating factor between the platforms now is complexity. Forza 2 for all of its depth and simulation finesse (I love it!), is still a very simple interface that suits a controller as opposed to a keyboard. But you will never get a game (and yes I did say NEVER) with the complexity and mechanical depth of Eve Online on a console and that is where the PC’s core market is now. MMORPG’s and complex RTS games like Supreme Commander or even MTW2 are just a nightmare for a developer to turn into a console interface without losing key chunks of the games core and thus soul. Some games simply demand that you have the flexible input mechanics of the old mouse and keyboard, whereas I would equally say that Forza would just not be the same hunched over a monitor at my desk.

The other thing (which really surprises me) about console gaming is that they remain so restricted in terms of how many players you can have in an online game. Battlefield is a game built on the chaotic carnage that only 64-128 players on a map can create. It gives the game it’s gameplay through sheer numbers, yet what is the most players ever in the consoles’ versions? 24? It’s just not the same game. I’ll go all out and say another NEVER. I will NEVER, on a console game, stand at the top of a valley on a map measured in 10′s of kilometres and look down on several hundred players duking it out over a single bridge like I did on Planetside. Whole platoons of tanks on either side, players and bullets flying around like hornets around a nest, a squad of choppers swooping through the valley on a strafing run only to be met with a load of AA fire, all within one grand landscape in an instant of time. Then checking behind me whilst summoning the courage to go down and join the melee, see an even bigger battle raging a couple of clicks away. This was what? 2001? The PC could manage that then, and no next-gen console looks close to creating such scene, and this was a persistent universe too where the battles meant something!

So now I accept it, my PC will always be the innovative proving ground for the truly adventurous games, but at the same time there a multitude of genres that are far superior on the console such as racing and hectic small scale FPS games such as GOW and Halo.

Well the demo of Forza 2 landed and joy was mixed with outrage for many of those who have sampled it.

Joy that the wait was over, joy that the game plays as smooth as butter, outrage that the game fails to live up to the screenshots graphically. Of course I am using the words of others when I use the term ‘outrage.’ There are many more important things in life than the graphic quality of a racing game. Wars are outrageous, poverty is outrageous, refereeing decisions in favour of Manchester United are generally outrageous. But dissapointing is a term I might use for the graphics on display in the demo.

Generally speaking… the game looks great. unfortunately (in the demo at least) they seem to have removed all traces of AA and AF on the cars (of all things!). Lets face it, the focus of your attention in such a game is the cars. The environment generally shoots past in a blur, but we spend hours admiring our beautiful beasts and to skimp on processing power there seems daft to say the least. I suspect that this is a Demo-Only problem.

I have seen it before with MotoGP 06, and TDU only to find that once you get the full game the full rendering engine is effect and things look great again. I guess they wanted to keep download sizes down, and even if it was released looking like the demo it is still on a par with most competing licenses and it wouldn’t stop me buying it on release. But I am sure I have seen the marketing material (admittedly not the most of reliable sources usually!) boasting that upto 4xx FSAA would be in use so lets wait and see. And as for the important bit (the racing!) its fantastic!

So, literally any minute now, petrol heads, racing enthusiasts and general fans of all things car-like across the world will see the demo of Forza 2 drop onto Xbox Live.

You have witnessed my obsession with a game I haven’t even played on these very pages, it seems to be contagious as people who I didn’t even know were gamers have been talking about it today at work. The post on the www.forzamotorsport.net forums that announced the demo release was coming got around 200,000 views within a couple of hours! Here’s hoping the demo whets the appetite rather than dissapoints!

Now to try and talk the girlfriend through downloading it for me whilst I am at work!

Here is the evidence!

I have never been so excited about a demo, especially one that is single player only, but still this will be the taste of the greatness that is to come on June 8th in Europe (earlier in lucky bastard locations around the world).

My speculation is that we will see it released along with the dashboard update… but then I make a career out of being wrong a lot May I suggest we spend the time waiting by harrassing the Luckiest Guy in the World??

If they don’t release the fooking thing soon…. I am gonna kill a puppy every minute until they do.

Is there a special school people go to in order to learn to speak at 300 words per second like this guy?

Anyway this seems to be a genuine leaked/released video showing off the new features of the XBox 360 spring dashboard update (apparent release date is 7th May).

Some nice features include real messenger integration with Xbox live, a dedicated Marketplace blade, a low power download mode which also switches of the box when all downloads are complete, and more information on those treasured achievement pop-ups such as which achievement you got and how many points it was worth.

Watch the short video below for more.