Sometimes you still get pleasant surprises when fishing around for a game to play like I did this week. I was firing up Steam to play Arma2 (heavily flawed genius just like Operation Flashpoint was I am sad to say) when a Steam promotion popped up offering Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War 2 for half-price. I ummmed and arrrred and then clicked buy.
Total War with extra musket!
Time to try something new, I thought. Maybe it will suck, maybe not, who knows, who cares?
A live blog review of Empire Total War starting with my pre-release expectations through to some point in the future where I get bored of the thing – genius right? We will see, but here it comes 
2nd March 2009 13:00 – Expectations
I am a big fan of the Total War series, not to the point of building my own mods and doing the virtual equivalent of painting my own soldiers, but I have thoroughly enjoyed almost every one of the series.
Starting all that time ago with Shogun Total War where my breath was taken away by SO MANY stick figure soldiers on the battlefield and being introduced to that seemingly vast campaign map. continue reading »
So I was coerced by some work mates into trying Warhammer Online this week. It was, in all honesty, a game I was planning on skipping because I have never been the warhammer type. I imagined myself not really being able to stomach thousands of brats with their painted figuirine history berating me for not knowing about waaagghh. I have also never really been a big pvp’er (Eve Online excepted) because normally PvP means gank versus victim in my experience.
So a couple of days ago I was persuaded and hopped on the WAR-wagon, creating my first character on a core server. continue reading »
Is that there is no reason for the DRM to even exist in the first place.
Two things stand out to me about the pirate themed mmorpg so many have been waiting for.
1. How much potential it had
2. How bland the final gameplay is.
This is very standard fare by anyone’s standards. There are so many things that could have been done well, nay properly! I am going to keep the rant brief and thus assume that people have a general knowledge about the game and mmorpgs in general.
Here are 5 reasons the game simply sucks at this moment in time:
Well that was unexpected!
A year where the console dominated my playing time rather than the PC! I never thought I would see the day and to be honest, I didn’t even realised I had seen the day until I thought about offering up my thoughts for Game of the Year!
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:
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.
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