Gears Of War: Quite Hard

posted by Jaitu at 20:38

TechMaster and I resumed our co-op campaign through Gears Of War on Insane difficulty today. It's been some months since either of us played any GOW and it took a while to re-familiarise ourselves with the controls. I found myself constantly clicking a stick to run a la Bad Company instead of simply pressing the A button. Even after we were back into the swing of things the Insane difficulty level seemed harder than either of us could recall. After spending what seemed like an age trying to complete the split path section in Act 3's Belly Of The Beast we finally picked up a little momentum and made some reasonable progress picking up the final COG Tag to complete another achievement. Then almost immediately reaching the next split path section where one of us battles through courtyards while the other negotiates the first floor hallways of the surrounding buildings and together take on a Seeder. After somewhere in the region of four hours playing and replaying this level we decided to call it a day.

Race Driver GRID: Start Your Engines

posted by Jaitu at 09:29

I began my GRID career last night and managed to collect a handful of
achievements without really trying. In fact a couple of them I was
really trying not to get - the ones for rolling your car or being
involved in a ten car pile up for example.
Like the previous Race Driver and TOCA games GRID is weighted heavily
toward the realistic end of the handling spectrum. This doesn't
instantly sit well with my more arcade-y style of virtual racing which
leaves me able to drive quickly or cleanly but not both at the same
time. Like those previous CodeMasters games I am sure that I'll be
investing a huge number of hours in to this one too.
Graphically the game looks great, shedding the slightly too crisp and
colourful aesthetic of the earlier titles and adopting shaders that give
a more naturalistic effect.
A new Gameplay mechanic that has been added is the ability to
'Flashback' at any point during an event. This gives you the power to
rewind time within a limit and have another go, think Prince Of Persia:
Sands Of Time, very useful having just ploughed into a tyre barrier. The
number of available flashbacks varies depending on your chosen
difficulty level.
Surprisingly, in the races I have completed thus far I have found the
most success in the Japanese Drift events. When I played the demo a
month or to back I was horribly bad at the drifts.
I am now seriously considering getting a racing wheel to go with this
game as I feel it would benefit from the control method. I always
struggle in the more simulation styled racers when relying on
thumbsticks.

Bad Company: Single Player Completely Complete

posted by Jaitu at 10:15

I wrapped up the single player achievements for Bad Company last night.
I've found the game to be very entertaining. Overall it has less
diversity to the actual mission content than COD4 but the persistent
game state mechanic allows for a great deal more freedom when choosing
an approach. I actually missed a Gold Crate on what should have been my
final run through the last mission and had to repeat it. Because I had
already got everything else out of the level as far as achievements were
concerned I was able to jump in vehicles and race through to the last
crate in record time.
I then gave the online multiplayer a quick go (literally two games) and
found that to be a fairly frenetic affair. I'll probably keep that as my
go-to online shooter instead of COD4 for the time being. For now though
I have Race Driver GRID ready and waiting to go.

Bad Company: First Run Complete

posted by Jaitu at 16:30

Last night I completed the first run through of Battlefield: Bad
Company. I went through at the hardest difficulty to begin with a plan
to then play through a second time on normal difficulty to clean up the
other achievements. It certainly a good thing that when the end credits
rolled I was more than happy to jump straight back in at the start
without it feeling like a chore to have to play through the whole game a
second time. The only slight frustration I've found so far is that on
the second run only a couple of the cut scenes are skip-able meaning you
have to sit through them again.

Monkey Tennis

posted by Jaitu at 12:18

Well not really but ten monkeys doesn't sound so catchy.
As of last night I have in excess of 5000 gamer points.

Bad Company: A Little Bit More

posted by Jaitu at 08:43

I'm enjoying Bad Company a lot.
We've just accidentally invaded a neutral country and have decided to
follow the mercenaries' gold.
I'm going through on the 'Hard' setting which doesn't so far seem all
that hard. Because the game keeps going when you die you effectively
have infinite lives. I suspect you could pretty much just run through
with no particular care and a huge number of respawns.
The difficulty achievements don't stack (completing Hard doesn't get you
the Normal achievement) so I'll have to play it through twice to get all
of them. I figure I'll play through it on Hard then go back through on
Normal and tidy up anything I've missed. I'm being fairly cautious in my
approach despite the slim penalty for failure.
There are a fair number of online-only achievements too.

Bad Company: First Impressions

posted by Jaitu at 11:25

Battlefield: Bad Company arrived through the post yesterday. I had already played through the demo and that had convinced me to buy the full product.
Upon playing the game you instantly get a sense that some thing slightly different is in store. On the surface BC is very similar to COD4. Both are military FPS in a modern setting. Both follow a mission structure in the single player campaign and both were developed primarily with the multiplayer component in mind.
Despite my limited time with BC there are significant differences in evidence right from the outset. The main menu music could not be more different. In COD4, as with most games of this type, the theme music has a very cinematic score feel in the style of a Tom Clancy or Bruckheimer movie. Bad Company has some laid back jazz.
The main characters are the comedic trio of Sarge, Sweetwater and Haggard who constantly quip and taunt each other as well as 'New Guy' Preston (played by you). A couple of obvious game play differences are the lack of regenerative health and a persistence of the world when you inevitably die. Unlike many recent games you must manually apply a health boost whenever your injuries begin to mount up. You do this by equipping one of an endless supply of syringes and using it. This means you cannot use you weapon and so it helps to take cover when treating yourself. In practice this is no different to finding somewhere safe to recover automatically except that you have to consciously intervene. There are also fewer indicators that your health is getting low so one eye must be kept on your health stat in the corner of the screen. Should you forget the penalty for dying doesn't seem so harsh here either. Unlike similar mission based games you do not have to restart the mission from the beginning should you fall. Instead you re-spawn at the last checkpoint and make your way back into the fight complete with any weapons you were carrying before you died. This makes the game more dynamic as you are not constantly repeating scripted sequences and the enemy continue to move and adapt as you re-spawn. This may become a situation of 'infinite lives' where you could simply rush in, chip away, die, rush in, chip away etc... So far I have not encountered any situation that suggests the streams of never ending enemy soldiers such as you would frequently find in COD4.
Unfortunately I won't get a chance to playing anything more for a day or two but I am really looking forward to getting back to Bad Company.

Horizons: Broadened

posted by Jaitu at 08:26

In an effort to extend my game playing range beyond the usual first-person-shooters and racing games I have ordered up two new titles.
Battlefield: Bad Company (A military based first-person-shooter) and Race Driver: GRID (unsurprisingly a racing game).

World Of World Of Warcraft

posted by Jaitu at 08:19

From the Onion News Network.


'Warcraft' Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing 'Warcraft'

Assassin's Creed: Another Stab

posted by Jaitu at 16:02

I fired up Assassin's Creed for the first time since last year. I
couldn't remember where I'd got to or what I was supposed to be doing. I
spent some time running away from angry guards and occasionally tried to
rescue a citizen or beat information out of an informant. It's not
grabbed me again.
This is a strange game for me. I'm having the same reaction as when I
first played it. Visually the game is pretty gorgeous. The cities are
large and rendered with an impressive amount of detail and atmosphere.
The movement is mostly fluid and the animation rarely skips a beat. The
problem I had then and now is that once the limited joy of being able to
run around through and over the sprawling buildings runs out the actual
game is a little thin and repetitive. Find yourself a high tower, climb
it and 'synchronise' your view of the city. Locate a mission objective
and perform one of a few tasks. Rinse and repeat until you have done
enough for the game to reveal where your main target will be and then go
in for the kill.
First time I played I soon had realised that there only appeared to be a
lot to the game but it still hooked me some how. This time around the
hooks aren't catching and after only an hour or so I'm feeling that old
lethargy creep in. I still *want* to play the game to the finish I just
don't know if I can be bothered.