I completed Darksiders last night. One word summary: Brilliant

It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a game this much, and all the way through. Now the game is by no means perfect, there’s a lot I could pick on: fiddly controls, underutilized powers and areas, frustrating in places. The game is also a shameless rip-off (or homage, depending on how cynical you feel!) of many other games: Zelda & God of War are the main influences, with a smattering of Panzer Dragoon, Portal & Prince of Persia. However it’s not really a problem, as Darksiders takes all these elements and blends them exceptionally well, it never feels like a hotch-potch.

“Greater than the sum of it’s parts” is a terrible cliché, but it describes Darksiders so well. Taken in isolation any of the game’s elements are fairly unexceptional; the graphics, the level design, the combat, the story etc. Each examined alone they probably average. But they somehow combine into an excellent and solid experiance. Be it: riding across The Ashlands on your horse, brutally slaying countless demons & legions of angels, exporing one of the games dungeons, or trying to get your head around some of the puzzles.

Special mention needs to go to the final dungeon which is a non stop barrage of mindf**k puzzles & huge battles. The puzzles are of the “spatial” Zelda kind, and come close to being up there with the best Zelda dungeon. In fact the game improves as it goes on, and I only fully appreciated it all at the end. It also has a curious backwards difficulty curve, so the game gets easier as you go on (the first boss is by far the hardest). It was also nice change for a game not to have a lame or ‘WTF?’ ending – they’ve set things up nicely for a sequel or two.

Anyhow, I know it’s only January but I think this is a strong contender for my 2010 GOTY

I buy a lot of my games cheap, by hunting out bargains and waiting for price drops. I used to buy a lot pre-owned, but these days games are often cheaper online and  brand new, than they are second hand (and scratched) in the likes of GAME.

Here’s a recent haul, which landed through my letterbox (apologies for the crummy pic). All for the princely sum of £42 which is about the RRP of a new title these days.

Now this post isn’t to brag about my amazing new games or my bargain hunting skillz. I thought I’d take the chance to highlight some of my favourite sources of gaming deals:

• Gamestracker.com – Couldn’t live without this site. You can use it to find the best price for practically any game. It also supports “watchlists” where you can keep track of stuff you’ve got your eye on (even games not released yet). So I maintain my ‘to-buy wishlist’ on there. Another good feature is email alerts, when a game drops below a specified price you will receive an email. Brilliant.

• The rllmuk “Bargains” folder (Note. You’ll need to be a member, sorry!) – An excellent source of all kinds of gaming & non-gaming cheap finds

• There are quite a few sites out there that post gaming bargains on a daily, even hourly basis, here’s some good ones, I’ve used in the past:
- Frugal Gaming
- Postabargain
- Cheap Ass Gamer

• Twitter. Some of the sites also have twitter feeds which is a really good way of spotting the deals as they arrive, as often these bargains are very short lived. For example: @frugalgaming & @postabargain. In fact this is becoming my main source of impulse buying

It’s been a while since I’ve published or updated any of my Google Gadgets. But I have been sort of busy…

I’ve turned to the darkside!

What this means in slightly less dramatic terms is; I’ve stopped using Google Desktop and Google Gadgets and I’m using the built-in gadget system in Windows 7 (and Vista) called “Windows Sidebar Gadgets” or just Windows Gadgets. There are various (boring) reasons for this, but the upshot is I won’t be able to use all my lovely Google gadgets that I developed! It’s slightly heartbreaking to leave all that hard work behind, but I’m looking at this positively as an opportunity to re-write & improve them

The first one I couldn’t live without was my Squeezebox gadget. I listen to all my music at home via a couple of Logitech Squeezebox players, subsequently  I used my gadget for controlling all my music. Well it turns out that developing a gadget for the Windows Sidebar isn’t all that different from a Google Gadgets. Both are Javascript based using a sub-set of HTML for display, this meant I could re-use a fair bit of my code, and this is the result…

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Been looking forward to this for ages and ages, since it news of it first popped up on rllmuk in 2008. I’ve been itching to play it since release (a couple of weeks now) but I had Assassin’s Creed II to get out of the way first.

Summary: You’re War, one of the four horsemen. You been stiched up with ‘acidentially’ bringing the apocalypse, and subsequently sent back to sort the mess out. Blah, blah. It’s a third person brawler cum action RPG.

It’s drawn a lot of comparisons with God of War, it’s pretty clear after a couple of hours play these comparisons are a bit off. It really plays & feels a lot more like a Zelda. I’ve also seen people lumping it in with Bayonetta, another fallacy – the two games are nothing alike.

So I’ve only played a few hours but initial impressions are good:

• Combat is chunky, with plenty of moves & combos, but without any of the “wankyness” of say DMC or Bayonetta
• Lots of power-ups to get, secrets to find and back-track for, in a slightly Metroidvania way
• The exaggerated OTT character design might not be to everyone’s taste, but Games Workshop desensitised me to massive gauntlets and shoulder pads years ago. I like it
• Graphically it’s adequate, quite pretty in places. The 360 version does suffer from some noticable tearing. But apparently a patch is on the way for that
• It does rip rather shamelessly from several games, but wears it’s influences on it’s sleeves. It’s a gamey game

So far it seems a really nice game to start off the year

So it’s 2010 and I once again decide to fire up my much neglected blog. What better way to start than discussing some of the best & worst games of 2009. Yeah that’s original!

I generally thought 2009 wasn’t a stellar year for games, yeah there were a few decent titles but nothing really standout & exceptional. Certainly when compared to 2008, which was packed with brilliant games (Fallout 3, Dead Space, Far Cry 2, LBP, Fable II etc.) it’s been a pretty disappointing year. But what about Modern Warfare 2? I hear you cry, well I couldn’t give a shit about MW2, so it doesn’t factor into anything as far as I’m concerned. Onwards to the listery…

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