And who said game titles aren’t getting longer!

I picked this up as a cheapy a few weeks ago (it can be had for about a tenner) and completed it last night. OK first things first, it’s a flawed game. The graphics are sub-par especially the textures which are woeful in places. The plot is utter 3rd rate, high fantasy tosh. It’s heavily cut down as a RPG with little customisation, choice or real depth, and it’s got quite a few glitches and bugs.

But… despite all of that I really rather enjoyed it! It starts off pretty badly, in fact I only continued to play in order to see how bad it could be and laugh at it. But soon I was sucked in, the game definitely improves by about Chapter 4 when the settings and enemies start to get interesting

In a way I enjoyed the fact it didn’t have all the depth of a real RPG or thousands of side quests like say Oblivion (which would be the closest game to compare it to, given the fantasy setting and first person view). The lack of options and choices basically meant I got on with playing the game, rather than the hours of buggering about that I normally do. The game also rewards exploration, something I like in my games; so if you go clambering up to the top of that hard to reach, ruined pillar there is generally something there to reward your efforts & curiosity (other good games in this regard are Tomb Raider and Half Life 2)

Anyhow, if you are after a light weight, action-RPG with a bit of hack and slash & dungeon crawling and general daring do - I’d say you can’t go far wrong with DMMM:E (as it’s know to it’s friends!)

The weekly Weight Watchers meeting could get a litte fraught once the biscuits arrived

So the old Xbox 360 has been packed up and sent off for repair.

I have to hand it to Microsoft the process is slick and painless, it can be all done online, no need to ring up a call centre or anything. So now it’s just a matter of waiting.

So l’ve taken this opportunity to treat myself to a new shiny Xbox 360 Elite. Is it much different? Umm no, not really. It’s noticeably quieter, probably about half as noisy as the original 360 esp when the DVD drive is spinning, but it’s still louder than the PS3. The 120Gb HDD is nice, but will really come into it’s own when the next dashboard update comes out, as this is supposed to have a new feature which lets you copy games from the DVD discs to the HDD for faster (and quieter!) loading times. Needless to say, this will use up a lot of disc space. The HDMI output, well I can’t tell any difference from the component lead I was using before, but at least it fills a gap in my TV’s 2 HDMI connectors and is less bulk.

The greatest pain I had, was copying off all the data I wanted from my old 20Gb HDD to the new one. I’m too impatient to send off and wait for the free data transfer kit all Elite owners are entitled too. So I opted for some manual copying via a 360 memory card unit. So problems I ran into:

• My profile was on my HDD which meant every time I swapped the HDD over, I had to go through the “recover your Gamertag” process, which took forever. Solution; move your profile to the memory card
• Some content such as certain game saves (Rock Band being one) can not be copied from one device to another. Bugger I thought and lots of swearing ensued. But if you select the option to move the save file rather than copy, it works. Massive sigh of relief when I found that out
• License transfer - MS embed some freaky DRM into all the content you download such as Live Arcade games. This means they are locked to a particular machine. You are entitled to download them again for no cost, but they will only play on your new machine if it’s on-line and connected to Live. Solution: License Transfer Tool

All in all I’m pretty happy with the new machine, at least now I can get back to Rock Band

For some time now I’ve felt excluded from the rest of the gaming community, somehow I just wasn’t part of the club. The internet was filled with discussions and forums that I could not participate in. I was on the outside.

Why? Because my XBox 360 worked fine. Yesterday finally I could be like the rest of the cool kids and own a broken XBox 360, yup my 360 has finally got the dreaded RROD (Red Ring of Death). For those of you that don’t know the 360 was made on the cheap by Microsoft out of bits of old Russian submarines and chips salvaged from Sinclair ZX81s which means they are notorious for breaking down. When they do you get 3 red lights on the front of the console, this Wikipedia article does a better job of explaining it all than I can.

Microsoft got a right royal pounding in the press and on all fronts on this matter and in response have extended the warrenty on any 360 to 3 years, which covers even launch models.

So do I get it fixed? do I upgrade? Well both probably. The newer 360s have HDMI output, much quieter DVD drives and 120Gb HDD so all of that is pretty tempting. That means I’ll probably pick up an Elite, transfer over my stuff and then send the busted one off for repair then flog it.

But what a pain, and I was only switching the 360 on to cancel my Live Gold subscription!

I’d been putting off picking this up for a while - the £180 price tag did seem pretty steep for a game! OK so you get a guitar and drum kit (not real ones of course!). Well I have guitar, which I got with Guitar Hero 2, and thankfully it’s compatible with Rock Band so I went for the cheap option and picked up the game without the instruments (solus).

After the massive, bloated disappointment of Guitar Hero 3, this is a total joy. The core principle of the game is more or less identical to Guitar Hero, so why is it so much better than Guitar Hero 3? Well the tracklist is very, very good, oddly enough having less metal and “rawk” seems to improve things. Secondly the note patterns match the songs very well, you actually feel like you are actually playing the song, and it’s fun. Most of the time Guitar Hero 3 feels like that old kids game Simon and you are merely matching colored symbols on the screen to button presses. Now of course that is what you are doing - but Harmonix, the guys behind Rock Band (and Guitar Hero 2 before it) somehow are able to make this simple thing feel like you are musical genius.

Another good thing - lots of downloadable extra tracks, stuff like classic Bowie, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Queens of the Stone Age, Pixies. In the main it’s good stuff, so I’ve already spent a fair bit on this stuff.

So now do I splash out and pick up the instrument pack so I can have a bash on the drums?!

Well not blogged for ages so time for an update.

I finished Bioshock a few weeks back, in the end despite the difficultly spike (more on that later) I thoroughly enjoyed the game. I found it to be a totally absorbing experience, the environment, the pacing, the audio, the whole design was head and shoulders above most FPSs

So that difficultly spike, well in hindsight I should have just wandered past the particular Big Daddy, got myself tooled up and tackled him when I was stronger. So in fact the real issue was not a difficult spike but rather the game never told you a few key facts. Firstly you don’t have to fight them, they wander the levels so you can fight them at anytime (or not), secondly Big Daddies totally ignore you unless you attack them. In fact the game tries to tell you the exact opposite, with the first Big Daddy encounter being mandatory and Atlas informing you you’ll have to kill them in order to survive.

Still looking back on it Bioshock was an amazing game, and I’m really looking forward to the sequel.

Finger on the pulse of gaming as ever, I’m playing Bioshock about 10 months after everyone else. Heck what can I say. it was a bargin.

So depending on who you talk to; Bioshock is either the pinnacle of next-gen FPS gaming with a intelligent and well told story and stellar visuals or a over-hyped, repetitive, badly thought out pile of dung. Quite a Marmite game this one.

Firstly, the art style and graphics are astounding. I’ve been playing for 2 days and I still spend a significant amount of time just gawping at stuff. Not only is it pretty - lots of games do pretty, but it’s a cohesive, designed and interesting kind of pretty. The art-deco styling and 1920’s future-retro feel to everything is breath of fresh air compared to the tedious brown/grey/biege grrrrritty style that seems so prevalent in gaming now. The story is different from the run of the mill too, I’m getting quite drawn into the world they’ve created.

It also has probably one of the best intros / opening sequence I can think of, it really does have an amazing start. Can you sense a “but” coming? Yeah so here it is, shortly after the opening bit it goes downhill like a shot. The problems for me started a few hours in when I encountered the first couple of Big Daddies (the heavily armoured, diving suit clad mega bastards that are on the games cover). It’s a difficulty spike; correction it’s a difficulty spike of mountain like proportions. I understand they are supposed to be hard and feared but they just take the piss. To cut a long, teeth grindingly annoying story short I had to drop the difficulty down to easy. Fighting the same enemy repeatedly for over 1 hour and not progressing is not my idea of fun.

Now on easy difficulty things are fun again (yeah remember that’s the reason I play games - fun) but the challenge has gone. Gone as in totally; it’s now so easy a blind gibbon with no thumbs could play the game. Come on guys strike some balance here!

A Big Daddy - bane of my life

I’m probably a glutton for punishment or something - despite not liking like online multiplayer FPS genre I’ve gone and picked up Halo 3 and Unreal Tournament 3 (henceforth UT3). Why?

Well Halo 3 got a lot of love when it was released, I didn’t pick it up at the time as the prospect of playing a shiny space marine blasting shiny purple aliens a-la Halo 1 & 2 bored me to tears. However a £23 quid bargain price (zavvi.co.uk) and a burning curiosity to see what all the fuss was about resulted in me picking it up. First of all the plot/story/acting is laughable; after playing Half Life 2 this is like coming straight from Blade Runner to an episode of Hollyoaks, anyhow that’s not a major problem. The offline campaign seems pretty good, I’ll probably endure it to the end, it’s deserves at least that much of me. So what about the online multiplayer, the main reason everyone loved Halo 3 – shit! did everyone else get a different version of the game from me? I hated it, absolutely loathed every second of it. It was just a horrible, repetitive experience - enhanced greatly by being sworn at in French the whole time.

I just genuinely can not understand the appeal. TBH online play has never really been my thing, but you know this could (or should) have been the game to change my mind. The fact that I die within about 3~4 seconds of respawning clearly doesn’t help. All the other players seem to have some uncanny, magic ability to kill me with a single shot where-as I’ll be pumping thousands of bullets into them and they bearly flinch. Gahh life is too short of this kind of hassle, and I’ve got a pile of games to play in which I don’t spent 90% of my time as a crumpled up corpse.

Shite this has turned into a long whaffle posting, I’ll cover UT3 another day…