Play Taste

Right, just finished the main story in Prototype I would write a full review of the game but I don’t really want to do that without having silly screen shots and an attempt at a witty caption to go with it. It was kind of fun but I didn’t like it nearly as much as I did inFamous, but I pretty much knew that before going into it.

Story wise it didn’t really do much for me but there are enough neat things that happen during the game to stay reasonably interesting. But honestly it’s more an excuse for you to go kill things and in terms of that you get loads of pretty cool powers to kill stuff with so the combat for the most part is pretty fun. It sort of falls apart when fighting some of the more powerful enemies because you really can’t defend yourself very well. You do have a couple of dodge moves but no block that you can just hit a button and just use. So I ended up dying lots and lots and all of the time just wanting to block attacks instead of jumping away, which is really annoying for a game which for the most part has you engaging people in close combat.

Another thing that Prototype does really well is movement, you can get up and around the city pretty darn quickly thanks to fairly fast running and giant jumps, so that stuffs kind of fun to do but it’s not quite as magic as swinging round Manhattan as Spider Man.

I think that’s all I’m going to say for now and I know I’ve been neglecting the food side of things but I haven’t really been making food that’s hugely interesting and I’m probably not going to be making anything post worthy any time soon which is kind of a bummer.

Andrew Games

I finally got these in the post today:

So I ordered SOCOM a couple days ago when someone said that it was £15 from John Lewis which was a pretty damn awesome deal, I doubt I’ll ever play the game but hey, I now have a neat headset. That will also probably go unused cause I don’t really play PS3 games online and usually when I do I can’t be bothered to talk so meh probably really dumb thing for me to buy but whatever.

Prototype I originally bought for the PC but that copy got lost in the mail so I ended up just getting a refund for that and ordering the PS3 version of the game because apparently if you want to play Prototype on the PC you really want to be using a gamepad which clearly if I’m going to do that I might as well be bloody playing the PS3 version. So about a month and a bit after I ordered Prototype I will finally be able to kill people on a massive scale. But not tonight though.

Andrew Games

A game that I have been wanting to play for quite a while now but didn’t because of the price point, so I managed to get it on Impulse a week or so ago now. I was feeling a little bit cheap because one of my biggest complaints about World of Goo was the fact that despite that game being fairly awesome, it to me felt a tad overpriced. So thankfully I did buy it on discount otherwise I would feel even worse than I did back then because Braid despite it’s widespread acclaim wasn’t really as much fun to play.

So Braid is a puzzle platformer that was released on XBLA a quite a while ago and made it to the PC a couple of months ago. So in classic platforming style you run, jump and land on enemies to kill stuff, but really the game at heart is a puzzle game and its wonderful time mechanic. It starts off fairly simply in that reversing time is a good way to undo your mistakes or to help your timing in order to get to hard to reach puzzle pieces, but it ramps up with objects that are immune to your time manipulation so while every other object on screen is going back in time that one just continues on going. So it’s a very interesting use of time and it works very well.

Attack of the Bunny

So each world has its own different twist on time so you get to drop an item that creates a time slow down in a small circle, the ability to create a shadow clone of yourself but for the most part these ones that just aren’t straight up time tend to not be quite as fun and the puzzles in these later worlds fall into the annoying category more often than the challenging. But there are more good puzzles than bad ones overall so if you’re willing to get past a certain amount of insanity then you’ll be fine.

I suppose the one of the biggest thing that some folk have praised is the ending of the game and I’m not going to spoil anything if you haven’t played it but it’s one of those things that you can see what was going on conceptually and if you take it at face value it is kind of neat. But in reality it ends up looking kind of janky.

Shadow Tim, What will happen when he faces his true self?

The music and art style is something that I’m not going to complain about, because Braid is a beautiful sounding and looking game. But in the end Braid is a game that is hampered by just having a couple of puzzles that are not very good, in that the solution to them don’t logically follow on from what the game tries to teach you, to a certain extent I think this may just be a side effect of having 5 worlds each having their own specific world mechanic and it ends up being interesting but not necessarily always fun to play.

Andrew Games

Okay so I bought a hand beater for no other reason than I’m too lazy to use a whisk like I did the last time, so it was way easier to make them this time.

So hand beater that cost me 5 pounds so I can probably expect it to die in a couple more uses but more importantly the reason I bought it!

So not a total success but still lovely to eat, it obviously deflated as soon as I took it out of the oven. I can’t be bothered to make the pastry so I used the Sainsbury’s pre made puff pastry which is actually really nice. As for the filling it would probably have benefited from having an extra egg yolk in there but as a more serious issue it turned out a little bit too sweet, but regardless yum! and I still have some left .

Andrew Food

I’m just going to get this out the way, The Sims 3 is awesome, it may not have the complete feature set that The Sims 2 and all of its expansions combined have but its still full of charm, humour and randomness. The basic premise for the game is still the same except this time you have an entire town at your disposal which has plenty for you to do, however with a few notable exceptions.

The first character that I made was an evil genius which was clearly the first thing I was going to do and you really aren’t allowed to be that evil. So first things up when you make a sim you pick their look, clothes and so on but the important bit is that you also choose a number of traits and a lifetime goal (if you’re creating a young adult or higher). So I chose become an evil mastermind who wanted to become the emperor of evil and the thing that I noticed more than anything on that play through was how thoroughly not evil that character was, in fact one of the most evil things that he did was steal candy from a baby. No axe murdering psychos allowed apparently, I couldn’t even tell him to go break into someones house although I think you are supposed to be able to do that if you made a klepto sim.

Evil Genius At Work, Do Not Disturb

So being evil didn’t work out for me so well so I decided another play through was in order this time a different bunch of characters including but not limited to a charitable vegetarian lesbian gardener. I kind of went a little overboard with going to the other extreme. I played around much more with the creation tools this time round and if you’ve ever wanted to see what a formal dress looks like on a person that’s been painted like a brick wall, well its interesting to say the least. The moving stuff around the house seems as functional as ever, and is very well designed drag and drop with the menus being very well designed and incredibly beautiful from a UI stand point. If there’s on main complaint with the UI in general its that it tends to become a little unwieldy when there are loads of items, like the inventory became a pretty big hassle later on.

The things that I like most about it are the variously geeky references in the game like if you’re sim is a genius you can work on the computer to help solve the P = NP problem or the fact that the title to one skill books that the sims can read is just Pi to about 8 dp. Awesome. Also some wonderful EA product placement, when your sim plays video games apparently they enjoy playing Burnout Paradise, Madden and Skate.

The Sims 3 Still Supporting Gay Marriage

Graphically the game looks pretty good, it’s not going to win any technical achievements but it does still have that a wonderful look at feel to it that makes the world more alive than a different aesthetic would probably give it. I did have a couple times when there was a significant amount of texture pop in and this is from no texture, not just a blurry one although I was moving from one part of the town to the interior of a building on the other side of the map so it’s excusable but worth noting. Another technical issue but at one point my game just wouldn’t save, I would just keep getting an error code, I figured that it was something to do with an overcrowded inventory as it does actually cause significant slow down when you’re carrying hundreds of items (it just takes like a second to move items about so if you moving items from one person to another it’s far more apparent than when you only have a couple of inventory items). So I sold a bunch of items on my overloaded sims and voila saving allowed again, not a scientific test I know and I’m not bothered to try to repo it again but again, worth noting. Also saving takes way too long to not have a progress bar to it and it doesn’t auto save which I don’t like but given how long saving actually takes not having it is probably the best of the two evils.

Overall I had fun with The Sims 3 and it gets a big thumbs up, for those folk that were really into The Sims 2 expect to have many many omissions from the expansions and I’m guessing that those will show up in the future. But what is taken away it does give plenty back so its definitely worth your time, I never played The Sims series before now and I’m saying that. Now to go play something less addicting, maybe a good MMO…

Andrew Games

Alan Wake

This was cool when they showed off that original trailer so many years ago, now we have gameplay footage. It basically shows Alan Wake running about and shooting enemies as well as dodging telekinetiaclly controlled objects presumably. Now the shooting involves you pointing your flash light at enemies to weaken them and then putting a bullet in their head. I think I would feel better about the game if there was less shooting in it and also the objects floating in mid air being thrown at you, it just makes that game so much less compelling to me. Still the enemies that all got scared when he lit a flare, that was kind of cool.

Halo 3: ODST

To preface this I’m not a huge Halo fan to begin with, but seriously its way more halo than it really should be, you can still take a couple shots before dying but you aren’t quite as hardy as master chief. But other than that you might as well be the same guy. The only interesting thing is that apparently the game is a sort of semi-open world as you can move about the city in any way you like and then there are mission trigger points. Not sure how limited or not the city is but it is you by yourself so chances are its more a mission hub than free flow open world that you can do stuff in.

The Beatles: Rock Band

The game looks neat and is totally Beatles, but also announced you can’t export the songs at all and that the game will not work at all with your current DLC. Lame.

Andrew Games

Fat Princess

A wonderful looking PSN title with class based combat. Not a huge amount of new information but it still looks like wonderful silly fun. They were showing a pirate ship level which includes a drawbridge instead of the castle door that was in the beta. Not really sure how you are meant to get over it directly, but I assume that there was another way in considering someone did actually rescue the princess.

Bioshock 2

Not a huge amount was shown about Bioshock 2, some people got to see the multiplayer which you play as a splicer before the fall of Rapture which is weird because you fight with a whole bunch of plasmid powers but Rapture is all pristine and new whereas it probably shouldn’t be. Still excited for the game though but as with a lot of people I kind of think of the multiplayer in Bioshock as an unneeded feature. But it still could be cool, so I’ll wait till I actually play it myself.

Alpha Protocol

An RPG from Obsidian who made KOTOR 2, Neverwinter Nights 2. This on the other hand is much more action oriented and based in modern day and you play a spy. So apparently they are taking a number of cues from things like James Bond and trying to create that in a game which is cool. Also conversation trees which is something that both these guys and the guys at Bioware have in common. In conversation you have a time limit on what you are going to say so that what you say follows on the conversation more naturally, on the flip side I still have no idea what happens once the timer runs out, although I guess that it would just pick a default.

Andrew Games

Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time

Not really a huge amount to say about this that isn’t too obvious. It continues from Tools of Destruction and Quest for Booty but you don’t need to have played either of those. It includes new weapons, new gadgets and new enemies. One of the new gadgets is a pair of rocket boots that basically allow you to boost round the levels quickly so this should mean larger levels to mess about in. Also sniper rifle.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2

More MUA goodness, fighting and beating up dudes as various Marvel characters. There seems to be a fair number of people that you would guess would be there as well as some of the less well known characters like Deadpool (if you didn’t know who that is don’t worry neither did I until recently). It seems to have Iron Man still in it so I’m happy.

PixelJunk Shooter

The next entry into the PixelJunk franchise is something of a dual stick shooter, although I’m guessing the control scheme here. You fly around and it’s your job to save a couple of stranded people in the world before moving onto the next. The interesting part is the fluid mechanics that are in the game, which involves lava and water, one of which kills you the other makes the other safe for your ship, take a guess as to which is which. Overall it looks kind of cool, and I want to see more of it. No word on pricing but I would expect something in the $10-15 range.

Andrew Games

Dragon Age: Origins

New trailer for the game and some cool looking gameplay, the combat isn’t quite as fluid looking as most modern games but it still looks fine. It’s a little hard to judge how its going to work just from video but it seems as if it will play out very much like Neverwinter Nights and similar things. A major theme in the trailer, sex.

MAG

This was kind of a surprise when it was showed off last year at E3 but for the most part it seems to be coming together nicely. It’s somewhat of a controlled setting but it seemed to work well, no one complained of lag except of course when the LACC lost all of its internet for a while. Think battlefield 2 and up the scale to 256 players and at it’s most basic level thats what it is. The way they split up each time seems interesting so you have a company commander, 4 platoon commanders and each platoon has 4 squad leaders of 8 person squads. So the voice chat works in that hierarchy, so platoon commaners talk to the company commander each other platoon leader and its squads. Seems neat and it’s made by the folk at Zipper who were the orignal creators of SOCOM so it’s certainly worth paying attention to.

Assassin’s Creed 2

More Assassin’s Creed, in short. You can disarm people and use their own weapons against them. Also the people in the city seem to be slightly more interesting as in they don’t just walk around they actually do stuff. Maybe not the best example as it’s easily scripted but during carnival it looks like people at carnival. Also you now carry a pair of hidden blades for twice the assassination goodness, no sign of the gun they showed off in the trailer when they demoed it. Also no word on wether the key assassination figures are going to be mysteriously impervious to all weapons other than the hidden blades. Also they’ve said that they are going to try to make the gamey parts of it more invisible which if you played the original were very much in your face and you could very easily tell what the mechanics were.

Andrew Games

Modern Warfare 2

This was shown off first at the Microsoft press conference and it was on the show floor, basically its a lot like the first modern warfare plus snow, minus the call of duty name. In the demo you were playing Roach in the SAS under the command of Captain Soap, no word on Price in the sequel. It seems like more modern warfare goodness so if you enjoyed the original seems like a fairly good buy, if you complained about the length of the original expect to have the same complaint this time round because they’ve said that it’s going to be about the same length this time round but it seems to have the same level of intensity as the first so I’m really not too bothered about that.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

An amazing demo shown off at the Sony press conference and Nathan Drake is still awesome and it seems as Elena Fisher is going to be in this one as well, so potential for wonderful dialogue is clearly present. The shooting seems very similar to the original except it takes a couple less bullets to put someone down this time so that seems like a good improvement cause I really got tired of running out of ammo in that game. There seems to be a really nice amount of work that seems to have been done on the engine as they showed off you looking at a great looking cityscape, oh and helicopter fight.

Left 4 Dead 2

One of the surprising announcements of E3 and one that seems slightly odd given Valve’s continuing support for TF2 but it looks like left 4 dead, there are a couple of new weapons the only one that I’ve seen is a silenced SMG with incindiary bullets which just sets zombies on fire when you shoot them. Also new infected, like the charger whos a lot like the tank except faster and less health and the uncommon common which apparently are just zombies in outfits that make them immune to fire like hazmat suits. Four new survivors as well, but they are decidedly less interesting than the original four. Also the new location for the game which is the southern US states doesn’t look nearly as cool but I might feel different actually playing it. New improvements to the AI director which now allows a little more than just zombie placement but a bit of object placement as well, we’ll see how much flexibility it actually has when it’s released.

Andrew Games