When I realised games would be big

It was the end of 1986, a year when Bon Jovi reigned supreme and the disasters of Chernobyl and Challenger were still fresh in my mind.

I'd been swimming at the local leisure center, Beau Sejour, and decided to hit the rather small games arcade which consisted of about 15 or so arcade machines including some favourites as Star Wars and Gauntlet. There, in the mostly deserted arcade, was a new driving game in the place of Pole Position.

Up to this point I couldn't have cared less about driving games but the screen on this machine was a whir off full-screen colours, cars flying past and cool music blaring out.

I trundled over to the machine and wrestled the change out of my pocket and was soon behind the wheel of one open-topped Red Ferrari with a blonde woman in the passenger seat.

Not only were the graphics beautiful and everything moving and a phenomenal rate but it played well and rewarded great driving not with another boring lap of the same but with an entire new environment.

I was hooked and it suddenly dawned on me that games weren't always going to be these odd little curiosities for geeks tucked away in dark corners or in kids bedrooms.

They were evolving and would push computer hardware and artists imagination to the limits.

That game was Outrun and I enjoyed Outrun 2 just last week with my little brothers on a multi-player arcade setup hidden away in the French alps.

Ah memories,

Trant

Free Live Title Announced

As the last 'Jaded-gamer' who is still posting(again), I thought I'd bring your attention to the title that Microsoft will be offering to the public to make up for the Live! problems over Christmas...

*drum roll*

Undertow!

Actually, I was expecting worse to be fair, I may download it even though I'm not particularly interested in it.

As this will probably be the last post on JG(again), thank you all for watching/reading. (But you never know, the other 'contributors' may actually get off their respective asses, courtesy of this guilt-trip)

Mass Effect?

"So Lab, were you massively affected by Mass Effect?" - It's a good question, especially for you.

I'll just ramble on about things in no particular order, and you make up your own mind if I love/hate the game from there, which sounds like much less work on my part.
Let's start with the texture pop-up; it isn't particularly game-ruining, but there is a lot of it, and due to its sheer quantity it does serve to break the immersion on occasion. In a strange way you get so used to it being bad that you don't notice it after a while, which I guess is one way to fix a bug.

The music is fantastic, almost reaching Halo and Homeworld standards, and then there is the facial animation which is equally awesome... most of the time. Graphically the game is superb (bar the previously mentioned texture issue), and the overall quality and design quickly gloss over concerns about the uneven frame-rate. It I did feel like the developers had cut a lot of corners, to the point where I thought the packaging might actually be approaching round. For instance the item names are very generic, with repeating names and roman numerals denoting power. Then there were the side missions, which suffered from a very cookie-cutter level design. Then there's the lift on the Normandy (which you end up using quite a bit) which shares a sense of expediency with zero-G treacle. There are other elevators in the game that are similarly mellow or long-winded, but at least you get plot related guff to listen to on most occasions.

Combat is a strange mechanic, you have all these abilities and modes, yet I plowed through most of the game without touching any of them. Every now and again one of my party would bust out some bizarre move and the enemy I was shooting at would float around as though they had sat on a helium suppository.

To be honest, I think I could go on for a while listing stuff I liked/hated. The one thing that I was constantly thinking while playing the game was, "FFS, what were the testers/developers thinking/doing?" This happens a lot when I play games these days, but with a small amount of changes Mass Effect could wiped the floor in the GotY competition.

These aren't just empty words on my part. Take the slow loading textures for instance, just have a slightly longer loading screen by default and an option for "Fast loading/slow textures" in the options. *fixed*
A short tutorial on the Force powers... oops, I mean Biotics. *fixed*
Make the AI squad members less willing to sacrifice you when selecting cover *fixed*
A button for the Asari (that's the blue girl for you hard of thinking types) that instantly reduces her level of clothing to bra & knickers *fixed*

Sod it, I will rate it after all, seeing as you asked so nicely: 9.3739287/10

FREE Stuff on Xbox Live

Microsoft are giving away a game and 500 MS Points to celebrate the five year anniversary of Xbox Live!, of course there are a few requirements but they shouldn't be a problem if you're a gamer. Just log onto Live now and download the full version of Carcassone (I have no idea if I spelt that correctly, and am not feeling bad about it either as it's a stupid name). If you've been a Live member since the start then go to this link and claim your 500 points. PS: This is a time limited offer, so get your finger out.

In other news, Crysis (henceforth referred to as Crapsis) is absolute arse. If anyone tells you differently then they've either been brainwashed by EA or have been living under a rock, and this state of geological habitation has caused them to miss just how far the FPS genre has come in the past 10 years. Bottom line?: Crapsis is utter bollocks whose only use will be for benchmarking.

See? You got a free rant too, talk about value.

EverQuest 2 - Ruins of Kunark

To be honest, I'm not sure how I ended up buying this expansion. I'd made up my mind not to, closed all Station Store browser windows that I'd subconsciously opened up, but still ended up getting the damn thing. I assume that I must have blacked out for a short period, and will blame the French for it, as usual. Anyway, might as well tell you what the deal is with the game to offset the £26 hole in my bank account.

We have a new continent, called Kunark. It's pretty large and caters for levels 1-20 and 65-80. If you're in the middle of those two ranges you'll need to go elsewhere. On the subject of the continent, I have to wonder about the sea captains in EQ2. Looking at the world map it's bloody huge, and not far from Kelethin either - and still they took 3 years to find the bloody thing! Dual-wielding eye-patches for the win! Myopic navigators aside, it's your typical EQ2 setting, and by that I mean reasonable graphics with an extremely poor frame-rate. You also get a new race, with horns made of so many polygons that things turn into a slide show if you get two of them within a mile of each other. So as you can imagine, when in the starter area it's quicker to print the view with a 1980's dot-matrix printer rather than bothering your VGA card.

Also of note is the new card game, which initially I thought was going to be a rip-off of Vanguard's Diplomacy. What it makes up for in complexity it loses out on integration, aside of finding cards as loot in EQ2 there is no link between the two systems. Summary of the card game: Pretty but ultimately pointless; think of it like an iPhone where people think you're retarded instead of gay... and retarded.

Summary of the EQ2 expansion: Dont't know to be honest, ask me if I ever make it to 65. Oh well, at least I wasted your time too ;)

Still A Lie - A Portal/PS3 Parody

*Sung (or hummed depending on your vocal talent) to the Portal end credits song.
Lyrics by me during a short period of boredom :)


This was an own-goal
We're making a note here:
HUGE DISTRESS
It's hard to overstate
our consternation.
We're Arrogant Sony
We claimed what we did
because we could.
For the good of all us.
Except the ones who believed.

But there's no sense crying
over every piss-take.
We'll just keep on lying
See how much you can take.
And the consoles don't sell
and we make the best pun
for the fanboys left believing
the lie.

Ken's not even angry
He's playing his PS3 right now.
Even though there's no good games
to play with.
and not many movies.
and an ever shrinking hardware spec.
How we laughed at our E3
joke that is Killzone two.
Now this market data
makes a beautiful line
and it's heading downwards
could we be bankrupt this time?
We're glad we're getting burned
Think of all the things we've learned
about 'FUD' and distorting
the truth.

Go ahead and leave us.
Our console prefers to stay on the shelf
Maybe you'll find something else
to play with.
Wii or three-sixty?
THAT WAS A JOKE, oh wait, too late...
Anyway, the cell is great
And so is 4D gaming.
Look at us still lying
Is that all we can do?
When we look out there,
Unsold units block our view.
We have got new fibs to concoct
a big brand to be undone
for the stupid who
still buy the lie.

The no multiple SKUs lie.

The backwards compatibility lie.

We're in third place thanks to our lies.

While we're dying we'll still be pushing the lie.

And when we're sold off we'll still tell the lie.

PS3 lies.

The Witcher. Greatest RPG to date?

I'm not one to rave but when your as jaded as me it takes something special to 'unjade' me.( yes I just made that word up ). The Witcher, is that thing.

I'll be honest, I'd barely heard of it and had completly forgotten about it, as it just came across as another RPG that supposedly did it all. Gothic 3 was a classic example of a RPG hyped to death and ending up a pile of shite.

Then the posts began to appear and the people were happy. Very happy, so I ended up purchasing it and...

I'll make it simple. The Witcher is Balders Gate in 3D and some.

I'd say more but that'll take me away from the game. Just buy it.

10/10 !

P.S We got it before the Americans. :p

Yahtzee reviews something funny etc...

As everyone else is selling out by posting links to witty stuff instead of making it themselves, I thought I'd follow suit. No sense bucking a trend when it's easy? Right?



I don't give two shits about the Wii, and by the sounds of it neither does he. Still, it's good for a laugh until Mass Effect hits.

Oh btw, PGR4 rules; it would probably have it own monarchy in Labdonia if not for the annoyingly wooly controls (read: stupidly large dead zone) which can't be adjusted.

Bioware MMO to be based in KOTOR universe?

From some interweb site....

A source close to BioWare confirmed to us today that the studio’s upcoming untitled massively-multiplayer online RPG will be centered around the Star Wars universe, specifically that of Knights of the Old Republic, which the developer released in 2003. The game garnered critical acclaim and spawned a less-popular sequel, released by Obsidian two years later.

The game is being developed by the company’s Austin studio, formed in 2006 and headed by BioWare Creative Director James Ohlen, whose past credits include the first KOTOR, Neverwinter Nights, and Baldur Gate’s I and II.

This is not the first Star Wars-related MMORPG: Star Wars Galaxies debuted in the summer of 2003, followed by several expansions. It was generally well-received by fans and critics, but subscriber numbers plunged and never recovered after a controversial gameplay update in 2005. It’s estimated that the game now has fewer than 100,000 subscribers and less than 20,000 active players.

It’s currently unknown whether or not EA, which acquired BioWare last week, will act as publisher for this title, or if the studio had a previous arrangement with another publisher.

Expect the game sometime in 2009.

Published by EA? Ewwwww.

Zero Punctuation: The Orange Box watch!

It must be Wednesday.



Spot on as always but Portal's had quite an effect on Yahtzee.

Half Life 2 Manchester United 0

The iceing on the cake!

Just had to get a cake reference in there ;) Orange box, easily one of the best releases of the last few years is about to be topped!

It's a magazine scan so I'm not allowed to post it but yeah Game Informer gave it 9.75.

Graphics:
Every second of gameplay offers the visual quality you have come to expect from Final Fantasy cutscenes.

Entertainment:
An expansive quest (18 to 30 hours) that toys with your emotions and keeps you engaged.

Replay Value: High

Concept: One of the greatest science fiction stories ever told, and a new benchmark for video game storytelling.

Just wrote those 3 things down, thought they was the most important, they also said the voice acting was amazing and that the soundtrack is one of the most memorable and unique soundtracks in gaming.

Mass Effect is almost here.

Gabe Newell Slags The PS3

Stuffed with cash and now feeling somewhat more secure after the release of Orange Box, Gabe Newell has launched a scathing attack on the shiny black next-gen turkey dubbed the PS3, calling it "a waste of everybody's time." My hero.

Read it and weep [tears of laughter], not that anyone would intentionally buy one of these overpriced, underpowered and now neutered pieces of shit.

Personally, I don't care if it's true, I just like seeing Sony taking a beating for all the bullshit it originally came out with. Here's hoping it'll stay a distant 3rd place forever.

Gareth Gobulcoque....

Yahtzee does Tabula Rasa. As usual, spot on.

Zero Punctuation: Halo 3

This is by far the best game review i've ever seen :)



credit to Yahtzee at the escapist

I have to say I found Halo3's single player to be very average for a game that got so many perfect scores.

Yaarr!

'On Monday, October 1st, Flying Lab Software and Sony Online Entertainment will be kicking off a Beta Stress Test event that will invite File Planet subscription holders to temporarily participate in the Pirates of the Burning Sea beta test. We expect File Planet stress test accounts to go live on the afternoon of Thursday, October 4th and expire at midnight on Sunday, October 7th, Pacific Standard Time. Why a Stress Test?This stress test is a crucial phase in the development of our server infrastructure, and the temporary addition of File Planet subscriber accounts will provide us with the data we need to evaluate and adjust the stability and scalability of our networks. More information will be shared as it becomes available.Best,Aether'

http://www.burningsea.com/page/news/article&article_id=10427

Oh for a new shiney mmo.