Having earned 100,000 achievement points and moved out to university - studying journalism - I'm not playing anywhere near as many games as I was and I'm not missing it as much as I thought I might. Look for this blog to be mainly movie reviews from here on in.
Heavy Rain tells a great story in an interesting way. I'm not arguing that there is no merit to it. Were it not for the technical issues I'd give it a near perfect score. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that my copy of Heavy Rain has had the audio dropping out pretty constantly in almost every single scene. During one of these I decided I'd missed so much that I popped up the PS3 menu and...
Current Xbox 360 achievement score stands at precisely 99500. I managed to hit exactly 55555 and 77777 and I intend to hit exactly 100,000 as well. I managed the most difficult part earlier today when I used Watchmen on XBLA to even up my score so it no longer ends in a 1 or a 6. Finished the first level without getting hit for 11 and while attempting that I clocked over 100 thrown enemy knockd...
This is a straight copy/paste from my Word document. The list I still need to see is almost as long as the top ten itself, which says a lot about how final anything on it might be, but here it is: Shaunage's Top Ten Movies of 2009 in order. Inglourious Basterds The Boat That Rocked Watchmen Avatar An Education Moon The Hurt Locker The Messenger Bad Lieutenant District 9 It is worth noting that...
I've had a quick look over everything I've played over the last year and have come up with this list of ten. In no particular order: Uncharted 2 Borderlands Infamous Resident Evil 5 Ratchet: Crack in Time Batman: Arkham Asylum Assassin's Creed 2 Forza 3 Modern Warfare 2 Red Faction Guerilla There are a few big name games missing, some because I didn't like them, some because I didn't get time t...
It occurs to me that I've been reviewing games in this blog while this fine site has a system in place to create a starred review so from here on in, anything I finish is getting the star treatment. Tomb Raider Underworld is the first of these and you can expect reviews of ODST and Mass Effect any day now. http://www.giantbomb.com/tomb-raider-underworld/61-20694/user_reviews/?review=11029 I've...
It's been a long time since I've written anything here. I'm scared to check how long exactly because it's probably almost a full year. Much of that time has been spent working a full time job - something I wasn't used to - and I've barely been managing to PLAY any games, let alone write about them. I took a week's holidays and have taken the opportunity to sit down and actually *gasp* finish so...
Several months after I trawled the Orange Box for a 13 point achievement to get my score Now, how long do I leave it this way?... even again for my 55555 I have now managed my next goal that seemed reasonable. 77777. It's always a little bit scary getting close to one of these numbers because you need to plan it perfectly to ensure you don't hit something by accident and jump 30 points over. Sc...
Anyone reading this knows that Call of Duty 4 was amazing - a huge leap forward for the series and honestly for games in general. Most of those same people will have been stunned to hear the announcement that World at War was going back to World War 2. Those people were right to be worried. I don't care if it is set in Japan. World at War is a really standard World War 2 game and I was sick of...
Let's get this out of the way right up front: 2007 was an absolutely incredible year for games. I think 2008 may very well have topped it. Say whatever you want about 1998, I think these last two years have been the best two in gaming history. The following list of games was taken from Giant Bomb's voting form for GOTY 2008. I've included everything I played, even if I only played a demo or pla...
As I prepare for the onslaught of AAA releases over the next few weeks (Rock Band 2, Take a guess at how this action is performed in game. Saints Row 2, Fable 2, Dead Space, Little Big Planet, FarCry 2, Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, CoD: World at War, Guitar Hero World Tour, Mirror's Edge, Left 4 Dead, Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, Resistance 2, Tomb Raider Underworld and Prince of Persia, for ex...
I am a pretty big fan of the Survival Horror genre. There are three Resident Evils and a A shot from the excellent intro. Silent Hill in my personal top ten games of all time. I was worried that RE4 had completely killed the genre, turning that series very solidly into 'Action games'. RE4 IS one of the three I mentioned earlier - let's get that clear. Silent Hill: Homecoming sticks a lot closer...
Like every other person on the planet I completely missed the first Mercenaries game. This is one of the smaller explosions in the game. I'm not even sure I've ever seen a copy. The four people who DID play it liked it enough and spoke about it so vocally for the last few months that they somehow got everyone else excited for it. I've learned to completely ignore review scores from a certain si...
The original Viva Pinata kind of came out of nowhere for me. I'd seen gameplay footage You can fill your garden with sand or ice (or both). and heard from people who were really liking it but the term 'Romance Dance' was then and remains so unappealing that I didn't want to hear about the game at all. I still don't really know why I bought it. I randomly walked into Kmart one day and saw it the...
I'm not generally a big fan of War based shooters. I pretty much completely ignored them until the reviews for COD2 at the 360 launch came out. So, so good. They were too positive to ignore and yes, the game was outstanding. I have even less experience with the Battlefield franchise. I only really need one or two online multiplayer games each generation. I'd rather be playing through a single p...
I recently sat down and played right through Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. I had a disgraceful amount of fun with force lightning. I then started a new game to finish grinding out an achievement, kept playing and completed the game again. The exact same thing happened again after THAT play, resulting in me having played the game right through three times in a row. Seriously. I'm kind of surpr...
"I think you'll all be pleasantly surprised." "Actually we've only been working on Too Human for FOUR years." "An integral moral choice: become more powerful at the cost of your humanity - how far will you go?" Denis Dyack is a liar. He has made a good game (not this one, obviously), but he is a bad person. Too Human is one of those crazy new games that realises people hate losing progress in g...
With Rock band 2 on the way (for PS3, so it'll be importable), me and a friend - Mitchell, decided to tackle the "insane person" challenge in the original game. The Endless Setlist. After a few false starts: playing a song with the vocals turned off before deciding it'd probably get annoying 45 songs in, and all sorts of dodgy drum pedal malarkey, we finally made our assault on the list. I was...
I've been absent from this blog for some time. Essentially, I finished Dark Sector, wrote three paragraphs about it and the computer crashed. I got super lucky and the screen froze up, so here are those three paragraphs. Better than typing it out again. Since then I've played a tiny bit of Siren, which I like a lot. It's completely crazy in all the right ways. That goes on hold for a long while...
I played Dark Sector for another few hours. I'm now at the start of Chapter 8, just got the ability to turn invisible. I think I'm ready to officially say I don't like the game. I remember back the the early, early days of Giant Bomb, Jeff was playing through Dark sector and he was pretty close to not finishing the game at all. He only beat it because he felt he couldn't review it without beati...
Quest For Booty is a lot of things. It's Experimental as a downloadable game, it's a nice change of theme and scenery from Tools of Destruction, it's short and it's mildly disappointing. Being such a short game (3-4 hours, I wasn't timing it), QFB has had a lot of the more time consuming aspects removed from it. The weapons all start out at level 3 and on top of that level up maybe five times a...
I've spent the last few days playing right through Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction and I liked it a whole lot. This is the first Ratchet game I've played, but I'm now considering going back to play the four (five?) PS2 installments. Is Jak and Daxter this good? I've never touched those either. The genuinely funny intro movie. I was initially a little disappointed by the graphics,...
This may not come as a surprise to regular readers, but I didn't enjoy playing through Timeshift very much at all. Having finished it didn't improve it either. There's an absolute non-ending, to fit in with the games complete non-story, I guess. Being able to play around with time was cool the first few times. Unfortunately for Timeshift, those first few times, and the next thousand, happened i...
I can't begin to describe how boring Timeshift is. It's painful to play now. It's just. So. Dull. I think this is Yawn. one of the worst shooters on the 360. I certainly can't think of anything worse. Except maybe PDZ, but that's not even fair. The guide on Gamefaqs lists 24 sections. I'm at the start of the 19th of those, meaning I'm about 3/4 through. The next few sections seem to have pretty...
I'm semi-actively working on Timeshift. There's nothing aggressively bad about the game, it's just... boring. There are no weapons I feel comfortable with and it's just a little bit too similar to FEAR, I guess, being as it's a first person shooter where you can slow down time and the enemies take maybe 3 full clips each to kill, even on the lowest difficulty setting. They're not dangerous, jus...
For the first time in a while I sat down and played a game from start to finish. This time it was FEAR, the second game knocked off the stack. Fear, which I refuse to fully capitalise from this point onwards, is a weird mix between a PC style first person shooter and a horror game. PC style because the game has little autoaim and is amazingly hard on anything above the "please don't hurt me, cr...
First game knocked off the list is Bioshock. Bought it almost immediately after launch, maybe release day. The disk has been sitting out of its case for the last 2 months or so because I realised the super hard disk holder in the metal case has done significant damage to the middle of the disk - something I've had trouble with more than once already on the 360. No plot spoilers contained herein...
My game playing has been following a disturbing trend for the last couple of years. Amazing games, or at least somewhat good ones, are released pretty frequently. I like to own as close to all of them as I can manage. The problem is how few of them I actually end up playing to completion. Enter Exhibit A: My stack of unbeaten games. There are over 60 unfinished games sitting in a pile on my bed...