Bungie's New Horizons and Boosting My Trooper

I’m now almost into the last week of my first year of university and with five assignment deadlines next week the amount of free time I have for video games is becoming less and less. I’ve managed to get some time in on Team Fortress 2 and Pokémon HeartGold among other games however in HeartGold I’m still really only stuck around the same city I was this time last week.

 The dark lord of video games.

The one thing I did not expect to be blogging about this week was Bungie signing a 10-year contract with Activision. This was shocking news for most but as a major fan of the Halo series I was left absolutely speechless and not sure what to think for a while. One of the first things that jumps to most peoples’ minds when they think of Activision is “big evil corporation” and it’s certainly no different for me, the kneel-jerk reaction to this is to start ranting on about how Activision are going to get in the way and ruin the Halo games but I’ve found myself strangely comfortable with the decision Bungie have made. I think one of the most important things about the deal they have struck with Activision is that they retain the rights to their new IP and in that sense their new contract with Activision benefits them a great deal more than the one they had with Microsoft. One big worry on the back of the West and Zampella crisis is that the employees of Bungie will end up in the same situation those guys did but in the event anything like that did happen I don’t see Bungie as the studio that is going to just sit there and take it, one of their foremost goals in finding a new publisher seems to have been finding one where they can be truly independent in the creation of their next title. If Activision keep their distance and Bungie keep doing that they are doing then it’s a win-win situation and there’s no way a mega-corporation like Activision don’t know that.

In more personal happenings this week my friend NinjaDuckie happened to gift me the game Booster Trooper over Steam, something I’m very thankful for but the game is not without its issues. The game seems to have some major technical problems and on my (and as I discovered from some research) and a lot of other peoples computers the game lags terribly even in single player mode. While I got a little further than NinjaDuckie who found himself with a completely unplayable game the game was still very disappointing in how jittery it was, the interesting thing is that this issue doesn’t seem to be directly connected to system requirements, apparently you can take two PCs and if one of the PCs is technically inferior it may run the game fine while the superior one may shakily struggle to push its way through the game. Other issues include very poor AI pathing and that any character can set the rocket launcher as their spawn weapon. I was going to write a review of Booster Trooper but I’ve decided to lay off for a while, it was only developed by an indie team and there is going to be post-release patching so I’m waiting to see if they can turn this thing around because without its technical issues Booster Trooper could be a good game.

 Truly this is the age of apocalyptic scenarios.

The highlight of my week was getting hold of a beta key for early access to the Halo: Reach beta from Bungie’s site. I happened to be in the right place at the right time and was in a state of disbelief upon finding that I had a working key. The Reach beta client is currently sitting snugly in the jumbled mess of data that is my Xbox 360 hard-drive and on what would have been the night of 30 April US time I got the chance to fire it up and take my first steps onto planet Reach. I don’t want to say too much until I’ve played more of the beta but so far the game has been very recognisably a Halo experience but with some very enjoyable changes and additions.

Thanks for your time and this week I’m going to leave you with this humorous offering from YouTube:

 

 

-Gamer_152