Reach, A Hedgehog and WoW's New Coat of Paint

Salutations comrades, it is Saturday 16 October and once again it’s time for some bloggin’. As has been the case for the past few weeks one of my major go-to games this week has been Halo: Reach and it seems I’m not the only one still enjoying it as Bungie have reported that over 16,445 man years have been spent playing the game (apologies for the formatting glitch here)

 That map is looking mighty purdy.and that in total 784 million games have been played; I think it’s fair to say it’s a popular game. The announcement of part two of the October playlist updates has made it a little more popular with me though as come Tuesday Bungie will be moving all snipers gametypes to their own playlist and turning off friendly fire in all firefight gametypes. Although I haven’t tried it out myself yet campaign matchmaking is apparently also online for those who are so inclined. But wait, there’s more! Bungie have shown off the new ‘Noble’ map pack and dated it for November 30th. It seems a little soon to be talking about new map packs to me, considering the game only came out a month and a half ago, but Bungie always like to start delivering news early on these things and I have to say the new maps do look very pretty.

Finally, Bungie have declared that they will lift the current cap on ranks once the Reach community has hit 117 million completed daily and weekly challenges, something that they predict will happen sometime during November. The social aspect of working towards removing the cap is certainly a nice touch. In general it’s really great to see Bungie giving so much post-release support to the game and listening to the fans as intently as they have been, but that’s part of the reason why I’ve always given Bungie the kudos I have.

He's blue (da ba dee, da ba die).

I always enjoy jumping into a good demo and this week I played the demo of Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1, a game that generated a fair amount of discussion and speculation even long before its release. One of the most striking things about the Sonic 4 demo is that it’s short, and I mean short, but there was a much larger barrier than that to my enjoyment of the game. Whatever the quality of Sonic the Hedgehog 4 I couldn’t help but feel when playing it that it rammed home exactly what had happened to the Sonic franchise. I was actually on board with the Sonic franchise a lot longer than most people, as a young teenager I even enjoyed Sonic Heroes on the Gamecube, but all that was going through my head while playing the Sonic 4 demo was that Sonic Team had managed to alienate the original Sonic fanbase so badly that the only way they could possibly try to pull the whole thing back around was to release a game that was almost exactly like the original Sonic the Hedgehog. My crippling cynicism aside if you don’t feel you’ve grown out of your like for 2D Sonic’s essentially simplistic platforming style there’s a good chance you’ll like Sonic the Hedgehog 4, although I do have some concerns with issues such as the amount of time it takes Sonic to get up to speed, and while Episode 1 seems to have plenty of content I’m very sceptical whether the Sonic 4 series as a whole will be worth $45.

The big release this week was EA’s Medal of Honor, a game which seems to be doing pretty well for itself but by all regards has fallen short of what EA promised. In a way it’s somewhat of a relief for me that Medal of Honor wasn’t one of this year’s hits like EA thought it was going to be. While the game seems to introduce a few interesting concepts it is essentially Battlefield: Bad Company 2 crossed with Modern Warfare 2 and in an industry that thrives on innovation, for the message to go out to other publishers that slamming two existing ideas together and throwing a bunch of money at it is the way to go wouldn’t have been good. I was somewhat saddened by the news this week that Pirates of the Caribbean: Armada of the Damned has been cancelled though. The game looked and sounded like it had some real promise and could have been a big step forwards for the quality of licensed games, suffice to say this cancellation represents the exact kind of bad messages I don’t want publishers to be getting.

 I'm no engineer but I think this qualifies as technical difficulties.

This was a major week for World of Warcraft fans as WoW updated from version 3.3.5a to version 4.0.1 in preparation for Cataclysm. I had some initial problems with the patch (see right) but after clearing out plenty of hard-drive space for the install and bringing down my settings a little lower than my norm I had it up and running. Right from when you jump into the game some of the new changes are obvious and you’re met with not only a sleek new UI for most of the games systems but also a restructured version of all the abilities and talents in the game. It’s refreshing having a lot of new spells and talents to work with and on the whole this patch seems representative of Blizzard’s commitment to really rehash the entire game. I had a moment of amazement upon seeing the new water graphics alone, and I can only imagine what it’s going to be like to see the next patch and the complete changes to all of Azeroth.

That is another week done but for anyone who is interested I have a new review of Bejweled 2 up here for your reading pleasure. Thank you for checking out my blog, good luck and have Tauren.

-Gamer_152