I’ve been somewhat lazy on the writing front of late, though not aiding my writer’s block has been my current excursion to the US of A, which is now drawing to a close. However,as I sit here waiting to head to the airport for the flight home I find myself browing some of the gaming news I’ve missed out on and came across this little tid-bit: New Zelda to require MotionPlus add-on.

During my holiday here in the States one of the things I ended up doing is playing with Wii with some friends, and greatly enjoyed time on Super Smash Bros. Brawl and even a little dabble with Mario Kart Wii. Both were suitably enjoyable that I’ve been entertaining the notion of purchasing a Wii once again, but crap like that (and every Wii game makers seeming insistance that you should buy there plastic add-on) just drives me mad. I’m not sure yet what price point they’re pitching the Wii MotionPlus at, but I’m betting it’s enough that a full set of 4 won’t be too shy of 100 smackers, which really takes the piss.

I had gathered that games would probably work best witht he MotionPlus, but I was sort of hoping that they’d avoid instantly jumping into the whole ‘required’ aspect too soon, but the fact that Nintendo may well be leading that charge themselves. Right now my opinion on the Wii remains as it ever has been: a fun toy with a few games I’d like to play, but overpriced and not worth the money to get me to go buy one just yet.

Apologies for the lack of updates, I’m in the process of getting a couple of reviews sorted, but have been busy with all the usual gubbins, including a bit of illness I’ve not been able to fully shake just yet. But enough of that, time for a little bit of a rant inspired by this bit of news: clicky clicky.

Yes, after all this time Infinity Ward are finally seeing fit to attempt to clamp down on the cheaters who plague Call of Duty 4’s (formally) excellent online multiplayer component. I was, and to an extent am, a huge fan of CoD4’s multiplayer, as it’s a really well put together game with some excellent modes and an almost pitch-perfect reward/growth system that develops as you play. There’s room for improvement, but IW brought a lot to the table and for months myself and friends duly ploughed countless hours into the game.

However, over time, and as tends to happen I guess, people starting finding glitches (like the reload glitch, or various geometry glitches) and the mass popularity brought in some of the worse elements of the populous, such as the kind of fuckers that use stand-by cheats and other suck exploits. Very quickly the game became less and less fun as the chance of getting some bullshit game increased almost exponentially (or so it felt at least). And so a few people gave up on playing it, and before you knew it the game wasn’t getting played at all.

I hoped that IW would see fit to patch the game, especially since they’d already churned out the obligatory map pack, but it never came. Apparently the PC version got an update to try and fix some of the issues, but only now do with the news (with no known release date) that a patch is coming for the 360. This is the true definition of too little, too late (though as Skills has pointed out to me, this is possibly the understatement of the year) and right now I’d much rather Infinity Ward spent their time making sure that Modern Warfare 2, which probably rates as one of my most anticipated games right now, is free of such glitches and issues.

That said, maybe this patch will be enough to tempt me to try CoD4’s multiplayer again, for the first time in quite a long time now. Guess we’ll see. What do you guys think, might this tempt you back to the game?

Star Ocean: The Last Hope is the final entry in the long-running and pretty well-liked Star Ocean series.  It follows up on the godawful story of Star Ocean 3 and ends the series with a longer, more epic tale of spaceships, symbology, and silliness.

On paper, Star Ocean 4 is a no-brainer.  It’s a series that has always thrived on its interesting and fun realtime battle system, combined with a general tendency to fill the games with a ridiculous amount of hidden things to find.  It can appeal to more action-oriented gamers as well as poopsockers just as easily!  It should be a fantastic game, right?

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Back when the XNA Community Games section was announced, the general reaction that I saw was one of cautious optimism.  The idea of independent developers getting a low-cost entry into the downloadable games field and actually have the chance to earn money doing it sounded like a noble endeavor, but the niggling doubt in the back of everyone’s mind was that trusting the Internet at large to come up with anything well-made is a bit of a losing proposition.

Enter XNA, with its release schedule of “about 50 games an hour” and its apparent acceptance criteria of “It works most of the time” for games.  The optimism has been replaced with a full dose of apathy, with the combined one-two punch of awful games and a lack of achievement points, which would at least get some of the achievement whores spending 200 MSP on some of these games.

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As ever I’ve been busy playing games over the last few months and thought I’d catch up with another mega review. I had intended for these to be a little on the shorter side than my regular reviews, but it seems my fingers got a little carried away on a couple of them. Ah well, can’t be helped. But here you go, enjoy my take on a few of the games that have occupied my time recently…

Scene It? Box Office Smash

As I noted in my review, Scene It? Lights, Camera, Action was an entertaining game that suffered with a few small issues that detracted from an otherwise solid experience. The follow up, Box Office Smash, looks to improve on the formula, and brings a new slice of movie trivia fun, albeit with a somewhat familiar feeling.

Much like Lights, Camera, Action the game can be played in either short of long configurations, which merely changes the number of quiz blocks you’ll get in each round. Options are still fairly thin on the ground, though definitely an improvement on the last effort: the addition of options to remove buzz in rounds (hoo-bloody-rah), and a Solo Mode designed to generate a high-score challenge for single players (each correct question increases a multiplier, from x2 up to x10, with wrong’uns sending you back to x1), are certainly most welcome.

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For the first I can think of in quite some time I have absolutely no games on pre-order. Zero. Nadda. None. I literally can not think of a time in recent memory when that was the case, and it’s a slightly odd feeling, though a welcome one. I’m hoping this break in new titles might give me some time to catch up on recent additions to my gaming catalogue, though given how much time both Street Fighter IV and, most recently, Resident Evil 5 have been consuming, who can say.

I certainly don’t see myself ordering anything soon, but any which ways, this lull in pre-orders had me thinking about what games are coming up in the year ahead that I’m actually looking forward to. As always, many of these might not pan out as expected, or could end up being rubbish, but here’s what I have an eye on at the moment.

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Or Tom Clancy’s B.U.L.L.O.X.
Or Tom Clancy’s C.A.W.X.
Or Tom Clancy’s C.R.O.X……of shit.

Yeah. Yeah.

New AEROPLANAN’ GAEM right. Can’t be that bad. Or something. Right…right?

I wouldn’t be writing this if it wasn’t.

Well, FUCK. Continue reading this article »

So yesterday Jay got around to picking up a cheap copy Scene It? Box Office Smash – a rather decent movie quiz game and all-round improvement on the solid Lights, Camera, Action – and so I dropped him a message on Live seeing if he was interested in a bit of friendly online competition. Being the good sport he is he was up for it and so popped BOS in and created a game and sent Jay an invite.

All being right in the world we would have gone on to have a fun time answering questions and me kicking Jay’s arse due to my movie geek knowledge. However, all was not right in the world, and it turns out Scene It? is yet another title that has idiotic region locking on the online game.

Trying to accept an invite from one another we got a message saying the game we trying to join was from a different locale. You know what, who cares? If there’s a chance different regional sensitivities might affect gameplay, surely that’s down to the players to decide. If you want, give an option to only play with people who are in the same locale, don’t cut off whole swathes of the potential game playing population from one another.

Surely the world has gotten small enough now that we can stop pulling this bullshit and let people play with whoever they want to. I know I’m fed up of finding out I can’t play with friends just because of a decision made on a developer’s whim; and I’m most certainly sodding fed up of finding out at the point I go to play with mates.

One of the worse parts of being mates with a bunch of yanks is that every time a game release comes around that I’m excited for I have this horrible three day wait whilst they enjoy the game and I’m sat twiddling my thumbs. This is all down to the fact that in the US they get their game releases on a Tuesday and we have to wait until Friday. Of course we don’t have to, they could quite happily release games here on a Tuesday too, and on some rare occasions they have done just that with actual worldwide releases.

Unfortunately that has not been the case for Street Fighter IV, a game I’ve been more excited about right now than pretty much anything in recent memory (save possibly GTA IV, though that was a worldwide release). It’s incredibly frustrating seeing my Xbox Live friends list filled with “Now playing Street Fighter IV” entries, as I just want to join in and play too.

But for now I have to sit and cross my fingers, hope my various orders turn up on time and I get to join in the fun on Friday. I’m also hoping that my Street Fighter IV Tournament Edition Fightstick makes it at some point over the weekend too (the order has actually changed to packing, so this is promising) as I’m planning to get a few mates round from some elbow-to-elbow Street Fighter action.

I just have to wait…

After finishing Prince of Persia in 2 days, I checked my email to discover that its predecessor from Ubisoft, Assassin’s Creed, was on its way.  Not one to turn down a good game, I gamely fired it up to find out how good it was, especially compared to its spiritual sequel, Prince of Persia.  I was surprised with what I found.

Assassin’s Creed is a better polished, better designed, and just all around better-made game than Prince of Persia was.  Its controls actually allow you freedom to roam, its story is more interesting, and its open world setup actually works.  I would repeatedly marvel at some facet of Assassin’s Creed and wonder why they didn’t do the smae thing in Prince of Persia.   Hell, even the dual plot mechanic they use works better than PoP’s excuse for a plot.

(For those who don’t feel like reading a wall of text, the end of this article contains a bullet-point “tl;dr” version of this review.)

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