It is currently Monday 9th November and I'd hoped to have this blog up over the weekend but things were a bit... Busy. Tomorrow is the big release of Modern Warfare 2 and I must say with all the hype surrounding the game I occasionally feel a little bit like a stranger in the world of gaming. Not only is the internet abuzz with talk of Infinity Ward's next great game but even people around my university are constantly questioning who is and isn't getting the game on launch day and most of the time I don't seem to be met with much understanding when I tell people I never really got into the Call of Duty franchise. Still, gaming goes on and I'm happy for all those who are super-expectant of the game's release.

This week I've managed to get myself hooked back on World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2. Considering the addictive nature of WoW I thankfully haven't got too obsessed with it this time round but it's been nice to do a few quests and participate in the odd battleground match, although it might be nicer if the Alliance won more often. I also did experience a very odd glitch the other day where I was standing at the end of the pier on Booty Bay when the ship arrived and my character seemed to get stuck on a bit of the ship's outer geometry and it started pushing me along. This was kind of cool so I just let it run its course but when the ship sailed off for faraway lands my client refused to load the next area, forcing me to log out and in again. When I logged back in my character appeared to be underneath the game world, falling downwards and after a minute or so he just dropped out of view, lost all his health and the game asked me if I wanted to resurrect. When I did I ended up in the Hillsbrad Foothills, a ridiculous distance north from where I started. It really was the weirdest glitch I'd ever experienced in the game.

On Team Fortress 2 I've been trying my luck with the Sniper this week which has been a bit of a daring move as I have a bit of a history with just plain sucking at sniping in shooters. However, even if I may still not be that good I'm surprised by how much I've improved in such a short space of time, practice really does do wonders. Now if only I could do a half-decent job with the Spy and the Scout.

As promised last week I did upload my review of indie game Osmos to Giant Bomb this Tuesday and I've also filled out the Geometry Wars 2 review on Giant Bomb which was lost in a posting glitch a while back. I may have more reviews on the way in the near future and I look forward to any writing I get the time for. That wraps up this (relatively) short blog for this week. I will leave you all with a video that brought me great amusement. May I proudly present Laddergoat.

-Gamer_152

It is currently Saturday October 31st, All Hallow's Eve and I'm in pretty high spirits on this cool autumn evening. Unfortunately I have been suffering a little from the flu this week and while it's not been as bad as it could have been it has cut down my gaming time. I've been playing more of Brutal Legend this week though and have found all the motor forges, collected all the solos and unlocked a bunch more achievements. I have a bit of a dream of going after 100% completion on that game but I'm not sure I'll ever reach that. It doesn't matter though, I still stand by what I said last week; I think it's a great game. It's only two months now though until Assassin's Creed 2 hits which looks like another very well-made action-adventure game but I guess I'll have to add that to the pile of things I wish I could buy next to Borderlands, Arkham Asylum and The Ballad of Gay Tony.

This week one of my university assignments did require me to download a game off the internet which my parents courteously paid for. Our task was to play and review an indie game we'd never played before and I was excited about my assignment and don't think I did a bad job. My review for indie title Osmos is already written but I'm not uploading it until Tuesday, sometime after midday, for fear that otherwise my lecturer will believe I have simply ripped it from the internet. I also downloaded League of Legends this week as the open beta went live on Monday, but whadda ya know? Another game my university internet connection is blocking the ports for. At this point I'm a little bummed out with this whole port blocking thing because even after I've registered my Xbox 360 with them they're still restricting my connection with that too.

But this is the week of Halloween and what does that mean? That's right, in-game events! Valve pulled off a great and unexpected Halloween event by putting out a new map, two new hats and five new achievements. The new map was actually a modification of a community map by the name of Harvest. Valve took it and added a more halloweeny environment, a ghost which randomly appears and scares characters into not being able to use their weapons, changed the health packs into sweets, added special pumpkin powerups that give you a crit on your next shot and generally made the map great fun to play on. I've also had a bit of an excuse to play World of Warcraft again, given that it's All Hallow's End in the world of Azeroth. I've got up to level 46, spent some time in Warsong Gulch and run back and forth across the world collecting Halloween treats. I even now have my Steam and WoW accounts synched with Giant Bomb so everybody can see how badly I'm doing with my achievements as well.

But, I think that's enough of a catch up for this week. I hope you're all having an awesome time and I'll leave you with what Giant Bomb aptly called the craziest GTA trailer ever (viewer discretion is advised).

-Gamer_152

It is currently Sunday 25th October and I did cave this week and get Brütal Legend. What do I think of it? In one word: Brilliant. Maybe it's best I back up for a moment. You see last week I was rather unconfident that this game would actually have any solid gameplay and wondered if the whole problem of the game trying to blend RTS and action-adventure elements or the numerous side missions would get in the way of me having fun. Despite this I scooped the game up without a second thought at the first opportunity I got and was only too eager to experience what the game had in store as I played for the first time. I'd played through the demo before and seen more of the game from video of it that Double Fine had released, but I played through the first 15-30 minutes content enough. From then on my excitement began to grow and a few missions later I was already enjoying the game greatly. After a fair amount of time with the game I turned off my 360 believing that although I'd had an enjoyable time with the game I wasn't that desperate to go back and play any more of it. Oh, how wrong I was. Absolutely itching to play more of the sweet metally goodness I jumped back on my console the next day, played all the way up to the final mission and loved every minute of it. After completing the game I still wanted more and have spent this weekend glued to my TV, going after every achievement, unlockable and hidden item I can get.

So what did I find so unbelievably amazing about Brütal Legend? I'm not sure I can entirely put my finger on it right now. The game seems almost greater than the sum of its parts. Of course the characters, environments, lore and general aesthetics of the game are extremely well done and though it has been criticised I thought the main story was compelling as well. The voice acting was not only great due to the personalities from the world of rock they had cast in this game, but was also very well-delivered and made all the more effective by the body animations and facial movements of the character models in-game. Although I wasn't overly-enthusiastic about the soundtrack it was still a great compilation of metal classics and the original music score for the game was a solid component as well.

Now we get to the gameplay and while I can wrap every other aspect of the game up in a neat little bow, this is the part I find really hard to assess. I can pick out various small grievances I have with the game such as technical issues with the checkpoint races or how you can't set your destination marker to anywhere on the world map but that's not to say that the gameplay as a whole is some kind of perfect blend of elements. There is nothing that original about the side missions or extra collectibles or even the action-adventure side of the game in general, the strategy portions of the game don't control too well on a console and the game is a tad on the short side. Now I'm not a big lover of side missions; when playing Red Faction: Guerrilla I found that after a while they could get quite tedious and the checkpoint driving missions in that game became almost torturous. I'm also not too much of a fan of collectibles; I don't usually go that far out of my way to get them and I don't think I've ever come close to 100% completion on any game before. However my completion rate is already sitting at 83% and I'm ravenous for more. Maybe the world of Brütal Legend really is enough to make me forget about anything else, maybe I've suffered some kind of fatal mental damage from listening to too much of the in-game radio, but whatever the case I love this game and think Schafer has done a brilliant job.

This week I've also become a part of the preview programme for the new Xbox 360 update and from what I've experienced it has its ups and downs. Just trying to remap the navigation and use of a system that would usually be handled by a keyboard to a controller is not a process that you can expect to go smoothly in the first place, but the main problem seems to be with Microsoft trying to cram the existing features of the websites they're working with into UIs that are just plain unsuitable. The worst of the social networking tools seems to be Facebook which has been warped from its simple and compact browser-based version into the NXE user interface that is used on the rest of the Xbox's menus. The Twitter system also seems somewhat lacklustre in relation to its browser-based parent but the difference between the Twitter and Facebook UIs does beg the question, if they created a new interface for Twitter why didn't they do the same thing for Facebook? Last.fm doesn't seem to have come out of this whole thing too bad, probably because although they have once again tried to cram the whole thing into the NXE panels it still does what it was meant to do pretty proficiently: Play music. The branding of the new video marketplace place as the Zune marketplace feels very tacked on as it actually doesn't have anything at this time to do with Zune, but although I haven't experienced the 1080p video streaming myself they do seem to be running a very good service there. All in all the navigation of the new features of the 360 update are a bit of a shamble and I can't imagine who at all would want to use the social networking features, but as far as streaming media goes the console so far has been doing a good job of it.

That's gonna be it for this blog. I'm going to try and somehow resist the urge to buy Borderlands over the coming weeks (as I just can't afford it) and get back to playing more of Brütal Legend. I'll leave you with this little trailer from the rock gods themselves.

-Gamer_152

It is currently Tuesday 20th October and Brütal Legend has finally hit shelves. It's a game I've been excited about for a long time and I've loved everything that I've seen of it. The game's been getting some good reactions from critics, with the lowest review score I've seen so far being a 3/5 from Giant Bomb and even that isn't that low. Although I must admit my expectations for the game have been skewed by the Giant Bomb review a little, I don't want them to be but despite what everyone else is saying, after hearing Ryan Davis talk about how flawed the gameplay of Brütal Legend is, it has pulled my confidence in the gameplay of the game down a bit. That might not be a bad thing though, with my lowered expectations it may mean I enjoy the gameplay all that much more and whatever the quality of the rest of the game the art style and general atmosphere of the game are looking as thrilling as they ever did. So you may be wondering if I'm so hyped for the game, why don't I have it yet? Well I'm still waiting for my university maintenance grant etc. to come through and so I've been trying to keep costs down and considered buying Brütal Legend too much of a luxury, however I think I may just reach a point where I really do want this game badly enough to pay all that money for it even under current circumstances.

I haven't played a whole lot of games this week, mainly because I've had university work for a considerable portion of the week, my sleep pattern has been all over the place and Friday, Saturday and Sunday were spent either making the journey back to my family's home, staying there or making the journey back. Getting to and from there cost a total of £53 and took over 12 hours but it was very well worth it to celebrate the 18th birthday of my mind-blowingly awesome friend xCompanionxCubex.

Getting back on topic I did play quite a few game demos last week which I didn't write about in my blog because there wasn't realistically enough space but now that I have plenty of room to fill let me regale you with tales of my time trialing Xbox 360 titles. I was expecting brilliant things from the Batman: Arkham Asylum demo and even then it delivered more than I was expecting, the combat, stealth, environments, voice work, graphics and characters in that game are all brilliant and it's just a shame that's yet another game I can't afford to be buying right now. One game that did surprise me was WET because I hadn't heard a great deal of positivity towards that game so I didn't presume I would find the demo that enjoyable, but I was won over by its sty*e, music and general madness. I have heard however that the demo is not entirely representative of the full game and for this reason I'm assuming that if I actually did play the full version I'd probably run into a lot of the flaws people have been describing, which didn't seem so distinguished in the demo. Then there was South Park Let's Go Tower Defence Play! which definitely had some great South Park humour in the enemies, achievement names etc. but even in that short demo I kept hearing voice clips taken from the show repeated too many times and there's not really anything which can disguise the fact that this is just another in a stupidly long line of tower defence games already created. Lastly there was of course the Brütal Legend demo which I strongly encourage you to try if you have any interest at all in the game.

And that's all folks. Thanks for reading, keep playing those games and I'll leave you with this breath-taking display of DDR skill. Peace out.

-Gamer_152

It is currently Tuesday 13th October and my course in computer games programming continues, as does my gaming itself. The programming on my course is pretty much still all stuff I already know but I don't mind. In my ludology class I've been given a 10 hour assignment to create a simple video game using GameMaker and I don't think I've done a bad job; my game involves moving a bullet-firing mouse around space and destroying the various enemies flying around the screen. The one thing I cannot get my head around though is the maths. I think we're a long way from applying the maths we've learnt to any actual programming but I cannot for the life of me understand some of the mathematical concepts we're being taught. Maybe it will all become clear eventually.

I have finally got my games consoles set up and working though. This week I've been playing Fable 2 which I've picked up some nice new achievements on and Burnout Paradise which is still great fun. But of course being the Halo nut I am, the highlight of my week has been finally being able to play Halo 3: ODST and the new Halo 3 multiplayer maps. I don't think that ODST is as good as any of the games in the Halo trilogy but you know what? It's still awesome! The game is good-looking and I thought the lighting was especially good. The setting was one of my favourite things about ODST and it was great to see the whole thing play out in the huge, dark city of New Mombasa. The new SMG and pistol were weapons that I thought were very well integrated into the game, it was great to headshot a few grunts at a time with the pistol or unload a stream of bullets into the nearby enemies with the SMG. The limited stamina and health of the ODSTs also did make for an experience where it felt like you were much more vulnerable and had to be more cautious in the way you approached fights and I do think that ODST was harder than any of the games in the trilogy. I thought the story held up well and one thing that I think has been overlooked greatly in the game is Sadie's Story, the story told via the audio logs; I thought it was great to have a story told in that form and it was a nice little throwback to I Love Bees. One of the most interesting observations I've seen about this story though was from a thread on the Bungie.net forums and compared the story of ODST to Dante's Divine Comedy. It sounds like an insane theory at first but if you actually take a look at the things said in the thread (warning: contains spoilers) it starts to make sense.

Firefight has been pretty cool as well but I think it'll be better once I have the chance to play it with some friends. One major complaint I know a lot of people have had about the game is that the campaign was too short and that they don't think they got the amount of content that they paid for. It's interesting to see how many people are measuring whether they got what they paid for by amount of content and not by the quality of that content but I understand their complaints. It's also interesting to see how many people are willing to trade the game in for a fraction of their money back and forgoing having free access to the Halo: Reach beta next year but if that's what people wanna do they might as well go for it. I'm not gonna pretend the campaign wasn't quite short because it was but I knew what I was getting going into this game and I was impressed with all of it. Oh and one more thing I feel I have to say before I move off of the subject of ODST: There were points in the game where I just could not ignore the fact that Dare's face looked freaking weird. All the other characters looked and sounded good, but Dare? I tried to ignore it at points and just go with it, but even if only a trivial matter it was something that stood out for me.

I think Bungie have done as good a job as ever on the new maps for Halo 3. My favourite map at the moment is Longshore but they're each great in their own way. The only problem is that I have a strict NAT and it has been seemingly impossible to play Halo 3 online with friends. This is almost certainly being caused by all the ports that are blocked on my university connection. I have a very strong suspicion that this is gonna be a problem for all my 360 games and if it is that really sucks. In fact the number of ports they have blocked has already meant that I can't log onto my old puzzle-based MMO Puzzle Pirates or update my Champions Online character editor to use that. What is life if I can't have virtual pirates?

But I think that about does it this week. This weekend I'm going to be going back home to celebrate the 18th birthday of a very special friend which is gonna cost me about £50 and take over 8 and a half hours to get there and back but it's gonna be well worth it. I hope everybody reading this is having a great week and I'll leave you with the very final episode in this series of Giant Bomb's video game movie review show TANG.

-Gamer_152

It is currently Monday 5th October and I have now completed my first week of education in computer games programming. It's been a pretty interesting week and for the most part I've enjoyed it. At the moment my timetable consists of five classes: computer environments which deals with how to properly communicate with other people about computers both in a verbal and written manner, software development 1 which deals with the basics of computer programming, ludology which is basically the study of video games, computer architecture which deals with how computers work and basic maths tech which deals with all the basic mathematics required for computer programming.

Computer architecture and software development have really so far only been going over what I already know but I still enjoy even simple programming and it's always good to refresh your knowledge of things. Computer environments is a class I really wasn't expecting and I don't quite know how they've built an entire module around it but I can see why it's there and if it's what is necessary to learn how to be a good games programmer then I'm all for it. Basic maths tech has definitely been the most difficult so far as I was expecting a simple slow-paced introductory lecture but they threw us right in at the deep end with a two hour lecture on powers, algorithms and algebra and while I did manage to understand all of this it very much suggests that this is going to be a very hard subject. For one thing they are trying to pack an entire a-level maths course into one semester of my CGP course. My best lesson so far has been ludology where our main assignment has been to produce a three minute presentation on one obscure video game and while I'm not the first to jump at a chance for public speaking in front of a bunch of strangers, making a presentation on Geometry Wars has actually been the most fun part about my course so far. I look forward to next week.

One notable thing about my experience at university so far is that my sleeping pattern is all over the place. Maybe it will regulate itself eventually but I will fall asleep or wake up pretty much any time of the day, regardless of when it is or what my sleeping pattern for the day before was. For most of the week university can start at any time from 9:00 to 12:00 and finish at any time from 12:00 to 16:00. But the thing that really throws me is on Wednesdays, right in the middle of the week, I have a single lesson from 19:00 to 20:00. It also doesn't help that as I live in the university halls of residence, loud music can come blaring through the walls at almost any time. I guess this is just something I'm going to have to live with.

As for playing video games there hasn't actually been a whole ton of that going on this week. I hoped to have completed Halo 3: ODST by now but things haven't quite gone according to plan. I'd like to thank my parents very much for bringing up my Wii and Xbox 360 but when I went to set up my brand new TV I discovered the manufacturers hadn't put in the power cable they should have and so for the past week I've still had to stick to PC and DS gaming. I'm getting a replacement cable mailed to me which should arrive tomorrow which I'm very excited and very relieved about.

Thanks to all of you who have been reading. This week I'll leave you with what is, in my opinion, one of the funniest Giant Bomb quick looks so far, this quick look at Darkest of Days. Enjoy your gaming everybody.

-Gamer_152

It is currently Saturday 26th September and I have now been living in my university halls of residence for a whole week. It's still very strange here and while my computer games programming course doesn't start until Monday it's been good to know that I'll actually be around large groups of people I can have a really intelligent discussion about video games with. So I'm eagerly awaiting 11:00 Monday morning when I will get my first official practical lesson in computer environments. Of course I could go on about the university and the course itself endlessly... So let's do that.

I've been very impressed by what I've been told about the course. My university has direct links both with Microsoft and Sony and my lecturers have even seen secret Microsoft and Sony tech which they are not legally allowed to talk about. In fact these guys knew about the Natal even before its announcement at E3 09. More than one of the people in the computing department here has worked with Codemasters and others have worked on games such as Motorstorm, Need for Speed: Underground and one the people teaching computer games programming was even an AI programmer for Fable. They have been emphasising that the course itself is extremely hard though. There are about 94 people on the course and these have been selected from over 450 applicants and the course is so intimidating for some there is also a 10% drop-out rate before it even starts. We will be working more than 40 hours a week in the first year and overall the course is considered to be about the hardest course out of the hundreds taught here. The overall dropout rate is over 50% and the last group of 74 programmers has dropped down to about 30 programmers. I'm raring to go and willing to put in every bit of effort it takes to get this qualification though.

I haven't been playing many video games themselves this week. I've played a bit of Zoo Keeper, Tetris DS and Microsoft Pinball but that's really it. But today I picked up Halo 3: ODST and tomorrow I will be back in possession of my gaming mouse, my Xbox 360 and my Wii. It's gonna be one hell of a Sunday! However, as a student buying games is pretty much entirely off my agenda until I get a part time job and earn a fair amount of cash. In other news I was disappointed this week to find out about the various problems people have found with Scribblenauts. From the sounds of things the game has serious problems with controls, the way in which the objects interact with each other, physics and just how easy the levels are to complete (e.g. Entering "Cthulhu" and "Wings" seems to be able to get you past just about anything). I'm still going to buy the game but with such glaring faults I still feel like the game isn't going to be the full experience it could have been.

I think that's everything for this week and stay tuned for thoughts on my first days getting a degree in computer games programming and my opinions on Halo 3: ODST in the near future. This week I'll leave you with this ****c trailer for Chu Chu Rocket on the Dreamcast. Peace out.

-Gamer_152

It is currently Sunday 20th September and this week things have been very different for me. For a while now the plan had been that on September 20th I was gonna be moving half way across the country to finally start university and begin my work towards a bachelors degree in computer games programming. However the past week has been very hectic and I had all sorts of financial problems. Everything seemed to be going wrong and it looked like I wasn't going to be able to start my course on time. This was some bad news but out of all of the chaos there was one small upside; with me getting to university late it seemed things were perfect for me to attend my local midnight launch of Halo 3: ODST. So I pre-ordered the game and was all prepared to get that little bit of experience with the Rookie and his lost squad before I headed off to university.

2 days ago I was contacting the university again about my financial situation as I'd had no reply from them in 2 days and wasn't expecting an answer back any time soon. However I got an immediate response saying that emergency accommodation had been arranged for me and I was in an absolute panic about my impending 150 mile trip to start a life-changing four years. My family in a rush, we managed to collect together what we could and less than 24 hours later I was standing in the university reception filling out an accommodation booking form. I quickly ended up in the halls of residence, living on my own for the first time and I was feeling very lost in the world. I've acclimatised a little more since then but it's still a very strange experience as people who have been in my position will surely know.

As far as games go I didn't have time for much more than a few plays of Super Smash Bros. Brawl before I left and I don't have a 360 or a Wii up here so I am restricted to DS and PC gaming but I have some enjoyable things I can play. The real bummer is that Halo 3: ODST comes out in 2 days and I'm going to have no way to start playing Bungie's excellent-looking shooter. From what I have seen of the game the environments, graphics and characters look great and I like the new gameplay styles which push the player into being more careful and calculating about the way they take down their enemies. I have also seen the demo of Brutal Legend and I was excited about that game before but now I just can't get over how well-styled the game is. The environments, cinematics, character animations and general world that Brutal Legend take place in seem enough reason alone to buy this game. It's a bit unlikely I'll have a 360 by Rocktober 13th but I sure hope I do.

Induction for my course starts at 9:30 tomorrow and hopefully it'll be the start of something awesome. If anything especially interesting happens within the week I will report back, but in general over the new few years I hope to give the people reading this blog an idea of what it's like to be a student studying video games programming in the UK.

All that remains is to say thanks for reading, thanks to the people around me who helped me get to university and I'll leave you guys with the awesome intro to Brutal Legend.

-Gamer_152

It is currently Sunday 13th September and it's been a bit of a long week for me, rushing around trying to prepare everything before I get off to university. Hopefully once I'm there I can use this blog to give you a little bit of a look at some of the more interesting points of education in video game development. Until then things are continuing pretty much as normal. I must say I haven't really been enthused enough to continue my playthrough of Saint's Row this week, I think systematically building up my respect over and over and working my way through the stronghold missions, deprived of anything in the main storyline has put me off the game a bit. Most of my gaming time this week has been spent on Super Smash Bros. Brawl which is still an awesome game.

But moving on to main events, this week saw the passing of the date which I think can only be described as a product marketer's dream, 09/09/09. Set for release on this date were The Beatles: Rock Band, Modern Warfare 2 and the slightly more obscure Bob's Game. The Beatles: Rock Band looks like the ideal rhythm game for any Beatles fan and a great game in general for anyone who likes Rock Band, but I don't think this game is for me. I'm just not into the music of The Beatles enough or all that interested in the Beatles-ish style the whole game is presented in. None the less Harmonix seems to have done an outstanding job with it. Then there's Modern Warfare 2 which I know a lot of people are hyped about but I didn't really get into Call of Duty and in general more realistically themed first-person shooters don't seem as enticing to me as sci-fi shooters. This may have been a game I bought in the great drought of releases in the middle of the year but with me off to university and a whole bunch of great looking games on the horizon it seems like I could make purchases now that I'd get a lot more out of.

Then we come to Bob's Game, the adventure game solely developed over five years by one Robert Pelloni. Unfortunately Bob's Game could not be released on 09/09/09 and it wasn't until a few days later that anyone really got word of what was going on with Bob. As it is now, it seems that testing for the final version of the game is underway and he has released a new demo of the game to the public. Maybe it's because I'm interested in video game development myself but it definitely feels cooler playing a game when you know what you're playing is entirely the work of one person. The game has a very nice retro charm to it, from its pixel-sty*e artwork to its little nods to video game cl*ssics. The parts of the game that don't see the protagonist, Yuu, adventuring around his little world to the pleasant sound of 8-bit music involve small minigames based on the great video games of yesteryear. For example a Tetris-like puzzle game called Tetrid which is played in the same sty*e as Tetris but involves completely unconventional pieces. There are a couple of other clever little games that appear in the demo but I won't give them away. Overall I think the game has come across quite well, but the difficulty level of this demo has been excruciatingly hard. Even from the very early stages of the game you will really find that you'll have had to have mastered certain retro games if you wish to have any chance of completely Bob's unforgiving minigames. For anybody who is playing themselves, I'm stuck on the second one. As for what full games I am actually getting next ODST will be at the absolute top of my list, followed by Batman: Arkham Asylum and Brutal Legend.

One of my good friends, Ninja Duckie, has also recently started up a new blog where in every edition he looks at and gives his opinion on a chosen experimental or original video game. He's a great writer and takes a pretty extensive look at his chosen games so I recommend him to anyone who's interested. You can find Ninja Duckie's Experimental Game Journal here. Also congratulations to my best friend xCompanionxCubex who got a shiny new DS Lite this week. That's it for another week and this time I'll leave you with one of the best trailers I've ever seen, this live-action trailer for Halo 3: ODST. Prepare to drop.

-Gamer_152

It is currently Saturday 5th June and in case you can't tell you're currently reading Gamer_152's blog. This week I've played more of Saint's Row and the game's taken a bit of a slow down for me. It's just really a matter of completing all the stronghold missions now to progress to the last few missions of the game, but this means constantly filling up my respect bar in between missions and with the activities of the game growing progressively harder this is becoming a task that is somewhat easier said than done. I've also had some unfortunate experiences in missions where I've found myself babysitting the AI that's supposed to be helping me much more than I'd like to, they genuinely don't seem to make any effort to get away from vehicles that are about to explode. Still, this will all pay off when I get back to the main storyline missions, and my brother informs me that Saint's Row 2 is a big improvement on the original, if I ever get around to playing that.

The big deal this week though is PAX 2009 which is on in Seattle, Washington from Friday until Sunday and I so wish I could be there. From the panels taking interesting looks at video games as entertainment forms to those looking at the development of video games and getting into the industry, all of them look awesome. They've also got some awesome game companies up there such as EA, Blizzard, Gearbox and Valve and they've got some brilliant personalities there; Randy Pitchford, Ron Gilbert and the Giant Bomb crew to name a few. I'll be very interested to see what comes out of there.

This Wednesday Valve added another free update to Team Fortress 2. Now under the terms and conditions of Steam, anybody using external applications to mess with their in-game experience can be instantly and permanently banned and Valve have decided to do something about all the people who have been using external idling applications to hang around on servers and cheat their way into unlocking items. Now they haven't gone overboard on cheaters but they've done what I consider to be only fair and removed all items from people gained by using such applications and all non-cheaters have been rewarded with a unique new hat: a halo. Unfortunately there have also been glitches and some people have been unfairly punished while others cheaters have retained their items. Both those who have had items confiscated fairly and unfairly by the update seem to be causing an uproar in the Team Fortress 2 community, with everything from saying they will quit the game to using mods to place homophobic slurs above their heads in place of the halos. Needless to say there are certain members of the Team Fortress 2 community who have come off as immature, idiotic and generally ungrateful to a company who has given them so much free content and simply made one slip-up. I'm sure this childish hysteria will die down eventually but it's rather sad to see certain members of a community in such an uproar about things that don't matter all that much.

Thank you all for reading this week and a shoutout to my old Gamespot acquaintance Jimb0 who is enjoying the delights of PAX 2009 as I write this. I'll leave you with this brilliantly made trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony. Enjoy your gaming, internet.

-Gamer_152

We're just on the edge of September and after a few weeks of no blogging I thought I drop a little something onto my profile page. Luckily after my laptop charger broke on the day I wrote my last blog I was able to get it fixed the next day and was only too happy to be reunited with my laptop. However I don't have a whole lot of time left with my Xbox 360 and Wii before I head off to university, half of my 360 is owned by my brother so I'll probably have to buy a new one and if I want to play any non-handheld console at all I'll need to get a TV and a TV licence. I'm making my way up there September 21st, unfortunately one day before Halo 3: ODST comes out as well.

But Inow have working copies of Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise and Saints Row to play. At first I wasn't so sure about Saints Row, knowing that however good it was it would be overshadowed by my experiences with Grand Theft Auto IV. Indeed this is nothing like my experience with that game but after a few initial worries and annoyances I actually started to really enjoy Saints Row. The story missions have really been the highlight of the game for me and the characters are all really interesting. It can't be ignored that it's just plain fun when the game puts a whole building of enemies in front of you and you get to systematically blast your way through them in a rewarding and well-designed way.

I've also played the demo of a downloadable PC title from Dejobaan Games, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! : A Reckless Disregard for Gravity and it's actually not a bad game considering you can pre-order the full 80-level game for only $15. The basic premise of the game involves 1. Jumping off of buildings, 2. Moving close to other buildings without hitting them and 3. Landing without breaking all your bones. For anyone who is interested I suggest you check out the free demo.

I also tried out Trine for the PC and it was a fun game but I'm not sure I don't really feel like paying £20 for a downloadable game right now. Batman: Arkham Asylum is also looking like a great game, I've seen the Giant Bomb quick look on it and the Gamespot review and the graphics, setting, combat and voice acting all look brilliant and I'm thinking of picking up the game and playing itfor a bit before I head off to university. I'm kind of waiting for the Giant Bomb review to go up for it though.

That's just about it for this week. Thanks for reading. I'll leave you with the amusing trailer for Death Tank.

-Gamer_152

This week it seems I am the victim of a rather tragic happening. For almost a year now I've been the proud owner of a Dell Inspiron 1720 and I've loved that laptop, whenever I was sitting around the house I always had my laptop close at hand. However there was always one slight problem I had and that was that there was a particularly weak section in the power cable for my laptop's charger and this has gradually worn away over time. I suppose I always knew that one day my slowly disintegrating charger cable would eventually leave me with half a wire between me and the power source and that my laptop would be rendered completely useless, but none the less it's still quite saddening to see the wire laying there, it's shining conductive innards exposed to the outside world as my laptop sits next to it helpless, without a power source to draw from. My laptop has served so many purposes; I would use it to chat with friends, check my emails, watch videos, read web comics, research anything I needed to, program software, read articles, visit forums, listen to music and (most relevantly) play video games among other things. Now that I am without my laptop, even for a day or two this does present somewhat of an inconvenience.

For now I'm making do with my family's old desktop but this is an old and very sluggish PC. Despite all my compressing, uncompressing, deleting, virus scanning and defragmentation, this machine still has occasional problems when just navigating the web and the frame rate it's giving me on flash videos has scared me away from watching them on here altogether. I was even a little worried about updating the instant messenger and web browser on here in case they put a further dent in the computer's poor performance. Hopefully I can replace my old laptop charger soon and all will be well, but I don't really know when I'll have the opportunity to do that as if I want to get to the shop where I bought my laptop I'll need someone to drive me there and I'm rather wary about buying a replacement online. So I could have my new charger tomorrow or I could have it in three weeks. I suppose the one thing I can be grateful about is that at least it was only the charger that broke and my laptop itself is still entirely intact.

Before my laptop broke I didn't do that much gaming with it but I did manage to play through a few things. I played some more Team Fortress 2 and that game continues to be consistently entertaining, but I also tried out a fairly new free MMORPG called Dragonica. It's no secret that the internet is currently sprawling with these kinds of games but this game was recommended to me by someone I know and there wasn't anything to be lost in giving it a try. The thing that probably comes across best about the game is the 3D chibi art style, but as for the gameplay itself it's probably best described as a cross between World of Warcraft and Maplestory. That's not to say the game doesn't have some interesting features in its arsenal that keep it from being just a clone of those games and the various gameplay elements of the game do mesh together quite well, but when I realise it is comprised of more or less what I've already played the game seems to lose its charm somewhat. Still, I think I'm confident I'll return to the game sooner or later and if I don't it was still all free so overall it's been quite a success for Dragonica.

I've also taken a bit of a look at the upcoming FPS-RPG game Borderlands. I'd heard a lot of talk about Borderlands but outside of the famed overhaul of the game's art style I didn't really know a lot about it and I wanted to check out what all the fuss was about. From what I've read and seen Borderlands seems to be exactly what I'd want from a game like this. Although it has an endearing graphical style, what really impressed me was the gameplay; the way the shooter-based combat and RPG game mechanics blend so well and the incorporation of the millions of different weapons and pieces of equipment seem to be what really make Borderlands look like an amazing game. It'll be great to get my hands on it.

Speaking of getting my hands on games it seems that there have been yet more games which have had their release dates pushed back. When this fate befell Bioshock 2 I was a little frustrated but I accept if the game needed more work then it needed more work. It's a bit disheartening however to see the same thing happen to Starcraft 2 which looked like it was shaping up very nicely. Also as is typical it looks like Europe is getting the short straw for another release: Dark Void. I'm actually quite happy I'm not super-hyped about Dark Void because while over in the States the game is being promptly delivered this September it looks like it's not going to hit this continent until February 2010, a whole 5 months later.

That's all for this blog. A special thanks to Jeb800e though for creating my new Gamespot profile banner. This week I'll leave you with this look at Halo 3: ODST which seems to have garnered some very positive attention on Giant Bomb.

-Gamer_152

It's a cool August afternoon and as the sun sets outside I find myself sitting here, very relaxed and ready to blog. I know that for those of you reading my last blog entry things were a little heavy on the Halo front but I promise much less of that this time. Recently I've been playing more Sims 2, Team Fortress 2 and a bit of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Now I've had my issues with Oblivion in the past but I've been in the a bit of an RPG mood and so I decided to give the game another try but try as I might I'm still finding the game doesn't seem to quite gel with me. Don't get me wrong, I can see why people like it but I reached a point in the game where I could no longer continue with the main quest line with my current skills and since then I feel like I've been thrust out into the big, wide world with no real sense of where to go or what to do and on the whole that's really impeded my enjoyment of the game. Even in places where I can win my battles I feel like most of them involve a large amount of me running backwards spamming the same in-effective healing spell over and over. I'll soldier onwards as far as I can but I still feel very lost and a bit bored.

This week I've also been thinking a lot about what games I want to purchase next, but this may be a bit of a problem when I'm off to university at the end of the summer and this could leave me half way across the country with no 360 and little money. However there are some great-looking games coming out including Brutal Legend.What I've seenof that game so farlooks great; the environments, the soundtrack, the humourand the character animations all look great. Jack Black and Ozzy Osbourne also provide surprisingly good voice work for the game. Assassin's Creed 2 is also looking like a big improvement on the original, it has more mission types, more attacks and better looking environments among other things. Then there's also a whole bunch of other games I'm interested in like Wii Sports ResortDragon Age: Origins, Halo 3: ODST and Scribblenauts. This is definitely going to be one of those times where there are just to many games coming out at once for me to buy and play.

That's about it this week, expect for one thing. Now I'm not deeply obsessed with achievements but I do like getting the odd achievement here and there, in fact they're often pretty fun to go after, this week I finally hit over 10,000 gamerscore on my gamertag and it's hard to believe that all my little achievements add up to so much. It's been very satisfying earning all those points. Aside from that one of my best moments this week was seeing the finale of Giant Bomb's coverage of the dying days of the Matrix Online. I'll leave you this reveal trailer for Command and Conquer 4. Thanks for reading.

-Gamer_152

Earlier this month I ended the blog I posted wishing everyone reading a great summer and I gotta say things have been pretty cool for me. I have actually spent much less time gaming this summer than in previous ones but none the less I've had great fun with what I have played. My main focus has really been on Team Fortress 2 for the PC and The Sims 2, although watching my friend building houses on my version of The Sims 2 last night I must say even with two expansion packs my version of the game still seems a little light on content to me. I may pick up another expansion pack for The Sims 2 or another small game next time I'm in close proximity of one of my local video game retailers but my real priority is pre-ordering Halo 3: ODST as soon as possible.

Speaking of Halo the 7th month of the year has definitely brought a good share of news and celebrations based around the popular sci-fi shooter. The 7th day of the 7th month this year marked Bungie Day, a day when Bungie and their loyal fans celebrate Halo, the Bungie community, Bungie's ongoing obsession with the number seven and their break-off from parent company Microsoft 2 years ago. The day was celebrated with a special playlist called Bungie vs. World in which players were invited to go 7 v. 7 on a variety of map variants created by the Halo community and hand-picked by Bungie. Teams of Bungie were also online 24 hours randomly dropping into player games and rewarding any teams that could beat them (or set a major record on the playlist)with the much fabled Recon armour. Sadly I didn't get the chance to play off against the Halo creators but I still enjoyed a Halo marathon like I'd never experienced before, managing to stay up 24 hours and play 75 matches despite taking out a 7+ hour break to eat andsocialize in the real world. It was also a nice surprise to see Bungie release new pictures and information on their next map pack which looks to be shaping up really well.

21st of July also celebrated the day 10 years ago that Bungie first showed the worldHalo: Combat Evolved at Macworld 1999 and it's amazing to look back and see the journey Halo's taken since then.

The news of Halo Legends has also recently hit and looks like possibly the most unusual branch-out from the Halo franchise yet. Halo Legends is going to be a 7-part anime based around the Halo franchise, the project is being financed by a new companyunder theownershipMircosoft called 343 Industries and created by five well-reputed Japanese anime studios. I must say that I'm rather sceptical of this new project, I'm no anime expert but I am well aware of the fact that translations of original fiction into anime don't have a great track record. I am further worried by the idea of six of the episodes involving the banding together of4 different studios which I'm sure must take some kind of miracle in communication to pull off. However I am somewhat comforted by the fact that although I'm sure he doesn't have a great level of involvement in the actual making of anime,Frank O' Connor, former Bungie content manager seems to be playing a large part in 343 Industries. I'm also somewhat reassured by the fact that the companies chosen to make these animes do have a very impressive portfolio of previous work, although it's beyond me why Toei, creators of such famous work as Dragonball are the ones producing the seventh anime, a Halo parody, in fact the whole idea of an anime Halo parody worries me a little. The real worry for me though is that from the brief flashes of what we've seen of the upcoming anime they are working with rather main elements of existing source material with one scene showing a brief shot of the Master Chief and The Arbiter clashing energy swords. If there's one thing I don't want to see from Halo Legends it would be a poor re-telling of the great story Bungie created for the games. When Halo has been put in the hands of companies like Mircosoft and Ensemble they did well because they stayed as close to Bungie's vision of Halo as they could without infringing on existing storylines but I'm worried that this may not be what we see with Halo Legends. All we can do is wait and watch.

That just about concludes my end-of-July blog. I hope you enjoyed reading and this week I'll leave you with Bungie's tribute video to 10 great years of Halo. May there be many more to come.

-Gamer_152

Today is a rather special day for mein the history of video game journalism and I thought it was only fitting that I took time out of my "busy" schedule to show my appreciation for my favourite video game website. I still remember the depressing, rainy Friday on which I returned home from college ready to be met by the warm embrace of the internet, only to find that comment sections and forum boards all over Gamespot were exploding with a pandemonium of comments about thedismissal of Jeff Gerstmann from the site. This was neither the first nor the last departure of a great Gamespot editor from the site but Jeff was then and probably still is now my favourite video game journalist and at the time it was certainly grim news.

I was excited when I heard the news that Gerstmann had set up a small blog on the internet and was back with a means to communicatewith the public again, but it still wasn't the same. When news rolled in of Giant Bomb, who they were, what they wanted to doand their big launch I was very expectant and I was one of the many who signed up on launch day, July 21st 2008. Since then I've had an awesome time reading the articles, watching the videos and hanging out on the forums of Giant Bomb. Jeff, Ryan, Brad and Vinny are all excellent journalists and work together brilliantly as a team, creating such madness as the Giant Bombcast, the Endurance Run and TANG, all of which have been a realpleasure to follow. Giant Bomb works because it is run by people whose experience has taught them how a video gameswebsite should be built andit has allowed them to buildthe kind of website they'd want to useand although I wouldn't have said it at one time, I'm glad Jeff, Ryan, Brad and Vinny left Gamespot because it allowed them to create something amazing.

Happy birthday Giant Bomb!

Another week of gaming has served to reinforce my belief that holidays are awesome and even if it's been getting so hot I've lost the ability to think straight I've still had a pretty good time this week. I've played Team Fortress 2, Rock Band 2, Metroid Prime 3 and another game I'll mention shortly but if you know me you'll probably be able to guess what it is. I have been thinking of going for the Bladder of Steel achievement on Rock Band 2 but I'm somewhat reluctant. The achievement requires that you play the entire 'Endless Setlist 2' without pausing the game and while I knew this would be a seemingly impossible task it was not until recently that I worked out quite how long it would take to play the setlist without pauses and it clocks in at over 6 hours. Even with me and my bro switching in and out between songs this is still quite the task to complete. I've still got a little voice in the back of my head telling me to go for it though, not so much for the achievement itself but just to know that I've completed the challenge.

The really exciting news for me this week however is that my limited edition copy of Halo 3 arrived as expected. Not only have I been packing in a fair bit of multiplayer sinceI was reunited with the gameI got it I also went through all the content on the special features disc. The short film on Bungie and the Making of Halo 3 documentary were amazing to watch as a Halo fan and I'd definitely recommend them to any major fan that has the limited edition version and hasn't seen them. Seeing that these people will do 12 hour shifts, will work until 3 a.m. and won't see their families or have proper meals for days it really brings home the commitment that the people at Bungie have towards the Halo projects and makes it easy to understand how they are able to produce such high quality games. There was even one occasion in the Bungie documentary in which the security guard mentioned that he has known people work 28 hour shifts in the building.

The reviews for The Conduit on the Wii also finished coming pouring in this week and from what I've seen since the games release I'm not all that surprised by the negative reaction from critics. I remember a long time ago hearing about this game and seeing how much some of the Wii fanatics were so hyped about it but I didn't really understand the appeal, what was different about this game? Was I supposed to be impressed purely because this was a traditional FPS being released on the Wii? As time went on the game didn't really start to look any better and it looks like it has turned out as a bit of a mediocre game. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against a shooter games coming out on the Wii, I thought Metroid Prime 3 and Red Steel were great, but the game just seems to generic and really doesn't look up to scratch when compared to other shooters these days. It seems that a lot of the people who like the game reallyare purely excited about it's an FPS on the Wii and like most people I'd much rather have a good FPS for another console than a bad one for that one.

I think I'll leave things abouthere this week as despite the electric fan in my room I seem to be a little bit on fire. I hope everyone else has a great summer and I'll leave you with this short but amusing YouTube video. Keep on gaming.

-Gamer_152

So I have finished the campaign mode on Red Faction: Guerrilla. It wasn't an amazing game but it was most certainly a very good game and was well worth the play through. For anyone who is the slightest bit into action-adventure games I would recommend Red Faction to them because I'm sure they'll enjoy it very much. Right the way through the game I found that the destructible environments and the emphasis the game made on all the destructible buildings was what really set it apart from other games of its kind. However Guerrilla has actually only taken up a small portion of my gaming time this week due to my purchase of another great game which I'll mention in a bit.

I have finally gotten around to ordering my collector's edition copy of Halo 3 off of the internet and that should be arriving in two or three days. I figured I had to get it before the annual celebration of Bungie Day (which falls on the 7th day of the 7th month) and with a little luck I may even be able to pick up the legendary Recon armour permutation on the day itself, which is being awarded to anyone who can beat the Bungie employees at their own game. Pre-orders of Halo 3: ODST are also going cheap on some sites as well but I figured I'll check if I can order it at a local store first, that way I can pick up the game after it comes out as soon as possible, or at least that is the plan.

I have also downloaded and played a little America's Army 3 this week and I find myself once again disappointed with America's Army. I thought that maybe in the new version the shortcomings of its predecessors may have been cleaned up a bit, but it seems not. The game is littered with bugs ranging from major technical issues to numerous gameplay problems. But even ignoring these annoying glitches, the gameplay in America's Army 3 provides feels bland and derivative and I really couldn't find much enjoyment at all in playing. Being essentially a propaganda tool of the U.S. Army, it is free to download for anyone with Steam but there's not much to be got out of playing the game.

I am happy to say though I have downloaded a game this week that has been nothing less than brilliant and that's Team Fortress 2 for the PC. I really liked the game on the 360 but my two major gripes with the game were that it felt limited in terms of the number of maps and it tended to demand quite a bit of connection which wasn't the most convenient thing when my router and my Xbox are not the best of friends. However not only are there tons more maps on the PC version, along with all the stuff the various server admins of the PC version have cooked up, but I've found myself surprised by just how rich of an experience I've received from all the new (well, new to me) content in this version. There's more weapons, more achievements, more players allowed per game and maybe it's just because I haven't played an online shooter in a while but I think it's just plain awesome. If you wanna play you can add me under the steam ID Gamer_152 and I'll be playing much more of that game this week.

Anyway it's absolutely boiling where I am with summer heat and the hot air blowing out of my laptop cooling fan so I'm gonna go sit by my electric fan and play some more TF2. I'll leave you with the trailer for the new series of the Halo machinima, Red vs. Blue. Peace out.

-Gamer_152

Has it really only been a week since my last blog? Wow... Well, ok I guess it hasn't quite been a week. You see I spent part of Saturday and Sunday round a friends house and I decided that sleep deprivation and blogging weren't a good mix. I've tried writing while barely conscious before and let's just say it wasn't my best ever work. However my exams are over and I am back gaming for real again. This week I've worked my way up to over 300 obtained pokemon on Pokemon Diamond Version, I've unlocked and completed all songs on Elite Beat Agents (although I'm still struggling at getting past the final mission of sweatin' difficulty) and I'm up to the final sector on Red Faction: Guerrilla. I've also played some of the online matchmaking on Red Faction and I've had a good time with that too.

Now don't get me wrong, all the games I'm playing at the moment are great but I've spent quite a bit of this week thinking about what games I am going to get next. I've already decided what site I'm going to get my limited edition Halo 3 copy from and as we speak I'm downloading America's Army 3 (which is free is anyone else is interested) for my laptop, however there are a few other games I have my eye on. Unfortunately my laptop is .2 GHz away from meeting the system requirements for The Sims 3 but the other major game I have my eye on is Prototype. I like the look of the big open-world gameplay of the game, the huge amount of skills to unlock and the abilities bestowed upon your character which give you the crazypower to run up walls, fly between buildings, turn your arm into a lethallysharp blade etc. I'm also thinking of getting Team Fortress 2 for my PC, I have it for my 360 but without the various extras of the PC version which they have been promising for a ridiculous amount of time it's not quite the same.

I am also considering getting Ghostbusters: The Video Game but from what I've heard Ghostbusters has fallen slightly short of being the video game it could have been. I wouldn't call myself a big fan of the movie but it's a movie thatI thought was very goodand it's good to hear that the game delivers on fan service, I only wish that it could have delivered a bit more in other areas because from what I saw it had the potential to be a great game. If I do get the game it will probably be one of my later purchases. I am also thinking of getting the Big Surf Island DLC for Burnout Paradise. I've been waiting for this one for quite some time and although the island isn't as big as I thought it'd be there certainly seems to be tons more content on there and it seems worth a look but it's not my number 1 priority.

As for games I already have I think I'm gonna finish up Red Faction: Guerrilla, play some more Pokemon and maybe go back to Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Lastly a special thanks to Gamespot for featuring me on their list of E3 bloggers and thanks to PJ24 for telling me about that. This week I'll leave you with Ryan Davis's review of my least favourite video game movie of all time (I really can't begin to explain how much I hate it). Hope you've enjoyed reading and there'll be more blog next week.

-Gamer_152

It seems like an eternity since I wrote my last blog and even longer since E3, but I suppose it hasn't been my normal week with things revolving much more around exams than gaming, through some miracle I haven't been entirely distracted by video games and I think I've actually done okay on my exams so far. I'm still playing Elite Beat Agents in my free time and as with any rhythm game it's great to see how much better you get over time just with practice, indeed I've come a long way from playing Walkie Talkie Man on Breezin' difficulty. Now if I can just get through Sweatin' difficulty I'll be very happy with myself.

As I promised a couple of weeks back I have spent a little time during E3 playing the copy of Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise my brother picked up. I must say even expecting good things from the game I was surprised myself by quite how much the few simple additions in Trouble in Paradise expanded on the original Viva Pinata and it was great fun to play. In fact I'd become quite forgetful of exactly how frantic managing a garden full of pinatas could be and it was good to get back to the crazily-paced gameplay, colourful graphics and enchanting music of Viva Pinata. Unfortunately the unruly nature of preowned Xbox 360 games struck again as within a week or two the 360 had already begun to refuse to play both the preowned Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise and the preowned Saint's Row. My brother decided he'd cut his losses and have the discs repaired and traded in as he'd lost the receipts for them but although GAME were willing to repaiir the discs for £1 but as I predicted they really tried to rip him off on the trade-in and would only give him £10 for both. So as I type this there are two non-working 360 games sitting on my coffee table.

My search for a collectors edition copy of Halo 3 stretches into yet another week as well and although I almost never buy games off of the internet I may have to consider it in this case, as long as I can find somewhere which isn't selling it for too much and will ship it to the UK. However my brother still seems to be purchasing games as his new fix this week is Red Faction: Guerilla and I do have to say it's a very good game. I didn't think I'd be so into this game but running away from exploding buildings and hitting enemies in the chest with sledgehammers is a very satisfying experience and I hope to spend a lot more time on Mars demolishing bridges and running down EDF soldiers.

I guess this is just about the end of things for another week. I'd like to give a quick shout-out to Jeb800e who has started a new Gamespot union for Metroid fans, Distress Signal 4. Also a big shout-out to someone who I think is a very underappreciated Gamespot user, the Best Buy employee turned Navy recruit (no really), CmdrMcNeil. Thank you all for reading and hopefully there'll be more from me next week. I'll just leave you with this amusing real-life Elite Beat Agents parody from Mega 64.

-Gamer_152

So, straight into the blog this week, no time to talk about what I've been playing 'cause I got a video game expo to talk about. Please don't be afraid to skip through whatever of this gargantuan wall of text doesn't interest you or read part of it now and come back later.

Microsoft

The Microsoft press conference was definitely my favourite press conference of the show this year and the one that really sticks in my mind. For a while I was just sitting back and watching it thinking what I was seeing looked really good but not much blew me away in a really big way. I did think that the whole concept for Tony Hawk Ride was good and the game itself looks like a good play, although I don't really want to pay that much for the board peripheral. Although I'm not a big fan of stealth games I did think that Splinter Cell: Conviction presented itself really well and the look of the game world and the various elements being projected onto the environment were really stylish. I thought Modern Warfare 2 looked like a lot of fun for those who enjoy the Call of Duty series even if I'm not overly partial to Call of Duty myself. I also thought that Final Fantasy 13 also looked like a game well worth picking up with its combat and the brilliant world the game was set in.

As a huge Halo fanatic I do have to say that I was absolutely glued to the screen in a moment of pure captivation as Halo 3: ODST was shown. I thought the opening of the game came across really well and I liked the look of all the gameplay as well as the darker feel of the games setting and the new firefight mode they showed post-conference. They also announced Halo: Reach and while we have no clue what this is (although I may talk more about this in a later blog) I'm sure Bungie will very gradually reveal details on this mysterious game and at any rate we'll get to experience it this September in the beta.

So everything was going great for Microsoft and proceedings then reached the point where I pondered whether they were about to wrap things up, when Microsoft unleashed something I was completely unprepared for. All of a sudden I was watching this strange but rather brilliant turn of events where Steven Spielberg was on stage talking about this wondrous new peripheral, the natal. Even trying to keep calm and critical I couldn't help but get excited over what Microsoft was showing. It wasn't just the motion capture aspect of it; it was also the voice and facial recognition features which really gave it some of its potential. Although I did think the somewhat controversial "Milo" scene was undoubtedly scripted in one way or another, I think that the basic concept of an interactive computer AI which works with the natal would be possible and very fun at that, even if not quite in the magical sci-fi way Microsoft presented it in.

The 1 thing I wish I could have seen on a Microsoft console that wasn't there was a Portal 2 or a Half-Life 2: Episode 3, instead Valve opted to showcase a Left 4 Dead 2. This'd be all well and fine but considering the latest series of Half-Life games are supposed to be episodic I think we're owed at least a glimpse at Episode 3 when Episode 2 was more than a year and a half ago.

EA & Ubisoft

So I knew the EA and Ubisoft conferences weren't going to be as big as the big three's but when EA's hit off it wasn't too bad. I'm far from being fanatic about anything in the EA Sports franchises but what they showed of Brutal Legend was very entertaining, The Saboteur was interesting in both art style and gameplay, there were some nice trailers here and there and all other content at least managed to hold my attention. Particularly the confusion of Gamespot users tuning into the live stream just as EA began showing everyone The Littlest Pet Shop game. It also seems like Mass Effect 2 is really a step up from its predecessor with much less of the technical issues and a darker story.

I wish I had something positive to say about the Ubisoft conference but sadly I feel like I gained little more than a 2 hour nap from watching the show. Granted it was pretty late when I watched but I was awake enough to properly take in what I was seeing and for E3 I was willing to sacrifice any amount of sleep if I got to see something good. But the only one thing in this conference which really interested me was James Cameron's lengthy talk on the universe of Avatar he and his team had created; apart from this the only other items of the conference which I really had any interest in were the showing of a very small amount of information about Red Steel 2, the announcement of No More Heroes 2 and to a certain extent the demo of Rabbids Go Home which seemed very Katamari-like to me and could be relatively fun. Most of the rest of the conference was filled with the same Splinter Cell content we saw in the Microsoft press conference, Academy of Champions which still seems like a bad football/Harry Potter crossover to me and a big presentation on games for casual gamers. I understand that Ubisoft are a company and like any company what they aim to do is make money, they are not simply here to entertain me, but while statistics of high profits and exploitable markets are all well and good for those in the business, they risk putting off potential supporters of their games by having a large chuck of their press conference dedicated to flaunting fitness titles and "tween games". Indeed at the time watching the Assassin's Creed trailer was good but it wasn't worth waiting through some of the rubbish that led up to it, when both the trailer and a full demo of the game were featured at the Sony press conference.

Nintendo

For Nintendo I was expecting something amazing. I was expecting to see some awesomely innovative new peripheral or some really inventive applications of the Wii Motion Plus. Sadly it transpired that there was no presentation of either of these things. The Wii Motion Plus however is still looking like it will modify the Wii motion controls in the way everybody wants and it looks like there are some genuinely fun mini-games in Wii Sports Resort, so I think I'll enjoy that when I get it. Nintendo's new peripheral, the Wii Vitality Sensor however seems decidedly set around a single idea and seems like the kind of thing that may be used for one fitness game and then simply die. We might get maybe a few games out of it if we're lucky but I can't see it being used for anything ground-breaking.

As for the games themselves I'm surprised that I wasn't more excited over New Super Mario Bros. Wii, although I think this was just due to the way it was presented, with the 4 players in a sort of competitive co-op platformer situation, but with what was broadcast from the show floor later I was able to remind myself "Yeah, this is still Mario and Mario is awesome". The Wii Fit Plus will undoubtedly be another big money-maker for Nintendo but I don't think it's really the game for me, out of the RPGs they showed there wasn't much that appealed to me apart from the new Mario & Luigi RPG, the new Mario vs. Donkey Kong looked kinda good with the same old gameplay and the level creator, I thought the microgame creator in Warioware seemed like a great feature and hopefully it will be as good a creative tool as they said it would be (seeing the music editor for it was a very promising start), however I was surprised to see no demo or even trailer of Zelda: Spirit Tracks during the conference, but what was on the show floor reassured me that it will be another solid Zelda title.

However the two major announcements for me were the announcements of Metroid: Other M and Super Mario Galaxy 2. As far as Nintendo games go Super Mario Galaxy 2 was the highlight of E3 for me and a second 3D Mario game for the Wii really took me by surprise, of course we only got a glimpse of it but the brief look seemed to give the impression of a game that has more of what we saw in Super Mario Galaxy (which was a phenomenal game in my opinion), mixed in with some fun new content... Called Yoshi. Metroid: Other M looked very different than any Metroid game before it, being less isolated and seeming like it was a game with a story much more driven by character interaction, but I think this will provide a refreshing take on the Metroid series and I'm very interested to see what Team Ninja can do alongside Nintendo on this game.

Sony

Now I don't have a PS3 or a PSP but I have to say that even I was reasonably impressed by what Sony had to offer. Of course with the numerous leaks this year the announcement of the PSP Go was hardly the most surprising event of the show but none the less there it was even if I wouldn't want to pay all that cash for the console.

The way the new Uncharted presented itself certainly seemed enticing, MAG looked quite exciting and unconventional even if you will need the world's best internet connection to play, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker looked okay but it could have done with a few more Snakes, Assassin's Creed 2 looked very good and fingers crossed this game will have more longevity than the original, Final Fantasy 14 Online was as much a surprise for me as it was to anyone but it none the less looked like another very good game, the trailer for The Last Guardian piqued my interest and had me slightly confused, I'm sure more Little Big Planet won't be a bad thing and the track editor in Mod Nation Racers did look absolutely awesome.

The big deal at the Sony press conference for me though was their motion control peripheral. No doubt an attempt to improve on Nintendo's Wiimote, but this kind of thing will be an essential if they wish to survive in the market and if applied to games properly it could (much like the natal) snap up some of those casual gamers that Nintendo have been hoarding all this time, although I do wonder about how well they'll be able to break into an area of the market Nintendo has themselves so deep-rooted in. However it didn't really hit me properly until some time after the Sony press conference that none of the motion control devices we saw at E3 are necessarily better than any other; there are advantages to having buttons on your controller and advantages to not having buttons on your controller, there are advantages to having a camera and advantages to having something in your hand. At the moment although I think I probably favour what Microsoft is doing if I have to choose, I see each company's motion control peripheral as an alternative to the others, not something that is necessarily inferior or superior.

Until Next Year...

It was sad to see E3 end this year but honestly I don't think I could have properly taken in any more information about all the insane games there. There were tons of great games, some interesting peripherals and overall a whole plethora of exciting, interesting, promising and just plain awesome things that we'll all have our grubby mits on some time in the future. I'd like to thank you very much for reading and I'll be writing again next year when hopefully we'll see more of what made E3 2009 so special.

-Gamer_152