Lost Planet 2 (!!!WARNING!!! VERY BORING POST !!!WARNING!!!)

 I treated myself to some post-dissertation game buying. Three games on Monday (3 for 2 pre-owned deal in Game) and another one on Friday.
 So I bought:
 Dark Void, which is fucking laughable, going on what I've played so far. Even the guy who served me said it was shit but it was basically free and I seemed to remember Yahtzee saying it had some redeeming features in his ZP review of it. But yeah, it's shit in just about every way, although as usual this can be fairly entertaining in itself.

 I also got White Knight Chronicles. It's an RPG and I usually don't really bother committing to them, as I know how long they take and I don't like turn based combat, but it's by Level 5 who are amazing so I got it.
 It's pretty cool and the environments and monsters are cool although the combat is slow, the story is the same as every RPG and the lip-syncing is terrible.
 You get to create your own support character. I called mine Roy and made him look like a retard. He is completely out of place next to the clean cut anime characters and just stands around staring at things during cutscenes. I'll try and get a picture of him. I got a picture of him. Here is a picture of him (taken on my phone):

 The final game of the first three was Lost Planet 2. I'd played a bit of the demo before as well as the original game on Xbox 360, which I really enjoyed. It is a fucking odd game. I knew from the demo that it was online co-op orientated but I was also expecting an actual single-player campaign to carry on the story.
 There is a campaign option at the main menu but you set it up as you would an online game, replacing other players with AI bots, but in the actual game your team-mates are given mock online ID names like sharkboy123 or whatever. This is weird. Also you can't pause the game. For my second attempt at the game I HAD TO USE GOOGLE TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO PLAY ACTUAL SINGLE PLAYER!!!
 Anyway, there are cutscenes and a kind of overall story but the player character is literally no one. From what I have played you play as 'a snow pirate'. There are a lot of snow pirates. There are two snow pirate character models. They look almost exactly the same... So there is no characterisation in a partially narrative driven game which is very very odd.
 Otherwise it looks great and the gameplay is pretty much the same as the first game, which is good news. The giant monsters are awesome as well.

 Finally on Friday I bought the original Lost Planet on PS3 which I have been mostly playing since. I fucking love the kind of Japanese retro arcadey style action, also seen in Vanquish and MGS3(?)(ish).
 The story is also pretty cool in that it isn't completely generic, the player character is called Wayne as opposed to Jack McGunfist for example. The characters are good and some are a lot deeper than in many games, which is why the lack of characters in LP2 is so odd. I found Basil was surprisingly well characterised, especially for a smaller role.
 Definitely check out Lost Planet (I got it for £8) and, if you like the gameplay, Lost Planet 2. If you like RPGs give WKC a go and, wait for it ... Dark (A)Void... lolololol. Oh dears.

 I think 2011 is going to be a good year for games. Lots of great titles lined up including L.A. Noire and Mortal Kombat (both of which I have pre-ordered). I'm sorry to say that you're not going to enjoy Battlefield 3 as much as CoD regardless of what you might think after seeing the trailers. You heard it here first. That's not to say it's going to be bad.

 April Skyway update coming very soon as well as something else I'm working on that will hopefully turn out to be quite interesting. But then I would say that.
Bye.

JUGGERNAUT!!!

You should only be able to equip Juggernaut/Painkiller online in Call of Duty up to a certain level (15/20 maybe).
This is because it's for people who aren't very good and they won't get better if they keep it on.

Just a small point...

It's been really annoying me. That new Nesquik advert is so shit. It couldn't miss the mark any more if it tried.

5 things Call of Duty should have sorted by World at War but didn't

 Once again I have felt the need to play through a Call of Duty game on its hardest setting, Veteran, and, as usual, various sections of the game have proven to be so excruciatingly difficult that they have angered and frustrated me into thinking about the game's most significant gameplay problems, some more obvious than others, and also into feeling the need to tell you all about them.
 This time the game is World at War. I've recently bought it on PS3 but have completed it before on Veteran  on the 360.
Apparently a lot of COD fans aren't at all keen on WaW, apart from Nazi Zombies obviously, judging by internet chatter but they're wrong and can fuck off because I like it.
 Anywayz here are the five things, some of which were sorted in Modern Warfare 2, with brief descriptions:

1) Grenades - Ridiculous. The cause of the majority of my deaths on Veteran. Combined with number 2 turns any open ground into an endlessly replenishing minefield.

2) Infinitely spawning enemies - A problem that Infinity Ward explicitly addressed for MW2. Combined with numbers 3 and 4 and some bottlenecking level design makes advancing in some cases virtually impossible and only possible with a lot of luck on your side.

3) It's always down to you to push forward - Another common one for the COD games and closely tied to number 4. Without this problem most of the others would be a lot less significant and frustrating as pushing forward is a key element in a lot of the series' big battles.
Leaving pushing forward completely to your AI allies is a cop out so perhaps they could push on slowly and your input is to speed the process up if you can...

4) AI - As lovable as they are your AI team is shit when it comes to killing baddies. Of course they have to leave the fun to you but they really do seem to be there just for show.
 This is made a lot more obvious when the enemy AI enter the equation. They shoot you, and only you. Surrounded by other targets they will take you out through a 5p hole in the rubble from a mile away.
 Now World at War gets bonus points for its super-retarded enemy AI that seemingly came out of nowhere, although, amidst the frustration, it can be quite funny imagining the thoughts of the Nazi soldier who decides enough is enough and a jog over to the Russian and back would do him the world at war of good.

5) Checkpoints - Perhaps the least obvious 'thing' that becomes very obvious on a Veteran playthrough is the   frequently flawed placement of checkpoints. The game is made up of action sequences broken up with brief rest periods, often used for dialogue or plot progression.
 What becomes apparent is that the checkpoints are almost always placed at the end of an action sequence and at the start of a rest period. So what could start off as a simple walk up a hill or ten second chat turns into a complete pace breaker on your fortieth respawn. The checkpoint should be at the start of an action sequence.
 Of course they're not all like this but pfffff.

Anyway fuck it nobody cares, hopefully Black Ops will be good BYE

Update: It's just occurred to me that I think the problem I have with the Veteran playthrough of WaW is that it's hard to roleplay as a Russian soldier when your comrades are running headlong into the enemy and you're cowering behind a sandbag every five seconds waiting for your health to regenerate...

You know what really grinds my gears?

Rhetorical question. Rhetorical answer = AI support characters who take credit for shit you've done. Alyx did it in Half Life 2 and it's one of the only things I can think of that I didn't like about that game.
It just happened in Uncharted 2, in the monastery level. I had to move this statue thing to climb up it to get through this gap in the wall but I had to wait for Elena to help me. When we pushed it in place a very short cut-scene showed Elena climbing up it and saying to Drake: "Look we can climb up it. Come on!"

A) I fucking know. It was my idea.
and
B) Please shut the fuck up. I'd be up there now if the cut-scene didn't lock the fucking controls.

In contrast Benson (I think his name is) the Filipino(?) tracker(?) is perfect. He helps you out as much as you do him and, although he talks quite a bit, he doesn't speak English so it doesn't matter. And I can't tell if he's taking the credit or not.

In other news:
I've been trying to play shooting games, Uncharted 2 included, using only the shotguns (where they're available).
Firstly to see if it's possible i.e. have the developers put this gun in to give me more choices in tackling a situation or are they just conforming to the traditional selection of weapons for the sake of it?
Secondly, following on from this, does the traditional weapon set have a place in contemporary games?
And thirdly do you give a shit? No?BYE

This Bourning

Ok played so more of Conspiracy, getting quite into it now. Got to grips with the shooting a bit more and there's enough cool set pieces and brutal finishing moves to keep me entertained.
Following on from what I said earlier there was another boss battle (against the same guy) and I was again annoyed by the post fight cutscene. This time I won the fight and Bourne kills him in cutscene. Yes that's right Bourne, not me. What is the fucking point?
Anyway like I said the game is growing on me, as is the ever frowny Jason Bourne. I've noticed that he looks a fair bit like Fern Britton's husband who does the cookery bits on This Morning. So I'm now playing the Bourne Conspiracy pretending to be an amnesiac day-time TV chef who is killing hundreds of baddys in order to get home and make sure the back door is locked.
I think so far the game's visuals and cinematic style are its saving grace.
B
Y
E

aaaand...

...it does that really annoying thing where, when you get a call from your boss, you can't move and those widescreen black bars come from the top and bottom of the screen, apparently to make it more cinematic.
...Jason Bourne is constantly frowning as though he's trying to remember if he locked the back door on his way out this morning.
...it does that other really annoying thing of telling you how to get into cover but not out so you just have to experiment by running away from the chest-high wall, standing up and then getting shot.
...you can never tell where you're actually getting shot from.
...you move so slowly when your gun is drawn.
...it takes ten times longer to holster your gun than it does to draw it.
...every enemy near a chest-high railing seems to have the innate instinct to fall over it to the ground/water below when they've been shot. And I do mean every enemy. By which I mean the one enemy that's been copied and pasted throughout every level so far.
...the AI in the pacific campaign in CoD: World at War is either completely retarded or offensively authentic.

for FUCK sake

I cannot fucking stand games where you do a boss fight, win outright, then have a cutscene show the enemy in fine health beat the shit out of you and win. Why not just have the cutscene instead of the fight.
I'm playing The Bourne Conspiracy and that just happened. It might be ok if the fight itself was biased in the enemy's favour, I mean for fuck sake it was a fist fight with a seven foot tall African guy, and you had to lose the fight to continue.
If you lose this fight you have to start from scratch, beating up five henchmen then the boss.
If might even be bearable if the fight differed from any of the others in the game but it didn't, well he had more health so it was slightly longer but it was still punch punch punch block over and over with the occasional cutscene special move thrown in to spice things up, korma style.

The rest of the game (that I've played so far) is sooooo fucking clunky and sluggish. The aiming is erratic considering you have to go for a headshot every time. You're supposed to be Jason Bourne professional headshotter but instead it's like the crosshair and the baddy's head are two repelling magnets.
Will play more but that new thing in Splinter Cell would have worked perfectly in Conspiracy. That combined with the cover shooting stuff from Uncharted.

Day of the Triffids on BBC 1

It's not long. I was interested and looking forward to the new adaptation. I haven't read the novel but I want to. I haven't seen the 1962 film and according to Corrado I don't want to. I've seen bits and pieces of the 1981 BBC series and I want to see the rest. Really wasn't keen on the new two-parter though. I remember the old series reminding me of old Doctor Who in terms of production at the time. Laughable effects looking back now etc. Looking back on this weeks version, in the future, I think people may make similar comparisons with current Doctor Who. It looks like Doctor Who vs 28 Days Later. I'm not quite sure who it was aimed at either. The first part was about the blinded people and the second part was about the Triffids. I don't think that's how the producers would like it described. The two parts felt completely segregated from each other. The Triffids weren't characterised at all in the first episode. Maybe they were but it was so badly handled I didn't notice. I think I would have done a better job. Then in the second episode they just felt like background characters. They are the title characters. Their design was particularly unadventurous as well. I think the old series' Triffids were better designed. More exotic. I designed a Triffid for a horror postcard project last year and I think mine was more interesting. The special effects deserve some praise. The CGI was very good on the roots of the plants. A lot of the time it was hard to tell if they were real or computer-generated. That may be because it was so dark though. The blinded were ok. Not as good as the old ones by any means. Then in the second part they didn't feature at all. Nor the american guy. Thought he was going to be shit but turned out to be one of the more believable characters. Not particularly difficult a challenge to be fair. The brilliance of the whole blinded thing is that they're essentially the zombies of DOTT but at the same time just blind humans caught up in mob mentality. They almost got it down in this version. Then they disappeared. Not good. uuuuuummmm. The script and dialogue weren't good. The performances were bad. The action was nothing but what we've seen a hundred times before. The two children characters in the second part were ridiculous. There was absolutely no successful creation of mood, tension, fear, emotional connection or the vital impending danger. The cinematography was as conservative as possible. Except when it makes no sense. There's one bit in part two where Eddie Izzard's main baddie character arrives at the goodie's dad's house where they're all hiding and it's all filmed showing only his feet and trouser bottoms. I didn't understand this at all as it was immediately clear it was him. He wasn't a new character and we knew who it was just by his shoes. No mystery so why not just show his whole fucking body? I'd like to think I could do a better job. And where did all the guns come from? Every policeman seems to have a pistol on them. It's set in Britain. I don't really know what happened at the end. Offer me a job.

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can fuck off if it thinks I'm watching it.