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.

Hi..

..I'm super mario galaxy 2. I was designed during the 16 bit era but due technical limitations on the available systems at the time I wasn't able to go into development.

Luckily, thanks to the Wii, I now exist as a fully playable game, but don't worry, none of my design document has changed since the early 90's so if you're not accustomed to the functionality and accessibility of contemporary games in 2010 you can feel at ease.

Judging by my cartoony visuals and endlessly patronising, unskippable dialogue sequences you'd think my target audience was young children however this couldn't be further from the truth. As will become immediately obvious when you play me, I am aimed primarily at experienced digger drivers and the sort of people who post speed runs of my older brothers on the internet.

The character you play as in me, Jumpman, can perform about 20 different types of jump, although funnily enough you will only ever use two of them as the rest are either completely useless or are more dangerous to Jumpman than most of his enemies.

As I mentioned earlier I am developed for the Wii and, although it does run me fairly well until anything bigger than Jumpman moves on screen, I myself do present some of the console's limitations. For example, like many pre-playstation one games, dialogue is presented in speech bubbles rather than as actual audio and, given how little is said in the game, this, on an admittedly laughably current generation console, surprises even me.

Well that's all for now, I might see you again if Ollie lets me back on his blog. Bye.

Bad Company 2 SP first impressions:

It's a lot better than the first one. Cool start but a bit supernatural.
Far too many cut-scenes in the first level and too much messy variety in them. There's first-person cut-scenes where you can jiggle the camera, first-person cut-scenes where you can't jiggle the camera, in-game first-person cut-scenes where you can turn around but the other controls are locked (and it has those fucking ridiculous widescreen movie black bars that appear for no reason like in The Bourne Conspiracy), Modern Warfare rip-off satellite loading cut-scenes, third-person cut-scenes where you can jiggle the camera and third-person cut-scenes where you can't. I'm sure I've missed a few out but you get the jist.
To put it bluntly, why the fuck do we need any cut-scenes. Modern Warfare gets by perfectly without any.
Another thing MW does better is the death screen. You die, up comes a a poignant war-related quote (or the fucking annoying "you were killed by a grenade/dog/lawnmower"... I know) then you're back in the action. In BC2 you die. You go to the death menu. You select retry. You wait five seconds for the level to load, presumably because the console has forgotten about it while waiting for you to fuck about with the menu. Then you're finally back in the action.
I'm playing on hard so I die fairly often and going through that every time really breaks the flow of play.
Another annoying thing is when you pause the game there's this repetitive distant banging sound, like someone dropping a brick on an empty oil drum outside your window in perfectly slow rhythm, so if you pause for quite a while to, say, write a pointless blog post that no-one will ever read you have to mute your TV. This is annoying. Why put such a fucking stupid soundtrack in a game?
The shotgun's good.

Wow...

I am shocked. I just completed The Bourne Conspiracy. By which I mean the half of The Bourne Conspiracy the developers bothered to make. It was just building up momentum then it stopped. I guess it was long enough for a game but I was expecting at least another hour or two.
I thought it was a joke but there was a 30 second cutscene then the credits rolled. I didn't even get to find out if the back door was locked or not.
That is very annoying. I know Zero Punctuation said the CoD4 ending came out of nowhere and I always disagreed with that but this is taking it to another level.
BYE

Ahahahaa sorry 1 more!

Laughing quite a lot as I just finished the first driving section of Conspiracy. It was fucking hilarious.
Like a cross between Midtown Madness and the vehicle sections of James Bond games. You drive round (and through) a linear set of streets (and china shops) at top speed in an indestructable Mini Cooper being chased by French police (although you can't look behind you so you can never tell if they're still there or not).
The funny thing is it seems like most of the driving could be cut out if you were able to turn right as you set off.
Just the pace of the thing is completely different anything so far it really is fucking funny. And the woman in the car with you keeps shouting "JASON!" like it's Heavy Rain.
BYEEE

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.

no skills required

Quick, pointless animation I did using the plaster filter in Photoshop.
I completed Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard last night. It is by far the shittest game I have played for a very long time. Mine and Steve's running commentary/analysis would have most hopefully made the developers cry.
The one thing that made the process bearable was the knowledge that, should I break into the industry, there is no way I could possibly make anything as pathetic. By the end I was physically feeling sick of it, not even joking, not even exaggerating.
Luckily I got a preowned copy for a fiver and it kept crashing. When this happened I was greatly uplifted. I don't think this is the response the developers were hoping for. Nor the relief of knowing that I will never have to play it again once the credits rolled.
It's supposed to be a parody blah blah blah but it was not funny in the slightest. Never has the term "one-liner" made so much literal sense. All we heard was "This is getting riduculous" over and over and over and over and over. And over. We noticed a hundred, if not more, missed opportunities for humour or commentary on video games whilst playing through, none of which were realised.
I did watch the credits, purely to make a mental hitlist of the fucking idiots. I noticed to my unsurprise that there were only two memebers of the testing department.
It's been almost 12 hours and I'm still wound up by the game. Characters using variations of quotes from Die Hard and Star Wars in the final boss battle got to me the most.
There were some cut-scene sections set in "the real world", but they weren't, they were CG as well. How. Fucking. Stupid. Can. You. Get????????? Surely it would be far cheaper, not too mention far more engaging and funny, to just have live action scenes. JESUS.
Seriously Vicious Cycle never make a game again. I know it said Matt Hazard will return... but don't you fucking dare.
BYE.

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.