Too human Demo: First Impressions

Monday, 14 July 2008

In addition to all the tasty, tasty, E3 goodness [Which i'll probably post up some of tommorow, Theres just so much to wade through] the Too Human demo dropped today. Word is, its a sci fi dungeon crawler, think.. Diablo in space, with norse gods.

Impressive eh? Well, the demo weighed in at a hefty 1.1 gig, The demo was typically "fantasy" and there was 5 classes on display, but only one to choose from, the champion. The opening intro looked very nice, with the norse gods seeming like the colonial marines from aliens,weirdly enough.

The game play? well, the controls were very nice and it looks awesome to roll in a dodge, pull dual handguns, and start shooting, and I hadn't even left the initial area yet, Let alone seen any monsters. Controlling your sword is done via the right analogue stick which is a concept i've loved since playing Blade 2 back on the PS2. When I finally reached enemys, I realised something. This game is fucking awesome, Like Diablo on steroids. When you level up there are 3 skill tree's to choose from. The setting is certainly unique, but it plays like the popular "Action RPG's" of the last generation of consoles.

Basically, what i'm trying to say is, I was blown away by this game, and i'm buying it. Try the demo, its free.

Also I managed to download the Vegas 2 gift pack today, Containing Dark versions of CQB training and murdertown, and Calypso casino from the original game. Its free on the 360 marketplace. Its a worthy reason to try the game, as there appear to be new A.C.E.S as you play, Gifted you 5k exp per level.

Labels: DLC, First impressions, Free, RSV2, Too Human, Xbox360

Author: DW | Comments: | Leave Your Response?

5 endings that felt like i'd been kicked in the face.

Thursday, 1 May 2008

Lets face it, sometimes you get to the end of a game, the credits roll and your sitting there, head in your hands, cursing the stupid fucking ending.

Some are far worse then others, and so I've put them down here. Just in case, Yeah, theres spoilers down thar.



5: Kane And Lynch

At number 5, the self acclaimed "Brutal tale of Hate,Loss, and Revenge". Yeah note the capitalisation of the exciting sound of words. I guess to be honest, the clue was in the word Loss.

Anyway, In this game you play as Kane, an ex mercenary who ends up fighting for his daughter with a couple of his old mercenary buddies, and his on/off partner Lynch, who cant quite decide who he wants to kill at any given moment of time. During the course of this game, Kane sacrifices pretty much every ally and friend he has to get to his daughter, and eventually he catches up with her, in a villa in some country not a single gamer cared about.

Now, heres pretty much a summary of the good ending. You escape with your daughter, and decide to go back to try and save your last 2 mercenary buddies from death, I had the idea it would be a nice heroic ending, and so this shocked me: You go down into the village at the bottom of the hill to save them and when you arrive, you find one has burned to death, and the other hates you, but grudgingly accompanies you to the escape boats. They he betrays you, and is blown up by a rocket. You get to the boat, where your daughter is shot and killed, and lynch is wounded and presumably bleeding out. The game end's with Kane and the now silent lynch floating in the middle of the ocean.

That was the good ending, and I wanted the last 8 hours of my life back.


4: Rainbow Six Vegas [1 & 2]

This one gets it mention because of one guy, Gabe. You spend the entire first R6V trying to find your teammate, and save him from Irena as Logan, only to find out he's a fucking traitor. So, After shaking your fist at him, you presume Logan's gonna give him whats coming to him, Before he err.. escapes in a helicopter.

So you shoot the helicopter down, and he escapes from the wreckage. I suppose that happens eventually, so i sucked it up, and when R6V2 was announced, I bought it straight up, ready to use new boy Bishop to kick Gabe's ass. Only to have to order him around for a mission in the prologue, and then spend the whole game working with him when hes disguised himself as an NSA agent and chasing some cuban brothers you dont really give a shit about. Then he declares that he's not really an NSA Agent, and is in fact Gabe, and you travel to his villa to bust him.

Imagine my joy when at the end of the second game, I had to fight a fucking attack chopper with just an assault rifle. I mean, yeah, i can handle that, i'm up to the challenge. then, you get treated to the worst boss fights in existance, you shoot the breeze for a bit, and chat to gabe, then he raises his pistol, and you shoot him. No massive finale, you shoot him. You've taken on a whole army of terrorists, spanning two entire games, and you just shoot him. One bullet. No climatic battle, no fucking transformers taking each other to pieces on the Vegas strip, no. You just shoot him.

Yeah, i want the real boss fight please.



3: Fahrenheit [or indigo prophecy]

Let me start by saying, straight out, that Fahrenheit was the best game I had ever played until the story, and I still reckon it's a classic.

The game starts in a Diner's restroom, your character is standing above a dead body, and your thrown into the action. What follows is upwards of 9 hours of pure brilliant story telling, and scripting, trying to find out why you killed the man, and battle your ever growing insanity, all against the backdrop of a harsh winter in New York City. The story branches off into 3 possible endings in this game, but it's not the ending movies that bother me about this game, oh no. About 3 quarters of the way through the game, you engage in a Mid air fight with an ancient cult priest, and then, against the back drop of a new ice age you go into a battle straight out of Dragonball Z and fire a massive ball of energy at the main boss, killing him.

A fucking ball of energy.

Lemme just run this past you for a second, so you get this. Your Lucas Kane, your in a diner in New york city, and you've just killed someone while in a trance. Your trying to evade the police and work out why you commited the murder.

Thats badass plot right there, and i was eating it up, always playing the game.Now i'll give you the second half of the plot.

Turns out, you know something called the indigo prophecy, and some AI's are trying to get hold of it to become all powerful, also, for some unknown reason, you develop psychic powers, and must save the world from a new ice age, by flying around like your in a bad sci-fi film.

Yeah. What the fuck.

2: Assasins Creed.

This was a game with a good story. You were an ancester of the master assasin Altair. Forced to live out his memorys in an "Animus" while they search for some artifact or another. Basically, you run around 1191 assasinating people, and in your breaks from the memorys, you start to hear about assasins breaking into the lab's to come and rescue you. I found myself rushing the relatively boring assasination missions to try and get back out of the animus, and find out more about the real story. I mean, it was getting good.

Then ,its revealed one of the lab assistants is one of the assasins, and you steal a pen of a table, and get keys to unlock the doors to your cell, and you cant wait for the obvious last mission where you escape from the labs, except. it never happens.

The Assasins rescue attempt ends in about 6 seconds with the sound of gunfire over an intercom, you never get anywhere with the stupid key cards, and the last you see of lucy is her strolling out into a corridor. You end the game locked up back in your cell, and nothing's changed. I mean, sure you just spend 12 hours of your life jumping around on buildings and stabbing mentally challenged guards but in the end, you havent really done anything. I was almost tempted to play the game again, in the hope that it was a glitch and i'd get to play the last level this time. This is elevated so highly in the list because the game was utter dogshit, and i ended up finishing this game just for the fucking story.

After two years of solid hype, It appears Ubi-Soft didnt notice that the last 15 pages of the script had been left elsewhere, and just made the damned game anyway. Thanks Ubi-soft.


1: Prince of Persia: Warrior within

this tops my list for one reason, and i'm going to keep it brief, because it makes me a very sad panda, and it's uh.. been a while since i've played it. at the end of this game, the creature that has been chasing you for the entire game finally catches up with you. And it doesnt want to hurt you.

Bearing in mind, it chases you for most of the game, and if it catches you then, it flosses it's bastard teeth with you. So you spend 2 fucking games avoiding the overgrown bastard when he doesnt even want to hurt you.

oh yeah, and did i mention that one of the possible endings turns the whole thing into a time paradox meaning the entire two games didnt happen?? Yeah.

Fucking prince of persia. You ruined my life.

Labels: Assassins Creed, Fahrenheit, Kane and Lynch, Original, Prince Of persia, RSV2

Author: DW | Comments: | Leave Your Response?

Vegas 2 Review

Thursday, 17 April 2008

So, having finally finished Rainbow Six Vegas 2's story mode on realistic, i not only feel like a fully trained, well equipped counter terrorist agent but i also feel like i can now discuss the game.



For a start, Theres alot of people who believe that this game is just an expansion pack and not a real sequel, much in the style that GRAW2 didn't add much to Ubi Soft's Ghost Recon series. I'm 100% in agreement with these people, but to just write Vegas 2 off as a simple expansion pack would be a disservice in my opinion. I was possibly the worlds biggest Rainbow Six Vegas fan, i pretty much played it solidly from its release in November 06, till well into 2007. As a result expectations were pretty high, and I'll happily admit to being on the verge of joyous tears as i slid my new copy of Vegas 2 into my 360's disk drive.

I'm afraid to say that first impressions were not so great. the PEC (Persistent Elite Creation)Character creator was almost exactly the same as the first one, with very little new options, and the menu screen could of quite easily been mistaken for the originals. this is nothing but cheap design in my opinion, a new game should at least get a new menu. From there on in I found i was developing a horrendous case of Deja Vu, the game used the same game engine, and the even better, the same crippling multi player host advantage.

but no matter, this was a game i loved, so i settled down, and played for a little while. My first major complaint with the game was that the maps were straight up just not as good as the originals. Again, a problem of lazy design.

It took me about a week to get through the realistic storyline, which ties in and completes the originals finally dealing with the traitorous Gabe nowak. I did like the fact that your PEC was now your avatar in story, as well as the rather bland fatigues of Logan Keller from the first Vegas, and I pretty much enjoyed the story. It had a slight problem of being a little short, but I'm going to chalk that up to laziness on Ubi Soft's part again, and fart in their general direction.

I played through the story with a good friend of mine playing as Knight, and i found that Co-op enhanced the experience heavily, as coordinating with a real person just made it all seem more natural to me.

I didn't get on so well with the single player, while i was completing it cooperatively, i trailed behind on single player at normal difficulty. I found it to be largely unchallenging, but my major upset was that they fucked up the voice commands again. I tried to tell my team to lob a grenade, and suddenly they were sprinting headlong at an enemy on a light machine gun, practically tripping over each other to get into the line of hot leaden death. So, i muted the mic.

In general, I think a lot of my problems with Vegas 2 were that it wasn't the sequel i had been rabidly expecting,and convincing all of my friends to buy. It felt somewhat rushed, and i couldn't help but feel it was Vegas 1.5 rather then the real deal. It's still a totally playable game, and I'm still playing alot of multi player, despite the lack of good hosts. I'd score it a pretty decent 7/10, because the Graphics are still pretty shitty, but the games nice and solid, even if it isnt the instant classic Vegas was.

Labels: 7/10, Review, RSV2, Xbox360

Author: DW | Comments: | Leave Your Response?