Rispon Avenue

I really like regular controllers, so I’m not overly receptive to another wand-like controller.

Let’s just take a look at this thing. It’s incredibly similar to the Wii-mote in set up, save that it’s black. But… so is the new Wii-mote… Oh and it’s also got a very silly little balloon thing on the end, that looks like the controller is obnoxiously blowing gum at you. Apparently it’s not hard, and is sort of rubbery and pliable like a clown’s nose that can be pressed out of shape and then will just bounce back into place when you let go of it.

The Move is, essentially, the Wii-mote restyled. It works on the same principal as the Wii-mote, but instead of an infrared sensor bar that the Wii implements, you’re working with the PlayStation Eye instead. This means that the Move will pick up more of a 3D aspect than the Wii has, as the Eye allows for greater perception of depth.

As with the Wii-mote, you’ve got a secondary controller, that in this case is called the ‘navigation’ controller, but apparently you don’t have to use it, you can just play with the normal PlayStation controller in your left hand… wtf!? Yeah, how do you imagine that’s going to work, Sony? Oh, you don’t? Of course you don’t.

The Move will sell in the UK for £39.99, the navigation controller for £29.99, and if you need the Eye as well, you can get that with the Move for £49.99. So, price wise we Brits are paying a little bit extra, but at the same time it’s not the worst price difference we’ve been hit with.

Really, the Move just hasn’t blown me away… but then again, PlayStation in general really hasn’t made a big impact on me. I like to game in order to relax, and I don’t actually like having to stand up and wave something around to play.

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Ohhh, that’s always fun, isn’t it? The Warrior looks pretty cool, too.

It’s about time, too, that we saw a significant update. The site has fairly much been stagnating for most of last month, but there’s been the odd bit of info go up now and then. However, finally, we’ve got a brand new profession up there, and I have to say, I’m impressed.

The Elementalist class is the only other profession up at this stage, and it’s a flashy one, really. Magic classes always get a lot of nifty particle effects and the biggest sound and light show when it comes to what the player can do. The Warrior in Guild Wars 2, however, isn’t short changed in this regard either. The five short videos of some of the Warrior’s class abilities all look pretty cool, some even kind of epic.

There seems to be a strong collaboration of a few different game classes; Diablo 2’s Barbarian, LOTRO’s Captain, and D&D’s Fighter and Paladin classes all seem to be melded here to make a pretty strong and awesome player class. There’s actually some flexibility to the class, in that the Warrior could be tank, oftank, or DPS, so that you can really tailor it to how you want to play it, and it doesn’t make two Warriors grouping totally redundant, either.

I’m really looking forward to more info on the game, and hoping that it lives up to the potential. That’s a big ask, because a lot of what’s been talked about is pretty amazing, and seems like it would be very hard to implement effectively.

I miss playing LOTRO, at the moment, but I don’t think I’ll go back to it just yet. I want to give Guild Wars a fair chance, and I’m hoping that the lore of the game is as thoughtfully and artfully crafted as the graphics and two professions so far released.

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For Deus Ex: Human Revolution, of course! Well, not new so much as expanded upon, really, but the three month wait for the expanded trailer seemed like a very long time.

I have to say first off, before anything else, that my wisdom teeth are coming in with a vengeance, and that the right side of my face is afire with pain. Yeah, so I’m not feeling great, but I’ll soldier on to get this post up.

Secondly, before I get to the meat of the article, remember me talking about my IP phone system that’s suitable for office or business, because since I started working from home there’s the odd occasion where I have to last minute join an internet video and audio conference? Yes well, that’s brought to light something. I don’t like strangers in my home, and I don’t like strangers being able to see in my home. So I’ve calibrated it now that you can only see a blank expanse of wall behind me when I’m talking. It’s less awkward that way, now I know prospective clients aren’t sitting there thinking ‘So that’s the kind of art this fellow’s into? We don’t want him creating our website!’ or something like that.

And now onto the trailer. I’ll preface this – there’s a lot of that going on today – by saying I really, really enjoyed the previous Deus Ex titles, so I’ve been eagerly awaiting updates on this game. Some time back Deus Ex: Human Revolution was announced, and a trailer soon followed. After a very long wait, an extended version of the trailer has been released… It’s. Bloody. Awesome. Seriously, I cannot wait to play this game.

A lot of fans of the series were disappointed by Deus Ex: Invisible War, but I thoroughly enjoyed the game, and it still ranks as among my all time favourites. Human Revolution seems to be really tackling some gritty themes, and that’s a really good thing in my opinion. There’s a lot going on in the trailer, and the visuals are amazing, the voice acting great, and the musical score working very well too. Apparently the CG scenes have been outsourced to Visual Works in Japan, with the direction coming from Goldtooth Creative in Canada, and I have to say it really comes together. I know the game won’t look as good as this CG trailer, but the style of graphics is very appealing to me, and I really can’t wait to see where they’re going to take this title.

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I’ll be including spoilers to the latter stages of Red Dead Redemption here, and I don’t want the story line inadvertently ruined for anyone reading this, so I’m saying it loud and clear. There will be spoilers!

So… where to start… Okay so I’m very close to finishing the game, but before I get to that I’ll go back a bit. I went to Mexico and helped out there for a while, waiting to get info on two members of my old crew. I had to do missions for both the Mexican government – a bureaucracy filled with drunken insane rapists and murderers – as well as having to do missions for the rebels uprising against said government.

Mexico was interesting for me because it was by far my favourite of the landscapes, and the music is fantastic around there too, the missions were amongst the most irritating. I found it very frustrating to have to play through doing quests for both sides of this uprising, never being given a choice as to who I would support, whilst both sides jerked me around with regards to information, for quite a while until finally the government were going to kill me and then I’m fully on the rebels side. I really liked Landon Ricketts quests as he was a pretty awesome character, but Luisa was very fatalistic and irritating. Her refusal to see how much of an ass Reyes was was frustrating, and then having to do quests with that idiot was really annoying. I’m glad I got to kill De Santa and Allende, though, that was fun. Luisa dying was quite sad, but in a way I think she would have been less happy should she have made it through the rebellion alive.

Tall trees is also nice looking, however the music there is so annoying that I soon want to be out of the place. That ominous, tense, single piano key twanging soundtrack was a bad idea, in my opinion.

So, now onto the meat of things. Disposing of Dutch was… well a little unsatisfying. There wasn’t as large a build up to his death as there was with Bill, and in the end John doesn’t kill him, which I found frustrating. I would have shot that psychopath in an instant, even taking into account the history he had with Marston.

Getting back to my very own ranch was just awesome, and doing a few minor quests for Abigail was fun, as well as seeing them interact. The Jack quests were alright and I liked the way John handled Jack’s misbehaviour when running of to hunt a bear. Nice writing there.

The scene where John is gunned down by a large posse of Ross and his crew was… poignant. I felt like the writing was good, the story made sense, and I was very sad to see John go that way. He deserved better. So now I’m running around as Jack, after Abigail has died some ten years or so after John, and I’ve found out that there is a quest to kill Ross, so I’ll gladly be taking that on!

However running around as Jack is rather irritating. His voice is childish and overly chipper, in spite of how they’ve tried to make him look in his older state. This kid has lost his father to a corrupt government, and he’s recently lost his mother, his last family on earth, and yet you pass a rider on a track and Jack’ll greet them with an upbeat ‘Howdy, Mister’.

So all in all I’d give the game a 9.5 out of ten, it really is a masterpiece and gives me great hope for where Rockstar may go in the future. I’ve respected this game on every level, graphics, music, story line, game play, it’s all here!

Now I was going to talk about a call from my real estate agent about that overseas property investment in Philippines that I was considering a while back, but good lord this post has gotten too long to do that now! The Philippines can wait!

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At long last, gamers, you will have the sequel to Shogun: Total War! Hurrah!

Ten years ago, a game development company called Creative Assembly created an awesome battle simulation game called Shogun: Total War. It was an awesome game, where you commanded armies as a Daimyo and tried to take over the entirety of Japan.

Sounds pretty damn fun, right? Well, from what I’ve heard it was fantastic. Unfortunately I didn’t hear about the game when it was released, too busy with other titles I supposed, and I didn’t get to it before it looked pretty bad on my system. Not to worry, I thought, Creative Assembly will surely be making a sequel, right?

CA went on to make Medieval: Total War, Rome: Total War, Medieval 2: Total War, Empire: Total War, and Napoleon: Total War in the intervening ten years. I thoroughly enjoyed both of the Medieval titles, however Empire was not very fun for me as the time period was far less interesting and I didn’t enjoy the sea battles, and I didn’t play Napoleon at all. I’d sort of given up hope of being able to play an updated version of Shogun, so I’m very happy to see CA going back to where it all started and making a sequel for it.

The teaser trailer has no game play featured as yet, however the visuals included fit perfectly with the art style of the time the game is set – somewhere between 1450 BC to 1600 BC – and are really very well done.

So I’m counting down until this game is released, though I’m thinking I’ll have plenty to fill my time with Civilization V shipping later this year. That title I’m so incredibly excited about, along with Diablo 3 though there’s no firm release date on that one yet.

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And I’m loving every minute of it! Well, nearly every minute.

I meant, initially, to do a post to say how I was going every ten hours or so, but as you can see, that didn’t happen. I’ve been playing quite solidly for the last five or so days and I’m thoroughly enjoying myself.

I’ll start with the only negative to the game, then go through all the positives. I very much dislike the duelling process. Seriously, this is the only game mechanic that feels completely unintuitive and unfairly difficult. There’s never a good in-game tutorial for the process, and it all feels quite arbitrary to be honest, but that’s my only real complaint with the game.

In terms of graphics, the game is beautiful. I’m playing on the 360 and the game runs very smoothly, the load times are short, and the entire world is streamed. There aren’t any loads between indoors or out, and there’s never a hitch to anything. The look of the landscape and animals is really very amazing, though character models could be a little less ugly.

In terms of game mechanics, there’s so much here to appreciate. Riding a horse is amazingly accurate and so is running around on foot. The ‘Dead Eye’ shooting mechanic works very well, and I’m thoroughly enjoying being a crack shot in the wild west of yore.

The story line is also quite good, though being forced to help out the Mexican government for as long as I did, knowing full well they’d betray me any minute, was rather annoying. I did like the slight supernatural inclusion of The Funny Man, who in my opinion was the devil.

The music and ambient sounds of the game are very good, the only exception being the music in Blackwater, which is strangely irritating and too often ominous with no apparent reason save some ambiguous notion of ‘civilisation being bad’ sort of thing. Getting off the train in the game and having that harmonica play, just like so many Western movies was just such an awesome introduction to the game.

Well, I’ve written enough for now, back to the game! I’m into the Tall Trees area, and doing missions around there!

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I’m talking of the upcoming title Okamiden, and the fact that it seems a bit of a mesh of a few games I’ve played before.

There are elements from a few previous DS titles that seem very strong in the Capcom title. When I first viewed the trailer it immediately struck me how like Phantom Hourglass the game play was, as well as the cell shaded visuals.

Now, I’m not saying that any cell shaded visual game is like Phantom Hourglass because it’s cell shaded, but it’s the almost puppet show aspect to the visuals. The roiling waves in the background in the opening scene have that sort of feel to them. Of course, the actual game play is also very Zelda reminiscent. The collaboration of the wolf and the boy and the fact that it appears necessary for them to perform attacks together to get past certain parts of the game makes me think strongly of the game-play of Spirit Tracks. I suppose any fantasy DS adventure game is going to immediately bring to mind Zelda, and the comparisons made as a result. The audio of the voices actually reminds me very strongly of Animal Crossing, a sort of jumbled sped-up dialogue where nothing is discernible as a language.

From what I saw the game play looks quite fun, and though I’ve not played any of the Okami games before, it doesn’t seem to be something that’d hinder my enjoyment of the game. A quick read of the Wiki outline of the story and I’m set to go!

On a completely unrelated note, I was cleaning out my desk and found my and my SO’s old mobile phones, which we intend to sell, and I have to say, I love a service that makes it so easy to recycle these sorts of items. When it comes to recycling the energy saving light bulbs or fluorescent lights you’ve got to truck all those things into a local retailer, which in our case is the nearest post office, but that’s still not close. But with this, I just called them and they sent me the envelope! Now, I don’t expect much cash from this, which is why people often think these sorts of mobile phone x change things are scams, because they’re expecting more cash based on the site and it’s high figures for certain phones, but let’s face it, how many people are trading in top of the line products? So why should someone’s four year old mobile phone bring in more than a few pounds? I’m just happy to be able to recycle it without having to drive down to my local post office to do so!

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I’ve decided to take a step back and play the original Baldur’s Gate.

I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate II, as I said the other day, but it struck me that I’ve never actually played the original game. I’d actually bought both in a special edition collector’s pack, but upon instillation of the first game, was told in an error message that my copy of the game could only be played in North America.

Yeah, nice one. So I put it in a draw and ignored it for a few years. Well I felt inspired the other day, so I got the discs out – only two of them, as opposed to the original six or seven in total – and loaded it on up. I got the same error message, but I researched it this time and found that BioWare had released a patch to correct the issue.

So with the game patched, and my 3D acceleration on my video card turned down to non-existent, I’ve actually been playing the game. I’m playing it full screen on my 1920×1080 screen, in spite of it’s original resolution of 640×480. At that resolution, if I play the game windowed, it’s just too tiny to see anything. So it’s huge and pixelated, but it’s nice to be able to see everything.

So far I’m noticing that it’s a heck of a lot harder than BGII, for a start you begin at level one, as opposed to level seven. You also don’t get access to a full party straight away, and you can really suffer in fights. I’m playing a Mage, and I started the game with one Magic Missile. You can imagine how many times I’ve reloaded thanks to one or many of my party members dying!

It’s great to see the origins of great characters that I know from BGII, though. Minsc with his witch, Dynaheir, and Jaheira with her husband Khalid. Imoen is very different, too, and it’s sad to see what has happened to her in the later game. All in all I’m very much enjoying myself, and enjoying the tougher challenge!

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And now for the stylings of Nintendo at this year’s E3.

It’s looking like it will be a pretty big year for Nintendo, and I’m interested to see the reactions after E3 is over. In terms of hardware, Nintendo is going to be showing the new 3DS, which will be great for those of us who are hanging out to see more details of this latest handheld. Nintendo is not the only company going for broke with the whole 3D thing, but theirs is the one that is portable and doesn’t require any peripherals. Quite frankly I’m still very leery of the whole thing, and hope I’m presently surprised.

Software is the key thing for Nintendo this E3, with more information expected on the Wii titles Conduit 2, Epic Mickey, Lost in Shadow, a remake of Metroid: Other M, and of course, the big kicker, Zelda. I pretty much don’t care one little bit about any of the games save Zelda, so I’ll talk about that a little. For the last year we’ve not heard anything on the game. At all. Pretty much since one piece of concept art was released, and a hint that perhaps Link won’t have a sword in this one, we’ve learned nothing in twelve long months. Now, I cherish Zelda games, so it’s pretty frustrating to wait that long with nothing… until now! Or, well, E3. Nintendo has said that they will be showing a great deal on the new Zelda title, including story-line, setting, and a brand new control scheme. I enjoyed the last Zelda DS title, even though trains weren’t really my thing, and I also enjoyed Zelda: Twilight Princess an awful lot, but I’d love to see a soul-sequel to Ocarina of Time, if perhaps with some of the grittiness of Twilight Princess thrown in.

The DS is set to get some groovy new games, too, with Dragon Quest IX, Golden Sun DS, Okamiden, Super Scribblenauts, and Pokémon Black and White. I’m actually quite interested in a few of these games. The Dragon Quest series has been a very enjoyable one, and Golden Sun has also caught my eye. Okamiden has some very cute visuals, but Super Scribblenauts has no interest for me at all. I found the first game tedious, so the second doesn’t seem like a great idea. The Pokémon games are a little interesting, because I do usually give the new ones a try. But I keep asking myself, why? Aren’t they essentially the exact same game? So not sure, but still interested in learning more about that one.

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I have to wait, though, which sucks.

So, the game is set to release on our fair shores in less than a week – May 21st – but I really want to play this game right now! Dammit! Well, in lieu of being able to actually play, I’ll write about it.

It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly makes this game stand out… there’s a few things that really make me very excited to play it. For instance, it’s finally a sandbox style game from Rockstar in which you don’t have to be a bad guy. You don’t have to be the scum of the earth organised crime sort. Sure, you can still be a raving bandit who preys on the weak, but you can actually be the vigilant good guy who kicks that first guys ass, too.

There was always a special place in my heart for a certain aspect of Morrowind, which relates to this game as well. I really enjoyed searching for, and searching through, shipwrecks. I loved feeling like I was hunting down some awesome treasure. Now, sure, in Morrowind what was usually waiting in a shipwreck was pretty much crap on a stick and a Lich thrown in for good measure, but in RDR there are treasure maps, and you have to use your knowledge of the local landmarks to find said treasure. To me that’s an absolutely fantastic inclusion that I can’t wait to get right into.

Other aspects of the game that is very appealing is the grittiness. Rockstar seem to have really tried to recreate one of the most turbulent areas in American history, and I for one am looking forward to walking on in there and makin’ thing a little calmer. Maybe it’s all those awesome old Western films I’ve seen, but I really can’t wait to get in there and kick some serious ass.

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I hope you are, you’re going to want to be if you intend to play this game…

I just happened to take a look at the Toy Story 3 preview, not something I would usually do – licensed games since SNES being what they usually are and all – but I trust in Pixar so I thought I’d take a look at the preview.

I was mightily surprised to hear that the game actually sounded fun! Basically, there’s a very minor story-mode which apparently touches on parts of the upcoming film, but the real joy to be had is in Toy Box mode.

Basically, you get to be either Buzz, Woodie, or Jessie, and you get to run around in a big toy box like town, either doing missions for the locals, or decorating, or doing… stuff. You can miniaturise the locals with goop to be found around the place, you can get a rather large assortment of weapons or items, including a lightning rod to zap the locals with, and there’s all sorts of other unlockables and so on.

So, whilst I do hold some trepidation, I mean, this is a licensed game after all, and they are rather notorious, but when I read the preview I was pleasantly surprised by what was there. When I showed my SO the preview, she, and I hope I’m getting the term right here, squeed at the idea of unleashing her inner child and playing around in the Toy Box.

Among the unlockables it would be good to see the option to ‘Sheriff’ – because yes, that’s what you’re doing in the Toy Box – as different characters. I forgot to mention too that you can ride around on mounts to get to different places within the Toy Box, including a horse and a dragon. Also, you can play split screen with two players at once, but they don’t necessarily have to be playing together doing the same things, but they can help each other if they want to.

All in all I’m hoping it lives up to it’s potential. Probably not, but hey, why not have a little hope?

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Lost Planet was an alright game, didn’t blow me away, but Lost Planet 2 seems pretty damn bad.

I played Lost Planet back when it came out. It’s actually a bit of a blur – a white, snowy blur – as much of the storyline has faded from my mind. Not a good sign. It wasn’t a very long game, but I suppose that’s not really a problem when the game isn’t really, really engaging, but I have a thing about games being less than 20 hours. That seems cheap to me.

So, when I saw that Lost Planet 2 had been reviewed on IGN, I thought I’d check it out. As I said, I wasn’t blown away by the first game, but there’s the rare occasion where a sequel will be a better game than the first. Rare, but it does happen occasionally. In this case, no. A game that wasn’t great to begin with lead to a sequel which doesn’t even qualify as good.

Reading through the review, which happens to come out four or five days before the game is actually released – watch this one do poorly in sales! – one has to wonder why anyone would want to play it. It sounds absolutely terrible, and when IGN rates a game 6.0 and they say passable, they really mean passable. I’ve got a standard of not usually playing any game that didn’t get an 8.5 or higher, so when a game gets a score this low I’d never play it.

Basically, it’s incoherent, poorly controlled, animations are overly elaborate and take too long, the game is very unclear in directing the player to what objectives need to be completed, and you can’t save during game play. Seriously. The game is set out as 6 episodes with a few chapters for each episode. Each of these chapters constitutes a playable level. They take about an hour a piece, and you can’t save during it, so if you die towards the very end, you go right back to the beginning of that level. Oh and nor can you have someone jump in for some co-op play.

The game’s difficulty level is also poorly balanced, and all in all it seems an exercise in frustration. Yep, I’ll give that one a miss!

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Oh yeah, back to the really good old stuff.

After playing Alan Wake, a game that I could have said so, so much more about – in a negative light – I needed to play something fun, something really good, something that was excellent the first time I played it and was going to be excellent this time as well. That game is, of course, Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn with the Throne of Bhaal expansion pack.

This is one of my all time favourite games, one of those games that forever shall be a yard-stick against which all new games shall be judged. You can’t help doing that when you play a game like this. BGII is one of the longest, most well written, most engaging, most enjoyable games out there. Forever after playing it you’ll remember great lines from your party members. “Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes! ” and “I have lost myself in your words but Boo thinks you’re just ducky.” from Minsc – and Boo – as well as “I can’t! I’m allergic! Well, not that allergic.” from Jan Jansen are among my favourites. Pretty much anything Minsc says in reference to Boo is awesome, and Jan’s got a few other good one liners.

There’s certainly a lot of humour in the game, but it’s not all so light. There’s enough darkness to make you appreciate the light. You get to fight such a wide variety of foes, too, from Beholders to Mind Flayers, from Umber Haulks to Vampires, and you even get to fight – and kill if you’re awesome like I am – a black and a red dragon!

There’s so much to talk about with this game, and the storyline is so epic, that one little blog post really can’t begin to cover it’s total amount of awesomeness. All I can say is, if you’ve not played this game, go get yourself a copy now! If you have, and you have fond memories of it, then get it back out, play it windowed, and have a great time with it all over again!

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Alan Wake is what I am referring to, here, and here’s my opinion of the game!

I, like many gamers, feel conflicted about the whole thing. It looked alright and played alright, but surely for five years of development it should have been more than alright, right?

I mean, the game mechanic was a very interesting and fun idea when I first heard about it, back in 2005, but now there are other games that have gone and done very similar things so this isn’t as ground breaking as it could have been if the developers hadn’t taken so long. Also, Remedy made out like the game would be quite a bit more expansive than it was, suggesting there would be a great deal of exploration. Most of the game actually takes place in an extremely linear fashion, and sure you can stop and have a peek here or there into a few places that you don’t strictly need to go to in order to complete the game, but this by no means makes it expansive. It lasts for about ten hours. Goodness me that’s a lame amount of time. That’s why I love RPGs!

I have to say, I’m also extremely irritated that a game that took five years from announcement to release already has tokens for bloody downloadable content. Are you freaking kidding me? And, spoiler alert here, when you finish the game you get the most boring cliffhanger ending, which supposedly Remedy is going to expand on in the DLC chapters soon to follow. I don’t know, but when I pay that much for a game, I want it to be bloody well finished, and I don’t want to have to guess randomly at an ending when I know that in a short time I’ll find out what’s going to happen anyway! Bah!

I think the thing that bothers me about the whole thing the most is the conceit. I felt like I was basically just walking through the inner monologue of an uninteresting and self-absorbed writer. It was like the worst of Steven King’s and Dan Brown’s novels put together. It’s so clichéd, and so… self indulgent. I really don’t like listening to internal monologues… I believe in the art of show don’t tell. I also felt the whole time that the monster in the dark was clearly a part of Alan, but I suppose we’ll have to wait for sequels and sequels before Remedy gives that gold up.

So, whilst there are some good things about the game, all in all it’s not really doing it for me.

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That’s right, Nintendo has confirmed that the 3DS will be fully unveiled at E3 later this year.

Details at this point are sketchy, but what Nintendo has confirmed is that the DS successor, the 3DS, will have 3D capability without the need for any sort of glasses to perceive the effect. Nintendo have also stated that the new handheld will be completely backwards compatible, so you’ll still be able to play the full library of DS and DSi titles.

At this point, confirmed details of the handheld run dry, and the rest comes from speculation from newspapers in Japan. Japan’s largest newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, says that the 3D technology being used by Nintendo comes from Sharp’s 3D LDC panel, which works by having a thin film suspended slightly above the actual screen, which each eye interprets slightly differently, causing the image to look three dimensional. Personally this sounds like a great way to feel nauseous after a short while of game play, but I’m sure Nintendo wouldn’t have gone down this road should that be the case.

The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper usually entrusted to break all Nintendo news, has reported that Nintendo is planning to use an analogue stick for controlling characters in 3D, and rumble technology is also expected for the new handheld. Both odd notions to me. To continue with a sleek design, the idea of an analogue stick seems somewhat of a sore thumb, and it makes me wonder if they’re planning on sticking with the same folded design. I certainly hope so.

Supposedly the new 3DS will also have much better battery life and wireless, but the screens aren’t set to go as large as the DSi XL – watch that chunky hardware sit on shelves for a long time to come! – but will have an accelerometer, which is the same technology that allows electronic devices to know when they are being tilted, so you’re already familiar with this if you’ve played a Wii, even if you didn’t know the fancy name for it.

That’s all the info that’s out there at the moment. No one eve knows what the thing is going to look like, but I do have to wonder why Nintendo announced it just days before the DSi XL hit shelves everywhere other than Japan. Just on IGN I saw many comments on the 3DS article from people saying that they’d just cancelled their pre-orders for the DSi XL. Seems a faux par, but still, the handheld is not set to ship until March next year, and that’s only for Japan.

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He’s a funny one, isn’t he?

The latest bout of my laughing at Molyneux was brought about by happing upon an article on IGN where Molyneux is claiming Fable III has ‘The greatest cast of any video game’. Now, I know that they’ve got some great actors in their voice cast, including John Cleese and Steven Fry, both very funny, but the best cast ever is just a ridiculous claim. It’s so very childlike that you have to wonder if Molyneux is even aware of how easily and often he’ll find himself ridiculed for such a statement.

Now, if this was a game developer who’d come through on his huge game promises in the past, then perhaps there’d be less of the ridicule, but he isn’t. He’s made huge promises with the Fable franchise and has failed to deliver on many occasions. His ideas of what constitutes a good video game sometimes baffle me, and it’s a little sad to see great actors working on less than great games.

Sometimes it seems, when one is reading or watching an interview with Molyneux, that he genuinely believes that he’s the most amazing game developer out there, but you have to wonder if it’s more of a media ploy; that he’s playing up his bold claims and eccentricities to get more coverage for the upcoming Fable title.

Either way, it’s both mildly irritating and rather funny. Apparently they’ve gone about voice recording in a way never done before. From what Molyneux said it just sounds like they’ve gotten the actors to ad lib a lot of the dialogue, in which case it’s really their great work not his, but anyway.

I’ll still not buy or play the game, but these little boasts of Molyneaux’s are often good for a laugh.

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I’m hoping to find it more appealing closer to release than I find it right now.

I took a look at some of the trailers for the game on IGN the other day, and the first thing I couldn’t help noticing was the poor graphics. Okay they aren’t terrible, but when you put it up against other games being released at the moment, the graphics really are sub-par. Sam’s head looks to be oddly shaped many times through the trailers, and textures look a little big for what these seventh generation consoles. The other thing of note was the minimalistic approach to the environments: though many of the scenes in the trailers there was a decided emptiness that wasn’t as engaging as it could have been.

The first thing my SO said was that it the ’same old storyline’, and she’s pretty much right. It feels like a very cliché storyline that’s being trotted out as the reason behind Sam Fisher’s new found aggression towards the bad guys. The events of the game take place around two years after the previous Splinter Cell game, Double Agent, and in the intervening years Sam’s daughter, Sarah, has died. Sam finds out in the early stages of the game that her death was no accident, so now he’s rogue Sam Fisher, and he’s after the bad guys whilst Third Echelon – his former employer – is after him.

He’s pretty much got a no-holds-barred approach to taking down anyone in his way to finding out the truth behind his daughter’s death, and this is a fairly new approach for these games. In previous titles Sam was often hamstrung by directives issued from Third Echelon, often making levels irritating because you couldn’t do kill or couldn’t be noticed or some other action. However, now that Sam’s rogue, that shouldn’t be an issue.

So I’m still hoping for a great Splinter Cell game, but I’m hoping for three things. One, that the writing is good if the storyline is going to even approach the cliché. Two, that the graphics are improved before release, and three, that Ubisoft has ditched their terrible DRM.

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Yes, it’s official, you’ll need a constant net connection to be able to play Assassin’s Creed 2 on the PC.

Many fans of Assassin’s Creed will be excitedly waiting for the sequel to come out in a little over a fortnight, but some recent news from Ubisoft has fans somewhat up in arms. Ubisoft has announced a brand new Digital Rights Manager – DRM – for all their games that have online capabilities. This system is supposed to ensure that their games are no longer being pirated, but of course, there’s a price.

If you want to play Assassin’s Creed II on the PC, you’ve got to have a constant net connection. If your connection drops out, you’re kicked out of the game, and are faced with a screen telling you that you can either wait for the connection to re-establish itself, or quit. You’ll lose your progress since your last save point if that happens, too. Oh and if Ubisoft’s servers go down? Well, Ubisoft stated that “The idea is to avoid that point as much as possible, but we have been clear from the beginning that the game does need an internet connection for you to play. So if it goes down for real for a little while, then yeah, you can’t play.

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Notice the way they said that? “…Avoid that point as much as possible…” You know, that sort of sounds like they’re trying to avoid saying it outright and owning this nasty flaw in their plan.

So, what to gamers get out of this irritating new anti-piracy tactic? Well, you’ll get to be able to install the game on as many PCs as you like, you’ll have cloud-based save data – fancy words for ‘on the internet’ – and you’ll not need a disc to play. So if you happen to play PC games at two different locations, you’ll be able to access the save file from both, which is the only real benefit that I see here. Most games allow for at least a couple of installs, and as for the disc not being necessary, that’s only an issue if you’re not careful with the disc and allow it to become scratched.

It feels a lot like Ubisoft is ransoming their games to us, and I really don’t think it’s a good idea. I think that hackers are going to find a way around the system, and the only one who’ll suffer for it are gamers who do the right thing and pay for the games. Bad show, Ubisoft, bad show.

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The game ships in around a fortnight, and already they’ve caused some uproar amongst their fans.

Fans of the series are eagerly snapping up any piece of info they can about the soon to be released Final Fantasy XIII, but not everything they’ve read has sat well with them. On the game’s official website, one of the creators has talked about the linearity of the first half of the game, saying that it’s largely story-driven and you don’t get to run around exploring until you’re in the second half. It’s an attempt to get players invested in the story and very familiar with the new game mechanics.

I’ll say right now that I’m no stranger to having a go at a game before I’ve played it. I panned the crap out of Fable 3 just the other day, but I’m a little less inclined to do that with the Final Fantasy series. One major difference is that the Final Fantasy series has really established itself, there have been no failures in the series so far, no games that just weren’t up to par, though sure, some people favour certain iterations over others, but none of the games have been bad or poor.

Okay so what am I thinking about this? Well, one of the major issues that fans are angry about – I’m speaking based on comments on sites like IGN – is that there aren’t any towns to explore, and whilst I understand that, those extra towns just wouldn’t fit in with this story line. The first half of the game takes place in Cocoon, a paradise city built for humans that floats in sky above the planet Pulse. Now, the people of Cocoon don’t visit the surface of the planet, ever. Heck, most of them have never even seen it! So how would it make sense to have extra towns for people to explore?

Well, you could argue that the story could have been structured differently so that there were towns to explore, but I think that if you’ve got a good story, go with it. Changing things like this could be the inspiration the creators needed to make an especially good Final Fantasy game.

Another issue many are having with this particular Final Fantasy is the linearity, the fact that players are driven by storyline for the first half of the game before they’re given free reign. Now, I can understand that that’s a long time, but on the other hand Japanese RPGs are usually like this to some extent, you’re guided for longer, but the story line is usually quite in depth, so it’s worth it. I do like that it will give players a long time to get used to the new Paradigm mechanic, but mostly I am just trusting in the franchise at this point on this particular point, and I’m fine with that, Square Enix has earned it.

Oh, and how funny is it that we are now up the thirteenth ‘Final Fantasy? :D

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Considering I’ve been playing the game for close to a fortnight, I thought I should put my thoughts down on the game.

Where to start… Okay so after I finished the first Mass Effect, I waited a day before starting the next one. Upon starting I could see straight away that there were indeed massive improvements to the graphics, which was nice. The game opened up with a scene of the Normandy being destroyed by some unidentified massive space craft that looked half like a rock, and Shepard being ’spaced’ and dying.

Great start! Then a group from Cerberus – yeah, remember that crazy black ops group? – picks you up and fixes you better than you were before! Yay! But then you’ve got to run around with a group of Cerberus people for pretty much the rest of the game, and deal with the irritating ‘Illusive Man’ – voiced by Martin Sheen, and seems to be an homage to ‘The Smoking Man’ of X-Files fame – to figure out why whole colonies of humans have gone missing.

You get only two of your previous crew members, Tali and Garrus, though Joker is still your pilot. You do, however, get a bunch of new people to run around with, many of whom are irritating in one way or another. Miranda is your link to Cerberus, and comes off as mean and frosty, though you can make her less so by completing her ‘loyalty mission’. Then there’s Jacob, who’s strangely brusque with you considering you’re his commanding officer. You get a very strong biotic named Jack who’s kind of insane – understandably so – but who is also very rude and foul mouthed. You get a Salarian doctor named Mordin, who’s actually pretty funny, and a Krogan named Grunt, who I like quite a bit, even if he’s violent as all heck. Samara is quite nice, an Asari Justicar, so at least she’s fighting the good fight. Thane is a Drell assassin, and in spite of his profession, is a stand up guy. Haven’t gotten to know Legion all that much yet, but it’s interesting having a Geth on board. Then there’s Zaeed, a human bounty hunter, who’s an irritating old ass, in my opinion.

You’re no longer with the Alliance, who’ve tried to say that all your warnings about the Reapers where silliness, and that really it was just the Geth and Saren that were the issue, and you’re on a bigger, better Normandy supplied by Cerberus.

Personally I am enjoying this game more, but the storyline is far, far less appealing than the previous game. I don’t really dig fighting on the side of Cerberus, especially with the Illusive Man being all creepy and ‘end justifying any means’ kind of thing. I personally think he’s some remnant from the Protheans, perhaps an AI or some such, but either way, I don’t like him and I don’t like working for him.

I’m also irritated by the new HUD, and think that it would actually be, oh, I don’t know, a good thing to be able to see your damn health and shields bars!

Yeah, mixed feelings on this one. I liked a heck of a lot about the first game, and I am enjoying the sequel a lot, but I am not as happy with the over-all game as I was with the first one.

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