I just took a look at the Gamespot's Game of the Year Awards and I'm fairly pleased at the results.

I'm really pleased to see the Orange Box won quite a number of awards even if they are all for Portal, though that shouldn't exactly be unexpected as Episode 2, although very good wasn't exactly amazing, Team Fortress wasn't very good at all and you can't give Half-Life 2 any more awards now can you, especially seen as it came out in 2004.

I was also pleased to see that Call of Duty 4 picked up alot of awards, especially as it got the Best Multiplayer Award, as for Best Shooter I would still have to give it that award but if it was based only on Singleplayer I would've given it to Episode 2.

This might sound a bit mean but I was pretty pleased to see that Halo 3 didn't pick up that many awards and especially that it didn't steal away the Best Shooter or Best Multiplayer Awards.

My dissapointments are only that Mass Effect got Best Voice Acting Award, which makes me realise that people just looked at the award and though "oh yeah, lot's of people talk in Mass Effect, I'll vote for that" because I feel that most of the time the voice acting in Mass Effect is hardly any better than an Ace Combat game although that's partly owing to the dodgy script. That award should've gone to The Orange Box or at least Bioshock, as from what little I've played of that at least the acting was good. The only other dissapointment is that World in Conflict didn't win Best Strategy Game, I know I've not played Supreme Commander but I really doubt that it beats World in Conflict.

So, all in all a pretty good year for gaming was 2007 and a pretty good year at the awards save for a few disagreements I have.

At long last (I bought this game in November): my Ace Combat 6: Fires of Libertion review.

Enjoy, and feedback of all sorts very much appreciated...unless you're Ben Stokes. :P

...and it's one of the worst games I've ever played.

Expect a ranty review soon with plenty of comments about this game's Nazi SS Special Forces Soldiers who carry machineguns and take 3 sniper rounds to the head before they go down, the terrible historical innacuracies, the weapon innacuracies and the last level being what can only be described as a "Doom Fortress".

...is absolute rubbish.

Which is especially sad seen as it was recommended to me by a friend. The game follows a "what-if?" storyline of an Axis defeat over Britain and their invasion of the United States via New York. You play the role of a lowly construction worker caught up in a massed air-raid/airborne invasion of the Big Apple. At first I thought the game was going to be really good, a quote from Winston Churchill at the beginning gave me high hopes followed by a little backstory; in 1931 a man named Winston Churchill was hit by a car and had to walk on a cane for the rest of his life, he went on to defeat the German Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain thus saving the allies from certain defeat...what if that car killed him? So, the game opens with bombs being dropped on the Statue of Liberty which I thought was fairly cool. Then it suddenly switches to 1st-person and you get to control (or more like wrestle thanks to the awful controls and animations) the main character who's mission is to get down to street level from the high scoffolding your on. Very quickly you find yourself fighting hordes of Germans...for some reason for the rest of the incredibly short and rubbish demo. The aiming in this game is broken much like in Turok except the opposite way round because it's far to insensetive but when you aim down the sights it becomes way to sensetive. Strange. The worst thing about it is its terrible historical accuracy even if it is a "what if?" scenario. I don't know what year this game is set but basically all they've done with all the designs in the game is take stuff from the real war, change its name slightly and give it lasers and jet engines. Also, the Germans all use zepelins full of men in the airborn despite the fact these were abandoned during the First World War thanks to their being absolute rubbish at just about everything. Then at the end some random police officer comes up to you and shouts "come with me! we're making a counter-attack!"...to be honest I seriously doubt, considering the look and feel of the attack, that a completely unprepared local police force, even with the National Guard can push back what looks like Operation Overlord except twice as large. Oh, and did I mention the graphics are terrible?

Utter rubbish. Downloading this is a discrace to your modem, your hard-drive and your console, playing it is a disgrace to your eyes, your controler, your ears and your brain. DO NOT DOWNLOAD!

Okay...mabye I made this sound a little more exciting than it really is.

Anyways, here are two rewritten reviews as I've been meaning to write for some time:

Mass Effect

and

Call of Duty 4.

Enjoy!

...is exactly the same as Devil May Cry.

When I look back I imagine the original DMC on PS2 as one of my favourite games of all time. When I play Devil May Cry 4 for XBOX 360 it makes me wonder what I ever saw in it as this new installment in the series is exactly the same...but it's also rubbish.

Firstly, when playing it, I never felt the sense I was playing a truely next-gen game, in fact, it felt like I was playing something horrifically outdated and naff. I'll admit the graphics are pretty amazing but that's not really hard to achieve when each environment is no larger than a Tekken fighting arena. Nothing is interactive in these tiny environments either, which makes them feel so dull and uninspiring - the best you'll get is a box of melons that crack into huge, badly textured shards of wood with dodgy red gems underneath them for some extra points. Also, the combat feels old fashioned and unexciting compared to how it used to feel where getting a better 'rating' for your kills and looking cool was the best thing in the world, now it simply seems like a slightly more interesting way to get a repetetive strain injury than flicking through TV channels or clicking a mouse repeatedly for three hours. Quite simply, mashing the "Y" or "X" button for hours doesn't sound like my idea of and involving combat system.

So, another example in 'this day and age' of a pointless release exactly the same as all the other previous games in the series (I'm looking at you too EA).

On a lighter note I played the Under Tow XBOX Live Arcade Game and to be completely honest I can see why it's free...it's just plain bad, so bad I won't even justify the game (if you can call it that) with any reasons for my opinion.

NOTE: Has anyone noticed my new Band of Brothers/Brothers in Arms style? Yes? Good. Could anyone give me a hand, however; it won't let me upload a user icon (that is the one that's currently a head-crab isn't it?) despite the fact I've made it exactly 80x80 pixels and the file size is way under 20K...I've even tried it with the picture size at 40x40 and it always comes up with the same message - "The file is too large to be uploaded" or words to that effect, note not "file size" so I assume this implies something to do with the dimensions of the picture, not the literal size of the file.

I played the Rainbow Six Vegas demo recently (yes, I know I'm rather late) because I noticed that it runs on the Unreal 3 Engine - the same engine that Brothers in Arms will run on - and that it uses squad combat and a 3rd-person clip to cover system as the new Brothers in Arms will. I was pleasantly suprised, espcially considering that when I played the demo some two years ago and all I can remember was that I hated it...well, now I quite like it. So I bought it (come on! It was only £15!). I'm only a couple of levels in but it's shaping up to be a brilliant shooter as far as the singleplayer is concerned, in fact, much better than the Call of Duty 4 singleplayer.

I also played a couple of hours of Crysis on my friend's fairly amazing computer...and it was incredibly dissapointing. I played the game on all "high" settings and the game didn't look as spectacular as I expected. At times the special effects are amazing and some of the textures are very good but at other times they are a bit dull and look almost unfinished. The physics are a little light, much like Half-Life 2, but it is quite awe inspiring to see a whole forrest cut apart by a machine-gun and shacks blown apart by grenades. The gameplay, much like Far Cry, sucks, however. For example, one of the few things that made Far Cry any good was the gun mechanics were realistic; an M16 can fire something like 800 to 1000m and so long as you could see that far you could hit an enemy at that range. On Crysis however, you can't hit anything until you're about 100m away from them which reminds me of something much more arcadey like Half-Life. So, a very dissapointing game indeed (and my friend also mentioned that, much like Far Cry, the 2nd half of the game is utter rubbish after the aliens are introduced).

I also played the Turok demo, whcih is good in parts, and pretty shoddy in others. Graphically it looks pretty good and the jungles at times can look fairly decent...even if the 2D grass turns to face you as you move. It's alot of fun fighting the dinosaurs, and quite scary too; I jumped more than once when a raptor sneaks up behind you and jumps on your back, but it's too easy to kill them thanks to the animated knife sequences instigated by the press of a button, instantly killing your enemy. Fighting humans is terrible thanks to a poor and jerky aiming system that, even when the sensitivity is as low as it can go, moves far too quickly. Also, the enemies are ripped straight from Killzone or Half-Life 2.

So, I bought one good game and sampled two very average games.

UPDATE: Rainbow Six eventually gets far too hard with your team of three (including yourself) against ten or more enemies with only sofas for cover. Also, in these rather large encounters, the AI shows some severe cases of Gears of War syndrome (sometimes known as Mass Effect syndrome) where-by the enemies simply run at you, despite all the cover they have for themselves.

...is pretty terrible.

I'm boring this game of a friend of mine who convinced me to play it because apparantly "it's much better after the level on the demo". Well, to answer that argument quite simply; no it is not.

All of my original impressions from the demo still stand (read the the blog if your're really desperate to know why I dislike this game so much) but more points I've learnt from playing this game more is that it's incredibly historically incorrect, the whole game is pretty much in the dark, it is devoid of any storyline what so ever, it's incredibly short (I played it from 16:30 'till 18:45 and am now one level from the end) and is no different, apart from graphically, from its PS2 counterpart Medal of Honour: Frontline. So, a rubbish game indeed.

In other news, I tried to find out when Left 4 Dead comes out (if you don't know what it is, shame on you) but I like to draw dates from different sources but Amazon, Game, Gamestation and Play don't have it in their databases. Shame on them.

I never knew Halo 3could be so much fun...though I doubt we were playing it for how it was intended.

I'm talking about sleeping over at Ben's with Tom. We played Forge, Halo'srubbish version of Garry's Mod for a while, trying desperetly to make afootball pitch(or soccer, depending on your location)on one of the new maps...that Ben payed 800 Points for - but that's another rant altogether. Anyways, I'm going off track a bit now. As I was saying, we tried to make a footbal pitch for some time until it just ended up as Tom spawning so many storage containers that the map was full of them while Ben and me played in our new playground, courtesy of Tom, with energy swords and grav hammers.

Soon I suggested we go on a map with planes on it, if you know me well, you'll know how much I love anything that flies. So we played Rockets on that huge desert map with the giant Elephant thing. Thenwe hatched an idea; two people on a Mongoose, one with a rocket launcher on the back versus a Banshee (only firing bombs, no machine-guns to keep it fairer). We had alot of fun, with some quite spectacular cinematic moments, like me driving the Mongoose and driving straight through the center of an Elephant as one of Tom's bombs exploded spectacularily behind me. Fun fun fun. You'd have to watch the whole hour long video to see everything - there's just far too good stuffmuch to list!We played it 'till 5 in the morning.

...is pretty terrible.

For those who don't know, The Club is a 3rd person shooter by the same people as that popular racer PGR, which is a pretty good game. For those who don't know again, PGR is based around getting combos of points for doing different cool and stylish things with little time between them such as drifting.

Well, The Club is based around the same thing; getting points for stylish things in a really short space of time. How cool! Getting points for being really violent! Sounds great eh? Yes? NO! The idea sounds brilliant but it just doesn't work and, despite how exciting it may sound, it's really quite boring thanks to a dull combat system than reminds me alot of playing Mass Effect on Easy. I also expected it to be based around doing cool rolls over cover and diving through windows and THEN killing guys to get points...and supposedly there are lots of these points around the maps that are predesignated for extra points...although I didn't come across a single one. Instead, it's really just about killing as many people as you can in an area really really quickly, getting headshots if you can and then sprinting to the next area and repeating the process until the end of the 'event'.

So, brilliant idea, terrible game.