Main Event:

Today after school I decided to run around the few decent gameshops and find a cheaper copy of RE5. One of the best deals was a 1C Russian dubbed copy for a mere ~15 bucks, so I went with it. It's a real shame that there's no language change option, but the translation is unusually great, with perfect actors for both Chris and Sheva as well as nicely translated menus. So I guess no atmosphere will be lost.

As for the gameplay, well, one of the first games in a long time to grip me with the sheer hardcoreness of the process. Its unique mix of sloppy yet fast-paced action is impressive in practice. I went through the first chapter, and, well, the main surprise was even more diversity. As opposed to RE4-s exploring, even asomewhat meditative gameplay, decorations change with dramatic speed in RE5, mechanical similarities aside.

Gonna review it soon, but probably after completing AND re-playing it on the high difficulty setting, along with most unlockables and hopefully a chance for a LAN play. Great game, in all. Really immersive, and a profitable deal.

Gaming:

I, umm, uninstalled Fallout 3 today, along with all the add-ons (left the savegames of course). I'm not the kind of guy that focuses on collecting games on his HDD, and I really feel satisfied when the drive is at least half-empty. As soon as I noticed I had stopped playing it, I decided to move it, temporarily,to history. Hopefully another expansion, or just boredom will make me return to it.

Got all 240 riddles in Batman: Arkham Asylum at last. The first time I used a game guide for a long time, I discovered that a bunch of toughly hidden chattermouths were "deliberately glitched" to be silent. Got 'em anyway.

Downloaded the NFS: Shift demo, and, unfortunately, the age of my GPU starts to show itself. While RE5 runs at a steady 40 FPS with medium-high settings on my screen's resolution, Shift spat me in the face. I don't consider it badly optimized, but the port is definitely a little unmerciful to low-ends (car models in particular are in an almost-fixed state on all settings), and I had a terrible 25 FPS on low-medium settings on a really shameful resolution. So yeah, DiRT 2 it is.

Reviews:

I'm still not working on anything right now, but a general outline of the RE5 overview is already forming up in my head. I'll definitely have a draft ready in a few days after completion.

Gameobserver.com kindly published yet another review of mine, of yet another add-on for Fallout 3. You can check out the Broken Steel review on GO right here. Batman: Arkham Asylum will also appear there soon (as a PC-only review).

News:

• Batman: Arkham Asylum stepped over 2.5 million sold copies for all three platforms, a really great result. Rocksteady, we want a sequel even more epic!
• Gran Turismo PSP will have a custom music import option, quite a rarity for PSP users.
• Officially confirmed, a Street Fighter IV sequel is in works. Hooray!
• Rumors have it that GRIN's Final Fantasy project is still in works, so anyone who had hopes should bring them back up. Miracles do happen!
• Blur has been postponed till 2010. I'm pretty sure that Modern Warfare 2 and Split/Second are directly involved... which is great, because the latter beats Blur at almost everything.
• Some concept arts have been released for the cancelled Halo MMORPG project. To be honest, never knew something like that was in works. The art is pretty impressive, Mass Effect meets Halo scale.
• An expansion is in works for Warhammer: 40,000: Dawn of War 2, entitled Chaos Rising. I didn't particularly like the swing of the series towards top-down RPG rather than full-scale RTS, but a formidable fanbase has been collected anyway. So I guess this is hilarious news for many.