Milestone blogs are always easy to make!

I have surpassed 10,000 posts in the forums, blogs and comments. My reward is a tin of spam should I choose to accept it. It's quite a lot of posts, and therefore a lot of time. I try not to spam the forums or blogs with useless posts, but I enjoy contributing, here's to the next 10 thousand.

I finished Red Alert 3, all campaigns. Soviets I probably enjoyed the most but all the sides have some good long range units. I ended up really disliking the co-commander system - it takes away far more than it adds for me. The cheesy over-the-top flirtacious Alied campaign was also cringe worthy. Sadly I'd have to say this is the worst C&C game I've played, and I've played nearly every single one. That doesn't necessarily make it horrible, but it's really disappointing direction for the franchise. The C&C4 news doesn't inspire confidence but I'm tracking it anyway.

Also picked up CoJ: Bound in Blood on Steam. I enjoyed the first one playing through it last year. I'm happy to say that I think Bound in Blood is the superior game. It does start out slowly, and the last half of the game is much better story and gameplay wise so persist with it. It's a pity the concentration modes were changed for the worst but most everything else is pretty damn good - graphically I'd say it's second to Crysis (runs great too). It's not a long game - about 7 hours long and the multiplayer was flat out broken for me. My full review for it is over at NGN

Haven't been playing a whole lot else, the usual Guild Wars questing. Wolfenstein is the next game I'm probably going to get, out late August and looks alright. Hopefully it brings back fond memores of Wolf 3D :P

The new Mechwarrior "teaser" / "mock-up" looks pretty cool. Above is my favourite game of the series. Although I loved all the Mechwarrior 2 games to death. Hopefully it turns out well. Click here for awesome intro vid! (1995)

My review for Prototype is up on Gamespot!

Hi guys I finally got around to completing the fairly long (15 hours or so) Prototype game. Overall I had a good time with it, aside from a few tricky bits and some camera / lock on issues it was a pretty solid game. I will say that I never got into the hype of the game and really knew little about it until close to release. I did this on purpose and I think it paid off for me in the end.

I wrote a fairly lengthy review over and NGN

Click here to read it if you are interested.

And I've posted my FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage review up on Gamspot if you happened to miss it over at NGN (good game btw if you are after some racing fun)

I saw terminator salvation last week and I actually enjoyed the movie, I thought it took a pretty good direction with the terminator idea and it had decent action. If anything it was very short and over a bit too quickly.

Did you guys check out the Trine Demo? Very cool little game from the guys that did shadowgrounds (also fairly fun). $30 on steam with free shadowgrounds is very tempting I must say.

In other news I finished Guild Wars Factions last week, woot! Took a while but Shiro fell after about 15 attempts, that guy is a serious boss especially with AI teammates :P. Then on the divine path I forgot to get my special item and then had to defeat Shiro again, lol. I defeated him with my monk, found assassin kinda boring

Level 40!

Only took me 4 years and 11 months to get here :P Although I've only really been active for half that time, but I've certainly done my fair share of spamming the forums, almost 10k posts!

E3 2009

For me unfortunately not a whole lot of surprises / new announcements as I'm a PC guy and it was really all console stuff. I did like the look of Assassin's Creed 2, Alan Wake and Mass Effect 2. Titles I'll be picking up near release I should imagine. We did get confirmation of BF3 after E3, disappointing that BF3 didn't come into the show but perhaps they are saving it for another event.

Although I've got a hell of a lot of L4D hours the L4D2 announcement shocked and saddened me. Reason being that I bought the game at full price at launch and felt it was pretty low on content and I expected more campaigns to be added over time. Even the SDK and the 2 extra versus maps were released much later than they should have been. Not to get any of this stuff from Valve is a real shame and quite out of character compared to CS:S and TF2. Obviously I'm not questioning value given my gametime, merely stating I feel that L4D is very light on content and poorly supported by a team who does exceptional post release support in general.

Current Gaming

You know it, Guild Wars still my number one game. I won't bore you with the details but I'll just say I still really enjoy this game, so much to do, so little time to do it, I'm somehow fitting in 20+ hours of it a week

Picked up Prototype on the weekend, have played a few hours and so far it's not too bad at all. Carnage and action is quite nice, and I'll often just go off and cause some mayhem instead of heading straight for the story like I do for most games. I actually look forward to when they send a strike team in (choppers etc) because I can pick up a car and run up a building then jump off and throw that car at the chopper :D The short movie flashback segments you unlock remind me heavily of the Dead Space prequel cartoon movies. No worries about performance or controls yet either.

Red Alert 3 I've had for a while, but never played much. I've done a few missions for the soviets and honestly they aren't bad. I dislike the co-commander system, I dislike having my base already set up and I'm not liking the ore gathering. I do however like the electric boat, the submarines and the cheesy cutscenes. So overall it's ok.

Other

Max Payne 3 in Sao Paulo huh? Well that I don't mind, in fact I think the euphoria engine could really put the icing onto bullet time. However NOT using James Mcaffrey as Max's voice bothers me, I don't think there is any reason to not use him. Sure Max is older and apparently a different man, but James can surely act the part. Max Payne 2 didn't drastically change the formula or location and it turned out to be a fantastic game.

Outlander is a movie I saw recently, never heard of it before maybe you guys have. It's basically a straight to dvd release I think (?). It's pretty much vikings and aliens. Now while you may think it's a disaster waiting to happen I was pleasantly surprised with the level of awesome. It's got swords, gore, Ron Perlman and aliens. It's well worth checking out for sci-fi / action / vikings fans.

Also this year has flown by, seems like only yesterday I was having summer (christmas) holidays and now it's mid June. Time flies when you're having fun I guess. :)

Last few weeks I haven't really been playing any new release games but I'm still playing lots of old games.

As you know I got Guild Wars Trilogy some time back and just like how I left it I'm now playing it excessively. I did get some distance in Factions with my new assassin character (still long way to go) then I started a Derv/Parago and only got to about level 8. I just went back and started playing my Monk in Eye of the North, found it more enjoyable. The game has lot more things since I last played like better party systems, heroes you can customize weapons / skills and all these mini games or quests.

I completed FlatOut and Carnage modes in FOUC, carnage mode was very enjoyable since you basically just spend a lot of time ramming into other cars to gain points. FlatOut mode is very long and gets a bit boring, still a good game and better than FlatOut 2. I completed a review for it over at NGN.

My Dark Sector review is now up on gamespot if you want to read it.

TF2 new pack was released this week, sniper vs spy. I tried playing some, for a start the random drops is just dumb if you ask me, I don't see anything good about making a FPS online shooter have random drop weapon unlocks. It didn't work for me, but even if it did you get duplicates. Honestly it's ridiculous, not to mention that you had people just leaving their characters on idle servers all night to unlock things, at least with achievement farming they had to mess around and be at the computer, now they just leave themselves idle in unlock servers. Valve doesn't get a lot wrong but random unlocks in TF2 is not right. BF2142, COD4 etc have much better unlock systems than TF2 pre or post this new pack,

E3 is one day away and I'm still hoping for a good show on the PC side of things, many places are saying it will be quiet for PC. Some exclusive announcements would be great (BF3 pls), even just things like Ep3 footage or Alan Wake footage + release date. Modern Warfare 2 is already announced, no doubt they are going for best game of the show again, but still could be upset but some surprises. Unfortunately the majority of E3 is going to be happening while I'm asleep, so I'll be quite a bit behind, then again I'll have the whole day of news to catchup on when I read it.

I just spent 20 minutes making a longer blog only to stupidly close the window wiping it all out, not fun lol :(

I picked up Guild Wars Trilogy, ncsoft declined my visa card and the in game store said did not pass risk assessment (???) Never had this problem before but I used my paypal account and it worked first time. Currently playing through factions and got my ass/ritualist to level 19. I'm finding it tough going and I don't know how new players without any money get through it.

The main island is for level 20s, I got there as level 15 with medium armor so I was struggling to stay alive let alone do damage, it does not handle new players very well compared to prophecies but hopefully nightfall deals with this better. I would be getting quite frustrated had I not had ample money to upgrade my stuff from my other characters, I'm trying to avoid using too much of it though.

GFW Live has been one mess after another. The latest DLC did not work thanks to a DRM error from MS, they fixed it in a few days but it still doesn't inspire confidence. The third attempt and they can't get it right for the same game. All the DLCs require me to copy the files manually and install them myself defeating the whole purpose. No other digital platform is anywhere near this bad, EA store included. I'm not jumping out of my boots to get it because of this, no wonder they haven't done anything else with the service as it would just be a disaster. Very poor Microsoft.

I completed a review for Dark Sector, summary: Glaive = good.

Read it here on NGN

Additionally I reviewed Zeno Clash a little while ago, unfortunately I was not that impressed with the game

Read the review here

The_PC_Gamer keeps winning pro tournaments and gifted me Red Alert 3, hopefully the art design doesn't annoy me too much when I sink my teeth into the campaign soon.

Well it's been about four weeks since my last blog, and one has to question whether it's really a blog if I'm updating so infrequently. Although I do tend to only do a blog if I have a several things that people may be interested in reading, rather than 1 or none (heh). Therefore this blog might be a bit long.

The L4D survival pack was released, it means 2 more versus campaigns but I haven't really played them because I've been doing survival mode. I quite like surival mode because it requires careful management of ammo, molotovs and focusing your attacks on the tank. Not to mention in some you often need to cycle around to get all the stockpile of items. It's fun to try for bronze, silver and gold, or even beat your best times.

If you don't know, basically it's a crescendo moment only it doesn't stop and they launch tank after tank, smoker after smoker. It's common to have like 4 smokers and at certain points you get multiple tanks. There are good spots on the maps too. games are quick, lasting 4-10 minutes, although our lucky team managed 15:17 on the terminal map, damn that was tough. You are meant to die, but it's still enjoyable for that reason perhaps. Even if it doesn't last me I can fall back to the other two versus maps.

I preordered Zeno Clash when it was cheap on Steam, I finished it yesterday, only about 3.5 hours long. It's an indie title but I didn't think much of it, the combat is ok but at times frustrating, the story is mixed and often silly for no real reason. The artistic s.t.y.le is quite interesting but not enough for me, I wouldn't rush out to buy it at $20 though.

I also recieved a gift from The_PC_Gamer, that being Dark Sector (thanks gama), it's not for sale here in Australia. The game starts off very poorly, and has some fairly ordinary AI. it's the type of game that would not be sevrved by a demo because people would just see the faults. It feels like Gears of War mixed with Lost Planet, but it has this glaive weapon that basically makes the game fun. You throw it and it comes back to you, but you can charge it with elemental damage like fire and ice. You can control it mid flight and you also have things like a shield and normal weapons. The game however gets quite a bit better towards the end, it actually ended up being alright. Just needed more polish.

I'm also playing through Flatout Ulimate Carnage, It's pretty much Flatout 2 with better graphics and carnage mode. But I think the driving is quite a bit better firstly the auto catch up gives you a fighting chance, but more importantly the little physics items on the track very rarely send you drastically off course like they used to do for me in Flatout 2. I actually got a 360 controller recently too since my other one broke and it works quite well with this game (and a few others)

I changed my banner image temporarily to Call of Juarez Bound in Blood, coming fairly soon and looks pretty sweet, Ray has one of the best video game voices in any game. The original was fairly underrated, aside from the sometimes annoying stealth or rabbit hunting segments.

Guild Wars hit steam, that and The_PC_Gamer telling me off is getting to me. I played prophecies well over 300 hours, in the campaign, co-op was excellent but I sadly got midly addicted to the thing:shock: and went cold turkey when factions came. I figure now I have work to keep me occupied it might be time to go back into Guild Wars with Factions, Nightfall and Gwen of the North and see if it's still as fun as it was plus GW 2 is coming. Also at $50 for the trilogy it's not a bad price, the games were retailing here at like $90 AUD each...

I posted my Cryostasis Review up on Gamespot (thanks to all those who recommended it)if you prefer to read it there instead of NGN you are most welcome. Gamespot reviewed it and gave it a pleasantly high score of 8.0, was a pretty good review. Opposingly IGN reviewed it quite poorly and gave it 6.0. It's the first review in a while that I've felt has done the game justice on gamespot, maybe it marks a turnaround for them.

Anyway thats it, sorry for the longish blog but feel free to only read the interesitng bits if you can find them ;)

I finished Cryostasis today, it took rougly 7 hours I guess so I went pretty slow :P. I'm not really sure because I have no xfire tracking or steam tracking to tell me, I usually rely on them when it comes to game length nowadays. The game will come out in the US on the 21st of April I think. It's well worth checking out, I was quite impressed with it at times, but it ran pretty badly especially towards the end. Perhaps that signals an upgrade, but I think the problem was that it got progressively worse, at the start it ran fairly well on my machine

Combat wasn't exactly crysis shooter quality, but it was passable. Horror elements were pretty good, mental echoes were probably the standout along with the fantastic sound effects. If you are interested in knowing more check out my review

Fallout 3 Operation Anchorage was pretty disappointing, it basically took out all the good elements of fallout 3 (exploration, side quests, choice) It was a linear shooter, and fallout 3 is not a good linear shooter. You get some items at the end, but hardly worth it despite the small price tag.

I've just started The Pitt, and it seems to be a bit better, it feels like paradise falls side quest in Fallout 3, At least I'm not in a simulation with no pickups from dead bodies anymore. Too bad I can't take fawkes with me :(

I put my FEAR 2 review up on gamespot if you want to read it.

Max Payne 3 is coming, well all I can say is I hope they don't ruin one of my favourite franchises, I'll be waiting until I see some gameplay screenshots or some videos before I judge. I wonder if they will get the guy who did Max's voice back for this one, the writer and developers are gone so they have a rough road ahead.

The DiRT trailer was hot, but totally ambiguous and irrelevant to the game, hooray for silly marketing. Well it got me to post a link so +1 to sly marketing.

Need for Speed shift trailer makes it looks totally like GRID

I'm still playing left 4 dead, it's gotten beyond addiction stage (what stage is that? Death?) and I'm nearly up to 200 hours in xfire, talk about crazy given that I only play no mercy and blood harvest over and over. I just can't stop playing it.

Finally GTA 4 is my profile header image and since it's been a while since release it's time for something new, suggestions welcome!

World of Goo!

Picked this up on the bargain weekend deal of $5 on steam. I played the demo and thought it's was pretty good. For that price I had to get it. The game is a physics puzzler with goo balls you connect to form structures to reach a pipe. I played though all the chapters, pretty crazy art but a few of the levels were brilliant. You know those eureka moments you get when you work out something? Yeah I had a few of them.

One level, called "infesty the worm" was downright amazing, balloons and momentum and careful placement got the job done. Fair bit of variety in the game too, different types of goo balls and hazards. It took me about 4 hours to finish just the main levels, but you can go for the OCD (rescue every possible goo ball, but thats silly if you ask me :P )

I picked up dirt to get some racing fun, it is fairly fun, graphically nice. But it's unplayable for me, it will stutter and drop framerate ever 10 seconds or so. Forcing me to account for this drop in framerate when I turn corners, it sucks badly. This happens low or high settings. GRID didn't do this too me at all, so I have no idea whats going on. Hopefully DiRT 2 hasn't got this stutter issue.

My Penumbra collection is complete with Penumbra Overture. I played the tech demo a long time ago but never got overture partly because of the problems with ATI cards at the time. It still has some problems with missing walls but mostly it's fine. I thought the game was alright, but I preferred black plague, less annoying dogs, more puzzles and overture had some weird puzzles. THere is basically no combat in the game, you get spotted or if you aren't quick enough = ded. Not so fun when you have no idea where to go. BP > Overture > Requiem.

Cryostasis is a new 2009 game I picked up on Gamers Gate for $40 USD. I've been following the game for a little while, the unknown nature and 1c publishing got me on the train. Basically it's not something we've seen before. I've played a bit and first thing I've noticed is how thick the atmosphere is. The game will flash you back to previous times on the icebreaker ship and you may see what happened. First impressions are cross between penumbra and bioshock, but still quite different and I appreciate a bit of difference ;)

I have done two mental echos. Baiscally saving somebody from a fate. One was saving myself from drowning, the other was defending myself against attacks in a pretty good scary set piece.

Pictures!

I have written a fear 2 review at NGN. Ended up being a bit harsh I guess :P

Oh and I can't stop playing Left 4 Dead. The game is my top played game on xfire and I'll start a session and then 3 hours go past and I can't believe it, then I keep playing.

I saw the Far Cry movie so you don't have to. Don't watch it, the action is pretty dumb, the acting is dumb, the location is not even a tropical island. No beaches to be seen, it's filmed in Canada. The mutants are low budget, the deaths and sounds are terrible. Jack Carver has a german accent and while he's not terrible the movie pretty much is. Even makes Yuri from red alert look bad.

Finally my new games to buy list is empty for the next two months so please somebody bring me news of something coming out in april or may that I can sink my teeth into and buy, can be obscure, can be indy, can be most genres except sports / fighting / country and western!

I had FEAR 2 on preorder and picked it up on Friday the 13th (yeah that was the launch day here) and have completed the single player. The game took me just under 6 hours to finish which is shorter than the original. If I were to pick out two obvious things to compare the original with 2 they would be

a. It is much easier than the original

b. Also less scary than the original.

It was still a decent game, the slow motion combat is still good fun and they did spend some time getting the pacing right. Levels are probably better, because they are more open but still on the bland warehouse / office ****if you didn't really like that in the original. I haven't tried multiplayer but I will be. I think if you liked the original you'll like this one though, the story is definitely more obvious (and for me the ending was predictable)

Short gameplay vid (no spoilers): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg1jmpVG20w

I did see Slumdog Millionaire this week, and I have to say that the positive reviews from people (like biggest loser) are completely justified, it's a very clever feel good movie, I enjoyed the themes and the links. It's the best movie I've seen in quite some time and I'm usually a big sci-fi action fan.

On the movie front I did also catch Screamers: The Hunting. I didn't even know about this until I saw it on imdb. I was a pretty big fan of the original. The original is based on a novel by the same guy that wrote story that Blade Runner is based on, He's a pretty good sci-fi writer and I think Screamers is an underated film (the special effects are very poor) but the premise is cool. The hunting is not as good sadly so unless you love screamers avoid it :P

Own Unreal Tournament 3? Well you can now register your retail CD Key with Steam. When the update comes March 5th, Steam will simply update it and you can get the steamworks achiemvents. I recommend installing the game first, then copying the files over to commonUnreal Tournament 3 in your Steam directory and it should only update a few files to save you download time. Anyway I'd like to see more companies use steam and let people register games on steam. Maybe Epic are pretty happy with Steam sales if they went out of their way to introduce these new features?

Finally I have completed a review for Left 4 Dead. Posted over at the site (New Game Network) I mentioned in my last blog. I will be posting it up on gamespot in a few weeks time as I did with Prince of Persia review

Also I hope Shepard doesn't die for real in Mass Effect 2 he and me were pals :(

2009 is well underway and although I'm still not quite used to writing dates that end with 2009 or 09 I'm sinking into this year with ferocity and you know I mean gaming!

I got Mirror's Edge on Steam and have already finished it. People says it's short and people are right. The game took under 5 hours for me and thats with a few repeated sections that are pretty common in platforming.

The game seems like a decent port, runs well for me, no crashes, controls work pretty well. I appreciate the unique look of the game even though it does get pretty bland if you ask me, adding colors to boring rooms isn't going to win you GOTY, either are the very mediocre animated cutscenes.

Gameplay wise I think it lacks, I think it's far too thin. The combat is pretty bad, Most of the time they let you avoid it and just run away. A few places they seal you in an area and let you run around and take these guys down. Usually it means, die ~4 times then work out where everybody is and you can then redo it all.

I don't really recommend the game unless you see it for a bargain price, it just doesn't have enough to keep you interested past those 5 hours.

Almost up to 80 hours with L4D, what a crazy evolving game it is. Still no new content which I think sucks (hurry up valve) but it's really the only thing I can punish the game for. The game is just an amazing coop experience both on survivors and as infected. Pulling off ambushes with precision is so mood lifting.

Of course there is plenty of bad players, plenty of rage quitters but I'd probably take 2 bad games for every good game I get it's that fun. I started with coop against the AI, but once you go to versus and get into it I doubt you will go back. I raised my score for it up to 9.0 because it just has amazing longevity for a game that has really 2 campaigns in it's defining mode (about 8 maps I guess). Time for 1337 score.

FEAR 2 single player demo. Well my impressions are that this is definitely not trying to break new ground, gameplay and scares are retained. Story is told via pda notes instead of answering machines. Graphics are a little bit of a step up from FEAR 1, basically 100+ effects and post processing.

The black bars kinda annoy me in this (they didn't much in ass creed or mirrors edge) but I guess playing fear 1 without these bars, then coming to black bars and a circular hud and I feel like I am missing out on so much more. The film grain is bad enough but thankfully modders got onto that crap.

"Hey guys lets add film grain!"

"How much? Just a little bit during scares?"

"nah lets add enough so they can barely see anything all the time, that's scary!"

"Why don't we add black bars for 4:3 users so they can see even less?"

"Sure great ideas people"

etc.

Whats the decision making process behind these final choices? Even if you design the enitre game around awful film grain and black bars with obtrusive HUDS - LET THE PLAYER CHOOSE to have them or not. Guess what developers, you aren't right 100% of the time, choice is the key to success.

Got gifted indigo prophecy from The_PC_Gamer and at the start I was having some problems with the button mashing. Eventually I found some reflexes and started doing fairly good. The story is pretty good except the last few hours which I felt were just kinda nonsense, pretty good game though and gets me interested in Heavy Rain which hopefully comes to PC.

Also was gifted Dreamfall and again this is a story driven adventure game. I didn't enjoy this as much as indigo, but it was still good. Lots fs really long dialog that could have been much more concise and the last 1/4 wasn't really a lot of puzzle solving, just walking back and forth. Kinda sad ending though.

My firefox extension for gamespot went public a few weeks back but I forgot about it, you can download it and use it to navigate gamespot / feed news directly to the menu. Stats page say people are using it but who knows where or who are. I haven't updated it in a while though, but I use it everyday.

Last but not least my friend and I decided to create a gaming focused site for news, reviews and articles. New Game Network. If you read this far of my blog (or skipped to it) then I consider you a fairly loyal reader. Well I consider anybody that clicks on my profile a loyal reader :P. You are most welcomed to register, visit or otherwise mention it. We have just started so are still working out things from logos to forums. We are also tentatively looking for contributors who will be willing to work together with us.

Basically we want to provide a fairly simple website where people can come read news (PC atm) and read our reviews or articles, we aren't going to try to take communities away from sites like giantbomb or gamespot. We want to provide gamer opinions from gamers who don't get paid to write reviews, don't get paid to attend public relation demonstrations and don't get money from game advertisers.

I have put up a review for Prince of Persia 2008 on this site, I have yet to put on gamespo, but probably will at a late stage.

Thats all for now. Australia day is tomorrow so I get a three day weekend which is most excellent. Time for more Left 4 Dead I guess :D