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Microsoft confirmed a growing suspicion I’ve had for a while with their E3 presentation.

They are slowly losing touch with gamers.

At least 70% of the Microsoft presentation was fluff. They have an amazing piece of technology in Kinnect and the highlight of the show was voice recognition? Couldn’t we have done that with the existing Xbox headset already?

It seems to me as though they are trying to make the Xbox the ‘everyman’ console and focusing on the media aspects a little too much. Gamers, and their Live subs put the Xbox where it is. Invest that money in gaming. Not bringing UFC pay-per-view to the Xbox for smegs sake!

Last year it was motion control dashboards, this year it’s voice control. Neither of which were shown to push gaming forward at all in my opinion.

Well, I’m blown away.

I have just been informed via email of an amazing deal! Apparently, Microsoft are willing to give a £10 discount towards the games on demand version of Halo Reach. Incredible! Right?

Of course, even with the discount the price is still £39.99. For a digital version you can’t trade in, or sell on.

Amazon has it listed as £28.25 brand new. Physical copy in your hand. To do with as you please within reason.

Game UK are selling it for £24.99 brand new. Physical copy in your hand. Yada yada yada…..

Do Microsoft even check the retail price of titles? I mean, I know games on demand has always been somewhat of a scam when it comes to pricing, but this is just crazy.

Let’s assume the worst is true about digital downloads for a minute. Let’s just say, the big reason for pushing it is to knock out the preowned market. Possibly to some extent the rental services too. Would it not be beneficial to price the digital versions at least comparable to the retail price? I’d prefer a little lower considering there are no covers/manuals to print, disks to write, cases to make, and no shipping costs. That does not seem too unreasonable to me.

If pricing were lower I’d support a disk free future. If only to get away from faulty DVD drives in consoles, or the various problems that come from disk based media. Less loading times, quieter console, possibly more life before a console fault, these are things I can get behind when it comes to digital distribution. No questions asked. I may prefer having a hard copy on my shelf and the freedom to trade it in towards a new game (something I rarely do anyway), but the benefits to a disk free future are pretty substantial.

Right now, you would have to be insane to buy Halo reach via games on demand. A certifiable nut. Even if you really, really wanted a disk free Halo experience… firstly, you can buy Reach for £15 preowned. A saving of £24.99, plus you get a physical copy in your hand. One you can take to your friends house and use on another console easily. You could then take that £24.99, buy another preowned title and still go home with cash in your pocket. Even if you bought it brand new at £25 you could still pick up another game from the preowned bin.

Secondly, install it to the Xbox HD. Not quite disk free, but it’s as good.

For digital distribution to ever work, or catch on, companies like Microsoft need to occasionally step outside and check the prices everywhere else in the world.

Slow month for gaming.

1. Guitar – Learnt some new things and started recording some ideas
2. Socom 4 (PS3) – Single Player on Elite
3. Red Dead Redemption (Xbox360) – Second time through the story

So… PSN being down sank my plans of whipping some folks on Socom 4 all month and I had to stick to the single player. Completed it on Normal, half with the Sharpshooter, half with just the Sony Move and Navigation controller. I enjoyed the campaign but it wasn’t anything remarkable. The team based element is quite good once you get into the swing of it. If you try and one man army it and only have your team there as backup you won’t get the most out of it.

If you take your time and set up the teams well it can be very fun to use. You can stealth team mates into flanking positions and set up ambushes very easily. There is also a nice option that allows you to mark targets for takedown, but only on your say so. This gave me a few great moments in the single player.

I’m now playing through the single player campaign on Elite difficulty, with the Sony Move and Navi controller, and recording it for my youtube channel. You can watch me play the first mission here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUpQW3rWpSo

With LA Noire coming up I decided to restart the single player on Read Dead Redemption. Well, technically I put it back on so I could ride through the desert (on a horse with no name) and listen to Ennio Morricone… but one thing led to another and I’m about 5 hours in to the story again. Every time I play I’m constantly blown away at how impressive RDR’s setting is. I could sit and look at scenery for hours in this game!

Mainly though I have been playing guitar. I’d not played seriously in nearly 10 years so had to go back and refresh myself on a few things, and build up the ol’ callouses once more. Picked up some new things and started messing around mic’ing amps up and recording/editing stuff in Audacity. Not sure why I left it so long till playing again but kicking myself for stopping when I did.

Damn well won’t be stopping again this time that is for sure!

Second attempt at a commentary for BFBC2.

Thanks for watching!

“Just one more game” it whispers. “Just one more….”

Lack of posts is due to a Socom 4 beta addiction. Normal service to resume soon.

In the meantime, check out my first attempt at a game commentary…

Just a little something new I’m trying out.

Running around a shoebox map, with CoD killstreaks, and OP melee is about as fun to me as pulling teeth.

That’s not to say there are not things I like about Crysis 2.

Graphically it’s decent. Certainly not what the hype would have you believe though. The nanosuit abilities are interesting and help make navigating the map quite fun.

However… Killstreaks, perks… one hit rifle butt kills… shonky controls. There are too many negatives outweighing the positives in the multiplayer for my liking. I’m sure the offline campaign will be fun, but as I buy games for both single and multi I’ll likely give this one a miss.

My gaming shelf is already overflowing with shooter games and I have no real incentive here to play this instead of Bad Company 2 or Killzone 3. Maybe if I had a graphics card in my PC good enough to run the game at full specs I’d feel differently, and to be honest, I fully expected the console version to not play as good as the PC version anyway.

If you enjoy CoD and Halo, you’ll likely find something of interest here. I’m not sure it will be enough to take many players away from either of those franchises in the long run though given the draw those two games seem to have in the console market, but as always, grab the demo for yourself and try it out.

I’m not saying it’s bad as such, just that there is nothing here that grabs me in comparison to the other shooters I already play. With Socom 4 coming out soon I’ll be set for FPS games for a while anyway (as long as classic mode plays ok. Normal sounds a bit naff online).

Till Battlefield 3 anyway

Finally played through the Undead Nightmare DLC for Red Dead Redemption.

Not bad, not bad at all. In fact, one of the better DLC releases if you ask me.

Firstly, because of the zombie content, it’s sufficiently different enough from the main game that I’m certain it was not denied inclusion to make more money. Many other devs put out DLC that really seems as though it should have been on the disk in the first place (That’s right Assassins Creed 2, I’m looking at you here with your missing ‘chapters’). Not only that, but a lot of developers start talking about how much the ‘day one’ DLC is going to cost before the damn game even ships these days!

I’m sorry, but even if you have a legitimate reason for not including that DLC as part of the retail package, you do yourself no favours in gamers eyes by talking about how much it’s going to cost on launch day before the game has even shipped. Delay it a month, give gamers a chance to sink their teeth into the game before you start the squeezing extra cash from them maybe?

Anyway, back on topic. The Undead Nightmare pack was perhaps some of the best value I’ve seen in a DLC pack outside of the recent Battlefield Vietnam addon. A new 6 hour single player campaign (albeit with some issues), some new weapons, new enemy types (or at least some reskinned ones that act a little differently), and some good use of the existing game mechanics in a fresh way.

I think I actually sank about 16 hours in total in to the DLC storyline. That’s not far off what I actually spent playing the full game if memory serves me right. Now that’s value in my opinion.

If that weren’t enough , the standalone DLC disk doesn’t even require Red Dead Redemption. I could be wrong on this, but as far as I’m aware you can grab the retail version and play it as a standalone game. It costs a little more than the marketplace version, but still. A stand alone DLC release? You can’t argue with that really.

The singleplayer campaign of the Undead pack begins with Marston protecting his family from a zombie attack, unsuccessfully as it turns out. You are then tasked to try and find the cause of, and cure to, the undead plague sweeping the land. Many people believe Seth and his glass eye to be the cause, some think West Dickens and his tonic are responsible, others believe the infection was brought over the border by the mexicans.

Along the way you will encounter several characters from the main game, alive and undead as it happens, and complete various themed missions for each in an attempt to discover the true reasons surrounding these events.

Missions include burning graveyards to ensure no more dead rise from the graves, securing towns from zombie attacks (enabling you to save in a safehouse), and many other undead related malarky.

Missions still have a ‘same old, same old’  feel about them. Once you secure one town, every other town is more of the same. In addition, towns only stay secure for a few days before another attack. Once the town is overrun you have limited time to secure the location before the survivors are killed. If all survivors are killed you lose that location as a savepoint. Not really that big of a deal as they tend to stay secure long enough for you to get a lot done without it being an annoyance. Quick travel helps immensely here and securing a town never takes too long. Either wipe out the zombie invasion or provide the survivors with ammo to take care of the issue themselves. If you give the survivors ammo, you will have to clear up any remaining zombies to secure the town, so either way, you’ll be fighting a lot of the undead.

The undead provided me with some issues. Specifically some of the smaller animals at first. Headshots are the only way to down enemies as you would expect, but the smaller the target, the more frustrating it is to headshot. Especially if bushes are obstructing your view. I gave up killing undead animals and elected to speed past them all on my horse in the end. There is an achievement to kill one of every undead animal in the DLC but I lack the patience to deal with that right now.

Combat against the normal undead zombies is fine and you soon get into a headshot rythm. Occasionally the control system will fight you at exactly the wrong time, but nothing too bad.

The new weapons are great and I especially appreciated the ‘boomstick’ of sorts you eventually get for the authentic Army of Darkness vibe. The new enemies are a bit… meh. Well the normal zombies are fine, the ‘special’ types are really just copies of Left4Dead2 special zombies without any tongue in cheek reference to why they are like that. Something I found a little odd given R*’s tendency to reference things for a joke.

Other than that, the usual Rockstar humour is at work here. Seth can be found hosting an undead party of sorts, West Dickens is still attempting to peddle his wares as zombie repellent when actually it attracts them (yeah, boomer bile). The film director spots the opportunity present and asks you to bring him live zombies for a film he is planning. As you can imagine, this does not end well.

Ahh yes, and for all the San Andreas fans, there is finally a Sasquatch in the game. It’s actually quite a sad mission really, but I wont ruin it for you.

Conclusion?

Great DLC, well worth the price of admission and a great example of how to implement paid content.

So I was always a huge fan of the original Tony Hawk series. I thought it lost it’s way in terms of map design somewhat by the third game, but the fourth made up for that. The THUG and Wasteland additions killed off any interest I had in the series for good.

TH1 & 2 were great games. Yes they were still arcade based and you were racking up million point scores with never ending runs, but they were enjoyable for gamers and skateboarders alike. Somewhere along the line, Neversoft felt what the series needed was more Bam Margera and Jackass related humour. What most players over the age of 12 felt the series needed was more of what actually made the game great. Skateboarding.

When challenges degraded into mimicking Bam Margera’s trademark idiocy splashed around like so much urine on a drunks shoe (to re-quote myself), many gamers were understandably turned off the series. I personally played the games because I skateboard in real life and I enjoy any extension to that hobby that I can get. Once the Jackass style gameplay was added and focused on, I walked away from Mr. Hawk, never to look back. His recent attempts to win gamers back by bundling the same old game with an expensive, unreliable, plastic gizmo have fallen on deaf ears. In fact, as I understand it, it has been so poorly received they have slammed the final nail in the franchises coffin, given up and geared the entire thing to appeal to the twelve and under age groups. I’m sure TH’s marketing will include some guff about trying to get the youngsters into the sport, and if it does then more power to him, but I think TH, Neversoft, and Activision know that they will never reach the lofty heights they once enjoyed and grew complacent upon.

Now it’s Black Box’s turn. Now is the age of Skate.

Read more…

Completed Transformers: WFC late Saturday night.

Given that it only came out on the Friday, you could be forgiven for thinking perhaps the game is not that long. Well, much as I’d have loved it to be longer, the truth is, I hammered the single player a LOT on Friday night and Saturday day/night. Once I got started, it was very hard to stop to be honest. The full game weighs in at around 10+ hours depending how you get on with the bigger battles.

As I mentioned in my last TF post, the gameplay is solid doing everything you would expect from a third person controlled shooter. The transformations  add something a little new to the genre however with vehicle forms being just as useful in most situations as robot forms (In some cases vehicle forms are actually essential to avoid high levels of damage during some of the bigger fights). The system feels very balanced and I found myself constantly shifting in and out of vehicle forms enough that it felt like second nature… as it should in a Transformers game. Flip to jet mode, turbo across the room to grab some health, quickly fire a few missiles, flip back to robot form – use special abilities/gun, back to jet form for evasive actions. The system feels.. well, it just feels right.

The story was particularly interesting to me as a Transformers fan, and Hasbro obviously agrees as TF:WFC’s take on a prequel to the events of the original animated series (and the 1984 movie) is now officially declared cannon in the Transformers Universe. For good reason too.

SPOILER ALERT

The game takes place in the middle of a civil war between the Autobots and the Decepticons. Featuring two campaigns, played chronologically, the first features Megatron and his quest to obtain Dark Energon which he intends to use to control Cybertron. The second campaign deals with Optimus becoming ‘The Last Prime’ and his attempt to cleanse Cybertron of the corruption Megatron has unleashed.

It’s a basic plot, but along the way fans will find much to enjoy here. Omega Supreme’s involvement is nothing short of epic in my opinion. The fight goes on for a long time, and while not always in direct confrontation with Supreme, he affects every step of your journey through that level. Starscream’s defection to the Decepticons was of particular interest for me. I’ve long been a fan of Starscream and his treacherous ways so to finally see something of his origins was really great, plus all his trademark attempts to overthrow Megatron and assume control are all present and accounted for.

High Moon have really done a great job at accurately portraying the characters largely as you remember them from the 80′s. The opening Decepticon cutscene shows Megatron annihilating one of his own underlings after being questioned on the logic of crashing his spaceship directly into Starscreams orbital station. If that doesn’t say ‘Megatron’ then I don’t know what does.

Having not played the Multiplayer much I can’t comment more than I did on the demo just yet, but the single player experience is everything and more any Transformers fan could ask for. I was happier with WFC than I was with the recent perversions to the franchise made by Michael Bay, as was a fellow Transformers fan who played the last 3 Decepticon levels with me. 3 Levels out of 10 convinced him it was better than Bay’s Transformers. Not only in terms of story, but also visually.

5/5 – I’d highly recommend this to any TF fan. Up there with Batman Arkham Asylum in terms of setting the bar for quality in licensed games.

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The universal greeting works every time!

I’ve been playing the multiplayer Transformers demo a little over the last few days and I have to say, I’m surprised at how good it is.

Don’t get me wrong, it wont bring anything new to the table that other 3rd person shooters already haven’t, but at it’s core the combat and controls feel very solid. Based on that fact, plus developer interviews regarding the story, the art direction (G1 FTW!), and the trailers showing snippets of the Omega Supreme/Trypticon fights.. I’m very optimistic for this title to say the least!

More updates after I pick it up tomorrow. Feel free to add me for some co-op action…