sprites & bites

Gaming, iPads and a few biscuits on the side…

Category Archives: next generation

Xbox 360 Games Marketplace

Great idea but like everything else run by a big corporation, it is too expensive.

I really want Call of Duty 2 as I have never been able to find it again in the shops but at £20 I think that is far too expsnive for a game which is 5 years old.  If it was £9.99 I would buy it instantly but not at £20, I am not that desperate.

They should really have prices whcih reflect the market for older games.  Maybe have a tier system – new games at near full price, games over 2-3 years old should be bargain bucket.

Unfortunately I think people will accept these prices and pay them which will in turn justify them to Microsoft and they will not bother changing them.

Prototype Xbox 360

I am quite far into this game and whilst it is really quite fun, I am struggling with the controls.  There seems to be far too many options and far too many controls for my hands to deal with.

It is not that the controls do not work well, it is just that there are too many of them.  It can take 4 hours or more to get to grips with what to do and then after upgrading you have to learn a whole new set.  Because of this confusing control set I find I am not actually using my powers to the best of their ability because I forget even what I am allowed to do.

We have normal moves, extra super moves, critical mass moves plus moves which only work in a certain mode and it is all mind boggling.  I think I need 2 extra hands to play it to it’s fullest.  God forbid anyone play this that have a finger or two missing.

Well done to the developer for trying something different but I really think they could have simplified things a little.  The end result is that I am not sure I have the willpower to actually complete this game.

inFamous PS3

I have just finished playing inFamous which was out last week on the PS3. It is very much like Crackdown which appeared on the Xbox 360 a few years ago. The only thing different really is that you have super-human electrical energy powers and that the missions have more structure to them. Most of the side missions are very repetitive so after a while I didn’t bother doing those but concentrated on the main storyline missions. On the whole the game was enjoyable but there were times when the difficulty spiked from really easy to very hard and not much in between. Certain sections of the game were really hard they had me swearing like a grumpy old woman and throwing my controller.

One thing in the game that a lot of games do which annoyed me is nagging me to do things. For example I had to climb a high tower and activate lifts so my partner could get to the top of the building aswell. The game was nagging me and the partner kept shouting at me to hurry up and activate the lifts. There was no timer on these sections so there was no need for him to keep nagging me to get to the lifts. I am playing the game, I know what I am supposed to do, so stop rushing me!

Moans aside, inFamous does have flair and style and explosions aplenty and also the added bonus of being good or evil with your powers. There are times in the game you have to make moral decisions. This can increase your good karma or bad karma depending on which decisions you choose. Obviously if you are playing for a good character then you will want to increase your good karma as much as possible. Completing missions, committing good acts and so on give you experience points which you can spend on upgrading your powers.

It is a solid game and whilst it certainly for me is not game of the year material, I had a lot of fun and that is what games are about. If you can get past the difficulty spiking then this is definitely a game to try and maybe buy. There is a free demo on the PSN store.

Downloading Full Games

Downloading additional content for games for your consoles is a multi million pound business. From small arcade titles to map packs and older games with backwards compatibility. This multi million pound business is here to stay and will only grow. But what about downloading full games? Sony and Microsoft are of course aiming to get everybody to download games and in the future we will no longer have a physical disc to play them on. They hate the rental market and the second hand trade in market – it costs them sales but that sort of business model requires the support of both the consumer and the retailers – retailers who have supported them for years by selling their consoles and games, are the console makers really ready to bite the hand that feeds them?

It is not just retailers who would die but other sectors aswell. Rental companies like Swap Game or Gamesfrenzy would die, disc manufacturers and disc pressing companies would lose millions and the retailers like Game or Gamestation would shut up shop because there is no point in stocking just consoles. Could they live with themselves for making all those millions of people jobless? Money matters more than morals so maybe that point is dead too.

Having a physical disc is also a reminder that you own the copy of the game. I have countless games downloaded on my PS3 and Xbox 360 that I have never finished. I never finished them because within all the tabs of the interface they got lost and I forgot that I actually bought them.

Top 5 reasons why discs should never die

1) Most customers want a physical disc which shows they have something for their money.

2) Rental markets and second hand markets would fail. Consumers will not accept the lack of right to sell their games on when they have finished with them.

3) With no retailers to sell the games they would have no retailers to sell the consoles. Instant kill.

4) People want to be able to take a game to a friends house to play, they won’t want to lug their consoles around.

5) If I want to buy a game for someone as a present there is no way I am going to buy them a download voucher.

I started out making a top 10 but couldn’t think of any more reasons, if anyone wishes to add some reasons please feel free :-)

FEAR 2 Project Origin Review

Previous F.E.A.R games have been quite repetitive in their environments and are famous for having long corridors with samey rooms and not much variation in between. So I approached this game with the feeling it would be more of the same. How wrong was I? The developer Monolith has given us a game which has a big variation in the environments and also a different style to some of the levels. Sure there is still some corridor fighting, but it is no longer just an office block with countless computer rooms all that look the same.

Some examples of the scenes you will encounter are a school, a hospital, a railway station, and the scene of a plane crash in a town. Hospitals, schools and train stations have been done to death in games and Monolith will lose a little bit for lack of imagination, however they have done the levels with such flair and detail that it would be rude of me to mark them down especially given the brilliance of some of the open levels in the game which were so much fun. In fact all of the game was fun and it is very sad that I have now finished the game as I did not want it to end.

In addition to the locales mentioned above, there are also a couple of levels where you step inside a giant mech-suit with rocket laucnhers and just stampede through the town destroying everything. You can get out of the suit at any time to gather ammo and health left behind or indeed you can do those sections without the suits but they might be quite hard to complete. There are also several sections where you use a gun turret to kill everything in sight.

One of my favourite bits of the game is where you are chasing after a spirit that keeps bringing up soldiers like puppets on string. Annoyingly fun stuff.

As with all F.E.A.R games before it, the AI in the game is brilliant and I don’t know of any game I have played yet which can surpass it. The AI will run for cover properly, they will upturn furniture to provide cover and they will crawl through spaces to get to you. They are always moving and running from cover to cover so it is sometimes diffcult to pin them down. This is where the slow motion (press Y) comes in handy. I rarely used it, however if you have a big firefight with lots of enemy moving at you at once you can press Y to slow things down and have more time to aim.

“Alma” the ghostly child returns but is older now and is a young woman and is there to provide you with the scary bits of the game. Games do not usually scare me, but if you are of a nervous disposition you might find it scary yourself. For me, the scary parts concentrated the mind and sometimes I was concentrating so much on the ghostly goings on I could hear myself breathing. In comparison to the older games, this has more weird spooky things happening than before so if you liked the previous games then this is a winner.

There is one very important thing you need to know. The demo is a slicing up of various little sections of the game. It is not a set level but little pieces of most of the levels. Personally I think because of this, it does not give the game justice as the demo is a disjointed mess with the action going from one area to another very quickly. So please do yourself a favour and do not judge this game on the demo alone, it is there to give tasters of the various action within the game but the retail version of the game is very different.

Ammo and health is aplenty on easy mode and you could get by without dying if dying is your frustration. The game took me approximately 10-12 hours to complete.

Graphically, the game is highly detailed and looks every part a current generation game. It has some amazing effects especially when it switches to weird spooky mode. The sound effects are equally as awesome and you would definitely want your speakers turned up – children and neighbours permitting.

I urge everyone to play this game. Hide behind your sofa with your Dr Who Collection if you wish, but you must play this game. Beg or borrow if you must, or if you cannot afford it now, wait until it is a little bit cheaper, but in my uneducated opinion you would be doing yourself a dis-service if you did not play this game sooner or later.

This game is amazing and is one of the best games I have played in a few years and it is clear that Monolith have taken the time to deliver an experience that is well detailed and most of all, fun to play.

EXCELLENT/10

F.E.A.R 2 Project Origin is out now in stores on Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC.

Find more FEAR 2 reviews at GameRankings and TestFreaks.

FEAR 2 Live Event

On 12th February 2009 there will be a LIVE event in London where 8 gamers from around Europe will compete against each other and be the first to play FEAR 2: Project Origin.

Anyone can enter and all winners will have their expenses paid to get to London for the event.

For more information and to enter, visit www.whatisfearlive.com

Closing date for entries is 2nd February 2009