sprites & bites

Gaming, iPads and a few biscuits on the side…

Category Archives: ps3

FEAR 2 Project Origin Demo

Just a quick note to let you know that there will be a playing demo this week on Thursday for F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin.

The demo will be available on Xbox Live, PSN Store and for PC available from http://www.whatisfear.com/

You can see screenshots and videos of this upcoming game in my previous posts

http://www.spritesandbites.net/2009/01/07/more-fear-2-project-origin-screens

http://www.spritesandbites.net/2008/12/22/fear-2-screenshots/

I will be bringing a short review of the demos at the end of the week.

PS3 Mini Keyboard

Last week on a whim I bought the PS3 keyboard accessory which sits on top of the PS3 controller.

It is very strange and badly designed on so many levels I am not sure where to start.

The keyboard clips into place by a plastic hook which hooks under the front of the controller.  It sits over the start, back and PS buttons and has new buttons to replace them, it then reaches out above the trigger buttons.

The Xbox 360 keyboard sits snugly between the handle grips and it is easy to use the thumbs to type quickly.  Because the PS3 keyboard is above the controller over the trigger buttons it is not a particularly comfortable fit, I have small hands so I really have to stretch my thumbs to type properly or slacken my grip on the controller and move my hands up nearer to the keyboard.  It feels quite awkward and unnatural.

The keyboard has its own battery power and mini usb charge socket.  This is quite annoying.  If both your controller and keyboard batteries die at the same time you need two cables to charge them both.  The keyboard does have an on/off switch to preserve battery power but that can be annoying aswell – you may forget it is switched on and be happily typing away at a message only to look up and find the cursor on screen has not typed anything as the damned thing is switched off!

Now the other design flaw which I think is particularly bad is the blue and brown function buttons.  Just like on a laptop, characters not normal to numbers and letters can be found above the normal numbers and letters – you press the blue or brown function key and then press the corresponding key you want – it could be a brown character or a blue one. Under normal circumstances this is an excellent idea and works on all laptops, mobile phones and so on.  But who on earth decided to make brown and blue on a black controller?  The characters are too small as it is without making it hard to read because of merging colours.  God forbid anyone uses one that has vision problems.

And Finally…  the keyboard also works as a touchpad.  Press the button with the hand on it and the whole keyboard gets touchy feely and works like a mouse.  Except there seems to be no double click for clicking on links in the web browser so once you have touched your way to a link you then have to move away and find the enter button to click it.  Again, not very user friendly.

I am glad I bought it because it means I don’t have to fumble around for my USB keyboard if someone sends me messages, but it has so many design flaws that it is not something you would want to use on a regular basis.  Accept it gracefully as a Christmas present, but don’t rush out to buy it.

LittleBigPlanet Frustration

This game is really clever and a great enhancement to games trying to emulate true physics, but it is so frustrating. Some of the jumps are really awkward or feel near impossible. When it comes to a point when I am trying a level twenty or so times then it is losing the enjoyment and just becomes a chore.

I don’t want games to be a chore I want them to be fun. At times, this game is not fun at all and I just want to throw it in the bin tonight. Tomorrow I may feel differently, but today I am crying.

Fallout 3

What a great game. I just finished the main story last night and have a great sense of satisfaction and money well spent. I am extremely disappointed that you CANNOT continue your game in the world after the final quest, so I have to go back to a previous save now to do all the side quests I missed.

The game was very similar to Oblivion, but many times better. In Oblivion I could travel for miles wandering around and not meet anybody and not be bothered, but here in Fallout 3 every step I felt there was something around the corner. I stepped with a real fear that something would jump out on me. I think the cause of that was the post-nuclear-bomb setting. The ruins, the desolate buildings and burned out cars, I was always moving with excitement and intrepidation about what was coming next. Even in areas I had been before and killed all enemy, I felt like something else was around the corner.

Graphically it looks fantastic but I did have a few issues with tearing at times and a few framerate drops. The most annoying thing though was that quite often after saving or fast travelling I would lose my hotkey settings for weapons so had to keep re-assigning them. An annoyance but at least I had no crashes or game killing bugs.

Fallout 3 for me is definitely a candidate for Game of the Year, I think the only one that can beat this now is Call of Duty: World at War, we will see about that one next week.

Saints Row 2 Review

Sandbox games are quite common nowadays but it is rare that one jumps out at you as being a great game. Some of them, like The Godfather, are pretty mediocre and have you driving from place to place doing the same routine and have nothing special to offer. The most famous sandbox series of course is the Grand Theft Auto series and every sandbox game after that gets compared to the last GTA offered. In this case it is the most recent GTA 5. GTA5 looks so much better than Saints Row 2 graphically, but in many respects Saints Row 2 is the better game because it is much more fun with a lot more to do on the side.

Now that is where my GTA comparison will end because I feel that Saints Row 2 is a game that deserves to stand on it’s own merit. The game is chock full of things to do on the side. Not just your drug courier missions or car collecting for garages but the developer has looked past these tired old missions and given us some great fun things to do. One of the side missions was to drive a truck full of poo and to spray it all over the buildings indicated to cause damage to the buildings. You have to reach a certain amount of damage caused for that level to pass. Another side was racing a mini vehicle dressed in a flameproof suit. You have to get to the checkpoints and at the same time riding over bombs to explode them and cause damage to cars and people around. But my favourite has to be “FUZZ”. You dress as a policeman and drive around attending crimes to stop the criminals – you have a cameraman in tow to collect footage for the reality show “FUZZ”. There is a footage bar to complete and the more crimes you clean up you increase the bar to its fullest. Each level is a little harder and you are requested on different occasions to use certain weapons like an RPG or flamethrower to create the maximum footage. The police are on your side as homies during these fuzz missions so if there is one nearby they will jump in your car and help you out.

The main missions themselves are quite varied and my only gripe with them was that I had to fill up my respect level to play the main missions. This involved doing side missions. Sometimes this involved a long drive to the nearest activity to play the activity and the drive all the way back to the mission point. Now whilst the side missions were fun, they sometimes got int he way of what I wanted to do. Some days I just wanted to drive through the main storyline to get to the end and do the activities when I wanted, but they were forced upon me.

Back from the original game are the strongholds. You takle over a stronghold by beating the goons and then that area of the map becomes yours. There are 45 areas to beat. Your strongholds can be attacked at any time though. In the last game the attacks were very frequent and quite disruptive to the flow of the game, but this time around it was pleasant to have only a few attacks to deal with. I think I had 3 through the entire game from start to finish.

Visually the game is not a stunner like some other recent games but it does look quite good. I had a few framerate issues on a couple of occasions but nothing major. One thing to note, this game is buggy. I had crashing of the console, bugs and glitches people getting stuck, homies not following me, and stupid AI who would stand there and do nothing. But despite all these flaws I kept coming back for more. If this game had not been as much fun as it was then it would have been binned days ago.

I thoroughly enjoyed playing this game and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys the openness of sandbox games.

GREAT/10 – A buggy game but such a lot of fun.

Linger in The Shadows PS3

A couple of nights ago I woke up in the middle of the night and somebody was pointing a gun with silencer at me through my wall.  I jumped out of bed and ran into my hallway and there I sat for a good 10 minutes worried someone was trying to kill me until I realised it was all a dream.  Even when I realised it was a dream I carefully went back into the bedroom and checked the wall to see if the gun was there.  It was that vivid that I was convinced it was real.  

This I feel is a side effect of playing too many games, especially ones with guns.  I am sure most of you gamers out there have at one point dreamt about being in a game.  For me it doesn’t happen often, but when it does it is certainly not forgettable. 

What has this got to do with Linger in the Shadows from the PS3?  Well speaking of dreams, this game is like one weird dream.  It is the weirdest, dreamiest game I have ever played, it is like all your strangest dreams rolled into one freaky episode.  In fact it is not even a game, it is an interactive video.  I know after “playing” this game (video) that i will definitely be dreaming about it at some point in the next few weeks.  It is not scary, it is weird – choose any synonym you like… 

Synonyms: bizarre, cranky, curious, erratic, freakish, idiosyncratic, odd, outlandish, peculiar, quaint, queer, quirky, singular, strange, unnatural, unusual

It could be any of those, in fact I would go as far as to say it is quite disturbing.  This video (game) is so strange that every PS3 owner must play it, purely for the experience of knowing what it is like to see a giant cat or a twisted cog or even a flying dog with massive ears.  Even the list of synonyms above cannot explain how I feel about this game.  It is truly unique and not in a particularly pleasant way.  I have no idea what I am doing, there are no help files, no tutorials and you are just thrown into this video with a few icons here and there which mean nothing at all and the video keeps rewinding itself and playing again because I am missing that sweet spot to do something, except I don’t know what or how. 

For the love of gaming gods, everybody has to try this video (game). it is only £1.99 and will serve you with the weirdest game experience you have ever had.  You can then go and dream about flying dogs with gigantic ears.