I don't usually get around to playing video games all the way to the end, but with Ratchet and Clank I've managed it. And not on "easy" level too. It really is a splendid game. I especially like some of the weapons which are great fun, as are the mini games. I picked up a secondhand copy for the PS3 at the knockdown price of 15 pounds, which is very good value.
Next stop, Uncharted.....
There are not many things that improve themselves after you buy them. Spend twenty quid on the latest blockbuster book from Jordan and it is unlikely to improve in content over time. Buy a Girls Aloud CD and, although you might get to tolerate the tracks after a while, it won't suddenly sprout extra songs and arrangements. But video games seem to be different. I've just spent a little while upgrading the copy of Burnout Paradise I bought a few months back. Now I've got proper day and night and bikes to ride. In short, a great game just got greater. The upgrade is automatic for Xbox and PS3 owners and works a treat.
A lot of video game manufacturers walk away from a game as soon as it is released. Sometimes they don't even hang around long enough to make patches to make the game playable. It is nice to see that Criterion are in it for the long haul.
Spent a big chunk of my Bank Holiday working, but I did find some time for Lego Star Wars. I've enjoyed it so much in the past that when I got a chance to buy the entire saga (all six episodes) on one disk I jumped at it.
If you've not played with the game then where have you been? It is a classic, not least for the quality of the cut scenes which are wonderful. It is also very had to get killed and two player action is a hoot. I have very fond memories of working through "Revenge of the Sith" with number one daughter. Much more fun than the film.
The new game is very much more of the same, but there are some nice tweaks here and there.
...and the Lego Indiana Jones game will be out soon.
I feel terrible. Today I bunked off using the Wii fit (which is excellent by the way) so that I could play Grand Theft Auto IV instead. Now I know that the fitness program is going to give me a hard time when I next use it. Mind you, I'd back Nico against a weighing machine in any kind of fight. Oh yes.
I managed to get myself a copy of Rock Band for the PS3 (that is the one which works in the UK). All I had to do was travel to Seattle, got to Fry's, cart the thing back to my hotel room, unpack it and cram it into my suitcase (it just fitted) and then carry it back.
Easy.
(I left all the empty boxes in the hotel room. I feel a bit bad about this, they might think I've left them a copy of the game to play with, when all they find is a bunch of cardboard and packing.)
Anyhoo, I got the thing home and it is worth the effort. Particularly if you look at how much they are going to charge for the game upon UK release. I've worked my way through Easy mode on drums and I'm now moving on to Normal. It really does feel like drumming and we had a quick go at multi players and the impression of being in a band really is there.
The only slight snag is that the drumpads are a bit noisy when you hit them. So I've bought some felt which I'm going to use to damp the drums. I'm going to get a circle cutter and some foam and hope to make a proper job of damping them down a bit. In the meantime I'm going to use a time-honoured technique for making sure I can't hear the drum pads.
Turn the music up.
I've always liked Gran Turismo. Ever since the first version on the Playstation 1 I've enjoyed it. Of all the car games I've played it seems to capture the spirit of driving better than any other. I was a particular fan of the PS2 version, I even bought the force feedback steering wheel with the game on the day it came out, which must have been nearly seven years ago.
So, on Saturday I bought the Prologue version for the PS3. I was expecting it to be good. I wasn't expecting it to work with my nearly seven year old steering wheel. But it is and it does.
Once you've played a driving game with a proper steering wheel you can't go back. My first ever attempt at this was with the Mad Catz wheel for the Playstation 1, which I used with the original Need for Speed. I blu-tacked the thing to my desk and had a whale of a time getting caught by the cops. They only had around four or so "cuff and stuff" videos for when you got pulled over, but they were great fun none the less. The actual wheel was a bit primitive, what force feedback you got was provided by a large elastic band, but the sensation of driving was much better. I've been through a few odd devices since then. There was that strange Necon twisty thing, and a very odd jogcon force feedback controller which sort of worked. But nothing beats a real wheel.
I never got around to buying the wheel for the Xbox 360, maybe I'll get one some time. But with Gran Turismo a steering makes the whole thing like driving. It is hard to turn when you expect it to be, and you can feel the weight of the car shifting on the tyres as you go into corners. You can even feel the front wheels letting go at the start of a skid. I've spent far too much time today trying to coax my little car into third place on one of the B series races (the solution for me was to ignore the racing line and just blast around the outside of the track) but I've enjoyed every minute of it. If you have a PS3 you really should have this game. And a steering wheel.
If you are after an engrossing and beautiful RPG for your Xbox 360 you should get Lost Odyssey. It comes on four DVDs (there is only just room in the box) and it looks amazing. The characterisation and dialogue is also excellent. I'm not much good at these things but number one son (who takes this things very seriously) is. And he likes it.
I got a new game on Saturday. Burnout Paradise. Number one son said I would like it, and he is right. I got the PS3 version, but it is also available for Xbox 360. I've always been a big fan of Burnout games. I seem to remember getting at least the first couple and greatly enjoying them. The format of the Burnout games have been pretty much the same up until now. You work your way through a serious of increasingly difficult races of slightly different formats unlocking new challenges as you go until you either complete the game or lose interest because it gets too hard.
Guess which one I do.
Anyhoo, this format has been seriously tinkered with. There is still progression, but it is much more free form. You can drive anywhere and try anything in the huge city that is laid out in front of you. Traffic lights at junctions serve as the kicking off point for a variety of different racing missions. Win a few and your licence gets upgraded, you get a bigger car and so on. The sense of place is hugely impressive, you really do feel that you are in a genuine location. The driving is good, although with Burnout I always feel that I am flying the car rather than steering it. The crashes have to be seen to be believed. Bits come off your car and get scrunched up in a most realistic manner. And yet...
They have taken away the big green arrows. I used to like these. They told you when and where to turn. In the new game it is all about learning routes and finding shortcuts. And the driving map doesn't rotate to face the way you are going. You have to figure out orientation from a little pointer. I hate having to do that. You get some help telling you when to change direction, but it didn't do much for me. You can lose a race because you miss the turnoff. You can't easily resume a race if you get left behind. And the weather seems to always be the same. Bright sunshine and harsh shadows. The game is undoubtedly richer and more complex than it used to be, but it is also harder to figure out what to do next.
Some aspects remind me a lot of Mid Town Madness, a Microsoft game of some time back, where you had a whole city to play with and a bunch of mad drivers to take on. However, there was much more of a sense of fun about that affair, I used to love racing using buses.
Burnout Paradise is nearly a great game. If you want the impression of driving round a city the only game that gets close as far as I'm concerned is Need for Speed Most Wanted, which I reckon is much more fun (even though the graphics in Burnout are better). The network play could be great, but I've not tried it yet. It gets so much right, and is so well constructed that I really should love it more. I enjoy playing it, but I don't have the big stupid grin on my face that I get when I play some other driving games.
Number one son brought home a copy of Guitar Hero 3. This is the new fangled one with the wireless guitar, which is very nice. It also has a very wide range of different songs supplied with it. Hardly any of which I've actually heard of, which is a bit of a problem really.
The first Guitar Hero was packed with tunes that I knew. They were not the original versions, the weasel words "..as made famous by.." appeared next to most of the artist names, but that didn't matter to me. At least they were covers of stuff that was familiar.
The new version seems to have gone the other way. Rather than copies of very well known material they now use original versions of stuff that nobody knows. So I end up trying to pick may way through a tune that I've never heard before, and don't particularly want to hear now. They've also fiddled with the two player mode and added stupid battle modes where you can snap your opponents strings and overload their amplifier, which all seems really silly to me. Add to that some daft duelling parts in career mode and I think we are talking about video game franchise that is in the process of jumping the shark.
Some modern computer games are deep. Very deep. Mass Effect is like this. Far too deep for me. It is a role playing game where you have to interact with a whole bunch of people to get the job done. What happens to you do depends on what you do, and how you treat other people. This aspect of the game is very impressive. To someone watching the gameplay it looks very natural, and the feeling of actually being there talking to the other characters is very strong.
Number one son bought a copy of Mass Effect for the Xbox 360 last week, set himself up as a straightforward, honest and caring engineer, and went out to right a whole bunch of wrongs across the galaxy. He doesn't like the inventory management, but he does like the gunplay and the plot is quite compelling. I've seen the game on sale for less than 25 pounds, which represents fantastic value for something which could keep you busy for a rather long time.
If you are a PS3 owner who is short of money (perhaps a bit of an oxymoron - although actually buying one can leave you a bit strapped for cash) then you should seek out this months official Playstation magazine. It has a Blu-Ray disk on the cover with a whole bunch of playable demos on it. I know that most of these are available for download, but I'm the the kind of impatient fellow that doesn't want to wait overnight for 800M of data to trickle down the broadband just so I can try out Sega Rally.
Turns out that Sega Rally is actually quite good. Nowhere near the simulation quality or graphics of the wonderful Colin McRae: Dirt game but it does have one thing that Dirt lacks, other cars on the road with you. Fighting against the clock is one thing, but ramming an opponent's car into a tree is another. Even though they instantly put on a burst of speed and zoom past you at the next corner. I think I'd ultimately find the lack of realism or feeling of control a pain, but for a quick half hour of powersliding for virtually nothing it is worth a whiz.
I then had a go at Stuntman: Ignition which struck me in the limited time (five minutes) that I had the patience to play with it to be deeply unpleasant. Maybe I'll go back and have another go. Maybe I'll be tempted to try one of the other twenty or so games on the disk instead.
One of the benefits of Blu-Ray is that it can hold a whole bunch of data. It is nice to see this ability being used to good effect.
In a weak moment today I got hold of a copy of Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii. And it's lovely. I'm having to exert my famous iron will to avoid losing time playing with it when I should be reviewing book chapters.
Ah well. Perhaps tomorrow....
Some time back I got a copy of table tennis for the xbox 360. When the Wii came out I remember thinking how great the game would be on that platform. So I was well pleased when I found a copy up town. I checked the reviews and they seemed ok so I bought it today expecting great things.
And it has been downhill ever since. I just can't get the hang of the controller and the game just isn't fun for me. I'm going to have a few more goes before it gets traded in, but if you are thinking about this title I'd advise you to try before you buy. Like I wish I had.
I've only just got around to playing Colin Mcrae, "Dirt" on my Xbox 360. I got it for my birthday ages ago (at least it seems ages ago) and I've been too busy with other things to have a go. But tonight I put aside a couple of hours for fun (it is Saturday after all) and fired it up.
I love it.
I've not been that keen on Colin Mcrae games in the past because they seemed too focused on technical accuracy and genuine handling for me. (translation: I crashed all the time). But the new one seems to have toned down real life to a level I can cope with, albeit at rookie level, and I think it is great.
I had a go at the truck racing stuff, which seems to have taken several leafs, nay perhaps a whole bunch of chapters, from the PS3 Motorstorm game. It has the same bouncy handling, insane opponents and funky vehicles, but without the charm or sheer improbability of the tracks, which all look a bit dull to me.
But the proper rally championship is another matter. Me and my little Clio have been tearing up a storm, hurtling through very impressive looking locations in the UK, Italy and Germany. The handling is just right, very believable but sensibly forgiving. And the bonnet cam view is wonderful, until you go off the road onto the verge, where I found myself flinching as foot high plants smashed towards my face. One of the best features is the co-driver who calls out instructions as you hurtle towards the next blind jump. Once I'd learnt the grading scheme (the smaller the number the nastier the curve - get that the wrong way round like I did at first and things can get very frightening) he really helped me get the car into position for the next part of the course.
And it was nice to have a rumbly gamepad for a change. For a variety of technical and legal reasons Sony left this out of the PS3 and I see it as a huge omission. Nothing brings home just how hard you've just hit that tree like a controller that suddenly tries to leap out of your hands. I notice from the instructions that Dirt also supports the Xbox force feedback steering wheel, which is looking very tempting.....
Until now I'd regarded the rally mode of Gran Turismo as the ultimate in off road driving fun, but Dirt, with its superior graphics and greater variety, is the new rally king.
I like silly things. Always have. And the more out and out daft that they are, the better it is for me. Elite Beat Agents for the Nintendo DS is definitely silly. We are talking "FBI style agents with big hair solving problems through history by the use of dance" (including helping someone who looks suspiciously like Leonardo da Vinci get the Mona Lisa). Deeply silly and perhaps a bit strange too.
You control the game with the stylus, using it to tap out beats, follow notes and twirl things around. The action takes place via a sequence of little stories, each of which is illustrated by animated cartoon sequences. There is no reason on earth why any of this should work. But it does.
If you think that video games are designed by percentage players, who use focus groups and cunning market analysis to decide what will sell and what won't, then Elite Beat Agents will come as a bit of a surprise. There is no way that something like this could have come about in that way. Sega must have just locked a bunch of programmers in a room with an X-Files DVD, a pile of manga comics, a copy of Parappa the Rapper and a children's encyclopedia.
If you like silly games, this is for you.
I've found a way to survive marking. It goes like this.
Seems to work a treat.
Only got to level 3 so far, but great fun
If you've got a PSP you ought to get this game. Recommended by number one son (there is no higher recommendation, believe me) it is worth getting just for the frantic Japanese music and the look of the thing. I picked it up for ten quid last weekend. You should too (except for the last weekend bit - which would require a time machine).
So it was up with the lark (in a manner of speaking) and onto the PS3 to see if the games had arrived. And they had. And they all work well.
Tekken is Tekken, looking much better now than it did in San Francisco. For the price it is very good value. It is obviously not a next-gen game, there are some graphical issues which mark it as a kind of PS2.5 release, but for the price it is darned fine value and should satisfy my need for a fighting game until something less demanding than Virtua Fighter comes along.
Flow is weird. You guide a strange creature around by tipping the gamepad in the desired direction. You eat food, you get bigger and other things try to eat you. Quite mesmeric for a while, but with an attention span like mine I'm not sure it will get a lot of play. Then again, for less than the price of a packet of cigarettes it is OK.
Lemmings is a blast of old school fun. I played this one a lot on the Amiga, and was worried that the absence of the mouse would make it tricky. However, the game has been slightly altered for gamepad navigation and I must admit it works well. And they still make that nice sound when they die.
Tonight we finally got around to playing Sega Virtua Tennis on the PS3. It is really fun. We started off playing singles, but after number one son had beaten me a couple of times I figured it was time to move on. So we had a go at doubles. We squared off against a couple of computer controlled players who wiped the floor with us. So, in an attempt to make our game easier, we turned one of the computer players into a girl and tried again. And they wiped the floor with us once more.
The game is tough. Getting the ball back over the net is not that hard. Getting it back in such a way that your computer controlled (or otherwise) opponent can't then immediately smash it past you is a bit more tricky.
I was especially interested in the graphics of the game. It is one of the few that runs in the highest resolution mode that the PS3 supports. And it looks jolly good. The various locations are rendered with loving care, and the crowd looks amazing, with hundreds of individually animated people watching intently as you blast the ball out of the back of the court.
The only real problem I've noticed is that the players, although wonderfully rendered and with fantastic motion capture, have a strange, unearthly pallor which makes them look to me a bit like the undead. Not that I've seen many undead up close you understand, but I've watched a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if that counts.
I know that drawing people is really hard, and that this is state of the art. I've noticed a similar effect in other computer generated content that tries to depict real people and I'm not sure what can be done about it. To my mind the simple cartoon graphic faces of the players in the Tennis game in Wii Sports look more "human" than the beautifully drawn players in this game.
What I really want I suppose is a game with the depth and visuals that Sega has, but with the warmth, character and easy controls that Wii Tennis gives you. But in the meantime, I think that Sega Tennis is going to provide quite a bit of fun.
Hull at 8:00 am this morning
I don't think that we needed to get up early and dash up town. But we did anyway. At 8:00 am there were around 10 people outside the Game shop, but in Virgin, where number one son had placed his order, things were very quiet. So number one son got his machine, and then I got mine. Hint: If you are a student you can get 10% of the machine and any games at the moment at Virgin, if you can find one in stock...
Actually, finding a Playstation 3 in stock does not look like too much of a stretch at the moment. Everywhere we went we saw signs advertising the fact that there are plenty to go around. Whether this is gamer apathy, good production by Sony or the high price of the console remains to be seen, but it does look like anyone who wants a Playstation 3 can just go and buy one.
Then again, the "sold out" phenomenon is not how it has always been, I remember buying a PS1 when it came out and that was certainly not an all night queuing job, I seem to recall getting that a week or so after launch. I guess it all started with the PS2, and everyone now expects demand to outstrip supply or the launch is deemed a failure..
Anyhoo, we got the machines home and fired them up. Mine is plumbed into the big telly and the decent sound system and fits very nicely. It was a bit of a pain to have to endure a twenty minute firmware upgrade before I could play with the games, but the results on MotorStorm were worth the wait. I got three game titles (I've been saving up for a while), the other two being Sega Virtua Tennis (so realistic that in my first game Tim Henman lost) and Resistance: Fall of Man (not played it yet but it has Grimsby in it so it must be great).
I must admit that MotorStorm is so good I've not played anything else much yet. It shows the console off for what it is, a very powerful beast. There are lots of different vehicles on the screen at any one time and they all bounce off the scenery and each other in a very realistic way. If I have one criticism it is that it shares with many other race games the "First to Twelfth" behaviour where slightly misjudging the final corner can take you from a winning position to last in the field as they all tear past you. But then again, this might actually be quite realistic.
The console itself is an impressive piece of kit. It runs very quietly, is immaculately presented and has one or two really neat touches. I loaded a bunch of pictures onto it and it has this very groovy viewer where your shots are dropped onto a tabletop as if they were real prints. I'm pretty much going to get my entire record collection onto the thing, and a goodly number of my photos too. I downloaded the demo of Gran Turismo and things look very pretty. Tonight we watched the Blu-Ray version of Casino Royale and it was awesome, with genuinely jaw dropping quality.
This must be around the best time to get a video game console. There are no bad ones out there. Each of the three has something to commend it. Hard core gamers moving into the next generation can go for the XBOX 360, where its maturity and good range of software pay dividends. Those after a quick fix of sociable good-times can go for the Wii. And those who want something to put under the telly which will serve as a media hub, get them into HD video and with the promise of some genuine innovation in the future can dig deep into their pockets and splash out on a PS3.
We started the day bright and early. At 9:00 we were learning how to use shaders at an XNA lab.
Plenty of nice monitors for the XNA lab..
It has to be said that I'm not actually a great video game programmer. But after today I'm a lot happier writing shader code. Even if it looks a lot like C++. Once we'd got our flashy music player working I bailed out of the lab and headed for the next keynote. I really wanted to see the next man speak.
Building Mr Miyamoto
Shigeru Miyamoto is a true video gaming legend. The man behind Mario and a host of other Nintendo classics last came to GDC 8 years ago, and today he was back to give another presentation. The slant was broadly similar to the Sony pitch yesterday. Community is good. Games which are fun are good. And we now have games which can bring in people who up until now have never played games. Including Mrs. Miyamoto. The presentation ended with some mouth watering footage of Super Mario Galaxy.
Coming to a Wii near you soon
At lunchtime I took a bunch of pictures.
Reflections on a city square
Flowers
Another nice day
Later on there was another community themed talk, this time by the brains behind EyeToy, SingStar and Buzz. It seems to me that games are getting more and more mainstream, and soon they will be part of life for pretty much everyone. Later we went for another wander.
567 Pine
Grant
More nice lumpy streets
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
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