IainThe first time I played my PS3 almost half a year ago, I vowed that this would be my new console of choice. Forget the 360, the PS3 has much more power under the hood and it has a blu ray player as standard. My first thought was “why did I ever doubt this machine based on its lack of PS2 compatibility?” my second being “why are people willing to throw their cash away on a console that provides more red rings than a curry house on a Friday night when Sony have made this stunning console?”.
A few months later, my PS3 had basically become a curvy blu ray player and I started asking myself “Why am I picking the 360 over this stunning console?”
Is it the controller? No, I’ve grown up with the Playstation controller and love its light weight and smooth analogue sticks. Is it the graphics? No, games like LittleBigPlanet and Killzone 2 prove that PS3 can walk all over the 360’s capabilities. Is it online? No, I barely play online any more. Is it the games selection? No. Most of my favourite games on the 360 have been multi-platform releases.
Last week I found the answer. Achievements.
Yes that’s right; this is yet another blog about achievements and the art of whoring them. What sort of gaming writer would I be without one?
On Thursday, I managed to cross the 20,000G threshold and since then, I have hardly touched my 360. Why? Because I can’t be arsed squeezing out enough achievement points to reach 25,000 yet. I always told myself that I would only buy games if I thought they looked good. I always stood my ground, shunning easy achievement duds such as Avatar and King Kong in favour of games that I thought would provide some fun or challenge. That is until I reached 18,000G at the beginning of the month. Once I reached that figure, something changed. I stopped giving a shit about gaming integrity and purchased Fight Night 3 (although admittedly it is now one of my favourite 360 games), Prey, Bionic Commando and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I spent close to £100 on games, purely to bump my gamerscore over 20,000. I can barely afford food this month because I wanted those sweet 2,000G so now I’m contemplating pawning my xbox for groceries.
Yesterday spelled payday for me and in my mind payday translates to “how much cash can you waste in 24 hours day”. Among other, not so essential, items such as food and a new toothbrush I managed to nab a few new games, a red and black 360 controller, a new router and a pose-able Ryu figure. The item that I’m most impressed by though is the Xbox answer to Sony’s Eyetoy, the Live Vision Cam.
Oh the fun I had taking hundreds of stupid pictures for my Burnout Paradise license before finally settling on the “startled cat” look I currently have, then building an army of Chewnicorns in Viva Piñata: TiP by constantly scanning the same Piñata card.
There’s still so much I have to do try out with the camera, like taunting people I take down on Burnout Paradise with a photo of my cheesy grin. Scanning my handsome visage into Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 so people know it was me they shot down for the 100th time. See how well my poker face holds out in a game of Texas Hold ‘Em and of course, get drunk with some friends and create awesome films in You’re in The Movies. I can see me and the Live Vision Cam being friends for a long time, even if it’s just to send stupid pictures to my friends over live.
The Xbox Live Vision Camera is currently bundled with You’re in The Movies for £14.99 in store at Gamestation or £14.98 online at game.co.uk (compared to the £35 – £40 for a separate Live Vision Cam in most stores)
To quote Gloria Gaynor, first I was afraid, I was petrified but unlike Miss Gaynor I was more concerned by the living dead eating my insides than a man walking out on me. But will I be able to survive with the new downloadable content that was released for Valve’s award winning Left 4 Dead?
April 21st, a date that zombie enthusiasts and co-op loving gamers alike have been waiting for. For those who haven’t played Left 4 Dead, the premise is simple. You play as one of four survivors (Zoey, Louis, Bill and Francis) of a zombie apocalypse, with the other characters being played by either AI, friends or random people online. There are 4 campaigns to choose from which are all unlocked from the start and feature the sort of locales you would expect to see in classic zombie flicks such as stand offs on a hospital roof, chases through cornfields and battles in a deserted airport. On paper, and indeed playing on your own, Left 4 Dead does get very repetitive but play through it with friends and L4D is endless fun.
And to think people used to worry about ants at their picnic...
Now onto the Downloadable Content. The first, and not so major, addition is the inclusion of the two previously omitted campaigns (Dead Air and Death Toll) in versus mode. While this addition adds a fair bit more variety to versus modes, it really should’ve been included on the disc. The best part of the DLC is an entirely new mode entitled “Survival”. This mode pits the four survivors against hordes of zombies in a constant stand-off at a variety of locations, including a new area that’s never been seen in L4D before. The pace is extremely hectic with only a few seconds between hordes to grab ammo or heal, special infected quickly build up until you find yourself facing two smokers, a hunter and a tank all wanting your brains for a midnight feast and on the whole matches only tend to last around 4 minutes. The emphasis on team play and communication in Survival mode is particularly strong compared to other rounds as you constantly have to watch each other’s backs for special infected. Overall the DLC is very good and as it’s free there’s no reason not to download it. The only thing I would’ve liked to see is achievement points for lasting certain amounts of time etc. but the lack of new achievements doesn’t detract in the slightest when you actually manage to last long enough to receive a medal.
Well it’s a new day and a new month, yes I know it’s halfway through April but I’ve been busy. March has come and gone and with it, the celebration of my year’s Xbox Live subscription renual. A year’s subscription pretty much wasted as the only games I ever played online in the first nine or ten months were Call of Duty 4 and the occasional scrap on Soul Calibur IV. This year’s subscription, on the other hand, brings about a new and improved me. If the old me was a Live virgin, this year’s already leaving so many notches on my gold account bedpost that it may be mistaken for severe case of woodworm.
Let me start by saying that online gaming isn’t a new experience to me. I’ve played many a PC game online and had a lot of fun doing it but my first live experience, which involved me and a small group of either 12 year old boys or 30 year old eunochs who thought they were being clever by camping for the whole match and resorting to racism and rubbish insults whenever they were killed, was an entirely different beast. Now as you can imagine, this isn’t the best way to be introduced to a service you need to pay around £45 a year for, but this is the man who has over £100 worth of Rotostak caging for one dwarf hamster. The months that followed my plunge into the live community were strictly single player affairs, only leaving the comfort of one man’s mission to blow things up in interesting ways for the occasional COD4 battle with a few friends. That is until January. Cue dramatic music.
In January I was introduced to a site called ready-up.net through an advert for new staff writers. In January I joined the forum of said site. In January, dramatic pause, I discovered the fun side of Xbox Live gaming.
This is actually a copy and paste job from my old Blogger page, I know Valentine’s Day was two months ago…
So as almost everyone is aware, Valentine’s Day has not only reared its ugly head but is close to swallowing us whole. So far it’s been a pain in the arse and here’s why. After much dispute with my girlfriend over the weekend as to whether we were going to buy gifts, I decided I would buy her Professor Layton and The Curious Village on DS because she’s been wanting it since Christmas and our local stores have only just started getting stock in.
Two days later
I’m walking around ASDA, perusing the games magazines for any interesting freebies when I see The Guinness World Records: Gamer’s Edition 2009. Now it’s worth mentioning here that the book was initially to be released a few days before my birthday in January but got pushed back a month for whatever reasons. So I pick up a copy, continue my shopping and then head home to tell everyone I know about my purchase. This is where my Valentine fiasco begins because the first response my girlfriend gives after telling her what I bought was “That’s fucked up my Valentine’s idea then”. Of course I offer to return the book but she must of sensed that I had no intention of doing so and decided to think of something else. I get my book plus a new present and my idea for her is still safe.
The next day (yesterday)
So I’m back in ASDA (I work near it so it’s convenient to pop in at lunch) and I’m on a mission; Pick up Professor Layton at any cost. I get to the games section and I’m in luck, they have a few copies left and it’s £5 cheaper than anywhere else in town so I buy it. As soon as I’m back at work I decide to tease my girlfriend a bit and tell her I got her Valentine’s present. She replies “please tell me it’s not Professor Layton, I bought it myself this morning”. Bollocks.
Today
So now, not only have I bought one of the few ideas for presents my girlfriend had, she’s gone and bought the present I actually got her. Now I’m not a romantic sort of guy (surprise, surprise), I’m not good at picking things like flowers or chocolates because I never know what would be best so I’m pretty screwed when it comes to finding a new present. Or am I? About 20 minutes ago, an idea struck me like a goat knocking a child over in a You’ve Been Framed clip. My girlfriend bought a 360 for her son at Christmas with the intention of playing it herself and one of the games she made a big fuss about was Dead Space. My predicament has been sorted, who needs flowers when you can blow body parts off of scary aliens?
As for Professor Layton, well let’s just say I love myself enough to justify keeping it.
Well despite having several years of chances now, most peripherals for the current generation of consoles have been either useful or at least worked how they were meant to, although there are still a few things that have could rival the Power Glove
So with that in mind, here’s my run through of 5 7th gen peripherals that just shouldn’t have been made
5:Chat pads
Ok so they do work and they help with things like web browsing on the PS3 and MSN on the 360 but I don’t know a single person (myself included) who has bought one of these for either console and used it enough to justify the price of buying it. For a start, both consoles feature voice chat which is far easier than having to stop and type out a message in the middle of a firefight and secondly, it’s cheaper to get a usb keyboard if you’re planning to use it with PS3′s web browser
4: PS2 to PS3 Memory Card Adaptor
This is a strange one because the Playstation 3 no longer has any PS2 backward compatibility so unless you’re looking for an elusive second hand 60gb model, there is absolutely no point to buying this. Second of all, the Playstation 3 has a virtual memory card creator so the only reason anyone would ever buy this wo
uld be if they had a 60GB PS3 and a memory card full of PS2 save games. In the long run it would’ve been cheaper to buy an 80GB PS3 and a second hand PS2…
On the other hand, the Nyko PS3 USB Media Hub (pictured) is a great idea, adding two extra USB slots and a card reader to the PS3
3:Wii Sports Accessories
What is the point of these cheap, plastic and often useless “accesories”? just because I get to swing a controller like a golf club, doesn’t mean i want to pay between £5 and £20 for a piece of plastic to put on the end of my Wiimote.
Seriously, if dodging and diving around on my bed like a lunatic while playing Wii Sports wasn’t bad enough, You can now buy Wii boxing gloves to really make yourself look like you’re on a day trip from the mental home.
2:Wii Wireless Sensor Bar
Yet another Wii peripheral on the list (surprise, surprise. The console is full of useless things like this). Now I can understand people buying this if they have their Wii too far away to get the sensor bar near the telly but if they cant get the sensor bar to reach, how the hell are they getting the AV cable to stretch because out of the two, the sensor bar has the longest wire! On top of this, there hasn’t been a single wireless sensor bar released for the wii that hasn’t had reports of a poor wiimote detection and the ability to chew up AA batteries like a fat kid in a sweet shop.
1: Xbox 360 HD DVD player
OK, so it’s not so much useless, infact it was a really good alternative to Bluray, but it was never going to win the battle and most people knew it from the start. Only a handful of studios backed it and hardly anyone bought it until stores started discontinuing and selling it for around £25. HD DVD’s could only really be found in specialist shops and online even at the peak of the HD-DVD’s life span, compared to Bluray which could be bought in most stores with a DVD section and the initial add-on pricing of around £120 meant people could have bought a Playstation 3 with built in bluray player for another £50 or so more than the Xbox and HD-DVD drive combined.
Hello kiddies, It’s great to see nothing has happened in the five minutes since my last post, so with that in mind, here’s part two of my gamespot copy-a-thon, entitled “Lucky number 7(th Generation).
After having an fight over the pros and cons of the three 7th generation consoles with a bunch of xbox fanboys and getting nowhere, I decided to post up my opinions on here….
Graphics
360: Looks the best out of the 3 so far
PS3:On paper it blows the other two out the water but in reality, the cell proccessor is still causing problems for developers
Wii: Basically a suped up gamecube so doesn’t come close on technical graphics although it is much better for artistic graphics.
Controls
360: best for shooters. has a rubbish d-pad though
PS3: the best (not including arcade pads) for fighters but the sixaxis was lame and it took sony too long to get dual shock in it.
Wii: basically a pointer from an interactive white board and a mediocre motion sensor shoved into a controller. Granted it was marketed really well because it even fooled me into thinking it was revolutionary at first, but then after playing wii for a few months I realised how wrong I was.
Games:
360: lots of exclusives. Most of them are good but only a few are excellent
PS3: Has lost a lot of exclusives because they pumped too much money into the console and not enough on keeping exclusive rights. It still has MGS and GT (for now) though.
Wii: well for a start my old nintendo favourites, like mario and zelda, have been done much better on previous consoles and the third party games are either based too much around mini games or are only fun for 10 minutes at a time.
Online:
360: Slightly more reliable than psn but not £40 a year more reliable. It does feel like more of a community than the others although most of that community is made up of pre-pubescent boys who think constant high pitched singing during a game is fun…..
PS3: well it’s free but it isn’t as stable as live. It can also support a lot more players in a game because of the dedicated servers it uses but resistance 1 and 2 are the only games so far to really take advantage of this. the online shop is also a lot better as it doesn’t require you to buy points before getting what you want and there’s a free web browser.
Wii: I can honestly say I haven’t played it much online but the times I have, it hasn’t really been anything special. The shop is alright and the idea of having weather and news channels is good plus it has a web browser if you’re willing to spend 500 wii points
