>>Nostalgia For Infinity

I told you it was a week for games. Games, games, games. Don’t you just love ‘em? Some people like fast cars instead. Some people like fast cars and games, and these people might like Racedriver GRID, which is full of beautiful shiny cars. You can drive them into walls very quickly and suffer no consequences whatsoever. Someone notify The Sun!

My review of Civilization Revolution has just gone up over at Den of Geek. As a long-time fan of Civilization I was really pleased to be able to review this, and I’m also glad that the game didn’t disappoint.

If any of you pick up a copy of the game and fancy a match over Xbox Live, let me know!

My review of the latest Dragon Ball Z beatem (kudos Damien Murray), Burst Limit, has gone live over at Den of Geek. I’m quite pleased with it overall. I wasn’t sure how qualified I was to review a beat-’em-up as I don’t play a huge number of them, but fortunately the game proved to be both accessible and comparable to one or two recent titles that I have played. Plus it’s based on an anime so I got to poke a bit of fun, which is always good.

My review of the lengthily-titled Penny Arcade Adventures Episode One: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness has gone online at the multimedia shrine to geekdom that is Den of Geek. It’s my first piece for the site, and hopefully the first of many. Check it out here.

I did quite well with the achievements for this game, and I’m not normally much of an Xbox Achievement hound. By the time I finished the game I’d gotten 155 out of 200 points, and would have done better if I weren’t rubbish at counterattacks and blocking. Clearly I didn’t spend enough of my youth playing beat-’em-ups against my friends (although I did beat Civilization on the Emperor setting, so it wasn’t a total waste).

On its original release in mid 2005 – that’s “February 2006″ to we lucky few European gamers – Psychonauts rapidly accumulated substantial critical praise. From the lofty perspective of 2008 this is best illustrated by a brief look at some of the awards the game garnered: Eurogamer’s 2005 Game Of The Year, a BAFTA Best Screenplay, Best Writing at the 2006 Game Developers Choice Awards, and a host of awards from Gamespot including Best Voice Acting, Best Original Music and Best Platformer.

Further, Metacritic presently ranks the game with a healthy score of 88 – with only the Detroit Free Press and games(tm) ranking it under 80. It can safely be said that in the eyes of the arbiters of entertainment, Psychonaut was well-received.

Perhaps inevitably, it was a total commercial flop. » Read the rest of this entry «

Thanks to the generosity of Eurogamer.net, I got in on the closed beta action for ncSoft’s forthcoming SF MMORPG, Tabula Rasa. The setting of the game sounded promising. Avoiding the usual high fantasy guff peddled in competing products such as LOTR Online, World of Warcraft, Lineage, Overlord, Everquest, RuneScape (etcetera ad infinitum), the game billed you as a new recruit in the Allied Free Sentient Forces. The AFSF is a coalition of species (though you can only play as a human) defending themselves from the encroaching war machine of the near-unstoppable Bane. It’s as hackneyed as they come but sometimes a computer game can get away with that sort of backdrop, provided the game itself is entertaining enough to allow you to slip into a comfort zone of immersion and suspension of disbelief.

And the game has promised much. Archlord Richard Garriott, most famous for his landmark Ultima series of CRPGs – not to mention popularising the nascent MMORPG genre with Ultima Online – had spoken of a blend between traditional MMORPG dice-rolling combat mechanics and the immediate vicerality of the FPS genre. Tabula Rasa, we were also promised, would be a dynamic and persistent universe, in which the conflict between the Bane and the AFSF ebbed and flowed, with various bases and map areas falling under the control of different forces. To gain access to the rewards of a certain area, you might have to work together with various other players and AI squads to capture command points and drive out the defending Bane. This sounded promising, particularly when applied to a huge swathe of the game world (or worlds – Tabula Rasa boasts several planets), and was something I’d previously only seen as a recently-introduced high-level game subtype in City of Heroes/Villains, and as a promised feature in 2008′s Warhammer Online.

So this beta is quite significant. Although nominally it’s an attempt to weed out bugs and streamline quests and gameplay in advance of the game’s imminent October 2nd launch date, it was also an opportunity for several thousand fans to have a crack and see what they thought. Speaking as someone who’s had their eye on this title since mid-2006, I was quite eager to give it a try.

Perhaps inevitably, I’ve come away somewhat disappointed.

» Read the rest of this entry «

I originally wrote this review in August ’06, and I’m reposting it here now because who the hell reads Gamespot user reviews? I know I don’t.

» Read the rest of this entry «