Category Archives: Personal

Personal posts, ie; about me.

This Week, I Have Been Mostly Playing…

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This week I have been mostly playing…

A mix of things – a massive game of Sins of a Solar Empire (still incomplete), replaying Warhammer: Mark of Chaos’ Good campaign, Calamity Annie, Jill Off, the first episode of American McGee’s Grimm, Guitar Hero III and many hours of Team Fortress 2. Some of these games are worth explaining more about…(now with pictures!). Continue reading This Week, I Have Been Mostly Playing…

This Week, I Have Been Mostly Playing…

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This week I have been mostly playing…

Lots of games! Well, some. I’ve been trying my new Wii, which I brought last week, in a bundle with Smash Bros. Brawl, which is fun (playing the singleplayer campaign with my brother mainly and learning the controls). Also the packaged Wii Sports made the rounds – I must play more of this, it is fun! 🙂

The reason for a Wii? Price mainly. There is no way I can currently afford a full Xbox 360 or certainly not a Playstation 3 console – I wanted a second controller for certain, which this bundle had saving me a bit of money. I need to get a few odds and ends for it (memory card, component cables) which are under a tenner to finish it off. Suggestions for awesome Wii or Gamecube games to pickup are welcome 🙂 (Zelda, however, is not my thing, so scratch that 😉 ).

Another reason for a Wii over the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 is I am terrible at FPS games on a console, and play them on my PC. I don’t need to have duplicate systems to play the same things (especially at the extra price that comes with console games, and subscriptions, etc), and the Wii has several unique games. Maybe I’ll get one of the consoles at some point – after a price drop, or for the Playstation 3, the inclusion of their actual real rumble controller – yes, Europe still doesn’t sell them yet! what’s up with that?!

On the PC, apart from Team Fortress 2 (now the Pyro craze is dying down it’s more fun), I’ve played through a long, long playthrough of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I found on sale, which was pretty good (I made sure to download a bug and improvement mod – it still crashed on me too often however – BSODs all round!). The game really kept my interest – despite it’s flaws, and I might write up some deeper analysis on why it kept me entertained, and what was good and bad about it. The word “potential” might come up a lot – hopefully the games “prequel” Clear Sky will improve upon the games design.

I’ve also played a few games of Dawn of War – Survival Mod. I enjoy just setting up an awesome defence (Imperial Guard rocks my world), and it is well made, even though it is beta. I’m a sucker for this kind of thing.

My DS has been host to Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, and it’s sequel, which are both enjoyable after playing so much Elite Beat Agents. My bus or car ride to work is long enough to finish a fair few songs, although hard mode on both is, well, hard (The first also is dead slow to restart some songs, making it an agony to lose near the end!). There is not much need for a translation either, it’s pretty obvious what is going on, and the Japanese pop references and in-jokes wouldn’t translate very well I presume 🙂 – the general humour however is pretty universal!

No VGMS today, revision instead!

Ahh, University Exams. Joy. Or not, since I prefer coursework to be honest.

Since I have 5 of them I’m spending the 3 or so hours (plus a few more to prepare) to do the show dedicated to revision, minus the time taken to write this 🙂

I might have time next week since once this week is over I will only have 2 exams left, so not needing to do 3 sets of revision at once, and will plan a special theme show – request still welcome of course.

London Game Career Fair ’07 visit

I visited the London Game Career Fair to do some filming today – I basically did a quick interview about each company (me, being like I am, off camera). Once I get them done they should be up somewhere for download, and I’ll put it on the IGDA forums – and should be useful for people interested in each company, although I don’t ask any tough questions.

Sadly, LucasArts and THQ couldn’t talk without express permission, while Ubisoft had only just recently brought Reflections (who produced Driver and other racing games) from Atari, and rebranded it Ubisoft Newcastle (I think they did anyway…).

I was finished with just about everyone but EA at the end, and so got time to film their 1 hour Q&A about themselves. Sadly, I didn’t have time to make any of the other sessions, since I arrived a bit late.

I also enjoyed talking to several companies about programming, although currently I lack the kind of unique demo which would sell me to them 🙂 some useful information came out of it all however.