Well i think phisco nuts or whtaver the hell u call the game is cool. Why? Because lets face it people the game is very odd. The character kind of looks like a cross between a bee and a human.
You pretty much summed up my entire thoughts for the game. I’m either loving it immensly when I driving like a loon and ramming people off the road in an aggression car in Road Rage, or swearing at it and hating it whenever I do a burning lap or race.
DMC4 – somehow the demo didn’t grab me. I thought the first one was awesome but never got the next few – and I’m not convinced about this either. It just seems, dare I say it, too *slow*.
TUROK – Slow, laborious and generic. Not impressed – and the characters don’t hold any interest.
THE CLUB – a good idea but I can’t see the longevity. It seems to be shoehorning single player onto a multiplayer game.
NO MORE HEROES – now this I am looking forward to. A distinctive and surreal game that needs people buying to move the gaming industry forward in terms of creativity.
UT3 – a big fat meh from me, I’m afraid – although blowing up Ronan Keating would seriously tempt me.
LOST ODYSSEY – a year ago I would have said a big ‘no’, but somehow Blue Dragon got under my skin and 40 hours later I have to say I’m sorely tempted by this. Especially with the LucasArts linkage.
YES. Thank you. I’ve come across too many bloody ‘oh this is awesome’ reviews that after playing the demo I frankly do not trust. This is the first one I can identify with.
I hate driving games, but Burnout Revenge got me hook, line and sinker. Like you I loved the aspect of shaving precious seconds off on Burning Laps and the intricate trial and error of Crash Mode, and knowing they were missing or altered did not please me.
And the one thing that did annoy me more than anything on the demo (and this seems not to have been picked up by anyone else, so maybe it’s just me) was that crashing into the back of car was just not that satisfying. Smack into the back of a sports car on Revenge and you could ping it across three lanes of traffic and land it head on into a truck. It was brilliant and exhilarating and turned out to actually involve skill. Pile into the back of a car on the demo, and what happens? It shoves forward about five yards, and you drop down to 20mph. Excuse me?
So is that still the case? If so, I’m afraid Criterion will just have to go and fuck right off.
Sorry Ooshka, Traffic Checking is certainly out… almost. It’s in the game, but it seems to be only for very large vehicles and at slower speeds.
Its fustrating because its often ambigious whether or not you’ll actually get a traffic check so its left for “oh phew, I thought I was going to crash, but I got a traffic check” instead of going out for blood and sailing down the road, knocking away cars left right and centre!
It will also slow your car down a lot, so it’s as good as gone in Paradise :(
Man, you completly summed up what i was thinking.
I do love this game for its road rage which has been my favorite event in all the burnout games and its just as good on here, but everytime im in a race i’ll take a quick glance at the compass and then i’ll have rammed up the ass of a car (or wall)
Or if its not that i would have gone up a ramp thats landed me complely off the route. Plus traffic checking has been pretty much binned so your not safe on either side of the road anymore, same goes for burning routes. But the online mode is great.
But another thing is, where are the crashbreakers? they where so much fun in Revenge but now we just bounce of the floor and try to hit some cars, they ruined it so bad!
I’m selling this game in a few days, its the biggest gaming dissapointment i can remember
I’ve read a dozen reviews of this game that contain mainly the reviewer trying to play burnout revenge on their copy of burnout paradise. It’s as stupid as mourning the lack of open-world freedom in burnout revenge, go play the game you want to play instead of complaining that the new game isn’t just a shinier version of the last one – god only knows there are enough titles in the burnout series that are simple tweaks of the earlier releases.
Only bit I don’t like is no drivers – I want motorstorm ragdoll crashtest dummies flying through my windscreens, if it’s a driveaway I want broken arms and floppy necks. Empty cars is more spooky when everything else is so carefully rendered. I guess I’ll have to wait for the “burnout luxury” paradise polish next year …
“go play the game you want to play instead of complaining that the new game isn’t just a shinier version of the last one – god only knows there are enough titles in the burnout series that are simple tweaks of the earlier releases.”
But I think that’s kind of the point – a shinier version was kinda what we wanted. The total overhaul has left out a lot of aspects of the Burnout evolution that fans really liked. It was a big risk on Criterion’s part and it’s hasn’t paid off for me and some others. So I am going to go a play the game I want to play – and save myself £40 in the process.
Having the original Flashback on the Virtual Console is something that I’m very much looking forward to. Fade to Black in no substitute that’s for sure.
As for Theme Hospital, the PS1 version is really slow and hard to control with a regular controller so unless there’s some way to play it with a USB mouse i wouldn’t really recommend it.
BTW Mark, what Urban Chaos do you say is underrated? The 3rd person PC/PS1 action game with a black female lead or the more recent FPS with a ballistic shield one? I avoided the former at its time based on bad reviews (PS1) but I was a bit curious about the other at one point.
Oooshka:
Yeah, he used to write crazy children books, and I assume this is what he’d think goes on in a hospital.
Theme Park’s cool, but I hope you don’t think Another World is anything to do with Flashback!
Alochetano:
The GTA clone with Tomb Raider inspired Darcy Stern for PS1/PC was really awesome, If I remember correctly. Not sure about the new one, but I know it’s nothing to do with the PS1 game :P
This was damn better then the original Theme Park. Great graphics, sounds, music, and it all worked really well, and was more fun too.
Theme Park was paltry to this. I still have it – I played it last year, in fact. I might have to complete it some day – the last few hospitals are so huge!
I agree, Rez is incredible, the XBLA version is a must have.
I feel like Rez is a game of the future, we’re only seeing version 0.5 and the real edition will be released when the technology is right; it could work with future controllers that the Wii only hints at, displays far more involving and deep than an TV, sound setups that echo through an entire room.
It’s an attack of the senses. In an illustrative sense, humans have 5; games can only ever hope to stimulate 2 – 3 at a push. Rez arrests and constricts both your visual and audio reaches the entire time you’re playing that to leave the game isn’t to turn off the Xbox, but is to make a jarring disconnect from the incredible world of Rez.
Pachinko, I’d be more than happy to leave by behind the classic Burnout legacy as long as they kept behind some of Burnout’s most important features (crash is gone, will Burnout 6 have no boost?!) and made a truely fune game. BP just falls short of the mark.
I thoroughly enjoyed my first 4 hours of playtime although I have to admit i have never played any of the burnout games. Still, I’m a big racing fan and i was on the fence when deciding whether to get the game mainly because the demo doesn’t quite represent the actual game. I find the complain on the lack of restart to be absurd when you’re in an open world that this game is in. If you’ve played enough, you will end up racing the same race maybe 1/2 hour later as oppose to just after losing a race (or in some cases, esp. idiots who hates losing, prior to to losing a race). This game has the two most important elements that make a racing game fun, a sense of speed and control.
We’re recording right now. 30 mins in. The guys are currently talking about Assassin’s Creed. Bacon is saying he doesn’t like Ubisoft as much anymore. And now minigames.
Hey guys we’re still recording any ideas what to talk about
Edit: and we’re done. It’s a bit of a mess, but hey, it’s got no stupid structure, and it’s pretty entertaining. Hopefully we’ll be back in to the swing of things more in episode 2.
Looks rather swish, and any promised content is more than welcome!
One thing though that’s semi-related- my Google Reader subscription isn’t updating with your posts, with the last dated the 26th. Due to the crash or are Google just being twats again?
Looks good, though honestly I can’t really tell that much of a difference from ver.4. Still, a little botox always helps in keeping things looking fresh.
Just something to think about for update 5: you’re pushing content that people read wayyyyy down the site. You might consider more on the sidebar – Rock Paper Shotgun does a good layout with the content visible on smaller screens. Notably, my macbook barely can see the first entry since you’ve got the ads, topbar, banner, and usually a huge picture on each entry. :)
It is only a suggestion in your best interests, at least in my opinion it is. Maybe cut the top top banner by half and cut the size of pictures you put at the top of posts by half and it’d be much more bareable. Going further; bin the top menu bar (which repeats some sidebar content) and make the sidebar more prominent with the same links.
Otherwise good stuff, not too huge a change. And I too don’t get RSS updates – what’s up? If you’ve changed the address, you need to at least put a redirect in so it doesn’t simply break every existing feed :)
Okay, I’ll leave it a few days, and maybe re-subscribe or whatever it does. I must admit it was lucky I checked this site manually to look for updates ;)
Andrew, you definitly make some good points; I guess thats the curse of designing sites in a huge resolution.
The banner could always be smaller, but I really like the huge images in the posts; video gaming is graphical and some have amazing artistic style, to squander that would be a huge shame.
Yeah, your RezHD one is fine – and put as many images after the first body of text / the jump to “more” as you like. :)
Just my Macbook suffers, haha. It’s only got a 800 high resolution, which if you factor in toolbars cuts down a bit more.
But don’t worry about it; it’s only my opinion (I do think the top top toolbar is a bit redundant still ;) ). I’m still going to come to the site anyway, since I use RSS to see new posts :)
I’ve played a couple of the burnout games before BP and loved them.
BP’s open race system, I find is fun. There’s no restriction on the route you take to get to the finish, just so long as you get there first. The AI is prety thick and the other cars don’t always take the quickest route, so you can find one that suits your driving style.
I do miss the old crash mode, but the rest is all good in my books.
re: Turok…
I loved the first one. Simply a well-made game, good mixture of aggression and intelligence required. The story and character were engaging.
The second had some truly great weapons, and the graphics were ok, but it didn’t have the same unique feel that the first one did.
After that it all went seriously wrong. Generic, frustrating, and I lost interest.
Could have been a good series. Unfortunately ruined, and this new one looks like an abomination too.
Still, at least it gives you a great excuse to have an image going from the main banner to the article’s banner ^_^ I played the mobile game the other week, and it was appalling – like a poor man’s Prince of Persia, without ANY stealth or human characters or anything. There were pits filled with cobras, perfectly parallel and rigid. I hate mobile games.
I enjoyed the game on the 360 and even though the mobile version was quite good. This however I will be staying well away from.
The Ouendan style bits, ridiculous as they look, seem to be the least of the problems. The videos on Gametrailers looked pretty bad (and not from a technical point) and this review seals it. Thankfully.
Aww crap, I hope I left enough money on my card after buying Medal of Honor: Heroes 2. I’ve been playing a proxy-ised version of the beta for the last month or so.
Oh well. I’ll do what I must because I can.
Personally I thought it was a poor game…very little to it! We’ve seen it all before in the past with button tapping but done so much better! If that wasn’t enough the single cart multiplayer is amazingly slow…leaving you an unbarable wait between each event!
Surely games are marked out of 0 – 10 rather than 1 – 10.
The idea of marking is you start at 0 and gradually add marks to a score for positive aspects on what you are marking.
only dealing in integers, and where 0 is an average game, anything below 0 is “below average”, anything above 0 is “above average”.
And the highest and lowest score (5 and -5) are reserved for really really super amazing games and really really bad games respectively.
Needs moar biscuits. This should be Biscuit Gaming Blog.
So yeah, minigame compilations are pretty much pointless nowadays, since nobody’s interested any more. Feel the Magic was awesome when it came out, but now about three quarters of games on Nintendo consoles are like that, everyone’s had their minigame fill.
People don’t see 7 as ‘average’, people see 7 as ‘playable’. People don’t like to play games under 7 because it means that their quality is questionable in many regards. Of course, as you said it is questionable, however all games which critics and public have both liked have been above 7 in scores.
I don’t mind BGB’s 4 star rating system. It’s short, it’s snappy. Although I do not like to advertise my website through others’ (as shown by the fact I do NOT include my website URL in any comment forms’ “Website” box, I feel my rating system for my own review site; 50Hz Gamer (www.50hzgamer.co.uk) to be fairly effective. It’s a /5 rating, however takes place on a scale. One end marked with a 0 for “Bad” and a 5 at the other for “Good”. Games further up the scale are better, 3/5 (or mid-way) are ‘average’, everything under is poor or awful (although I’ve never given a 0/5 score before).
I once had a system which was based off tick and cross at either end of the scale with no numbers. However it seems to have degraded into numbers anyway. Oh well.
Spore promises tonnes of interesting features like your creature being uploaded to the net a populating tonnes of other players’ games.
The other attractive part is how your evolutinary tract will evolve over the course of the entire game; the way you make the dude in the first stage and the way you interact with other creatures could very well make you inept at space exploration, advanced combat or creating civilisations. Careful considerisation of evolution, diplomacy, war, exploration and the juggling of factors lead to interesting insights.
I want to get into the world of Spore and just see how intelligent the game is; will my grotesuqe Frankspore find it difficult to trade and alliance with other factions, will my fast and nimble yet weak and weaponless Spore be able to colonise the galaxy, despite it’s lack of combat expertise.
And Will Wright has hinted at something in the very middle of the universe, guarded by a super race of Sporians – Will Wright’s giant floating head?
-Select the Hermitage Race in St. Petersburg.
-Change reverse to on under advanced options.
-Select the Dodge Challenger Concept.
-And you should get the achievement on the first jump unless there is a certain distance you need to jump or something and you don’t end up with enough speed. But I got it with no problems on the first jump.
Are you the one? (Matrix Reference)
-Start a custom race.
-Select the Hermitage Race in St. Petersburg.
-Change reverse to on under advanced options.
-Select the Ducati 998.
-Go over the first jump and while your in the air do a 360 with your camera.
Not a bad review, although I’m surprised that one flaw of the game wasn’t mentioned. The terribly designed respawn system, allowing the player, with enough time and effort, to take down a big daddy no matter how under equipped and resource exhausted, on the smallest slither of health. This removes any fear you might’ve felt when facing off against them simply because if you were to die, you’d appear round the corner ready to continue giving the Big Daddy a black eye, over and over again.
I think this is great news not least because of the C64 classics now coming to the Wii but because of what it implies. My hope is we’ll see the Amiga classics come to the system! Imagine if they started doing classic PC games like the X Wing series or Elite too?
Finally, a note to Nintendo, start releasing Gameboy and Gameboy Advance games. I want the original GB Mario platformers!:D
The Virtual Console needs a price overhaul. Most (if not all) C64 games are very short and simple, so should be the cheapest. SNES games are a bit expensive at 800, especially next to 600 for MD.
C64 had some good games I guess. HMV used to sell (inexpensively) CDs packed with an emulator and hundreds of ROMs. It makes the idea of spending a couple of quid on one C64 games far less appetising.
Nintendo do need to release GB games, though :D
Shame most of the c64 titles I like are gory ones (Forbidden forest etc) and probably won’t show up on ninty’s kiddy friendly Wii. This is interesting news though.
I was a bit of a PC elitist back then, and Goldeneye couldn’t hold up to the superior mouse and keyboard, using LAN to avoid fighting for screen space and titles like Duke 3D, Quake 2, Hexen II and Star Wars Jedi Knight 2. It’s iconoclastic to fight against such a rabid fan base, but I think there is some rose tinted nostalgia in play here.
nintendos really been taking the piss this whole wii cycle… for the most part ive been really disapointed with it. they can fuck off it they think people are going to pay to play and still mess around with friend codes and sub-standard online functionality. My wii now pretty much is just a VC machine. god knows if they’ll ever release brawl over here too.
Pay for play? Seriously, I uhm-ed and ah-ed about signing up for Xbox Live Gold, and that was a service I trialed for several months using free trial cards where ever I could. It was great and the unison between Xbox Live and the Xbox 360 just felt quality. Online on the Wii and the DS… Well, let’s just say I consider the 360 as a well built shed, you would trust it. the WFC? It’s more like an Ikea shelf, after you’ve tediously set it up (adding the friend codes for each and every game) you just don’t trust it because you know you have left over pieces in the box.
So to hell with these paid services, especially since Nintendo is making huuuuuge profits off the Wii, raw profit off VC games and even the consoles themselves… Nintendo are just going to alienate their consumer base if they start making you pay for something which they’ve been presenting as free thus far.
I doubt this’ll see release after all the fuss Nintendo made over the rights to the name a month or two back, but if things do get settled out between them then it’ll likely see a release pretty soon, seeing as the game was practically finished before the publisher issues began.
The reason this game is loved by so many people is because of its importance. It was one of, if not the, first ever objective-based first person shooters (I’m very prepared to be proven wrong on it being the first). Before GoldenEye, the good FPSs involved just getting to the end of the level, only having to shoot things that got in your way. GoldenEye, however, demanded more thought. You had to take out cameras to avoid raising alarms, bug computers, photograph documents – all the kind of things we now expect and take for granted. It all added up to an immense feeling of actually being Bond – something no Bond game since has managed. When you watch the film after having become so familiar with the game, it’s easy to forget that the film came first. It’s like watching one of those now common crappy films based on video games. For a lot of people, GoldenEye was also the first FPS they played using the N64s revolutionary 3D stick. Now I’m not going to get into the controller vs. mouse/keyboard debate, because it’s pointless, but GoldenEye was designed for playing with the 3D stick and it was a great new experience.
So there are my reasons for still loving GoldenEye. If this ever does get released, I’ll be buying it (pending getting an Xbox 360 :/) and simultaneously once again cursing Nintendo for selling Rare. Mind you, Rare is now very different from the young, idealistic team who created GoldenEye…
Recently discovered your podcast and its very entertaining! I just wanted to know what the answer was to the other puzzle (ball in hole). Personally i thought the answer was WATCH since that is ‘on-hand’.
I REALLY disagree with this review. Zero Gravity is fun and the controls are easy and good actually. Did you by chance used the Wii Remote? Because the controls are 100% much better with the Gamecube controller.
Zero Gravity is a good game. Around 3/5 rating or so.
The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai is a real live arcade game.
The creator made it in XNA for a contest and one of the prizes which he won was a Live Arcade contract.
We’re doing once a week… we might pull it down to fortnightly, but it’s hardly unheard of. But if you’re thinking of skipping any, skip this one, it’s not as good as 2.1 :P
I find it had concentrating for an hour and the fact I can’t do much else while listening to it, maybe I should chop it up into 10 minute sections and play it in audiosurf :)
Hey Rubberfishy, I’m quite a big podcast fan and I like to listen while playing games – not everything is viable, but COD4 online, getting my “Insane” achievements on the Club or just searching for ramps in Burnout Paradise are some of my recent ones!
It’s been in discussion, but the Playstation Blog is very careful in saying “in North America”. I’m sure Konami Europe will pipe up soon with confirmation.
Personally, I found Bleach DS 2nd to be a bit shallow. The only “serious” fighting game I’ve played before was Soul Calibur, which seems infinitely deeper than Bleach. The story mode is based mostly off beating one-hit hollows and collecting sweets, and the online is full of people who seem to be able to get infinite combos as soon as the game begins, so the only mode I really enjoyed was the arcade modes- high scores, time trials, etc. Don’t know how much of this applies to the original Bleach DS.
Wow look at what The Americans get for the equivalent of £250 they are so spoiled! and they still whinge on about the price! It has come to my attention just how tight fisted Americans can be. They don’t know how lucky they are, they would have an apoplexy if they ever had to live in UK and cope with “treasure island’s” prices lol
SRsly, that is an incredible value bundle they are getting there..I think there will be a huge surge in PS3 sales in the States when this pack goes to retail.
I just gave the demo a whirl and it was mind-bendingly awesome. If they can keep the variety up in the puzzles then we’re looking at a potentially great game.
death be wth u all cuz all are not happy. if you are not happy then death will make u happy. is this true or is this fault. for all i no i do not no wa i am typing so dont carry on reading this. why carry on reading this when i have already told u to stop =] sorry i am jus bored and i think that this is helping me get rid of the boredom. this is for me to no and u to find out. well i would rather you to not find out wat is going thru my head as it will confuse you for the rest of your life. im serious. however you will not be able to find out where i am or who i am, unless u own this and can hack. if u can hack. then hack my email address, use it to find out my personal details, then bingo, you no who i am and where i live. now if u are certian u wanna no wat goes through my head then you may come to my house and check. but beleive you me, you will not appreciate how much effort you put into reading this. yes i am insane and wasted my time, i wasted your time. but if u think about it, i told you to stop way before, if u listened it woulda saved u the time and trouble. well thank you for reading this and ha u wasted your time. i am very sorry but this may have amused you or it may not have.
I actually laughed out loud at the female protagonist’s costume… Says a lot about the direction and target audience of the game, which unfortunately leads to me thinking that although this game looks cool, it’ll play like ass and have a fairly naff story to boot. But here’s hoping I’m wrong.
Army of two is a great game to play in single player and also in co-op, i found the grafics to be visually stunning aswell as well as indepth. However the story line is a little shallow as of most games of its kind, but huge fun none the less. 4/5
Gears of War was brown, Assassin’s Creed is blue, MGS is green – using one colour, despite the system being capable of presenting the most luscious high def visuals, is the new cel-shading.
Apply Photoshop’s Auto-Colour feature, and it churns out a screenshot of a normal videogame!
I’m a lot less excited about the new ferraris than I am disappointed about the lack of any nissan that isn’t a skyline of some sort. 6 variations on the same car and no 200sx or pulsar or 240/280z … for Mazda there’s 4x FD batmobiles but no “too cool for school” FC … and there’s not one single Toymota on the list (apart from the lumbering Lexuses) … instead there’s a couple of Prancing Ponies (available in red) basically the gayest car company in the world.
It seems that all this high-definition glory is not suitable for the 70s, 80s and 90s classics – I mean why bother when there’s the inexplicable Peugeot 307 cabriolet to sway gently around the corners in.
Well it’s $9.99 over in the states, which converts to 800 points (£6.80) and a similar price on the PSN. You’re not going to pay more than £10/$10 for it.
If anything, 2/4 stars should be mediocre, while 1/4 stars should be bad, but agreed it would be much simpler to have 5 star rating system , 4 star system doesn’t make you look any smarter than other sites.
Our review system shows 1 and 2 as bad games, 3 and 4 as good games – there’s just an opportunity to sort the buggy and unplayable (1) from the “not my cup of tea” (2) and the good, recommendable games (3) from titles that will make gaming history (4). It’s pretty much just thumbs up, thumbs down.
Jonas, I’m well aware that some people really dig this game, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I wasn’t warning people exactly what this game entails. It’s a very specific type of game that will please a very specific group of people.
I actually agree with the reviewing system, because gaming experiences are more than just numbers on a scale.
The 4 star systems lends itself to being slightly ambiguous, but ultimately forces you, the reader, to read inbetween the lines. Isn’t that what reviews are for? A good review helps you reach a decision rather making that choice for you.
This “review” is a travesty and I can’t believe people are debating that they think that 2 stars = bad rather then the ridiculous notion that this game is bad in the first place.
You’re just whining because you fail at the game. It’s not the games fault you can’t stand the idea of your actions actually mattering, that you actually need to think about what you need to do.
Hey, power to you, Mark, this game is clearly an acquired taste but for those of us like random roguelikes its one of the best!
When was the last time the threat of getting killed in game scare the crap out of you so badly? In almost any other RPG its just, oh no…I have to re-spawn 3′ from where I died at full power or maybe just reload the last save. Having your character lose all of their experience is nothing, it would only take at most 60 minutes usually to get back up to whatever experience level you were at but losing a sword you’ve built up over several different runs.
I don’t suppose you’ve ever played Rogue, or Nethack?
It’s worth noting here that things like the fullness meter are NOT here out of a misguided sense of realism. They have a definite place in Shiren’s design.
And Shiren is difficult, but that’s because the intent is not to provide an “experience,” the thing that most RPGs try to do, and usually pretty damn badly at that. It’s explicitly a game, there’s a score, and Shiren even has an online scoreboard.
When you die in Shiren the Wanderer, you haven’t “lost work.” It is a game. You are playing it, hopefully, because you enjoy it. If you die, you haven’t lost anything; you can play again and, if you’re still enjoying it, have just as much fun.
Finally, the statement that roguelikes are the “GTA clone of the 80s” is simply false. I have no idea where you got that impression. I can’t say I find this review very insightful. I can’t say I find the reviewer very knowledgeable.
Look, I appreciate that some vocal members of the community are big fans of Shiren the Wanderer, and sure – it was wrong of me to say that only escaped mental patients would find this game fun (which is now gone from the review), but you guys have got to be realistic;
The term roguelike isn’t quite as well known as I’m sure you’d like to think. On a website that writes reviews for everything from Brain Assist to Half Life 2, I wouldn’t be doing my job If I wasn’t warning potential purchasers exactly what the sub-genre entails.
Actual roguelike fans will likely need to look elsewhere, which is a flaw of the review I just can’t help; this is my first rougelike so I can’t provide an accurate review on those merits. I suggest reading Jeremy Parish’s review over at 1up who has plenty of experience with the genre.
I’m fairly sure this is going to be extremely light compared to PC RTSes. I mean, with COH you can tell your squads to take light/med/high cover, throw grenades, use mounted guns, move while firing or move in stealth.
EndWar is likely RTS 101, but we shall see. And take no notice of the Fragdolls!
Isn’t this getting ported to PC as well?
From what I’ve heard it is (Wikipedia :P). That’s the only place I’ll be getting it, as I’m stuck on a PS2 on the console front. My PC is where I game properly…
Could be interesting, if it’s on PC. I do want optional voice recognition – it’s useful in fast games, as a complement to normal commands, or when it’s otherwise impractical.
Of course, for an RTS, a good grouping and pathing system with unit-level AI helps a lot more then voice stuff :)
:D Oh, forgot to add, I just read the EndWar book.
Absolutely AMAZING. There is a reference to Scott Mitchell in it, and also the trailer (the battle in Paris, ending in the Kinetic Strike).
It says on the back “Based on Ubisoft’s Bestselling game, EndWar”
Good question. No word yet, but the peripheral showed there won’t: the DS Phat’s GBA port is deeper, and looking at the picture and video… no, that one won’t. DS Phat and DS Lite versions are a possibility, though I am sure they must have considered this.
Of course you’ll want headphones on because the DS speakers kinda suck. That’s gonna be weird with them being at the top of the console when it’s held like that.
This sets high expectations, looking forward to it. DIRT ran great on the 360 and esp the ps3, so even though multi plat we should be able to expect great things. Nice mix of cars in there, touring, f1/3 etc. There’s only gt5p, ferrari challenge and this on the horizon in terms of console racing this year so far.
I understand Here comes Alex, I paid some attention in German, but as I understood it “toten” meant to kill as it has the n on the end kind of like how spielen is to play and spiele is playing or whatever. I don’t know. I got a B in German at GCSE, but I don’t know how.
I would love that! I haven’t ever gotten it for my Wii, but know I can get it cheaper and hand held!!!! I hope it works well! On the DS lite? Thats crazy!
Looks to me like that Wii Sonic game… Wild Fire, since the final name is too bad for me to remember. Though I’ve never played it, so it’s probably nothing like that.
Throw in a couple of new sidekicks, a plot of time/space dimension lark and constant reminder from the voice actors that the villain is no longer called Robotnik, and this’ll be exactly like all the other horribly awful recent Sonic games.
I wish I could be more enthusiastic, but Sega have yet to inspire hope with their ‘mascot’ these past two generations.
Haha! I thought of Jimmy Carr too (and possibly crossed with Clarkson).
Only prob was I’d read most of the news items on the net and I lack the short attention span to watch them again. Maybe concentrate on the stunt/featurey things that Top Gear does? (like you did with Accordian Hero).
Rubberfishy is right though. It would be good to see a few more presenters so there is someone to react to the news items.
Oh God, please don’t tell me the werewolf stuff is true.
I saw a video of this on youtube and it actually looked good, but nevermind that now if they try and shoe horn something stupid into it.
I agree with Richard’s comment. Graphically this looks awesome but there’s always that feeling of it replicating the same mistakes as every previous 3D Sonic game.
Wow! This could be the game we’ve all be waiting for for so long, let’s pray it doesn’t turn out to be a bitter disappointment. Ha, I seriously couldn’t resist downloading Sonic 3 on the Wii after viewing this awesome footage, good on you Sega!
You’re really missing out with Vice City if you’re a GTA fan. The Scarface parody is really cool, the music selection is out of this world, the gaudy neon 80s world is beautiful and Tommy & Lance’s relationship is well realized.
A slow month, but sandwiched by Mario Kart and GTA, so I’ll be fine :)
Cant wait for these titles to be released, GTA will be a smash im sure and will pick one up asap, not to fussed myself with Mario Kart but im sure it will be a hit with alot of gamers
The release of the GTA will give followers a new lease of gaming life as it lets you do a lot more with the controller which will impress my lads im sure. I will need to get it quick as they will be badgering me for it as soon as its released
Looks awkward to me, but wii version is great. Will need to see it in flesh so to speak as to see if it would give the same feeling as holding the basic guitar!!
Cheers for the kind comments all, and it’s pretty certain that this will be a full series. Maybe I should send out a press release.
I think there’ll be more silly things on the show in the future, though the content lined up for this week’s might be a bit heavy for some… there’s some big news that’ll be covered (if it comes out as expected), but hopefully that’ll be nicely balanced with some stupidity: though that will be more in the full BGB Wire episodes, when they resume. When there’s something to cover.
The format will remain mostly the same, but I’m working on things like transitions and the visual design of the show. Oh yes, and there’ll be a surprise or two if you’re lucky.
This does leave me to ask about distribution: right now, the plan is:
Streaming: YouTube
Download: WMV / MP4 (iPod) / High Resolution (?)
RSS Podcast: WMV / MP4
Any requests?
Cheers again for the kind comments, Newswire will be back on Friday. :)
The lag is quite bad, I’m beginning to think that DICE is using servers buried under the frigid tundra of northern Sweden; run by a crew of Samis and powered by reindeer. At the launch of the beta there are such irritating problems as the player finds himself sliding about the map against his will, the player randomly clips through walls and floors (sometimes finding themselves teleported through the clipping to somewhere else entirely), players are unable to switch their weapon without it immediately snapping back, and of course the typical lag symptom of other players flickering wildly about the screen and being impossible to hit without liberal use of the grenade launcher (Which is incredibly fun to use regardless).
Am I the only person yet to be excited by this game? it and ‘killzone’ being largely the reason I’m hanging onto my ps3 is a little disconcerting for me
you shouldnt be. theres alot of good titles on ps3 which mean you shouldnt let go of it.
my list is :
uncharted
heavenly sword
resistance (takes a bit of going)
Ratchet and clank
UT3
Gran Turismo 5
Haze
and plenty moe to come.
BUT mgs4 will be game of the year without a doubt, ive non stop impressed by it so far.
I’d like to see some hard statistics as to how many kids get injured/killed because they rode a fairground ride that they were too short for on the “You must be this tall to ride!” scale. This is me shooting in the dark, but I don’t think there’d be a huge difference in injuries between the kid who was a centimetre below to the kid who was a centimetre above. As it pertains to video games, I believe the idea of 3/7/12/15/18up or whatever it is to be similar, if not identical. Games should have reccomended age ratings, sure, but more importantly (in my opinion) are those little cartoons that show what kind of content is in the game (you know, clenched fist for violence, angry speech bubble for swearing, that kind of thing). That’s a PEGI service, and it goes totally overlooked. If they expanded the critea for those, a parent/child could take a look at the back of the box and see exactly what kind of stuff you’re gonna get in the game (violence, for example, differs greatly from an FPS to a fighter). If I were 14 and wanted to play Halo 3, for example, what is there aside from a [proposed/supposed] law to say I can’t? I’m sure most kids know that you shoot the aliens and not the people, anyway.
Then again, I’m always berating people with high-pitched voices over Xbox Live with taunts of “Why are you playing this game, it’s rated 15 and you sound about 9 years old. Better go back to Viva Pinata before your mummy callsyou for bed time.”
Sky News also run a very similar take on the news. Saying that games would get BBFC ratings… Even though games have been carrying them since as long as I can remember. (I have a bleeding original Doom: Thy Flesh Consumed box with a BBFC 15+ rating on the front of it.)
The BBC aren’t much better, they’re so incredibly bias against video games you can actually feel the hate when reading website articles or listen to headlines on BBC News 24.
Reading their response to the report on BBC.co.uk yesterday made me roll my eyes. However, I think they did learn from past mistakes (Sony Vs. Church, anyone?) and actually got people from the video game industry to talk about the report on BBC News 24, people from EA and somewhere else where they were speaking sense.
The thing is, I keep using the BBC complaints form and as they have a proper official process they have to be listened to, so they’re certainly improving. What was interesting is how on the dot.life tech blog they do, they covered what Byron actually said much better than their news articles: it’s the only place I’ve actually seen someone apart from me point out that she said BBFC on the front and PEGI on the back.
Ratings on games? You chose to write an article on that?! There are illegal immigrant paedophile terrorists stealing our jobs and we’re all going to die and you focus on video games?! You should be panicking, dammit!
Even though it clearly states that DS3’s will not be shipped to the EU on the product page, yes, I did have a go at ordering one. I thought it possible that this was some sort of ploy to make it look like they are doing the right thing by Sony when in fact, they will happily ship orders outside of Japan when requested.
Alas, once you have a DS3 in your cart and go to checkout, you choose EU and are told you must remove restricted items from your cart as they are not allowed to be shipped to the chosen shipping region.
Hia mate, love this blog and absoloutely loved this video, I love the sarcasm and the humour although was there any point with all releases at the end?
I’m new to online Racing (MKDS aside). Does the actual racing skill of opponents mature over time or am I just going to have to get used to being bashed into on EVERY SINGLE CORNER?
So who did the Nintendo prank then? Because I’m sure that if Nintendo ever did a prank they’d make it so obvious. In fact, the “110mb.com” at the end of the press.nintendo url is the only thing that gives it away.
At the end, does that give the first clue to the setting of ass creed2 being in europe, poss medievil europe??? ps jade is so hot
pps i know ass creed has its weaknesses but i am so into it at the moment, its one of those games that you have to be in the right mood for. i hated it at first but am getting really into it now after 3rd assassination.
It could have been so much more tho…thats why im excited for ass creed 2 oh and mgs4!
Hideo, you are sexy too.
I gotta agree with Lithium, it has some high production values like the way you use captions and the fact that you can see the ‘other Jonathan from BGB research’ on the actual tv for a shot instead of relying on the post production super imposed image.
Thats right, I am actually sad enough to notice those small things. Whilst on the subject – kudos on having the Guitar Hero controller in shot whilst mentioning GH’s relative unpopularity here in the UK!
To respond to a few points, yeah: I’ve had a haircut. After 6 months.
And on the presentation discussion, thanks much: it’s something I’ve really been trying for… whilst I know it’s an indie video, how it looks and sounds is so important: which is why the straps and titles have changed for 3 weeks running as I refine them to look good and all match, and why this week’s episode was delayed as I was fixing the audio: I’m wearing a tie-clip radio mic. The video is in widescreen for a similar reason: whilst for something on YouTube and to be watched on iPods is probably best 4:3 for maximum screen usage, it looks a bit more professional in widescreen.
The feel of an actual news show is rather important, as it helps ‘justify’ the completely absurd nature of the show’s content: blimey, I’m portraying Nintendo’s business decisions as done when drunk, taping DVD players to Guitars, talking to myself… it’s insane, really.
With the BGB Research shot on the TV, I was worried no-one would notice, but phew! That was also done in post, but it was done because it’s actually easier than resizing and lining up the overlay shot to the same size each time so it looks good on the image overlay and strap… I’ll certainly be experimenting with more things like that in the future, it’s all part of the fun of doing it weekly.
If the show really takes off (it’s had views increasing week after week, so that’s good) then I might actually be able to justify a budget for the show, so we’ll see about more newsy type sets, though I’m fond of how cozy it is :P
I do want a lovely big HDTV behind me though. Well, I want a lovely big HDTV, but that’s another story…
Fraid you’ll have to get used to it, it was exactly the same on Project Gotham Racing 3 when I tried playing it. In the end we formed a group that played by “gentlemans rules” to avoid the constant use everyone else to get around the corner without braking tactic that seems to infect every single online racing game that allows it.
Excellent! I still owe Her Majesty about £24 for my DSlite which I imported from Japan a few weeks after its release. However, DHL forgot to charge me on my doorstep, and it took them 4 months for them to realise! So, after ignoring their letters and threats of legal action for about 6 months, I seem to have gotten away with it! :-)
@peanut, nah you will get a letter from a debt collecting office after a year or so demanding payment + interest since the time the debt was handed to the collecting office to the day they finally sent you a letter.
the longer it’s unpaid the longer it will silently collect interest.
if your experience will be anything like mine in a very similar case then your ds lite is getting more expensive every day.
I’ve narrowed down my initial song picks to Radiohead’s “My Iron Lung”, The All-American Rejects’ “Move Along”, Blink-182’s “All the Small Things” and of course Portal’s “Still Alive” (which is Free). At a tiny £4.08, I’ll be happy (besides, the original set list features so many amazing songs!)
You know, I was going to save up and get this – I had guestimated that it would hit at around the 130 GBP mark. But at this price? Forget it. AND the DLC is 2x the us price.
Wait, one hundred and eighty Great British Pound Sterling? That’s outrageous! I’m surprised there isn’t a bigger mention of it in that post because that’s an absolute rip-off. There’s no way I’m buying it at those prices (unless it’s bought for me…).
So, what’s the best part about all of this? Being able to skip those walk/talk sections! But seriously, this sounds great. Gears of War was near-perfect so if Epic can just refine this a little more then we’re in for a treat.
I really wanted this game, but I was thinking that EA would not have the gaul to charge more than £120 ($236.12), but £180 ($354.18) is an absolute outrage. I know everybody says it, but I will NOT be buying this game – if only everybody in the UK would see sense and boycott these ridiculous prices for just a couple of months – things would soon change.
Well i for one am hugely upset considering i’ve waited wince they announced it, gotten hugely frustrated at the push backs and now im shocked and upset that they think they’re gunna get £180 for something that costs around £100 in the “good old” US. I’m sick of everyone dumping on europe. Bad language.
even if neversoft introduced the dreaded battle mode, at least they never introduced a £180 price tag….madness. i really want this, but now i’ll be happy to see gh4 trounce it in sales just, you know, to send a message.
Have been pumped for this game for so long… but that price point is quite frankly offensive.
Until there are some serious price drops EA have lost a customer with that slap in the face.
I thought the whole point of Rock Band was that the kit was gonna be cheap to drive a high volume of sales, and then make the money back on the copius DLC. Now they want to bend us over on both ends.
Rock band….
or a second Nintendo Wii…..
or an Xbox 360…
or an Xbox 360 Arcade with a game…..
or a vintage Roland SH-101 synth, or a second-hand car, or any number of other things I could buy for ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FREAKING ENGLISH POUNDS.
Thanks EA; you’ve yet again got us Europeans over a barrel.
If the title is indeed Perfect Prosecutor I doubt we will be seeing Apollo here. This would probably be a prequel back before Phoenix ruined his record.
Anyway, as this is likely to be a spin-off I do not believe that we have seen the last of Apollo just yet.
Well I see they are claiming it is due to lots of little things adding up.
So to be fair:
Well theres VAT at 17.5%
Import Duty at 5%
Shipping £5 by container.(if it isnt coming from china directly)
Maybe add an extra £2 because petrol is expensive over here – oh but of course this is a much smaller country so better take that back.
So thats £111 – now the £85 in the US could be that the retailers over there arent making a huge markup – so lets assume that game etc are greedier over here – maybe add an extra 25% – so £138 – which would probably drop to £125 after a while.
shoop da whoop. might just get the game to start with and try and pick the instruments up on ebay. probably don’t need another guitar, i already have 2
It’s easy for online stores to undercut the RRP, high street stores are still going to be the worst affected by this mess. And ultimately, it’s EA’s fault, not the retailers. Fuck EA and fuck Harmonix if they’re in any way responsible for this mess.
I admire Play.com for reducing that ridiculous price but even £140 is a little too steep, and the individual instruments haven’t had their prices cut, either.
Game will be able to do this simply because they’re the only dedicated game retailer in the UK – if we had, say, three or four of them then I’m sure the price wouldn’t be this high.
I’d be very suprised if we ever see a company to rival Game on the high street – meaning they can pretty much charge what they like to those who don’t have the Internet or aren’t comfortable with Internet shopping.
Hell yeah, I always want to pay for data which is clearly already on the disc but kept from me!
It’s like giving me a bag of crisps but putting some crisps in locked containers, you then send off for these keys with extra money attached. I paid for these crisps, why can’t I eat all the contents?
Any more than £100 for the full set and I’m just not buying it. No video game is worth that — a console is barely worth that. Which is a shame, because I was really hyped for Rock Band.
The most telling thing regarding the price I find in this whole debacle really is that of Play.com. Now, I don’t believe they will be selling the hardware at a loss just to be reaping the profits from the sale of the game. They will easily still be making a tidy profit from the hardware, yet some increased markup on the game as well.
I would love to get this game, but even taking into account the price reduction from play, their discount voucher, then getting the game from shopto, it’s still damn expensive. That, and i don’t think EA deserve a sale from any european until this is sorted.
lol, this trailer is many months old, and it is verified that PS2 Buzzers will work too in this game and those wireless buzzers will work on PS2 games – and if you use your head, you can see that there is going to be released two versions, one that contains Wireless buzzers, and other what contais only the game. – Why should they release only the game now, if PS2 buzzers wouldn’t work??
Hoping that this comes soon. Relentless has informed that wireless buzzers have been in development in China, and first cargo is coming.
Game will be out in may in Europe, and I guess so that in US in summer. US release date hasn’t been announced yet.
Hey Mark, you reckon the memory unit is worth it if only for moving profiles around?
As opposed to going through the whole rigmarole of recovering your gamertag option that is…
Pyrobi; 100%. I have my profile stored on my unit, its not different that having it on the HDD, and I just snap it out and throw it in my pocket when I go round a friends house.
Recovering your gamertag is slow, and is also quite risky if you do it a lot. I’d totally recommend it.
Also, you can use it as a save game space. I put all my saves on the HDD, but when we were into Virtua Tennis, I copied the save to the memory unit to use my custom character.
And Andrew: I still do PC stuff, just not much of interest this week.
Ah right on. Do they do a black one?! Lol, i just bought an elite to replace my ever unstable launch 360 >_<
Will purchase now anyway :)
Do you get some sort of credit for me going through the link on BGB, or is that only with amazon and the like?
yo this sounds like its gonna be worse that c.o.d.4 for lag and thats saying sumthing see as thought at times its auwful i mean common think about this for a second
C.O.D.4 LAGGGGGGGSSSSSSSS and that game dosent have 2×2 km sq fully destructable inviroments
as soon as i heard about what this game could do
i thought to my self that game gonna LAAAGGGGGG BIG time they gonna need supa supa servers to hold this game down i mean for once i wanna play a online multi player war game i win because of my skillz to kill at WILL not coz COMPUTER SAYZ NOOOOOO YOU GET ME
Oh trust me, the way that trend is planning to continue… it gets worse. That and a few other things established in the show’s ‘continuity’ by now.
And I gave up trying to hide the lighter, I got pissed off the one I used in the first take of the show was utter shite XD
Luckily though, the point isn’t to make you think it set itself alight, more just mocking Microsoft build quality. It’s a piece of paper. :P
Hey. Cool show but there’re some tiny niggles that let it down. You move your head too much, it’s like you’re trying to cover all angles possible. And those pauses you take with every 3 or 4 words are really annoying. Other than that, cool stuff.
i have to agree with what grindie said… your pauses at the end of every line do get annoying, paired with the extreme head jolts in every direction makes you look a bit of a twit. no offense.
No offence taken at all: it’s good to get constructive criticism. Some things like those I haven’t noticed myself to the degree you two say: so I’ll try and tone it down, though that might take a bit of practice as this is all just one big experiment each week. However, I will say it’s not that I’m “trying to cover all angles possible”: if I was vain, the camera wouldn’t be at the other end of the room and zoomed as far as possible. :P
And the pauses… again, yes, something to work on. I haven’t yet found the right balance point between scripted and spontaneous: it can be a bit forced when it’s completely pre-written, but it can also be hesitant.
I agree with most of the review. I enjoyed Time Crisis 4 at the Arcades but that’s exactly why: because it was at the Arcades. This is worth a couple of quid for a quick bit of fun, but not much more. It’s a shame that the series hasn’t changed because I loved the older ones.
Indeed Cutty; like I said, it’s still Time Crisis, which is worth a few quid with your mates. £65 on the other hand, isn’t quite so worth it – and that’s only for one gun!
It was released last week, dude! I’ve heard its pretty buggy and has some bad DRM, but with it being a US exclusive on Steam, we don’t have a review copy >:(
This is a prime example of when to choose retail over download. By buying the retail version you pay less and get more for it. And, of course, I’m willing to bet that it’s faster for most to take a trip to the store and buy it than it is to download on our terrible connection speeds.
Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m just bitter that Dreamfall isn’t on the UK store yet. =D
there is no werewolf its a warehog as in a dark infected version of sonic
the internet really is a sad place at times im the only guy it seems on it that can clearly see its werehog not werewolf
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr stop telling lies folks
hi guys,
i also think this is a rip off the U.S.A hav had this game before XMAS and now we have 2 pay double what they have. i suggest if u want it £40 cheaper and delivered on the day of release order it from amazon.co.uk its so much cheaper and you get the same stuff. so stick all the games stores round the country and EUROPE!
You people are morons, nice articly by the way.
GAME are selling it at RRP cause if you actually read the news they are fed up of EA not stepping in line with other retailers and selling games at rrp of 40quid and still mark them up as 50. So when GAME got into a discussion with them they basically decided that untill EA did the right thing, they would refuse to lower the price of EA’s games and not advertise them in the charts along with letting stock run out or not even buying it, meaning GAME are taking a profit hit but they’re doing it to get at EA. So another theory thats acceptable is that they’ve marked the price up to make up for losses because of the GAME incident
Pah, Navi would’ve helped you by freezing time, shutting up and actually telling you what you wanted if you’d predd ^C. Because buttons exist in real life.
My purchase of Puppy Love for the Wii is going to have to wait until next month I think, but I am fairly certain that my copy of GTA will be arriving day of release, if not, hopefully sooner. :)
Whilst the first did star Greg Grunberg as the protaganist, I’m pretty sure the sequal doesn’t. Not sure the review made that clear, just wanted to throw that out there.
I haven’t. Would have done some time soon if this date hadn’t been announced. I’m afraid I was concerned by Nintendo attempting to cripple the Freeloader.
@alto
Possibly. You might have to save it to SD card first and then do some jiggery pokery with the filename. Would err on the side of not though.
Another one here who hasn’t gone down the import/freeloader route. I’d almost grown impatient, but I can hang on until the end of June. Only just though.
I can’t believe you left out “Once Upon a Time In Japan: Earth”! The game looks excellent and it makes a change from the usual settings of regular point and click adventures.
And how are you reviewing this early? :/ The UK release date it Tuesday 29th isn’t it?
Also; I found this review entirely too unsubtle about going into detail. Detail you don’t really want too much of. Why can’t you detail some of the singleplayer missions …isn’t it more repetitive stuff from GTA1, 2, III, Vice City and San Andreas?
In fact, how does it compare to San Andreas – are there the same varied vehicles (planes?), can you dress your character? is there bars for skills? Are there more side missions and distractions available? All these things made San Andreas a much better game then the predecessors, but are they left out here? If so, why is it still 4 stars?
In fact, how does it compare to other city-roaming games? Crackdown was damn *fun* despite being unrealistic. Is the smaller world limiting or “just right”? Are there more or less complex missions then Saints Row? Is the cover system as good as first person shooter games, or is the third person view still crap for shooting?
How about comparisons with other alternatives. Does it beat out other similar games? Will it be still worth playing once the singleplayer game is over? Does it have potential for replayability? What about ease-of-use of the game. Could someone new to it play? are the tutorials good enough? I heard that you can now actually restart a mission you fail half way through without penalty – you don’t mention it but it’s a pretty big thing to most people :)
Also; is the story *any good*? Frankly, most of the GTA games have “barely passable” stories. Good characters for the most part, but plot holes abound and flimsy premises – for instance, doing crime just for the sake of it (because it’s essentially the only option – you never get a choice, you’re a criminal and it’s expected of you). I don’t think for me a GTA game can get full marks until it gives you more choice and less pretty static cutscenes. But that’s just me maybe.
I just brought up a few points, but you’re going into a ton of detail that does bore me a bit. You also don’t detail nearly enough those things you talk about – the “extra activities” like bowling – are these minigames? mandatory? optional? helpful? What about other activities out of missions (as I mentioned above in the comparison with San Andreas), can you still do vigilant missions for instance?
Sorry I seem so critical here, since you are only one of a million who have given it full marks. I only request a bit on the why since I like this site, and always want to see good articles. I know you want to keep the review short, but some of this could have been covered while removing some other bits. Simply put; there are no perfect games, and I don’t even see one hint that ANYTHING is wrong with the game. It CANNOT be that good, just from what I’ve seen from it already! Keep the reviews coming, for sure, but you have to realise that reviewing games like this is not very useful for making me pursue the game with a better judgement, since much of your stuff sounds like preview quotes. :(
We review games a little different to some other places; I hope to review the game as it’s own work of art, not a new addition in the GTA series.
Also, we don’t want to make bullet point lists of what is good and what is bad; that’s boring to read and it rarely makes sense until you’ve played the game and have a basis of comparison.
Also, you mentioned things that you wanted to see in the review, but GTA 4 features so much that every reviewer latches onto something different (unless you’re IGN and your 7 page review mention everything). Cripsin Boyers review at 1up (Read) for example talked more about watching fake TV and browsing a fake internet than shooting thugs.
What really resonated with me was the city, its vibrance, its organic feel and its coherent connection with the player whether they’re on a mission, blowing up cars or going bowling with friends.
As for the negative issues; sure, it has some tiny cover issues that might lose you a bit of health when its not your fault. That’s not going to deter you from buying the Game of the Year (or century, perhaps :P) and I found it frankly academic in perspective.
To answer your questions:
Single Player missions make a good use of set pieces such as banks, museums and factories to keep shoot-outs interesting. This breaks repetition well. If you think that all of those games had repetitive missions, however, you won’t find much new here.
You can dress your character but can’t build stats. There are choppers but not planes. There are side missions. What GTA 4 does with world, character, story, convergence of enviornment I feel is superior to working out in a gym and stealing a jet pack.
I’ll cease continuing because frankly, this bores me; I’d rather put this feature list into a bullet point list than a readable review.
You complain about the review being “entirely too unsubtle about going into detail. Detail you don’t really want too much of.” yet you ask for intricate details about every inch of the game.
And yes, the game is incredible, I mean what I say in my review and I can say with conviction that Grand Theft Auto IV is one of the best games in this PS3/Xbox 360/Wii generation.
As for the early copy – dude, we’re legit press, a lot of our reviews are sent from the publishers.
I asked for more general points – you go into how shooting a vehicle adds bullet holes, but not how it compares to other games. I just take issue that you seem a bit random in your analysis. I put forward a lot of questions, but trust me, they are not bullet pointed ones. You barely mentioned the story for instance – I say that unless the gameplay is that good, many people will finish the story missions mainly for the, you guessed it, story (in GTA games, people generally *don’t* finish the story because the missions get that hard/bad/repetitive or the story isn’t that good to begin with). Simply not saying anything about the main section of the game’s point seems a tad silly to me. It’s not detail, it’s general information – like what you actually *do* in the game, which does seem limited to “shoot outs” by your description. Obviously this isn’t the case, but I can’t think of any other conclusion. Anyway, free roaming in a “living city” is all well and good, but it gets tad boring if there is nothing to do in that city.
Thanks for the information on vehicles – and the partial comparison with older games. People enjoy customisation and breath of gameplay (shame about no stats for instance) – if you can fly helicopters, and it’s fun, it’s worth more a mention then that the game has dents when you crash a car – all GTA games had this :)
I take a little issue critically that you’re reviewing it solely by itself, and yet proclaiming it’s game of the year defacto on all platforms for all year ;) but in any case, that’s your prerogative. I don’t think it’s ever wise to try and isolate a game like that, it doesn’t really work. Something can only be good if it is better then something else after all, with no baseline, there is no reason why every game couldn’t be “4/4″, right? But that is just me perhaps. I’ll try and not take your reviews as seriously since it’s probably meant to be a less in depth review then I thought.
Fair enough on the press angle. In any case, you seem to think everyone will enjoy it, but academically, remember, not everyone will :)
I do enjoy reading the reviews, sorry for being harsh and boring *you*, but I do hold this site in higher regard then others I don’t even bother to comment on or read (IGN, for instance, is woefully sad in it’s reviews). You can always ignore my comments, if you want.
Thanks for the comments, I’ll try and keep them in mind in future :)
Oh, and as for the reviewing the game by itself, what I meant was not reviewing it simply as “is it better than San Andreas”, because despite the gazillion sales, not everyone has played GTA but many people are excited about Four, so saying “GTA 4 is bad because it does not have a jet pack” means very little to those people :P
I’ve been playing GTA4 for a few hours now and I must say I am a little underwhelmed.. I think all the 10/10, perfect game reviews all over the Internet are a bit over the top. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good game a great game even but it’s not perfect.
A lot of focus has been given to all the little details the game does well and how the city itself is the star of the show but I would say I’ve been left a little frustrated with the level of interactivity with the city. I think it feels a little limited.
For example, early on, you do a mission to collect some protection money from a shopkeeper. The shopkeeper locks up his shop when he sees you and your are told to find something to throw through the shop window. The only way of achieving this is to walk round the corner and pick up some specific bricks and walk back to the shop and throw them through the window. I was left thinking that this was too limited and specific.. – All I had to do was smash the shop window but I was limited to using these specific bricks to do it.. Why couldn’t I have picked up the bins from over the road and chucked them at the window (you can’t even pick up the bins)? or used my shot gun?, or just driven a car into it?
Anyway, that’s just my first thought… – it just doesn’t seem that ’sandboxy’ to me….
The early parts of the game are meant as tutorials Ben, it really opens up as you move on. Definitely get in some shootouts, some car chases and a helicopter before you say tis limited!
to be a fashion man then you also need a fashion and good shoe,
nike dunk will be your partner.
trust me, you will like it.
like it and then choose it.
you can get it from http://www.tradekey88.com
Ben, I totally agree…I absolutley love online but single players just sorta..eurgh..
Its getting better now that the storys picking up, but I keep going through random patches of “meh..”, which is a real shame considering thats mainly what I bought it for. And the controls, except those used during driving, feel rather unnatural and awkward..
Maybe its just me.
Its a great game, don’t get me wrong just..no where near perfect..
Perfect… Now there’s a discussion that could get really interesting. What do you define as perfect? (Rhetorical question btw).
Anyway, nice review, by no means “perfect” (:P) as some have pointed out, but the quality of the literate British is unsupassed. I’m still waiting for my copy, so I’ll get back to you with my personal thoughts later.
It’s a shame that after the long wait that there are so many problems with this. Being able to instantly unlock all the achievements is a terrible mistake on VALVe’s part :(
“Daughtry” is a rock band formed by American Idol reject Chris Daughtry. They’re pretty good IMO. They’re well known in the States, their album got to #1 there.
Don’t think they’re good for Guitar Hero? Well this might help: the lead guitar on “What I Want” was performed by Slash.
This isn’t the full tracklist anyway. They said there will be over 20 songs on the cartridge so we are probably missing anywhere from 5 to 10 songs. And yeah, being from the US, Daughtry is a pretty good band, at least for their first album, and with Slash on “What I want” there’s no reason to worry about guitar.
This review is spot on.
I have only played the game for about forty minutes and am ready to snap the disc. It is a total dishonest mess that simply shouldn’t be allowed to be sold as a fun leisure experience.
The best comparison is Spiderman 3. Poor animations, level design and controls.
Just downright insulting to the consumer to be honest.
That looks like Playstation 2 graphics to me. If you say they are Playstation 1-like, you are seriously young or don’t remember the very very poor quality “graphics” PS1 games had! :p
So another poorly done licence eh? hmm, not too surprising.
Spelling, oops: *That (the Iron Man game) looks a lot better,…
And strictly speaking, it might be lazyness – the levels look much larger then any PS1 game, so it must be a similar level layout to the other platforms.
The good news, I managed to get a refund after having the game less than 24 hours. Sadly not everyone will be so lucky and will have to settle for selling to trade in shops for a considerable loss in funds. I really think there should be comeback to suppliers for pushing out stuff like this.
GRID is my most anticipated demo of the lot. Haze should have come out last year, now it seems old hat with sub par graphics from every review to date. Bourne demo could be good if it plays like uncharted, certainly looks good in gfx department. Either way, this is good news, more demos the better.
Personally I find it a bit boring…Feels like a slightly updated Vice City.
I like some of the detail in the game, but at the same time I’m disappointed with the radio – in the past this was one of GTA’s highlights but now it just seems uninspired. Also the chase cam is too slow and positioned slightly low for me…And there are very few places to go in the city, too many streets with no shops to go in or anything to do. On the other hand I do enjoy tempting biker’s into fights and then watching the police take them down – that kind of situation feels a lot more realistic than in the past games.
So far I haven’t been able to let rip as much as I’d like to…the police are a bit too quick on the scene and too tough to get away from. Maybe that’s just me. :)
I like playing it for a break from cod4, but just with friends. I won’t be buying the game unless I can find more fun in it. Maybe after more missions the game will change.
bring it on indeed, also waiting for the first installment of dreamfall chapters (longest journey franchise)
a vampire story peaked my interest on and off, beautfull 2d oldskool drawing style (just at higher resses then 640×480 or 800×600 lol) -> on ; then it went 3d according to an announcement -> and off again lol
the story and humor still entices me, i just wonder why they switched to another engine having already made bundles of beautifull artwork for the first engine.
any of the old talent left in game land? (the people who made the first monkey island’s, larry’s, space quest’s, maniac mansion’s, grim fandango etc. )
(and off topic bullfrog needs reviving, been playing evil genius of late and it’s bringing back bittersweet memories of a never realized dungeon keeper 3 and theme hospital 2)
Is PlayStation Day the renamed PlayStation Experience that used to be held in Earls Court? I went to that once and it was pretty awesome. Kojima was on stage talking MGS3, but at the time I had no idea who he was…
It looks fantastic, no actually, it looked fantastic until the guns appeared. why oh why does it seem for a game to be successful it has to have some kind of weapon in it.
I know i would just love the freedom of being able to run around a free roam city like that doing parkour, in the same vein as say endless ocean for wii.
the voice over at the end was fantastic,
was that silver tounged dude really mcbacon? or did you pay some top voice over actor. We need more of him,
he knows his stuff. I give him 5 stars
better than the Robert Llewellyn ( how do they do it )
Jonathan greaswell. I awlays worry his head might explode. (sorry jon)
I agree with Michael though, seeing the gunplay towards the end of the video made me altogether a lot less excited. Hopefully the platforming can be the central focus while the gunning takes a backseat…
Haze wasn’t too bad, no tearing, visually ok but not a patch on cod4. Looking forward to GRID demo tomorrow. The DIRT engine ran better on ps3 so I’ve high hopes for it’s performance after further development.
From past news about the game you guys have nothing to worry about, DICE themselves say that they’re really focusing on the parkour, and that guns do genuinely take a back seat, i’ve not the time to find a link so you’ll have to take my word for it :)
Looks like a lambo, drives like a aygo. I was hoping this would be more sim like, esp since gt5p has no damage. The engine runs and looks superb on the ps3 but the handling. dear lord, what have they done. It’s sega rally all over again and look what happened to them!.
I am 13 and I’ve played the game at my local game on the 360 and it is just as crap, the graphics are awful and I’ve no idea what to do/ can’t be bothered because its so crap lol!
Probably cause I’m a gaming blogger – who’s in the middle of making BGN – the new… wait… what was my URL again? Oh I am getting forgetful in my old age.
With all the aids turned off it was pretty unforgiving, you really have to concentrate on using the controls progressively. Looks set to ge a good racer, in the first event I spent the whole 3 laps getting to 2nd, every place gained felt like such an acheivement. I’ll go back to the rest when I get bored of GTA
No Ganbare Goemon 2 or 3 SNES goodness? Or the SNES version of Hammering Harry? Oh dear :(
Mother 3 probably deserves an honorable mention aswell. Theres so many games we don’t get, thankfully one of them is no longer Odin Sphere.
I know somebody who worked for sega and he has a copy of the europe version of typing of the dead, i’ve played it, i had no idea it didn’t get released.
Lot of cutesy RPGs there. I’m european and I detest RPGs, cutesy or otherwise. Maybe they just figured they wouldn’t sell that well – I can’t think of anyone in my peer group of gamers who likes RPGs, though RPGers undoubtedly exist in europe.
Okay, now we need to get the golden skull to unlock the marshmallow kingdown with the fruitbat. Screw that!
Nope -Chrono Trigger was not released in Europe -not even the later port released for PlayStation… It goes the same with Chrono Cross -the most beutiful game of all time -we didn’t get this one as well here in europe unfortunetely :(
Im really enjoying it but i dont believe its owed the perfect score its getting everywhere. in my opinion a perfect score worthy game is once or twice every five years, its got to have theme music you can recall from memory after five years without playing it, great gameplay and story, and most of all leave you a little disappointed when you finish as you’ll never experience any of it for the first time ever again.
and the biggest point is a perfect scoring game has you replaying it again and again, but how many times will you replay this after you finish it, 4 or 5 tops is the average im guessing.
I’m surprised to read about Wario Ware Twisted. It made it to Australia (which normallly gets the identical PAL releases to Europe, including the waiting for conversion to all Euro languages!).
Anyway, I’ve got the Australian version. It’s great, but I still prefer the original Gameboy Advance version. It’s way easier to play on a Micro too :)
Actually, a PC version of Typing of the Dead *was* released in Europe.
I’ve got a copy and the voice acting is fantastically bad! It also taught me how to touch-type!
I remember Warioware Twisted was on a release list in my local gamestore in Belgium, and it was even listed in an add from that store. Then it got pushed back for 6 months. A few weeks later I saw the USA version in a Dutch store, so since I had to wait another 6 months I baught it and I’m glad I did cause the game never got released.
What an absolutely revolting article. Europeans who whine about being ‘deprived’ of games that any technologically-competent person can emulate or import deserve nothing but my scorn. They are the reason I have to put up with American friends telling me how ’sorry’ they are for where I live. Who cares about Europe getting the rest of the Super Nintendo’s considerable library because only RPGS matter, right? And padding the list with the Virtual Boy somehow makes it even more pathetic. Die in a fire please.
Ooh. Rather fitting name, Rage.
Lots of people, myself included, don’t like emulation, and importing foreign consoles can be costly for the sake of a few games, no matter how good they may be. Though there isn’t much excuse for Wario Ware Twisted, since the GBA is region free… some people just don’t like ordering games, I guess.
Sorry, I was distracted by a hate post. I also wanted to point out that Twisted was denied localisation after the testers were too busy playing it to remember to eat, so it’s currently one of the top criminals in Europe, and I should congratulate you on not laughing at Seaman.
Sounds like an interesting proposition, though Verbinski is a hack action director. If you want video game movies to be taken seriously, they need to hire a proper auteur for the job. He might manage to pull it off (but it won’t be on his merits, it will be on the merits of the game’s production design).
Honestly, though, these games are getting so cinematic that movies seem kind of pointless really. I mean, though IDEA of a Mass Effect game is cool, but in the end what would be the point? Everything you’d get in a movie – cinematic action sequence and shot-reverse-shot character interaction – is there already.
Now that we are getting games with stories good enough for the big screen, the problems is that they no longer require the big screen treatment precisely because they have most of what the cinema offers already.
That said, I am interested because the cinema’s collective experience is different… we’ll wait and see, I guess.
This was an awesome episode. I was born in Argentina, and it always nice to see people helping other people. I hope they spread their soles to the even more places. I’m going to get a couple of pairs right now.
man i would love to play this game on a scale of 1-10 i give it a 20 as fare as this compard 2 grand theft auto 4 this will pass grand theft auto 4 in all ways !!!!!!!! torrific game the maker/company should be proud
Wikipedia said 100 points was 75p, so I did the math. I’m the same TLS, Virtual Console doesn’t really interest me but stuff like LostWinds looks great.
This does look quite captivating, my only concern is the controls.
First person has never been the correct viewpoint for platforming or precision jumping.
However it looks like the players movements are assisted to make them more fluid.
If they can get the control system down, this could be a hit.
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis – This brings back memories of my old 486. Probably this and monkey island got me hooked on gaming. Top rate stuff.
Two clothes shops are the same, What the hell is wrong with you Rockstar some russian glasses are the only thing i can use to cover Nico’s stupid face and they make him look older if that’s even possible. NO MODIFIEDED CARS, WHYYY!! I was hopping it to be Brucie’s special ability at least let me choose the color on the Paint and spray.
GTA is the only game where I use cheats they keep the game alive after you finish it , some people say – Uhhh cheater, cheats are bad waaaa, most of old GTA cheats were useless on missions they were just for fun it was up to you if you used or not . two cheats give you the same set of weapons and the other set is almost the same, no flying cars, Knife sucks, also the bat, he swings like a girl, no jetpack, no parachute, no Hydra, no monster truck, no chainsaw, no bike, I was hoping even skaters on this game, no lowriders, no fighting styles, no gym, food is pointless if you cannot go fat, no barbershop, and so many cool cars are also missing, no tank , well I can undestand that cause there are no military bases on New York as far as I know , BUT AT LEAST LET ME SUMMON ONE WITH A GOOD OLD CHEAT!!!
-But the game looks more realistic like this , some others say , If I want realism I go outside my house drive like a maniac kill some cops and end up in prision for life.
beside all this is a great game but I was specting it to be bigger than San Andreas.
I am sure that nobody would complain about 10/10 if it had those things I’ve mentioned before plus the new features.
Sorry if my english is not perfect , I am from Ecuador and needed to go iternational with this comment
yeh fate of atlantis, brings back memories, not just of indiana but quality and fun adventure games. ah well there is hope on the horizon for the genre yet :)
download scummvm btw roarrr I think it includes indy for free and can run pretty much any old lucas arts or similar old adventure games.
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Well i think phisco nuts or whtaver the hell u call the game is cool. Why? Because lets face it people the game is very odd. The character kind of looks like a cross between a bee and a human.
You pretty much summed up my entire thoughts for the game. I’m either loving it immensly when I driving like a loon and ramming people off the road in an aggression car in Road Rage, or swearing at it and hating it whenever I do a burning lap or race.
So conflicted.
Phew, I’m glad I’m not alone!
It’s just such a shame because Burnout is one of my absolute favourite racers, but it’s a chore to do the races.
Oh well, I’m playing Burnout Legends on PSP again :)
LOL
Thank you for that valuable insight James.
That is the best video ever.
If this has colossi I might have to get a poos3
Agreed.
I’m soooo hyped for Devil May Cry 4!! :D
Can’t wait!
I would never have guessed, mister DMC42!
DMC4 – somehow the demo didn’t grab me. I thought the first one was awesome but never got the next few – and I’m not convinced about this either. It just seems, dare I say it, too *slow*.
TUROK – Slow, laborious and generic. Not impressed – and the characters don’t hold any interest.
THE CLUB – a good idea but I can’t see the longevity. It seems to be shoehorning single player onto a multiplayer game.
NO MORE HEROES – now this I am looking forward to. A distinctive and surreal game that needs people buying to move the gaming industry forward in terms of creativity.
UT3 – a big fat meh from me, I’m afraid – although blowing up Ronan Keating would seriously tempt me.
LOST ODYSSEY – a year ago I would have said a big ‘no’, but somehow Blue Dragon got under my skin and 40 hours later I have to say I’m sorely tempted by this. Especially with the LucasArts linkage.
Just my tuppence worth.
YES. Thank you. I’ve come across too many bloody ‘oh this is awesome’ reviews that after playing the demo I frankly do not trust. This is the first one I can identify with.
I hate driving games, but Burnout Revenge got me hook, line and sinker. Like you I loved the aspect of shaving precious seconds off on Burning Laps and the intricate trial and error of Crash Mode, and knowing they were missing or altered did not please me.
And the one thing that did annoy me more than anything on the demo (and this seems not to have been picked up by anyone else, so maybe it’s just me) was that crashing into the back of car was just not that satisfying. Smack into the back of a sports car on Revenge and you could ping it across three lanes of traffic and land it head on into a truck. It was brilliant and exhilarating and turned out to actually involve skill. Pile into the back of a car on the demo, and what happens? It shoves forward about five yards, and you drop down to 20mph. Excuse me?
So is that still the case? If so, I’m afraid Criterion will just have to go and fuck right off.
Sorry Ooshka, Traffic Checking is certainly out… almost. It’s in the game, but it seems to be only for very large vehicles and at slower speeds.
Its fustrating because its often ambigious whether or not you’ll actually get a traffic check so its left for “oh phew, I thought I was going to crash, but I got a traffic check” instead of going out for blood and sailing down the road, knocking away cars left right and centre!
It will also slow your car down a lot, so it’s as good as gone in Paradise :(
Man, you completly summed up what i was thinking.
I do love this game for its road rage which has been my favorite event in all the burnout games and its just as good on here, but everytime im in a race i’ll take a quick glance at the compass and then i’ll have rammed up the ass of a car (or wall)
Or if its not that i would have gone up a ramp thats landed me complely off the route. Plus traffic checking has been pretty much binned so your not safe on either side of the road anymore, same goes for burning routes. But the online mode is great.
But another thing is, where are the crashbreakers? they where so much fun in Revenge but now we just bounce of the floor and try to hit some cars, they ruined it so bad!
I’m selling this game in a few days, its the biggest gaming dissapointment i can remember
I’ve read a dozen reviews of this game that contain mainly the reviewer trying to play burnout revenge on their copy of burnout paradise. It’s as stupid as mourning the lack of open-world freedom in burnout revenge, go play the game you want to play instead of complaining that the new game isn’t just a shinier version of the last one – god only knows there are enough titles in the burnout series that are simple tweaks of the earlier releases.
Only bit I don’t like is no drivers – I want motorstorm ragdoll crashtest dummies flying through my windscreens, if it’s a driveaway I want broken arms and floppy necks. Empty cars is more spooky when everything else is so carefully rendered. I guess I’ll have to wait for the “burnout luxury” paradise polish next year …
Looks like Mr. Criterion isn’t get any of my hard-earned then. The bastards.
@Pachinko
“go play the game you want to play instead of complaining that the new game isn’t just a shinier version of the last one – god only knows there are enough titles in the burnout series that are simple tweaks of the earlier releases.”
But I think that’s kind of the point – a shinier version was kinda what we wanted. The total overhaul has left out a lot of aspects of the Burnout evolution that fans really liked. It was a big risk on Criterion’s part and it’s hasn’t paid off for me and some others. So I am going to go a play the game I want to play – and save myself £40 in the process.
I had this on PC a looooong time ago. Such a brilliant game.
Having the original Flashback on the Virtual Console is something that I’m very much looking forward to. Fade to Black in no substitute that’s for sure.
As for Theme Hospital, the PS1 version is really slow and hard to control with a regular controller so unless there’s some way to play it with a USB mouse i wouldn’t really recommend it.
BTW Mark, what Urban Chaos do you say is underrated? The 3rd person PC/PS1 action game with a black female lead or the more recent FPS with a ballistic shield one? I avoided the former at its time based on bad reviews (PS1) but I was a bit curious about the other at one point.
Who the hell is Dr. Sues?
I’m as-uming you’re referring to the author of ‘Green Eggs And Ham’ and the like.
Anyhoo, I always preferred ‘Theme Park’. And Another World > Flashback > Fade To Black
Oooshka:
Yeah, he used to write crazy children books, and I assume this is what he’d think goes on in a hospital.
Theme Park’s cool, but I hope you don’t think Another World is anything to do with Flashback!
Alochetano:
The GTA clone with Tomb Raider inspired Darcy Stern for PS1/PC was really awesome, If I remember correctly. Not sure about the new one, but I know it’s nothing to do with the PS1 game :P
This was damn better then the original Theme Park. Great graphics, sounds, music, and it all worked really well, and was more fun too.
Theme Park was paltry to this. I still have it – I played it last year, in fact. I might have to complete it some day – the last few hospitals are so huge!
And rat shooting minigame is totally FTW!
In a testament to the game’s awesomeness and intricate nature, there are full guides to the later levels, complete with colour coded maps and all!
Great fun.
tbh I’d rather have money to upgrade my real life “pad”
Ooo looking good :)
I LOVE YOUR WEBSITE ITS SO GOOD
Lara Croft always rocks…I never picked up Legends, but i grabbed Anniversary and loved it, even though I never got around to finishing it….
I agree, Rez is incredible, the XBLA version is a must have.
I feel like Rez is a game of the future, we’re only seeing version 0.5 and the real edition will be released when the technology is right; it could work with future controllers that the Wii only hints at, displays far more involving and deep than an TV, sound setups that echo through an entire room.
It’s an attack of the senses. In an illustrative sense, humans have 5; games can only ever hope to stimulate 2 – 3 at a push. Rez arrests and constricts both your visual and audio reaches the entire time you’re playing that to leave the game isn’t to turn off the Xbox, but is to make a jarring disconnect from the incredible world of Rez.
Pachinko, I’d be more than happy to leave by behind the classic Burnout legacy as long as they kept behind some of Burnout’s most important features (crash is gone, will Burnout 6 have no boost?!) and made a truely fune game. BP just falls short of the mark.
I like the new look, much cooler….
The only problem is it seems to take a little longer to load now…(for reference, I use Firefox 2)
It might just be caching. It’s loading fast for me, but I’ve been using the layout for the past week.
I thoroughly enjoyed my first 4 hours of playtime although I have to admit i have never played any of the burnout games. Still, I’m a big racing fan and i was on the fence when deciding whether to get the game mainly because the demo doesn’t quite represent the actual game. I find the complain on the lack of restart to be absurd when you’re in an open world that this game is in. If you’ve played enough, you will end up racing the same race maybe 1/2 hour later as oppose to just after losing a race (or in some cases, esp. idiots who hates losing, prior to to losing a race). This game has the two most important elements that make a racing game fun, a sense of speed and control.
Love it.
Maybe about time the favicon got an update. Small things that matter ;)
Give me a shout if you want me to do it.
I have it on PS2 its great.
However, I haven’t played it in nearly 2 years and really can’t be bothered to go back to it.
I played the original on PS2. I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. Was pretty amazing though.
It’s nice, but I’d say it’s more BGB 4.5, as it’s the same in most areas.
Nice to hear BGB shout is coming back.
I thought you guys had given up on it entirely.
We’re recording right now. 30 mins in. The guys are currently talking about Assassin’s Creed. Bacon is saying he doesn’t like Ubisoft as much anymore. And now minigames.
I love it! Apart from the adsense box at the top. It’s really confusing, being mixed in with the RSS icon.
Hey guys we’re still recording any ideas what to talk about
Edit: and we’re done. It’s a bit of a mess, but hey, it’s got no stupid structure, and it’s pretty entertaining. Hopefully we’ll be back in to the swing of things more in episode 2.
Wow! I love this on PC and now on PS3. Must download…
I love the little details like heating etc.
Woot! Must play now….
Theafroguy: the Google ads are always way small, so I had to think of something to put next to it.
Looks rather swish, and any promised content is more than welcome!
One thing though that’s semi-related- my Google Reader subscription isn’t updating with your posts, with the last dated the 26th. Due to the crash or are Google just being twats again?
I read your blog in a regular manner and just love it
hope there will be more postings from you, keep on going
greetz, carmella
Looks good, though honestly I can’t really tell that much of a difference from ver.4. Still, a little botox always helps in keeping things looking fresh.
Assuming that it is actually released in April!
The graphics are very good and improved and bmuch better than the first theme park. Awesome game
@McBacon
I know Another World has no direct link to FTB and Flashback but I think you could call them ’spiritual successors’.
Just something to think about for update 5: you’re pushing content that people read wayyyyy down the site. You might consider more on the sidebar – Rock Paper Shotgun does a good layout with the content visible on smaller screens. Notably, my macbook barely can see the first entry since you’ve got the ads, topbar, banner, and usually a huge picture on each entry. :)
It is only a suggestion in your best interests, at least in my opinion it is. Maybe cut the top top banner by half and cut the size of pictures you put at the top of posts by half and it’d be much more bareable. Going further; bin the top menu bar (which repeats some sidebar content) and make the sidebar more prominent with the same links.
Otherwise good stuff, not too huge a change. And I too don’t get RSS updates – what’s up? If you’ve changed the address, you need to at least put a redirect in so it doesn’t simply break every existing feed :)
I’ve done nothing to the RSS feed. Hm.
Wait, no, I updated Wordpress, that might have done something. I really don’t know.
Hmm, so Google Reader?
I’m here everyday anyway, but Reader goes through stupid phases sometimes with some of the other things i’m subscribing to anyway.
Nay matter.
Okay, I’ll leave it a few days, and maybe re-subscribe or whatever it does. I must admit it was lucky I checked this site manually to look for updates ;)
You guys need a proof-reader. Sorry. You just do.
Andrew, you definitly make some good points; I guess thats the curse of designing sites in a huge resolution.
The banner could always be smaller, but I really like the huge images in the posts; video gaming is graphical and some have amazing artistic style, to squander that would be a huge shame.
Yeah, your RezHD one is fine – and put as many images after the first body of text / the jump to “more” as you like. :)
Just my Macbook suffers, haha. It’s only got a 800 high resolution, which if you factor in toolbars cuts down a bit more.
But don’t worry about it; it’s only my opinion (I do think the top top toolbar is a bit redundant still ;) ). I’m still going to come to the site anyway, since I use RSS to see new posts :)
can anyone confirm if this is an 18+ or not
i hope not becaue i’m 16 and i want this more than GTA4, that’s right, you hear me
i realy want this on the psn :(
i love sing star and i cant wait to get this piticular game. I would not recomend sing star rnb!!
I’ve played a couple of the burnout games before BP and loved them.
BP’s open race system, I find is fun. There’s no restriction on the route you take to get to the finish, just so long as you get there first. The AI is prety thick and the other cars don’t always take the quickest route, so you can find one that suits your driving style.
I do miss the old crash mode, but the rest is all good in my books.
does any 1 kno what website shows all 75 car unlocks?
re: Turok…
I loved the first one. Simply a well-made game, good mixture of aggression and intelligence required. The story and character were engaging.
The second had some truly great weapons, and the graphics were ok, but it didn’t have the same unique feel that the first one did.
After that it all went seriously wrong. Generic, frustrating, and I lost interest.
Could have been a good series. Unfortunately ruined, and this new one looks like an abomination too.
i can,t wait to play the bully scholarship edtion i think it will mint for the wii i am getting one
Bacon: you’ll never guess what you have to do to interrogate people
never
Jonathan: touch the screen
draw a speech bubble
press A
Bacon: it apes a popular DS game
Jonathan: circle them
shout
please tell me its not shout
Bacon: Elite Beat Agents
Jonathan: tap in the beat to interogate?
spin?!
Bacon: there are pressure points on a picture of a man
a circle closes in on them
Jonathan: you are fucking kidding me
Still, at least it gives you a great excuse to have an image going from the main banner to the article’s banner ^_^ I played the mobile game the other week, and it was appalling – like a poor man’s Prince of Persia, without ANY stealth or human characters or anything. There were pits filled with cobras, perfectly parallel and rigid. I hate mobile games.
everything said there is true.
I had to stop playing the game after being unable to jump a 2yds gap. Altair wasn’t grabbing to the beam, rinse and repeat for over 9000 times.
Carol… lol
Sounds a terrible game but in a way it was the best review ever.
I enjoyed the game on the 360 and even though the mobile version was quite good. This however I will be staying well away from.
The Ouendan style bits, ridiculous as they look, seem to be the least of the problems. The videos on Gametrailers looked pretty bad (and not from a technical point) and this review seals it. Thankfully.
Spinning is fun.
Aww crap, I hope I left enough money on my card after buying Medal of Honor: Heroes 2. I’ve been playing a proxy-ised version of the beta for the last month or so.
Oh well. I’ll do what I must because I can.
I might have misunderstood your maths, but wouldn’t a lower gameplay score in your equations mean a higher score overall?
…yes, it would. Proving my equation wrong.
Which is good, as that’s the point of it being there. I’m wondering if we could actually devise a proper mathematical score… anyone want to help try?
Come on, they said it would be free.
bugger off, I’m not buying it.
I don’t remember that. There was the free beta, but I saw the screen saying that it would be for sale in Feb…
Oh man….
Personally I thought it was a poor game…very little to it! We’ve seen it all before in the past with button tapping but done so much better! If that wasn’t enough the single cart multiplayer is amazingly slow…leaving you an unbarable wait between each event!
Surely games are marked out of 0 – 10 rather than 1 – 10.
The idea of marking is you start at 0 and gradually add marks to a score for positive aspects on what you are marking.
A game could get 0. Making the average 5 not 5.5.
The majority of scoring systems are from 1 to 10. You get 10 possible options. 0 to 10 would mean you have 11, which is awkward.
I am glad to see nobody is yet to doubt the Biscuit System.
I think a good scoring system be -5 to 5
only dealing in integers, and where 0 is an average game, anything below 0 is “below average”, anything above 0 is “above average”.
And the highest and lowest score (5 and -5) are reserved for really really super amazing games and really really bad games respectively.
Could I rip the Orange box soundtrack to a cd ?
Needs moar biscuits. This should be Biscuit Gaming Blog.
So yeah, minigame compilations are pretty much pointless nowadays, since nobody’s interested any more. Feel the Magic was awesome when it came out, but now about three quarters of games on Nintendo consoles are like that, everyone’s had their minigame fill.
Your IP has been logged and the authorities notified.
The soundtrack is in the form of MP3 files included in the program folder.
Ever had Sainsbury’s cookies? They’d be, like, 9.7. Although it does sometimes get stuck in your throat and kill you.
Now you see, whilst having ‘death by biscuit’ written on your death certificate or whatever would be awesome, I’m not sure that would rank highly.
Is anybody actually interested in this game?
From what I can tell, its a very pretty version of Richard Dawkins BioMorpth evolution simulation software. With a game tagged on the end.
Can’t imagine anything more dull TBH.
but at the end of the day i could have you in a fight
“making up for the rest of it. Fruit shortcake”
I think sombody is a Rasin short of a fruitcake!!
does any1 no how 2 get the new secret achievements (01 yee haw & are you the one?) please respond :-)
People don’t see 7 as ‘average’, people see 7 as ‘playable’. People don’t like to play games under 7 because it means that their quality is questionable in many regards. Of course, as you said it is questionable, however all games which critics and public have both liked have been above 7 in scores.
I don’t mind BGB’s 4 star rating system. It’s short, it’s snappy. Although I do not like to advertise my website through others’ (as shown by the fact I do NOT include my website URL in any comment forms’ “Website” box, I feel my rating system for my own review site; 50Hz Gamer (www.50hzgamer.co.uk) to be fairly effective. It’s a /5 rating, however takes place on a scale. One end marked with a 0 for “Bad” and a 5 at the other for “Good”. Games further up the scale are better, 3/5 (or mid-way) are ‘average’, everything under is poor or awful (although I’ve never given a 0/5 score before).
I once had a system which was based off tick and cross at either end of the scale with no numbers. However it seems to have degraded into numbers anyway. Oh well.
Spore promises tonnes of interesting features like your creature being uploaded to the net a populating tonnes of other players’ games.
The other attractive part is how your evolutinary tract will evolve over the course of the entire game; the way you make the dude in the first stage and the way you interact with other creatures could very well make you inept at space exploration, advanced combat or creating civilisations. Careful considerisation of evolution, diplomacy, war, exploration and the juggling of factors lead to interesting insights.
I want to get into the world of Spore and just see how intelligent the game is; will my grotesuqe Frankspore find it difficult to trade and alliance with other factions, will my fast and nimble yet weak and weaponless Spore be able to colonise the galaxy, despite it’s lack of combat expertise.
And Will Wright has hinted at something in the very middle of the universe, guarded by a super race of Sporians – Will Wright’s giant floating head?
And for Richard AM, the Lego fan, check this ish out:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2104/2183869229_e006d5b68c.jpg
Good stuff
Yeehaw (Dukes of Hazard Reference)
-Select the Hermitage Race in St. Petersburg.
-Change reverse to on under advanced options.
-Select the Dodge Challenger Concept.
-And you should get the achievement on the first jump unless there is a certain distance you need to jump or something and you don’t end up with enough speed. But I got it with no problems on the first jump.
Are you the one? (Matrix Reference)
-Start a custom race.
-Select the Hermitage Race in St. Petersburg.
-Change reverse to on under advanced options.
-Select the Ducati 998.
-Go over the first jump and while your in the air do a 360 with your camera.
Achievement unlocked
From:
http://www.achieve360points.com/forums/showthread.php?t=71183
Uh… the statement was released yesterday, so it’s yesterday’s tomorrow today.
Well, it’s today if you’re in America, and tommorow if you put the B in BGB.
The first B
Edit: Actually, i think you’re right. My time zone converting is crap.
trance music or very fast speed(thrashmetal aka slayer^^
Don’t worry, Valve Time is different to real time: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time
I’m loving the sizzle :D Badlands seems quite well class balanced as well.
Hmmmm…..
I dunno about badlands, I havn’t played it too much but I still think well and gravelpit are best…
:P the fact that i have no clue where things are in it hadnt affected my judgement one bit!
I’m well ahead of you bacon- I saw them a few weeks ago. ;)
*wants update to X360 version* :(
Great Review, cannot wait to get my copy!
Faster damn you Play-Asia!
Nice One!
Audiosurf demo limits you to four songs and about five characters. I don’t have enough money on my card for another two weeks.
So was it a compass?
PS. good show guys (:
Yeah, it was, I canny believe it!
Thanks
Not a bad review, although I’m surprised that one flaw of the game wasn’t mentioned. The terribly designed respawn system, allowing the player, with enough time and effort, to take down a big daddy no matter how under equipped and resource exhausted, on the smallest slither of health. This removes any fear you might’ve felt when facing off against them simply because if you were to die, you’d appear round the corner ready to continue giving the Big Daddy a black eye, over and over again.
You update or write an article about the MASS EFFECT fox report.
0_0
Am I the only one whose compasses always go loose and draw a wiggly circle that needs to be joined up at the end?
Efficient compass care, resulting in perfect circles, can be achieved through the following simple steps:
- Keep the spikey bit sharp, poke it in a cork after use
- Use a sharp pencil
- Ensure the pivot point is screwed tightly, oil regularly to avoid rust
Follow these steps to the letter, to receive perfect Os, every time.
Rog doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Audiosurf is ace.
can you download or unlock maps?like overgrown cuz i want to play it but not online
“or gave Sonic the Hedgehog a gun.”
Nope, this doesn’t look to be a disaster the size of Shadow the Hedgehog.
Gears 2, 4 player co-op or bust.
Shadow would have been good if it wasn’t so shit.
Looks interesting. Don’t quite get it, but whatever…
Actually, the upper case O is a bit wonky. You want o.
And Audiosurf is indeed “ace”. If you have more than £4, that is…
I signed up my email but haven’t got anything yet, is it running now?
I don’t think so, I believe they will email you when the test begins, letting you know if you’re in or not.
I wonder if it’ll be violent ;)
Anyone remember Epic MegaGames’ excellent game Epic Pinball? I’ll get my coat…
Hmm… I only remember 3D Realm’s Balls of Steel, with a Duke Nukem Table – close enough!
Fable 2 is easily one of the top games on my most wanted for this year. Can’t wait.
I think this is great news not least because of the C64 classics now coming to the Wii but because of what it implies. My hope is we’ll see the Amiga classics come to the system! Imagine if they started doing classic PC games like the X Wing series or Elite too?
Finally, a note to Nintendo, start releasing Gameboy and Gameboy Advance games. I want the original GB Mario platformers!:D
The Virtual Console needs a price overhaul. Most (if not all) C64 games are very short and simple, so should be the cheapest. SNES games are a bit expensive at 800, especially next to 600 for MD.
Still, bring it on.
C64 had some good games I guess. HMV used to sell (inexpensively) CDs packed with an emulator and hundreds of ROMs. It makes the idea of spending a couple of quid on one C64 games far less appetising.
Nintendo do need to release GB games, though :D
Great news but they are a little pricey considering their age.
Shame most of the c64 titles I like are gory ones (Forbidden forest etc) and probably won’t show up on ninty’s kiddy friendly Wii. This is interesting news though.
Don’t lose hope, Namco’s Splatterhouse is on the VC – the first game to ever get a parental advisory disclaimer
Never seen why everyone loved Goldeneye. Especially when compared to Perfect Dark, which has more stuff than most FPSs nowadays.
I was a bit of a PC elitist back then, and Goldeneye couldn’t hold up to the superior mouse and keyboard, using LAN to avoid fighting for screen space and titles like Duke 3D, Quake 2, Hexen II and Star Wars Jedi Knight 2. It’s iconoclastic to fight against such a rabid fan base, but I think there is some rose tinted nostalgia in play here.
So many memories of Goldeneye multiplayer back in the day, but it’s still a bit odd this is appearing on a service called ‘Xbox Live Arcade’…?
Who cares, if it’s real i’ll be buying.
uh-ohs
Curse you and your horrid, previously enticing lies McBacon…curse you.
*kneels and raises arms to the sky screaming, echoing Calculon in Futurama*
nintendos really been taking the piss this whole wii cycle… for the most part ive been really disapointed with it. they can fuck off it they think people are going to pay to play and still mess around with friend codes and sub-standard online functionality. My wii now pretty much is just a VC machine. god knows if they’ll ever release brawl over here too.
Pay for play? Seriously, I uhm-ed and ah-ed about signing up for Xbox Live Gold, and that was a service I trialed for several months using free trial cards where ever I could. It was great and the unison between Xbox Live and the Xbox 360 just felt quality. Online on the Wii and the DS… Well, let’s just say I consider the 360 as a well built shed, you would trust it. the WFC? It’s more like an Ikea shelf, after you’ve tediously set it up (adding the friend codes for each and every game) you just don’t trust it because you know you have left over pieces in the box.
So to hell with these paid services, especially since Nintendo is making huuuuuge profits off the Wii, raw profit off VC games and even the consoles themselves… Nintendo are just going to alienate their consumer base if they start making you pay for something which they’ve been presenting as free thus far.
I sure hope this project isn’t dead and there’s hope for poor Goldeneye… I’d love to play a revamped version.
“for the most part ive been really disapointed with it. they can fuck off it they think people are going to pay to play”
The problem is that I think a lot of misguided people WILL pay for this. =(
I doubt this’ll see release after all the fuss Nintendo made over the rights to the name a month or two back, but if things do get settled out between them then it’ll likely see a release pretty soon, seeing as the game was practically finished before the publisher issues began.
The reason this game is loved by so many people is because of its importance. It was one of, if not the, first ever objective-based first person shooters (I’m very prepared to be proven wrong on it being the first). Before GoldenEye, the good FPSs involved just getting to the end of the level, only having to shoot things that got in your way. GoldenEye, however, demanded more thought. You had to take out cameras to avoid raising alarms, bug computers, photograph documents – all the kind of things we now expect and take for granted. It all added up to an immense feeling of actually being Bond – something no Bond game since has managed. When you watch the film after having become so familiar with the game, it’s easy to forget that the film came first. It’s like watching one of those now common crappy films based on video games. For a lot of people, GoldenEye was also the first FPS they played using the N64s revolutionary 3D stick. Now I’m not going to get into the controller vs. mouse/keyboard debate, because it’s pointless, but GoldenEye was designed for playing with the 3D stick and it was a great new experience.
So there are my reasons for still loving GoldenEye. If this ever does get released, I’ll be buying it (pending getting an Xbox 360 :/) and simultaneously once again cursing Nintendo for selling Rare. Mind you, Rare is now very different from the young, idealistic team who created GoldenEye…
So the Wii is getting downloadable content and a subscription model to allow for MMO games? That’s terrible!
Recently discovered your podcast and its very entertaining! I just wanted to know what the answer was to the other puzzle (ball in hole). Personally i thought the answer was WATCH since that is ‘on-hand’.
I REALLY disagree with this review. Zero Gravity is fun and the controls are easy and good actually. Did you by chance used the Wii Remote? Because the controls are 100% much better with the Gamecube controller.
Zero Gravity is a good game. Around 3/5 rating or so.
saints row 2 is much better than gta 4!!!
Dont get excited, not going to happen, not on XBLA not on Virtual Computer, sorry to be a party pooper,
nothing to see here, Move Along!
This review wasn’t on the Wii version specifically – Sega sent the game on PS2.
Yeah, I played it with a SixAxis.
….500 points…thats a joke! you’d have to be made to pay the orginal price for some of these dated C64 games!
mmm looks like i will be getting a 360 after all if this happens and really does suck….
The Dishwasher was definitely the pick of the bunch. It felt like a real Live Arcade game.
The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai is a real live arcade game.
The creator made it in XNA for a contest and one of the prizes which he won was a Live Arcade contract.
You know what I mean. =P
It’ll be released on Live Arcade in the future, yeah – it’s the only one that feels like it could go up in its current form.
FEZ FTW! lol, this looks like my kind of game, thanks for the heads-up :)
Weird to see Microsoft doing something like this, but cool!
sweet review, was waiting for a review before I picked it up. Thanks. As a lost fan it’ll be straight onto my list!
March looks set to be a winner. GT5P, Everybodys golf, Dark sector especially.
Gonna pick up Phoenix Wright – Trials and Tribulations and Condemned 2 for me.
As a gamer i’m still a little pessimistic about the whole thing, but as a fan, this is a dead-cert purchase.
argh, slow down with your podcasts! I still haven’t finished the last one.
last season I has to skip 5 episodes because I was so far behind.
No More Heroes, definitely, and a release long-overdue.
Hoping to pick up the LOST game before then as well.
We’re doing once a week… we might pull it down to fortnightly, but it’s hardly unheard of. But if you’re thinking of skipping any, skip this one, it’s not as good as 2.1 :P
I’ve just finished listening to it now.
I find it had concentrating for an hour and the fact I can’t do much else while listening to it, maybe I should chop it up into 10 minute sections and play it in audiosurf :)
Hey Rubberfishy, I’m quite a big podcast fan and I like to listen while playing games – not everything is viable, but COD4 online, getting my “Insane” achievements on the Club or just searching for ramps in Burnout Paradise are some of my recent ones!
Isn’t.. Trials and Tribulations.. Already out? I’m holding it in my hand right now, so…
Nevermind, my bad, I didn’t check what area my copy was from, I forget with imports sometimes XD
I’m thinking the US version.
my PC is downstairs and all my consoles are upstairs :(
I guess I could play worms world party or gta3, they’re the only good games on my PC that don’t need sound.
very nice
I love Team Fortress 2.
Umm didnt Konami state they were trying for a worldwide release?
It’s been in discussion, but the Playstation Blog is very careful in saying “in North America”. I’m sure Konami Europe will pipe up soon with confirmation.
Awesome, the other day I said to my sister that they better put Heroes in it…
and they did :D what shall I wish for next? :P
I agree, Call of Duty 4 fantastically addictive and these updates will only make it better.
*LOL* at the “Businessivity” EA jokes and you can sit on the wings of planes? HOW COOL IS THAT!!
I like the “4 star system” although I’m less critical and sometimes add 1/2 for good measure.
**** = essential
*** = great
** = ok
* = bad
ZERO = avoid at all cost
it’s sweet
Personally, I found Bleach DS 2nd to be a bit shallow. The only “serious” fighting game I’ve played before was Soul Calibur, which seems infinitely deeper than Bleach. The story mode is based mostly off beating one-hit hollows and collecting sweets, and the online is full of people who seem to be able to get infinite combos as soon as the game begins, so the only mode I really enjoyed was the arcade modes- high scores, time trials, etc. Don’t know how much of this applies to the original Bleach DS.
Are they adbots, or what?
rog i’m ashamed. first up you dis me when i get this game then you get it and say it’s good what up with that.
BLEACH SUCKS “this had to be said”
TLS, they just let you know when other wordpress blogs link off to our content. I might delete them in the future.
WWWWOOOHOOO!!! My copy just arrived today!
Wow look at what The Americans get for the equivalent of £250 they are so spoiled! and they still whinge on about the price! It has come to my attention just how tight fisted Americans can be. They don’t know how lucky they are, they would have an apoplexy if they ever had to live in UK and cope with “treasure island’s” prices lol
SRsly, that is an incredible value bundle they are getting there..I think there will be a huge surge in PS3 sales in the States when this pack goes to retail.
i think resident evil is the best thing in my life and im crazy on it
Thanks for providing the eboot file. Didn’t want to bother making a Japanese account.
I just gave the demo a whirl and it was mind-bendingly awesome. If they can keep the variety up in the puzzles then we’re looking at a potentially great game.
death be wth u all cuz all are not happy. if you are not happy then death will make u happy. is this true or is this fault. for all i no i do not no wa i am typing so dont carry on reading this. why carry on reading this when i have already told u to stop =] sorry i am jus bored and i think that this is helping me get rid of the boredom. this is for me to no and u to find out. well i would rather you to not find out wat is going thru my head as it will confuse you for the rest of your life. im serious. however you will not be able to find out where i am or who i am, unless u own this and can hack. if u can hack. then hack my email address, use it to find out my personal details, then bingo, you no who i am and where i live. now if u are certian u wanna no wat goes through my head then you may come to my house and check. but beleive you me, you will not appreciate how much effort you put into reading this. yes i am insane and wasted my time, i wasted your time. but if u think about it, i told you to stop way before, if u listened it woulda saved u the time and trouble. well thank you for reading this and ha u wasted your time. i am very sorry but this may have amused you or it may not have.
have a good day.
From the confused guy =]
I LIKE BIG ButTS AND I CANOT LIE :D
bout burnout… for it to last forver
u jus need some good quality mates playin on it
that have headsets.. dont u fink ;)
Anyone know anywhere thats taking preorders for this? Demos good but don’t see it coming out overhere anytime soon.
After spending some time last night updating the PSP to the latest custom firmware to run this game, I must same I am impressd.
It is a sublime experience that at once relaxes the player whilst simultaneously engages the part of the brain that is looking for a challenge.
The background music seems very ambient and quite appropriate to the sparse gaming environment you find yourself in.
Its a definate win for me and a must buy piece of software.
Free Xbox 360 Elite,This is good stuff. I use it realy and it is very useful. it is very cheap one with the market
Xbox 360 Free,This is good stuff. I use it realy and it is very useful. it is very cheap one with the market
I actually laughed out loud at the female protagonist’s costume… Says a lot about the direction and target audience of the game, which unfortunately leads to me thinking that although this game looks cool, it’ll play like ass and have a fairly naff story to boot. But here’s hoping I’m wrong.
Yes.I am sonic fans…I love sonic game,OH yeah I have got the highest score in UK
Neither the Wii nor the PS3 have demonstrated the appalling failure rate that the Xbox360 has to date.
Because of that, they would have to pay me to let one of these trojan horses into my house.
I suppose it makes sense given that putting the words Microsoft and reliability into the same sentence would be oxymoronic ;)
Army of two is a great game to play in single player and also in co-op, i found the grafics to be visually stunning aswell as well as indepth. However the story line is a little shallow as of most games of its kind, but huge fun none the less. 4/5
Is that Snake inside the Metal Gear in the third image? =D
Looks like the old ‘tachey geezer to me.
Is it me or is there too much green in those screenshots?
Gears of War was brown, Assassin’s Creed is blue, MGS is green – using one colour, despite the system being capable of presenting the most luscious high def visuals, is the new cel-shading.
Apply Photoshop’s Auto-Colour feature, and it churns out a screenshot of a normal videogame!
Check it out
Ah…thats much better!
Lets hope this new ‘cell-shading’ dies out.
Piloting a Metal Gear would be a great of relieving stress- let’s hope we get in on the action.
Oh, and that scenery looks like these could be the first shots of the South America area.
FlatOut Head On – apply directly to the forehead.
I might give that one a try, the Xbox 360 version is a right hoot, and very underrated.
Thanks to Mr. Freeloader I’m importing the bloody version of No More Heroes.
Screw you Rising Star Games.
Buy it! Buy it NOW! Damn GMod rocks, especially now that TF2 and Portal is properly supported ;)
Well, SystemShock 2 was a huge improvement over SystemShock… But there was a huge gap between one SystemShock and another… Aw well.
I’m a lot less excited about the new ferraris than I am disappointed about the lack of any nissan that isn’t a skyline of some sort. 6 variations on the same car and no 200sx or pulsar or 240/280z … for Mazda there’s 4x FD batmobiles but no “too cool for school” FC … and there’s not one single Toymota on the list (apart from the lumbering Lexuses) … instead there’s a couple of Prancing Ponies (available in red) basically the gayest car company in the world.
It seems that all this high-definition glory is not suitable for the 70s, 80s and 90s classics – I mean why bother when there’s the inexplicable Peugeot 307 cabriolet to sway gently around the corners in.
Alright, the DB9 is kind of cool.
Mark, the flickr link is for the “1942″ images?!
COOL. I want this game (for 10 bucks tops) now!
Whoops, fixed up now. Thanks
Well it’s $9.99 over in the states, which converts to 800 points (£6.80) and a similar price on the PSN. You’re not going to pay more than £10/$10 for it.
You can’t have a 4 star rating system, then make 2/4 equal to “bad”. It just doesn’t give a suitable number of options. 2/4 should be average.
If anything, 2/4 stars should be mediocre, while 1/4 stars should be bad, but agreed it would be much simpler to have 5 star rating system , 4 star system doesn’t make you look any smarter than other sites.
estupid review. this game is great
Our review system shows 1 and 2 as bad games, 3 and 4 as good games – there’s just an opportunity to sort the buggy and unplayable (1) from the “not my cup of tea” (2) and the good, recommendable games (3) from titles that will make gaming history (4). It’s pretty much just thumbs up, thumbs down.
Jonas, I’m well aware that some people really dig this game, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I wasn’t warning people exactly what this game entails. It’s a very specific type of game that will please a very specific group of people.
I actually agree with the reviewing system, because gaming experiences are more than just numbers on a scale.
The 4 star systems lends itself to being slightly ambiguous, but ultimately forces you, the reader, to read inbetween the lines. Isn’t that what reviews are for? A good review helps you reach a decision rather making that choice for you.
Great review. It went straight to the points that matter most to me, the fan service and how it differs from VT3.
Now, where is my Super Sega Smash Brawl?
This “review” is a travesty and I can’t believe people are debating that they think that 2 stars = bad rather then the ridiculous notion that this game is bad in the first place.
You’re just whining because you fail at the game. It’s not the games fault you can’t stand the idea of your actions actually mattering, that you actually need to think about what you need to do.
Hey, power to you, Mark, this game is clearly an acquired taste but for those of us like random roguelikes its one of the best!
When was the last time the threat of getting killed in game scare the crap out of you so badly? In almost any other RPG its just, oh no…I have to re-spawn 3′ from where I died at full power or maybe just reload the last save. Having your character lose all of their experience is nothing, it would only take at most 60 minutes usually to get back up to whatever experience level you were at but losing a sword you’ve built up over several different runs.
I don’t suppose you’ve ever played Rogue, or Nethack?
It’s worth noting here that things like the fullness meter are NOT here out of a misguided sense of realism. They have a definite place in Shiren’s design.
And Shiren is difficult, but that’s because the intent is not to provide an “experience,” the thing that most RPGs try to do, and usually pretty damn badly at that. It’s explicitly a game, there’s a score, and Shiren even has an online scoreboard.
When you die in Shiren the Wanderer, you haven’t “lost work.” It is a game. You are playing it, hopefully, because you enjoy it. If you die, you haven’t lost anything; you can play again and, if you’re still enjoying it, have just as much fun.
Finally, the statement that roguelikes are the “GTA clone of the 80s” is simply false. I have no idea where you got that impression. I can’t say I find this review very insightful. I can’t say I find the reviewer very knowledgeable.
Look, I appreciate that some vocal members of the community are big fans of Shiren the Wanderer, and sure – it was wrong of me to say that only escaped mental patients would find this game fun (which is now gone from the review), but you guys have got to be realistic;
The term roguelike isn’t quite as well known as I’m sure you’d like to think. On a website that writes reviews for everything from Brain Assist to Half Life 2, I wouldn’t be doing my job If I wasn’t warning potential purchasers exactly what the sub-genre entails.
Actual roguelike fans will likely need to look elsewhere, which is a flaw of the review I just can’t help; this is my first rougelike so I can’t provide an accurate review on those merits. I suggest reading Jeremy Parish’s review over at 1up who has plenty of experience with the genre.
1up.com – Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer
Argh, so many Pingbacks!
LAME
I guess this is good. I’m jumping up and down with excitement.
The Masked Millionaire
It’s a shame that the planned simultaneous release didnt happen though. Kudos to Infinity Ward but you’ve got to wonder what SCEE are up to.
“All units move to Foxtrot”
“All units attack Foxtrot”
“All units move to Foxtrot”
“Kinetic Strike on Foxtrot”
Is it just me, or did it seem like there was NO tactics involved in that!?
“I liked how it was 3D, not 2D, different from other games we play”
Ever heard of Company of Heroes!??! Total War!?!!?
Sorry, that video, did NOT help raise my hype for the game (which was big before it, actually)
I’m fairly sure this is going to be extremely light compared to PC RTSes. I mean, with COH you can tell your squads to take light/med/high cover, throw grenades, use mounted guns, move while firing or move in stealth.
EndWar is likely RTS 101, but we shall see. And take no notice of the Fragdolls!
Isn’t this getting ported to PC as well?
From what I’ve heard it is (Wikipedia :P). That’s the only place I’ll be getting it, as I’m stuck on a PS2 on the console front. My PC is where I game properly…
None of the press releases have mentioned PC yet, I think Wikipedia is just guessing.
Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system from Microsoft
PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system
But if you’re a big COH/Total War fan, I’m gonna assume this game is not for you. We’ll see closer the release.
Could be interesting, if it’s on PC. I do want optional voice recognition – it’s useful in fast games, as a complement to normal commands, or when it’s otherwise impractical.
Of course, for an RTS, a good grouping and pathing system with unit-level AI helps a lot more then voice stuff :)
“Entirely by voice command” As she wiggled both sticks and pressed the trigger.
Gamespot have a preview of it filed under PC
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/tomclancysendwar/news.html?sid=6177513&mode=recent
I used to really like the Total War stuff, but once I got into CoH, I found MIITW way too slow for my liking…
:D Oh, forgot to add, I just read the EndWar book.
Absolutely AMAZING. There is a reference to Scott Mitchell in it, and also the trailer (the battle in Paris, ending in the Kinetic Strike).
It says on the back “Based on Ubisoft’s Bestselling game, EndWar”
…But will it work on my DS Phat?
Good question. No word yet, but the peripheral showed there won’t: the DS Phat’s GBA port is deeper, and looking at the picture and video… no, that one won’t. DS Phat and DS Lite versions are a possibility, though I am sure they must have considered this.
That’s quite ingenious.
There better be a Phat G-Grip.
I’m assuming a new track-list, then? If it’s as good as GHIII’s, I might cry out of joy.
Aye, “at least” 20 tracks. Don’t be surprised if we see some songs from GH1 through III aswell, but there will of course be new tracks.
Of course you’ll want headphones on because the DS speakers kinda suck. That’s gonna be weird with them being at the top of the console when it’s held like that.
Rented it rather than buying it.. Great idea! Hated it.
Wow… that really is weird.
“You have passed screening, but only subscriber keys are left. ”
: (
Wowwee this looks amazing. I remember codemasters for the Micro Machines games on the NES and Genesis :)
This sets high expectations, looking forward to it. DIRT ran great on the 360 and esp the ps3, so even though multi plat we should be able to expect great things. Nice mix of cars in there, touring, f1/3 etc. There’s only gt5p, ferrari challenge and this on the horizon in terms of console racing this year so far.
Hey, didn’t know you look (are) so young.
I enjoyed it, just reminded me a little about Top Gear… you know furniture etc.etc.
Great section about Guitar Hero. Will watch it again!
BTW: The song “Hier kommt Alex” by “Die Toten Hosen” would translate to English: “Here comes Alex” by “The Dead Trousers”. ;-)
There was a flash game on the Doctor Who website… actually, I think several, so the TARDIS would fit much better in them.
Oh, and I may go break your world record with my collection… of which I can find about half of, but it’s still about twenty figures strong.
I understand Here comes Alex, I paid some attention in German, but as I understood it “toten” meant to kill as it has the n on the end kind of like how spielen is to play and spiele is playing or whatever. I don’t know. I got a B in German at GCSE, but I don’t know how.
I loved it, could do better with some sort of transition between news segments, but other then that it was pretty strong.
keep doing them guys, i will definitely watch it again, (:
Samuel. PS. nice hair, (:
I would love that! I haven’t ever gotten it for my Wii, but know I can get it cheaper and hand held!!!! I hope it works well! On the DS lite? Thats crazy!
Peace,
Parker
What is a DS Phat???
DS Phat is an informal name given to the original model of the DS.
the only thing I would say is that every time you looked down at your notes the flow of the video was broken.
also, I think you need someone else in the video to talk to and to take turns doing the segments.
apart from that It was good.
Looks to me like that Wii Sonic game… Wild Fire, since the final name is too bad for me to remember. Though I’ve never played it, so it’s probably nothing like that.
Sonic and the Secret Rings.
–
Bacon: which shot do you want as the main image
Jonathan: sonic screaming
Bacon: i was afraid of that
Throw in a couple of new sidekicks, a plot of time/space dimension lark and constant reminder from the voice actors that the villain is no longer called Robotnik, and this’ll be exactly like all the other horribly awful recent Sonic games.
I wish I could be more enthusiastic, but Sega have yet to inspire hope with their ‘mascot’ these past two generations.
How could you miss this off…
http://sega-portal.de/screenshots/1299.jpg
He turns into..a were wolf..
Sonic, you are dead to me, an avid Sonic fanboy…what worked for Link will not work for you.
I actually rather enjoyed that. For some reason you reminded me of Jimmy Carr. Maybe it was your delivery.
The werewolf bollocks was leaked after these screens :(
Haha! I thought of Jimmy Carr too (and possibly crossed with Clarkson).
Only prob was I’d read most of the news items on the net and I lack the short attention span to watch them again. Maybe concentrate on the stunt/featurey things that Top Gear does? (like you did with Accordian Hero).
Rubberfishy is right though. It would be good to see a few more presenters so there is someone to react to the news items.
Very professional though.
Oh God, please don’t tell me the werewolf stuff is true.
I saw a video of this on youtube and it actually looked good, but nevermind that now if they try and shoe horn something stupid into it.
It’s true. Sadly.
I agree with Richard’s comment. Graphically this looks awesome but there’s always that feeling of it replicating the same mistakes as every previous 3D Sonic game.
I’ve been wondering when the next one would be.
Expect me to have a list of things to say when I’ve listened to it.
Wow! This could be the game we’ve all be waiting for for so long, let’s pray it doesn’t turn out to be a bitter disappointment. Ha, I seriously couldn’t resist downloading Sonic 3 on the Wii after viewing this awesome footage, good on you Sega!
I’ll have a copy of GTA and Mario Kart this month please Sir Bacon.
I don’t care about GTA4, I don’t have an 360 or ps3 or good PC,
and looking back at my history of gta games it has gone: gta1, gta3, san andreas.
if you notice, the order is: get one, miss one.
That means I have to wait for gta5 then, don’t wanna break tradition.
You’re really missing out with Vice City if you’re a GTA fan. The Scarface parody is really cool, the music selection is out of this world, the gaudy neon 80s world is beautiful and Tommy & Lance’s relationship is well realized.
A slow month, but sandwiched by Mario Kart and GTA, so I’ll be fine :)
Cant wait for these titles to be released, GTA will be a smash im sure and will pick one up asap, not to fussed myself with Mario Kart but im sure it will be a hit with alot of gamers
The release of the GTA will give followers a new lease of gaming life as it lets you do a lot more with the controller which will impress my lads im sure. I will need to get it quick as they will be badgering me for it as soon as its released
Great review of game, i think i will save my money here and rent it first or borrow it
Looks awkward to me, but wii version is great. Will need to see it in flesh so to speak as to see if it would give the same feeling as holding the basic guitar!!
Cheers for the kind comments all, and it’s pretty certain that this will be a full series. Maybe I should send out a press release.
I think there’ll be more silly things on the show in the future, though the content lined up for this week’s might be a bit heavy for some… there’s some big news that’ll be covered (if it comes out as expected), but hopefully that’ll be nicely balanced with some stupidity: though that will be more in the full BGB Wire episodes, when they resume. When there’s something to cover.
The format will remain mostly the same, but I’m working on things like transitions and the visual design of the show. Oh yes, and there’ll be a surprise or two if you’re lucky.
This does leave me to ask about distribution: right now, the plan is:
Streaming: YouTube
Download: WMV / MP4 (iPod) / High Resolution (?)
RSS Podcast: WMV / MP4
Any requests?
Cheers again for the kind comments, Newswire will be back on Friday. :)
The lag is quite bad, I’m beginning to think that DICE is using servers buried under the frigid tundra of northern Sweden; run by a crew of Samis and powered by reindeer. At the launch of the beta there are such irritating problems as the player finds himself sliding about the map against his will, the player randomly clips through walls and floors (sometimes finding themselves teleported through the clipping to somewhere else entirely), players are unable to switch their weapon without it immediately snapping back, and of course the typical lag symptom of other players flickering wildly about the screen and being impossible to hit without liberal use of the grenade launcher (Which is incredibly fun to use regardless).
If GTAIV isn’t a contender for Game of the Year I will eat my socks.
Very good lads, i laughed quite alot, keep it up.
kewl but when will it be out in 2010 2009 ? who knows
I have to say guys that I didn’t think this episode was very good. Found it dull and not very interesting. I guess 2.1 is a hard act to follow.
They’ve been trying to sell destructible environments for years. Red Faction back in 2001 is the one that immediately springs to mind.
Am I the only person yet to be excited by this game? it and ‘killzone’ being largely the reason I’m hanging onto my ps3 is a little disconcerting for me
The upcoming Fracture does it too, but the art design is such a turn off.
How do you unlock worlds 4 and 7 in new super mario bros? I’ve read that you defeat the bosses as mini mario – but this has no effect.
Please let me know,
Cheers,
JK
you shouldnt be. theres alot of good titles on ps3 which mean you shouldnt let go of it.
my list is :
uncharted
heavenly sword
resistance (takes a bit of going)
Ratchet and clank
UT3
Gran Turismo 5
Haze
and plenty moe to come.
BUT mgs4 will be game of the year without a doubt, ive non stop impressed by it so far.
I had to laugh at Radio 1’s news report earlier which announced that some of the games effected by this could be “Assasins” and “Creed”.
I’d like to see some hard statistics as to how many kids get injured/killed because they rode a fairground ride that they were too short for on the “You must be this tall to ride!” scale. This is me shooting in the dark, but I don’t think there’d be a huge difference in injuries between the kid who was a centimetre below to the kid who was a centimetre above. As it pertains to video games, I believe the idea of 3/7/12/15/18up or whatever it is to be similar, if not identical. Games should have reccomended age ratings, sure, but more importantly (in my opinion) are those little cartoons that show what kind of content is in the game (you know, clenched fist for violence, angry speech bubble for swearing, that kind of thing). That’s a PEGI service, and it goes totally overlooked. If they expanded the critea for those, a parent/child could take a look at the back of the box and see exactly what kind of stuff you’re gonna get in the game (violence, for example, differs greatly from an FPS to a fighter). If I were 14 and wanted to play Halo 3, for example, what is there aside from a [proposed/supposed] law to say I can’t? I’m sure most kids know that you shoot the aliens and not the people, anyway.
Then again, I’m always berating people with high-pitched voices over Xbox Live with taunts of “Why are you playing this game, it’s rated 15 and you sound about 9 years old. Better go back to Viva Pinata before your mummy callsyou for bed time.”
Yes Rog, please stop saying that to me.
your not 9 years old yet jon i thougt you were still only 8
as for age rating for games i dont know which one im aloud to play as im old but a big kid
I once got kicked from IRC for saying JonEx looked cute on TV…
Dualshock3 controllers cannot be shipped to the E.U.
That’s annoying. It usually says that on the page for PS3 stuff but it isn’t there now. Did you try and order one and it stop you at the checkout?
What on earth were you doing reading the Daily Mail?! I can only suspect it was whilst you were in the toilet and waiting to use it to wipe your bum…
In my defence, someone else saw it, posted it on a forum, and then I read it.
My paper of choice is the Guardian, which I read on Mondays due to the MediaGuardian bit and Thursdays due to TechnologyGuardian. I like supplements.
Sky News also run a very similar take on the news. Saying that games would get BBFC ratings… Even though games have been carrying them since as long as I can remember. (I have a bleeding original Doom: Thy Flesh Consumed box with a BBFC 15+ rating on the front of it.)
The BBC aren’t much better, they’re so incredibly bias against video games you can actually feel the hate when reading website articles or listen to headlines on BBC News 24.
Reading their response to the report on BBC.co.uk yesterday made me roll my eyes. However, I think they did learn from past mistakes (Sony Vs. Church, anyone?) and actually got people from the video game industry to talk about the report on BBC News 24, people from EA and somewhere else where they were speaking sense.
I’ve taken the liberty of correcting your last sentence.
“Remember, each time read the Daily Mail, you lose a brain cell.”
The thing is, I keep using the BBC complaints form and as they have a proper official process they have to be listened to, so they’re certainly improving. What was interesting is how on the dot.life tech blog they do, they covered what Byron actually said much better than their news articles: it’s the only place I’ve actually seen someone apart from me point out that she said BBFC on the front and PEGI on the back.
Anyway, I best get back on set, filming Newswire…
Ratings on games? You chose to write an article on that?! There are illegal immigrant paedophile terrorists stealing our jobs and we’re all going to die and you focus on video games?! You should be panicking, dammit!
The sad truth is that a lot of people take in what the Daily Mail says as truth.
Even though it clearly states that DS3’s will not be shipped to the EU on the product page, yes, I did have a go at ordering one. I thought it possible that this was some sort of ploy to make it look like they are doing the right thing by Sony when in fact, they will happily ship orders outside of Japan when requested.
Alas, once you have a DS3 in your cart and go to checkout, you choose EU and are told you must remove restricted items from your cart as they are not allowed to be shipped to the chosen shipping region.
Hia mate, love this blog and absoloutely loved this video, I love the sarcasm and the humour although was there any point with all releases at the end?
Lol
Tim, please visit BritishGamers.com
Well, after covering the releases last week, might as well make it a weekly feature and just make a balls-up of it in a different way each time.
Did you actually read the releases that fast? It sounded like it had been sped up.
well done, keep them coming (:
that was pretty fast reading at the end, you have some skills haha.
thanks, these videos are awesome.
I’m new to online Racing (MKDS aside). Does the actual racing skill of opponents mature over time or am I just going to have to get used to being bashed into on EVERY SINGLE CORNER?
http://www.game.co.uk/CoolStuff/Miscellaneous/~r334349/GAMEware-Double-Bass-Controller/
Haha! Nice find, Jon.
Awesome way to get some publicity. Reminds me of a another MGS video where snake was made to look like sam fisher.
‘Noth’ isn’t a word Mark.
Uh… April Fools!
Someone launch a rocket at NoA headquarters until they actually do that stuff…
Also…
Zelda Movie Trailer
Actually looks pretty good, if they didn’t have awful actors.
So who did the Nintendo prank then? Because I’m sure that if Nintendo ever did a prank they’d make it so obvious. In fact, the “110mb.com” at the end of the press.nintendo url is the only thing that gives it away.
Yes, Kojima, I did like it. =D
I like Metal Gear. Hi Cutty.
Quite well made, indeed.
Apparantly, the G-Grip will work on the DS Phat, although I really don’t think it’ll be very comfortable, as it looks pretty awkward on the Lite.
Only 8 days left now until Mario Kart for the Wii is released on the 11th of April! :mrgreen:
Looks like most retailers are charging around £34.99 for the pre-orders. Pick a pre-order up starting at £32.00 from http://www.wiimariokart.co.uk!
How could you miss out this gem?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTHJtI_FLz4
Zelda the movie – how cruel can you get?!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Beast
Nintendo didn’t do it first, Sega did. As usual.
I do have higher hopes than usual for this game, though.
At the end, does that give the first clue to the setting of ass creed2 being in europe, poss medievil europe??? ps jade is so hot
pps i know ass creed has its weaknesses but i am so into it at the moment, its one of those games that you have to be in the right mood for. i hated it at first but am getting really into it now after 3rd assassination.
It could have been so much more tho…thats why im excited for ass creed 2 oh and mgs4!
Hideo, you are sexy too.
Alright trailer, Greek islands level looked alright. But what is with that music?!
Can’t they just have Super Sonic as his alter-ego instead of this feeble new-fangled werewolf lark?
Game looks good though- hopefully the framemate is consistent when you’re playing.
i com from the nederlands canis canem edit its a great game !! tis very much
The Hedgehog Engine? Well then, this game must be good! =D
But does it have Blast Processing?
You should start bugging Nintendo about Smash bros. :)
I’m not sure they understand what a ‘Smash Bros’ is.
You had haircut?
I’m pretty sure Nintendo’s response to your email was basically a polite way of saying “Go away”. Polite-ish.
I really like how this actually feels like a television news cast, the only thing missing is your typical news desk and tons of random lcd screens XD
I gotta agree with Lithium, it has some high production values like the way you use captions and the fact that you can see the ‘other Jonathan from BGB research’ on the actual tv for a shot instead of relying on the post production super imposed image.
Thats right, I am actually sad enough to notice those small things. Whilst on the subject – kudos on having the Guitar Hero controller in shot whilst mentioning GH’s relative unpopularity here in the UK!
Does this work with custom firmware?
The first game had quite a good damage model for cars. Although the cars were quite strong. You could also fill them with petrol.
Mafia was a great game. Looking forward to this.
Heh, thanks guys.
To respond to a few points, yeah: I’ve had a haircut. After 6 months.
And on the presentation discussion, thanks much: it’s something I’ve really been trying for… whilst I know it’s an indie video, how it looks and sounds is so important: which is why the straps and titles have changed for 3 weeks running as I refine them to look good and all match, and why this week’s episode was delayed as I was fixing the audio: I’m wearing a tie-clip radio mic. The video is in widescreen for a similar reason: whilst for something on YouTube and to be watched on iPods is probably best 4:3 for maximum screen usage, it looks a bit more professional in widescreen.
The feel of an actual news show is rather important, as it helps ‘justify’ the completely absurd nature of the show’s content: blimey, I’m portraying Nintendo’s business decisions as done when drunk, taping DVD players to Guitars, talking to myself… it’s insane, really.
With the BGB Research shot on the TV, I was worried no-one would notice, but phew! That was also done in post, but it was done because it’s actually easier than resizing and lining up the overlay shot to the same size each time so it looks good on the image overlay and strap… I’ll certainly be experimenting with more things like that in the future, it’s all part of the fun of doing it weekly.
If the show really takes off (it’s had views increasing week after week, so that’s good) then I might actually be able to justify a budget for the show, so we’ll see about more newsy type sets, though I’m fond of how cozy it is :P
I do want a lovely big HDTV behind me though. Well, I want a lovely big HDTV, but that’s another story…
Now that is brilliant news!
GREAT GREAT GREAT GREAT GREAT news!
Brilliant, great news :)
Good catch! Shame it’ll be another 8 months :(
Fraid you’ll have to get used to it, it was exactly the same on Project Gotham Racing 3 when I tried playing it. In the end we formed a group that played by “gentlemans rules” to avoid the constant use everyone else to get around the corner without braking tactic that seems to infect every single online racing game that allows it.
Excellent! I still owe Her Majesty about £24 for my DSlite which I imported from Japan a few weeks after its release. However, DHL forgot to charge me on my doorstep, and it took them 4 months for them to realise! So, after ignoring their letters and threats of legal action for about 6 months, I seem to have gotten away with it! :-)
@peanut, nah you will get a letter from a debt collecting office after a year or so demanding payment + interest since the time the debt was handed to the collecting office to the day they finally sent you a letter.
the longer it’s unpaid the longer it will silently collect interest.
if your experience will be anything like mine in a very similar case then your ds lite is getting more expensive every day.
I’ve narrowed down my initial song picks to Radiohead’s “My Iron Lung”, The All-American Rejects’ “Move Along”, Blink-182’s “All the Small Things” and of course Portal’s “Still Alive” (which is Free). At a tiny £4.08, I’ll be happy (besides, the original set list features so many amazing songs!)
Disappointed in EA. I was hoping to pick this up in April originally but its been pushed back and back and now not available for PS3 until summer.
Screw em, I’ll stick with guitar hero if they’re going to take the biscuit! Rock Band may be better, but least I can actually buy guitar hero.
P.S – Preorder cancelled. Meh
You know, I was going to save up and get this – I had guestimated that it would hit at around the 130 GBP mark. But at this price? Forget it. AND the DLC is 2x the us price.
Wait, one hundred and eighty Great British Pound Sterling? That’s outrageous! I’m surprised there isn’t a bigger mention of it in that post because that’s an absolute rip-off. There’s no way I’m buying it at those prices (unless it’s bought for me…).
I wonder if it’s cheaper to import Rock Band considering its ridiculous UK price? =D
Ben, while some songs are introduced for 80 points, songs are 160 points on the American Xbox Live Marketplace.
No news on whether we will receive a similar pricing structure.
Nice! That’s good news indeed. The EU is good after all XD
This was a triumph! I’m making a note here: day one purchase.
So, what’s the best part about all of this? Being able to skip those walk/talk sections! But seriously, this sounds great. Gears of War was near-perfect so if Epic can just refine this a little more then we’re in for a treat.
I really wanted this game, but I was thinking that EA would not have the gaul to charge more than £120 ($236.12), but £180 ($354.18) is an absolute outrage. I know everybody says it, but I will NOT be buying this game – if only everybody in the UK would see sense and boycott these ridiculous prices for just a couple of months – things would soon change.
Bugger me, that’s rubbish, it’s the cost of the console itself, and it’s half price in America. Goes to show they region locked it for a reason.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it flopped here. People can get 5 – 8 games for the cost of that one!
Well i for one am hugely upset considering i’ve waited wince they announced it, gotten hugely frustrated at the push backs and now im shocked and upset that they think they’re gunna get £180 for something that costs around £100 in the “good old” US. I’m sick of everyone dumping on europe. Bad language.
No way I’m gonna pay twice for that. NO WAY.
Bugger that, Guitar Hero here I come :-)
even if neversoft introduced the dreaded battle mode, at least they never introduced a £180 price tag….madness. i really want this, but now i’ll be happy to see gh4 trounce it in sales just, you know, to send a message.
no 4 player co-op :( but apart from that :)
£180!?!
Have been pumped for this game for so long… but that price point is quite frankly offensive.
Until there are some serious price drops EA have lost a customer with that slap in the face.
I thought the whole point of Rock Band was that the kit was gonna be cheap to drive a high volume of sales, and then make the money back on the copius DLC. Now they want to bend us over on both ends.
Hmm…
Rock band….
or a second Nintendo Wii…..
or an Xbox 360…
or an Xbox 360 Arcade with a game…..
or a vintage Roland SH-101 synth, or a second-hand car, or any number of other things I could buy for ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FREAKING ENGLISH POUNDS.
Thanks EA; you’ve yet again got us Europeans over a barrel.
I like Ikaruga. It, like, Geometry Wars, goes BOOM a lot.
I should note, yes, I am bugging both EA and Harmonix about this. This is bullshit, and they should be called out for it.
If the title is indeed Perfect Prosecutor I doubt we will be seeing Apollo here. This would probably be a prequel back before Phoenix ruined his record.
Anyway, as this is likely to be a spin-off I do not believe that we have seen the last of Apollo just yet.
Well I see they are claiming it is due to lots of little things adding up.
So to be fair:
Well theres VAT at 17.5%
Import Duty at 5%
Shipping £5 by container.(if it isnt coming from china directly)
Maybe add an extra £2 because petrol is expensive over here – oh but of course this is a much smaller country so better take that back.
So thats £111 – now the £85 in the US could be that the retailers over there arent making a huge markup – so lets assume that game etc are greedier over here – maybe add an extra 25% – so £138 – which would probably drop to £125 after a while.
Nope its just a rip off
Ah play.com
Band in a box £99.99 inc delivery
Game £39.99 inc delivery
Total £139.98
So my guess of £138 was close!
For the mathematically challenged, to get everything from Play.com at 5% off, or to get the kit (5% off) at Play.com and the game at Shopto…
It would be exactly the same price: £132.98
shoop da whoop. might just get the game to start with and try and pick the instruments up on ebay. probably don’t need another guitar, i already have 2
It’s easy for online stores to undercut the RRP, high street stores are still going to be the worst affected by this mess. And ultimately, it’s EA’s fault, not the retailers. Fuck EA and fuck Harmonix if they’re in any way responsible for this mess.
I admire Play.com for reducing that ridiculous price but even £140 is a little too steep, and the individual instruments haven’t had their prices cut, either.
STILL NO SALES (although a nice article)!
£130 is more tempting but i think for now i am still not ordering it. i could buy almost 1 wii or a psp for that much
The most plausible reason I’ve heard yet – still doesn’t make it right though.
Just ‘cos game are broke from buying their competitor doesn’t mean everyone else should suffer
Such is life.
Game will be able to do this simply because they’re the only dedicated game retailer in the UK – if we had, say, three or four of them then I’m sure the price wouldn’t be this high.
I’d be very suprised if we ever see a company to rival Game on the high street – meaning they can pretty much charge what they like to those who don’t have the Internet or aren’t comfortable with Internet shopping.
Buy the bundle for £99, then download the game from Napster (or whatever the kids are using these days) and play it on your hacked machine.
That’s right – PIRACY!!
That’ll show em! :-D
Yep…I went there….
My friend and I worked it out – it’s actually cheaper to buy the US bundle, region-locked version and all, and then buy a UK copy of the game.
Hell yeah, I always want to pay for data which is clearly already on the disc but kept from me!
It’s like giving me a bag of crisps but putting some crisps in locked containers, you then send off for these keys with extra money attached. I paid for these crisps, why can’t I eat all the contents?
It’s bullshit. Developers, stop it.
However, theafroguy, until the EU Import Limit is raised in December, you’re going to get stung on important tax like crazy.
Any more than £100 for the full set and I’m just not buying it. No video game is worth that — a console is barely worth that. Which is a shame, because I was really hyped for Rock Band.
The most telling thing regarding the price I find in this whole debacle really is that of Play.com. Now, I don’t believe they will be selling the hardware at a loss just to be reaping the profits from the sale of the game. They will easily still be making a tidy profit from the hardware, yet some increased markup on the game as well.
I would love to get this game, but even taking into account the price reduction from play, their discount voucher, then getting the game from shopto, it’s still damn expensive. That, and i don’t think EA deserve a sale from any european until this is sorted.
Exactly my point: the margin must be so high that Play can sell it so cheap, but someone’s got to want a large margin: and I bet it’s GAME.
Cool, europeans dont need a deposit! yay :)
lol, this trailer is many months old, and it is verified that PS2 Buzzers will work too in this game and those wireless buzzers will work on PS2 games – and if you use your head, you can see that there is going to be released two versions, one that contains Wireless buzzers, and other what contais only the game. – Why should they release only the game now, if PS2 buzzers wouldn’t work??
Hoping that this comes soon. Relentless has informed that wireless buzzers have been in development in China, and first cargo is coming.
Game will be out in may in Europe, and I guess so that in US in summer. US release date hasn’t been announced yet.
Oeps, my mistake. This isn’t the old trailer, it’s new. :)))
You don’t do PC game anymore on Bacon’s Bargains or are there really no offers on any? :?
Hey Mark, you reckon the memory unit is worth it if only for moving profiles around?
As opposed to going through the whole rigmarole of recovering your gamertag option that is…
Pyrobi; 100%. I have my profile stored on my unit, its not different that having it on the HDD, and I just snap it out and throw it in my pocket when I go round a friends house.
Recovering your gamertag is slow, and is also quite risky if you do it a lot. I’d totally recommend it.
Also, you can use it as a save game space. I put all my saves on the HDD, but when we were into Virtua Tennis, I copied the save to the memory unit to use my custom character.
And Andrew: I still do PC stuff, just not much of interest this week.
Ah right on. Do they do a black one?! Lol, i just bought an elite to replace my ever unstable launch 360 >_<
Will purchase now anyway :)
Do you get some sort of credit for me going through the link on BGB, or is that only with amazon and the like?
Non on Argos I’m afraid, but I don’t want that to stop me from putting up sweet deals ;)
yo this sounds like its gonna be worse that c.o.d.4 for lag and thats saying sumthing see as thought at times its auwful i mean common think about this for a second
C.O.D.4 LAGGGGGGGSSSSSSSS and that game dosent have 2×2 km sq fully destructable inviroments
as soon as i heard about what this game could do
i thought to my self that game gonna LAAAGGGGGG BIG time they gonna need supa supa servers to hold this game down i mean for once i wanna play a online multi player war game i win because of my skillz to kill at WILL not coz COMPUTER SAYZ NOOOOOO YOU GET ME
It’s about time!! They better not have a change of heart about this ¬ _ ¬
Haha, last week you were talking to yourself and this week you are talking to no-one.
Also you can totally see the lighter : )
Oh trust me, the way that trend is planning to continue… it gets worse. That and a few other things established in the show’s ‘continuity’ by now.
And I gave up trying to hide the lighter, I got pissed off the one I used in the first take of the show was utter shite XD
Luckily though, the point isn’t to make you think it set itself alight, more just mocking Microsoft build quality. It’s a piece of paper. :P
Haha. Love it. I have to admit, that was the most entertaining newswire yet. Congrats.
Hey. Cool show but there’re some tiny niggles that let it down. You move your head too much, it’s like you’re trying to cover all angles possible. And those pauses you take with every 3 or 4 words are really annoying. Other than that, cool stuff.
i have to agree with what grindie said… your pauses at the end of every line do get annoying, paired with the extreme head jolts in every direction makes you look a bit of a twit. no offense.
Nice, I personally didn’t find the whole Microsoft remote sketch funny though.
“makes you look a bit of a twit. no offense.”
why would he?
the conformation the wii version looks just like that in a OFFICIAL NINTENDO MAG UK PREVIEW
has got all the idiot ps3/360 fans in a tizzy in all the forums
even with conformation in a accual first look by nintendo magazine
there still arguing there not wii
ps3 fan go wait for a level to load and bash a ps1 controller your ps3 ships with
OUCH
yeah even threads tittled official nintendo magazine truelly next gen
have sony trolls in them saying the magazine is using x360 screens
yes nintendos official mag is acting in a liable manner
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
try harder sony fans
No offence taken at all: it’s good to get constructive criticism. Some things like those I haven’t noticed myself to the degree you two say: so I’ll try and tone it down, though that might take a bit of practice as this is all just one big experiment each week. However, I will say it’s not that I’m “trying to cover all angles possible”: if I was vain, the camera wouldn’t be at the other end of the room and zoomed as far as possible. :P
And the pauses… again, yes, something to work on. I haven’t yet found the right balance point between scripted and spontaneous: it can be a bit forced when it’s completely pre-written, but it can also be hesitant.
But thank you for pointing things like that out.
This game is an xbox original now! Yay! Think I’ll just download it straight to my xbox lol.
I agree with most of the review. I enjoyed Time Crisis 4 at the Arcades but that’s exactly why: because it was at the Arcades. This is worth a couple of quid for a quick bit of fun, but not much more. It’s a shame that the series hasn’t changed because I loved the older ones.
Indeed Cutty; like I said, it’s still Time Crisis, which is worth a few quid with your mates. £65 on the other hand, isn’t quite so worth it – and that’s only for one gun!
Since when was Cloud Strife in Time Crisis?
No way man – Tidus from FF10!
Yeah, Tidus was the guy I was thinking of. Having never played any Final Fantasy games apart from CC, all the protaganists look the same to me.
Tidus and Will Turner? What is this, Kingdom Hearts 3?
http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/7959/willgq9.jpg
oioi well they arent working for me lyk neither are n e of the other achievments nd its starting to piss me off!!!
When’s assassins creed PC being released?
It was released last week, dude! I’ve heard its pretty buggy and has some bad DRM, but with it being a US exclusive on Steam, we don’t have a review copy >:(
This is a prime example of when to choose retail over download. By buying the retail version you pay less and get more for it. And, of course, I’m willing to bet that it’s faster for most to take a trip to the store and buy it than it is to download on our terrible connection speeds.
Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m just bitter that Dreamfall isn’t on the UK store yet. =D
An easy mistake to make, TLS. =D
there is no werewolf its a warehog as in a dark infected version of sonic
the internet really is a sad place at times im the only guy it seems on it that can clearly see its werehog not werewolf
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr stop telling lies folks
Anyone have the game yet? I can’t wait until its release
“It was an accident your honour, honest- my foot slipped onto the accelerator…”
Ramming their car into a watery grave surely doesn’t count as cop-killing? They can swim, right? ;)
cool i want him on my side
hi guys,
i also think this is a rip off the U.S.A hav had this game before XMAS and now we have 2 pay double what they have. i suggest if u want it £40 cheaper and delivered on the day of release order it from amazon.co.uk its so much cheaper and you get the same stuff. so stick all the games stores round the country and EUROPE!
You people are morons, nice articly by the way.
GAME are selling it at RRP cause if you actually read the news they are fed up of EA not stepping in line with other retailers and selling games at rrp of 40quid and still mark them up as 50. So when GAME got into a discussion with them they basically decided that untill EA did the right thing, they would refuse to lower the price of EA’s games and not advertise them in the charts along with letting stock run out or not even buying it, meaning GAME are taking a profit hit but they’re doing it to get at EA. So another theory thats acceptable is that they’ve marked the price up to make up for losses because of the GAME incident
Gears Of War 2 OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Happy 420
Gears Of War 2 OWAH!!!!
Happy 420
Pah, Navi would’ve helped you by freezing time, shutting up and actually telling you what you wanted if you’d predd ^C. Because buttons exist in real life.
…well thiers yet another thing sony can add to its ever-growing list of cock-ups….:(
Sony has nothing to do with this ‘cock-up’, grif. This is all Konami’s wrong-doing. … I’m defending Sony, I feel so dirty…
removing the faltilies was a wrong BIG disgusting mistake
Heh, yeah – Konami even avoided using Playstation Network all together, so Sony really has no part in this.
Sorry grif, can’t use this to fuel your irrational Sony hate/Microsoft Fanboyism.
no you can not it has to be an online download
Good, but the thought of The Scout as a cleaning expert makes it all the better.
My purchase of Puppy Love for the Wii is going to have to wait until next month I think, but I am fairly certain that my copy of GTA will be arriving day of release, if not, hopefully sooner. :)
I hate to admite it but the quality of Wii titles by 3rd party developers that are being filtered through by Nintendo are cr*p
Easter European Immigrant?
He’s the Easter Bunny!
Whilst the first did star Greg Grunberg as the protaganist, I’m pretty sure the sequal doesn’t. Not sure the review made that clear, just wanted to throw that out there.
If my pre-order still holds any merit I’ll be picking up Wii Fit. We have both ends of the gaming spectrum with this week’s releases!
All together now: Finally!
whats the point? is there anyone who hasnt imported it yet? I wonder if the imported save file will work on a PAL copy.
I haven’t. Would have done some time soon if this date hadn’t been announced. I’m afraid I was concerned by Nintendo attempting to cripple the Freeloader.
@alto
Possibly. You might have to save it to SD card first and then do some jiggery pokery with the filename. Would err on the side of not though.
Another one here who hasn’t gone down the import/freeloader route. I’d almost grown impatient, but I can hang on until the end of June. Only just though.
Cool. Bring it on!
Will it still be based in Solihull? I live a stones throw away from where they used to be housed…
Yep, SSUK, Codemasters is just moving in :)
codemasters seem to be going more and more into racers dangerous place to be race market is saturated and stale
well done,
keep it up (:
I can’t believe you left out “Once Upon a Time In Japan: Earth”! The game looks excellent and it makes a change from the usual settings of regular point and click adventures.
Nice show. That Mario Kart Wii ad was just… er, I’m speechless. Looks like Nintendo never moved on ‘Will you get the girl, or fight like one?’.
Also, loving the GAME OVER YEAAAAAHHHH reference.
Still with the stars, heh. :P
And how are you reviewing this early? :/ The UK release date it Tuesday 29th isn’t it?
Also; I found this review entirely too unsubtle about going into detail. Detail you don’t really want too much of. Why can’t you detail some of the singleplayer missions …isn’t it more repetitive stuff from GTA1, 2, III, Vice City and San Andreas?
In fact, how does it compare to San Andreas – are there the same varied vehicles (planes?), can you dress your character? is there bars for skills? Are there more side missions and distractions available? All these things made San Andreas a much better game then the predecessors, but are they left out here? If so, why is it still 4 stars?
In fact, how does it compare to other city-roaming games? Crackdown was damn *fun* despite being unrealistic. Is the smaller world limiting or “just right”? Are there more or less complex missions then Saints Row? Is the cover system as good as first person shooter games, or is the third person view still crap for shooting?
How about comparisons with other alternatives. Does it beat out other similar games? Will it be still worth playing once the singleplayer game is over? Does it have potential for replayability? What about ease-of-use of the game. Could someone new to it play? are the tutorials good enough? I heard that you can now actually restart a mission you fail half way through without penalty – you don’t mention it but it’s a pretty big thing to most people :)
Also; is the story *any good*? Frankly, most of the GTA games have “barely passable” stories. Good characters for the most part, but plot holes abound and flimsy premises – for instance, doing crime just for the sake of it (because it’s essentially the only option – you never get a choice, you’re a criminal and it’s expected of you). I don’t think for me a GTA game can get full marks until it gives you more choice and less pretty static cutscenes. But that’s just me maybe.
I just brought up a few points, but you’re going into a ton of detail that does bore me a bit. You also don’t detail nearly enough those things you talk about – the “extra activities” like bowling – are these minigames? mandatory? optional? helpful? What about other activities out of missions (as I mentioned above in the comparison with San Andreas), can you still do vigilant missions for instance?
Sorry I seem so critical here, since you are only one of a million who have given it full marks. I only request a bit on the why since I like this site, and always want to see good articles. I know you want to keep the review short, but some of this could have been covered while removing some other bits. Simply put; there are no perfect games, and I don’t even see one hint that ANYTHING is wrong with the game. It CANNOT be that good, just from what I’ve seen from it already! Keep the reviews coming, for sure, but you have to realise that reviewing games like this is not very useful for making me pursue the game with a better judgement, since much of your stuff sounds like preview quotes. :(
God, that Zelda one was terrible. I think it was “whilst thou get thee girl, or fight like one?” which makes it even worse.
Hey Andrew
We review games a little different to some other places; I hope to review the game as it’s own work of art, not a new addition in the GTA series.
Also, we don’t want to make bullet point lists of what is good and what is bad; that’s boring to read and it rarely makes sense until you’ve played the game and have a basis of comparison.
Also, you mentioned things that you wanted to see in the review, but GTA 4 features so much that every reviewer latches onto something different (unless you’re IGN and your 7 page review mention everything). Cripsin Boyers review at 1up (Read) for example talked more about watching fake TV and browsing a fake internet than shooting thugs.
What really resonated with me was the city, its vibrance, its organic feel and its coherent connection with the player whether they’re on a mission, blowing up cars or going bowling with friends.
As for the negative issues; sure, it has some tiny cover issues that might lose you a bit of health when its not your fault. That’s not going to deter you from buying the Game of the Year (or century, perhaps :P) and I found it frankly academic in perspective.
To answer your questions:
Single Player missions make a good use of set pieces such as banks, museums and factories to keep shoot-outs interesting. This breaks repetition well. If you think that all of those games had repetitive missions, however, you won’t find much new here.
You can dress your character but can’t build stats. There are choppers but not planes. There are side missions. What GTA 4 does with world, character, story, convergence of enviornment I feel is superior to working out in a gym and stealing a jet pack.
I’ll cease continuing because frankly, this bores me; I’d rather put this feature list into a bullet point list than a readable review.
You complain about the review being “entirely too unsubtle about going into detail. Detail you don’t really want too much of.” yet you ask for intricate details about every inch of the game.
And yes, the game is incredible, I mean what I say in my review and I can say with conviction that Grand Theft Auto IV is one of the best games in this PS3/Xbox 360/Wii generation.
As for the early copy – dude, we’re legit press, a lot of our reviews are sent from the publishers.
I asked for more general points – you go into how shooting a vehicle adds bullet holes, but not how it compares to other games. I just take issue that you seem a bit random in your analysis. I put forward a lot of questions, but trust me, they are not bullet pointed ones. You barely mentioned the story for instance – I say that unless the gameplay is that good, many people will finish the story missions mainly for the, you guessed it, story (in GTA games, people generally *don’t* finish the story because the missions get that hard/bad/repetitive or the story isn’t that good to begin with). Simply not saying anything about the main section of the game’s point seems a tad silly to me. It’s not detail, it’s general information – like what you actually *do* in the game, which does seem limited to “shoot outs” by your description. Obviously this isn’t the case, but I can’t think of any other conclusion. Anyway, free roaming in a “living city” is all well and good, but it gets tad boring if there is nothing to do in that city.
Thanks for the information on vehicles – and the partial comparison with older games. People enjoy customisation and breath of gameplay (shame about no stats for instance) – if you can fly helicopters, and it’s fun, it’s worth more a mention then that the game has dents when you crash a car – all GTA games had this :)
I take a little issue critically that you’re reviewing it solely by itself, and yet proclaiming it’s game of the year defacto on all platforms for all year ;) but in any case, that’s your prerogative. I don’t think it’s ever wise to try and isolate a game like that, it doesn’t really work. Something can only be good if it is better then something else after all, with no baseline, there is no reason why every game couldn’t be “4/4″, right? But that is just me perhaps. I’ll try and not take your reviews as seriously since it’s probably meant to be a less in depth review then I thought.
Fair enough on the press angle. In any case, you seem to think everyone will enjoy it, but academically, remember, not everyone will :)
I do enjoy reading the reviews, sorry for being harsh and boring *you*, but I do hold this site in higher regard then others I don’t even bother to comment on or read (IGN, for instance, is woefully sad in it’s reviews). You can always ignore my comments, if you want.
Thanks for the comments, I’ll try and keep them in mind in future :)
Oh, and as for the reviewing the game by itself, what I meant was not reviewing it simply as “is it better than San Andreas”, because despite the gazillion sales, not everyone has played GTA but many people are excited about Four, so saying “GTA 4 is bad because it does not have a jet pack” means very little to those people :P
I’ve been playing GTA4 for a few hours now and I must say I am a little underwhelmed.. I think all the 10/10, perfect game reviews all over the Internet are a bit over the top. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good game a great game even but it’s not perfect.
A lot of focus has been given to all the little details the game does well and how the city itself is the star of the show but I would say I’ve been left a little frustrated with the level of interactivity with the city. I think it feels a little limited.
For example, early on, you do a mission to collect some protection money from a shopkeeper. The shopkeeper locks up his shop when he sees you and your are told to find something to throw through the shop window. The only way of achieving this is to walk round the corner and pick up some specific bricks and walk back to the shop and throw them through the window. I was left thinking that this was too limited and specific.. – All I had to do was smash the shop window but I was limited to using these specific bricks to do it.. Why couldn’t I have picked up the bins from over the road and chucked them at the window (you can’t even pick up the bins)? or used my shot gun?, or just driven a car into it?
Anyway, that’s just my first thought… – it just doesn’t seem that ’sandboxy’ to me….
The early parts of the game are meant as tutorials Ben, it really opens up as you move on. Definitely get in some shootouts, some car chases and a helicopter before you say tis limited!
to be a fashion man then you also need a fashion and good shoe,
nike dunk will be your partner.
trust me, you will like it.
like it and then choose it.
you can get it from http://www.tradekey88.com
Ben, I totally agree…I absolutley love online but single players just sorta..eurgh..
Its getting better now that the storys picking up, but I keep going through random patches of “meh..”, which is a real shame considering thats mainly what I bought it for. And the controls, except those used during driving, feel rather unnatural and awkward..
Maybe its just me.
Its a great game, don’t get me wrong just..no where near perfect..
Perfect… Now there’s a discussion that could get really interesting. What do you define as perfect? (Rhetorical question btw).
Anyway, nice review, by no means “perfect” (:P) as some have pointed out, but the quality of the literate British is unsupassed. I’m still waiting for my copy, so I’ll get back to you with my personal thoughts later.
It’s a shame that after the long wait that there are so many problems with this. Being able to instantly unlock all the achievements is a terrible mistake on VALVe’s part :(
ROCK BAND!!!!!! FINALLY MY WAIT IS ALMOST OVER
*even though im getting ripped off by EA*
15 songs? Is that it?
“Daughtry” is a rock band formed by American Idol reject Chris Daughtry. They’re pretty good IMO. They’re well known in the States, their album got to #1 there.
Don’t think they’re good for Guitar Hero? Well this might help: the lead guitar on “What I Want” was performed by Slash.
Pokemon Snap is a great pokemon game, i love it free Online Pokemon games
anything pokemon has got to be great
free Pokemon games
This isn’t the full tracklist anyway. They said there will be over 20 songs on the cartridge so we are probably missing anywhere from 5 to 10 songs. And yeah, being from the US, Daughtry is a pretty good band, at least for their first album, and with Slash on “What I want” there’s no reason to worry about guitar.
I like All Star and Rock and Roll All Nite. That’s it.
A decent track list but so far it’s too short and some have been in other Guitar Hero games already.
This review is spot on.
I have only played the game for about forty minutes and am ready to snap the disc. It is a total dishonest mess that simply shouldn’t be allowed to be sold as a fun leisure experience.
The best comparison is Spiderman 3. Poor animations, level design and controls.
Just downright insulting to the consumer to be honest.
That looks like Playstation 2 graphics to me. If you say they are Playstation 1-like, you are seriously young or don’t remember the very very poor quality “graphics” PS1 games had! :p
So another poorly done licence eh? hmm, not too surprising.
what kinda ps2 game do you play Andrew?, it differently looks like a ps1 game (judging by them screen shots only) to me.
Count yourself lucky you’re getting free games. Then again, if their cheap movie tie-in tat, maybe that’s not such a good thing. :/
Looks like a PSP game… unbelievable.
This is Playstation:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation/final-fantasy-vii/screenshots/gameShotId,155579/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation/metal-gear-solid/screenshots/gameShotId,52062/
Thank looks a lot better, despite the artefacts. Without a video you can’t tell anyway.
You whippersnappers!
Spelling, oops: *That (the Iron Man game) looks a lot better,…
And strictly speaking, it might be lazyness – the levels look much larger then any PS1 game, so it must be a similar level layout to the other platforms.
WoW nice ….. HAZE is going to be awesome!!
Race Driver don’t know about that one games like that aren’t getting a lot of people…its getting boring
Looks more PS1 than PS2 to me. Either way, it looks awful.
Why exactly did they send that one to be reviewed when it’s so obviously bad?
The good news, I managed to get a refund after having the game less than 24 hours. Sadly not everyone will be so lucky and will have to settle for selling to trade in shops for a considerable loss in funds. I really think there should be comeback to suppliers for pushing out stuff like this.
GRID is my most anticipated demo of the lot. Haze should have come out last year, now it seems old hat with sub par graphics from every review to date. Bourne demo could be good if it plays like uncharted, certainly looks good in gfx department. Either way, this is good news, more demos the better.
Personally I find it a bit boring…Feels like a slightly updated Vice City.
I like some of the detail in the game, but at the same time I’m disappointed with the radio – in the past this was one of GTA’s highlights but now it just seems uninspired. Also the chase cam is too slow and positioned slightly low for me…And there are very few places to go in the city, too many streets with no shops to go in or anything to do. On the other hand I do enjoy tempting biker’s into fights and then watching the police take them down – that kind of situation feels a lot more realistic than in the past games.
So far I haven’t been able to let rip as much as I’d like to…the police are a bit too quick on the scene and too tough to get away from. Maybe that’s just me. :)
I like playing it for a break from cod4, but just with friends. I won’t be buying the game unless I can find more fun in it. Maybe after more missions the game will change.
omg!
ive had such a laugh on gta with my m8s lol
bring it on indeed, also waiting for the first installment of dreamfall chapters (longest journey franchise)
a vampire story peaked my interest on and off, beautfull 2d oldskool drawing style (just at higher resses then 640×480 or 800×600 lol) -> on ; then it went 3d according to an announcement -> and off again lol
the story and humor still entices me, i just wonder why they switched to another engine having already made bundles of beautifull artwork for the first engine.
any of the old talent left in game land? (the people who made the first monkey island’s, larry’s, space quest’s, maniac mansion’s, grim fandango etc. )
(and off topic bullfrog needs reviving, been playing evil genius of late and it’s bringing back bittersweet memories of a never realized dungeon keeper 3 and theme hospital 2)
Is PlayStation Day the renamed PlayStation Experience that used to be held in Earls Court? I went to that once and it was pretty awesome. Kojima was on stage talking MGS3, but at the time I had no idea who he was…
u forget MGS4 june 12th
Great article, i really enjoyed reading it!
That music is beautiful.
Not to mention it looks fantastic, not so sure how true this is to the final product though?
Moar please! But what’s up with the soundtrack? Doesn’t seem to fit with the game’s frantic pace at all.
Looks awesome! Finally, 1st person game where the player isn’t just a floating head!
I’d imagine that you could shoot yourself in the foot then if you wanted to?
haha, this is great step in the BGB newswire series, got a few more laughs from me anyway. good job!
It looks fantastic, no actually, it looked fantastic until the guns appeared. why oh why does it seem for a game to be successful it has to have some kind of weapon in it.
I know i would just love the freedom of being able to run around a free roam city like that doing parkour, in the same vein as say endless ocean for wii.
Looks stunning though, definitely.
Looks nauseating.
1. I am over 12.
2. I thought the opening, with “iron man” rocking in the background was awesome, until the song was over.
3. (See #2) This was most likely due to my astonishment that the developer licensed the original song.
4. Swap magicked it. If I had paid I’m sure I would be more critical of the rest of the short, short game. ANyway good review pops.
The meek shall inherit the earth; but by that time there won’t be
anything left worth inheriting.
—————————————————————————————————-
http://xanga.com/henrypenningtonve
the voice over at the end was fantastic,
was that silver tounged dude really mcbacon? or did you pay some top voice over actor. We need more of him,
he knows his stuff. I give him 5 stars
better than the Robert Llewellyn ( how do they do it )
Jonathan greaswell. I awlays worry his head might explode. (sorry jon)
First-person Crackdown!
I agree with Michael though, seeing the gunplay towards the end of the video made me altogether a lot less excited. Hopefully the platforming can be the central focus while the gunning takes a backseat…
Haze looks a bit crap… another weak title for ps3
Haze wasn’t too bad, no tearing, visually ok but not a patch on cod4. Looking forward to GRID demo tomorrow. The DIRT engine ran better on ps3 so I’ve high hopes for it’s performance after further development.
From past news about the game you guys have nothing to worry about, DICE themselves say that they’re really focusing on the parkour, and that guns do genuinely take a back seat, i’ve not the time to find a link so you’ll have to take my word for it :)
Your impressions of companies are really scary… Also, how old are you, Jon? I thought you were 17, but it sounds like you’re old enough for GTA.
Yeah, he’s 17. He can’t play GTA, I’ve banned him until his Birthday.
…
16 actually :(
It’s certainly interesting doing a 9 minute special on a game you haven’t played.
Really? Madness
This is astounding, I’m a traceur myself and this really shows how it feels to do Parkour, the music is perfect. Can’t wait to check this game out!
Meh, I’m the oldest person in my entire school, and one of the very few males who hasn’t played GTA IV yet.
Looks like a lambo, drives like a aygo. I was hoping this would be more sim like, esp since gt5p has no damage. The engine runs and looks superb on the ps3 but the handling. dear lord, what have they done. It’s sega rally all over again and look what happened to them!.
I am 13 and I’ve played the game at my local game on the 360 and it is just as crap, the graphics are awful and I’ve no idea what to do/ can’t be bothered because its so crap lol!
Probably cause I’m a gaming blogger – who’s in the middle of making BGN – the new… wait… what was my URL again? Oh I am getting forgetful in my old age.
Tim
With all the aids turned off it was pretty unforgiving, you really have to concentrate on using the controls progressively. Looks set to ge a good racer, in the first event I spent the whole 3 laps getting to 2nd, every place gained felt like such an acheivement. I’ll go back to the rest when I get bored of GTA
I need to see the amount of scripting in order to provide an accurate veredict :)
uncharted would be good game to turn to the silver screen, but it has to be made clear that tomb raider isnt its influence.
maybe even assassins creed could make for a good film.
there soooo many gmaes nowadays that have the potential to become amazing movies but things like this really depends on the idividuals opinion.
on the main point ill be seeing the Bioshock movie.
dude thats for the movie drrrrrrr idiot look it up on youtube
Wow, now that honestly looks incredible.
Looks great for sure. Though this, KZ2 and MGS4, utilise far too much grey/brown palette.
Yay outside.
That environment looks so very Half Life 2 Ep 2 though. After all the dark and underground drivel of the first GoW, that’s a good thing.
They seemed to be having problems aiming using a controller.
I hope this time you dont have to write to sega asaking for there help?
What? Chrono Trigger was released in Europe, or?
–
I sooo wanted to play Seaman, *sniff*
No Ganbare Goemon 2 or 3 SNES goodness? Or the SNES version of Hammering Harry? Oh dear :(
Mother 3 probably deserves an honorable mention aswell. Theres so many games we don’t get, thankfully one of them is no longer Odin Sphere.
Uhm, Chrono trigger was released in Europe. A friend (in Sweden) played it on his SNES back in the day.
Sorry Joel, your friend must have imported it from America, Chrono Trigger was never released in Europe.
I know somebody who worked for sega and he has a copy of the europe version of typing of the dead, i’ve played it, i had no idea it didn’t get released.
I’d like to suggest one for the list.. Katamari Damacy.
Lot of cutesy RPGs there. I’m european and I detest RPGs, cutesy or otherwise. Maybe they just figured they wouldn’t sell that well – I can’t think of anyone in my peer group of gamers who likes RPGs, though RPGers undoubtedly exist in europe.
Okay, now we need to get the golden skull to unlock the marshmallow kingdown with the fruitbat. Screw that!
This looks ace. I can’t wait.
Just so everyone knows typing of the dead came out in the uk on the pc, I remember buying it from EB years ago ^__^
Shows how much Square have changed: they never would have released The World Ends With You back then. Glad they have :D
Nope -Chrono Trigger was not released in Europe -not even the later port released for PlayStation… It goes the same with Chrono Cross -the most beutiful game of all time -we didn’t get this one as well here in europe unfortunetely :(
I am the only one on here that got the last sentence for the 2. Chrono Trigger.
Im really enjoying it but i dont believe its owed the perfect score its getting everywhere. in my opinion a perfect score worthy game is once or twice every five years, its got to have theme music you can recall from memory after five years without playing it, great gameplay and story, and most of all leave you a little disappointed when you finish as you’ll never experience any of it for the first time ever again.
and the biggest point is a perfect scoring game has you replaying it again and again, but how many times will you replay this after you finish it, 4 or 5 tops is the average im guessing.
I’m surprised to read about Wario Ware Twisted. It made it to Australia (which normallly gets the identical PAL releases to Europe, including the waiting for conversion to all Euro languages!).
Anyway, I’ve got the Australian version. It’s great, but I still prefer the original Gameboy Advance version. It’s way easier to play on a Micro too :)
Actually, a PC version of Typing of the Dead *was* released in Europe.
I’ve got a copy and the voice acting is fantastically bad! It also taught me how to touch-type!
I remember Warioware Twisted was on a release list in my local gamestore in Belgium, and it was even listed in an add from that store. Then it got pushed back for 6 months. A few weeks later I saw the USA version in a Dutch store, so since I had to wait another 6 months I baught it and I’m glad I did cause the game never got released.
Squirrels
Day one purchase confirmed.
I seriously can not wait to see what Microsoft/Rare have in-store for us @ tomorrows Gamer Day.
And as always, rare brings out the great grahpics of any system they work on.
Awesome, i loved playing 1 & 2 on 64
Need some platforming shots to make a decision.. but, doesn’t look brilliant.
But, we need to LOOK AT THE FOOTAGE to decide.
What an absolutely revolting article. Europeans who whine about being ‘deprived’ of games that any technologically-competent person can emulate or import deserve nothing but my scorn. They are the reason I have to put up with American friends telling me how ’sorry’ they are for where I live. Who cares about Europe getting the rest of the Super Nintendo’s considerable library because only RPGS matter, right? And padding the list with the Virtual Boy somehow makes it even more pathetic. Die in a fire please.
Ooh. Rather fitting name, Rage.
Lots of people, myself included, don’t like emulation, and importing foreign consoles can be costly for the sake of a few games, no matter how good they may be. Though there isn’t much excuse for Wario Ware Twisted, since the GBA is region free… some people just don’t like ordering games, I guess.
Sorry, I was distracted by a hate post. I also wanted to point out that Twisted was denied localisation after the testers were too busy playing it to remember to eat, so it’s currently one of the top criminals in Europe, and I should congratulate you on not laughing at Seaman.
Sounds like an interesting proposition, though Verbinski is a hack action director. If you want video game movies to be taken seriously, they need to hire a proper auteur for the job. He might manage to pull it off (but it won’t be on his merits, it will be on the merits of the game’s production design).
Honestly, though, these games are getting so cinematic that movies seem kind of pointless really. I mean, though IDEA of a Mass Effect game is cool, but in the end what would be the point? Everything you’d get in a movie – cinematic action sequence and shot-reverse-shot character interaction – is there already.
Now that we are getting games with stories good enough for the big screen, the problems is that they no longer require the big screen treatment precisely because they have most of what the cinema offers already.
That said, I am interested because the cinema’s collective experience is different… we’ll wait and see, I guess.
umm…Ben you don’t have to pick up those bricks. you can just punch the glass.
BEST VOICE OVER EVER
I know Skate-It is mentioned, but the ‘proper’ sequel isn’t coming out this year as well is it?
This was an awesome episode. I was born in Argentina, and it always nice to see people helping other people. I hope they spread their soles to the even more places. I’m going to get a couple of pairs right now.
Love this one and also for sarees try
http://www.tradekey88.com its for those loving nike dunk men shoes. But i love the most the nike dunk.
There hasn’t been any date announced for Skate 2 yet. Can’t wait, though!
Burnout Paradise on PC – yes please.
this makes me cream
Yay for lots of BGB posts :)
I thought 1000 points was £7.00, not £7.50?
Meh, I haven’t bought any Wii Points for months, so I can’t remember.
Get some Queen in and it will be the best game ever =)
man i would love to play this game on a scale of 1-10 i give it a 20 as fare as this compard 2 grand theft auto 4 this will pass grand theft auto 4 in all ways !!!!!!!! torrific game the maker/company should be proud
Wikipedia said 100 points was 75p, so I did the math. I’m the same TLS, Virtual Console doesn’t really interest me but stuff like LostWinds looks great.
what about Rock Band?
If we’re honest wasn’t the First round of Banjo games on the N64 just methadone for the Mario 64 addict? ;)
It bought its own charm, unique brand of humour and addictive collecting angle. Plus, Kazooie bought a lot to the game.
Yeah, it was highly inspired by Mario 64, but Its far from a carbon copy :)
Rock Band is 180 pounds and here in the US it’s only 180 dollars. Why should the UK have to pay twice as much for 9 more songs?
MOOZIK!
This does look quite captivating, my only concern is the controls.
First person has never been the correct viewpoint for platforming or precision jumping.
However it looks like the players movements are assisted to make them more fluid.
If they can get the control system down, this could be a hit.
LostWinds for me. Everything else looks somewhat mediocre. Good thing we’ve got World of Goo, Gyrostarr and Animales de la Muerte turning up later.
It’s not radael it’s rafael ;P
Whoa, can’t mention secret files! This isn’t the British Pirate Blog!
I saw a short adverticment video of this game on PS3, that was really great!
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis – This brings back memories of my old 486. Probably this and monkey island got me hooked on gaming. Top rate stuff.
Two clothes shops are the same, What the hell is wrong with you Rockstar some russian glasses are the only thing i can use to cover Nico’s stupid face and they make him look older if that’s even possible. NO MODIFIEDED CARS, WHYYY!! I was hopping it to be Brucie’s special ability at least let me choose the color on the Paint and spray.
GTA is the only game where I use cheats they keep the game alive after you finish it , some people say – Uhhh cheater, cheats are bad waaaa, most of old GTA cheats were useless on missions they were just for fun it was up to you if you used or not . two cheats give you the same set of weapons and the other set is almost the same, no flying cars, Knife sucks, also the bat, he swings like a girl, no jetpack, no parachute, no Hydra, no monster truck, no chainsaw, no bike, I was hoping even skaters on this game, no lowriders, no fighting styles, no gym, food is pointless if you cannot go fat, no barbershop, and so many cool cars are also missing, no tank , well I can undestand that cause there are no military bases on New York as far as I know , BUT AT LEAST LET ME SUMMON ONE WITH A GOOD OLD CHEAT!!!
-But the game looks more realistic like this , some others say , If I want realism I go outside my house drive like a maniac kill some cops and end up in prision for life.
beside all this is a great game but I was specting it to be bigger than San Andreas.
I am sure that nobody would complain about 10/10 if it had those things I’ve mentioned before plus the new features.
Sorry if my english is not perfect , I am from Ecuador and needed to go iternational with this comment
yeh fate of atlantis, brings back memories, not just of indiana but quality and fun adventure games. ah well there is hope on the horizon for the genre yet :)
download scummvm btw roarrr I think it includes indy for free and can run pretty much any old lucas arts or similar old adventure games.