An Hour With: Turning Point: Fall of Liberty

Another WW2 shooter? Oh joy. But wait, this is an alternate history WW2 shooter? Fair enough then! I thought I’d use this as a way to get through my backlog also, and what better way to do that than to play all the damned shooters I’ve bought.

DOOM: The Review. Modern Classic or Just Another Shooter?

Titles that refuse to admit they are sequels must be the “self-titled white album” trend of the gaming industry. Xbox One, Tomb Raider, and now DOOM. Bethesda and id have had a pretty good track record when it comes to keeping an older series alive. Fallout, The Elder Scrolls and Wolfenstein are both great examples of taking franchises in exciting new directions and succeeding. Fallout and TES became the most popular and celebrated first person exploration/RPG games on the market, and Wolfenstein found its niche by being a FPS that stood out from the rest with a very unique story and unique gameplay/stealth mechanics. While these games have found a foothold in the modern gaming market, they did so by changing very fundamental pieces of the games in big ways. Players of the original Interplay Fallout games or even the 90’s Elder Scrolls games often find that the newer additions to their beloved franchises aren’t at all the same games they once were, relying more on combat and severely limiting dialogue when compared to the older games. This worked out pretty well, since it turns out mainstream gamers enjoy looking at pretty landscapes and shooting bad guys a bit more than engaging in tribal politics. With DOOM though, they took one of the biggest, baddest, most violent and most fast paced games ever made, and simply made a new, even more violent and still fast paced game where the goal is basically “shoot everything until it dies”. So, with a studio that has lost most of the minds that helped create the original, a poor showing at last years e3, and abysmal reception to the multiplayer beta, expectations were low and DOOM seemed, well, doomed (I’m so sorry). However, it’s finally here so we can answer the question, “Were they able to create a game worthy of it’s own name?”.

An Hour With: Mirrors Edge

I quite recently purchased this game and planned to play it over the weekend. I played Wolfenstein: The Old Blood over the weekend instead. No matter, I’ll play it now and be back in an hour.

Right, well then. That was something else. You can take that as good or bad, if you want to find out what my opinion is (which you probably don’t) then click the “Read More” thing, if I remember to put the bloody thing in.

King’s Quest Chapter 2: Rubble Without a Cause Review

In King’s Quest Chapter 2, King Graham (Christopher Lloyd) continues to recount the adventures of his younger self to his grandchild(ren). In chapter 1, he was simply an adventurer hoping to become a knight to the king, but in Rubble Without a Cause, he himself is now the King of Daventry. That doesn’t mean his adventuring days are behind him, though. After a quick intro showing that Graham was actually not that good of a king in his younger years, he and his friends who work in the town square are promptly kidnapped by goblins and taken into a secret cave illuminated by bioluminescent lizards and held as prisoners. For some reason, Graham is chosen by the goblins to perform their chores for them which means he is the only prisoner able to wander the caverns unsupervised. This of course means that he takes it upon himself to figure out how to break everyone out and get back to Daventry.

Creed just might be my new favorite sports movie

That’s right, I’m actually writing about something other than games for once! I’m no professional movie critic, but I feel that Creed is a movie worth writing about. I just recently went to see Creed and came in with high expectations due to the surprisingly high Rotten Tomatoes score of 93% (I didn’t read reviews to avoid spoilers). Even with my high expectations, though, Creed surprised me and may now be my new favorite sports movie for a multitude of reasons. Warning: Spoilers ahead.

A Really Fast Rundown of the 104 Backwards Compatible Xbox 360 Games

Alright, really quickly, here’s a list of I think all 104 games that are now backwards compatible, with a brief description of if you should buy it, download it or completely ignore it, throw your Xbox One out of the window and eat a tub of mint flavoured ice cream. Here we go!

An Hour With: Codename CURE

See that image above? No, I didn’t get my grandparents dog to make that, it’s the logo for the game I played over the weekend. Codename CURE, a free to play, early access zombie game, which are becoming quite a common sight on the Steam Store right now. Go see the logo on Steam because I kid you not I’m not making this up. I haven’t seen this type of master class editing since Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.

Diving right into the game, you’ll notice it was made on the handy dandy “Source Engine”, not a problem, some extremely amazing F2P games are made on that engine, such as the F2P, Zombie game No More Room in Hell. Keep note of that game, I’ll be comparing the two frequently throughout. I absolutely adore zombie games, from your Resident Evils to your Dead Risings and Left 4 Dead 2’s and especially No More Room in Hell. It gave the old, tatty, overdone genre just what it needed. A genuinely frightening and tense game that is at the same time a fun game to play with friends and strangers alike. Not Codename Cure though.

So, gamemode wise in this game, there is one gamemode, which is run to a bomb site, plant a bomb and escape. Think of “Zombie Panic Source” meets “Counter: Strike”, because that is literally what this game is. The game uses a lot of Half Life 2 and CS:S models for the zombies and player characters. There’s also a class system extremely similar to that of Counter Strike: Source’s layout of it all. (i.e instead of picking a different coloured terrorist, the one you pick in this game is like picking a class on Call of Duty).

Codename Cure, put simply, doesn’t sound like a good game. However play it and you’ll find it moderately enjoyable. I’m not saying you could sink hundreds upon hundreds of hours into this game, God no, it’s not that good. However it’s good with friends and it’ll keep you entertained for a good three or four hours. Now, let’s take a quick look at the other, F2P, not in early access zombie game on Steam. It’s honestly one of the best games I’ve played in a very long time. It’s suspenseful, forces you to work as a team and it’s got replay value. It actually captivated my attention quite quickly and I’ve enjoyed every second of gameplay.

I don’t think it’s fair to compare Codename Cure to No More Room in Hell because No More Room in Hell will win every single time. But does Codename Cure do anything good? Well, I mean, it can accidentally make tense moments. We had 30 Seconds on the timer to get to the helicopter and we had to run down a corridor, down a flight of stairs and through a yard with a load of crates in it. What happened is I shot my team-mates as friendly fire was on, to slow them down. The zombies went for those team-mates, I got to the helicopter, made it to safety and got myself a Steam Achievement which are about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

A similar experience was had on No More Room in Hell, we had to set the train off and the only way to do that was to pull a lever. Which was “guarded” by a large crowd of zombies. I hopped off of the train, hitting a few zombies as I barged through them, made it to the lever and pulled it. I was completely surrounded by zombies at that point, luckily I had a plan! I shot myself in the head. Also getting me a Steam Achievement, which, like I said, are as useful as a chocolate teapot. What you may notice is that NMRiH (No More Room in Hell) didn’t need a time limit to create suspense, whereas Codename Cure does.

Zombie games should have moments of suspense or just downright (heh, more like updownright) awesome moments. Codename Cure tries to do this but just fails completely fails at doing so. If you want some stupid fun with an awfully poor zombie game that will entertain you for a few hours then play Codename Cure. However if you want an extremely fun, teamwork oriented, sophisticated game that can provide you hundreds upon hundreds of fun, then play No More Room in Hell.

Either that or you can ignore the past 741 words and just buy a copy of Left 4 Dead 2.

Team Fortress 2 Halloween Update Review

Team Fortress 2 is, in all seriousness, the only game you can be killed by a flame-thrower wielding mute wearing a stockbrokers tie and carrying a gold plated shotgun. It’s definitely a fun game without all those items on the side and on the 28/10/15, the Halloween update was released. It finishes on the 11th of November so get to Halloween-y-ing it up.

So what’s actually in the update? Well, every year for the past god knows how long we’ve gotten a Halloween update. Now I’m just gonna say it now, I hate Halloween. I don’t like anything about it other than the fact that we get another Team Fortress 2 update.

Now the big thing this year is that we have to complete contracts to get Mersasmus rewards. The rewards are always old items such as the masks or voo-doo cursed souls and honestly, it’s just not worth it. Valve have made it so that all of the items are unable to be traded or usable in crafting, which creates a big problem. The Halloween Paper Bag Masks you get, should be able to be crafted together to make the awesomely awesome Saxton Hale mask. This doesn’t bother me, I have all the masks in a craft able state, so what’s the point in giving me items I already have?

Valve have failed quite literally this year. Seeing as though you can’t actually craft some items you get through contracts together to get better items. So what’s the point in actually giving us those items? The contracts are terrible too. It’s always just “Collect 100 Souls on this map for 1 Merasmus Point”. Which can be translated to “Kill 100 Enemies to get another contract similar to this one”. I did get a contract that was to kill Merasmus, however because the Team Fortress 2 community is now almost as bad as the Payday 2 community, it was impossible to actually kill him.

Also the other contract I got is for a map that isn’t played on any Valve Official servers. Because that’s what they decided to do, you can only finish contracts on the specific map AND if it’s on a Valve server. This is sort of a double edged sword now Valve, and by double edged sword I mean you’ve just stabbed us twice with a sword, that you can buy from the Mann Co. store for only £17.99!

One new thing Valve always adds are hats and stuff. You can get hats in the new Gargoyle crates, which did actually provide something good for me. I sold them on the Steam Market and made myself a couple quid so I could buy some more games on Steam.

Valve have came up with a concept for what could’ve been a great idea, having all the previous Halloween events at once, but the way it was executed was very poorly. The contracts can only be completed on certain servers which causes even more problems than there already are. The poor community of Team Fortress 2 makes contracts like killing Merasmus almost impossible and the fact that you can’t craft some of the Halloween items because Valve hasn’t let you craft them is just plain stupid.

At least the Gargoyle crates let me buy a lot of games. (By a lot I mean 9, then 31 free games off of TremorGames followed by another 4). Guess all that’s left to do now is wait for a couple more crates to drop into my inventory and sell them for extortionate prices.

The Xbox Elite Controller might actually be worth the money

You read that right, Microsoft somehow made a controller that just might be worth the ridiculous $150 price tag. Ever since the announcement of the Elite Controller, I have been more than skeptical that it would be anything other than a minor improvement over the already solid Xbox One controller. Honestly, I thought it was just a way to get more money out of Xbox fanboys to make up for the price cut last year. Every once in a while though, I’m OK with being wrong. The Elite seems more like a PC and Xbox player’s wet dream than shelf decoration.

Let’s start out simple. Before even pairing it up a console, the Xbox Elite Controller is obviously a solidly made piece of hardware, even more so than the console. It comes in a hard case, which nicely keeps track of the interchangeable pieces of the controller when not in use. Three sets of triggers are included, two different kinds of d-pads and a pair of interchangeable sticks. Everything feels like it is made of high-quality material and should hold up well over thousands of uses. The thumb sticks click in magnetically, which gives me hope that the inner mechanism is well protected and won’t pick up small problems along the way as I have experienced with the normal XBO controller. Another important feature is the ability to customize the travel of the Elite Controller’s triggers which can increase performance in different game types.

The controller feels extremely natural and solid when in my hands. It feels like I’m holding something that cost $150. The physical customization isn’t crazy, but the software side takes it to the next level. It is possible to remap the controller’s buttons on the Xbox One. This may not be an important feature to PC players who can do that with any controller ever made, but for serious console only players this can be a game changer, literally. This is all done in the downloadable Xbox Accessories app. A slider on the back of the controller allows for quick changing between different saved controller configurations. While I didn’t personally use this feature much, I can see how it could be great for a variety of games like first person shooters where one might want a different control setup for different weapons. The Elite Controller allows for this to happen quickly and smoothly in game which could certainly help in a competitive online situation.

Now for the one terrible annoying thing about this controller which makes absolutely no since to me. The Xbox Elite controller does not come with a rechargeable battery pack. That’s right, this $150 controller requires two AA batteries, not included. Um, what? Surely Microsoft could have included the $20 rechargeable kit in their ridiculous expensive controller, right?

I feel that the Xbox Elite controller will actually be used mainly on PC. Console gamers are often not very likely to spend ridiculous amounts of money on their gaming experience. I mean much of the console gamer crowd is yet to move up to the current generation of consoles! PC gamers, though, who often throw down over a grand for a PC build may be much more likely to invest in a high quality gamepad, especially when so many PC gamers are looking for a new controller after seeing the disappointment of the Steam Controller.

So, is the new Xbox Elite Controller worth the money? Well, that depends on how much you have? If the price means you would have to do without buying two new games this holiday season, it’s not worth it. If you are willing to spend money to improve the gaming experience on top of just buying new games, this controller might be worth it to you. I could certainly see this controller being the way for gamers to cement their status as a “real gamer”, even if that is a ridiculous thing to do. The Elite Controller is certainly the best console controller made to date. There is a problem for console gamers though. To use the Elite Controller you have to play on the Xbox instead of PS4…

 

Review: NBA 2K16 for PlayStation 3

Throughout my life I’ve always been a basketball fan. It’s a love affair that started when I was young and playing ball with friends everyday after school and eventually on real teams. At some point, though, I stopped paying attention to basketball, really only giving it any attention during March Madness each year. This year, though, I decided I missed the game, and want to really follow the NBA because to me it’s one of the most entertaining sports both on the court and off. Sports games have always been a great way to keep up with who is on what team when I’ve been out of the loop and helps me get back up to speed on the sport in some ways.

I played 2K16 on a PS3, which differs greatly from the current gen version. Firstly, it doesn’t include the new Spike Lee story for MyCareer is absent, which is a good thing from what I’ve seen of it. Other game modes are absent as well but all of the important things are there as well. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in every game mode available and I can definitely say this is the most fun I’ve had in a sports game in quite some time.

Gameplay on the court is fantastic. For a long time now, NBA 2K has been the best playing sports game to me personally, and this year doesn’t change. Gameplay is easy to pickup, and very difficult to master. The right stick can be used to perform very precise moves that really make it feel like performing an impressive move compared to just hitting a button and watching an animation. In fact, there is really no time when the player is locked into an animation and doesn’t have control like in many other great sports games (looking at you MLB: The Show). The AI feels like a real team, performing smart plays and properly adapting to pretty much any situation. In fact, I think I enjoy playing against the AI more than another human player.

Franchise/association modes have always been the main attraction to me in sports games as I love being able to control every aspect of a team and not be confined to a single role during gameplay. NBA 2K16 does not disappoint. The Association game mode is fantastic as always. Having a good team feels good, and there are real moves that can be made to help out lesser teams to really build up the franchise even if it takes a season or two. Commentators do a good job of really sounding like people who are watching the game, and not just piling on repetitive cookie cutter comments like many games.

Even though I rarely enjoy career modes (aka create a player and play as him), I actually find it the most engaging mode in 2K16. On the floor, playing is fun and kept interesting by a “teammate” rating that constantly updates on screen as you perform actions on the court. The use of fake social media, press conferences and meetings with the GM make it really feel like a career and not just controlling one guy instead of a whole team like most other games’ career mode. Even as a bench player the game does a great job of making the player feel like they are filling an important role on the team.

Online, as always, was broken at release because the 2K servers are never able to handle the load on release day. Now that things have calmed down though, online works fine and is fun. The main attraction to online gameplay is MyTeam, a mode that is trying to recreate the success EA Sports games have found with their Ultimate Team mode. MyTeam doesn’t feel as refined as Ultimate Team, though. Building a team feels like a chore simply due to how long one has to play with a terrible team before building anything resembling a real team. Sadly, this is probably on purpose because one can simply buy virtual currency in NBA 2K16 via micro-transactions. Other online modes are fun, though, especially when playing against someone who knows what they’re doing. The problem is, of course, finding those people, because otherwise you might want to just thrown your controller at the screen while playing someone who things it’s NBA JAM in an arcade.

NBA 2K16 has helped me rekindle my love for basketball simply from how well every aspect is handled. Even the soundtrack is great and probably in my all time top 5 favorite soundtracks. I can only hope the upcoming NBA season will be as captivating as the virtual one has been. Go Clippers!