Finally someone in the mainstream agrees with me.
There is a section in PC Format magazine that says cooperative play in upcoming games will be a bigger part. Coop gaming, especially in first person shooters is tremendously fun. I spent a lot of time playing Duke Nukem 3D and Doom coop on my PlayStation. Very few games after that supported coop modes (although I realise that it brings some complicated design issues).
I just bought one of the games I mentioned a couple of weeks ago (actually I bought both but I’m only talking about one right now): Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in America). You should probably read the other post first.
To summarise, the game is well cool. You don’t need fast reflexes or a large amount of skill as such but you do need to be able to think fast. A lot of the time you have a time limit to do something which is three times longer than you actually need - but it includes the time needed to work out what to actually do. Failing to do something isn’t always as bad as you think since the story seems quite flexible: there are times when you realise just what an impact your past actions have on the story.
The story itself has a lot of depth. While trying to solve the murder (alternately controlling the murderer and two detectives) you also have to deal with relationships of the main characters which adds more to the game than you’d think. In fact there are a lot of mundane task to you have to complete that are surprisingly fun.
Graphically the game isn’t that impressive, at least intrinsically. But the clever use of split screen during important events adds a certain style and grandeur to it. The sound for the most part is simple but many moments have an eerie sound track reminiscent of Silent Hill just to heighten tension.
This game will probably appeal most to point-and-click adventure lovers and anyone who loves story over action. But I strongly suggest everyone have a look at it (if you’re in the UK get it from Game; you have 10 days to take it back if you don’t like it :P).
I did something I haven’t done for years recently: I bought Official PlayStation Magazine UK for the demo disk. No particular reason except now having a job I’m not so worried about the price of a magazine…
I was glad I did. It has two demos of games that look really cool (and they’re already out).
The first is Fahrenheit (although it was renamed before the launch - search GameSpot for Fahrenheit and it comes up). You control a guy who has just done a murder and you have to (basically) escape from the police. But it is so much more than that. Firstly, the genre is closest to point-and-click adventure à la Broken Sword, except it’s in 3D - you just move near objects and push the right analog stick in different directions to do different context-sensitive actions. Another point is the emphasis on story - you get to see things that are happening elsewhere that you wouldn’t normally know about (like the cop approaching the door of the men’s room where you committed the murder) if it is good for drama. Finally you get to control most of the important characters throughout the game (although not in the demo).
The second one is Shadow of the Colossus, a third person action adventure. All you have to do is go through the game killing these huge Colossi (they look like something out of Lord of the Rings - large walking bear type things. I mean large - they start out about the size of a house and get bigger). And that is literally all you have to do. No piddly bad guys in between, just the Colossi. The game gets away with this apparent simplicity with two (related) features: Firstly how you kill them is not that obvious. It generally involves climbing up them somehow and stabbing them but there’s usually more to it. Secondly the platform aspect of the game is amazing. The most important part is the “grip” feature. Basically you can hang on things (think Prince of Persia) and while hanging you can jump around and hang on other things. This is how you climb the Colossi. The physics engine for this is close to perfect. As the things move around trying to swipe at you your character swings around, ends up hanging with just one arm (so you have to wait for him to get his bearings and grab with both - all the while you’re grip strength lessens) and all sorts of cinematic type sequences occur. On the demo I managed to get all the way up to its head, got throw off and ended up hanging off its nose…
So go out and by them… I think I will.
I bought Julia Civilization IV for Christmas. It’s something I wanted myself but my computer only just reaches the minimum specs. But we installed it anyway and on the lowest settings it does run (although it runs “fine” it’s really unstable after about half an hour and prone to crashing).
If you don’t know, Civilization is a game where you control a civilization from ancient stone age times through to the near future (the last technology you develop allows travel to Alpha Centauri). This version adds a lot to the basic idea though. The biggest addition is religion. It was always going to be a touchy subject but since religion has had a huge impact on Civilization they couldn’t ignore it forever. All the religions in the game are basically handled the same, the only differences being what you need to do to found them. The fact that you can found them can cause events that are vaguely blasphemous (like founding both Buddhism and Christianity in London) but this is really no worse than warfare between two countries that never fought each other in the real world.
I can’t really describe all the coolness here but anyone remotely interested in the genre should go out and buy this game.
I just got the new (well it’s not that new now) Timesplitters game for the PS2, and wow is it cool.
It’s sort of a cross between Timesplitters 2, Halo and the Goldeneye sequel on the N64 (Perfect Dark?). Think Timesplitters 2 but add the ability to get into vehicles and separate grenades and deployable guns. The graphics are improved and are less cartoony but the whacky sense of humour is still there - whenever you kill a monkey it shouts “Chimpicide!”.
I found a cool little PS2 game recently, Sonic Mega Collection Plus. It’s a collection of Sonic games from the Mega Drive/Genesis and Game Gear, including Sonic The Hedgehog (for each), Sonic 2, Sonic 3, Sonic & Knuckles, Sonic Spinball, Sonic Chaos, Sonic Blast, Sonic Drift, Sonic 3D and Dr. Robotonik’s Mean Bean Machine (for both).
For anyone who likes Sonic it is well worth getting. There are a few notes first though.
It does include Knuckles in Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles, but they must be unlocked. The Game Gear games are single player (emulating two Game Gears that could link up would have been fun). The unlockable non-Sonic games are interesting but not really worth going to the hassle to unlock.
It would have been nice to have the Master System versions of Sonic and Sonic 2, but you can’t have everything.
I was in a computer game shop today.
It was own of those places that does trades and has a lot of preowned stock. Much to my surprise they have a second hand Super Nintendo with one game for the same price as a GameCube with 4 games! Admittedly the one game was Legend of Zelda but still…
Here’s a demo of what may become a game: Cash City Wars.
There are various reasons for the title I won’t go into right now… Basically the game will involve you moving from city to city in some way (quite exactly what the mechanics of the game will be I don’t know yet). The cool thing is that it will use real geographic data. At the moment there is only data for the UK but depending on availability I could add the whole world.
Although they don’t like it, the town names are in fact clickable.
Update This page previously contained a statement regarding the closure of OrbWars down over a year ago - BUT OrbWars will be returning soon, check the website over at http://www.orbwars.co.uk for more details once I get it all finished!
This will hopefully become a nice place for all the info I currently have on Galaxia Reborn.
I realised putting stuff in normal blog posts was silly since the GR info isn’t really supposed to be time sensitive and once it falls off the front page, former Galaxia players who stumble over here won’t be bothered to find it.
The current version is now available: Galaxia Reborn Login with “Q” as your username and “q” as your password.