Portal 2, worth the wait?

So, I picked up Portal 2 at the release and quickly fired it up to see what it has to offer. And, to answer the title question, yes it was worth the wait. Though by wait, we should first look at Valve's innovative release system using the potato sack. Essentially, you could pre-buy the game bundled with a bunch of Indie game titles selected by Valve from the steam library, and the more people logged into the games the closer Portal 2 would come to being released early.

So, release mechanism aside, players of the first Portal game will know how it plays, and in short I will say to you guys, stop reading here because, honestly, the game is more of the same procedure. It feels and plays the same as before, though the look of it has gotten a little more polish since, as you might expect with the passage of time and Valve's evolving Source engine.

Well, ok there is a little more on Portal 2's table I guess, so keep reading a little longer and I will tell you where to stop.

What happens in New Vegas...

... Stays in New Vegas. Yes, it is time for a new Fallout game review.

Fallout New Vegas is Bethesda Softworks' newest offering in the post-apocalyptic retro scene, served up by Obsidian Entertainment.

Many of you (or rather my three readers, in any case) will know my thoughts on Fallout 3 by now, so this game does have some pretty deep shoes of expectation to fill. The open world format delivered by Fallout games, seeded with well structured deposits of intrigue and backstory supplements to those willing to search for them, made Fallout 3 one of the best games I have played. Mainly because it made free-roaming in an open world worthwhile when you found some small supply cache either guarded by raiders or traders or entirely empty leaving you to wonder when the three bears would be coming home. It always delivered something interesting.

But I will not go on gushing about how excellent FO3 was since I pretty much covered it in my original review. So let us look towards the new mewling baby in the Fallout series, already sporting it's first DLC and a wealthy library of community mods to add more depth (or, if you like this kind of thing, god weapons.) Of course, these are only available to the PC players, sorry console guys but you chose to play an FPS on a kids toy...

Mass Effect 2 brings me hope

Besides my BioShock review I mentioned before that I also bought Mass Effect 2 on the Steam sale over the holidays. In fact, playing Mass Effect 2 took over most of the time instead of BioShock to a point that I was not too sure which game review would hit the blog first. It has been interesting to play two heavily contrasting games side by side, especially as both involve some kind of super powers in their characters and dub themselves as Role Play Games.

I also mentioned before that I replayed the first Mass Effect to import a save game, something that once I got down to trying was fairly difficult. Mainly locating the obscure hidden holders where the save game was from the first Mass Effect so I could select it and import it. Feeling a little flushed about this, though, I started playing and pretty early on realised that there were a couple of perks to importing a game. One was an increase to the starting points I could assign to powers and abilities as well as a starting pot of credits, the other was less useful but might appeal to others in the form of an achievement. So I guess for the starting points and credits it was kind of worth it. I was also able to remap my character details a little to give him Biotic powers, which is something I have never done in the first Mass Effect so I decided this was the time to give it a try.

Still, you do not start with the credits you had at the end of the first game, so if you are yet to get this far do not spend time obsessing over grinding the first game out. There are major differences to the setting, space available, exploration, inventory management, ship, team members and character skill building in ME2. They have not transplanted the first game over a new story so focus only on getting the major story points out of the way if you have done the grind before like me and want to start again from game one. Do all the quests to enjoy the story, pick your romance option, make the hard moral choices near the end and save the galaxy.

So, to start with I might find it a little hard to set the scene, as you know I like to do, without spoiling the beginning. Yes, the beginning is just as easy to spoil as the ending. So you will have to bare with me. All I will say is that over two years have passed since the first game and our hero has found himself in a tough spot. Essentially, Shepard finds himself in the company of a pro-human activist group calling themselves Cerberus. Along the line of a group you encounter in the first game called Terra Firma, but a lot more organised and a lot more secretive. Essentially they are branded terrorists by the Human Alliance and the Citadel and not well loved. However, their current focus is investigating the disappearance of human colonists in the fringes of lawful space. It seems only human settlements are targeted and people just vanish with little sign of a fight. The leader of Cerberus, calling himself the Illusive Man, has pooled together their vast financial clout to get Shepard on his team, equip them and then uses his information sources to point you in the right direction. As for why Shepard is going along with them, again it is hard to say too much without spoiling it but the circumstances leading to him being in the company of Cerberus and the last two years since the original game leaves him with little credibility in the Citadel and the Alliance itself, who are all sitting on their hands and doing nothing to begin with.

So it is a rock and a hard place, but as with the first game, you get to pick your attitudes in conversation with people about how you feel your new affiliation relating to you. You might want to start being cautious and distant but eventually you may well converse with people about Cerberus and hail them as being heroes who are misunderstood. Or you could praise or damn them all the way from start to end, and the story allows you some latitude in the end to either do their ultimate bidding or piss on their party.

You start your new quest having to assemble a team past the initial two people who join you from Cerberus, Miranda Lawson and Jacob. I will spare you their life stories but suffices to say the character depth is there with everyone you meet in game, and BioWare has not short-changed their usual standards of story telling.

I mentioned differences though, and trust me all of them are for the better, and this is why I said in the title that this game gives me hope. RPGs as of late have had a nack for over complicating and over layering their gameplay with stat building and an endless supply of marginally different from the last weapons and armours. Keeping to that example for now, you no longer have to buy armour or loot it and then compare it and hundreds others ad nausium before finding out which one is slightly better than the last you picked up not ten minutes past and change again. The same goes for weapons too where you don't have to outfit a whole team by buying the weapons repeatedly. You are given your base set of weapons in the form of a pool where there is one for everyone that joins your team, provided their character class will let them play with that weapon. You might find some new ones or even buy them but they are few and far between and overall their have different characteristics setting them apart more clearly than a pistol that does 154 damage instead of 147. Standard issue pistol now has a 15 round clip and lots of spare ammo with a fast re-fire rate. Or you can have the hand cannon when you find it early on, which only has a 9 shot clip and 19 more ammo spare.

'Wait a moment,' keen players of the first game will be saying. 'Ammo?'

Yes, there is now an ammo count in favour of infinite ammo controlled by overheating of guns fired for too long. Overall the principal of how they work is the same, with a metal slug being shaved off and tiny pieces being propelled through mass effect fields, but you now pick up the heat coils for the guns and they need replacing every few shots depending on the weapon.

Anyway, armour is pre-set for all members including Shepard, though you can unlock alternate costumes for the other team members by doing their side quests. As for Shepard, you can change the characteristics of the armour with add-on upgrades you can buy and research, then select them when customising your armour. Such as increased medi-gel capacity or ammo holders, stronger sheilds, heavier fibre weaves and even a different helmet in the form of a visor like Garrus wears to increase headshot damage. The only different armour are pre-set options you get with some DLC content.

Other changes, and anyone who played the first game will hit the roof when they hear this, driving is now dead and buried. No more bouncy driving physics and exploring a tiny patch of a back water planet for new equipment and random encounters. Instead you can scan planets from orbit to locate resources, which I mentioned earlier is a part of blanket upgrading all weapons and their characteristics. You launch probes on hot spots to mine out deposits of Element Zero, Iridium, Palladium and Platinum to make the upgrades you have bought or found. Some of them will also change the outcome of the game's conclusion, and depending on what ship and field kit upgrades you do or don't purchase some members of the team may not make it back in one piece...

Speaking of the team, there is a new cast for the most part. Importing an original ME save, or configuring the starting conditions yourself, means some of the characters who died and outcomes of the final battle in the first game will already be represented in ME2. However, many of them will not be joining Shepard's team this time round. Don't worry, they will all put in an appearance at some time or another, and even some of the smaller characters who you just had a short dealing with in a side mission will be there too and one or two of them take part in a slightly larger role that before. I won't spoil it for you who does and does not join Shepard as one of them is kind of a surprise to learn their true identity and, personally speaking, I loved the way it was delivered and especially when I found out who it was. I will tell you one person who join though, as it leads me onto the next point.

Romance... Yes this is a feature in ME2 as well and I am wondering if it is almost a compulsory requirement for any game pitch to BioWare that they must all come with a romantic sub plot where your main character can engage in love scenes with one of their compatriots. It is all very conventional, as such, with male Shepard having a pick of all female characters, and female Shepard getting her choice of most of the male characters.

While the first game did have the usual pick of Human or Asari as a potential love interest, and the others were left in the cold, ME2 breaks that old mould making all races in your list of travel companions fair game. Imagine my surprise when the one original character I will tell you who joins the team, Tali, started suggesting to Shepard in idle conversation that she always felt she could trust him with one of her people's customs that would most often signify a willingness for intimacy. This character, as pictured to the right, is a species who spends all their time in a sealed environment suit due to their immune systems having become so weak they spend their whole lives in a bubble, even around family, as the smallest germs make them sick. And when one wishes to be with another they spend some time with their suit environment systems linked to become accustomed to each other and develop an immunity to the other.

By this time I had already started my character down a path to follow the romantic plot with Miranda (and why not?) so I let her down gently but had I known ahead of time I would not have, simply to see how this plays out. But some reading on all the choices available seems to suggest there is an option for success.

Anyway, now that is out of the way, I will tell you about how the game plays. As before, it is 3rd person and over the shoulder. While I always felt that the first ME lacked some punch to the combat, with the guns not feeling meaty, ME2 has addressed this with some more feel to drilling bullets into a merc's armour chest plate. With the inventory system being more simplified and the weapon selection trimmed down, you have little else to think about before heading into battle, and no distractions in the form of looting a slightly better gun and feeling tempted to stop fighting to look at it and see if it is worth equipping. The locations are less of the traditional copy/paste of the old game, where all the colony buildings seemed to be exactly the same layout, which might be the case with prefab units, but not when they are built into caves, unless colonial planners were overcome with very bad OCD and everything needed to look the same so they commanded all mines to be drilled out in the same pattern. Since the driving sections are no more you only visit locations you find or are sent to and each one has been designed uniquely from the next, instead of this being an honour reserved purely for the central plot missions. Something I felt might have been a better fix for the first game over the driving segment as the random generated terrain dotted with points of interest, as opposed to some individually sculpted landscape featuring roads and lakes which could have made locations more interesting and less painful.

Hacking has taken on a new face, instead of the guiding of a small chevron past moving blocks running around 5 layers of rings like a game of frogger with a timer. You can either match up symbols on a circuit board to bypass them and open stuff or hack dataports by finding the right sets of fragmented data in the order you are asked to while avoiding moving through corrupted blocks of data while they scroll up the screen. In short, they are still mini games but their guise feels more along the theme of the game.

Walking around the different locations filled with NPCs, you still pick up on snippets of conversation and happen across random jobs being proposed to you by both sides of the law. News casts echo through the halls, sometimes speaking about stuff you have just done and sometimes about random stuff entirely. Once or twice you will hear about events relating to the last game, such as a foundation for biotics named after Kaiden Alneko from the first game, I guess because I had him set to have perished at the mission to Virmire. I suspect that, had I set Ashley Williams to be the dead one there would have been some kind of military academy scholarship for women in her honour. There is also the chance to drink at the bars and even get drunk and dance if you want, though don't expect Shepard to cut the rug or anything as on the whole the features are kind of useless. One bonus to the locations on offer is that there are not elevators. The first game had them cunningly disguising the long loading sequences between sections of scenery and a quick jog through the Citadel soon became an exercise in frustration.

The controls on the PC version feel substantial enough and up to the task, though I am still not sold on the revisiting of a feature in the first game where your number keys above the keyboard can be mapped to powers and abilities, when every other game uses them to change weapons. In this first play through I selected Shepard to be a Vanguard type with some biotic powers instead of the soldier I played with in the first game, as his circumstances leading into ME2 kind of felt like this change could be justified without breaking continuity and I had not played much as a biotic. I felt like I would miss my assault rifle, as I found that no matter what foe you faced in the first game having enough bullets flying down range would deal with any and all threats without the complications of hurling bodies through the air with my mind. And even then I reached a point in the story where I had an option to train an additional weapon class or improve more on my current skills, and the weapon available to me was an assault rifle so now I feel as complete as before anyway.

There is a nice array of DLC content too, some of them providing some better looking armour suits and new weapons or alternate costumes for the support characters. Others give you new NPC characters and sub-missions to obtain them or other small bonus missions to play through to get some new rewards. As of writing this, I have not really dug deep into many of the missions except for the Hammerhead missions where driving is reintroduced, but this time with a hover tank kind of thing that is meant to be an armed science platform. It is really nothing more than a glorified vacuum cleaner that sucks up the dirt beneath it to extract some Prothean artefacts. There are a few missions in a hub based string leading to a final mission but overall the adventure was just a repeat of the same thing. Drive here, suck this up, kill Geth with missiles and go home with the only plot devices showing up at the beginning and end of the mission string.

Still, some of the new weapons are nice and the armours are pretty good as well, though the Cerberus assault armour would have been better if you could remove the bulky helmet when not needed like the default armour  lets you do.

Overall, I was impressed with the pace of ME2 and the delivery over the first game where some bad features were rejigged for simplicity and a less-is-more feel. ME2 proves that less is indeed more and is well worth picking up at any price. The storyline continues to be compelling leading into the soon-to-arrive ME3 which I shall be sure to grab as soon as I have free time to play once it hits the shelves. I regret it took me this long to get to this game in the first place so I won't be making this mistake again if they continue this winning formula.

BioShock, better late than never

Now then, back to some solid reviewing and I will kick off the new year with BioShock, by 2K Games, followed by Mass Effect 2 in another blog, maybe a poker game blog if I have a sweet game in Poker Night at the Inventory, a review of the XBox Kinect and Fallout New Vegas all in the winds as I find time for them.

Here goes with number one, BioShock.

I have quietly considered this game for a while now and took the plunge in the Steam holiday madness sale getting it for about £3 or something like that. Looking at the past trailers and such the style latched on to me fairly quickly but I never got round to getting the game. It has this film noir thing going on mixed with some classic horror in an art deco steam punk setting underwater.... if that cocktail did not blow a fuse in your brain then keep reading.

As always I start with a quick run down of the setting before moving on to the actual gaming. You start as some unnamed and unknown quantity on an aircraft that quickly runs into some mechanical issues and finds the water below to be suddenly appealing. After the love affair runs its course and the plane is smashed to bits you seem to be the only one alive in the water with burning jet fuel and flight cushions floating in the bobbing seas. As you look around you see, unnerving close to the crash, a kind of light house in the middle of the ocean like a beacon with stairs leading up from a dock. Seeking shelter and maybe some help you climb the stairs and go inside to be greeted by a dilapidated lobby that looks like a welcome suite, and an elevator at the far end. Well, sitting around will not get you help so naturally you pull the lever and it turns into a submarine that goes back under water and heads off on some auto pilot as a slide show plays telling you of some scientist called Dr Ryan who has a dream for a utopian community where people can be whatever they want. This is Rapture.

There is a reason I am giving some emphasis on the 'why' of your character's actions which I will come back to soon. But back to Rapture. You soon realise when you get there that it is becoming a bit of a shit hole and the place is a complete mess. The elevator/sub grinds to a halt in a debarkation room with some kind of freaky thing attacking someone who you heard on the radio in the sub, and then it turns attention to you in the flickering lights and does a good job of being scary before running off again. Then the radio flares up again and a guy called Atlas introduces himself and ask for your help. Naturally he plays the survivor story on you and wants to hook up, but not before you help him and rescue his family. He becomes your constant nagging companion all the way telling you things about Rapture and the people within.

Essentially, the good doctor who made Rapture found ways to splice people's genes with superpowers available in a convenient injection from handily placed vending machines. Want to throw fireballs? Buy an injection. Want to freeze something by touch or have telekinetic powers? See above. Of course, most of the powers you encounter seem to have some primary application as a weapon, and even the little info vids that pop up when you install a power leave little to the imagination that you are meant to use these against your fellow man. Which I guess is hardly surprising that the place suddenly went to hell in the proverbial hand basket.

I should maybe give you a quick run down on the malodorous denizens of Rapture. For the most part they are citizens who have gone off the deep end in some way and became a raving gang of lunatic killers with their own special talents between them. There are people who like pistols, some who like wrenches, some who are insane medical staff, some are like spiders climbing the walls with hooks on their hands and so on. You also have other residents with an even stranger agenda in the form of the 'little sisters'. And they have a bouncer with them called a 'big daddy' who protects her. The little sister is a creepy thing in a red dress and some kind of hypo-gun in her hand sucking stuff from the dead bodies. It is almost as if they are possessed to do so for some reason I still cannot work out yet, and they have a fairy godmother watching over them with a .44 magnum. Some Doctor who is apparently responsible for unleashing the little sisters on Rapture and now wants to make amends through you by asking you to rescue them from their curse giving you some power of touch that stops them being creepy.

Or you could do as Atlas suggests and just harvest them, which kills them. You see, the one thing they give you is something called Adam which they are extracting from the dead, and I gather is some prime genetic material used for gene splicing that revolutionised the genetics works of the Dr Ryan while in Rapture making all things possible. If you rescue them you get a bit of Adam, if you harvest them you get a lot of Adam. Of course, you have to get them away from the big daddy first by killing it and that is no easy task. They will not let you get near their little sister since they want the Adam anyway. You can use your hard earned Adam as a form of currency at vending machines to buy new powers in a bottle, and unlock more slots to fit them in.

The story itself is delivered in short bursts over the radio with Atlas and a few other voices who chirp in from time to time as well as recordings you find dotted around the place like audio logs. This makes it rather disjointed without the traditional and more true RPG conversation tracks with the NPCs. A quote from Gamespot's BioShock page:

BioShock creates an amazing world that you'll want to explore and a compelling mystery that slowly comes together as you play.

Note the use of the word, 'slowly'. This is an understatement and the way it is presented soon left me confused early on and I eventually had to admit I was lost.

Not just in terms of the plot but also why I was suddenly waving a gun around and doing Atlas' bitch work for him. I cannot figure my character's angle here or even why he is meant to be good at combat. He is not a soldier, spy or other such typical archetype so why he is not cowering in fear wetting himself in a dark corner of Rapture is beyond me. It seems little work is done to integrate the player character into the actual story at all and provide a primary motivation beyond simply letting the player at the keyboard enjoy the ride. And the way the story soon pans out it is a wonder to me why they simply did not just go with a usual angle of investigator checking out the under water colony of Rapture after hearing about some strange ape shit things happening. How can the world not know about this vast underwater kingdom going belly up and send in the marines?

The way this story is delivered seems more fitting to an open world setting where you find random logs of a story in any order you find them while you progress through, and piece it together yourself. In the case of BioShock they put this system into a pretty linear mode of game play and it does not fit well above a normal narrative system they could have adopted, leaving the small radio diary logs you find scattered around to simply add more flesh instead of being the bones as well.

I have also noticed as I play through that the lack of a fully engaging story causes me to be a little sidetracked. Since my Win 7 upgrade I have had to reinstall other games and, as mentioned before, I bought Mass Effect 2 and am replaying the first Mass Effect game to import a save game state. And I seem to be replaying a game I have already played more than BioShock right now. I suspect the story layout of BioShock is to blame here...

Still, with that out of the way, the actual combat is pretty good and has a nice feel with blurred vision and wider properties to the superpowers you get from injecting the plasmids such as electricity having more effect on targets in water, the fire ability igniting standing oil on the ground and melting ice letting you get access to stuff and new areas. Also, soon after I fired the pistol I realised the smoking gun barrel had a nice effect where moving around caused the whisp of smoke to leave a trail, bringing the noir feeling to the forefront every now and then.

The atmosphere created is thick and glorious with moments of blood chilling terror as you see shadows round a corner you know from the map is a dead end, the lights flicker and then they are gone only to jump you from behind later. Or the low drone of a near by Big Daddy as it plods along at a rather sedate pace, each footfall shaking the ground and sending a gout of dust into the air.

There is the ability to hack the vending machines as well as sentry guns and helicopter gun drones to be on your side. Though it takes the form of a mini-game as most seem to do which is a game of connecting pipes. The difficulty increases with the grace period before the water flows being shorter and the grid being smaller and riddled with broken pipes you cannot move. Soon they become tedious and hacking vending machines only gives you a slim discount on goods.

There is an almost non-existent inventory management which I feel is a big minus for the game. Whatever you find food wise, you consume there and then to keep healthy otherwise you are wasting your time. And no one has a desire to backtrack over the level to find that snack bar you left earlier now you need it. Once again, I find myself holding a game up to Fallout 3 to compare features, and while I have resisted mainly due to the mode of game play adopted here being substantially different to Bethesda's contribution to my crippled social life, an inventory system and the reasons for needing one are pretty much relevant to BioShock. Stocking up food for later consumption seems to me like something an unlikely hero in a tight spot would do.

I will leave my review here, though, as I have lingered too long on this one and not feeling an impulse to play the game as much as I would have expected and I am sure I have seen a decent dose of it to render a verdict.

BioShock can stand on its own as a shooter game, with a few features and nicely done combat and utility powers, an upgrade system and no level grinding you see too much of in most shooters today where the developers feel the need to bog a player down with mindless busywork trying to get another fractional sum of damage out of their weapons. And there is a simple arsenal of weapons, in the form of one of each kind of weapon and nothing more, something not really seen much past the days of Duke Nukem 3D. It is atmospheric and uncomplicated as far as game play goes, but unless you really pay attention to every scrap of story, don't expect to have a clue what is going on at first. I expect the conclusion of the game will shed a lot of light on stuff that has been going on, so if I have some second thoughts, expect to see a follow up blog in the future. But for now I got a bigger list of games to get through.

Back to gaming, Christmas and other stuff. (Short blog)

OK, hello there guys. Just a quick rundown on what else I got planned game review wise. Since my last blog was more about my PC rebuilds and such. Ohh yeah, Windows 7 installed on the old XP desktop and working ok now, and repopulated it with a few games here and there as well as some new purchases from the Steam holiday sale. I have been ill with flu the last week as well so this blog should have come out soon after Christmas and before the new year so.... Happy New Year!

Anyway, I take you back (again) to a previous blog with a wish list on it of what I want to review. And with the Steam holiday sales planning to ruin my life as much as possible I have grabbed a couple of the cheap and small games.

First of all I do recommend the Flight Control HD game from steam if it is still under a fiver. You will be surprised how addictive it is, but I would recommend it more for either touchscreen users or for iPads and other tablet PCs. I had a cut down version on my Droid phone and it was good but limited to two airfields and less actual kinds of aircraft in the free version.

But there were some mad offers on large titles too and I have a couple of them on my backlog list I wish to trim down and try to stay current. One being BioShock (and BioShock 2 as well but first things first) and the other being Mass Effect 2, which I know a friend I have in the states will be finally relieved to hear I purchased for £7 on the one day offer for the 23rd. (She nags me constantly about getting it...)

I plan to review both, but I wish to replay the first Mass Effect as well so I can import a save game and profile from there to the new one and see how that works out for me. My old save was wiped in the update to Win 7 anyway but getting back to grips with the storyline again (and the crappy driving sections) is not a bad thing.

Also, as I write this I notice Back to the Future game is on steam... ohh yes I shall have to be getting this!

Fallout NV is on the list still, and in my crosshairs for the next blog after the two above, and now the first DLCs are out for it, and it seems the mod community has kicked in high gear already, it might be worth waiting for a Game of the Year edition with some extra content shipped included. I will most likely not buy this from steam, though, as I hear that the ~ key used to open the console will pretty much shaft achievements for the game forever, even on new games. That little key, while used to cheat in some cases, was also useful for keeping a handle on the bugs in FO3 as well as being required for mod controls in some instances so I don't think I can live without it.

Finally I downloaded, and have been enjoying Poker Night at the Inventory. Since I played Red Dead Redemption, and liked the cards mini-games such as Texas hold 'em, I have developed a taste for little games featuring this contest of cards. And what better company than Heavy Weapons Guy from TF2, Tycho from Penny Arcade, Strong Bad from Homestar Runner and.... welll, Max from Sam and Max is kind of annoying... But you can win his gun from him so that's ok when he puts the damn thing on the table.

I might actually devote a little time to recording a single blog post diary when playing a tournament as it is moments like this when you want to share your triumphs with the world. Such as tonight as I write this, I resolved to go all in if anyone holds in the first hand, as I usually see others do this and everyone has to fold. After all, no one wants to be out on the first hand... My turn to do this I think. Everyone folded except Strong Bad, who went all in. I had a couple of diamonds, like a 4 and a 9 or something. Strong Bad had a pair of queens so naturally I thing I am screwed and ready to get my coat. But the first three table cards needed playing and what drops out? Another three diamonds! Flush, baby! So he was screwed as no other cards hit the table that could beat a flush and was out on hand one. After this we had maybe another 9 hands of back and forth with the last three, I put chips down eventually and lost all but $4,000 from a headway of nearly $30,000. Last hand they all go all in and I have a choice to make, end it now or fold and hang on by the fingernails. I was getting bored of the endless up and down so I go all in and the cards are dealt. I have a queen in hand, and another two flop on the table. As the last two are drawn I see they all have either one or two pairs... and no chips between them making me the winner with three of a kind and all three players kicked off the table in one hand.

So, you can see how I would like to blog such stuff so maybe I make a small journal and do a single blog on it one day if I am bored.

So, that's about all I got for now and I will see where BioShock takes me, followed by ME2, and get some reviews done on them so I can step up to some newer stuff again this year.

The big PC rebuild project of 2011

So, I wanted to take a little break from reviewing to talk about my upcoming projects to rebuild a couple of my desktops.

I have an old Compaq that I got about 5 years back now with Windows XP, two 160gb hard drives and some old vid card, an Nvidia 7600 GT I think, with 256mb power and the rig has 2 gb of DDR memory and the CPU is an old AMD Athalon 64 3400+. So it is pretty old and served me well as a games machine for a long time, but had limited upgrade potential and as the years wore on I saw little point as it would mean a total rebuild anyway. And the base itself is not really big enough to accommodate many of the monster GFX cards of modern times. With my usual approach of 'Go big or go home' when it comes to computers I would naturally be going for one of these, so tat meant a full ATX-E capable case.

This happened around summer last year when I finally assembled the pieces and a fresh copy of Windows XP, going for a 64 bit version of XP pro to work with the 8gb of DDR 2 gaming memory and a massive 1gb Nvidia 285 GTX card the size of a house brick. Married to a gaming board by Gigabyte with much upgrade potential straddled by a sexy Intel Core 2 Duo 8400 with 3ghz of speed and a heat sink putting my house's radiators to shame.

I relegated my old Compaq, thumping on strong like a faithful old terrier getting past its better years but with a strong heart still, to media work now where I store movies and TV series files and such. But having an old version of XP home, and the hardware not liking SP3 causing a crash and roll-back when upgrading, means it is going to drop off the map eventually. And it limits my media steaming capabilities not having Media Centre on board and I cannot convince my XBox 360 or PS3 to access the shared folders on the network to play stuff on my TV downstairs.

My TV has a USB input and plays nearly all media files save for WMV/A files, so sticking an external hard drive into it and playing the files from there is no major issue. It just means I connect my Win 7 laptop to the hard drive and move files through the network from the Compaq upstairs onto the folders on the hard drive.

This can be tiresome at times though and I long for a more holistic solution. One would be a wifi external network hard drive connected to my TV downstairs that I can view as a network location on any PC in the house and move files to it. This would mean I could send them from the desktop upstairs using some kind of synch software on a schedule or manually activated. This would free up my laptop from the task as I need to perch it near the TV to connect it so it is not convenient to use as a social networking machine in my living room while moving files. I could also access the drive from the laptop or elsewhere to reorganise the folders as needed and rename them if required.

I am still looking at this as an option for the media PC but nothing seems to be on the market right now that would do this for me. Possibly the Seagate range of GoFlex stuff might introduce something but short of getting a very expensive Linksys NAS media hub the size of a compact PC tower I likely going to be waiting a while. And as I use my PS3 mainly for BluRay to begin with I would like to use the streaming capability more effectively. So this means rebuilding the media PC into something better.

Sure I could just install a copy of Win 7 on there anyway but if the hardware does not like SP3 to begin with it does not bode well. So a hardware upgrade and full rebuild is still on the cards.

I am not sure what I will go with yet, and I might get myself an Intel i3, or a mid range i5. It would not need more than 4gb of RAM anyway as it is only streaming to one device and I am happy with the download speeds on just 2gb of RAM to begin with. And this is old DDR standards too, so when I get an i-series in there it will need DDR3 as a standard anyway which is blistering by any standard. And since you get both 32 bit and 64 bit on an Win 7 disk anyway I have it for if I need to unlock it so I might as well install the 64 bit version off the bat. I am contemplating a fast hard disk too, like a 10k rpm disk, but only if there is any point to it for the usage I will put it to. Some might suggest a Solid State Disk for total speed, but they have limited read/write lifespans and if I am watching stuff and streaming it that will be a lot of read/write cycles and most likely I will wear out the disk in short order. Plus they are expensive to buy compared to conventional HDD technology where you could get 2tb of space now for the same price as a 100gb SSD.

So, there is much research to be done, and this is just for one PC rebuild. The main dilemma I have is that I might want to upgrade the CPU, and by necessary extension the motherboard, of my new games rig to an i7 in the future when they become more reasonably priced. But in this age of austerity and such I look at the long term savings I could get from this. While the hardware is not a priority right now, doing such an upgrade would need a new version of Windows installing as switching out the CPU and motherboard can de-authorise an install of Windows. So where does the dilemma come in?

Well, Windows XP 64 has some issues too, namely not accepting SP3 since they do not make it for XP Pro 64 to begin with. This is now an issue for my gaming since a few things are dropping support for SP2 like Windows Live Games marketplace where I tried to download a DLC for FO3 and was told I could no longer do this. So this is forcing my hand to upgrade to Win 7 now. I do not mind this as I wanted Win 7 on the game rig anyway but it was not released at the time so I settled for XP Pro 64. If I now upgrade to Win 7 then when I want to update the backbone of the hardware I will need to reactivate Windows anyway.

I hear, though, that you can ask Microsoft nicely over the phone to do this without charge if you tell them you have upgraded the computer and it is the same machine. So getting the cheaper upgrade copy of Win 7 might not be a total waste of money but I want to see if I can do this first. And since I want to put a new version of Win 7 on my media PC I will rebuild then a 3 user 'Family Pack' would be nice to have. They sold them last year when Win 7 was released and then they stopped printing them. However they are back on the market again but they are only upgrade versions. While this is a good thing for my games PC, it is not for the media PC as I will be putting in a totally fresh hard drive as stated earlier. Even if I do not go for a 10k rpm + disk I will put a new hard drive in to upgrade to the latest SATA version as the old ones are the original version and there is no sense doing anything half arsed.

The issue here is that you cannot install an upgrade version onto a blank disk because it will not let you unless you have a fully active copy of Windows XP or higher already installed. So a 3 user upgrade for Win 7 is pointless... or is it?

You see, in my stupidity I ordered two copies of XP Pro 64 last year and one of them is still in the box, unused... Since it is of no use I can always install this on the media PC and then install Win 7 over it. And I will still have one copy of Win 7 upgrade to spare should I need it.

I am not sure what I will do with that one yet since I have no other computers I could put it on and no old versions of Windows to play with, except maybe the one on the old disks I will no longer have on my Compaq. Not that it will be a Compaq any more by then but anyway. The other thought I have is that both my XP Pro 64's are OEM versions. I am not sure what impact this will have on upgrading them or reinstaling them on different machines but if I am able to do both with little fuss then I could always save the spare license of Win 7 for when I need it to overwrite the XP Pro 64 disks in the future.

So this is the prospect on my mind right now and I have some research to do before I start saving up and buying stuff. I have already secured a Win 7 family pack since even if I only use two of the licenses it is cheaper than buying one upgrade and one full version for my needs. Looking forward to backing up my folder of files and stuff... Well maybe not. Theoretically I should be able to run the update disk, do a fresh install of Win 7 64 bit, and reinstall the driver disk for the motherboard. Everything else after that should go as seamless... The update advisor says there are a couple of unknown issues and most of them are unimportant.

So I am getting into this today. Wish me luck, people.

Read Dead Redemption revisited: Undead DLC... Muwhahaha...

Hey folks, so I thought it was time, now that I got the Minecraft blog out of my backlog that I look for something else to play through.

Even though I still have to complete games like Front Mission Evolved and Dead Rising 2 and a flurry of other new titles are coming out all the time with christmas around the corner. The Kinect has launched, Black Ops is out, though not on my wish list as such, and previously new titles are turning into old ones. And here I am going back a few steps to another old one with a new DLC that has been out for a month or so now. Also, anyone with eyes will have noticed that this is the fourth game blog in a row with the 'Zombies' tag, because who doesn't like zombies? The darling of the video game scene since the likes of the Commodore 64.

But this is zombies in the wild west we are talking about... and Red Dead Redemption no less. RDR was, as I originally stated in my previous review earlier this year, pretty authentic feeling and experienced very little outlandish elements beyond having one super hero cowboy wrecking other people's shit in the dusty landscape of New Austin. And now, seemingly out of pure novelty given its release around Halloween, Rockstar have thrown some undead into the mix with Undead Nightmare.

My initial reaction was... Ohh god.... that's going to ruin it. but as much as I love the game I figured I would give it a try anyway and see if my favourite story driven sandbox has been enhanced or if Rockstar have just squatted over the rim and laid a steaming coil of crap in the corner.

Watching the trailer you cannot deny that it at least looks well made, and does not have the hallmark of a novelty expansion stuck to the side of an otherwise serious game with prit-stick, despite the setting mismatch. And much of the media who have reviewed the game and done previews before the launch were foaming at the mouth to get their hands on it and saying nothing but good things. Either they got their perspective different from my own or they know something I don't.

First of all, after downloading the DLC (along with the Liars and Cheats and Legends and Killers DLCs in a multipack) I noticed when going to single player that you have an option to play the undead expansion separate to the normal game. Guess it makes sense given the way the game ends in normal mode. It did not leave any leeway for add-ons that do not follow on with the story where it left off unless they force you to go play the whole story again and weave themselves into the main plot as a new sub plot.

After checking out a little of the small additions with the other packs to the main game, and given most of them are multiplayer content heavy anyway, I reloaded the game and selected the undead nightmare. The scene is set in the main story with John Marston after he returns home and is living it up on the homestead before the finale of the game. A storm is kicking up something wicked, literally, and a monologue voiced out of some 1960's B-movie sets the tone ending with an almost comical wicked laugh. Muwhahahahahahaha...... *Cough* And even the menu text reminds of Zombies Ate my Neighbours, all gooey greenish yellow and splotchy.

So yeah, impressions were not so great at this time, and as music worthy of the Munsters kicked up I started shaking my head. People who know me will know how I favour continuity of theme with my games and so far this game was doing a good job of biting the forehead of continuity and feasting on the mushy grey stuff inside before I even lifted the controller to my fingertips. When you finally do get to control the scene you are popping your first zombie in the face with the classic double barrel shotgun and then hog-tying the wife and son to stop them from munching on your vitals.

Then your story begins and it seems structured in the familiar sense of any other Rockstar free-roamer with mission activation waypoints and freedom to wander between jobs as much as you like. The last scene of the intro leads with a suggestion to head for Blackwater and find a doctor, but as I always do with games like this I ignored the initial jobs to see the extend of what I can explore freely first. Despite the almost cartoonish introduction and spooky writing, and even the map screen shows the water as being red like blood, the atmosphere hit me as being very well done. There are low hanging clouds, patches of fog on the ground and not a living thing to be seen, including animals at first. The music ditches the Adams Family feel and goes back to western with a good dose of slightly spooky tension completing the scene and the control systems all feel and work the same as we are all used to so nothing has been 'improved' there that I can tell.

Then I realised it was like restarting the game anyway, given the skills and array of weapons on hand and the poor quality of stamina in the horse you start with. You have fewer clothing options, but at least a couple of new one and some familiar ones too. Two of them you have to work towards getting like the other special garments in the original game. And there are some undead specific journal challenges to work your way through in ranks. Also the 'stranger' encounters have been replaced with 'survivors' and I had to catch myself to make sure I was not playing Dead Rising 2 by mistake. Well, ok not really. Survivors go with the theme of zombies like icing on cake or bangers with mash. Putting an already established western theme with it though is like serving the bangers and mash with custard instead of gravy.

OK, no more bashing of the 'theme mismatch' since I recognise it is subjective and you all want to hear the meat of the game so I will highlight the good and the bad and the undead ugly scratching at my heels from beneath the ground of the old grave yard.

As I said, the controls are the same so nothing has been fiddled with. See my original review for my thoughts on this as they were mixed. Detail wise, I have already said the atmosphere is good and the models and cutscenes are as sharp as usual. The in game map, which we all know had markers showing different animals that you might find in certain places, now shows clusters of humans too, which I can guess already will be places you see zombies.

As for everything else, well I don't know at this stage. My idea to head off into the wild and see what lurks before throwing myself into the mission was pointless. You are cut off from the rest of New Austin and Mexico as bridges are down again and nothing actually lurks anywhere. So guess the first missions railroad the story for a short while by way of introduction. All the safe houses you had in the original game are naturally not available too and you are sleeping at the ranch in the hay loft above the small stable building having walled up the wife and son in the main house.... not good planning on his part if you ask me. I would trade the double bed for a sleeping bag out by the outhouse any day but John Marston is a tough frontier cowboy so maybe he likes it this way.

A minor disappointment came my way once I realised I was trapped in West Elizabeth and it might be petty of me but I am sure I mentioned this in my original review too. There is not really a sense of the landscape changing to fit the progress of the story and despite the bridge being 'out' it was more a case of someone having rewound time to a point where the bridge was being built and then set fire to a couple of things. There were small cranes ready to rebuild the bridge and piles of wood and work benches scattered in places and the only telling details to give you the impression that they were broken down in the undead rising the previous  night were the flames. I mentioned in my first review that the town of Blackwater had some houses under construction to give the effect of progression when you play as John Marston. Then fast forward to a few years in the future to play as the son, Jack, and the same houses have not had a single plank or brick laid since.

Also, I did note that the rivers were not, in fact, running red with blood as the map shows us so not sure what that is all about...

So on to Blackwater I rode and began the story finally in the hopes of it releasing me into more exciting prospects outside the mission structure and revealing to me it's rotting dangly bits in all their undead glory. And then my initial disappointment at the 'cut and paste and apply glitter' approach to progressive scenery was soothed a little when the town of Blackwater was done a little better than the bridge. Broken furniture littered the street and buildings were boarded up and it seems the art team have done at least some work on making it look like civilisation was cut short overnight. However, one of my other bugbears emerged as the walls are scrawled with the usual 'The end is nigh' messages and I think to myself, why do people always find time when running and screaming as the end really is nigh to write their inner most thoughts on the walls?


But this aside I was thrust into a short cutscene ending in the expected manner and then the whole town came alive with the undead... so to speak. I am not sure if this is because with all my tomfoolery the sun ad begun to set when I arrived in town and the dead only rise at night, which would make sense, or if this initial encounter in Blackwater triggered this. But I soon found myself mobbed and called over my horse to high-tail it out of town and back to the ranch. Coward? Maybe, but bullets are few and zombies are many as Rockstar have added in the typical and classic survival theme of conservation of supplies. Again, raising my past review I did register my displeasure at the lack of utilisation of true survival in the wilderness where the only real reason to harvest meat and skin was to sell them on and herbs with medicinal uses were not really used at all so I get the feeling I am going to lament this lack of content in the game even more now there is a real emphasis on survival and the carrying of supplies or foraging for berries and such.

On the way back to the ranch I indulged in a little sniping of bats that has started to appear and collected a nice undead bat wing. Also, I was chased by wolves and after no less than 5 bullets from the revolver one of them still did not go down. I suspect a headshot might have changed that but I was kind of harried and concerned more with not dying until I got a good feel for things. As I ventured on I was gifted with a flaming torch weapon which was pretty cool and told to go burn some corpses by a hysterical redhead who was clearly in denial about her dislike of the men in her life.

On returning to the town a new mechanic rose from the depths like something out of a Thriller music video as some survivors took to a balcony and started sniping the dead. A progress bar appeared at the top of the screen like a beat-em-up health bar and I began to fill it when I took down corpses. When it was full it emptied itself and one of the markers above it lit green. So I guess I needed to fill the other marker and some targets appeared on my mini-map. I took them down, and one of them was curiously a chest in the bank building. Once I filled the second marker a final wave of enemies appeared on the radar. Once I killed them the town was declared safe 'for now' and a message told me that the town can come under attack again and if it falls into undead hands I will not be able to shop or sleep there until I clear it once more. This brings back a fond memory of the gang land wars in GTA San Andreas where you trigger a turf war and fight for control, and they can fight back against your own turf too at random. In all, while not a new concept in gaming by any stretch, it was a welcome addition and a distraction to compensate for the lack of other mini-games and occupations from the original. And the funky fog clears when you clean out a town, though the fires do not get put out so my earlier disappointment with dynamic scenery states lacking returned a little putting me in a state of neutrality at best on the subject.

A curious incident also arose while I was searching for the treasure map hinted at in the journal. A blue circle appeared on the fringe of my mini-map covering an area and a message said a 'mythical creature' had appeared there. I looked around and only saw a few horses and none of them stood out as being particularly unusual, apart from also being undead. So not sure what that was about but would guess it is some other kind of hunting challenge or maybe the four horsemen journal entry. When it happened again I looked around some more and found one of the four horses of the apocalypse, War, who is always on fire and looks pretty awesome. Running into a pack of zombies causes them to ignite into flame and he also has infinite stamina. There was also Pestilence that is near impossible to kill. The other two horses I have not found yet as I guess they are into the Mexico area and have not reached that yet.

There are also the usual random encounters as you ride along, where people have camps set up, one of them with his undead wife leashed to a stake in the ground while another seems to have taken to eating the undead and invites you to sit and share the fire. I approached one guy with my usual apprehension from the first game expecting an ambush and pulled out my gun ready to rumble. The guy soon took exception to my lingering while armed and tried to attack me. Another identical camp I found I just sat at the fire and watched as John tucked into some flesh before vomiting on the floor. There are people running from the undead or making a last ditch stand in the woods while calling for help number among them, one of them you hear before you see as he has an automatic field gun. And as before, there are some people making sport of this and bet you they can kill more undead than you in a time limit. Eventually I became aware that the only survivor encounters were generally people defending themselves from the zombies and started to wonder, where are all the looters? After all when the world turns upside down the general theme would always include the usual arse holes who please themselves and it looked like it was a pretty one dimensional apocalypse. Sooner or later I was proven wrong as I came across a guy trying to accost some 'favours' from a lone woman around the ranch and it felt good to kick him all around the field just for a change of pace.

Another feature they have adapted would be the bounty hunting, though it takes the form more of search and rescue. You take on a missing person rescue mission in return for ammo and head out looking for the lost soul, saving them from zombies and bringing them to a settlement.

I also noticed that when aiming at a leg or arm the crosshair goes blue instead, indicating an incapacitating shot of some kind. And on the subject of shooting it can be pretty hard to deliver a kill shot to a zombie since they have to be head-shots and they wobble around a fair bit. In dead-eye mode you can do this ok, and the advanced features of dead-eye are already available from the start but the recharge is slow to begin with and the lack of a 'legend of the west' duster coat giving you the bonus is keenly felt. Sooner or later your dead-eye meter is empty so you have to make good and frugal use of it because manual aiming for the head is pretty hard. The tactic in this situation is to stagger them with shots to the torso and quickly adjust to their head while they are standing still.

As for bullets themselves, well as I said they are more scarce in this DLC as all the shops are shut, naturally, and you are limited to what you can scratch around and find when you kill a zombie or find a chest when defending a new town. You get ammo as a reward for doing some of the encounters as well so it is not all bad but you can soon find yourself out of lead if you just indulge in mindless sport. This seems to focus your mind a little more too and keeps you on track, not to mention you have most likely played the original game to death and done all there is to do if you have owned it for any length of time before the DLC came out so the need to explore soon wears off as Undead Nightmare delivers a more focused campaign feeling. Also, another new mechanic that makes a little use of the old herbal gathering part steps in out of nowhere when you are awarded an upgrade for your bullets to fire phosphorous rounds that set zombies aflame. Pick one of each of two kinds of herb and they are consumed with each activation of the upgrade which lasts for a short while. And as with the buffs in Dead Rising 2 there is a conspicuous lack of indication on how long the effect lasts for and when it is nearly over, aside for the lack of fireworks when you shoot a shuffling corpse. And it did not seem to last long at all, like maybe three or four shots at most.

The zombies also come in several flavours. There are the usual zombies with nothing special, there are the 'bolters' who suddenly spring towards you very fast, and there are the bruisers who are pretty fat and take a good licking before they go down. They can charge at you and try to knock you down as well so be careful. You will also encounter some zombies that spit poison at you and one person wants you to capture one of them, because naturally there are crazies all over the west who have been out in the sun too long anyway. There are even some zombies who might qualify as a 'boss fight' since they are named and several seem to be from the original story. They might be people you killed yourself, or people you just tried to help to no avail. They usually show up either in survivor encounter jobs or when you are called on to burn coffins at a graveyard to lessen the spread of zombies. Not that it actually seems to have any effect there and it is a shame it's not mixed into the whole territory defence aspect of the game.

As in the original game, you can say hello to people as they pass by and the usual pleasantries are exchanged depending on your honour status. While the honour status seems to be missing this time around, with more important things to worry about beyond reputation, the hellos have also changed to something more fitting the situation with John saying things like he is happy to see another survivor and such. So some more work has been done there beyond simply scripting inside a current engine and new voice acting is not restricted to the storyline.

As I said earlier, the controls are pretty much the same as the original game and nothing innovative is added as such, and so the same control issues are present as well. However they are not as present in usual game play since you rarely need to duck into cover due to a lack of people with guns shooing back at you.

The story takes a few liberties with the central plot characters and while not wishing to spoil too many of the encounters you will come across some well knowns from the original adventure who meet a bad end here and there. It becomes clear that this is not meant to be some kind of 'missing chapter' in the story where everything sets back to normal and you continue on to the game's finale so we can see why it has not been ingrained into the original game like other step-in-out style DLCs.

Overall, and my own minor objections on theme mismatching aside, Rockstar have done as good a job as can be expected when planting the undead into an established background and have made a decent zombie themed game out of it. If anything, as it stands on its own, if RDR's original outing had never existed then Undead Nightmare is a very decent and passable game for the zombie killing lovers. There is also a host of new multiplayer challenges to play through with friends or on X-Box Live, but I have not toyed with them as I have mentioned my views on XBL multiplay in the past. I never liked stepping into a game with a bunch of strangers who I cannot reach over and slap when they act like retards and grief people so I am dependent on my very slim list of XBL friends to assist me there. But single play has plenty of content to make it worth the cash.