Crouching!

A lot of games include tutorials nowadays, do we need them? Now I'm not about to go ranting on how we don't. RTS games, sports games, management games all need a beginner basic tutorial in my book, but playing a lot of first person and RPG's i feel not even my three year old son needs to be told which way to push the analog stick to look left and so on. I'm guess I'm just asking for some kind of "switch off" button or maybe a "dumb mode off" button maybe??
Tell you what developers, plop us in a area with no bad guys and leave us to have a quick button bash to learn what makes us jump,crouch,etc.. If we happen to wander out the area before we have learnt the fire button then more fool us!
You don't need to stick some pipes in our way to remind us we can crouch, like its the first time our character has done it in their lives.

I understand that there are people picking up the controller for the first time everyday and they may need to get to grips with how all this gaming malarkey works but i like to think everyone doing this has the simple ability to come to terms with what buttons do what by themselves given the time and space.

I am no asking for these tutorials to be removed , just that they are applied in a different manor maybe. Don't treat us like idiots. If your game has special features that set it apart from the average shooter then by all means show us how these work but let us learn to walk and crouch by ourselves, there is only around 14 buttons crouch could be, ill find it!

Summer and how i hate it..

OK people, its been a while but I've been busy doing a few things, playing games when i get chance being one of them!

First off, I'm going to be a dad again early next year! Thanks to all that left comments on my face book page.

Righto, well i find the summer always a bad time for games, not many good releases, they should know better than to think us gamers are out enjoying the sun, the last thing you will find me doing is playing football down the local park with my top sacrificed to make a goal post. But i suppose its times like these that give us a chance to go back and fully complete such games as Red dead, Red dead undead nightmare, Fallout, assassins creed etc.etc.

Recently Ive completed Assassin Creed: Brotherhood, now i never completed the original cos as most complained about i found it tedious, boring and repetitive. My,oh my how this game changed my opinion with the follow up and and this kinda 2.5 add on, i now count these games in my top 10 franchise's. Now I'm playing Halo:Reach again i am not a fan of the Halo games, i don't like the combat system, that's my main jib.
I find the whole run,jump,strafe,circle way you fight everything annoying. I like to take cover and pinch off shots. But it is the most enjoyable Halo game I've played yet, the storyline is great and the characters pretty well written.

Games I'm looking forward too on the run up to Xmas: dead island, raccoon city, sky rim, deus ex, battlefield3 and more..
Its going to a good end to the year for gamers!

Till next time, I'm going to revise these blogs in future, make them not so fleeting, ill put some more effort in i promise!

Gamer love from the core!

I'll leave you with this..

Bioshock 2 Review.

I want to love these Bioshock games, i really do but for me many little things let it down to make it an average first person in an awesome setting.

In Bioshock2 you play a big daddy, those strange hard to kill bastards from the first game(pictured above). He controls not much differently from the character in the first game,set in the same underwater utopia, with various different locations, they are still inhabited by the same crazy loons singing from the twisted boss characters hymn sheets so to speak. I love the setting of this game, the way characters speak to you from various radios,TV,etc.. and it is very atmospheric. One thing that niggles me is the AI of the crazy loons, when you enter a room and they spot you, they often just approach you firing randomly and i often found myself adopting a retreat around the corner and wait for them to show their head technique..

The music definitely falls in my 'likes' list of things for this game, 50's tunes that fit perfectly with the crazy settings, i like how each section of the city has its own tune too.

You cant complain really about the graphics in this game, the views,rooms and every little detail is nice to look at but sometimes there is so much going on you don't even notice it, the plasmids arr a good touch but to me ,overly done and some you don't even end up using,although those bigger fans who play through more than me will surely get to experience them.

I don't venture online much so i very much favour a good story driven game, which this is. Its very much 'go there' and 'do this' kinda game, the people who you do things for are often talking to you through glass walls or through radios though so you still often feel like its only you ad the loons out there, i found myself ignoring dealing with the big daddies/harvesting sisters when i could as it was not needed to proceed.I also didn't really mess about with plasmid,upgrading abilities,adding slots, etc.. making sure i had plenty of ammo and at least one good plasmid was enough. The guns are good and their effects are nice, as well as the plasmids,but as i said earlier there is normally so much going on these things i didn't even notice much at times, as i was just busy trying to dodge shots and not step in view of the security cameras.

So to sum up, awesome setting,nice characters sometimes too much going on to enjoy the visuals and the end felt like they just wanted to chuck boss characters at you with a time limit to escape, its been done before...dunk gives bioshock2... 6 thumbs up the arse!

Corpse killer!

With the spectrum well and truly shelved,i wandered into the world of 16-bit and oh what a beautiful place it was!
It was the first time i would happily lose whole days killing giant babies(zombies ate my neighbours), hunting little green men(x-com), getting fucking frustrated driving skidu's(cannon fodder), fighting fire breathing fat men(streets of rage) or playing with a blue hedgehog(duh!).
It was even good watching my dad swear at nearly every episode on lemmings on those rare occasion's I'd let him on it.
After that i got me a mega CD even though most of the games were pretty bad looking back at them(check out a game with the same name as this post!). Then followed the 32X which was a bit better for a add on, got me into linking up two mega drives and two TVs to play ultimate doom death matches.
Playing doom was great just to make the fella grunt when he walks in the acid, sounds bit gay that!
Then i had a brief romance with the dream cast,which threw up some good games to be fair! Power stone,shenmue etc.. Its just a shame that Sega couldn't do everything they promised with this machine, it never really got off the ground.
The PlayStation 1 and 2 were my next machines but we all know this part of the story....

The core experience [001]

Hey guys and gals, welcome to my blog, im going to be using this thing to talk you about the gaming world with some in depth reviews,looking back at some old consoles and also featuring some talk of tv and films. Oh and you'll probably find me venting some steam off at the general world around me, but dont let that put you gamers off.
My first memory of the world of gaming is when my dad came home one day with a spectrum 128+k, the one with the funky disc drive on it. I loved this machine for many years, having fond memories of playing Yie ar kung fu, death wish, jack the nipper,frankie goes to hollywood, the great escape etc.. I had a great fondness for text adventures too even though i was probably a little young to get to grips with them, many times i climbed into a wardrobe dressed in a old chinese mans disguise in the sherlock holmes game!
Ive gotta say through my favorite game in this 80's era of gaming came in the form of Back 2 skool(aka skool daze), this game was immense, a simple idea of being a kid in school with a number of "naughty" tasks to complete without being caught. I spent many hours on this game just simply wondering around the boys and girls school firing catapaults at peoples heads and writing obscene words on the blackboards.I never did complete this game or get anywhere near as i remember but that just goes to show how fun and replayable it was!

My spectrum finally died a few months after i got a sega megadrive, i didnt miss it too much as gaming was moving on fast and i was lapping it up, i was never one of those kids hanging around the shops, not when there was Golden axe sat at home..