Why I no longer have any money

July 12th, 2010 by Tom 'GeneShark' Gibbard No comments »

If you are a PC gamer, you will probably use Steam, Valve’s digital distribution platform which is kinda known for occasionally having insane sales. Well, One such sale has recently ended. As well as reducing near everything in the Steam store, if you checked back every day you could get your hands on some even further reduced games. And that I did, here’s what I bought and what I think of them so far.

FUEL was my first purchase, at around £5. I’d read the hype that was happening before it’s release, with it’s ridiculously huge open world and the like, but for me the game was a let down. After banging my head against the wall whilst the necessary Games for Windows Live installed and updated itself (Closing the game around 4 times in the process, I mean, what the hell GFWL, why would you do that?), I leapt into the game. Well, no I didn’t, because I needed to adjust the graphics options, which you can’t do ingame. Sigh. Another restart of the game later and FINALLY I can start playing. And.. well.. I really didn’t like it. The actual racing felt clunky and rigid and the way of accessing races, whilst probably the best way to do it with such a large world, took you out of the game. Ditching races for the moment I decided just to explore, and whilst my surroundings looked nice, everywhere felt kinda samey.. Even climbing to some of the game’s Vista points just got me to see the same stuff in a prettier way. Having said that, the weather and light cycles were really enjoyable. Driving along a clifftop path whilst the sun is setting was the most fun I had in the game. What really killed it for me though is the poor GPS, if you’re going to have a game hyped up because of it’s huge gameworld, you might want to make sure it’s usable.

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[E3] Driver: San Francisco

June 16th, 2010 by JMB22 1 comment »

First things first, no, I am not reporting live from E3. Which is a shame, because that would be pretty awesome. But I thought that as this is predominantly a gaming site, and we haven’t had too many updates recently, I’d do a news piece and share a few of my thoughts.

As I was looking through stuff from E3 for Valve’s latest trailer, I found a link to ‘Driver: San Francisco’. Immediately Portal 2, which I already know isn’t coming out until next year, was forgotten. I have long been a fan of Driver, and I’d heard rumours that a new one was in the works, but I’d not come across any definite news.

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[MCM] Tecmo Koei

June 12th, 2010 by Mark "MasterCheese" Steele No comments »

Another highlight of the London MCM Expo this summer, for me, was the appearance of developers Tecmo Koei, a Japanese studio responsible for some incredible titles, such as the Dead or Alive series, Ninja Gaiden and Dynasty Warriors. But it wasn’t any of these games they were demoing…

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[MCM] DDR:UK, TurtleStomp does Rock Band

June 10th, 2010 by Tom 'GeneShark' Gibbard 1 comment »

A familiar presence to regular visitors to MCM will be the DDR:UK stand, usually distinguishable by upbeat music and terrifyingly fast footwork. This expo we decided to go and check out their stand properly, having missed it last year. DDR:UK are a rhythm gaming community, and they take games and equipment to expos and conventions all over the place. They had some form of DDR, as was to be expected, Rock Band, Beatmania and Drummania all setup over the weekend.

Whilst MTTG stayed away from DDR (For good reason, you’ve not seen realistic breast physics ’till you’ve seen Daryl on DDR) we did try our hands at Beatmania IIDX, which is absolutely and utterly terrifying to play. For those not familiar with the title, I’ll just wait a minute for you to watch the following video. » Read more: [MCM] DDR:UK, TurtleStomp does Rock Band

[Wii] Super Mario Galaxy 2

June 5th, 2010 by Brett "zxPieSqrd" Page No comments »

After recently completing the first Mario Galaxy, I took full responsibility of playing it at the expo. Throughout both days there was a massive crowd around the game, implying it’ll be new and different to the previous game however after managing to play it at the last minute I found I could shorten this review to “more of the same” but that would make it seem like a bad thing, since it is still one of my favourite Mario games and so much has been improved.

First of the premise, which is the same as usual. Peach has yet again been captured by Bowser and you as the portly plumber have to go save her (I’d have given in by now and just let Bowser have her) by collecting stars from various levels (galaxies) and face several bosses along the way. So just like any other Mario game but that was to be expected. » Read more: [Wii] Super Mario Galaxy 2