Posts Tagged ‘Asides’

Aside: Alan Wake Worth The Wait?

Sunday, May 16th, 2010

I don’t mean to jump the gun here, especially as I only booted Alan Wake up this evening, but I’m pretty certain it has been worth the wait. In case you didn’t know, Alan Wake has been milling around the Xboxsphere since the launch in 2005, victim to many delays and a significant lack of updates.

Games that are in development for a long time are, in my opinion, typically underwhelming. Prey, which was in development for 11 years, was rubbish (IMO). It certainly lacked the quality you’d expect from a game that had been at the centre of such TLC for a long time, and it failed to grab my attention enough to even finish the game. Too Human, while I never played it, was released to a mixed bag of reviews after a decade in development.

It seems that games that have been in development for lengthy periods of time are naturally met with high expectations, but rarely live up to these expectations. I think Alan Wake is different.

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Aside: Bioware’s Bizarre New Approach To Sidequests

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

In my last post, I mentioned lack of sidequests as one of Mass Effect 2’s downsides. At 60 hours in, I now realise there are in fact a ton of sidequests… It’s just that most of them are hidden.

Admittedly I shouldn’t have left scanning the planets for minerals until I was so close to the final mission, but I realised I needed to better upgrade my ship, and I had been holding off for so long because of the monotony of probing planets. Now I’ve spent many hours scanning the planets, I’ve come across many missions I would have otherwise missed.

I fail to understand why Bioware have tucked away many of their sidequests, and I simply can’t see how it’s beneficial to the game or the player. Hopefully this is something we won’t see with Mass Effect 3.

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Aside: Natal.

Friday, January 15th, 2010

I’m not usually one to link to stories that crop up in my feed reader, but I’m guessing many of you have reservations, like myself, regarding Project Natal. I’m not massively stoked on the idea of it. Not because of the technology itself, although the E3 demo initially had me thinking it seemed too ambitious, but more so about it changing the way we play video games entirely. Then I read this article, which had a quote from Jon Burton, the Traveller’s Tales Director. Burton said “[the controller is] exceedingly clever, but the lag on the input and lack of physical buttons is really going to restrict the kind of games that can be done with it.”. This has eased my mind in a big way.

Playing a triple A shooter with nothing but my body as the controller isn’t something that gets me excited. At all. And I was worried that this was where the future of video games was indefinitely headed. Who knows, it possibly could be, but I have a temporary ease of mind knowing that this may not be possible any time soon. Call me a lazy gamer, or call me too stubborn to embrace the changes Natal may bring about, but I’m suddenly feeling very at ease with the motion control phenomenon. How about you?

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Aside: Far Cry 2 Almost Slipped Under My Radar

Friday, October 24th, 2008

Wow, I almost didn’t give a second look to Far Cry 2, but with all the fantastic reviews that have been cropping up it’s hard not to take notice. Then again, today I’ll be picking up Fable II, then it’s christmas just around the corner with Gears 2, Fallout 3 and Underworld all on my wish list. And I’ve still got Condemned 2 to begin, with Infinite Undiscovery on my to-buy list. Argh!

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Posted in Asides | 6 Comments »