Posts Tagged ‘DLC’
Monday, March 7th, 2011
For the first time in, I dunno, six weeks I found myself with an unusually empty weekend. I was meant to be packing for my big move to the city next week (which only dawned on me earlier today that it is in fact, next week). Instead I polished off Fallout New Vegas’ DLC, Dead Money. Let’s just get the fact I’ll likely refer to it throughout this post, in err of course, as Blood Money out the way. Hitman seems to have had a lingering effect.
I usually turn a blind eye towards DLC. I find it rarely delivers in terms of content, often feeling like a watered down level(s) of the game, consequently meaning I begrudge spending almost a tenner on it. Meh. Dead Money was massively challenging, therefore felt considerably lengthy for a game add-on. Basically, I felt I got my money’s worth with all the time I put into it, and the locations felt quite varied, too. The only real disappointment being the Achievements totaled a mere 140 Gamerpoints.
What makes Dead Money so challenging? Okay, let me be a total douche, as always, and throw the fact I was playing the game on Hardcore out there (I feel I have to justify this for all the people who play on Easy and will comment telling me I’m rubbish at gaming for finding it tough). But on top of that, your character is fitted with an explosive collar around their neck, which is regularly disrupted by radios and alarms leading to combustion and, of course, immediate death. Add to that a hazy toxic cloud that has settled in many parts of the location, eating away at health rather quickly when you inevitably pass through it, and lethal holograms that will instantly kill you upon detection, there’s a lot of reloading earlier saves to do! Well, at least there was for me.
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Tags: Dead Money, DLC, Fallout: New Vegas, Hitman: Blood Money
Posted in General Gaming | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
I’ve been a naughty girl. I’ve shunned my ‘one game woman’ approach in favour of simultaneous variety. The reason being that I recently finished Splinter Cell: Conviction, and with only a week or so until Skate 3 is released, I didn’t want to start — and not be able to finish — something else entirely. This gave me the opportunity to tie up some ‘loose ends’.
My friend and I completed the co-op mode of Splinter Cell: Conviction on Realistic, which took longer than anticipated merely because of the connectivity issues we regularly experienced. I’m not sure what the issue was, but neither of us had a dodgy connection and were chatting without interruption over Xbox Live. This usually indicates it wasn’t an issue on either of our ends. I’m assuming it is, as usual, down to Ubisoft’s paltry Multiplayer programming. Bear in mind I’m a huge Rainbow Six: Vegas fan, which is also a Ubisoft (and Tom Clancy) title, but that would have never won any awards for running smoothly online, and I’m the first to admit that. As fun as the Tom Clancy games are in Multiplayer mode, they rarely seem to run fluidly.
With Conviction, you can guarantee the frame rate will drop repeatedly, and at one point you will inevitably get booted from the game. And with each co-op mode campaign being split into 4 chapters, you can rest assured that when you do get booted out, you’ll have to play through a fair bit of the game again. Considering the approach to SC:C is slow and stealthy, this gets frustrating.
With that said, there’s a lot to the Multiplayer that adds some much needed overall substance to Conviction. Even though we’ve polished off the co-op campaign, we’re now attempting the other co-op modes!
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Tags: Alan Wake, DLC, Fallout 3, Operation: Anchorage, Skate 3
Posted in General Gaming | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
Last weekend, in a bid to fill out my completion percentage, I decided to breath some life into stale releases with fresh downloadable content (DLC). For a couple of reasons I typically avoid DLC. By the time developers ship it I’ve long finished the game concerned and have moved onto something else. I also feel it’s rarely worth the extra cash, and accumulating everything I’ve spent on that one game generally leaves me thinking: “Wow, that was so not worth the £60 I’ve dumped on it”.
With the past few weeks, however, the completion force within me has been strong, and so I decided to revisit some of the older titles I had finished prior to the DLC. Because I had already whored Lara Croft for 1000 points in Underworld, I decided to chase after the additional 250 points. With it being a Tomb Raider game, I figured the extra Achievements probably wouldn’t be too hard to score.
Underworld has two expansions — Lara’s Shadow and Beneath The Ashes. Both are priced at 800 Microsoft Points, with a Gamerscore value of 125 Points each. Beneath The Ashes was the first to be distributed to Xbox Live, and so it was the first DLC I purchased. It was also the cause of controversy when a begrudged Crystal Dynamic’s employee divulged it was originally part of the retail game, only to be cut at a later point and re-branded as DLC. So, Crystal Dynamics are now charging extra for a level that was originally meant to be in the retail game. Cheeky, and just plain unethical.
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Tags: Beneath The Ashes, Crystal Dynamics, DLC, Lara's Shadow, Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider Underworld
Posted in General Gaming | 5 Comments »
Friday, August 21st, 2009
I didn’t see this coming, but one of my favourite games (and a bit of an older title), Mass Effect, has just had 150 G’s added to the total, bringing it up to 1200. Considering how long Mass Effect has been out, it feels the news of impending DLC is completely out of the blue. Having said that, I figured it was always odd having the total ME Achievements sitting at 1050 G’s.
Funnily enough, I’ve been pestering myself to go back to Mass Effect; I think that’s one game I’ll never get bored of, considering every playthrough unfolds differently. Referring to my recent rant about DLC Achievements, this is one game I welcome any new missions on. It’s just so freakin’ awesome!
And on that note, if you’ve yet to hop aboard the Normandy, now seems the perfect time to do so. New missions coupled with Mass Effect hitting Games on Demand? No excuse not to.
Tags: Achievements, DLC, Mass Effect, Xbox Live
Posted in Asides, Xbox Live | 4 Comments »
Monday, July 27th, 2009
I don’t own Halo 3, but if I did I’d have 1750 GamerPoints to chase. I thought Fallout 3′s 1450 worth of Achievements were bad, but no, Halo takes the hardcore biscuit. Remember when retail games capped at 1000? Arcade games at 200? It seems this was only to be the case in the 360′s infancy, back when gamers payed little notice to the fruitless digits tagging alongside their GamerTag.
Now developers deliver additional Achievements, usually in the form of Downloadable Content (DLC). Whatever the case, it’s to keep gamers coming back, to give us a bit of replay value for what we pay (though, more often than not, we also have to pay for the DLC). However, there’s also a degree of agitation, for me at least, that comes with each increase in cap.
You see, gaming can be an expensive hobby, and I don’t always feel comfortable spending significant amounts of money on it. Especially right now, I’m watching every spare penny, with any pocket money being invested into my business. For that reason I’ve found it useful trading/selling games I’ve completed and am no longer needing. In fact, I believe the pre-owned market is what makes high street retailer, GameStation, the most money, and is – on the flip side – the biggest cause of concern for developers.
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Tags: Achievements, Beneath The Ashes, DLC, Fable II, Fallout 3, Halo 3, Tomb Raider Underworld, Xbox Live
Posted in Rants, Xbox Live | 19 Comments »
Monday, February 2nd, 2009
Short.
When I Tweeted (or Twittered, whatever the technical term is) that I was playing the new Fallout 3 downloadable content, Operation: Anchorage, quite a few people @ replied me asking if it was any good. If you were one of those people who asked and are pissed I never replied, well that was simply because I had just started playing, and was wishing to reserve my opinion until I had actually finished it. Which I now have. And it really didn’t take long. The gist of it is, yes, it’s good – heck, it’s Fallout 3 – but I’m not so sure it’s worth what it’s being charged at.
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Tags: Bethesda, Broken Steel, Crackdown, DLC, Fallout 3, Operation: Anchorage, Xbox Live
Posted in General Gaming, Xbox Live | 7 Comments »
The Tomb Raider series means a lot to me, and while I admit it has lost its footing in recent years, I’ve always stuck by Lara. The latest Tomb Raider, however, has been completely re-imagined and – at some points – doesn’t even feel like a TR game. It’s a welcome change, though, and has me well and truly hooked.