Wednesdaily Update

Hey everyone, Wednesday rolls around and some exciting things are going down. Before we get to that first lets cover what I've been up to the last couple days. I'm still chugging along on my quest to try and get Angry Birds done, with it being pulled from the marketplace I'm anxious to complete it, hopefully without any problems. I worked my way through what was left of the second episode, 3 starring everything except for one level which I can't for the life of me manage to hit the score required for the third star. Even if I do everything in the videos that I'm following I always seem to be a few thousand short of where I'm supposed to be.

It's situations like this that really put me off certain games. Games that have a huge luck component just frustrate the hell out of me. You can do everything exactly how you're supposed to and still end up failing and that just isn't a great incentive to play the game. I place my birds exactly as the video and the blocks fall the exact same way every time except sometimes these ones break, other times they don't. Why? The physics engine just messing up I guess. Sometimes a stone block falls from way up and only cracks, sometimes it slides off from a lower platform and it shatters instantly. For these reasons Angry Birds has always been more annoying than entertaining for me. I guess that's just the way the green pig infested tower crumbles.

Physics, why you no consistent?

So I'm one star away from the Episode 2 - Total Destruction achievement. After trying for that star for hours I decided to move on and I've made some headway into the third episode but my previous couple of  hours failures haunted me and I decided that I've had enough of Angry Birds for a while. Thinking that I needed some time away from those annoying birds I was looking around wandering what to tackle next. Slightly lost I was browsing random TrueAchievement pages and saw a link to an Alien Hominid HD Walkthrough on the right hand side of a page.

Alien Hominid is a game that I liked the look of and played for a couple of minutes years ago (on the 3rd of April 2009 by the time-stamp of my first and only achievement in the game before yesterday). It just seemed crazy hard and I had no idea what I was doing or how to tackle the achievements so I gave up on it real quick. Discouraged I never tried to play it again, scrolling past it every time I looked at my games library on my Xbox 360. It's one unlocked achievement taunting me, always reminding me of my pathetic skill in side-scrolling shooters. Well no more! I clicked on that walkthrough and have been following it towards success. I'm two achievements away from completing it, and while they aren't necessarily hard, man are they frustrating. Obviously I hope to wrap Alien Hominid HD up fairly soon and put a lid on this 4 year saga.

That's my last couple of days in gaming. Last Fridaily Update I sort of teased something fairly exciting and today it arrived in the mail. I have been looking at it and messing around a bit but I'm not in the position to start testing it out yet. I still have to set up some stuff and maybe buy some things. I would explain my plans but I first want to get it up and running and see what I can actually accomplish instead of making empty promises. Hopefully by the time Friday comes round I'll be in a better position and be able to share with you guys. That's it for today, yesterday I posted a quasi-review of Red Dead Redemption, stay tuned for a more formal review tomorrow, leave a comment and I hope to see you all again Friday!

Red Dead Redemption Xbox 360 Review

I'm feeling a lot of pressure writing this review. It's a long time past any use, anybody and everybody has bought this game by now, and my review isn't going to have the slightest effect, but I'm going to state right up front that this game would probably be my number one Xbox 360 game ever. I loved just about every second of the over 130 hours I poured into Red Dead Redemption. It's because of this fact that I feel the most pressure to write this review, it won't be nearly as good as the subject it's covering but I can only try.

Red Dead Redemption's multiplayer pretty much has it all!

There is also some pressure coming from the fact that this is my first retail game review, this isn't by accident. I made a conscious decision a while ago to work my way through the huge backlog of Xbox Live Arcade titles I had saved up, you can read a little more about it in my last review for Serious Sam: TFE. It was a decision brought about partially through necessity, and partially because I had been boosting and otherwise working on long multiplayer achievements for months. I like to work on one game at a time but when I've done everything I can in singleplayer I move on and keep my eyes open for boosting sessions. When the game you decide to work on has a multiplayer achievement that requires hundreds of hours of boosting playing some quick, sometimes smaller games in between can take the edge off.

Red Dead Redemption's multiplayer is awesome, and kept me coming back for quite a while but eventually I fell off, like I do with all multiplayer. It's not Red Dead Redemption's fault, I can sit back and look at it rationally and I can't see one real problem. At the end of the day I'm just more of a single player guy, I want to consume and experience everything a game has to offer, but when I do I'm ready to move on no matter how good the game was.

This is about to go real bad, real fast for one of us

I've already waffled on for too long without really saying anything specifically about Red Dead Redemption, now that I think about it I'm not even really sure what I want to say. I don't know why but I just don't want to apply my normal review format to this game. I think it may be partially because it would be nothing but me gushing about Red Dead, and the completely massive amount of different things it brings to the table, for pages upon pages. While the game is certainly deserving of such praise, reading it will just be boring, and I think I would wear out my thesaurus coming up with synonyms for awesome, amazing and great. If you are legitimately still searching the internet for reviews of Red Dead I don't know what I can add to the huge pile that are already out there, just play the game!

Cowboy ish!

I've written so much already without really saying what I want to say. It's been said a hundred times before, it's boring, it's known already but I guess I'll just say it to get it out of my system... RED DEAD REDEMPTION IS FUCKING AWESOME! MY BALLS TWITCH JUST THINKING ABOUT HOW RAD IT IS! IF YOU LIKE COWBOY SHIT AT ALL, EVEN IN THE SLIGHTEST, YOU NEED TO PLAY THIS GAME. IT IS GIGANTIC AND PACKED WITH ALL THE COWBOY STUFF YOU CAN THINK OF. PLAY THIS GAME, PLAY IT, PLAY IT, PLAY IT!

Sorry, I guess I repressed that for too long. I've been waffling and I'm not sure I can add much of anything else to this post. This is nowhere near the review I envisaged for one of my favourite games of all time. If I was going to say one last thing about Rockstar in general it would be that I've been a big fan of just about everything Rockstar ever since GTA3 hit, and I'm eagerly awaiting GTA5 but man, I'm just not sure if anything can top Red Dead Redemption for me personally.

Mondaily Update

For the flock!

This weekend was a busy one in gaming and out. I played a bunch on my Windows Phone to get the weekend started. Mostly Angry Birds, for the reasons I stated in the last Fridaily Update. I've managed to get halfway through the second episode while three starring each level. It's been going smoothly enough, seeing as I've been using Youtube videos to guide me through each level and get those coveted stars. As I've mentioned before Angry Birds was never something that I found incredibly entertaining. While it's fun enough to play a level or two, after that I get bored and increasingly annoyed with trying over and over to get a 3 star score. The fact that you don't even have any idea if the way you're approaching the level can result in three stars or not isn't my idea of a good time.

After having enough of Angry Birds I put some time in with iStunt 2 again. These games are quite different yet I get a very similar experience from them both. I think it's because of the achievements I'm aiming for at the moment in both, getting 3 star ratings in the first 3 Angry Birds episodes and collecting all the stars in the first two iStunt 2 packs. Both require multiple trial and error runs before finding out how you're able to achieve all the stars. iStunt 2 is a very different game however, with you tilting your phone left and right to rotate your snowboarder in order to land jumps and other stunts. I'm enjoying iStunt 2 slightly more than Angry Birds, but I'll be very happy when I finally finish both of them.

After spending most of my Saturday gaming on my Windows Phone and it subsequently whinging about having a low battery, I turned to my trusty Xbox 360 once more. After scrolling through my slowly diminishing XBLA games list Zeit² caught my eye. Zeit² has been sitting there quietly at the end of my games list for a while now. I'm not the biggest fan of these types of shooters but it had been discounted to a very reasonable price a while back and I couldn't help myself. I have seen a bunch of friends complete it relatively easily so I decided I'd tackle it myself.

Zeit² throws a hell of a lot your way, and quick too!

Zeit² has a trick up it's sleeve, you can rewind time, and the game requires you to use this and use it often. It took me a little while before I wrapped my head around the tactics  something like this opens up to you but eventually I felt like I had a decent grasp of them. I was wrong, Zeit² keeps adding and adding features right up until the final boss, barely giving you time to come to grips with any of them. Eventually I muddled my way through it, only barely knowing what I was doing at any given time. The achievements and game are easy to get through, but if you want to spend the time I think there is a lot here you could master.

After Zeit², I was contacted about playing some Zombie Apocalypse: Never Die Alone by a couple of friends. As I have been looking for a group to get the Epic Run 4 player achievement for a long while now so I jumped at the chance. Everything went smoothly and about an hour later everyone grabbed their achievement and thanks to King Plug, The Dark Liege and Chilli Thunder I have one more completion! You can expect reviews covering Zeit² and Zombie Apocalypse: NDA in coming weeks.

That's the weekend in gaming, this update is long enough already but I'll continue for just a little longer. Friday night we went to see Oblivion, the new Tom Cruise science fiction epic, and I have to say I quite enjoyed it. The group I saw it with had a different opinion but I thought this was the first time I had seen a real Sci-Fi movie in what seems like forever. Most Sci-Fi these days seems like it's just there as a setting for an action film but this one seemed different. It had some action to be sure but most of it was just good old fashioned, I hesitate to use the word but, slowburn Sci-Fi. Then came Saturday and the girlfriend had signed me up to run the 5 km Stampede fun run event in Perth. I wasn't exactly thrilled at the idea but it was a fun and messy time. After sloshing through mud and maneuvering through obstacles I was dead tired, but wouldn't hesitate to do it again.

Fridaily Update

Hey all, another Friday rolls around and I have spent most of my gaming time with Iron Brigade and it's DLC Rise of the Martian Bear. On Wednesday I told you all of the troubles I had been experiencing with the DLC being a lot harder than the original game; the enemies are a lot tougher and they throw a lot more of them at you. This was the case for the first and third level but the others were almost too easy. The difficulty ended up being all over the place in Rise of the Martian Bear but I'm glad I've finally finished it.

I spent some time playing the game online with a variety of people but it seems the multiplayer isn't very stable. I had no problems playing Red Dead Redemption for hours on end with 16 people in massive free-roams but for some reason getting 4 people together on a aircraft carrier with legs usually results in dropped connections. It's really frustrating as the achievements I have left are all multiplayer ones. I will keep working on it here and there but it's time to start a new game now I have nothing left to do by myself.

I never really got into the whole
Angry Birds phenomena

There's been a couple of developments in the Windows Phone front, with the first being Rorio pulling the Angry Birds game for Windows Phone 7 and re-releasing an updated non-Live enabled version. I started playing the Angry Birds game a while ago and left it half finished, now that it's pulled I've decided I better get back to it and finish it off before something happens. If anything glitches, I won't be able to re-download it and try again, so fingers crossed.

The second thing I've got to say is the new Deal of the Week on the WP is Farm Frenzy 2 for a buck. I buy pretty much anything if it's a dollar and I have a huge stack of WP games waiting for me, all bought for a dollar. I might put in some work and clear a bunch off my phone so there could be some Windows Phone game reviews popping up here some time soon.

That's it for this week, there has been one more exciting development but I'll wait and see how it pans out before talking about it. There could be a bunch more content coming out in the relatively near future, so get hype! Leave a comment below and I'll see everyone Monday.

Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter XBLA Review

I remember when the first Serious Sam game came out on the PC, it created quite a stir and I was told by a lot of people to give it a look. I never took that advice, something about the screenshots and other stuff I saw  just didn't click with me. When Serious Sam was released on the XBLA I remembered everything I had been told and picked it up, played a couple minutes of it and turned it off. This was years ago, "I have retail games to play" I thought, as if the way you gain access to a game has anything to do with it's quality.

120 gig is so small these days!

With the release of Serious Sam 3 I was reminded that I have never properly experienced this franchise, I still put it off. Then one day my 120 gig hard drive was full, no room for even a save game. I had been buying  all kinds of XBLA games when they appeared in the Deal of the Week. This was when it was decided something had to be done about this situation, and I focused on completing and then removing these XBLA titles to once again claw back some space. It has been a long process, and is the reason I've played and reviewed almost exclusively XBLA titles, I have to thank this decision for finally getting me to commit and play through Serious Sam HD: TFE.

Overview
Serious Sam HD: TFE is a fast paced arcade style shooter. If you're not running and gunning you're more than likely dead. There's just enough story to give a reason for the crazy you see running head(less)first at you and for you to be there mowing everything down. This is B-Grade camp at it's gory finest, explosions, lasers, bullets and gibs. You play the titular Sam, who is very very serious about saving earth from the never ending onslaught of thousands of ridiculous alien monsters who want nothing but your annihilation.

This part in particular was one of the hardest for me the first time I encountered it

You'll run through every level, shooting anything that moves and trying to stay alive. The first run through I played on Normal and even then the game is not easy, with the hordes of enemies you need to face down. After a while you learn how each enemy reacts and what the best tactics for dealing with them are but when you are swarmed with hundreds of them, knowing what to do is half problem, pulling it off successfully is another thing entirely.

Rational
Serious Sam managed to through these hundreds upon hundreds of enemies at you without any performance hit what-so-ever and it really amazing sometimes with the sheer number of things moving about on screen. The enemies wildly vary in both their looks and attack patterns which keeps you on your toes every encounter. Sometimes just scraping through a seemingly never ending wave of Kleers with 7 health left is a win. It throws all these enemies at you at breakneck speed too, with every enemy type not hesitating to take you on. The break into a full sprint the second they notice you and you had better hope you have the dexterity to shoot and weave your way through and out of trouble.

Sam comes across a wide range of weaponry as you progress through the missions, with most being useful throughout the game in different situations. Experimenting will help you find which gun seems to work best for which enemy and while it's entirely possible to turn on infinite ammo and just stick with the one, learning how to deal with what you're facing in the most efficient way possible raises your chances of survival immensely.

You can't hide from the onslaughts you'll regularly face!

Serious Sam is a game meant to be played with liberal use of the state save and load feature, and that is not lost on the Xbox. State save is mapped directly to the Y face button, with loading happening when you die or through an option in the start menu. It's a great way to implement it on a console and is a life saver, especially when playing Serious difficulty. I was saving after every enemy kill in some firefights, and while in some games these would be close to cheating your way through, in Serious Sam it's almost expected.

Summary
Serious Sam is great fun if you're willing to get into it. It's simple, but that's the point. It's also very challenging on harder difficulties, but every time you clear a stage you get a real sense of accomplishment when you look back and realise how often you just scraped through most of the firefights. Multiplayer is a blast, with you and your mates running roughshod over the even further increased number of enemies thrown your way but unlike single player you have an unlimited amount of lives which removes a lot of the challenge. If you've never played Serious Sam before I would recommend giving it a try, if you have then I can say the Xbox 360 version is a quality remake and playing it with a game pad and voice chat is a lot of fun.

Wednesdaily Update

Firstly I'd like to apologise for for not getting the review for Deep Black: Episode 1 up in time yesterday. It seemed like I turned away for a minute and all of a sudden it was midnight. If you're interested in knowing more about Deep Black: Episode 1 you can check it out here. Since Monday not too much has been going on with my Xbox, I'm not exactly sure what happens with my time but it all seems to vanish without anything productive to show for it.

New missions, enemies and weapons. All you could want but it's damn hard!

Monday I filled you guys in on my progress in Iron Brigade, since then little has happened. I managed to finish the main game in pretty much one sitting, but have been banging my head at this DLC for days. The difficulty has definitely been ramped up, enemies take a bunch more damage and come at you from more varied entry points. Guns I had been dominating with in the normal game feel super weak now and it took me hours to get past the first level.

Vlad is back, this time in bear form!

I've managed to work my way to the third Rise of the Martian Bear battle now, but have been stuck here for days. I managed to get most of the way through the last wave once, so I'm hoping I'll finish it soon, but if there are more, harder levels on the way I'm not sure what to do. That's all I can talk about right now, as I said earlier this week hasn't been too productive. I'll have another review up tomorrow (I promise this time) and hopefully come Friday I'll have a bunch more exciting things to talk about. Leave a comment and see you later.

Deep Black: Episode 1 XBLA Review

Deep Black: Episode 1 is a third person shooter that seems to have borrowed it's feel and mechanics from a wide array of other good third person shooters. When playing the game and looking at your character from the back I couldn't help but see a striking resemblance to Isaac Clarke of the original Dead Space in his original space engineer suit with the helmet of an ODST trooper from Halo. The underwater sequences also harked to Dead Space series, reminding me of the low gravity sections. The action taking place on terra firma is unmistakably Gears of War with all the cover-based shooting you could wish for.

Deep Black manages to pull all these ideas together into a mostly cohesive and polished title. It's a shame the public seems to have decided to all but forget of it's existence, as the game itself is surprisingly good. I'm reminded of Amy, another supposed-to-be episodic gaming series that will never see a second episode. Amy had interesting ideas and showed some glimmer of promise but lacked execution, this has some interesting ideas and executed them pretty well seemed to have been more overlooked than Amy. It seems the curse of the dreaded water level trumps the dreaded escort mission in this case, as by my metric four times as many people played Amy than Deep Black.

Drones and other enemies can come from anywhere when you're swimming around

Overview
As stated above this is a pretty standard third person shooter, not bad, not good. It does offer a unique experience, with the underwater action being new and fun. Your character works for some sort of military, maybe private, and has been sent in under the guise of protection and or prevention of some disaster about to befall his people. It ends up being a sham and you've been unwillingly swept up in a conspiracy to steal new technologies from a rival company/country for the "good" of the people.

While your character is none to pleased about the situation he finds himself in he completes his mission like a good little soldier and kills hundreds of potential innocents along the way. Let's not sink to deep into the moral or ethical quandaries to be found here and talk more about the gameplay.

These guys come out of nowhere!

Rational
Deep Black distinguishes itself from the horde of other third person shooters by it taking place in a world where everyone thinks it's a good idea to have an underwater lair, or lab or some sort of dominion from whens to do their business. This affords some interesting new gameplay opportunities not seen in any other game of it's type. Having a fully three dimensional space for the character to not only move about in but also be attacked from can lead to some interesting situations later in the game. It also affords you some cool advantages, allowing you to sneak under patrolling land based enemies and also scout out a location from the relative safety of being seen by staying under water.

There's plenty of above sea level shenanigans too!

You are also armed with a grappling hook/spear that can be used to drag unsuspecting enemies from their patrols into the water for a grizzly execution and left to drown. This same grappling spear can be used to hack into consoles and the many drones that patrol Deep Blacks world. If you manage to hack a drone you will have an ally in your gunfights for as long as it stays alive or until you hack another. They can provide excellent distraction and allow you to flank or escape the other enemies in an area.

Deep Black: Episode 1 suffers the same end as Amy does however, with the story being completely unresolved. This time it's worse however with the action just ending abruptly, not even in a decent spot in the story with absolutely nothing learned about the situation you find yourself in. Even Amy's ending gave you a little more than that.

Summary
It's very discouraging to know that this game will never be resolved as I believe it is more deserving of a second part than Amy. Deep Black: Episode 1 did everything with more then enough quality and quantity than one could ask for from an episodic game and still didn't catch on. I think the mere fact a lot of it takes place underwater scared everyone away, which is a shame. It's not the most original game in the world, but it does have some new ideas and is executed well. The fact the story is cut of without any conclusion what so ever is the real downer here. If you have a chance to pick it up cheap maybe give it a look.