Borderlands (360, PS3, PC)

There's guns. And guns. And guns. And more guns. And more guns. I could go on like this for about an hour.


BORDERLANDS is the highly anticipated four player co-op shooter which has been touted as Diablo for a new generation by cliffy B over at Epic Games. That's pretty high praise. He's right, however - Borderlands is a loot-driven experience which relies heavily on co-op and online play.

The premise follows the tale of four fortune hunters arriving on planet Pandora, a wasteland of sorts filled to the brim with scrapyards the size of football fields and angry wildlife. It's your job to take control of one of the four characters and lead them on their way to find the Vault, a massive stash of alien technology. It's been generally dismissed as a myth, but you are contacted by a mysterious woman who tells you the vault is real. It's a decent enough plot but it's not fleshed out terribly well and feels rather forgettable.


The gameplay, however, does not disappoint. The single thing I can state firmly about it is that it's fun. It's fun blasting bandits and raiders to pieces, it's fun dissecting skags with your favorite shotgun, it's fun making heads explode with a sniper rifle that fires explosive bullets. You'll be gleefully entertained as you pick up a revolver and begin showing people what their brains look like. It's a good thing the controls can keep up with the action most of the time, although control defaults are a bit odd. Melee is mapped to V? whaa?


My largest gripe with the game was that I experienced a few bugs. The PC version has terrible connectivity issues and gearbox are jamming their fingers in their ears and shouting. The xbox 360 version's matchmaking function would send you into games with players well below your level. There's a few other ones I don't feel like specifying. The PS3 version suffers from a bug which affects being able to invite people from your friends list, and that hampers the overall experience, as borderlands is a heavily cooperative game.

The world of pandora will seem very lonely without a few other players to help you through it. This is problematic, as stated with the issues above. It's playable in singleplayer, but do you really want to slog through the entire game without anyone to shoot stuff with?





Graphically, the game won't disappoint. It's got a lovely cell-shaded comic-y style that pretty much anyone can enjoy. If you think this'd tone down the violence to the game, you're wrong - Heads roll, skag bits fly, and you'll be electrifying people out of their skin.

You'll occasionally notice a few visual glitches, blurry textures and poor animation (find Scooter in New Haven. You'll know his creepy, inanimate face when you see it.) but it can be looked over to an extent. I've got an odd glitch on my widescreen monitor which seems to stretch past the model for the combat rifles. There's an odd gap between character's arms and the screen. I'll post a screenshot of it later. I'm hoping gearbox will patch it, it's surprisingly distracting.


The sound design, also, does not disappoint. There's the usual variety of boom, rat-a-tat-a-tat, kchunk kchunk kchunk, ka-pow and others which all make a good amount of the weapons sound appropriately beefy. It's all supported by some solid voice work and good music. The voice work is downright hilarious, especially with the psychos and other bandits. One thing I always love is Brick's maniacal giggling. The music is all done very well, and there's not much else to say about it. It'll change into a more actiony track when you're fighting a large group of enemies which is a nice detail.


Borderlands, with all it's 17.5 million different guns, is a very fun game. You'll definitely need some friends in order to have some lasting fun with it, however.

Presentation - 7.0

Gameplay - 8.7

Graphics - 8.5

Sound - 8.5

Overall - 8.7

A rant.

Remember S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl? I sure do. I'm here to rant about it s'more.

The nail-biting-keyboard-smashing-wall-destroying-controller-breaking difficulty was my biggest gripe with the game. The one thing I have no tolerance for is important quest NPC's being killable. I must have loaded my game about five times trying to save that bastard Seriy before giving up.


Onto the bigger and better subject. Call of Pripyat, the new game in the series. Guess what - The difficulty isn't insane. Yes, you read that right. Although I must admit I've been desensitized to difficulty after Demon's Souls. I share a love/hate relationship with that game. It's a good game, just makes me want to load a puppy onto a catapult and calculate exactly how far the yappy little bugger flies. Go have a look at it if you want, just be ready to make a head-sized hole in your wall.


Anyway, call of pripyat - The game's out in russia right now. And that means it's in russian. And that means we can't buy it anywhere other than russia.

Torrents are fun.

Yes, I will admit to 'pirating' the game. I'd prefer to look at it as gamer's interest. So, anyway - It isn't translated. So you know what some guys did? Ran the entire bloody game through google translate.



Now that's pretty lazy. Thankfully, there is a much, much better translation available. No voice work has been translated but any text is now actually readable without you shouting "what the дерьмо am I reading".

Nevertheless, the game is a large step up from shadow of chernobyl (and even, oh god, clear sky). It is no longer frustratingly hard to find medical supplies and items, and quest npc's no longer walk into bullets.

Oh, and there's hotkeys now. Yay, no more rustling around in my inventory while I'm being shot at.


Sheesh. This has turned from a rant into a bloody overview of the game. I think I'll end it here for the moment but I'll never be done ranting about the stalker series.

Demon's Souls (PS3)

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH


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THERE'S YOUR REVIEW








Fine. I'll make an actual review later.

Dead Space Extraction (Wii)

If cloverfield made you sick, this is not the game for you.




Gasp! What is this? Another wii game that doesn't overuse waggle? This must be a gift from the heavens! Altman be praised!

Heh heh. Unitology. But yes. Waggle is not overused. I want to hug the man who designed the controls for the game.


Dead Space Extraction takes place in the media hub that is the Dead Space franchise. The series is a cake made of win and the icing is made of success. All the content of the series (thus far) takes place around a single event: the Aegis 7 mining expedition. They found something. Something dark. Something evil. But enough about my brother's armpits. The colony found a marker. No one knows where it came from, why it's here, etc but digging it up unearthed something that also is not my brother's armpits. Now before I turn this into a rant about how bad he smells I'll just get on with the actual plot.

You play several different characters throughout the game attempting to survive an alien onslaught and escape. You'll fight the horiffic Necromorphs, who are quite different from your average space zombies. For one thing the only way to kill them is to brutally dismember them, limb from bloody limb.


"y halo thaaaaAAAAAAAAGH"

Yes, the series is quite gruesome.


The gameplay is where the game shines. It's another rail shooter (chrissakes we've got enough of those on the wii, why make more?) but at least they've broken the mold to an extent. More on that later. It's all the pretty standard formula - Baddies rush at you, blast their ugly heads in. It's actually surprisingly fun as you tear enemies asunder with an array of commandeered mining tools, such as the Ripper and Plasma Cutter. I mean, this stuff is awesome. The ripper is a remote control circular saw. If that doesn't sound awesome I don't what is. All the weapons are entertaining to use which is a good thing. It's great fun ripping a slasher's legs apart with a blast from the Line Gun.

The quality of the gameplay can only carry a game so far, however. I encountered a few bugs on my trip through the ishimura. The worst of which was a game stopper which had a bossfight stuck like a broken record. No game is free of bugs, but even then - That's pretty bad.

A co-op function is also included with the game. Ammo is not shared. Health is. It can be pretty fun at points, but it's mostly rather strange having two pointers waving about on screen. Things get slightly easier as well as one might expect, with two people gunning through.


The game sounds fantastic. Music is there when it needs to be, appropriately spooky and very well made. There's an excellent voice cast to back that up, as well. Everything from distressed yelling to barking out orders sounds great. The characters are about as fleshed out as they can be considering this a rail shooter but the voice work makes them seem like believable people. The sound design, too, doesn't disappoint. It's very satisfying hearing the disgusting splatch of a necromorph's arm being blown out of it's socket with an equally awesome sounding plasma rifle. The best part of the sound design is when you're in a vacuum. The game, with it's predecessor, was designed with great intelligence. Hull breach shows up? zwoosh, the entire game goes silent. Remember, no sound in space. It builds up a hell of an atmosphere, again, like it's predecessor.


Graphically the game is among the best on the wii. Alot of the animation is fluid with character models looking great. I have a single complaint about the game. Blurry textures. Oh wait, we're on the wii. It'll be difficult to find something that doesn't have blurry textures. Nevertheless - The major disappointments are just a few blurry textures but that comes with the hardware. The design around the environments is amazing. They've looked through the previous game and recreated many key areas such as the medical wing, shuttle bay, tram systems so that they look like they areas that you'll have to run through in the original. There's the off occasion where I forget I'm playing on the wii and have the odd flashback to my first run through the original. Design on the tech also looks great with all the mining tools looking quite space-y.

The entire game takes place from a shaky first person view as your character stumbles about. It gets a bit dizzying at points and tends to obscure ammo on the off occasion. There's a few points when you get to look around the rooms freely but they don't last nearly long enough.


There was alot of hype leading up to extraction with many seeing the transition to the wii as an utter failure. They can go walk off a cliff, as the game didn't actually suck. If you've got a wii and a spare 70 bucks, here's something to buy.


Design - 8.5 An awesome universe and well made content make the whole franchise a blast.

Graphics - 8.0 Looks great. For the Wii.

Sound - 9.0 The game sounds amazing with awesome sounds and music.

Gameplay - 8.5 It's a ton of fun as you fight for survival against hordes of space zombies.

Overall - 8.6



No necromorphs were harmed in the making of this blog post.

Wait ten minutes and I'll write a review for dead space extraction.

Yes, yes. I'm still here. Lord only knows how many of you are still following my blog, but suffice to say I haven't died, gone missing, been sucked into an alternate dimension, eaten by cthulhu, had my mind flayed, or been outwitted by guybrush threepwood.

So, nothing much has happened, really. Just been chugging few a through games. Dead Space Extraction, specifically. I preordered the hell out of that thing and have not regretted it. Any gamers reading this should go and look up the dead space franchise, actually. It's fantastic stuff.

Wii Sports Resort (or, OH GOD WHY AM I REVIEWING THIS)

I LIED AGAIN


Wow. I don't even know where to start with this one. It was loaned to me for a week and I played about 20 minutes before heading off to play fallout 3.

So, as you might expect it's a followup to Wii Sports, the game that shipped with the wii to show off the motion tech. This time they've stepped it up a notch by including the Wii Motion Plus, a new addition which fits onto the regular wiimote controller. It basically fancies up the motion control.

And yes, it's a collection of minigames like the previous one. A few of them are fun such as the swordfighting and there's a few that you'll get bored of in ten minutes and never play again, such as the Archery.

Alot of the minigames are multiplayer but the downside is that you'll need extra motion plus addons for each other remote. Kind of sucks.


The visual style is that cheery little mii style as used in wii sports and wii play. There really isn't alot to say.


Audio-wise the game isn't too bad but there's some annoying commentator voice pieces and a few music bits that loop until they rot your brain.


Boredom factor - 5.0

How much I want to play something else - 7.5

How much I wonder what the release date for the next metroid game is - 10

How much fun I could be having playing tiberium wars - 8.0

The game itself - 7.5

This is a joke review because my father insists that I review it. He didn't specify how I did.

I dunno, maybe I'm just not a fan of party games that are nothing but a ton of minigames.

-leo

Updates. Soon.

Coming up next, either Fat Princess (PS3) or American Mcgee's Alice (PC/MAC).

Alice. That was a fun one.

Tim Burton would've looked at it and said "woah fuck that".

In the meantime, here's what I've been playing for the last fortnight.



EVE online. Yeah.