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Posted by FatherJack at October 1st, 2007

…

Hmm, I really need to play some of those games a bit more, and increase that gamerscore thing.

Posted by FatherJack at September 15th, 2006

To be released with Half Life: Episode 2

Posted by FatherJack at September 15th, 2006

Also released with Half Life: Episode 2

Posted by FatherJack at September 13th, 2006

Well, I had to try out the new media tags, and this is the best thing I’ve seen in ages – check out Father Grigori.

Posted by FatherJack at August 18th, 2005

Writing about web page http://na.square-enix.com/games/starocean/ Title: Star Ocean: Till The End of Time (PS2) Publisher: UbiSoft ASIN: B00029P9NM Rating:

This game is made by Square-Enix (formerly Squaresoft), who were responsible for what many regard as the pinnacle of console RPGs – the Final Fantasy series. You may have heard of them. This, though is not a Final Fantasy game and while I would be a liar if I said the bonus DVD featuring FF12 footage did not inflence my buying decision, I was kind of hoping there’d be a decent game on the other disc, too. I was wrong on two counts: there are two other discs (only the second 2DVD PS2 game I’ve encountered) and it’s rather a fine game.Square have done some other games besides FF before, and while some (like Unlimited SaGa) felt like they were made up of ideas rejected for inclusion in the next FF, others were sufficiently different to stand on their own. Star Ocean There was a “Star Ocean II” on the PS1, but it’s rather rare, and whatever SO1 ran on I can’t find it – so I’m reviewing with no knowledge of the series as a whole. The whole style is the anime-type thing we’ve seen before, so if spiky hair, big doe eyes and pointy noses and ears rub you up the wrong way, it’s not for you. It is two types of game squished together. In the main you explore around, talking to people and advancing the story much like any other console RPG, with all the usual levels, equipment, magic skills as well as a few other things like inventing and cooking which I haven’t managed to unlock yet after about 12 hours of play. The other part is the battles – they are real-time button-mashing affairs, switching between characters at will while the configurable AI controls the other party members, in battle you gain various trophies which are redeemable later. For some reason these trophies require a whopping 1.2Mb of your memory card (with each save game taking 500kb) – and are not transferrable, so plan your memory cardage before playing. Despite the name, the boxart and website pics – I haven’t seen much in the way of space adventuring, having consecutively crashlanded on two “underdeveloped” planets and had to utilise my sword-swinging and face-punching skills to sort them out. Remember the Prime Directive, space cadets. Controls Overall rather well done, certainly very simple and hard to make an error. When you’re in a small room your character seems to move a bit fast, though, and it can be a bit frustrating to get them to line up just right in order to activate usuable items. There is no indication items are usable, apart from obvious treasure chests, so it’s trial and error for a while until you learn to spot them. Battle is okay, there are a few more moves than just hit-hit-hit and it’s actually quite a small part of the game time-wise. Attention to detail The character models are quite well done and used in all the cut scenes – a few sword-poking-through-the-character and “steel hair” glitches, but you almost expect them in these types of games. The backgrounds though, deserve a rather special mention, still in a cartoon style they are much more detailed, and while they do have a stack of reusable stock furnishings they do manage to make every location seem custom-drawn. While many locations are simply labelled “Private Home” they have made the effort to make them all look unique. Fun? Yes, it’s quite fun. I’m still playing it and taking time time to enjoy it, too – rather than rushing to the next quest. Will I play it again when I’ve finished it? Very unlikely. I’ve given it four stars – while it’s not as jaw-dropping as Jade Empire, I expect it will last me a lot longer.

Posted by FatherJack at August 17th, 2005

Writing about web page http://jade.bioware.com/ Title: Jade Empire Limited Edition (Xbox) Publisher: Microsoft ASIN: B000854CRO Rating:

My first real game review. Could even be the first game review. Creators Bioware. Made Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic. All of them Action RPGs with familiar backstories – the first two in a D&D setting with a game world spanning 11 games/add-ons and the last one being set in the Star Wars universe, hugely successful amongst the fans who had actually grown up since the original trilogy. They could have made the sequel to Knights, but they didn’t: they made Jade Empire. I’m rather glad they did. Graphics While the consequence of this is that Knights II was rather clumsy graphically, Jade Empire is absolutely beautiful – while the Xbox is probably the most powerful of the current consoles they get more out of it than I thought possible, given it’s based on technology which seems very outdated to PC users. Smoke effects, running water, rain, fountains, waterfalls and an amazing water trickling over stone effect all add to a believable and wonderfully detailed world. Typically as the Xbox’s replacement looms into view we only just begin to see what it is capable of. Level Design I always judge a good “map” or “level” by how easy it is to remember – if after a couple of runs around you pretty much know your way around, the designers have done their job – they’ve made it “real” and they’ve made it distinctive. A perfect map of the old Senate House corridors isn’t going to make a great level, and no level is going to win awards if it’s all made out of plain concrete. New Thing This is a new thing for Bioware – the game world is basically ancient China, but a China where all the stories you ever heard about magic and demons and crazy kung foo antics were all true. Plenty of Emperors, Monks and Spirits too. They went a bit mad with it, and I’m not sure if there’s enough left for a sequel. What’s not new is the “Open Palm”/”Closed Fist” meter – it’s just the “Light Side”/”Dark Side” meter taken straight out of Knights and while the game has plenty to say on the merits of either course, in actuality it’s a good/evil choice as usual. Gameplay The controls are a little different from a regular RPG, and more what you’d expect from a game based around martial arts, but are nowhere near as hard to master as a straight beat-em-up. Actually there’s loads of things to help you – there are buttons for healing, dealing more damage and even a “bullet-time” mode – the latter two only really being necessary when you’re in a desperate scrape. Summary Overall I found it rather fun, most of the lines are spoken in not-too-annoying style, the good/bad thing works well, difficultly is constantly adjustable so you shouldn’t get stuck/bored, there’s a nice variety of missions from finding lost animals to repelling a siege, great story and it looks superb. Having finished “good”, I will probably give it another play through as “evil”, but not right away. The limited edition reviewed here gives you an extra selectable character Monk Zeng but his Leaping Tiger move is available to other characters, so I’m not sure if it’s an exclusive – it was my favourite move, though. You also get a Making Of DVD which is reasonably interesting, but recorded at a pitifully low resolution and probably available for download from the game TV channel it was taken from Edit: on reflection have reduced the rating to four stars – while it scores highly on all the criteria I am interested in, I will only play through it a maximum of two times, good and evil paths, unless a significant amount of extra content becomes available for it.

Posted by FatherJack at July 11th, 2005

Writing about Gimme Five… from The random scribblings of a diseased imagination

The brief was to select five characters you would take on a quest, after a bit of thought I limited myself to characters from computer games. I’ve only played RPs on computers, but that didn’t stop me selecting a classic Thief, Ranger, Wizard, Cleric and Fighter combination, I decided to avoid robots and select characters whose skills would be useful in both a fantasy and sci-fi setting.

1. Cate Archer (No-One lives forever) – rather good at sneaking around and being a super-spy and good at using gadgets. More attractive than James Bond.
2. Gordon Freeman (Half-Life) – good with guns and other projectile weapons, versatile pilot. Easy to locate in bright orange haz-suit.
3. Eiko Magami (Project A-Ko) – obligatory super magic anime girl, A-Ko is quite possibly indestructable, jumps onto nuclear warheads and punches them to oblivion – kind of like Superman did but on a larger scale. Rather than performing magic, she just is magic, while Sabrina Spellman might be fun to have along she rarely gets a spell right and can’t keep her mind off boys.
4. Sam Stone (Serious Sam) – Not here for his fighting skills, but his amazing healing regenerative powers. If you play the (first) game on Easy mode he actually recovers health all the time – so much so that he recovers it quicker than even vast hordes of monsters can remove it. Proven against large numbers of foes.
5. Bonus Mahler (Fighting Vipers/Fighters Megamix) – Of all the fighting games this bloke dominates in his. He hardly has to do anything – a single button press is enough to clear most opponents (after taunting). So while it might be kind of cheap to use him against a human opponent, and rather boring against the CPU he would be good to have on your side in a scrap.

Posted by FatherJack at May 20th, 2005

Writing about web page http://www.xfire.com/xf/index.php

It’s just been updated – now tracks even more games!

Posted by FatherJack at April 20th, 2005

Have been playing 16 hours now, so it can’t be that bad – having 108 characters to collect/choose from certainly adds to its longevity.

Lilin from Suikoden IV

Fina from Skies of Arcadia

I would probably still rate it second to Skies of Arcadia (not bad for a 5-year-old Dreamcast game), but a much closer second than I initially thought.

Posted by FatherJack at April 4th, 2005

Writing about web page http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/82088R1MY89U/026-2076860-3658819

The must-buy list has been updated again, with a few additions, but with 6 sequels being removed, on account of the fact that I have bought them. Here they are:

Gran Turismo 4
Slightly harder, more cars (who can claim to have a racing sim without the inclusion of the Volvo 240 Estate?) and a new mode: B-spec directors mode, which involves you watching rather than racing. The new mode is probably the biggest change, it makes the endurance races rather less taxing and is a good way to learn circuits and skip annoying tracks with hard-to-control cars, but you’ll always be quicker if you drive it yourself. Interestingly it can use my USB memory stick to save pictures – so why do I have to buy £20 8MB memory cards for savegames?

Knights of the Old Republic: The Sith Lords
It appears to be the same game as the first one, which isn’t really that bad, although I’ve felt less overwhelmed on visiting new worlds as the game’s mechanics really start to show when they don’t vary it enough – sometimes a visit to a planet could just have a text screen:

Do you want to:

• Race speeders
• Play cards (Pure Pazak)
• Do the Good quests
• Do the Evil quests

Apparently the good/evil stuff has more effect than the previous game (they must have been playing Fable) but I have yet to notice anything. Mind you, I always play good. Of course.

Suikoden IV
Quite a nice RPG, but without the millions spent on it that Final Fantasy X had, it looks a little unpolished. At least that’s what a lot of reviews seem to say, personally I don’t think you need to spend very much money at all to animate your character’s walk properly or to fix the excrable control method of the ship. Apart from those annoyances it’s quite a nice game, although random encounters seem a little frequent in some areas. Not quite Skies of Arcadia, though.

Championship Manager 5
This is always going to be exactly the same, but with new players, right? Wrong. They’ve speeded it up – really speeded it up, once you get used to the rhythm of when to click continue you hardly experience any delays at all, infact during month-ends I’d go so far as to say it gets a bit hectic! Other than that, it’s much the same, the match view is a bit better, approaching the detail seen in LMA, but I never really cared for match views. The constant flow hopefully means I smoke less fags when playing it.

Timesplitters: Future Perfect
Don’t tell me – just the same? Um, sort of – it’s like Timesplitters 2 with internet multiplayer. Which I haven’t actually tried yet. I like the story mode better (than TS2) – there’s some great moments when you travel through time to meet yourself, some good characters and some silly puzzles. There are a lot of new game types such as basketball hoop-shooting and remote-control cat racing, both of which I found fiendishly difficult. The internet multiplayer should be the game’s strong point, and I will have to brave it sometime – perhaps without the headphones.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant
Best ’til last. The game I had the lowest hopes for actually turned out the best. The prequel was a dark affair, very well done but made a bit too hard by the combat system which involved stopping a line in the correct place as it circled a disc like a sped-up second hand on a clock face. You had to do this for everything, every attack, item use – whatever. In the sequel – er – you still do…but there’s the option to do it automatically at the cost of a bonus hits/damage. This is far better as now they do the attacks you have told them to, albeit at reduced power. I don’t know how much they had to spend, but the presentation isn’t that far behind FFX, while the cut scenes appear to be rendered using the game engine rather than the fancy supercomputers they used in FF they are no less effective and probably more numerous, being the first PS2 game I’ve seen to come on 2 DVDs. Some may complain about the linear nature of games like this, but I’d rather go straight to the next area than get lost at sea like in Suikoden. There are tons of things to keep you occupied as well, not-quite mini games as they all contribute to real battle performance. A nice surprise, as I was considering not buying it as I hadn’t bothered to finish the first one.

So what am I playing most?

World of Warcraft.