From the best PlayStation 2 game ever made, Ico, comes this beautiful track Castle In The Mist.
Whether you’re a gamer or not you should own this game. It’s actually worth buying a PlayStation 2 just to play it.
Its mixture of puzzling, platforming and action is perfect, the setting is beautiful and the gameplay is evenly balanced. Oh, yeah and the music is perfect.
I remember my first play through with Kate, it was a great joint experience, me at the controls and Kate helping me solve the puzzles. Ah, the good old days!
Those three things are a heady combo when you’re twelve. The kid in this video obviously has them all in abundance.
It’s really quite cute the fact that the info for the video says:
everything in this video is made out of card board
Bless. What a helpful lad he is for pointing that out! It almost makes up for his attrocious and oh so twelve-year-old’s-mind username of fartbuttface.
I’m really glad YouTube didn’t exist when I was eleven, otherwise the whole world would right now be pissing themselves at the sight of my low rent Thunderbirds clone, Rescue 11. I had a headquarters and everything.
Well I say that, my bed had a headboard on which I stuck a label I’d written Rescue 11 on but to me that was a headquarters.
I know that my great mate Bridz completed Portal in my presence (I may have been pissed) and no doubt he saw the amazing end song and video to ‘Still Alive’. However I did not.
As I am yet to complete Portal on my own, I had to resort to a bit of crafty Googling to find the awesome end song that is ‘Still Alive’.
Thankfully YouTube is here to save the shit gamers amongst us that have yet to complete Portal but still want to hear the amazing end song. For those of us that applies to, watch this.
Awesome isn’t it? Those gun emplacements really seem to have the song writing knack don’t they?
A new Puzzle Quest game will always be welcome in my home. I lost about three months last year playing Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords on the DS, but by golly it was worth it. I still go back now for a quick blast, it’s like that passage from The Time Machine.
‘The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.’
Just like that in fact.
I’m glad to see that this one is coming to the DS too, I downloaded the demo on XBLA but, like Lumines, it just didn’t feel right when it wasn’t on a portable.
The new game mechanic looks a little worrying but I’m sure it’s going to play like a dream regardless.
I’ve just watched a trailer for Soul Calibur IV. The sound of cash registers ringing has just stopped, so I’ll tell you what I saw.
Darth Vader. Darth Vader and Yoda. In Soul Calibur. Fighting with lightsabers. The world has just made a popping sound and turned inside out.
How greedy is George Lucas? Obviously having lost all credibility as a filmmaker he’s decided to just become very, very rich instead. The really sad thing is that he’s done so much for the special effects industry and film making in general, to see him whore his properties like this (again) makes me want to cry.
Word Up, or Word Soup as it now insists on calling itself, is quite possibly the most fun you can have in a pub. I’m serious, don’t push me on this one it’s fucking awesome.
What’s more, in news that will send shockwaves through the Dean household, I’ve discovered that it is available on the PC! Your dream has come true my friend you can now play Word Up in the luxury of your own home!
I’m not certain that this game is going to be as big as Nintendo might hope. Don’t get me wrong it’s great fun and it’s has the potential to be one of the best games ever but I’m not sure the average Wii owner will be able to get into it.
You see the problem is that the Wii is popular with everyone not just gamers and Super Mario Galaxy is very much a gamers game. Your average Wii owner has one game, Wii Sports and they’re not all that interested in mastering anything that involves much more than waggling the Wiimote.
The first few levels do little to bring in the Wiimote-wagglers, it’s so different from anything that has gone before as to actually be confusing. It’s a step beyond Super Mario 64 in that it’s not just a 3D representation of the landscapes that were in the original Mario games it’s a fully realised up, down, in, out, sideways, right way up, upside down, round about, twisty turny, mind fuck of a landscape.
We’ll see how it fares, Gamestation’s second hand section should prove a useful indicator.
Bridz popped round this evening for a spot of gaming and a pizza, and what an evening it was! Just look at this!
How fucking awesome is that? 300! A perfect score at Wii Sports bowling.
It was touch and go for a while when on the seventh frame it dawned on me that he’d had seven consecutive strikes and I made mention of it. Oops. The last pin on the eighth frame wobbled for a while before finally falling, jinx over! Phew.
If only he’d done it using his own Mii!
Still at least he can gloat that in a handful of frames he managed to match the score I’ve been working on for about a year. Smart arse!
Although I suspect I probably haven’t actually finished the fight, I did complete Halo 3 last night. On Heroic I hasten to add. It was good fun, seemed very short and if I squinted I could almost imagine I was playing Halo. Don’t think the campaign was worth the asking price but I strongly suspect I’ll get more than my money’s worth out of the multiplayer game.
As I say, I don’t think I really have finished the fight and I’ll tell you for why. After the credits roll there’s a cut scene and in this cut scene we see Master Chief being put into stasis by Cortana. As she tucks him up in bed he says ‘Wake me when you need me.’. Hmmm, not if you need me but when you need me.
My suspicion is that Microsoft are planning on offering level downloads, perhaps even making it episodic. Although the only thing possibly acting as a bar to that is that the limited disc space on the majority of Xbox 360s might mean that owning the entire series of these (at the minute, hypothetical) levels/episodes would be limited to Elite owners.
Having thought about it a bit more I suppose Bungie’s recent split from Microsoft might cause a few minor issues too, but with an IP as strong as Halo I don’t think Microsoft will be too keen to let it go unexploited. Instead I suspect they’ll either develop it in-house (unlikely) or farm it out to a trusted third party (likely).
Whoever they decide to let develop it, I’d bet on the end result being downloadable as there’s an infrastructure already in place with Xbox Live. Every purchase then from a retail point of view becomes pure profit as there are no physical retailers, packaging people or distributors to pay. The killer reason though is that the second hand market completely evaporates when we start to talk of things in terms of downloads which are locked to the machine they’re downloaded onto.
Halo 3 feels much more like the original Halo did, the sense of freedom you get from being able to rip up gun emplacements and carry them or deploy shields where you want is immense. Add to that the number of different ways to progress through each level and you end up with a thoroughly convincing world.
The sheer amount of stuff you can do in this game is astonishing and rather unusually it doesn’t feel tacked on, it just adds to the atmosphere.
I know I said yesterday that the graphics weren’t really that much of a step up, well I was wrong. The further you get into the game the better they get. Not only that but the number of enemies on screen at once and the number of effects going on is fantastic, you really do get the sense that you’re in the middle of an invasion.
The Arbiter from Halo 2 is still present and thankfully from what I hear you never have to play as him. That was one of Halo 2’s major failings and Metal Gear Solid 2’s while I’m at it, I’ll never forgive Hideo Kojima for making me play as Raiden.
Fucking about with the players sense of identity is a big no-no in my book and so far I’ve felt very much that the fate of the world really is in my hands and that I am Master Chief. Little details abound to convince you of your status as the world’s saviour.
The character of Master Chief really is made to feel larger than life in every situation, marines talk about you in hushed reverential tones and the grunts shit themselves when they see you. It all adds up to a solid sense of immersion.
The Cortana part of the plot is interesting too, I’m looking forward to finding out where her part in the story is. At the minute I can only guess that 343 Guilty Spark will be involved somewhere down the line but for once I’m actually interested in a game’s plot!
I get the feeling too that once I’ve completed the campaign I’m going to get more than my money’s worth out of the online multi-player stuff. It’s a really good game, there’s no mistaking that, but only time will tell if its truly a classic.
A temporary fix has been made on my ‘360, looks like that Elite won’t be winging its way to me anytime soon.
As a consequence of my great fixing ability I’ve finally had a chance to play a bit of Halo 3 and from what I can see it looks good. The graphics aren’t that much of a step up from Halo 2, texture wise at least, but the increase in resolution is pretty noticeable.
There have been a few design changes too, for example the Brutes no longer have fur and the Grunts look way more vicious up close. Nice touches.
What’s really freaky though is the voice acting, I’m certain I’ve heard Jonathan Ross and Nathan Fillion as marines, I can’t be sure and they’re not listed on IMDB but I’ve got a sneaky feeling it’s them…
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