BeefJack: Prototype 2 Review

Yes, a month ago I made the glorious statement that after previewing the game I was quite happy to wait until Prototype 2 went down in price before picking it up. That was all before the lovely people at BeefJack gave me a copy to review. I fairly enjoyed it, way more then I expected to after previewing it. That said I do bemoan the fact they changed the lead, Heller is a complete prick, even Mercer was more fun to play than this guy.

To sum up here's my original conclusion: Prototype 2 is the gaming equivalent to superhero summer blockbuster, dumb as a bag of hammers but you'll have a hell of a lot of fun at the same time.

Oh and this is my first ever review :D

The Problems with Downloadable Content

Downloadable content and the perceived perceptions of it are generating quite a lot of press at the moment, especially those that are ready to be downloaded the first day of a game's release. First BioWare caused uproar by daring to have a Mass Effect 3 squad member that fully integrated into the game, then Capcom offered twelve characters for Street Fighter x Tekken that were already on the disk.

For some gamers these are basically the same thing. “We're having to pay for something we should have gotten for free!” is the comment most seen in news stories. As far as I'm concerned they are polar opposites.

BeefJack: Prototype 2 Preview

Another article published over at BeefJack, a Prototype 2 preview. I really loved the first Prototype, and have been looking hoping for a second one as soon as the credits rolled. Unfortunately, doing this preview has put me off the sequel a little. I was bemoaning the fact I couldn't pick it up on release, now picking it up cheap a few months down the line doesn't seem like that bad a thing.

Mass Effect 3's ending and my problems with it

Now that I know Mass Effect 3's ending I've been playing catch up on all the bitching about it. Ignoring the over-the-top petitions and calls to boycott BioWare FOREVER, some of these people kinda have a point. This is about to become spoiler central. You have been warned.

I have nothing against downer endings. My periphery glance at the bitching before I'd seen it myself convinced me it was just a bunch of gamers that couldn't handle everything not going their way. Shepard dies. Big whoop. Grow up. But the lack of choice? The feeling that most of your decisions don't effect the end of the game? Now there's a point I have to agree with.

BeefJack: List with a Twist

Three articles in two weekends. This one was a lot of fun to research.

5 80s action movies reimagined as FPS games

No Stallone sort of bugs me, I really wanted to include Cobra but couldn't find it anywhere. Rambo 2 and 3 certainly fit the bill but by the time I'd admitted defeat on Cobra I'd already written the rest. If I'd got chance to do it I'd probably take Dirty Harry out. Not because of its seventies origins, the article's too light hearted to worry about that, but during the research I found out that there was nearly an open-world game based on the first movie. There's currently a Facebook campaign to try and revive it.

Also found out some other crazy facts:
The Russians did a remake of Commando
Steven Seagal started his film career as a martial arts stunt coordinator on Never Say Never Again and A View to a Kill.

Games for a Hangover: Red Dead Redemption

It appears it's the weekend of me on BeefJack. Another article of mine is up, part of our regular feature Games for a Hangover. My choice: Red Dead Redemption.

BeefJack: Why Mass Effect fans feel alienated

Another of my articles is up on BeefJack. Changing the world: Why Mass Effect fans feel alienated. All about how Bioware blundered with the latest Mass Effect book. Really proud of this one, original version was written last week when I was quite outraged at the whole affair. Monday was spent IMing with the editor, Lewis Denby, and made it ten times better.

Struggled for ages with the title though. That's not even mine. The one I left it with was "Mass Effect Deception: How to Lose Fans and Alienate Gamers" Lewis obviously wasn't keen on my reference.

The Darkness: From page to polygon

Over at BeefJack my latest feature has gone up, The Darkness: From page to polygon. This one was a lot of fun, not often you get to combine two of my favourite things and get it published. I even got to drag out my old Darkness comics out and read of some good 90's comics. My collection was a lot fuller than I remember, I always thought my Darkness collection was patchy at best, apparently not.

Stuff that didn't belong in that article was how much of Ennis is in the first few issues, a writer I'd never really sampled until after my Top Cow phase. And the art, wow I'd forgotten how exploitative the 90s was with women, practically every female present looked like they're about to go do a shift at the local gentlemans club.

Chuck vs. The End

So that's it. Chuck has finally finished. In some ways I'm sad, in others not so much. The first two seasons were tremendous telly, and this last season has been pretty damn special too. At least it got to end properly. Part of the problem has been the writers treating each half season as their last, only to receive a last minute reprieve from the networks. This wasn't more obvious than the first half of Season 3, which ended beautifully, only for them to get a further six episodes and the staff seemed to scramble for a suitable storyline.

Its probably why season 5 has been so good, for once they actually knew this was the end and it was time to draw a line under it all.

Mass Effect 3 Unlocks AKA Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning demo

The Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning demo, yes I only played it because of the Mass Effect 3 items, but that's what forms the majority of this story.

First time I played it I was vaguely impressed. It was sort of a more serious Fable, the world seemed interesting for a rather standard fantasy fare, but then as I was speaking to the first Fateweaver conversations just disappeared with a lovely bug. However, there was a prize at the end of the road so I pushed on, ran across the play area to see as much of the main quest as I could to see if it grabbed me. It sort of did. But then it happened. It crashed. One of those big ones that freezes the entire Xbox and the only way around it is the power button.

Any other game would have gotten a “Well that's buggy as week old shit” and forgotten, but there was a Mass Effect unlock waiting at the other side. A few days later I had another pop. I had a few hours before I had to head out and figured I had plenty of time to fit in the 45 minutes needed. This was when I realised just how amazing a demo the game was. First I didn't have to redo the tutorial the game just went “Shall I skip that part since you've done it already”, which I thought was going to be the most painful of the replay. That done I set off handling the quests I'd blatantly ignored previously and I was in for another shock. The disappearing conversations were nowhere to be found, and I'd never see them again.

SOPA and PIPA

It's funny. If this had happened a year ago I pretty much would have been on the outskirts of this debate saying something like "I hope the Americans realise" and being nicely surprised at the blackouts conducted around the internet on Wednesday and the consquences of that action.

However, here I am now and I was part of one of those blackouts over at BeefJack. For a day we didn't post any news at all, because if SOPA went through in it's current state it is entirely possible we would get shut down for using images from games that we're trying to tell people about.

Book Title Story

Another writing group segment. This was we were given the task of creating a piece of writing using a number of book titles. I cheated a little, it was meant to be a pile with no manipulation but I skipped over a couple I didn't think I could do anything with.

The books were:

WITHOUT REMORSE by Tom Clancy

DEBT OF HONOUR by Tom Clancy

RAINBOW SIX by Tom Clancy

TEETH OF THE TIGER by Tom Clancy

INCOMPETENCE by Rob Grant

BLACK HOUSE by Stephen King and Peter Straub

DEAD EVEN by Brad Meltzer

FIRST COUNSEL by Brad Meltzer

MILLIONAIRES by Brad Meltzer

ZERO GAME by Brad Meltzer

BROKEN ANGELS by Richard Morgan

GOOD OMENS by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

ICURAS HUNT by Timothy Zahn

BETTER THAN LIFE by Grant Naylor

BACKWARDS by Grant Naylor

It was Icarus Hunt that finally gave me an angle on what to do. This is what I came up with:

We call it the ZERO GAME. We cater for MILLIONAIRES and billionaires that are looking for something a bit different, something that offers more than just the TEETH OF THE TIGER, something BETTER THAN LIFE.

This one felt different though. the vision of BROKEN ANGELS I'd had the night before wasn't exactly what I'd call GOOD OMENS for our upcoming ICARUS HUNT. But as FIRST COUNSEL I had a DEBT OF HONOUR to the organisers to see it through.

Genetically engineered prey. Scientists cook up mythical creatures in a lab. Rich people hunt them for a kill that they will be the only person in history to ever claim. Many called it genius. They had it BACKWARDS, it was INCOMPETENCE. You can't go messing with nature and expect nothing to go wrong.

I knew it wouldn't be long till until someone was hurt or DEAD, EVEN. But here at the BLACK HOUSE we gathered and as I looked across at a the artificially generated RAINBOW, SIX of them declared they were ready. We set off. I just prayed it wouldn't be me.

The Annual Games Cycle

With the release of Assassin's Creed: Revelations a lot of people are once again talking about how it shouldn't be an annual release. How Ubisoft are killing the franchise releasing games so close together. How only two games ago, Assassin's Creed 2 was hailed as a masterpiece and look how much it's fallen already.

What this has us asking is why is everyone in the industry so desperate to have annual releases? There's so many examples of it not working.

My First Proper BeefJack Article

2012 is off to a great start as my first article over at BeefJack "Why I stopped playing so many games in 2011" appears. Quite a moment for me. 

Random piece of information, I nearly spent a whole afternoon relearning Photoshop to do that first image, doing little tweaks here and there. I had to step away from it to stop myself going crazy.

And A Happy New Year

Hello Twenty Twelve. Not Two Thousand and Twelve. Embrace the future people!

So what's the plan from here on out. Well, the last few weeks of 2011 didn't really contain any major writing, in fact it was pretty atrocious. But it was the holiday season, so that's my excuse.

But, it's the new year and it's time to press on. In fact, I'm just back from lunch and I already have over a thousand words clocked up today so not a bad start. I intend to have the first draft of the novel finished by the end of January. Of course the fact I've been offered that deadline by a friend with promise of a rewards helps (though I'm ashamed to admit I need it).

After that I'm not sure. Ideally this novel should be done in the first half of the year. I've got a few ideas where I want to go, and the website needs that overhaul finishing so I can put it back up. But first draft first!

Merry Halo Christmas Everyone

I hope you all had a good Christmas. It was a relatively quiet one here in the Haresign household, what with me barely having any cash to speak of.

However, aside from the hideous amounts of chocolate everyone gets, I also received Halo: Anniversary. Being the die-hard Halo fan I have of course played it way back when but the lure of new graphics, achievements and the new maps for Reach was just too much.

Wait! That wasn't there before was it?

You noticed some posts appearing from when this place was on hiatus? Don't worry you're not going insane, I'm moving some select pieces from GeekGasms.org here too. I'm doing it mainly because at some point I'll be pointing people to my work and I'd rather send them to a place with everything rather than two places with gaps.

Snow began to fall, huge flakes of it

One of the things I intend to do is to start throwing up some of the writing I do in the writing group I've joined. Well, at least the ones I'm happy with. This bit was written in there, we were given five minutes to write a Christmas piece beginning with "Snow began to fall, huge flakes of it". So here ya go:

Snow began to fall, huge flakes of it... Dave's head smacked against the steering wheel. This better not lie he thought as he could see it doing exactly that at the side of the road.

It was 9pm on Christmas Eve and he had two hundred miles to go before he got home. And home was exactly where he was going to get to, not matter the weather, Tim was three this year and Dave knew that this was when Christmas mattered and he was going to be there when his son woke up to see what Santa had brought.

It.. It's changed?!?

What? There's been a change and now an update?
Yes, strange person checking a site that's been dead for nearly two years, there has.

So the GeekGasms.org experiment was pretty much a failure. Poor communication, changing priorities and more can be blamed. However, there were a number of successes. We had a podcast for over a year and a half and I blogged nearly every week, but as we started to lose people I stopped, then the only other regular blogger did too. Nevermind, it was damn fun while it lasted. There's a couple of ideas Danny and I batted around that may keep some life in it though. We'll see.

However, this year I decided to make a rather drastic change. Quit my day job and give writing a try properly. So I need a web presence all of my own, originally I was tempted to do it with GeekGasms, but there's too much on NightJim.com to just abandon that too.

So I've decided to update the latter, because that's where Justice League of Abertay is and it's more within my own abilities. Right now it's still the old site, but I'm in the process offline of ripping it apart, discarding a lot of crap and going from there. This page is going to be my main update portal, with the site being more of an archive of stories etc.

Also we have my first success as a writer. I'm now a contributor on BeefJack.com, keep an eye out for news stories from me, as well as the odd blog/feature such as this Halo one I've already done.

I'm also going to keep updating GeekGasms.org with my blogs, but I'm going to be putting them here too. Hopefully an all new NightJim.com will spring up soon, and I already have some material for it.

Halo article on BeefJack

Here's a feature I contributed to over at BeefJack for Halo's 10 year anniversary. My first proper article printed by someone that isn't myself :D

Halo: Combat Evolved - Happy anniversary