There comes a time where everyone feels the need for a little more excitement in their life, a little more danger. For me extreme sports are where I get my kicks, and nothing is more extreme than the high-speed and precision of Formula One. Lucky for me Codemasters have just released F1 2012, and at the touch of a button I can be in control of my very own powerfully tuned behemoth. That settles that then.
Being a fan of Formula One and wanting to play a F1 game are two entirely different things. In my opinion the games that I have seen in the past haven’t delivered the excitement and tension I get when watching the races on TV, and don’t convey the same feel of complete precision and total control that the drivers have over their extremely powerful cars. That is until now.
Skyrim’s next official expansion, Hearthfire has been finally given the official announcement treatment, so brace yourself for action, adventure, and apparently home-decorating.
One of the first games I ever laid my hands on as a child was Rainbird Software’s Carrier Command. It came bundled with our state-of-the-art Atari ST and from the very first time I loaded it up I was hooked. Providing a futuristic naval simulation, it took place in a beautifully rendered 3D environment, in which you commanded a technologically advanced naval carrier in attacks on gorgeous tropical islands.
Ok, perhaps my memories of the original’s graphical prowess might be a little out of touch with reality, but despite its dated looks, much of what made Carrier Command unique stands out even today. A fully open world with hundreds of miles of ocean to explore. Customisable units, open-ended objectives and a challenging AI to defeat. It was up to you to craft your plan of attack, and defeat could easily come to the unprepared.
In an interview with The Verge, Brian Hall General Manager of Microsoft’s Live unit, talks about the changeover this week from Hotmail to Outlook. Mentioning the reasons why the changeover was happening he says:
We just decided it was time to do something new… and release it right in time for the new wave of products we have coming out with Windows 8, with the new version of Office, with the new windows phone and the new Xbox.
If numbers are your forte then hold your breath for some impressive figures heading your way, courtesy of Assassin’s Creed III‘s new trailer. Ubisoft are showcasing the capabilities of new engine AnvilNext, boasting some impressive stats in the process. Over a thousand new animations have been added for Connor alone, allowing for more freedom and fluidity when fighting and climbing. A whole host of new abilities make the combat look far more impressive than in previous releases in the series,…
If there’s one thing I love about Skyrim it’s that it gives the sense of a deep and real, living and breathing world with meaningful consequences. There are various different stories to delve into, different paths to choose and even random chance encounters with a troll or necromancer that could potentially take you halfway across Skyrim on a quest for glory. Dawnguard is the first available DLC from producers Bethesda and adds to this world by deepening your characters story and environment even more.
Having sunk around 125 hours into my original Skyrim playthrough I thought I had more than had my fill of being dragonborn. But after an absence from the game of around three months, Dawnguard has reminded me of my love for the game and made me realise just how much I had actually been missing it. Certainly I had exhausted almost everything my original mage could do, but Dawnguard gives me a good excuse to start afresh with a new class and gives me the chance to do any quests I missed the first time around. Besides I wanted to try out that awesome looking new crossbow and become an evil vampire lord and my goodie two-shoes mage just didn’t seem like the kind of person to do this.
Zombies are everywhere. Not in the literal shambling around eating your loved ones sense perhaps, but in terms of popular culture they’re ubiquitous. Comic books, films, TV series and of course games are rife with the bitey buggers. One zombie brand in particular has made the leap across multiple formats, from comic books, to TV and most recently to games.
AMC’s The Walking Dead television series, adapted from Robert Kirkman’s comics at first promised to be a breathtaking serialisation of the zombie apocalypse. We watched in our millions as that bloke from This Life and Teachers did his best silly American accent, all the while wielding a giant handgun that gaming’s finest zombie-killer (Barry Burton) would be proud of. It’s inevitable in zombie fiction, that the tale becomes not about the zombies themselves, but the breakdown of human society and the collapse of morality in an ailing world. It becomes about humans being human and humans turning in monsters of a different sort. Sadly, for the Walking Dead TV show, it also seemed to be about sitting around on a farm, awkward love triangles and silent black men standing in the corner, their only form of communication; the frantic look in their eye that screams ‘please, just give me one line this episode, just one! I promise I won’t mess it up’ It’s a show that frequently fails to deliver on the compelling premise and becomes mired in melodrama, though it sprinkles enough Zombie thrills that we yet retain some hope that it will eventually come good.
Beginning a demo with a cut-scene of a half naked woman is a risky manoeuvre. It can put people off the game instantly, making people think that it is shallow, attention seeking and even misogynistic. Yet this is how the demo to Far Cry 3 opened, a game which could possibly be the most intelligent and abstract FPSs of the past few years.
The demo was available to play at Rezzed where I got a hands-on preview. The first thing that was noticeable was how beautiful the game looked running on a high-end PC. After the opening cut-scene the demo started out in a thicket of jungle, every leaf on every tree stunningly rendered. A path led to a cliff overlooking the island and the pristine blue sea that surrounded it, showing off the game’s impressive draw distance. On a dock on the island a man was casually tipping corpses into the sea.
After a dive into the lagoon and a brief swim the game really began. The jungle’s thick foliage and the default weapon, the bow and arrow, made stealth the most obvious tactic. Picking off enemies with the bow gave a satisfying sense of power. The tension of being seen while drawing back the string countered by the elation of an enemy dropping to the ground, bolt protruding from his body.
This feeling was somewhat lessened though by the relatively quick drawback speed of the bow and its one hit kill effectiveness, regardless of where you shoot an enemy. However, it’s possible that both these issues were due to the difficulty settings of the demo.
While it seems that the Xbox edition of Minecraft is always playing catch up, I can’t help but get just as exited over every update and every little bit of new content added as I did when playing on the PC. Owners of Minecraft 360 (as I like to refer to it as) are awaiting the release of the 1.7.3 update which will bring about shears, pistons and many bug fixes among other things. Most notably though will be the…