Gaming
The new Xbox avatars are pretty good
And they’re available publicly at http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/gamertag/avatar-body.png (replace “gamertag” with - yes! - your gamertag).
I’m gutted that you can’t put your avatar in a kilt - at least, not unless you want your avatar to have (a) a mini-kilt and (b) tits. Anti-Scots discrimination, or something.
[Via PlasticbagUK]
Dead Space (Xbox 360)
I’ve mentioned this game a couple of times now, but now that I’ve actually finished it (on the easiest level, naturally - I’m rubbish at games) I thought I’d do a quick review. Why? The timing of its release was terrible: instead of shining like an oasis during the summer games drought, a period so bad that people (well, me) spent hard-earned cash on crap such as Fracture because there was sod-all out, it came out just as big hitters such as Gears of War 2 and Fallout 3 were on their way to the shelves - which means there’s a good chance it’ll be overlooked. That’d be a shame, because it’s the most fun I’ve had with a game for ages.
Reviews have said it’s derivative, which it is: a lot of Alien, a bit of Doom and a soupcon of Prey. They’ve said it flags a bit in the middle, which it does. They’ve suggested that the story is a bit rubbish, which it is. And they’ve said the scares are of the simplest, open a box, AAARGH MONSTER kind. Which is a wee bit unfair.
There are indeed plenty of open a box, AAARGH MONSTER scares in the game, but what Dead Space is really good at is establishing a constant feeling of dread. Imagine your testicles were filled with explosives, and the explosives were really quite volatile, and you’re on a bus being driven by an idiot, and it turns onto a cobbled street, and there are lots of holes in the ground, and the driver speeds up, and you know that sooner or later your balls are going to blow up. You know it’s going to happen, but you don’t know exactly when it’s going to happen.
Dead Space is a bit like that. But with AAARGH MONSTERS instead of balls.
It’s not a 10/10 game by any means, and it’s not a 9/10 either, so if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t buy anything unless Edge has okayed it then you might not bother. But it’s worth getting hold of pre-owned, or when it hits the bargain rails, or on eBay, because it’s about ten hours of solid entertainment. It’s the game I’d hoped Doom 3 would be - dumb, derivative, gory fun.
Three-word videogame review: Dead Space (Xbox 360)
Scary. Gory. Excellent.
Some quotes the makers of Fracture could put on the cover
“Possibly not the worst FPS ever made. Possibly.”
“Hardly earth-shattering.”
“Several hours of tedium - guaranteed!”
“I wish I’d spent my money on crack instead.”
Sage advice for astronauts
If you’re in the future, and you work on a spaceship, and you get a call telling you to go and check out some remote colony because contact has mysteriously been lost, do yourself a favour and call in sick that day. Skive for your life. The only reason space colonies, and the drifting spacecraft spookily orbiting above them, stop communicating is because they’ve been overrun by bloodthirsty monsters. This is scientific fact.
Eurogamer reviews sci-fi horror game Dead Space.
“RealPlayer: like the Black Death, but made of software”
Feeling ranty? Techradar’s just uploaded “48 things we hate about tech“, which enabled yours truly to cheer himself up by being nasty about things. Any I’ve missed?
Google. Valve. Blimey
A happy Xbox experience
My Xbox 360 developed the dreaded Red Ring of Death the other week, and after trying the various troubleshooting tips it was pretty obvious that the ‘box was broken. So with a sinking feeling I called tech support to try and arrange a repair.
What I expected was this:
- Hours on the phone being passed from pillar to post
- Days and days before my console was picked up
- A couple of months without an Xbox while it sat in Germany gathering dust
- A returned Xbox with “there’s bugger-all wrong with it” written in biro on it
What I got was this:
- Talking to a real person within a few minutes
- An emailed shipping label that arrived during the phone call
- Pickup of the console within three hours
- An email update telling me it was fixed a week and a half later
- Delivery a few days after that, on the promised date
- A note explaining that my motherboard and DVD drive were buggered, so they’d been replaced
- A complimentary month’s membership of Xbox Live
Credit where credit’s due, that’s made me feel very positive about Microsoft.
Excellent games designer gets excellent job
I’ve blabbed about the superb Half-Life 2 mod Minerva before, so it’s nice to see that Adam Foster’s efforts have been rewarded: he’s bagged a job at Valve, working on Half-Life 2 Episode Three.
Dialogue in games: won’t somebody think of the parents?
When you’re a parent, you don’t get a lot of time to play games. More often than not, your gaming time is the odd late-night session when everyone else is in bed - and because everyone’s in bed, you can’t stick headphones on because you won’t be able to hear the baby monitor.
That’s not a problem if you’re playing arcade games or dumb shooters, but it’s a pain in the neck with more immersive things. You need to hear the dialogue because if you don’t, you haven’t a clue what’s going on. However, you can’t turn the TV up loud enough to hear the dialogue because if you do, there’s bound to be a HUGE BLOODY NOISE that wakes the baby, brings your gaming session to an abrupt halt and ends up with you sleeping in the shed.
Last night, I attempted to play Alone In The Dark. It certainly looks good, but I gave up after about 20 minutes. There’s loads of speech in it (in the first 20 minutes, anyway), but because the speech is interspersed with HUGE BLOODY NOISES I couldn’t turn the TV up loud enough to hear it.
GTA IV has loads of speech and lots of HUGE BLOODY NOISE in it too, but it has - yes! - subtitles. It spoils the immersion a little bit - some of the dialogue is even more clunky/cliched/annoying when it’s on the screen rather than in your ears - but at least you can work out what’s happening without ending up in the shed.
I know subtitles aren’t a big priority for game developers, but given that the average gamer is in their thirties there’s a good chance that a lot of game buyers are in the same quiet boat as me - and of course, people with hearing difficulties play games too.