When I’m not rotting my mind watching piles of crappy anime, I tend to find myself rotting my mind playing video games, like any other self-respecting 20-something nerd. My poison of preference is, as you’ve probably already guessed, the RPG. My problem is that I’m somewhat of an ADD gamer - due to having poor priorities in life and far too much disposable income I end up buying lots of games and hardly ever actually finishing them, resulting in my current situation: I think I might have more games in my rack that I haven’t actually played than I do games that I’ve finished. Especially RPGs. So I thought I would tell you, dear reader, about my Pile of Shame. Games that I haven’t finished. Perhaps you can give me some suggestions on whittling away at this pile of woe, or at least motivate me towards finishing one or two.
Archive for the 'Games' Category
Just got done with just shy of 24 hours of Halo 3. The midnight launch was much better organised this time - Halo 2 was a nightmare, wheras this time the store opened early to allow people to pre-pay and grab a ticket. I ended up getting there half an hour before launch, and only had to wait about ten minutes after the release time before I secured my legendary edition.
Extras are a bit of a disappointment. The promised 4 discs mysteriously shrank to three, and the content on them isn’t anything that special. The helmet itself, however, is gorgeous. For those who care, mine is #548108. Following the launch, myself and three buddies immediately sat down and played through the entire campaign on Legendary 4 player co-op. I won’t spoil anything except saying that the campaign is much more enjoyable, though I still hate fighting the flood as they’re some of the most tremendously boring adversaries in the game, so the overall experience takes a slight dip when they show up. However it’s still a much better experience than Halo 2 was, and probably edges out Halo as there’s no backtracking through previous levels, and there’s no repetitive geometry a la The Library. The campaign itself feels very tight and polished as well. And the ending is quite satisfactory. That said, playing co-op with four players makes it very easy to finish and we pretty much steamrolled our way through. I think it will be a deeper experience when playing solo.
Multiplayer seems excellent, but I haven’t really had a chance to check it out in depth. Overall, it was very much worth the wait, and pretty much manages to meet expectations, though it falls a little short of its potential.
Friday last week, I went down to my local EB Games to pick up Bioshock. I had had the collector’s edition preordered practically since the game was first shown off at E3 in 2006 - I was a big fan of System Shock so it was pretty much a no-brainer. Unfortunately, I got there and my CE preorder had mysteriously turned into a standard edition order.
Then a sudden, horrifying thought occurred to me. “Can you just check that my preorder for the Halo 3 Legendary Edition is still in place?”
Continue reading ‘The Highs and Lows of EB Games’
I complain a lot about Australia, but there are some great things about living here. One of them is that Australia is the home of Eminence. Eminence are a contemporary orchestra who draw the music they play from video games and anime (as opposed to Play or Video Games Live, which only draw from video games). They’ve been getting an increasing amount of exposure this year, primarily through their recent ‘Destiny’ tour. A quintet from Eminence travelled to Japan to stage a concert in Yokohama, which sold out in 12 hours. They then played a slightly different show at Otakon, which seems to have caused a bit of a splash, followed by a performance in Sydney and then finally in Melbourne. Last night I attended the Melbourne concert, and I was extremely impressed.
FFXII was, without a doubt, one of my most anticipated games of 2006. In fact, when I found out that it was probably not going to get a PAL release until later in 2007, it was enough to tip me over the edge and go and get my console modded just so that I could import the US release early. Everything I was reading about it was positive - dark, compelling story, modernised battle system, graphical sophistication, polish… everything is there. It is undoubtedly a great game.
But I hate playing it.