Raithe

It's a fairly solid 14 hour shooter/driver. But I can't really see where they put 6 years in it.. It's solid for what it is, but it's nothing brilliant or heavily engaging. And apart from breaking into the safe without alarms going off, or rescuing Leo without being caught.. theres no real reason to replay anything. But it's engaging for what's there. It's a popcorn-for-the-brain game. Fun, but you don't have to really engage anything mentally/emotionally to play it.

Or was Obama seen paddling away with a match in hand? Sorry, cynical humour went out there...

Hm, the Collector's Edition of Tron Evolution has been announced.. it comes with a model lightcycle and stand..with a slide out drawer you can put the game in... Of course, it's only going to be available for PS3 and Xbox360 apparently. And comes with the hefty fee of $130....

Hm, the other thing (just to highten the geek) was that Horrid Wilting was a necromancy spell.. Fireball, Meteor Swarm etc..are all evocation spells aren't they? Mayhaps that also has something to do with it... (happy now Oner?.. One simple typo...)

If memory serves.. that was the Tome of Magic.. (which also introduced Wild Mages for 2nd Ed).. Just for the geek points.

Dynamics Interview Hm, so you're playstyle should have some background affect.. if you go full frontal assault type you will get different reactions from your boss, and things like news reports will shift 'public' perception of you in-game..

Talking of brogues.. I caught Finding Neverland over the weekend. Jonny Depp putting on another wonderful take of a scottish accent merged with londoner.. An interesting little film loosely based on JM Barrie's creation of Peter Pan. I have to admit, the flights of fantasy where it spins from the "reality" to what's being seen in imagination did put me in mind of Terry Gilliam more.. but I liked that.

It's a solid 7.0 / 8.0 game. Depending on things, it'll take you between 10-15 hours to go through the story. It's quite linear, and the "open sandbox" doesn't provide much to actually do. The ending feels a little watered down, almost as if it's waiting for DLC to come along and add to it in the future... If you liked Mafia.. it's probably worth it. If you're just interested in the general "style" of game, I'd wait for the price to drop a bit. I picked it up with the Amazon rate of

Well I finished a run through over the weekend... The story isn't too bad. Although the latter half seems to have a lot more of the mafia cliches then the first.. Fairly enjoyable for that short weekend game. So for the most part the gameplay mechanics are solid, but nothing truly outstanding. (and yes, if you don't take cover a couple of bullets will end your life..) Hm, didn't see the lady with car trouble that's supposed to be somewhere in Chapter 2 (Home Sweet Home).. First thoughts, Vito really isn't as.. sympathetic a character as Tommy was in the first one. And for someone who started off worrying about his family and such.. apart from about 3 specific story moments, there's no mention/interaction with his sister. You can't even go visit her and meet her husband when you get out of jail... The autosave feature..(there's no actual choose to save), it resets to the start of a chapter.. so if you want to try redoing any elements within a chapter.. you have to do _everything_ up until that point. So if you've played halfway through a chapter and then have to exit the game.. you've lost everything for that chapter. The driving's not bad, but when combined with some of the extensive cutscenes.. you can end up with about 5 minutes of cutscene, 6 minutes of driving from point A to point B..and then have 3 minutes of action followed by another short cutscene... And one mission is a shout out to the ending of Mafia... almost makes me want to go back and see it from the original point of view again.... The open city is pretty.. but there's just no real reason to explore it beyond "'its pretty" and the cop AI isn't that great.

And it works for Heston Blumenthal.. As shown in the Perfect Christmas Dinner...

I guess it's a natural response. They give you a wide open sandbox to play in..but then there's nothing to actually do. The atmosphere is all built into the storyline.. and the story is linear and (from the sounds of it) if you're just rolling from one 'mission' to the next doesn't require you to really roam around.. and if it's all 'go from point A to point B for this mission, then you'll be shooting things up in a building'..... Apart from being 'pretty' in the background, there doesn't seem to be much actual.. purpose to the open world. So either they could have put all that effort into improving other features... or actually put something in there for you to do. <shrugs> But then, the original Mafia was basically the same. So I can't see why people would be that surprised. And the original was damn good with the storyline and the way it played. It just didn't make much sense to spend that much time roaming around.

when i see plots like this it makes me wonder about the fate of humanity. then again the day of the triffids sounds like an utterly ridiculous premise and yet its actually pretty damn good so what do i know... As mentioned, Weber has done things that were tongue-in-cheek humour then all the way in the other direction of fairly hard core military/serious.. and I'm not sure which edge of those it'll fall into.. but it'll be interesting to see.

Well I had one of those nights when insomnia hit.. so I ended up reading it through till morning. Light on action as you said, and some of the talk on technical hardware aspects could get a touch overlong for my sense of rythym..but still entertaining for the building blocks. The way the honorverse has expanded and you've got the last few books are all on the same "time frame" but from different perspectives is interesting in its way... I can't quite decide whether I like it for the way it 'builds' the sense of the universe..or dislike it for the back and forth nature it can throw at you.. Still, I'm looking forward to the next book in the series. To think that he'd originally planned to kill off Honor and then do all the Mesa/Manpower about 20 years in the future with her kids.. Of course, Weber has that new book coming out in a month or so that looks like it could be amusing.. 'Out of the Dark' - Aliens invade earth, the rebellion forms..and then gets help when 'vampires' come out of the shadows to help.. Since Weber has done military sci-fi, space opera sci-fi, humerous fantasy, and a few genres in-between I'm not quite sure how it's going to read..but it should be fun.

Having a break from "serious" reading at the moment.. decided to catch up on the Honorverse.. so spent an evening on Storm from the Shadows, then worked through Mission of Honor...

I am a serial non-finisher of games. To me, the greater cost of a game is the time I sink into it, not the cash I fork out to buy it. So if the game gets to a point where the gameplay isn't fun and there aren't enough other incentives (story, character, stat/loot progression, atmosphere, art/sound/music design, etc.) to keep me interested, the game ceases to be worth my time and I stop playing. To me, it seems wrong to put that extra 5 hours into a game that I'm not enjoying, just so that I can say I've finished it. Suffering through things that aren't fun just to get them over with is work, not recreation. Maybe I'm just good at picking up games that I enjoy then.. If a game's if a game has a storyline I like, I might have to force myself to deal with bad gameplay..but if its so bad that I really hate it I won't finish it. But still, that's only a handful of games that I've picked up that I've found that to be the case. I wouldn't finish a game I found myself really disliking just to complete it... But I don't tend to randomly pick up games ..

That's something I've never really understood well. In over 10 years of gaming there are only a handful of games I haven't finished once I've picked them up and installed them. If i've paid money for a game, i plan to finish it and enjoy the story of it.. to leave it unfinished just seems.. wrong. Unless there's something about it that just completely kills my soul. .. (see Oblivion for that..)

And the old lady in question has said that she "didn't mean to be cruel to the cat" that she did it as a 'joke' and that she thought the cat would have wriggled free on its own.

And personally, I found Saints Row 2 to be more mindlessly entertaining then GTAIV which seemed to have a touch too much angst buried in it to be properly fun.

Take it to the needy and lost... How about the Isle of Wight?

I'm surprised Purkake hasn't already mentioned Just Cause 2 for mindless fun destructive entertainment...

Review Hm, a little mixed there.

Well someone else is working on a new iteration of Neverwinter (using the 4th edition DnD ruleset) but as a co-op online thing rather then either a single-player or as an mmo... but I forgot where I saw the news article and interview on it right at the moment..

It's interesting that they've set it up so experience points get spent on opening up new skills/improving skills related to different augmentations you have.. but there's no direct "weapon handling" skills. There are potential benefits to weapon handling (recoil control and the like) depending on how you develop the augmentations and skills on your arms.. but nothing that's out and out "pistol", "rifle", "heavy weapons"... The only way to directly improve weapon capabilities.. is to modify the weapon itself. So that seems a touch more Invisible War'ish. But having "skill trees" as such within augmentations sounds a lot more complicated and potentially branching for character development for creating different character types then they had back then...

Started out as a human mercenary.. did the introduction bit, and the mars robot thing.. now every time I leave mars I just get jumped by 1 of two pirates and blown up before I can reach anywhere else. So I'm thinking I might just restart and see what develops.

The trouble I always have is that Al-Jazeera is about as biased and manipulative as Fox News, if noy more so.. It's so damn hard to take news networks seriously these days with the amount of control they put on just how news is told to suit whatever idealogy they have.. Or maybe I've just become ridiculously paranoid and cynical over it..