Epic FailTomb Raider 2013 is an Origin Story for Lara Croft and a reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise. This is a reboot done right and it streaks ahead of any of the previous games in the series. It keeps Lara’s character concept and the 3D platformer gameplay but everything else is reinvented for the new generation. It is a much grittier, adult game. I can only describe it as epic.
Dear Ester is an experimental indie game built with the Half Life engine. In fact some have argued it shouldn’t be called a ‘game’ at all; the only mechanic is exploration. You walk along a largely linear path and are rewarded by a poetic voice-over every so often. You can look at things and take detours to look at more things while you try to figure out what it’s all about.
The Ball is an Indie First-Person Action/Adventure/Puzzler where you play an archaeologist who has fallen down a hole, finds a massive Ball and decides to play with it. Let’s face it: we’ve been dying for another ball-based puzzle game since Marble Madness.
The Ball is an Indie First-Person Action/Adventure/Puzzler where you play an archaeologist who has fallen down a hole, finds a massive Ball and decides to play with it. Let’s face it: we’ve been dying for another ball-based puzzle game since Marble Madness.
Risen 3 has just been released, but this is a review of the original Risen released in 2009 for PC and Xbox. In a reversal of the usual trend this is a great PC game with a terrible port to console, so if you’re thinking of getting it for PC – absofiggin’lutely! Xbox? Give it a miss.
I loved this game. I’m a big fan of the RPG genre and Risen has everything a good RPG should have, and rises above many. You start out shipwrecked on a beach, your first weapon is a stick and the rodents fight better than you do. You’ve come from nowhere but nobody has had visions of you, nor are you the goddamned Chosen One! The characters you meet do not say ‘Oh look it’s the Player’ in fact they are quite surly and distrustful until you have proven yourself. It’s an immersive world with life, character and humour.
Zeno Clash is a surreal first-person brawler set in the fantasy world of Zenozoik. You play the role of Ghat who, seemingly, has the whole of this strange world against him save one faithful companion, Daedra. Ghat has murdered a hermaphrodite creature called ‘Father-Mother’ who is, yes, both Father and Mother to himself and a slew of siblings. His Brothers and Sisters will literally chase him to the ends of the earth to punish him for his crime. Daedra just wants Ghat to tell her why.
This is a review of the PC version of Alice: Madness Returns from Steam. I want to make that clear because the game was written for the Xbox console and it’s possibly better on that. The port to PC, however, is poor. The keyboard controls are practically impossible requiring too many keys to be pressed at once. The analogue controls were playable but not pleasantly so; combat made my hands hurt and in my opinion that is a big negative, plus vibrate seemed to occur randomly often when nothing was happening at all!
So Diablo III was launched at Midnight yesterday after one of the biggest game launches in history rivaling the MMO World of Warcraft. We’re talking two million pre-orders (the most ever for a PC game) and eight thousand launch events worldwide. Over 1000 fans were queuing for the game in Oxford Street alone.
So what happened? In short: The launch was an abject failure. The high traffic from so many players logging on all at the same time not only crashed the server but also the gaming forum battle.net as players flocked to it to find out what the hell was happening!
The problem was caused because Blizzard – in an effort to combat piracy – required everyone to log into its server, even those who wanted to play a single player game, in order to authenticate. Unfortunately this meant that all most players got when trying to play Diablo 3 was Error Message 37: ‘The servers are busy at this time; please try again later.’ This upset millions of Blizzard fans some of which had taken the day off work for the game’s launch.
Surely Blizzard should have been anticipated this kind of traffic and made sure they had the capacity to handle it. But no. This was a total and complete Epic Fail: all that hype over the game only for it NOT TO WORK when it was launched!
One tweeter said: “Diablo 3 is super hard. I’ve been playing for 30 minutes and haven’t even defeated the login screen!”
Boy am I glad I decided I’d play through Diablo 1 & 2 before moving on to Diablo 3. Will they have their problems sorted out by then do you think?
WOW! I can’t believe it’s over a decade since the last Diablo game came out, but we finally have a release date on Diablo III which is *Drumroll* May 15th!! Two days before my Birthday! *hint hint* Preorders are open now and you can choose either a digital or physical version.
Diablo II was the most popular game of 2000 and it has been predicted that Diablo 3 will sell 5 million copies this year. Diablo is a Dark Fantasy gaming series with many aspects of horror, lots of undead, and Demons playing a major role. It’s the ultimate dungeon dive descending into the depth of hell itself, and the ultimate monster mash with literally hoards of monsters going after your character (you’ll be racing for those choke points)!
Myst – I like Myst now, unfortunately it was responsible for initially putting me off the series (and point and click games as a whole). Why? Well, it is a very short game, something I did not realise until I replayed (and finished) it. On first play I got through most of it then got stuck at the music/space ship puzzle, which is very glitchy. This was frustrating. I felt I was stuck at the beginning (when actually I was close to the end)! It took me 10 years and a friend to talk me into Riven. After that I had another go… and got stuck in exactly the same place! Fortunately (technology having come on somewhat) I now had access was the wonderful internet to (a) help me and (b) make me realise I was not alone. So I got past it, and realised Myst was pretty good on the whole. (I played REAL Myst the second time around which was probably an improvement). But Riven…
Riven – WOWIEEEE! Dang fabulous game (but in 2nd place, keep reading)! Great puzzles and plot, tremendously beautiful and atmospheric. Amazing world-building mythos, plus the villain, Gehn, is fabulous. You really want to watch the alternate endings just to see how evil he can be. Myst is full of ideas and potential; Riven fulfills it.
Exile – This is my favorite. Why? Saavedro. He is fantastic. I like to get inside the heads of individual characters and this is a game where you really do. He leads you on a tour, you understood exactly how f***ed-up he is and how he got there. The actor, Brad Dourif, (the same guy who played Grima in LOTR and Suder in Voyager) does a truly superb job.
Revelation – This one is good but not a stand alone, and there were some bits that were annoying game-play wise. I was often left with no clue as to what I should be doing next, and spent a lot of time stumbling through the forest randomly poking things; for this it slips into 3rd place. But you’re hooked in here by Atrus’ children, Sirrus and Achenar, and discovering what happened to them after Myst. Having played the previous games I was invested in the characters and therefore really wanted to help, and understand.
End of Ages – Um. Yeah. The actors were CGed in this one, very good CG but I think it took away a lot of what made Myst so unique, appealing and realistic. I have not finished End of Ages, but so far I have found it pretty dull. Atrus isn’t there, nor anyone you recognise (the original actors were not involved with this project). The gameplay in all of the Myst series is slow, but they had me interested. This one didn’t. If I finish it I suspect it will purely be for completeness of the series.