Rabbit Hole

I’ve always been a Resident Evil fan… maybe that’s why Silent Hill never sparked my interest. It just simply flew under my radar waiting to be discovered at a later date. With all the hoopla about the newest Silent Hill at this years E3 I decided to try out the, world renowned, “scariest series” known to the industry. I dug up my old PSX sitting in the cubby-hole, preceded to my nearest “used video games” shop, bought Silent Hill and began to play. Unfortunately, I’m not home as much as I would like to be so I decided I would find out a way to play this game on my laptop. Read more to find out how you can do it too!

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Three great first person shooters are on my scope right now. I just got my greedy little hands on Unreal Tournament 3; I had the German version the other week, but refused to play it… but now… now my friends I have the English version and I am ready to pwn. We have been seeing media for this game for as long as I can remember and I am finally ready to make decisions on my own! The game is supposed to have amazing graphics and AI, but how does it favour coming so late into the game, against I.Ps like Crysis and COD4. Either way I am ready to mark another chapter into my Unreal book.

The release of UT3 couldn’t of came at a better time. Last night I just finished Soldier of Fortune Payback. Activision decided SoF wasn’t worthy enough for a full development team and put the title under Activision “Value” development. This really grinds my gears! Soldier of Fortune was HUGE when I was a child, with all its blowing off limbs, mindless violence and infinite bots coming out of every corner you could possibly imagine. Now its a second class citizen! A cast-a-way; something only to see in the bargain bins of Walmart! But no, this game is INCREDIBLE straight hardcore action with really good graphics and of course more mindless violence and limb blowing offing. The game starts out where you left off in the previous SoF’s; you are still pissed about your partner getting killed and now you are here for… well payback. You are instantly thrown into the fray fighting Americas favourite enemy… Iraq; trying to track down some weapon dealer and then heading to Asia to fight Americas second favourite enemy, Koreans… all very stereotypical. But what do you expect from Soldier of Fortune?! With Duke Nukem forever taking… well forever games need new Bruce Willis American Heroes. There’s nothing to say about the multiplayer of SoF:PB its just like anything you could expect from any old school first person shooter, you got your regular deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag and the subsets of the two. If you are looking to spend a couple of hours in a video game Soldier of Fortune would definitly be the way to go. Soldier of Fortune Payback has all the great qualities of the Soldier of Fortunes before it, plus better graphics and even better limb gibbing.

Lastly on my list is Crysis… I’ve been playing this game on and off for the past couple of days. I am making a valient effort to beat it, but it is a very very hellishly long game! I’ll keep you dudes and dudettes updated on when i finally do beat it, but guarenteed it won’t be for a while. Unreal Tournament 3 here I COME!!!

Today we have a guest writer! Mike McMahon from the Windsor Gaming Centre… he’s here to give us a guest review on Assassins creed!! Take it away mike!

Since we got the game I played it as often as I possibly could. The game started out with twist that took me by surprise by adding a bit of present day / futuristic content to the game. The storyline parts in between the assassinations all take place here, but thats the only time that anything happens in the “real world” as it would be. Once you get into the past, you take control of a character named Altair, who is an assassin in the days of the crusades. Your in the middle of a mission that you fail, and for that, you are demoted from the best assassin, to the lowest level. After each successful assassination, you regain one of those ranks to get new items / abilities. After waiting for all the preliminary story line stuff to end and adoring the awesome graphics, I immediately started free-running around town for a good 20 minutes. A complete waste of time, wishing that I could only do that in RL (Real Life), but fun nonetheless. Since I was in my own town I really couldn’t kill anyone, so I left for my first of 9 Assassinations. I needed to ride a horse to the first town, which was pretty sweet, only because it’s something that you can’t do in most games, and it looked really good. Sneaking my way past the guards into the city, I did a bit more free-running along the rooftops of Jerusalem (I think thats where it was anyway) and started looking for the target.

To get to the assassin’s guild I needed to get at least 3 of 9 “investigations” done to gain enough information to assassinate my target. There are only 3 ways to do this; Informant’s, eavesdropping, and pickpocketing. Informants have 1 of 2 missions for you once you find them. Either free-running to pickup a series of flags then returning to the informant before time runs out, or assassinating a specific guards before the time runs out. I did all of them with at least 1 minute to spare. Eavesdropping was rather easy, just sit down on a nearby bench, target the eavesdropping target, then press Y to eavesdrop. Listen to the dialog, and the mission is done. Pickpocketing is also rather easy to do. Target the guy carrying the intel, wait for him to finish some dialog with a random NPC, then wait till he isn’t looking, walk up behind him, and swipe the intel from his backpack (its more like a satchel, but whatever).

The hardest part was finding those missions. To do that I generally had to climb to the top of a tower, look around the area, and it would point out all the missions that were nearby, afterwards jumping off and landing in a conveniently placed pile of hay. Pain in the butt sometimes, other times it looked really nice so it made up for it. One of the three cities has a cathedral in it that was a ton of fun to climb, then fall off of and die because I couldn’t find the bail of hay to jump into. That process was to be repeated 9 times. Here I’m going to stop for those of you who would like to play the game and get into the storyline of it, because if i went any further I would end up ruining it.

All in all I thought the game was fun, and it looked amazing. However there is very little replay in it, other than the free-running part, which can get boring rather quickly. My final rating for it? 8/10, for Great graphics, and good first time game play.

We are coming to the home stretch of this week and my earlier post was right… I have tons of games but nothing to play them on.

Here is some quick bits of information before I start to list everything I got this week. First off my Internet is DEAD. Cogeco is coming to fix it tomorrow (friday); so hopefully that can be done by the weekend. I may of broke my keyboard by cleaning it out of boredom, the LAN centre doesn’t have any more DVD-R’s so I can’t burn anymore Wii Games and I have a midterm in roughly 8 hours that I have studied like crazy for… once again out of boredom.

Now with all that said I have managed to play ONE game out of the many I have received this week and that game is… drum roll please… Raving Rabbids 2; the sequel to the Wii release title Raving Rabbids. I refuse to call it Rayman Raving Rabbids because it is no longer about Rayman… its about demented rabbits. So take a look at this golden list of games that I CAN’T PLAY BUT I HAVE IN MY POSSESSION!

Cabella big game hunters - 360… not a game I’m into, but it seems the whole “hunting game genre” has become rather popular. I might play this for half an hour to see what all the buzz is about.

Need for speed pro street - 360 and PC… I don’t expect this to be any different than any of the other Need for Speed games so I’m not too excited however if I were to play it I would be playing it on my 360.

Kane and lynch - 360… You bet your ass I’ll be playing this I am very much excited to play this with my cousin. Should be an interesting experience; still waiting to get the PC version.

Scene it - 360… Microsoft’s attempt to speak to all audiences much like Nintendo has been doing this generation. I have no interest in this game… games like this only make me feel retarded.

Beowulf - 360 and PC… Movie games have never been that exciting, but if I had nothing to do I would touch this… but since I have other games like Assassins Creed and mass Effect; I don’t think this will be played much.

Blacksite area 51 - 360 and PC… A mysterious game. The only thing I know about this game is that kotaku is doing a contest around it. Other than that I really want to give it a try and see what its like.

Crysis - PC… Oh the untouchable. The only way I will get to play this is if my cousin decides to bring his computer to my house again.

Unreal tournament 3 - PC… Sure I got the German version, but there is nothing stopping me from playing this to check out the visuals

Soldier of fortune payback - PC and 360… Everyone is up in arms about this sequel; I loved the SoF series so its only natural for me to give this one a try. Definitly one to pay on the PC, but I don’t think it will live up to its daddy.

Resident evil umbrella chronicles - Wii… Don’t know much about this game but I would love to try it out real quick.

Raving rabbids 2 - Wii… Already been playing it and I can’t say much other than its much like its big brother… only not as good.

Assassins creed - 360… Do I really need to explain this?

Sim city society - PC… VERY BOTTOM of my list

Mass Effect - 360… Do I need to explain this too?

Oh and to top that all off I got Marie Antoinette to watch with my girlfriend

This weekend was chalk full of video games and film. Friday started out rather hectic! I was essentially recruited into a 48 hour flick fest group. Basically we have to create a film in 48 hours based on the stipulations proposed by the Windsor International film festival. The film had to include a down town location, a film festival t-shirt and the line “I’m sorry momma you can’t park there”. Saturday morning Tyler and I met up with the group and wrote a story about a hobo who time travels. It’s a short story about a hobo who is recruited by a scientist for an experiment. In this experiment the scientist will recreate this hobo into a respectable human being. At the same time another scientist is disgusted with this act and tells the hobo that she can teleport him back in time so that he can stop himself from working in the experiment. They filmed Saturday night and Melanie and I edited Sunday. It’s pretty crappy, but it was fun either way.

Friday night was jammed packed with video games. Tyler and I ended up beating Super Mario galaxy. We touched a little on Manhunt 2 for the Wii and we also played a lot of Conan for the 360. Oh and I beat his ass in bleach for the wii; Ishida kicks ass. This little gaming event bled into Saturday… oh and I hung out with my girlfriend a lot.

Overall it was a good weekend, I should write some reviews on Mario Galaxy and Conan soon. Manhunt 2 isn’t worth my time.

This week is a semi-big week, with games like Call of Duty 4 and the Simpsons game I am sure to stay busy! Before the week starts allow me to throw out all the games I’m keeping my eye on this week. From here I can decide which go play and which to pass aside as not worth my time. Well here be the list:

PSP:
Silent Hill: Origins

X360:
Call of Duty 4
Simpsons Game
Bladestorm
Lego Star Wars Complete Saga
Guitar Hero 3
Timeshift
Viva Pinata party Animals

PC:
Empire Earth 3
FEAR Perseus Mandate
Avencast Rise of the mage
Painkiller Overdose
Timeshift

Wii:
Mario and Sonic Olympics
Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn

Oh so busy where to start… might as well start with the small things. Just an update on Super Mario Galaxies for the Wii; I ended up getting a copy of this beast, but Nintendo decided they would be jerks and throw a new type of copy protection on this marvel of a game. The released version of Super Mario Galaxies works on the DCWii Keys, but not on the WiiKey’s or WiiKey Clones. WiiKey has announced that they have addressed an issue, but are working out a delivery system… whatever the hell that means; why can’t they just release an update CD or just give us the binaries… either way; thats at a standstill.

Last night Colin decided to praise me with an XBOX 360 with a BENQ drive in it. Which means Zach and I had a chance to finally take a stab at modding the BENQ’s. It’s surprisingly easy once you get over the millions of drive swaps during a read/erase and write. To make a long story short we finally got my BENQ modded and tested a backup of Halo 3 on it… worked perfectly! Yay!!!! We didn’t even boot it before modding it; that was kind of a mistake because we actually had to use a controller after modding it; yea… we are that lazy.

So all in all I have spent 130$ Canadian on a 360; not bad in my opinion. I bought a computer PSU with Xbox Connector off of DiviNeo today. Now all I need is to wait for the PSU, buy myself some high def cables and a memory card… then my friends… I am buisness.

I haven’t been able to play any new games recently. I found out an interesting tid-bit of news last night; it turns out the new Memorxes they sell in Windsor are not Wii compatable. I ran into yet ANOTHER batch of Memorxes that fail after burning Wii iso’s to them.. so if you are tempted to buy that 9.99$ 100 pack (like I was) … DONT! So now my Wii media of choice are Philips DVD-R’s… they seem to be working fine.

Things are slowing down in school which means I will have a lot more time for my girlfriend and video games, plus my parents leave next week so I will have some quiet time as well.

Just some Halloween news for all you guys! I went to Halloweekends over the weekend and I would have to say I was extremely impressed. Saturday night was VERY cold, but I got to share a coat with my girlfriend so that wasn’t so bad. The fright zones were the best… after 8PM they designate certain parts of the park as “fright zones”… essentially it involves actors running around scaring you, pretty cool stuff but it looses its effect after a couple of hours. There are also haunted houses sprawled across the park, sadly none of these were as good as the haunted house here in Windsor, but they were still really fun. To further my halloween adventures I went to a zombie walk with Tyler this past Sunday; it was AMAZING!!! If you are really interested in the walk there are tons of facebook groups under the Windsor network to check out. Just search Windsor Zombie… or look for the Windsor Zombie Horde. They are trying to plan another walk for december, but I will keep the blog posted.

Anyway tonight I will be heading out to see 30 days of night with my girlfriends brother…. I hope your halloween is spppooooookkkyyyyy!!!

It’s the end of the week and even today we are still seeing new releases for the week. My desk is cluttered with copies of Jericho (which we now have for the PC AND 360). I would have to say this game is the best game for 360 I have ever played.. a little mature, but still awesome. Also I can’t wait to get my hands on Bleach Shattered Blade and Zack and Wiki Quest for Barbaros Treasure for the Wii. There is also a Japanese Wii game that I would like to check out… Ghost Squad; it too came out this week. So enjoy minions!!

PC:
Hard Truck Apocolypse - Buka Entertainment (Apocolyptic Racing Action)
Age Of Empires III Asian Dynasties - Microsoft Ensemble Studios (Real Time Strat)
Clive Barkers Jericho - Codemasters (Demonic First Person Shooter)
Battlestar Galactica - Sierra (Top down Space Combat)

360:
Final Fantasy 11 - SquareEnix (MMORPG)
Need for Speed Most wanted - EA Games (Street Racing)
Need for Speed Carbon Collectors Edition - EA Games (Street Racing)

Wii:
Avatar The Burning Earth - THQ (Action)
Bleach Shattered Blade - Sega (Fighting)
Ghost Squad
Rayman Raving Rabids - Ubisoft (Adventure Mini Game)
Rockstar Games Table Tennis - Rockstar Games (Sports)
The Legend of Spyro Eternal Night - Sierra (Adventure)
Zack and Wiki Quest for Barbaros Treasure - Capcom (Adventure)