What ho chaps. How are you?

Well then the temperature in hell must have dropped a bit because it’s time for an update, and not just an update but a review!

This month object of my fanatical devotion is Superhero themed MMO Champions Online.

For those that don’t know, it’s based off a pen and paper RPG and has been transferred to the medium of computer games by those nice blokes at Cryptic. Yes the same Cryptic who made that other Superhero MMO City of Heroes (or villains if you prefer).

Admittedly, it’s been a while since I logged into City of Heroes, but it seems what issues I had while playing it have been solved with Champions. From the off you’re made to feel like a Superhero, right from the character creator. This can be the make or break for this type of game. Much like City of Heroes your appearance isn’t defined by what random drops you get, only by the sections available in the character creator, which are certainly not lacking in Champions. You can create a Hero that is truly original without having to spend hours dungeon crawling, though the creator and tailor options may eat up just as much time. Oh and don’t worry if someone’s take your preferred hero name, all names are linked to your main account so only that has to be unique.

From there you’re on to the tutorial level: A full blown alien invasion. No killing level 1 boars for these guys. And once you’re done saving the city, it’s off to pastures new, for a bit any way, and as soon as you’re out of tutorial you get to pick from a wide range of travel powers, again making you feel powerful straight away. No catching the subway here.

There are 5 zones for questing, Canadian Wilderness, Southwest Desert, Millennium City and later Monster Island and the underwater Lumaria. Each one is introduced by its own “crisis”, a special version of the zone with a number of obstacles to over come before been allowed into the zone proper. The invasion serves as Millennium City’s, and you choose Canada or the Desert from there. These first events function more like the standard worlds with missions that must be passed to proceed. The Crisis levels for the 2 later zones though take on the form of instanced team challenges which move along are a fair pace.

Levelling is a relatively painless affair. I hit the 40 level cap and only found myself grinding the last few thousand xp. There are a few content gaps towards the end and you really have to explore to find missions at some points, but as mobs give relatively small xp compared to other MMO’s it’s worth it.

Champions is the most enjoyable MMO I’ve played to date. The majority of it is soloable if you’re not the mood for a team-up and the Superhero setting is a nice change of pace in a genre dominated by sword-and-sorcery grind-a-thons. The quite a robust role-playing scene if that’s your things and even after hitting the level cap I’ve still found myself going back. With the first major additional content and event due at the end of the month, I think this one may have legs.

SO finally we have seen Final Fantasy 14 online in action and damn am I psyched up for this game now.

When it comes to MMORPG’s I tend to take each one with a pinch of salt, in fact there are only 2 names in the MMO world that will peak my interest whenever i hear their names, 1 is Guild Wars and the other is Final Fantasy.

I have very fond memories of Final Fatasy 11 due to it being one of the first MMORPG’s that I ever played and due to what we have seen of 14 so far it looks to retain that old style and magic that 11 held.

Now I could go into lots of details about what has been shown about the game but I’m not going to, just know that it is defiantly one to watch and here is a pic to get you going and a link to all the info we have seen so far.

So for more info go to http://www.ffxivcore.com/ for more info on what has been shown at GAMESCOM 2009.

Elbobo

It was about a year ago that i brought Wipeout HD from my beloved PSN store and too this day i still believe it to be one of the most beautiful games I own, therefore it comes as no surprise that the annoucement of an expansion got me…well a little excitable

usually when i hear the word expansion i think oh god the cost will outway the actual gameplay but for once this is not the case.  So what do we get for our measly £7.99?

The expansion adds 12 new ship designs (with updated stats) 8 new tracks (4 standard and 4 for zone), 3 new game modes (eliminator, detonator and zone battle) and a whole new campaign to play all this on. 

now when you consider the original had a campaign of the same size and about the same amount of ships and tracks, this becomes a bargin and you should buy it…I mean it go and buy it now, if not just for the new modes alone.

As a stand alone game this would be awesome, but as a expansion it just adds icing to a delectable jam sponge cake. 

so once again I can happily say thank you to our good lads at Studio Liverpool for creating the best Expansion i have seen in a long time. (on a side note more wipeout 3 tracks please )

Elbobo

What ho chaps!

Jolly nice day. Well that depends on your outlook. Been unemployed an suspicious of the sun I’ve been spending most of my time locked in my room hoping the need for food doesn’t over whelm my fear of the outside world.

That said I have been tempted into the daylight to purchase Ghostbusters: The Video Game

First off I’m very impressed with it. Unlike some other licenced games of recent times there are no glaring problems with it to detracted from the experience. Spider-man Web of Shadows for instance was a perfectly fun game, but it was plagued with issues. Ghostbusters is just fun.

Taking the role of a fifth Ghostbuster, both unnamed and unvoiced, you get the job of testing all the unsafe prototype equipment. As such you fell very unobtrusive in the Dan Akroyed & Harold Remis penned story, effectively letting the characters you know and love get on with it while you’re just along for the ride. All the returning characters are voice by the original actor for that extra bit of authenticity too and while some of the lines sound a little wooden, you don’t really notice the first time through.

The busting itself is handled very well. Unlike other shooter you’re not just blasting away and things. While there are enemies you do just destroy with your proton pack, the game really feel right when you’re trapping ghosts. This is split into three sections. First you wear down a ghost energy, then you hold in a capture stream letting you pull it around the stage, and then into the trap. Alot of standard shooter weapons have been replicated as various upgrades to the standard proton back. A boson dart stands in for an RPG and there are shotgun/machine gun alternatives thrown into. There work best against the destroyable foe, but for actual Ghostbusing I tended to stick with the standard proton stream.

It’s not an especially long game, but there is plenty to go back for for completionists . As well as been a tool for tracking ghosts down, your PKE meter can scan them to complete Tobin’s Spirit Guide and a number of cursed artifacts to track down in each level. In addition you also get a couple of quite entertaining features on the disk, a behind the scene look at the game and, my favorite, a look at the restoration of the original Ecto 1.

It’s heard to say if the game would stand-up without the licence, as the experience is just so Ghostbusters from start to finish. If you love Ghostbusters (and lets face it, who doesn’t) it’d be hard to go wrong with this one.

So with the last post hyping up the crazy I figured hey, may as well try and bring this thing back to life. If nothing else it gives me something to do while I’m between jobs.

Speaking of which my new status as a man of leisure has allowed me to dig into some older games a bit more, as well as fully enjoy the few new ones I’ve been able to get and a few I’ve nicked off Bobo.

First up, my addiction to the free-roaming crack that is Saints Row 2 has only gotten worse with the release of DLC. 6 new missions, 12 new forms of transport and loads of new customisation options for about £11.50. That’s two paid and one free pack. Now role on Saints Row 3.

inFamous also grab my attention. Did one run as a Hero, now running through in bad guy mode. Fun stuff.

Banjo Kazooie Nuts & Blotz is surprisingly good fun. Made some truly epic (and truly retarded) contraptions, such is the power of the creation tools most things will get you from a to b at least.

And last but not least Fuel. Been getting some bad press but I loved it. Has a pleasing “one more go” factor to it. On-line needs work though.

Well enough for now, no doubt more to come when boredom shows it’s face again.

Cheers.

Ok it’s been a while since a post here, but in the intrests of what you are about to see I felt it was needed.

Tekken 6 head

Now what the crap is up with that?!

Battlestar Galactica just finished and I felt compelled to do something small in tribute to the finest show ever made. One of the things that I love the most in the show is the astounding music composed by Bear McCreary so I lept at the idea of a tribute to his version of All Along the Watchtower.

All Along the Watchtower

It was a lot of fun to arrange and try to get something similar to his version but different enough to be my own. I enlisted the talents of Chris (El Bobo) Nelson for vocal duties on the song as I could never do it justice and then set out to record what would become a very instrument dense mix! All told there are around 30 different instrument tracks recorded and I managed to reduce that number down to something more audible. Stylistically, I tried to arrange this to be a heavier mix than the version used on the show. I wanted to keep the same Final Four/Five theme in there and keep the basic structure of the song the same. I decided to change up the rhythm throughout and slow the bpm slightly and gradually introduced more bizarre instruments and effects in to give a greater texture.

It’s not perfect by any means, but I enjoyed doing this, I hope you all like it

Phil Haymes

At the time of writing this it is 4am on a Monday morning, I have 2 hours until I go to work and I have not slept in two days, fun fun huh?

Anyway I actually have a point to write so here it is.

I never thought the day would come when I would be so utterly disgusted by a game from the Sonic franchise.  Myself  like quite a few people out there,  am a sonic whore, yes I play every game, yes even Unleashed.

Last week we got to finally try Sonic and the Black Knight and I have never taken a Sonic game back to a store so quickly.  Now I had heard the game was short (I am aware there are 2 endings btw) but even after the final boss I still felt that I had played for a longer period of time than I did.  My final save time was 2hrs 26mins and 23sec, now when compared to older Sonic games this is alot, but when you found that all you do for 2 hours is push forwards and waggle the remote occasionally you realise what a waste of time it has been.  This game has no challenge and it really is a shame because SEGA really could have made this something special.

The game has a really high production value, everything from music to menus is a joy to listen to and look at, so I found it to be a real shame that there is in fact no game here, presentation does not a good game make.  Now I can forgive the Werehog crap, hell I loved unleashed, but this is scraping the bottom of the barrel, the idea seemed good on paper but execution is so poor trust me you don’t want to bother. So overall i must say a few words to SEGA: -

Dear SEGA , please stop this right now, put away the darts and the ideas board or whatever you use to come up with this shit and stop feeding us this crap.  As a long time Sonic fan I feel sick having played this game, all my good memories from past games are now tainted by crap like this, oh and on a side note, new characters are not always better(Marine in sonic rush adventure should not exist in any reality).

This may seem like an angry post and I assure you it is and how can I not be angry, it’s not everyday that a childhood memory is shit upon.  Come on SEGA you are better than this.

Elbobo

It seems ASDA quite likes the Nintendo Wii and this weekend they will be giving the below deal.

Wii Console + Mario Kart + Wall:E + Wii Nunchuck for £177 – Save £59.47! This starts on Thursday 26th Feb and runs until COB Sunday 1st March.

This information comes from a contact within ASDA, so if you have yet to get that Wii for someone take advantage of this offer.

I hate to say this but my PS3 has finally died, well it’s not completly dead but it will no longer read disks.

luckily my console is within it’s first year warrenty(just by 2 days whew) and so I have made my first call to Sony to get it fixed and I must say compared to Microsoft customer support Sony seem like GODS.

Never before have I been so impressed with speed of response and cure as I have with Sony, they make me feel like all is right with the world.  Yes my PS3 is broken but I feel that it is in good hands:)

So long PS3 we await your return.