Diablo 3 Officially Announced

Diablo 3 has just been announced at the Worldwide Invitational in Paris. Check out a few videos and screens at http://pc.ign.com/articles/884/884836p1.html . It looks awesome, number 2 was great and i cannot wait for this, didn't see a release date anywhere but i would expect mid 2009.

Ninja Gaiden 2: Review

Ninja Gaiden 2 was released about 3 weeks ago now for the Xbox 360 so you have probably seen quite a few reviews of it by now, but here's my take on it. Ninja Gaiden 2 is an action hack and slash game where you string together combos to kill and mutilate your foes. You play as Ryu Hayabusa, who is shockingly a Ninja, in a fight against the fiends.

First of all for the story. There isn't one. The story is weak, bad and in some cases strange, you will be consistently wondering how you got somewhere, better yet, why you went somewhere. I don't want to give any spoilers but all you need to know is that the emphasis is on gameplay not story.

And luckily the gameplay is great. You have an arsenal of weapons, ranging from a massive scythe which will literally take your enemies legs off to a staff which will cause your foes heads to explode. And also a number of ranged weapons including my favourite; the gattling spear gun. The animation of the fights is great and one of the best features is the ability to dismember most of your enemies. You can take off a leg or both legs, or an arm or both arms, or if you are lucky you will instantly take their head off. Now when an arm goes flying off into the distance it doesn't mean they are dead, in some cases it actually makes them stronger. Certain foes will sacrifice themselves to try and take you will with them, while others will just throw whatever they have at you and keep their distance. It makes the gameplay more intuitive and keeps you guessing. However when a leg or arm is taken off it makes them vulnerable to obliteration techniques. These are maneuvers which will kill the enemy quickly and generally in a very gory way. Although these look very cool and to get rid of some enemies it is a necessity, it does become a bit of an annoyance in that you will almost always have to use it. Sadly though the game does in a lot of cases become a button masher and you will catch yourself using the same set of combos over and over again.

However the design of enemies is brilliant, there are a large variety of normal enemies with great AI. There is a number of different types of demons and ninja type foes and you never fight the same enemy for too long which keeps the combat feeling fresh. But where this game attempts to shine is the bosses which in my opinion are a mixed bag. When you first fight the bosses they are fun and something new, but Team Ninja (the developers) thought it would be a brilliant idea to make you fight them again and maybe even again. Fighting the same boss again with 1 or 2 normal enemies with them isn't fun or inventive. Also the difficulty of the bosses throughout the game isn't progressive, the greater fiends who you would expect to be difficult are actually the easier of the bosses in comparison to the random, none story related based bosses.

The worst part of this game is the camera, it is possibly one of the worst cameras in a game. Although for a game that is this fast paced it must be very difficult to make a good camera. But still the majority of your deaths will be as a result of the camera facing in the wrong direction and just switching to a random and pointless view point. You will likely get the hang of it and learn moves that move you towards enemies anyway. But there is a definite learning curve to this.

The original Ninja Gaiden is remembered for being ridiculously hard, and this is not lost in Ninja Gaiden 2. This game will run your morale down and make you cry, it is one of the most frustrating games i have played in a long time. It is extremely hard and i am sure a number of 360 controller will be thrown and hit during this game (just don't throw it at your TV).

So to sum up, buy this game if you want a challenge and to go back to the old school style of gaming where you will actually get stuck on a boss. But if you want to have fun throughout the game that you purchase avoid Ninja Gaiden 2, or play it on Acolyte mode. But for those hardcore it has a lot to offer with the score system for every level and a number of different leader boards to try and be the best at.

Score:

6.8 / 10

wow public test realm patch notes ???

If you haven't looked at patching coming out for world of warcraft have a look here http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html. This has to be Blizzard most interesting patch they have released to date with some truly great changes i am just gonna briefly talk about the one that make this truly odd patch the first thing that jumped and at me was

• Mounts at 30?! Yes, it's true: Apprentice Riding and mounts are now available at level 30. Training costs 35 gold.

This is great news and for all those altaholic out there this will mean less time walking around mountless and for people joining the game this should significantly increase speed at which you will level from 30-40 but it beckons the question why did it take so long.

• Blood Elf flightmasters outside of Silvermoon City and Tranquillien have traded in their bats for glorious fire-breathing dragonhawks.

Great for a lore sense, this is great news and shows that blizzard is still polishing the game.

• Alcohol cooldowns have been rolled into Drinks: All 10-second cooldowns have been removed and replaced with the 1-second Drink cooldown.

for all you RP out there you can now get your character wasted ten times faster and consume ten times as much in same time (is this blizzard brilliant strategy to get the economy back under control) :P

• Haris Pilton has launched a new line of bags and jewelry. Check her out in the World's End Tavern!

Why is all i can say

There lots of other weird stuff so be sure to check it out

Spore creature creator

Warp:

Today i downloaded and played with creature creator (look at time) well actual that was yesterday anyway if you go to http://www.spore.com/ you can download for free spore creature creator where the possibilities are endless expect for very limited amount of part you can use in the trial. But even with few parts you are given there is a huge amount of customizability and you can let you imagination run wild i would highly recommend trying it out i have contemplated buying the full edition but have decided to hold off until the game comes out.

I thought it would be fun to just show you guys what me and blaze have create with some comment on designs:

This was my first creation using spore and i had great deal of fun making it. I tried to push the genetic complexity meter to full, which is bar telling you when you've added to much stuff to your creature though i think i could have pushed it abit further i called this one Spitnort because it has tail which spit green stuff. Its a pretty basic design but i was just messing with features.








This one here is one of my favourites Grubber which was the result of wanting to create a biped with a sort of water theme hence the colouring and weed hair and fins and a younger version is also in the picture.









Blaze:

Yeah now for my (Blaze) exploits on Spore Creature Creator. But before here are my impressions of the creature creator. It is amazing fun, i only got the trial version and have considered paying for it. It is very innovative and something we frankly have never seen before to this extent. You owe it to yourself as a gamer to play this, at least the trial. But it will also appeal to none gamers just due to it being extremely simplistic to use but it can get very complicated and complex. I myself wasn't hugely excited for Spore before hand because it could have easily failed due to it being so complex on a game mechanic level but from this i am very confident it will be an excellent game and one that i will remember as one of the most innovative games. But still we have yet to see how the rest of the game will play out.

So here are 2 of my favourite creations:


This one is called Bleppin, i have no idea why i called it that but i did. I thought can the face be at the back and can it walk forwards. And yes it can which is cool. However you cannot have two sets of legs facing opposite directions. Which makes a lot of sense.






This one is named Hormiculas and it was my first creation. Pretty standard dinosaur thing and had some fun with the colours.


But yeah this is just a sample of what you can make and it has a awesome test drive system whereby you can move your creature, make them do different emotes (including dancing) and even view what the children will look like. And you can take photos such as these and even record video and upload it directly to Youtube from the game. So check it out.

Thanks for reading

Summer Gaming

Now summer has started and my exams are over its time to game. My current game list consists of ever present World of Warcraft (WoW), Team Fortress 2 (TF2) and Games from Game taps free game catalogue.

As you are probably aware Game Tap (http://www.gametap.com/) is a Digital distribution network which you can join for free to gain access to a catalogue of 121 free games (though they are not all available outside the US) and these arn't just indie games it includes some good title such as Tomb Raider: Legend and Psychonauts your not gonna find new titles on here for free but it has a nice back catalogue of games.

Your probably thinking to your self this cant be true they wouldn't give games away for free, well your right as you do have give up few second of your time to watch an advertisement when you load up the game. Its also quite forgiving, i had few errors when loading up one of the games and it allowed me to try loading it up again without showing the advertisement again though i am not sure how this grace period works or for how long.

The only problem I have with it so far is that it insists on giving me the same two advertisements whenever i load up the game. I would think since they must tracking what advertisement are being shown they would try mix up advertisement abit.

Anyway so far i have been playing BloodRayne and Psychonauts. I'd like to take few minutes to talk about these two games BloodRayne's cover art attracted my attention with its cunning scantly clad half-vampire. I thought what the hell and it turned out to be quite a decent adventure game with a cool combat system and a weak but dark story line to boot, but as Game Tap points out to you if your looking for depth look else where and it not possible to fight this argument.

It is showing its age as it came out in 2002 the graphics were good for its day but is heavily out dated now but its still decent game sadly i have run into bug which is preventing me from progressing any further. I am not sure if this is the games problem or vista being retarded so i will be looking into it.

This was obliviously an extremely popular game which I missed out on it was available on PC, PS2, Gamecube, xbox, Mac (why) and they also made film (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0383222/) and second game though since i haven't seen or played ether of these two i cant comment on its quality. OK back to the first game i have to admit that the controls are quite clunky and i can imagine it would play much nicer with game pad sadly the game would not recognise my 360 controller which it felt was uncalibrated. The combat is a gory affair with decapitations and finishing moves that slice the enemies into chunks, it's not particularly difficult to do but still satisfying. While fighting you charge up a bar which results in killing frenzy which is pretty cool and must use for bosses. The boss fights i had played were varied and interesting even if it was button mashing affair. I overall enjoyed this game and would highly suggest you to trying it if your 17+ of course.

The second game i played is Psychonauts (trying to spell this is pain) which is a truly unique game which was released back in 2005 on PC, Xbox, PS2 even though its 3 years old its cartoonish graphics save it from aging to badly and the unique art style makes it a good looking game to this day the basic story is that psychic boy named Raz escapes from circus and join psychic summer camp where the plot unfolds.

The game is witty enough to make you smile but personally not enough to make me burst out laughing and the game play is fun and varied with the a large range of bosses and puzzles asking you to use different psychic power to solve each one. The game will vomit out hints as soon as you get stuck so if your looking for difficult game look else where.

The controls on PC version feel like they were made for game pad as sometimes Raz wont go exactly where you want him to and when your doing some of aerobatic your lack of control can be a problem especially the second part of the last boss fight. It might be good idea to play this with game pad though i enjoyed it myself playing with keyboard and mouse (360 controller failed to be recognised again).

The game also has options for the completest with emotion baggage, mind cobwebs, psy cards and figments to collect in all of the level. If your like me you'll just grab what you see and move on with the story though but it does give the game some extra re-playability.

The Plot is extreme rich and vibrant and little too childish at time but on whole was extremely enjoyable. The game will allow you to access different character mind throughout the game mostly the insane so you get taken into lots of different weird world. In which you get to do cool thing like smash up a city as a giant, running simple war games against napoleon and fight wrestlers. This is a must try and since you can play for free (with adverts) whats stopping you.

So now with these to out of the way i have started playing tomb raider legend check back here for comment on that later.