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Worms 2: Armageddon was released on Xbox Live Arcade yesterday for 800 MS points. It is fantastic. Its like being in the golden age of 2D Worms again! Works beautifully over Xbox Live, and even uses those stupid NXE avatars to announce each player’s turn. I spent several hours at it last night. Holy hand grenades, banana bombs, exploding sheep, etc. Great

It is a much more complete experience than the first Worms game on XBLA, mainly because at the time the first one was released, XBLA games were restricted to being a maximum of 50MB in size. Worms 2 is over 170MB.
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Usually I find events like E3 to be a big media wank-fest but there’s some solid gold coming out of this year’s E3, such as:

Left 4 Dead 2 (PC, Xbox 360). Due November 16th, 2009. Yes, only 1 year after the previous one, but damn it looks good.

Forza Motorsport 3 (Xbox 360). Due October 2009. Several years after the previous one, which I loved. Trailer.

Also, they’re remaking 1990’s PC/Amiga classic The Curse of Monkey Island for Xbox 360. One of my all time favourite games. Video here. They’re also making a new episodic Monkey Island game.

Recession? What Recession? I’m going to have to drop the cash for all of these.

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Today I hooked my PC up to my nice 32″ HDTV using a DVI-to-HDMI adapter and a HDMI cable. The picture looks wonderful etc. However, there’s a problem. The main reason I did this was to play games like Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 on the big TV rather than my small PC monitor.

The problem is nVidia’s graphics drivers do not support running things in full screen mode on a secondary display. Huh? Wtf? A quick google reveals that people have been complaining about this since at least 2004. The only current solution is to make the TV the primary display before playing games, then change it back (manually) to the monitor when I’m finished gaming. What a pain in the ass.
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The browser game comes of age. This is impressively good for a browser based game. Still requires Windows though, but they say they’re working on Linux and Mac versions.

Its pretty much exactly the same as Quake 3 was when it came out 10 years ago, except that the computer I had back then couldn’t run it

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Well, I haven’t posted in a month and this is for a number of reasons. Mostly that its been insanely busy in work lately, and I have been wasting lots of my precious free time playing games.
I’m still addicted to Left4Dead on my PC, and have been replaying Forza Motorsport 2 on the Xbox. I bought it a year ago for €20 and I still love it. Today I went and bought the new downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto 4 – The Lost and Damned. Its only 2GB but it still took absolutely aaaaaaaages to download, so I’ve only played about an hour and a half of it but its been good so far. If you liked GTA4, this is more of the same but with entirely different characters.
My last post was about the PS3. I like it but the Xbox 360 is still king of the consoles for me. I spend far more time watching movies and stuff on the PS3 than I do playing games on it. It seems to do a much better job of upscaling standard-def stuff than the 360. The Playstation Network store is also a load of absolute shite compared to Xbox Live’s marketplace. There’s not a whole lot of stuff that you can try before you buy. PS3 does get bonus points for having a web browser and keyboard & mouse support though.

Oh, also my old man came back from Afghanistan in one piece \o/

Hopefully I’ll get off my ass and post more often now.
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My Nintendo Wii has been gathering dust in a corner for months now, so I finally traded it in against a new Playstation 3. It plus a few quite old games got me an impressive 263 euros credit against the PS3.

Then I got home with the PS3 and set it up, went to sign up for the Playstation Network and was told that I need to download a system update… which took 2 hours! Not impressed. On the 360 updates usually only took a few minutes max.

Whenever the hell it finishes I will be giving LittleBigPlanet a whirl.

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…My PC cooked its processor and was out of commission at the time the full version of Left 4 Dead was released
This did seem to be a good reason to upgrade it though. I got a new motherboard, CPU and 4 gigs of RAM from Komplett and got it all up and running on Thursday evening, then spent much of the weekend slaughtering the zombie horde with friends on Left 4 Dead
The new CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, one of the shiny new 45nm ones that runs much cooler than my older 65nm E6600 that killed itself. I am impressed at the difference in frame rate I’m getting in games on the same graphics card as I had before – it must have been CPU-limited by the old processor.

The game, by the way, is awesome, especially in versus mode where you can play as the zombies. Its having a hard time finding lag-free dedicated servers though. Hopefully Valve will get this fixed.

I’ve also gone and stuck Windows XP SP3 onto my Eee PC after a few months of Ubuntu. Eventually got pissed off with it. I’m actually finding XP much faster on it. The only problem is the fact that the C drive is a measly 4GB (as the Eee’s solid state drive is split into 4GB of fast but expensive flash memory, and 16GB of slow but cheap memory) so some fooling around had to be done to move user profiles and stuff to the larger but slower D drive. Battery life is noticeably better under Windows XP too, mainly down to the availability of Asus’s power saving apps I reckon. All of the ACPI on-screen displays and hot keys and stuff worked without any fucking about. To get that stuff working in Ubuntu was a total headache, involving kernel modules and acpi scripts and what not.

Added bonus: This means I can play Peggle on it, woohoo! Couldn’t get that to work through wine on Ubuntu either.

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2008 is a great year for games. See my recent post about Saints Row 2 for an example. Hot on its heels comes Valve’s Left 4 Dead. The free demo became available to the masses on Steam and Xbox Live yesterday, and is a wonderful example of the high quality, polished experience I’ve come to expect from Valve.

Left 4 Dead is a co-operative multiplayer festival of zombie* slaughter. Its not just got your traditional, shambling and slightly thick zombies – oh no, Left 4 Dead has a whole range of the bastards, many of which are athletic, fast-moving, high-jumping murder machines, much like the zombies from 28 days later. Others can do things like vomit on you (nice!), which attracts hordes of them to you for a few moments. There’s a few other varieties too, including boss type zombies which are huge bastards that take a lot of killing, although I haven’t seen them in the demo besides in the introductory cinematic.

(* zombie/infected/undead/whatever – you know what they are)

Its a great looking game, considering that the Source engine has been with us in one form or another since 2004, and it really emphasises the need for team play – there’s only 4 players versus hordes of zombie scum. If you get pinned or trapped by one of the zombies, you can’t escape unless one of your team mates kills the zombie in question. If you get killed you can be revived with minimal health by your team mates, but whoever is reviving you is left exposed, so they need the other remaining members of the team to cover them. If they’re really fond of you they can use their one and only medical kit to heal you up as well. And so on. One thing that sets it apart from other zombie-themed games I’ve played is that ammunition seems plentiful. This is good, since there is no shortage whatsoever of targets!

You can also play by yourself with AI taking control of your team mates, but its nowhere near as much fun. Its well worth getting a few people on your friends list on Steam and getting together to play this. I can’t comment on the Xbox 360 version as I haven’t tried it. I require a keyboard and mouse to be any good at shooters.

A few hours playing the demo was all it took to get me to whip my credit card out and buy the full game from Steam. It will be released on November 18th, and should hit bricks ‘n’ mortar shops a few days later. There’s a five dollar discount if you pre-order it on steam, which gets immediately wiped out when they apply Irish VAT of 21.5% At today’s exchange rate with VAT and preorder discount included it came to about €44.
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There’ve been far too many politics-related posts here in the last few weeks, so here’s something more fun: Saints Row 2, currently available on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 and coming “soon” for PC.

I bought the Xbox 360 version on Friday evening and have become quite addicted to it over the weekend. It is quite obvious to compare this game to Grand Theft Auto 4, so that’s what I’ll do. I loved GTA4 and played the hell out of it. A lot of people moaned about GTA4 after the hype died down, but I still like it. Saints Row 2 is in some ways very similar, and in other ways completely different. Both games give you a large city to drive around and cause mayhem in with a variety of weapons, but Saints Row does a lot of what GTA does best and leaves out the crappier elements, such as irritating tail-the-car type missions.

Saints Row 2 is definitely more forgiving, allowing you to resume from a checkpoint when you fail a mission, and not taking all of your weapons and other goodies away from you when you end up in hospital (i.e. get killed outside of a mission). It also has a Halo-style regenerating health system – if you’re getting your arse kicked, run away and hide for a few seconds while your health bar refills.

SR2 is not as technically accomplished as GTA, but it is just as much fun in my opinion. Volition have concentrated on making the game fun more than making it beautiful. The graphics aren’t great and the radio stations leave a lot to be desired compared to GTA, but I’ve had so much fun just playing the game that I don’t care.

For instance, today I played a mission where one of my gang members has been impaled with a Samurai sword (yes, indeed) and needs to get to hospital. Another gang member is driving the car, and I’m put in the passenger seat with a rocket launcher and infinite ammo. Hordes of enemies attack in cars and on motorbikes and I get to blow the shit out of them with my rocket launcher all the way to the hospital

Another example is one of the “activities” the game gives you to do to boost your reputation and unlock further missions, called Septic Avenger. This involves driving a tanker truck full of shite and spraying it at various targets (people, police cars, buildings, trailer parks, etc) in order to bring down property prices!

One thing worth a mention is the level of character customisation available in this game. As soon as the game starts you are prompted to customise your character, and you really can customise the hell out of him (or her!). This includes making your male character wear female clothes six sizes too small for him if you like. My character is a big fat guy with a beard in a pinstripe suit and a top hat!

There’s tons more stuff to do in this game – I think I’ve barely scratched the surface, but I would highly recommend it. It is certainly much better than the first Saints Row game, which I was not a fan of. Eurogamer gave this game 9/10 and I agree with that score.
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The latest version of Fortress Forever comes with a great piece of startup music that many will recognise as a cover of Ennio Morricone’s famous “The Ecstasy of Gold”, from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Its also well known amongst Metallica fans, as they use it to open their live shows.

This particular version is an acoustic guitar rendition of the song, and you can listen to it here.

(embed now turned into a link since it bloody autoplays)
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