My favourite games of 2011

Believe it or not Battlefield, CoD and Skyrim are not on my list like most others. I'm not the biggest fan of military shooters and as for Skyrim it's not that I don't like games like that, it's more the fact I will never finish the storyline as I will always get distracted by side quests and randomly killing shit. I've still not finished Oblivion purely for that reason. Anyway I've sat and came up with a list of 7 games released this year that I've really quite enjoyed.

Payday: The Heist - This is a little multi player where you play and 3 others play cooperatively in order to pull off heists, be it robbing banks or ripping off drug dealers. I've put so many hours in to game since it's release, it brings a different twist on the team coop style of games, you can definitely tell it was inspired by Left 4 Dead by the gameplay, but it is a awesome game in its own right. It has seen a number of patches already with some DLC on the way, no doubt being a map pack.



Bulletstorm - While this game didn't get the warmest reception upon it's arrival I loved this game it is the most fun I've had playing a shooter for quite some time. The skill shot system this game had is quite ingenious. The better you played the more points you got leading to you getting more and or better weapons quicker, leading again to more points. The game made you play better in order to get decent guns. This game was fun as hell.



Orcs Must Die! - This is a little indie game that I came across on youtube, possibly a Machinima video about it I can't honestly remember. It is pretty much a tower defence game with a playable character in them rather than from the top down perspective which they started off as. I release there are many 3rd person tower defence games out there these days. This one is quite a good one, only flaw in it is the lack of multi player which I could see being a lot of fun, especially if they put a harder difficulty in.  It would be good to see, but like I said there are many out there if you do want a multi player experience.



Bastion - This is another little indie game. Which has seemingly done very well for its self since it's release back in August (I believe it was out on Xbox before then but that is its Steam release date). It is a single player hack and slash adventure game. If you haven't played this game before I highly suggest picking it up. It costs about a tenner but is definitely worth it. The story, the gameplay, the music, the narration especially. It is a really good game.



Serious Sam 3 - Not much to say about this one. It's Serious Sam, if you don't know the series. It's a old school kind of shooter. Levels consist of a shed load of enemies you get a shed load of guns and you work your way through them.



The Baconing - This is the 3rd installment in the Deathspank series. It's weird, it's random and it has orphans and robot hookers in the game. If you liked any of the other Deathspank game you will like this game. It's definitely worth a look in to at the very least.



Hard Reset - This is a decent little shooter, it's also pc exclusive. It is a fun but really quite difficult game. I struggle on Normal difficulty and it's got hard and insane after that as well. I put this in the same boat as the  likes of Serious Sam and Painkiller. It's a good attempt at bring shooters back to what they used to be like. You get a variety of weapons, it's quite good what they have done with it though. They merged the two weapon system of todays shooters with the multiple weapon system of yesteryear by letting you upgrade the two weapons you do have letting them become multiple guns in one. I quite like this feature. On release it cost just over £20 and is now down to £12.99 on Steam. Definitely worth the money I would say.

Alan Wake coming to PC

Xbox exclusive Alan Wake will be making it's way over to PC some point in Q1 next year. Took a while but it's still a lot quicker than some games have been ported over to the PC side of things, two years is relatively quick for getting console ports. Anyway hopefully this is a sign of things to come and more Xbox exclusives will be making their way over to us with mouse and keyboards. Two main ones I want are Gears of War and Halo, I highly doubt their going to make an appearance. I can only hope.

New Humble Bundle

If you don't know what the Humble Bundle is, it was set up to raise money for charity by sell a random assortment of indie games for what ever price you found fit. The amount you pay can be literally anything and can be split between the developers of the game, the charity and the guys at humble bundle. 

As an incentive for you to pay more they give you an extra game or two if you pay over the average price paid, most of the times I've noticed it's been round about $5-10. Considering if you bought these games separately it would cost about £100, it's quite a ridiculous bargain.

This bundle includes: NightSky, Shank, Super Meat Boy, Bit.Trip Runner, Jamestown, Cave Story+ and Gratuitous Space Battles. The last two games you get if you pay over the average which stands at $4.58 at the time of me writing this. I will be getting this bundle on Tuesday when I get some money. I dunno how much I will pay yet but I will do more than the average. So if you want to pick up a few new games to keep you occupied in the up run to christmas send a few quid there way. There is only 14 days left on this offer so get in while you can.

Guild Wars 2 - Mesmer Trailer

I haven't written anything about Guild Wars 2 on here, I feel I should have really considering I was a massive fan of the first game. This trailer isn't meant to be out until tomorrow but has been leaked so I figured I'll share it anyway. I'm rather happy the last profession happened to be mesmer as it is my favourite along side ranger which was one of the first announced. First character I make will be Syvari ranger, second will be Asuran mesmer. Now they just need to hurry up and release the game. Anyway here is some mesmer footage.

Modern Warfare 3 makes $1 Billion in record time.

Love it or hate it, it must be doing something right. I am not the greatest fan of the series, but the fact that it breached 1 billion dollars in a matter of 16 days after it's initial release date.

This is the fastest any media product has reached this milestone, beating Avatar which held the title at 17 days to get to the 1 billion marker, which is still damn impressive in it self.

I have played CoD games in the past I can see the appeal as they all are easy to pick up and play. I don't like them due to the health regeneration system in place. I prefer games where you have a set amount of health if you lose it you die, not this whole 'you can suck you thumb behind this car for 10 seconds and magically your cured' system they have in place with a lot of games these days. It makes the game far to easy, which I guess is why it appeals to a lot of people. It makes it easier for anyone no matter there experience playing shooters able to play the game with at least some what of a chance of not dying constantly. Anyway I'm gonna stop there before I get in to a full blown rant about why I'm not a fan and actually congratulate Activision, because like the game or not, this is one hell of an achievements.

Command + Conquer: Generals 2

A new Command + Conquer game is in the works. This one being a sequel to Generals, from the teaser trailer below it looks like they are going back to how C+C games should be. Good to see they learned from the huge mistake that was Command and Conquer 4. I did buy it purely because it was another C+C game but that was without any research in to the game at all, I regret buying it but never mind. I did enjoy the first Generals game and hopefully this will be just as good as it's predecessor. I will be keep an eye on the development of this game.

Killing Floor

Killing Floor is a coop survival game and Steam are having a free weekend this weekend with the game also knocked down to £3.74, 75% off it's regular price. If you haven't played it before think a generic survival mode with waves of enemies with the option to buy weapons in between each one. I bought this game at least a year ago I would say but never really played it. But now have put a few hours in to it over the last day or so. It is quite fun, especially if you can get a somewhat decent team together. If you do die during a wave of enemies you will remain dead until the next wave where you will respawn with the starting weapons and money, so I would suggest not dying, so long as one member of your team survives you will all respawn, but if everyone wipes it's back to the start again. It's basic survival mode stuff going on here really. 

Depending on what weapons you choose you level up in a certain perk making you better with pistols, rifles, shotguns, medicing, melee weapons etc. The more you play the easier it will get if you stay on the same difficulty, I forget the names of them but there is beginner, normal, hard and I believe a couple more after that as well. It is quite a fun little game which I'm pretty sure I've mentioned already and for £4 you can't really go wrong with it. It's got about 48 hours left of the free weekend anyway. If anything give it a shot over the next couple days.

Payday: The Heist - Patch 3

The guys at Overkill have released another patch for Payday: The Heist. Below are the details, biggest new features being Normal mode for Diamond Heist and Slaughterhouse, the ability to join games that have already started and new masks. Also I am still getting round to writing up my thoughts on this game. I'm lazy what can I tell you.

The PAYDAY Xmas update!

Thanks to all you players who have robbed countless banks, snuck off with thousands of diamonds and scooped up gold bars by the tonnes!

OVERKILL Software has monitored you closely through the security cameras and here are our counter measures:

PAYDAY Xmas achievement!

Find a Christmas present on any of the levels in multiplayer - take it and you will be given a Santa mask! Plus you will get the chance to be surprised later on...

Big features

Player drop-in ability in load-out and in-game!

You can now join an ongoing game! You will no longer be locked out of games just because they have already started or because you dropped out during play. Just rejoin and continue collecting those precious dollars and gems!

These are the rules: Players who are downed or in custody and drop out only to rejoin the same game will respawn in custody. Drop-in is disabled during the "point of no return" phase of the heist, as well as on the end screen.

Heavily improved fighting and acting by team AI and enemies

New features and fixes include:

• New events and enemy tactics on all levels

• Team and enemies now pick better cover and firing positions, and use more intelligent firing lanes for suppression and sniping

• Enemies now master additional acrobatic moves (such as dashes and slides) and they can fire at you while doing them!

• More cover moves for team AI and enemies

• Enemy AI move in tighter formations and coordinate better

• Team AI now keeps up with human players much better

• Smoother turn and aim on team AI, and reduced animation glitches on movements

• Better looking weapon recoils on team and enemies

• AI teammates now pick weapons that better suit the current combat situation

• Combat will now be more mid ranged and not run-in gun battles

• Team AI no longer has "ants in the pants" (they don't move around so much) when there are no enemies around

Advanced GFX settings menu (AG menu)

Custom visual settings and optimizations, including:

• Texture resolution setting "low" to "high"

• Texture filtering "off" and up to x16

• V-synch on/off

• AA on/off

• Light streaks on/off

• Animation level-of-detail setting for better performance

• More suitable default resolutions to fit laptops etc.

• AlienwareFX on/off (for Alienware computers)

• Added eight color grade filters (inspired by a range of heist and action movies)

"Payday +"

"Dinero"

"In Traffic"

"Bastard"

"BHD"

"Xgen Brown"

"Future of Gaming"

"The Matrices"

New masks

To celebrate that yet another bunch of military shooters was released recently, we've added four new masks to Payday!

Improved network code

Disclaimer: We did not fix the Internet. Please talk to Al Gore about that.

We've added a red toothbrush to Panic Room, and we've made sure this one's worth the hullabaloo!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT1HShMInUs&feature=youtu.be

Additional features and fixes

Slaughterhouse and Diamond Heist are now available in the Normal difficulty setting

Single Player has improved scenario and difficulty balancing

Added more money bundles to First World Bank

The legendary über killer sniper removed from Heat Street

Teammate "mugshot" icons (lower left corner of the screen) now flash to indicate who is talking over VOIP

You can now see the cash value of the "near completion challenges" in the TAB menu

Fix to better hear team AI voices

Fixes for random crashes

Fixed the drill that kept resetting to full time for some people

Fixes for fake lobby appearing

Changed [Enter] to $Continue; to fix binding of enter to block the final stats screen.

More camera impacts on explosions

All weapons now have alert ranges, unique for each weapon

Chains is no longer replaced by Wolf on rare trade occasions

Bain will now correctly call the equipment "saws" (not "drills") in Panic Room

Now have fun, fellow heisters! DLC is of course in the works, as well as Patch 4! :-) 

/The OVERKILL Crew and Sony Online Entertainment

Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock

BBC have recently announced that a new Doctor Who game is on the way. I'm quite the fan of the doctor and interested to see what comes of this. I am thinking it will more than likely be a point and click adventure type game, which if done right could see this game being quite a good game. I think it's definitely got potential. I'll be keeping an eye on this to see how it turns out. Here is the teaser trailer.

Another Left 4 Dead Fan Film

A few months ago I found a fan made Left 4 Dead video which was quite intriguing. Today I found another one. It is only a teaser trailer but according to the description the full video will be released soon. If the quality is anything like trailer below, I will be looking forward to it.

Check it out.

Steam Daily Deal - Bastion

Steam has been doing daily deals for ages now and since the start of the month they have added their daily wishlist give away to it. Anyway todays offer is Bastion which is 67% off making it £3.83. This game is really good and I did a piece on it awhile ago nearer the time it came out which can be found here. It's a fun little hack and slash adventure kind of game and for the price it is right now I suggest picking it up.

Immortal Scorpion DRM

Recently PC gamers have been pummelled with ridiculous amounts of DRM that hurt and piss off paying customers, while pirates get away with hassle free with no restrictive bloatware (I'm looking at you Ubisoft) . The guys at Croteam have come up with quite the ingenious DRM system to protect they're latest game Serious Sam from pirates. Anyone that gets them self a pirated copy of the game will be harassed throughout the game by an immortal scorpion which will follow you on your journey through the hordes of enemies in this game. I fully support stuff like this, if you want to deter pirates from pirating do things like this that will make them more likely to buy the game so they don't die every two minutes, instead they'll die every 5 minutes, (this game is ridiculously hard). This is how DRM should work, none of this you have to be online every single second or we will stop you playing shite (again looking at you Ubisoft). Below is some footage of the annoying scorpion bastard.

Terraria nearly as popular as Modern Warfare 3

I came across an interesting piece over at PCGamer. It shows player stats for Modern Warfare 3 and Terraria on Steam. Since the release of the 1.1 patch of Terraria at the beginning of the month, the small indie game has been giving MW3 multi player a run for it's money. It's good to see a little indie title up with the big boys of gaming. If you haven't played Terraria or don't know what it is, think 2D Minecraft. I bought this game ages ago when it was on special and never really played it until this patch came out. I've really got in to it and put about 20 hours in to the game in a matter of a few days. I suggest picking it up if you haven't done already it's only £6 on Steam and I'd say it's definitely worth it. If you like building games and killing stuff this game is for you. Also the soundtrack is pretty cool as well.

Steam Daily Wishlist Giveaway

So the guys at Valve are at it again. They are giving you the chance to win the top 10 games in your Steam Wishlist. I could do with 10 new games I hear you all cry apparently though that might be the voices. All you have to do to be entered is simply log in to Steam be it through the desktop client or the website, making sure you have 10 or more games in your Steam Wishlist, then visit the featured daily deal page. Today is Terraria, possibly to coincide with the new patch coming out. I plan on entering every day in hope to be one of ten daily winners.

Games I have been playing.

So it's the end of the month and with it another post of me rambling on about what games I've been playing since the last time I did this. To start things off I am still playing Payday: The Heist (which I still need to finish writing up on here I'm about halfway done but keep getting distracted by other things, I'll try get it up soon). It is seemingly getting more popular. A number of people on my Steam friends list have now bought it, more than likely due to the recent Steam sales. I love this game it's great and I suggest you pick it up if you haven't already, I've put a good 60 hours in to it already and at £15 I feel I've got more than my moneys worth out of it already.

I gave the new Jurassic Park game a download recently as well whether you will like it or not depends entirely on how much you like quick time events. I happen to like them I feel it adds to the immersion of the game but that's just me.

Next on the list is Titan Quest, it's a pretty old game now as it was released back in 2007. I got it ages ago when I bought a THQ pack during a Steam sale at some point, and have up until now had only played a couple hours of it when I first got the game then more than likely got distracted by other games. I have got properly in to it this time round and am quite enjoying it. It's got a kind of Diablo type feel to the game. I'll admit it's not the greatest game in the world but it's pretty cool and easy too get in to. I'm about 20 hours in and am up to level 25, I believe the level cap is 65 so I've got a while to go yet. It's one of those games you can either play little by little doing a quest or two every time you play or you can easily get sucked in and play for hours at a time.

There is only a couple more games I have been playing first one is Serious Sam 3. I have been looking forward to this game ever since I heard it was coming out. Saying that I haven't played all that much of it so far. I have played a good few hours, I have died a lot and not got too far yet as I am playing on Hard, I am glad I didn't choose Serious though. At times it is quite ridiculous, but it is fun, it is challenging and it will take up a lot of my time over the coming months.

Last game I am going to mention is a small indie game which has taken up far too much of my time under the name of The Binding of Isaac. It's quite a strange little dungeon shooter, the levels are all randomly generated so each time your play it will be a different level, unless you play the game so many times it starts to repeat itself but that would take an extremely long time. Anyway it's strangely addictive and for a few quid you can't really go wrong with it.

I lie about the last game being the last game for this post. I found Psychonauts going cheap during the last Steam sales and picked it up for £3 I think it was. Anyway if you haven't heard of it you should check it out. Here's a trailer for it.

Half-Life: Origins

I came across this pretty cool fan made video of the start of the first Half-Life game over at Gamerant. It's pretty cool and this trailer has left me wanting to see more, anyway I guess this is as much of a certain Mr Freeman we will be seeing any time soon as we all know Valve like to take their time. Anyway here is the video, check it out.

The Binding of Isaac

This game has been out for a few months now on Steam. I have just come across it though. It is a quite random little indie shooter from a top down perspective where you fight through dungeons full of weird and random enemies. Each time you start the game, the levels are randomly generated so you get a different game each time you play. The game isn't all that long but I find it strangely addictive and I have put a good number of hours in to it already. It is 50% off on Steam at the minute bringing it to the low, low price of £1.99. For £2 you can not go wrong with this game. If I hadn't bought it already I'd be more than willing to pay more than full price for it.

Serious Sam 3 Launch Trailer

Here is the launch trailer to (long awaited at least in my opinion) sequel to Serious Sam. I shall be playing the shit out of this game tomorrow. Can't wait til I've downloaded it.

Jurassic Park: The Game - First Thoughts

Telltale Games have recently put out another Jurassic Park game. To be honest they aren't the developers I would have picked to make the game considering their game history of point and click games like Sam + Max and Monkey Island.

The game starts off with a cut scene of some woman getting tracked down by some dinosaurs, in which you have  a number of quick time events to do to dodge them and get away. This game happens to be all quick time events like Heavy Rain I guess would be the last game I can think of that uses this type of gameplay. So this is more of an interactive movie than a game. It can get quite frantic at times with the need for good old fashion button bashing goodness. If you aren't quick enough you can die quite nastily. There is one point in the first chapter where you are trying to shoo a baby triceratops back in to it's enclosure, just as you have it back in and nearly have the dino back in with use of the car horn and lights, you piss off mummy and it comes charging at you and knocks down the gate which traps you underneath, so you have to frantically button bash your way out from under the gate on top of you before before mother dino comes and crushes you to death by walking over the gate. There is a fair amount of different ways this game can kill you. 15 of which are shown on this video courtesy of gamesradar.com



I wasn't sure what this game would be like as it was coming from Telltale. It is actually pretty good so far, I've played maybe a couple hours now and only stopped to write this up. I would suggest using a controller over keyboard and mouse if you pick it up on PC as I did, as button bashing is a hell of a lot easier with a controller. It is also available on Xbox and Playstation as well so if you get it for console ignore the last sentence. I realise there are a lot of big titles coming out at the moment so no doubt this game will be completely over looked by most people. But if you see it on sale or if you have a spare £20 with nothing to spend it on. I suggest giving it a shot.

Serious Sam 3 Blood and Guts Trailer

Another trailer has popped up and is getting me excited for the release of Serious Sam 3 on the 22nd. Here it is:

Wii U may use Origin

I came across an article at gamerant suggesting Nintendos new console might uses EAs digital distribution service. I actually plan on getting a Wii U as I have had a Nintendo console since Snes (or gameboy if that counts). It's an interesting concept anyway. I know a lot of people aren't a fan of Origin. I can't say on this matter as I have never really used it. If anything this may give Nintendo some better games if they are to team up with EA. I also noticed the comments ripping on Origin and how Steam is better are coming in as well. It's a new system it's not going to be amazing straight off, just like Steam wasn't and still isn't (I love it but it's not perfect). I am giving EA benefit of the doubt with Origin to see how it turns out.

Are gamers too cynical and unforgiving these days?

Over the past few months we have seen a number of new games out, I mean actual new games rather than sequels to older games, such as Homefront, Bulletstorm, Dead Island and Rage. I can't talk for Rage as I have yet to play it but will do in the near future (probably christmas). Anyway even though each one of these games had rocky launches and lack luster reviews, they are pretty decent games. But as these are unknown titles the majority are more willing to automatically shun these games, while the likes of your CoDs and Battlefields among other well known titles I can't think of right now can get away with not so brilliant launches.

This mentality among gamers is wrong. If you are going to shun a game for a crappy launch, it should be done for every game. While I'm not saying everyone does this of course, there are a lot that do. I believe in the fact that not every game is going to have that perfect launch that they planned as mistakes happen, there's hardware issues, the list could go on. Dead Island is a perfect example of this, they had a terrible launch, especially their Steam launch (I'm still not sure how they ended up releasing the completely wrong version of the game but I'm not going to get in to that rant) but behind this crappy launch was infact a pretty awesome game. The point I'm getting to is you have to put faith in developers to fix problems when they occur, this is the exact reason patching of games was invented (along with with adding new content of course).

Along with that people these days seem a lot less forgiving with new titles than franchises. My theory on this is if we keep shunning new games the market won't change and get stale and we will be left with nothing but the same old generic game over and over. It is getting to that stage with shooters right now. There are many decent shooters out their but because they aren't Call of Duty they get completely over shadowed by months of advertising for the same game. Homefront is a prime example of this, the game in itself was a good game in it's own right and yes it had a bad start MP wise with server issues. But tell me other well known shooter franchises have never had problems at release. At the end of the day, they worked on it and sorted it out. The single player on the game was pretty good, the ending was a bit disapointing as it could have went on a bit longer, but it had an interesting storyline and decent gameplay.

Bulletstorm while it got over looked some what, it did have some momentum behind it but the hype about the game lasted ... well it didn't last. I'm sorry but that game put fun back in to games. Far to many games are trying to go all hollywood with their almost life like graphics and serious storylines. This game gave you guns put a load of enemies in your way and told you to go nuts. You could sit and complain about the storyline which I think was fairly decent, but it didn't really matter. The game focused on gameplay and I believe it truely pulled it off. Bulletstorm to me was a warm up for DNF. The only thing I didn't really like in the new Duke game was the fact you only got 2 weapons. Duke is supposed to have a massive arsenal of weapons. Putting that aside the game was fun.

It just seems people are far too cynical and unforgiving when it comes to games these days. If you don't get what I'm on about go read comments on damn near any review site and look at the amount of fanboys ripping on shit and abusive flame wars. There's always going to be the 'my dads harder than your dad' kind of flaming but people are generally full blown dicks these days. I am getting to the stage where I'm almost ashamed to call myself a gamer these days. Which is why I have moved away from the mainstream side of things and started to show smaller and indie games a lot more love. I for one would rather support developers with new original ideas even if they don't come across perfect over the franchises that chun out slightly tweaked games year after year. If you are going to update a game do it on your current game we don't need a yearly update for £40. Take Valve or Blizzard most of their games are old as balls but because of the support they have given their games over the years. People love them.

At the end of the day this industry needs innovation not repetition. Innovative ideas are rarely perfect on their first attempt which is why it keeps the industry moving. Games are supposed to be an investment, some thing that you can go back and play in a few months, years or even decades. There are games I still play from the days of early Nintendo and Sega, because they are good games. Will I be playing Black Ops 20 years from now? Probably not. I can't say for sure but I pretty certain I won't be. Half Life, Doom, Red Faction, Painkiller, Command & Conquer, all these games have been out for year yet I keep going back to them. Was it because they kept releasing pretty much the same games over and over? Hell no it wasn't. It was because they were creative and innovative would I enjoy them as much now if they were just a carbon copy of some other game? No. These games were not perfect, but they are great games so the flaws get over looked.

My top 10 games of all time.

This list is in no particular order, it is just 10 of my favourite games some are newer than others.

Guild Wars

I shall start the list with a MMO under the name of Guild Wars, I believe this game has been the under dog in the MMO market especially compared to the likes of WoW. Yes it does have quite the core fan base. But any casual gamer if they have heard of it and a lot of them will tell you no. The game is getting on a bit now as it was released mid 2000's, 05 if memory serves me correctly as of probably beginning of this year I finally escaped it's grasp on me, yeah I do have a few titles left to grind away at before I can say I have absolutely nothing left to do in game, to be honest I can live with my legacy left behind in the Guild Wars world and until Guild Wars 2 comes out I probably won't be getting back in to it. I have dabbled in a number of other MMO's but Guild Wars was the only one that took hundreds of hours of my life from me. I still to this day don't know why I was so addicted to this game but it does hold a special place in my heart.

Half-Life
The game that started Valves journey in to the hearts of many, many gamers. This game was probably the first game I played that had quite an in depth story behind it. Everything I had played before this game shooter wise, the story was 'There's the bad guy go kill him. Why? Because he's the bad guy.' While I still love those kind of games that essentially just give you a gun and tell you to go nuts, this game changed that. There was a lot of thought effort and time put in to the story, not saying it was the first one to do that of course it was my first story telling shooter game. I am much more of a fan of this game than the sequel. Half-Life 2 I still love that game to bits but there is far to many holes in the gap between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Valve totally could of done other games to fill in the missing pieces. Even if they had done a sequel to Blue Shift and Opposing Force that would have been more than enough game to explain a little more. I still think they should do a Blue Shift 2 with Barney and the events running up to Half-Life 2. You start off and he is undercover with the combine. You could have easily made a game with Barney and his time under cover with the combine, watch him make choices he later regrets so he doesn't blow his cover. I could sit down and come up with many situations you could make a story for a new Blue Shift or Opposing Force game. It has so many missing links you could fill in and you know from Valves huge fan base that people would be all over the games should they be released. I'm gonna stop my little rant there anyway and go play through Half Life up to Episode 2 as soon as I'm done writing this.

Road Rash 2
Now I am going back even further in time to one of the games from my childhood which I used to play the crap out of. Road Rash 2 for my Sega Mega Drive. I loved this game, it's racing motor bikes while trying to beat your opponent with bats and chains what is not to like. My only gripe at this game is the lack of save ability, but that's more at the console than the game it's self. Saying that though if I was able to save my game and beat it, the replay value probably wouldn't be as high as it was. Saving on this game involved leaving the console on with the game paused. All that time spent playing this game just so I could get the best bike available, I believe I got it about 4 times but because it took me so long to save up for it, I never got that used to the bike and crashed a lot due me not being used to the handling and speed of the bike usually ending up in me getting game over.

Final Fantasy IX
That's right Final Fantasy 9 not 7. Not to say 7 isn't a good game but it's not my favourite. I was a little late to jump on the Final Fantasy bandwagon getting into it with the release of the 9th in the series. But it is my favourite of all the Final Fantasy games. I have played it through so many times I could probably sit down and tell you the entire story start to finish.

Burnout Series

Burnout is probably my all time favourite racing game. Probably Burnout 3 being favourite of the lot. It's the most fun you can have crashing cars without being hospital bound.

Deathspank

It is a small(ish) game from developers Hothead Games. I am including all three games as this entry as well. I fricking love Deathspank and his random humour, abuse of orphans and just the generally weird ass hack and slash adventure. If you haven't heard or played any of the Deathspank games, be it the original, Thongs of Virtue or the latest adventure with our random hero, The Baconing. I suggest go invest in one of them, I believe they cost round about a tenner for each game. It's definitely worth the money.

Team Fortress 2

I have been a fan of Team Fortress since the days of TFC, never did play the quake mod though. I have only one gripe again TF2 and believe it or not it's not about hats. It's about how escort maps such as Hunted were never brought along with all the other game modes. For those of you unaware of this map type. Basically one person was a VIP which one team had to protect while getting them to a certain area to win the game while the other team had to assassinate them. I spent more time playing escort maps than any other type. I should really go look see if modders have made custom maps with escort objectives. I realise we have payload which is technically an escort type game but it's not the same. Anyway rant aside, this game is well it's fun as hell whether you enjoy using the variety of weapons available or just using the stock loadouts through one of the many vanilla servers which don't allow anything but stock weapons.

Left 4 Dead

Third entry in my list from Valve. This doesn't really much explanation why it was put in my list. It's killing zombies with your buddies. How can you not like it.

Unreal Tournament

This game was probably the first multiplayer competitive shooter I played. Epic totally need to revive this game and when they do they need to make it just a tournament, no storys like UT3, just pure good old fashion killing the other guy purely for the fact that you want to be better than them. They have Unreal if they want to put a story behind the game, Unreal Tournament should be kept as a Tournment nothing more nothing less. Anyway before I get in to a full blown rant I have to admit this game is fantastic, and whether you pick up the original or any other version of the game it doesn't matter.

Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 - Yuri's Revenge

While this is technically an expansion pack, one which I dub greatest expansion in existence, you can argue with me all you want you will never change my mind on the matter, I believe this game could have easily stood by itself without a problem. This game along with with Unreal Tournament was one of the games that got me into lan gaming, primarily with my brothers, while I haven't been to a lan for ages as it's a lot easier just to play online, I used to love sitting in playing over lans trying to out do one another. Though I hated playing my younger brother as he was always Yuri and made sure he was near enough to both Allied and Soviet bases so he could just send in Yuri to get their construction yard and get the best of each faction. I always swayed away from Yuri and went either Allied or Soviet, had a solid plan for each team though. If I was Allied it was simple as getting a shed load of rocketeers and prism tanks. If I was Soviet I just defended my base until I had a ridiculous amount of Mammoth Tanks, I would go for a minimum of 50, this would be followed by the complete and utter destruction of anything that got in my way, while this massacrer was in progress I would be preparing a second wave of Mammoth Tanks to join them.

Serious Sam 3 Melee Trailer

This trailer just proves why Serious Sam kicks ass. Seriously can't wait for this game to be released (see what I did there). Good old fashioned over the top shooter game, just like they should be, there really should be more games like this out in the market.

Hard Reset Survival Mode

The guys at Flying Wild Hog have released another patch 1.2 for Hard Reset.  The main update of this patch is Survival Mode, the game is difficult enough just playing the campaign I dread to think how hard this. It's to bad I can't play it right now due to my graphics card crapping out a while back and the one I'm using now doesn't run the game very well, come christmas I will be all over this. Along with survival mode, 3D Vision is now fully supported as well as a number of small tweaks, I imagine this game would look quite fantastic in full 3D glory. Full details of which can be found here.

Jurassic Park: The Game

I posted the trailer to this game a while back and earlier today I noticed the game is now available to pre order on Steam, and is due to be released 15th November. I am quite interested to see how this game turns out actually. Especially considering it is being developed by Telltale Games who are more accustom to the point and click adventures like Sam and Max. I kind of expect it to be at least some what of a shooter, I mean you in a world full of dinosaurs you have to shoot at least few of them down, no doubt there will be a lot of puzzle solving as it's what the Telltale games are renowned for. I will be looking at reviews closely on this one when it comes out in a couple of weeks. If you haven't seen anything of the game, it's at least worth a watch of the trailers to see what you think. There is the main trailer along with a behind the scenes trailer which you can find here.

GTA V Debut Trailer

We have yet another Grand Theft Auto game on the way with it's debut trailer released today. It's gonna be interesting to see what they do with the story. I'm sure the guys at Rockstar have something up their sleeve no doubt.

Games I have been playing.

I haven't been posting much on here as of late, I just haven't had the enthusiasm to do so. I tend to either read loads of gaming news and write a lot or just game a lot. Lately I have been gaming loads so I felt obliged to do an update of what I have been playing. While we are seeing a fair amount of big titles coming out, none of them really take my fancy. Battlefield I couldn't give a damn about, same goes for CoD. I generally play military shooters for single player, yes I know shock horror, someone who doesn't fall victim to the multiplayer military shooter trap which has seeming caught a boat load of folks over the past few years. Then we have Skyrim coming along, I did play Oblivion a while back with games like those I always get side tracked and just end up just going round killing stuff rather than following the story and never end up finishing it, I probably will get it some point down the line but really it's not all that high up the priority list. We have Rage which I'm kind of semi interested in, but due to my graphics card crapping out a couple months ago, I doubt a Radeon 3850 would do the game any justice, so I will probably get that at christmas along with a new graphics card. There is one game I am truely looking forward to though which is out later this month. That game is Serious Sam 3, if you do not know about this game go look in to it, and if you can't be arsed to do that I will sum it up for you in one simple sentence: Lots of enemies, lots of guns, lots of violence and lots of fun. That about covers it.

Now I will actually get on to games I have actually been playing. I will start off with a little game under the name of Payday: The Heist, this game came to my attention a few months back through some random playstation promotion they had on. About a week or so ago I noticed it was available on Steam as well (has yet to be released on Xbox). The game cost a mere 15 quid. So I thought I would pick it up and give it a shot. I am glad I did, at the point of writing this I have played about 18 hours according to Steam and that is within a week. Needless to say I have been quite addicted to it. The game is 4 player co-op where you get to pull off heists such as banks jobs and ripping off drug deals. The game only has 6 levels thus far however the last 2 in the list can only be played on hard or overkill difficulty, both levels in question I have yet to beat but I am working on it. I will do a little piece on the game in the near future giving a bit more detail about the game and my thoughts about it. I strongly recommend you go pick up the game if you have a spare £15 laying about with nothing to do.

While Payday has taken up a fair amount of my time, I have also been working through some of the games I got on the Steam Halloween sale. Which makes a change from me randomly buying games on Steam due to the ridiculously cheap price of it and never getting round to playing it. I bought Bioshock, Resident Evil 5, Painkiller and Ghostbusters all for £17. I haven't touched Bioshock or Ghostbusters yet, but I am about halfway through Resident Evil and slowly making my way through Painkiller, though I am playing PK on the hardest difficulty which is ridiculously hard but it has to be done. Just like Serious Sam has to be played on Serious difficulty otherwise your not doing it right. Anyway Painkiller will no doubt keep me occupied for months to come but I will persevere and eventually beat the damn game. I have also started to play Borderlands again as that was in the latest Steam sales so no doubt people will be playing it again.

I think that's about it really. I shall do another post about what I've been up to either late this month or beginning of the next.

Operation Raccoon City Trailer

Capcom have released a trailer for the next upcoming game in their Resident Evil franchise Operation Raccoon City. Up until now it hasn't really grabbed my attention however the trailer is rather good. Look like it takes place in the Resident Evil 3 time line as you see Nemesis in the trailer, also you seem to play as Umbrella Agents trying to get rid of any evidence linking Umbrella to the Raccoon City incident. It's an interesting twist on the story. Here is the trailer.

Also there has been a number of screenshots released as well which you can find over at Gamerant

Serious Sam 3 Weapons Trailer

I love Serious Sam and this trailer is getting me more excited for it. I can't wait to go take on hordes of enemies with a sledgehammer. This is how shooters should be face paced, ridiculously hard with shit tons of bad guys ready to be shot down. There should be more games like this out there, the only two that come to mind right now are Painkiller and Serious Sam, I'm sure there are plenty more out there but I can't think of any right now. Anyway here's a trailer showing off some weapons you'll be using next month when the game is released.

EA to expands games on Origin

EA have recently announced that they will be expanding on games available on Origin. Up until now EA have only sold their own titles on Origin, soon they will be seeing the likes of Batman: Arkham City and Saints Row: The Third along with other additional titles promised in the coming months. While it is heavy disliked by a lot of people at the moment, I feel it is a good thing they are widening the variety games available on their platform. Of course they still have quite the road ahead of them if they even want to get remotely near Steam and their popularity but if they keep up adding new titles it will surely help.

I will quite happily use Origin if the price is right, I generally go with where ever is cheaper at the moment it tends to be either Amazon or Steam sales. The fact they have Battlefield 3 priced at £40 for a digital download there is no way in hell I'm buying it for that price especially when you can buy a boxed version of the game for 10 quid less and actually physically own it. They certainly need to lower the prices if they want to tempt folk across to their platform even if it is only on their own games.

Steams Halloween Sale Starts Now

Valve are at it once again and throwing even more discounts at you. I completely forgot Halloween was coming up to be honest, but now through scrolling through all the holiday deals they have which you can find here. I am now nearly £20 worse off than I was this morning. I got Bioshock, Resident Evil 5, The Ghostbusters Game, and  every Painkiller game for I believe it was £17 all of which have been on my list of games to get for awhile now. No doubt Valve will rob me of the contents of my wallet a little more before these holiday deals end on the 1st of November. I just noticed there is a Dead Space bundle for £15 I may have to get that as well while it's going cheap.

Games that should have been more popular - Science & Industry

I was thinking about how a lot of games and mods never truly got the love and support they really should have. Over the next few weeks I am going to write up about a few I feel should have been more popular. First game I am going to bring up is an old Half-Life 1 mod under the name of Science and Industry. Compared to the likes of Counter Strike and Team Fortress this mod was severely under rated. It is in essence an advanced capture the flag type game.

You play as a security guard for one of two research companies, Amalgamated Fluorodynamics (AFD) and Midland Carbide Labs (MCL), I have no idea the reasons behind the names but they aren't really important. Each team starts off with 3 scis (from now on will be mentioned as scis), your job as a security guardis to protect your companies research lab from the opposing team while trying to kidnap rival scientists (from now on will be mentioned as scis as I am lazy) and bring them to the G-man at human resources to make them work for your team. This is the main objective in the game, there are some secondary objectives depending on the map which I will get to in a bit.

The reason for you needing to kidnap and hire enemy scis is to help with your teams research. This research can get you better weapons, better armour, devices such as trip mines, satchel charges and mind rays (which make you scis work more efficiently making them research quicker) and implants for your player which can speed your movement, regenerate ammo, health and armour among other things.

Along with hiring scis you can also help you teams progress with secondary objectives. If you happen to kill an enemy who happens to be using a weapon you have yet to research, you can pick it up and return it to human resources. Doing this speeds up research of that specific weapon. There are other secondary objectives that are only available on certain maps. These objectives include:
Stealing files from your opposing team which can help speed up research.
Sabotage of enemy lab equipment which costs them money to replace, this is important as the team with the most money at the end of the round is the winner.

I would really like to see some one bring this back and update it to say source graphics. It would be awesome if Valve picked it up, I believe they could do wonders with it and put Half-Life and Portal fans against each other changing the team names to Black Mesa and Aperture. They could then make the playable characters for each team a well known person from each franchise. Black Mesa having Gordon, Alyx and Barney while Aperture has Chell, P-body and Atlas, then maybe include the gravity gun and the portal gun as exclusive weapons for each team retrospectively.

If you are interested in the game and want to give it a shot to see how you like it, you should give it a download and while very few people play these days, there is always the weekly gather Sunday night at 9pm GMT which is still going without fail after all these years.

Gabe Newell on video game economics.

The mighty Gaben has sat down recently and spoke about 'how Valve experiments with the economics of video games'. There is a full article about it on geekwire here it is quite an interesting read. He talks about about piracy stating;

"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. For example, Russia. You say, oh, we’re going to enter Russia, people say, you’re doomed, they’ll pirate everything in Russia. Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market."

At the end of the day piracy isn't going anywhere and excessive DRM doesn't really stop it, if pirates want to crack a game they will getting round the likes of Ubisofts always online DRM for example, leaving pirates with a nice offline version of whatever game they happened to cracked, while genuine punters that may happen to have an unreliable internet connection can't play the game they paid for, which is generally why people dislike Ubisofts DRM. Anyway I don't want to get in to a full blown rant about that so I'll stop before I do. I must admit because of Valve and Steam I have bought a hell of a lot more games than I normally would have purely due to constant deals on games, games that I may or may not would have pirated if it wasn't for that, I mean I don't pirate games that's illegal. Shhh... Nothing to see here, move along people.

Anyway go read the article linked above.

Left 4 Dead - Blood Tracks

Another write up of my play through of Left 4 Dead 2 custom campaigns. This one is named 'Blood Tracks'. It is a four level campaign and includes the original L4D survivors. Just like the last few I have done, there will be a video below of me running through one of the levels in this campaign with the rest of them over on my youtube channel.

So we start off this campaign along the coastline with only secondary weapons (unless I'm completely blind but I played it a couple times before recording it and couldn't find any). So you start heading in land trying to find your way to the train tracks which eventually lead to you rescue, but I'll get to that later. You end up heading through a shipping yard which is where you get some primary weapons and come to the first zombie alert event where you have to move a big container with a crane which is blocking your way to the safe house which is not far from this point, it's round the corner and through a building. It could do with a few more infected through out the map, does seem a to lack somewhat in the zombie department on this level.

Now we have the second level which sets you off leaving the safe house and heading through an industrial yard where you can get some decent primary weapons. Towards the opposite end of this place you have to take a turn and go through a woodland area which leads to to a house where a horde alert event happens. This one is quite the pain in the ass, after you blow up the house you drop down to some train tracks below and have to run through a ridiculous amount of infected hunting you down. You have to be extremely quick running to the safe house otherwise you could easily get over whelmed.

Level 3 continues down the train tracks you came across in the last level and leads to a quite interesting tank encounter. You come to an area with a bunch of shipping containers and there is a safe room type door which is closed, as you go to open it a tank bursts through the door. First time I did this I crapped myself. After defeating the tank you head through the now gaping hole where the door once was which takes you to an abandoned underground train system which you fight through, eventually leading you back outside. From here it is only through a couple buildings to the final safe house. This level seemed to have a decent amount of zombies in, could maybe of used a few extra special infected but overall it is fairly balanced.

Now we come to the last part of this map. It is quite a short walk from the safe house to the finale area.  Just a quick walk along to the end of the tracks and through some buildings leading up to the rail bridge. This is where you hold out and await rescue. I find this finale quite difficult as I can't seem to find anywhere to hold out as everywhere seems to be fairly open. Though I have always tried to take the higher ground and stay about the walkway between the two houses. Every time I have attempted this at least one person hasn't made it to the escape train.

It's an alright map and I find it misleads you in to a false sense of security in the earlier levels due to the lack of zombies until the hordes come along especially on level 2. I will definitely be playing this campaign again as I am determined to master the finale and get everyone to safety. I'm sure I will manage it in a couple more runs at it. Below is my last attempt at the finale and was probably my worst run out of all my attempts as only Bill made it.



Next campaign on the list is 'City 17'

Ever wanted to be a panda? Now you can.

While I am not a World of Warcraft player, Blizzards latest expansion got me debating whether I should start playing due to their new race Pandaren, and if you haven't figured out what makes this new race so appealing to me, it's the fact they are pandas. That's right you will be able to play through WoW as a panda.

I find this hilarious and the picture just makes it more funny.

There's little piece on the matter over at PC Gamer which is where I came across this quite comical news if you are generally interested, here is the link.

Doom 4 Postponed

An unnamed source have told Kotaku that 'Doom 4' will be "indefinitely postponed" due to the disappointing launch of 'Rage'. I have yet to play Ids latest IP but it was plastered all over the news about the poor state of release, especially on the PC side of things. Anyway this is apparently due to Zenimax and Bethesda who believe this has demonstrated "a serious lack of confidence in the project management at id". The guys at Kotaku have contacted Bethesda and are awaiting feedback about the whole situation and will no don't post something about it the moment they hear back from them.

It is a shame as I would like to see a new Doom game in the works. My question is if Id have no new IP in the works what are they going to do, while they still have Rage to patch up and sort out but what are the future plans for Carmack and co.

Update:

We have had comments from Bethesdas Pete Hines stating that no game in development has been postponed.

"We don't comment on unannounced games and DOOM 4 hasn't been announced (though I appreciate that id has previously referenced DOOM 4)," Hines said. "Games are done when they are done and no title under development at id has been postponed – indefinitely or otherwise."

CS:GO at Intel Extreme Masters

Here we have some competitive CS:GO gameplay on an updated version of Dust2 along with some incite in to the game from Chet Faliszek. The map itself hasn't changed all that much, there has been some boxes moved slightly and some scaffolding put up to climb on which I don't remember being there in previous versions of Counter Strike though don't quote me on that. The guns used in this footage seem to vary from the standard mp5, ak, carbine and awp which most people tend to use in CS:S.

Round 1 goes to Mojang

While I am not the biggest fan of Mojang or the 'Elder Scrolls' series I have been following the law suit over Mojangs new game named scrolls. In case you haven't been following it basically Zenimax (Bethesdas parent company) have been involved in a law suit lately in dispute over Mojangs newest game named 'Scrolls' which apparently is infringing on Bethesdas trademark for 'The Elder Scrolls' series. Which in my honest opinion is a complete and utter load of shite as by that logic if anyone every decides to name their game 'The' or 'Elder' for some stupid reason (possibly to agitate Bethesda and co) that would also be infringing 'The Elder Scrolls' trademark. Anyway I'm not here to get into a rant about the stupidity of this case. Merely to point out that Mojang have won an interim injuction allowing them to keep the name of their game as 'Scrolls'. While Bethesda can appeal hopefully they will just drop this ridiculous case. Either that or take up Notch and his Quake Deathmatch challenge, as I believe all law suits in the gaming industry should be settled by gaming.

Left 4 Dead - Left Behind

Here comes my third entry of my Left 4 Dead campaign write ups. This one is 'Left Behind', it consists of only three levels, however these levels are quite long and could have easily been split up in to four, possibly five at a push. The campaign itself is really quite challenging and I would suggest getting a melee weapon as early as possible as the hordes when they come are quite large and just as you think you are doing with a horde attack more come along.

The first level starts you off in the outskirts of a city, you fight your way through streets and buildings, along with a brief period in sewers. There does seem to be a lot of supplies laying about, but considering the amount of zombies you easily can go through all of your ammo quite quickly (which is why I suggest grabbing a melee weapon).

Second level of this campaign you take exit a building and head once again into some sewers. After you escape the sewers it's a short walk to a dam, which is where I got a bit lost and had to put the in game hints on as you go on a scavenger hunt to find parts to a computer so you can open an electronically locked door. There is a lot of back tracking at this part as it seems you have to get them in a certain order even though some parts are really quite close to each other. Just like the first level there is a hell of a lot of zombies but there is also a lot of supplies to make up for this. After you have figured out this frankly quite tedious task of fixing the computer to open the door, you make it to the other side of the dam. Awaiting you is a train taking you to the final level, but first you have to wait for a cable car to get you down to the platform below while you defend yourself from on coming zombies. This horde seems to be lacking severely in the zombie department and could of don't with a lot more. I would say this final horde is quite pitiful to be perfectly honest. This level could do with some tweaking but overall it is still quite good.

Now we come to the finale which will be based at a military base but first you have to get there. After fighting your way off the train and through the train station you come to a gated area. A gated area which looked like it was being defended by the military at some point, due to the dead marine with a gun right next to you. He also happens to have a radio with him which tells you there are zombies heading your way which come along when you open the gate. It can never be easy, so after the initial group of zombies you have to find your way past another security door which leads to what looks like a loading dock for trains, I'm not sure but I did have yet another tank battle here which was fairly easy due to the openness of the area. It's not just a couple more streets away until you get to the military base. So now we are at the finale finally. However rescue isn't coming for another 10 minutes yet. Luckily there is a shed load of ammo and supplies to keep you going until they get there. To start with it was quite annoying until I went up in one of the watch towers and so long as you keep an eye out for smokers this finale is extremely easy as you can kill everything climbing up the ladder.

It is a good campaign, though could do with a few tweaks here and there and maybe be split in to 4 levels instead of 3. Below is my attempt at the finale of this level and like with my other write ups of these campaigns if you want to have a look at what the rest of the map is like I have uploaded my run through on my youtube channel.



Next campaign on the list is 'Blood Tracks'

PC Versus Console Gaming.

I came across an article on Gamerant about Id's John Carmack and his statement about PCs not being the lead platform for gaming and how Valve disagree. This obviously started I'd say a discussion but was more of a flame war about which was better PC gaming or console gaming. So here we are at the age old debate about the matter, so here are my thoughts about the matter.

While I am primarily a PC gamer, I do agree with John Carmack, and actually believe PC has never really been the lead platform for games, consoles have always been ahead, you can take this back to the days of early Nintendos and Segas and compare them to the likes of Amiga and Commodore, both of which were good platforms for gaming but I am sure consoles were ahead in sales back then as well. The fact of the matter is that console gaming will always be popular due to the fact of it's simplicity. What I mean by this is that you can go out and buy whatever console you want and buy a game for said console and you can play straight away. With PC gaming after you buy a disc of what ever game you want to play, you have to sit there and install the game so you are waiting 10 - 20 minutes or however long before you can actually play your game. That is 1-0 to console.

We then have the debate about cost and a lot of people have this notion that if you want to game on PC you have to spend thousands. While yes you can spend thousands if you're the kind of person that needs to have the latest tech possible, you will spend a ridiculous amount over the years. I bring up a point that console gaming could also cost a ridiculous amount if you want to have the latest version of which ever console you choose and go out and buy a new Playstation or Xbox etc every time they release a new one (and I don't mean PS2 to PS3 or Xbox to 360, I mean buying a new one when say you have a 250GB version and they bring out a 320GB version. There are people out there who do this, just as there are people who upgrade their computer every 3 months). The point I am getting to is that PCs don't have to cost £2,000. You can quite easily upgrade every 3-4 years and still have no problem running the latest games. The last time I upgraded was maybe 2 years ago (I can't remember so don't quote me on that). That was getting me up to a dual core chip, 4GB of Ram and a Radeon 5770 graphics card (which is the very minimum I would suggest for pc gaming, I am not sure of the Nvidia equivalent) costing me about £300 or so while it won't run the newest games at the highest graphical settings it runs them perfectly fine at the default settings, which is probably about on par with console graphics. Yes a 'gaming' PC is more expensive than any console counter part, but you also get a pc with your gaming platform if you choose to go down this road unlike consoles.

You could also debate the matter of exclusive games for consoles, and yes there are quite a few out there (and I'm not going to get in to a rant about Xbox exclusives that should be available for PC through GFWL). I would have to say PC probably do have a lot more exclusive games than consoles combined such as the obvious ones like WoW, Starcraft, Diablo and Total War series. Then you have the likes of Quake, Unreal, Hard Reset and Red Orchestra making an appearance on the shooter side of things. There are literally hundred, possibly thousands of PC exclusive games. Where as consoles each have very few in comparison.

It is obviously going to be easier for developers to create games for consoles as they have specific hardware specs so they only have to make one setting suited to that, while on PC they have to be able to support both high and low quality graphics. Which is why I believe PC gamers are seemingly more loyal and appreciative to companies that look after them, just look at Valve and Blizzards fan base.

Last point I am going to make is the keyboard and mouse versus controller debate. Frankly I find this stupid to be quite honest. Some people find controllers easier to use than keyboard and mouse and vice versa. Unless you are in to competitive gaming it doesn't matter. I prefer controllers for games which involve fighting, racing along with rpgs (final fantasy etc..), I prefer keyboard and mouse for shooters and mmos. They have made controllers compatible with PCs, it seems kb+m is starting to make an appearance over on the console side of things with the release of CS:GO for the Playstation. Why it took a pc developers to bring this to console god knows. But hopefully it's a sign of things to come so we can once and for all stop this pointless debate as it doesn't matter.

At the end of the day, there will always be both PC and console gamer, and this debate always seems to happen when either a) a 'next gen' console is released, which is when the "death of PC gaming" is usually predicted or b) when a consoles are showing their age which is when the PC gamers seem to come out of hiding and go on about how consoles are dated tech and pc gaming is the way forward. We see to be getting toward the latter right now.

I will leave you with this final thought. If you enjoy gaming just go out there and game. It doesn't matter if you play on PC, Xbox, Playstation, Wii, Gamecube, N64, SNES, NES, Dreamcast, Saturn, Genesis, Master System, PSP, DS, Gameboy, Game Gear...... are we starting to see my point here. Stop bitching about how the console you don't have is worse than the one you have. Just play it and have fun, enjoy it. You know the reason behind them being created in the first place.

Fanboys piss me off!

Left 4 Dead - The Dark Parish

'The Dark Parish' happens to be L4D2 campaign 'The Parish' except you guessed it, it is dark now. It makes sense now, but when I was having a mass download of all these maps, I kind of just went for a load rated 70 or higher, never really looking at descriptions of well many of them. This one included I should of put two and two together really due to the name, but it never clicked until I loaded in game.

As most people all ready know 'The Parish' map as it is one of the official l4d2 campaigns I will not bother going in to full blown detail about it as 'The Dark Parish' is pretty much the same as it's day time counter part. There are a few differences though, there seems to be more zombie spawn areas and less supplies lying about. Anyway here is a video of my attempt at this campaign, be warned it isn't the greatest footage in the world.



Next campaign on the list is 'Left Behind'

AMY

We have yet another zombie game on the horizon going by the name 'AMY'. But unlike most 'zombie' games, you can actually get infected. You can use this to your advantage by temporarily becoming a zombie to sneak past hordes, and so long as you get healed in time the infection won't kill you. It's an interesting take on the whole zombie situation. Here is a trailer explaining the contamination aspect of the game.

Left 4 Dead - Two Evil Eyes

So here we have a little review of Left 4 Dead custom campaign Two Evil Eyes. It is quite a long campaign and has a total of 6 levels.

The first one is ridiculously short and a simple cross a bridge, through a house full of zombies, round a corner and your done. It does seem like a little taster for the rest of the campaign.

The second level is a bit longer than the first but still not the longest level. Just like the first level there you do have to alert the horde quite early on which is easy enough if you get on top of the crashed train before they get to you. It does also seem to have quite a lot of special infected and you encounter your first tank of the campaign, which you can actually go hide up a tree from (if you go round the back of the tree house). After that it's just through a house and the safe house is the next building over.

Level three is where you finally get your hands on some decent weapons instead of the stock uzi and or shotgun which are just outside the safe room. That's the good new, bad news is you are now entering a swamp. Swamps are never good news, let alone a zombie infested one, so after wandering about killing zombies on your way, you come to a building. However this building happens to be closed off with no way in, luckily there is an open manhole nearby. I would say a tunnel is better than a swamp, so you head on down the man hole and find very little zombies down there, at least I did. This doesn't seem to be any old sewer tunnel though, it seems to be a secret tunnel to a garden area which is full of supplies and weaponry and an alarmed door. Obviously not wanting to head back in to the lovely swamp, you of course open the door, which in turn alerts the zombies. I chose to cheese it through the horde instead of sitting there fighting until the alarm goes off. While fighting through zombies I noticed a gate which you can't get past at the moment, so I follow the path round which leads to a car park with a few supplies towards the back of it, near a button you have to push, which opens up the path previously blocked by the gate. The walkway you unlocked leads you to a boat on a little river which you have use to get to the docking station which is right next to the next safe room.

Now we have a bridge level as the fourth part of this campaign. I found this quite difficult on normal (I was playing with random people that seemed to like wandering off by themselves and bots though), it took me 2 or 3 tries to actually finish this. While you can go with the I am going to just run and gun, never stopping to get this over with, there is a train crossing about halfway across so you have to wait for it to pass, and trains being noisy and all, it alerts the horde. I found so long as no one gets incapacitated you will generally be okay with this level, the moment someone is down it becomes hard work (though that might be the genius I was playing with that kept running ahead). The map itself is quite short yet quite challenging.

Next we have a quite dark and gloomy level. As you leave the you hear a helicopter over head which happens to be your rescue in the finale. After listening to what he says you carry on with your journey which is through a cemetery at this point of time. After fighting towards the back of  this creepy place you end up falling through the floor into a cave. Which is where you have to alert the horde by blowing up a barricade, doing so you are stuck in a hole with a wall of fire on one side and a horde of zombies on the other, it's not a great combination. Anyway you fight through this tunnel and escape you have literally a couple streets left to the safe house. However the house is fenced off, and the only way to get there is through the garden which is blocked by an alarmed car which you set off as you jump past it and on come the horde for another battle before you get into the safety of the house. The level isn't all that hard on normal but I could see it getting rather tricky on advanced.

We are nearly to safety as we leave the final safe room and head away to find the helicopter that you heard in the last part. So you head out and a short walk away you come to an almost dried up river bed which leads to an abandoned house on a cliff side, where you can stock up ammo and whatever other supplies it has inside. Just round the corner from here is where the escape finale will happen which consists of a few buildings and a helipad (which is blocked off until it's time to go). I found your best bet is to hold out on the roof tops and if you have actual people playing with you, I suggest using the fire and explosive rounds which are laying about for the tanks only, but of course you can't get the bots to work like that, which made it a lot harder than it had to be come tank time

On normal it took me about 40 minutes give or take to finish, so it is a decent length campaign. That was first attempt time for it as well, so no doubt you could finish it a lot quicker than I did. The hordes could maybe do with getting tweaked a little as some were pretty small while others seemed far to large. The special infected seemed quite nicely spread out with a decent amount of them to make it a challenge. To be honest the first two levels probably could have been combined into one, due to the shortness of the first level. Other than that I enjoyed this campaign and will be playing it a lot more. I would say it is definitely worth a download. Below is my shoddy attempt at the finale, I do make it but only by using everyone else as bait. I need to get this finale done with some people, hopefully leading to everyone escaping. I do have the rest of the campaign recorded on my youtube channel as well if you want to go check out what it's like, just fyi.

Next campaign on the list is 'The Dark Parish'.

The state of the gaming industry these days.

So I have read a few articles lately advertising downloadable content for games which aren't even out yet, this mentality seems to be spreading throughout a whole bunch of developers as of late. I for one hate the whole 'we have content prepared the which we could quite easily just throw in to the game for release day but we are not going to' frame of mind far to many developers are getting these days. So due to the likes of Batman AC and Battlefield (the latest games I have noticed doing this), I decided I am going to sit here and rant about why I do not like the state of the gaming industry today.

While I agree DLC has the potential to do great things and extend the replay value of a game. DLC should be something worth while. This should be the new aged equivalent of expansion packs of yester year. Take a look at Yuri's Revenge for Red Alert 2, to this day I would have to say that is one of the greatest expansion packs of all time, then you have Blue Shift and Opposing Force as expansions for Half-Life, which I still think they should of done the same with Half-Life 2 would of loved to play as Barney through that game but I digress. That is what DLC should be, not this whole 4 new maps for £15, or with the likes of Mortal Kombat where you pay them for new characters, that should be unlockable stuff in game, and the worst of all of this is Homefront when they released a shotgun, that's right a single shotgun as DLC for their game.

With the map packs while it is a good thing and it proves the developers still support the game and get new content out. The fact is that you get 3 or 4 new over priced levels  I truley believe that every game should have the option of using mod tools provided by the developers so people can create their own maps, thus prolonging the games life span due to constant new features and levels. Many companies have done this and still have people playing them to this day, a prime example of this is Valve. People are still playing Counter Strike and that game is getting quite old now, it's 12? if we go back to the pre Valve version of the game. Anyway my point is they got the gaming community to do half there work for them and when something caught their eye, they snapped it up and continued to support it along side the community.

At the end of the day video games are a long term investment, you shouldn't be sat there making them to try and get a quick buck. There are loads of games I buy from years ago purely because they are good games and I never got round to it first time round. Which is why I laugh at the likes of THQ and the latest Red Faction game; Armageddon, when they wiped their hands clean of the franchise when it didn't turn instant profit. They are a big company and have a number of other games on the go such at Saints Row, Metro and yearly renditions of WWE games to help subsidise. I am still going to get Red Faction: Armageddon, but due to me being skint and me getting another couple of games, it's still on the list. But now it's nearer the top of the list and will probably be bought at christmas. They have to remember we are in a global recession and not everyone can afford to go out and buy every single game as a day one purchase.

Talking of day one purchases as of late it doesn't seem like you can really trust them. With the likes of Rage, Dead Island, Homefront and numerous other titles being buggy as sin upon release. The bugs in the fore mentioned games were quite substantial though, if they were small glitches which could of easily been missed that is fair enough. The reasoning behind this, I don't know. The fact of the matter is this should not be happening. I would rather see a game delayed than developers throwing out half finished buggy products. This is another reason I wait before buying games normally a couple months or so after release, just in case if it is released buggy, it would more than likely be sorted by then. Games like Dead Island and Homefront (can't say for Rage as I haven't play it yet) are good games, but the majority of people are put off by the initial problems, and word of mouth spreads and you end up not getting the sales you wanted because you didn't push back the game a couple weeks to finalise the game and rid it of problem that shouldn't be there.