Saturday 31 March 2012

OMG OMG OMG OMG

I just loaded up steam for the first time in a few days and I noticed I had something in my inventory so I go check and low and behold I find an invite to nothing other than the CS:GO beta. So as you may have guessed by the title I am very quite excited about this. I don't know why I got a key I don't think I signed up for it at any point, but none the less I am not going to sit here and complain about it. So long story short I have CS:GO beta  and I am very very happy about it to say the least.

Thursday 15 March 2012

St Patricks Indie Bundle


So St Paddys Day is nearly upon us and not only do we get to celebrate the drunkenness of the Irish we also have another Indie Royale bundle on the go. This one is available now and we have just under 5 days left to get this bundle of goodness. The games included in this one are:

  • Hard Reset
  • Jolly Rover
  • Vertex Dispenser
  • DLC Quest
  • Lair of the Evildoer

    The first three games are available on Steam, the last two however are not, they are available on Desura though. The minimum at the moment is round about £3, but as always it is subject to change. I would highly suggest getting this if anything purely for Hard Reset, it is a great little game I picked it up in a Steam sale a while back and love it. The other games would just be a bonus but as I said before Hard Reset is awesome and is a hell of a bargain if you pick it up for the minimum.

Sunday 11 March 2012

Just a little update.

So I've finally found myself a job, I started yesterday and due to the location, work hours and not too brilliant internet service. I won't be posting as much as I have been as I can't really spent all day reading the entire internet which was pretty my what I did most days when I was unemployed, well I could but I'm sure my boss wouldn't be too happy with me arsing about on the internet instead of doing my job. I will try and post something whenever I get the chance to so I might end up with a weekly update or something rather than trying to post something most days like I have been up until now. Also I have bought a domain name for the site finally, so you can now find my blog at playeronegaming.net or you can just keep on using the previous blogger address if you really want to.

Wednesday 7 March 2012

Games That Need a Reboot

A while ago I found my self once again on the internet looking at random stuff as you do. I don't remember how I cam across it but I found but I came across a video on youtube of Brutal Sports Football. I loved this game and remember playing it back in the day on my old Amiga. Then I started thinking that someone should remake it. The nearest I can think of that has came close is Blood Bowl though that is a little too turn based for my likings. What I want is something that would combine some kind of American Football game with murder basically. That is pretty much the basis of the original game, you could win by either scoring the most within the time limit or you could just decapitate the opposing team. Someone really needs to remake this game.

This got me thinking over the next few days about other games that should get a reboot and I came up with another 4 games I would love to have a sequel. First one on my list is 'The Lost Vikings'. This game I think could do brilliantly if rebooted in to this generation of gaming. While the first two Lost Viking games where side scrolling platformers. If a sequel was to be made it would be cool to see it as a 3D platformer mixed in with Portal 2 puzzle solving co-op.

Carmageddon is next on the list that I would love to see a remake of. Next to Burnout it is probably my favourite racing game of all time. Racing around while running down zombies and trying to wipe out your opponents, what's not to love. I did find a game last year named Clutch which is pretty damn close to Carmageddon. Down the same road as Carmageddon we have Road Rash, a violent motor bike racing game which I don't think we have seen since the first playstation. My first experience of this game was Road Rash 2 on the Mega Drive which I spent many hours trying to get the best bike available, I got it a few times but that was due to me leaving the console on over night so I could continue my game the next day as we couldn't save games back then. It would be cool to see a reboot of it.

Last on the list is actually a series of game rather than one game in particular. The games I am on about are Desert Strike, Jungle Strike and Urban Strike. All of which are pretty much the same game except from the location and I reckon you could figure out what type of locations the games are set in due to the names, so I won't go in to that. The basis of the games is that you are a attack helicopter pilot and have to fly around doing missions such as destroying tanks, SCUDs, nuclear reactors and rescuing prisoners of war and hostages. It was a top down perspective game. I reckon if remade today you could make it a third person perspective, you could definitely make it a good looking game out of this. It would just be a change from the majority of games out there at the moment.

Monday 5 March 2012

What if Nintendo and Sony got together all those years ago?

Sony and Nintendo were supposed to come together and make a CD drive attachment for the snes. Which no doubt would have been similar to the Sega CD attachment for the Genesis/Mega Drive. But as we know project never happened and we ended up with the Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo 64 instead, both of which are great consoles in their own right. The point I'm getting at it both Nintendo and Sony are two of the biggest names in gaming these days, and if they actually combined their knowledge and experience together, rather than becoming rivals, how would that have changed the gaming industry be today.

I have always wondered how things would differ if the two companies teamed up which would have lead to getting one mega console. Though this could be both a good and bad thing, on the plus side of things we would have two huge companies working together, with all the experience between them I could see some great things being created, though if they did merge back then there would have been a lot less competition with the possibility of them getting a monopoly, which isn't necessarily a good thing.

I believe the gaming industry may have been further if they did work together back then. Take in to consideration back in 2006 Nintendo released a console with motion controls and Sony released a high definition one. Today we have Move which allows both high definition and motion controls on the Sony side of things and the soon to be released Wii U from Nintendo which will be high def and will be backwards compatible with everything Wii. So if both Sony and Nintendo had been working together, we may well have ended up with a high def console with motion controls 6 years ago. Which leads to the question if that did happen where would we be now?

'Indie Face Kick' Bundle



We have yet another bundle of indie game goodness on the horizon. This one as you may have guessed from the title is the 'Indie Face Kick' bundle. Their site is pretty much a coming soon advert at the moment but does give you a chance to sign up for their newsletter and get on the waiting list that will notify you when it goes live. This bundle will appear to come with 8 games, but we do not yet know how this will be priced. I'm going to take a guess at it being another pay what you want bundle. The games which will be in this bundle (all of which are available on Steam, and no doubt will be redeemable there, just as many other indie bundles have been) are:

Saturday 3 March 2012

Is 'Ripping Off' a Game Really That Bad?

IGN did an article named 'A History of Gaming's Most Shameless Rip-Offs'. After reading it I did the stupid thing of actually reading comments on a IGN piece. I think they have killed off a couple of brain cells, anyway that's beside the point and I should know by now that IGN comments are full of trolls. Moving swiftly on to my point, the majority of people seem to think that 'ripping off' games is a bad thing. I am not going to deny that a lot of games released have been near enough carbon copies of other games with slightly altered art work, to say that certain games are any more than that is ridiculous. Does that make whoever copied these games in the wrong? I wouldn't say so.

Say I was to start learning to develop games, I more than likely wouldn't start creating my own games straight away, I would attempt to recreate games that all ready exist, and if I did that it would be work that I actually created so is it wrong that I try to sell it? Again, I wouldn't say so. If I was to create a pong like game and attempted to sell it, I wouldn't see it as ripping off the game. Obviously I wouldn't say that the concept of the game was my idea, only that is was my recreation of the game. I can't remember who said it but 'imitation is the sincerest form of flattery'. All these games stated in the IGN article are doing exactly that. Recreating a game that already exists shouldn't be looked down upon as a lot of people seem to do. These developers may start off replicating games but they may just move and to create that next big game you love. So at the end of the day just let developers develop. It is their job and/or hobby after all. Today they may be making a 'rip off', but the knowledge and experience they get from making them may lead to making that next big title tomorrow.

Valve are making a console?


A couple articles have popped up this morning mentioning that a new console may well be in the works from Valve would you believe. I really wasn't expecting this from the guys at Valve. I knew they must have been working on something as tweaking DOTA and CSGO won't kill all their time. While this is still only a rumour, I edge on the side of believing this as there was an interview with Penny Arcade I believe it was, where Gabe mentioned if they had to sell hardware they would. Now with the "Steam Box" rumoured, you start putting 2 and 2 together. If this is true and they are making some sort of console platform, I am going to put bets on now that it will have cross platform capabilities just as Portal 2 did between PC and Playstation. This is something that I would love to see, and not just from the "Steam Box" but all consoles. Microsoft could have been doing this for years with XBL and GFWL all they had to do would to counter the unfair skill gap between keyboard & mouse and controller, which is apparently why they never did it, would be to make the Xbox compatible with keyboard and mouse. It's not rocket science. Anyway I'm not going to get in to that rant because I've done it far too many times before and it will take to long for my likings. I will definitely be keeping an eye on this matter and I really hope they can pull it off because I could see this being the start of something awesome for gamers across the field. If they allow cross platform gaming I could easily see Sony and Microsoft doing the same at some point down the line to keep up.

Thursday 1 March 2012

Payday: The Heist Free Weekend


The Overkill guys are having a free Payday: The Heist weekend allowing you to play the game in full for free (who would have guessed) until Sunday at 1PM PST. This game is a 4 person co-op game where you have to pull off heists such as Bank Jobs, Diamond heists and escort missions. It is a awesome little game, which I haven't played for a couple months now, but I bought it on release and played so much of this. If you can get three of your buddies to play along with it is definitely a much better experience than playing with either bots or randoms on the internet. Along with it being a free weekend to try out the game, it is also available to buy at the discounted price of £7.49 or £22.49 for a four pack of the game, 50% of the usual price. I would definitely suggest picking this up, or at least give it a play over the weekend. This has also reminded me that I still have a draft write up of my thoughts of the game to finish off for this game I started a few months ago, I get distracted and forget about stuff, so I will get that done in the near-ish future (hopefully).