Shoot Many Robots - First Thoughts

A friend of mine suggested this game to me a while back and I am kinda glad he did, it's a fun little game. Shoot Many Robots is a side scrolling shooter and as you might have guessed by the name of the game the primary aim of the game is to shoot many robots (10,000 of them if you want the Shoot Many Robots achievement). There are many different types of robots starting with choppers which are small little robots with chainsaws attached to them which are normally found in large hordes, then we have Hummers which are annoying little flying robots that shoot rockets, then as levels progress you get bigger and harder robots in your path such as the hot rod, which is pretty much a gattling gun and can hurt quite a bit if you get the way of its barrage of gun fire and a number of others that I won't go into but you can read about here if you are interested.

The game is both single and multiplayer. The multiplayer is however just a coop version of the story mode. While playing by your self is quite fun and fairly challenging, but this game seems to me like one of those games that should be played with some buddies while having a couple of beers, it's fun, fast paced and quite chaotic. Perfect for those nights of drunken gaming.

Shoot Many Robots also has a leveling and weapon unlock system, which seem to becoming more and more of a trend with shooters these days which I'm not the greatest fan of, but I'll not get in to that rant right now. To get to the max level (50) doesn't take all that long, so long as you join in coop games on Hard or Insane difficulty, I went from level 1 to 45 in a matter of a couple hours, unlocking guns and gear on the other hand can take a fair while longer as they seem to just drop randomly in game (I believe it's when you kill the harder robots, but don't quote me on that) which you then have to buy at the store with nuts and bolts you pick up during your robot killing adventure, so getting everything would take awhile.

Overall it is a cool and fun little game definitely worth the £8 I spent on it on Steam (it is also available on XBLA and PSN and I would suggest it to others who are in the need of a distraction until that next big game they are wanting comes along.

Ubisoft Strike Again

Ubisoft, the company PC gamers love to hate, are once again interrupting gamers ability to play their game due to their "successful" always online DRM. This time it is due to a server switch which will cause disruption to their DRM servers.

According to Eurogamer games such as Tom Clancy's HAWX 2, Might and Magic: Heroes 6 and The Settlers 7, along with a number of other Mac ports will become completely unplayable. So if you do plan on playing these games during the server switch, which starts on the 7th February until a currently unknown date I suggest you go to your favourite download site and get a patch allowing you to play the game you rightfully own.

Once again because of this fantastic DRM policy in place. They are going to be pissing off actual customers while pirates would be able to play their games without any problem at all. I don't own any of the games in question not being available so it doesn't affect me personally, that is irrelevant though. If I did own the games in question and wanted to play through the single player campaign I wouldn't be able to. I would be fine if only the multi-player portion of the game went down as that is perfectly understandable. But the fact you can not play the single player due to online servers being down is frankly ridiculous.

Ubisoft are at it again.

As we all know. PC gamers aren't exactly the biggest fan of Ubisoft due to the likes of their restrictive DRM, but I'm not here to bitch and moan about that. I'm going to bitch and moan about a new (and frankly stupid) policy they have implemented. It would seem that they do not allow more than three separate installs.

There have been many games I have installed more than that over the years. I buy a game I play it for awhile either finish the game or get bored with it. I then uninstall it to make space for some other crap. A few months later I want to play the game, so I reinstall. It's fine I can still install it once more. Let's see I decide to buy a new computer and sell the old one. It's still fine I'm on my final install now. Wait, no... it gets a virus or the hard drive dies, or even you have to much crap on your computer again and need more space, can't afford a new hard drive so we'll just uninstall it. Now my game is useless. Ubisoft you useless bunch of *insert word of choice here*. I buy a game I expect to be able to use it whenever I want.

That's not the best bit yet, according to a article at Rock, Paper, Shogun, just swapping graphics cards will use up one of your three installs. So this DRM monitors hardware changes and apparently can't tell the difference between you upgrading hardware to the game actually being freshly installed. It's like they want people to hate them and not buy their games, I wasn't the greatest fan of their DRM on PC but I still buy their games if they are cheap on Steam. From now on I am completely avoiding them and I hope everyone else does too.

I'm sorry but what they fuck are they thinking. Surely they realise people upgrade their computer. They must realise that people are not going to buy their games if they can not choose where and when to play their own games. It amazes me how Ubisoft can actually be in business with this frankly retarded frame of mind. Hell I just reinstalled Red Alert 2 the other week for about the 20th time. If it just stopped working because I installed it too many times I would be extremely pissed. Anyway I'm going to stop ranting now as I'm going to start going round in circles now.

Long story short Ubisoft can fuck off and we should all boycott their PC games. They do make decent console games but when it comes to the PC side of things they haven't got a clue.

Ubisoft to make AAA MMO

I came across an article on GameRant stating that Ubisoft will be heading in to the world of MMOs. This has got me quite intrigued considering Ubisoft are mainly a console developer and the majority of their games have been majorly single player with the likes of: Assassins Creed, Prince of Persia, everything Tom Clancy and others that I can't think of off the top of my head.

Whether or not they will be making a brand new title for this is undetermined, this would make more sense as none of their current IPs seem very fitting for multi player especially on the scale MMOs tend to be. There has been some speculation that it may be Assassins Creed attempting to make this leap. That is pure speculation though, I really don't see that happening though, I can't picture how that would work.

It does seem a weird move by Ubisoft considering their back catalogue of games. I'm definitely interested to see what happens with this as I have no idea how they are going to pull it off. It just seems too out of place for Ubisoft for me to comprehend.

Ubisofts DRM so successful it's getting removed

Everyone knows about Ubisofts constant online DRM and the majority hate it with a passion. They recently called it a success, as it apparently reduced piracy figures. Or it could be do to the amount of people boycotting the company due to this system whose to say. Anyway with the recent release of a wee little game called 'From Dust' which was apparently not going to have this 'successful' DRM implimented, but ended up having it anyway, thus pissing even more people off. They have now decided this was a bad idea and are now removing it according to a post on their forum. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come and they will start using DRM people have accepted with the likes of Steamworks or GFWL (I know alot of people hate it but I want more gamer points dammit).