PC Version of Mass Effect 3 Will Not Support Controllers

Mass Effect 3 on PC will not have controller support. While this won't phase most pc gamers at all as they are happy enough with there keyboard and mouse to play. Despite this Biowares senior designer Manveer Heir explained why this is on twitter.

“There is a development cost in terms of time/effort to get all the graphical user interfaces so 360 buttons show up on PC. It may seem minor, but our GUI team was already stretched thin, and things were coming in at the last minute, so we couldn’t add more work.”

This seems like a pretty legit reason for it and I believe the previous games in the series didn't support gamepads on PC either (don't quote me on that though). While there are third party programs out there which will allow you to play on PC with your controller if you wish to do so, I still believe in this day and age all games should be compatible with both, regardless of platform. Of course you will get those that think playing on PC with a controller is blastphemy, you will find these morons everywhere that allows you to post a comment who say things such as "I'm glad it doesn't support gamepads. Keeps console noobs from screwing their teammates over in multiplayer. Mouse + keyboard = best shooter controls". Just because you prefer a certain type of controls doesn't give you the right to be a complete asshat.

If you are a gamer it shouldn't matter about your choice in peripheral. Everyone knows aiming with a mouse is much more accurate than thumbsticks, therefore making them better for games such as shooters and RTS games. On the other side of the coin you have fighting games, driving games and the majority of sport games which gamepad controls have the edge over keyboard and mouse. I am primarily a PC gamer and do prefer using keyboard and mouse for most games. But sometime I just want to sit back with my feet up on the desk and play a game, you can't really do that with a keyboard and mouse, at least not with my desk setup. So I occasionally break out the Xbox controller and use that instead. Due to me not wanting to sit up at my desk that makes me a 'console noob' according to the muppet who I quoted above. All this makes me is lazy. Sure it's less accurate than aiming with a mouse, does that mean I can't play game? No of course it doesn't, it just means I have to spend an extra half a second aiming.

First Thoughts of Groupees 'Be Mine' Bundle

I recently bought the Groupees 'Be Mine' bundle and thought I'd do a little write up of my first impressions of the games included in it. All of these games if bought separately would cost over £40, so getting these at the absolute minimum of $1 is quite the bargain, I would suggest paying more as you will get your moneys worth out of them. I've already gave each game at least an hour each so far, that is since earlier today when I bought this bundle, I'm definitely going to put a lot more time in to all of these games.

Xotic is a strange little game. The basis of it is to progress though levels collecting things, you do this by shooting at them which breaks them and gives you items to pick up. Running through levels destroying stuff and collecting items seems simple enough, however there are many things put in your way to slow you down though like the weird enemies in the game, such as mutant looking things and spiders seem to explode if they touch you which are really quite annoying as they keep respawning until you kill there nest. Which is something I didn't realise the first time I encountered them so I just sat killing waves of them when all I had to do was walk round the corner and blow there nest up. Then you get the likes of huge gaps you need to cross, which can be done in a number of ways depending what upgrades you have. You can sit and cross it by placing a number of platforms underneath you as you jump, this has the higher fatality rate, if you can find an upgrade in the level that gives you flight, that is the far better solution to these giant death holes. It's not so much flight but more the ability to jump after you've jumped. It seems pretty cool.

Next we have Wasteland Angel. I had heard of this game prior to getting it in this bundle, so I somewhat knew what I was getting into with this game. It is played from a top down perspective as you drive around in your car shooting stuff. The game starts you off  in your car outside a town which you have to protect from waves of enemies. While this is pretty much the game, it does change it up occasionally to stop you getting bored and gives you boss battles. I've beat the first two which are big nasty armoured trucks with a couple flamethrowers attached to the front for good measure. Took me quite a while to beat it first time round, using napalm is the key for these guys. After the boss battle you get a bonus round which puts you in first person perspective. The first bonus stage was survival based, where you had to survive as long as you could while trying to get the highest score you could by shooting things. The second bonus stage was a time trial check point type race. 

There are a couple of platformers in this bundle. I will start with BEEP, it's a cute little game where you play as a little robot called BEEP, hence the name. You begin in a spaceship with a number of planets around you this is the level select menu which is pretty cool. After choosing a level, it looks like you standard platformer, plenty of platforms to jump on and what have you but come equipped with a gravity gun which is very necessary as there are movable platforms, debris in your way which you can move and it can also grab things (ie collectables, which happen to be little gold nuggets) which are out of reach. You also have what I think is a BB gun which you will need as these levels are fairly hostile towards you. I have only played the first few levels and have came across a number of things that are a danger. You have robots that shoot at you, some weird flying electric fish, along with a shed load of lasers and of course plenty of holes to fall down. As I am on about stuff that kills you, if you do die I wouldn't worry too much about it as each level has regular checkpoints so you won't have far to go to get back to where you were. You also seem to have unlimited lives so dying isn't really an issue.

The other platformer in this bundle is named Sideway: New York. This has a slight twist on your average platform, which is the fact that you play as graffiti on the side of buildings. You aren't completely stuck to the wall though as you can use window ledges, drain pipes among other things to jump on. You can also spray paint your own platforms to jump up on, which is a nice touch, thought you can only do this in certain places, it is quite obvious where you can spray though. As with any platformer, it's not all fun, games and randomly jumping about, thought that is a major part of it. Of course you need stuff that will kill you, or at least to attempt to. The main enemy you come across are alien goo blob type things, there are other enemies as well such as flying paint blobs and other graffiti artists. The other graffiti artist was like a mini boss I beat the first one at the end of level 2 or 3, he paints more enemies to attack you. While he isn't too hard to beat and only takes a few jumps on the head to kill him, but the paint blobs can get annoying if you don't kill them quick enough and can become overwhelming. Just like BEEP you don't seem to have any lives so you can die as much as you want, it also has regular checkpoints as well so won't you have far to go when/if you die.

Lastly we have The Ball, I say lastly it's not quite you get a bonus game called Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals due to the bundle reaching their 3 grand goal. But that is a point and click adventure game and I am terrible at them. I did attempt that game but struggled to get out of the first room, so I'm not really the right person to talk about the game. Anyway onto The Ball. The game starts you off underground as you fell down a mineshaft. Your friends up top aren't helpful at all and just tell you to explore the cave. So as you have no other choice than sitting around for help which isn't coming anytime soon, you take a wander along the only path available which crosses a very unstable looking bridge which breaks as you cross it, so you fall down another level. Great start so far you've fell down 2 holes in just as many minutes. You then see a building ahead but before you get to it you pick up some ancient device. You can use this device to push special buttons the first of which allows you in to the building. Upon entering the building you find the ball. The device you picked up outside can be used to both push away and attract the ball depending whether you use the left or right mouse button. Once you have the ball you have to take it along with you as it helps you solve puzzles. Sounds strange I know, but as you progress there are a number of buttons to press to open doors and activate lifts. Some of these can be activated by you but some of them only work by being ran over by the ball.  It's a cool game and definitely seems a worthy addition to the collection and I look forward to finishing the game off.

First thoughts of Modern Warfare 3

So Activision have pulled out the stops and let folk try out the multi-player for their latest Call of Duty game. So me being bored and the type that only play CoD due to free weekends (I'm not the biggest fan but I'll play it if I don't have to pay for it. First impression of the game was good, and by good mean complete and utter wank. This is even before I entered a match. I was sat about in the menu for half an hour or so attempting to connect to necessary "online services". For the first few attempt I figured there will be a bunch of folk trying to play the game due to the free weekend. However I grew more and more impatient with the game the longer this went on. Sure there is going to be more people playing the game but surely someone up there at Activision HQ must of thought to check the servers to make sure they would be able to handle the influx of new players, it's not rocket science.

In conclusion my experience of Modern Warfare 3 consisted of:

• Mostly menus
• The game "Connecting to Online Services"
• Then error messages telling me the connection to these servers had failed.
  

I would like to thank Activision so much for wasting my bandwidth, and due to this frankly terrible service which lead to me not actually being able to play the game, I exited the game, went straight to my Steam Library and deleted the game. Half an hour of waiting to play a game is unacceptable should not happen especially from a game made by someone as big as Activision. I was willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt ignoring all the anti CoD flaming that always happens and give the game a shot, but all I got was menus. I'm still not going to say the game it self is good or bad because I don't know. The online servers however are terrible.

Groupees 'Be Mine' Bundle

The Groupees 'Be Mine' bundle is yet another pay what you want Indie game bundle. They seem to be popping up everywhere these days. The bundle includes the following games:

• Xotic
• Beep
• Wasteland Angel
• The Ball
• Sideway New York

All of these games are available on Steam and if bought separately would cost about £43. Just like other indie bundles like the Indie Royale, Indie Gala and Humble Bundle you can pay what you want for this selection of games, getting them at a severely reduced price. The site appears to be struggling with the amount of traffic heading it's way, so you will have to wait until tomorrow to get on it, you can keep up to date about what is going on over on their twitter. Anyway it's another cool little deal which I will be getting to add to the collection, thought I would share and give them some publicity as this is the first I have heard about this bundle.

Humble Bundle Mojam

This weekend the guys at Mojang will be creating a new game. You can actually vote on what Genre and Theme you want them to make over at their website. From the two polls on their site they will choose the highest and lowest result and combine them into the game some how. They will have 60 hours to make the game and it will be sold via the Humble Bundle site. I'm quite interested to see what happens with this, I can see it being quite a weird and random game considering some of the options in the polls

Mass Effect 3 Demo

I downloaded the Mass Effect 3 demo last night through Origin and played it earlier today, encountered no problems with it. It was my first experience of the Mass Effect series. I have been meaning to pick up the first 2 games but have yet to get around to buying them. First thing I noticed is the lack of advanced graphics options, which doesn't really effect me as I tend to leave graphics settings on default but I know a lot of people won't be too happy about this.

Also with the key bindings use, cover, and jump all use the same button. I'm playing on a PC I have a entire keyboard to use and don't need one button to do numerous things, I'm not limited to the amount of buttons like consoles with controllers. They need to make separate keys for each of these. It's doesn't sound like that big of a deal but I find it interrupts the flow of the gameplay. It's more annoying when your in cover and need to get up and run somewhere, there are times when I was running along with some cover in front of me and I went to jump over it but ended up ducking for cover behind it. I should be able to jump when I choose to not when the game says I can. The controls seem very console orientated and not at all optimised for PC, you know because it's a PC port of the game, the least you could expect is some decent controls. It's a shame because throughout my play through of the couple levels available in the demo I actually enjoyed the story and the gameplay, except the not so brilliant controls. If they get some decent controls implemented for the full release, I would definitely consider getting it.

On the plus side of things, the combat is pretty swift and accurate, both melee attacks and weapon combat. Also you don't have health regeneration like a number of recent games, which is a good thing, unless you play a cyborg character, have robotic implants or have some actual reasoning behind it doing so it isn't acceptable to implement into the game. It does have armour regen though which considering the game is set in the future, the concept is definitely plausible.

Overall the game seems pretty cool, but it's the consolised controls I can't get past. So I will probably give the game a miss until it turns up cheap on sale in a few months time or so. Also I feel I should play the first two games before I before I play this anyway. I know very little about the series or the characters in it so playing previous games seems like a good idea.

Free Weekend for Modern Warfare 3 Multiplayer on Steam

Not sure whether you want to buy the latest Call of Duty game? Here is your chance to give the multiplayer a shot. This weekend you will be able to play Modern Warfare 3 multiplayer completely free. You can start pre loading there game now in preparation here which I am doing now. While I'm not the greatest fan of the series, I tend to play a few hours whenever one of these weekends pops up as I did with Black Ops a few months back. I'm not going to buy the game, but it will at least give me a little perspective on it. There are plenty of people on each side of the fence, some love, some hate it. I like to sit on the fence and watch them fight it out. Just thought I'd mention it in case any one was interested really. I may do first thoughts on the game after the weekend has finished as well.