Monday, August 08, 2011

Finishing things off and heading to Germany

This week I'm making a last ditch effort to get through Call of Juarez: The Cartel for the third time in order to polish it off. To be honest the games seems to get worse each time I play it and some of the errors are bordering on the ridiculous. When the subtitles don't even match what is being said and are often riddled with spelling errors then you have to wonder who the hell put this through QA. As I completed it for the second time yesterday one of my partners glitched into the floor so that only his head was sticking out - I just had to laugh really.

I reviewed the game recently and it is easily the worst FPS game I've played in a long time. It trumps even Duke Nukem and at least that game had the excuse of being stuck in development hell for an age. On the plus side, Juarez is a pretty easy 1k barring the fact you need to complete it with each character. So I should get it done, and out of my house, some time this week.

I also blitzed through Cars 2 over the weekend, which was a fairly fun racing game although some of the A.I was a tad brutal in places for what is ostensibly a kids game. I'm not a massive racing gamer myself, but this was easy to pick up. However, that made the difficulty spike in later races even more perplexing as if you dropped down the field early on then you would struggle to get back to the front. It seems like there was a very specific style of rubberbanding in place - whereby the cars immediately in front of you and behind you would always be on your shoulder. While those a few places behind or in front would continue to fall away/surge ahead. It was rather weird and meant that if you were in fifth, for example, then you could potentially catch fourth and the sixth place car would be right behind you - however, your odds of then catching second or first were pretty much minuscule and they would often finish about 15-20 seconds ahead no matter what you did.

Still it was easy enough to max out and fairly entertaining in parts, so I'd recommend it for kids looking to have a bit of fun with their favourite characters - or anyone looking for an easy 1k of course, ha ha!

I probably will not do much gaming this week other than Juarez, as I'm off to Gamescom soon. I may well putter around on Eternal Sonata or Fairytale Fights seeing as I've started both of them, but other than that I'll probably not bother with anything new.

Gamescom is lining up to be as interesting as ever. There are more of us going this year which means the workload will be spread out a bit more, instead of having 15 previews to write up (As I did last year) I'll have about ten or so instead. It's good in a way as it means less pressure and more time to experience the show floor instead. However, it also means less time with developers and less games to see behind the scenes, which is a bit sad.

Still I'm sure it will be a kickass time once again, and I'm looking forward to seeing some quality titles first hand. As well as having a break from work of course AND getting to do plenty of writing and, hopefully, meet up with some of the journos that were out there last year.

If you are heading out and bump into me then be sure to say hi. I'll probably be wearing some kind of geeky t-shirt and making a tit of myself. Good times.

No comments: