World of Goo

18/04/2009 Olly Leave a comment

I’m kind of late to this one given that it was a pretty big cult hit late last year, but the game that kept me from finishing Resident Evil 5 over the long Easter weekend wasn’t some big budget AAA title but World of Goo: a physics-based puzzle game developed by a team of two guys. Having been a darling of the independent gaming community for a while, it got released for WiiWare and has subsequently come out for various operating systems, and it was its inclusion in this year’s MacHeist that finally got me to play it.

At the time of writing my profile reckons I’ve been playing for around seven and a half hours, and that’s almost entirely been over the long weekend, a quick dabble with the demo when it was getting a lot of positive buzz aside. To my shame I brushed it off then, so consider this post my atonement.

I absolutely adore this game. It’s typical of the best indie games in the way that it’s built fun gameplay around a simple, strong central concept, and everything else from the sharp, detailed graphics with bags of personality to the jaunty, Elfman-esque soundtrack (free download here) has a couple of really great pieces. Even the writing, largely coming through the unseen ‘Sign Writer’, is often clever and loaded with in-jokes.

One moment that stuck with me was the beginning of the fourth world, the Information Superhighway. Whereas all previous levels had been similarly themed, here things are thrown into the green and black digital world, and even the gameplay changes to match the new design. New mechanics like the ability to ‘infect’ pieces to give them different properties and the use of gravity to curve shots around a planetoid are a complete switch from the basic bridge and tower building that made up the previous three worlds. That’s not to say the rest of it isn’t inventive, because it certainly is, but I think it speaks volumes about how much invention is in here that it can be so suddenly switched around.

Now I know how long this has been out so it’s quite likely that people have played it, but I also know what proportion of the players actually paid for it – so much for the ‘we only pirate because of DRM’ story, eh? Trust me: it’s more than worth the $20.

Editorials, Games, Impressions, PlayStation, Xbox

Resi 5: Old But Not Outdated

07/04/2009 Olly Leave a comment

If you need proof of how far certain genres have come in the last few years, just look at how gameplay that was considered a revolution in 2005 is now being treated as a relic in its next-gen sequel – I am, of course, talking about Resident Evil 5. Blame Dead Space for spoiling us if you like, but the fact is that few genres have come all that far in the last five years in any respect other than visuals.

Resident Evil 5

I’m nearing the end of Resident Evil 5, and yes, it does feel clunky after we’ve enjoyed the improvements to the formula in games like Gears of War and Dead Space. Yes, managing the inventory in real-time is an unnecessary attempt at creating tension. Yes, the partner AI is prone to lapses of judgement – although at least this time it can shoot back. Yes, the setting lacks that unsettling, macabre tone of Resi 4. Yes, we’d all like to run and gun. These are flaws that make it worthy of being marked down against its predecessor, but everything else that that game did right is in here as well. It looks great, it has that same satisfyingly precise gunplay, the boss battles are impressive, the battles are intense…

Maybe it’s played things too safe, which is what people seem to be piling on about, but the fact remains that when you play Resident Evil 5 as Resident Evil 5 and not what you think Resident Evil 5 should be, you’ll have a great time.

People are rightfully disappointed in Capcom’s conservatism, but it’s still based on what few will dispute is a classic game and a frontrunner for the best game of the last generation. Dead Space moved the survival horror/action sub-genre forward, but it hasn’t made Resident Evil 4 a worse game and thus to say that Resi 5 is a bad game is hyperbole.

Don’t let me stop you throwing some vitriol over the DLC situation, though. Capcom deserves a kicking over that, if not the game’s overall quality.

Tech, Tutorials, Xbox

360 Wi-Fi Without a £60 Adaptor

05/04/2009 Olly 6 Comments

Since moving into a place where my gaming den – more on that in an upcoming post – is beyond the reach of an ethernet cable, I came to require a way to get my 360 online wirelessly, and although the official adaptor was the obvious choice, I didn’t want to pay the frankly shameful £60 RRP. I know that wireless hardware is dirt cheap and that one isn’t even fully featured, lacking the WPA2 support that every certified Wi-Fi device since 2006 has featured. Not to mention that it wouldn’t help me avoid my previous issues with the PS3’s built-in Wi-Fi.

It’s not often that I can provide genuinely useful advice, so listen up. I know enough about home networking to know that one way around this is an ethernet bridge, which are reasonably cheap and will work with any ethernet device. But even so, buying one for each console and possibly more for, say, a standalone Blu-ray player in the future could add up.

My solution was to buy a Linksys WRT54GL, which can be had for less than £50 new. It’s a fairly basic router with one exception: it runs on Linux.

This being the Internet, it’s been taken apart by enthusiasts to add piles of features through third-party firmware. The free Tomato Firmware, which has a simple client mode as one of its key features, is exactly what you need. I put it in ethernet bridge mode and both consoles are online without a hitch, and the router has been going strong for two weeks now.

I should also point out that Tomato works with a number of other routers, which may even be cheaper. I just went with the Linksys because it was the original.

The official site has a video showing how to put it into client mode, which will be all that 99% of users want. There’s also an excellent tutorial here, which explains the difference between the two client modes – I went with bridge because I wanted everything on the same subnet for video streaming.

I know that I’m not the only one who is baffled by the fact that you can get an excellent router to do the job of the official adaptor and more for less money, but I’m not going to complain too much when open networking standards give us a relatively simple way around the problem. Alas, it’s not as easy to get around extortionate prices on other 360 peripherals like the larger hard drives or charging cables that cost comparatively nothing on a certain competing console, but maybe Microsoft will have a heart with the next iteration.

Then again, only one of those machines is actually making money. Maybe not…

Life, Tech

Feeling Disconnected

23/03/2009 Olly Leave a comment

So as some might know already, I’ve moved into a new house where, amongst other things, I’ve got my own TV/games room.

Very cool, but what’s doing my head in at the moment is being without Internet access – this is being typed on my phone. It’s coming on Friday when we’ll have a 20Mb connection – a fair step up from my old 1.5Mb/sec that I’ve suffered… well, since we got upgraded from 512k – but you don’t realise how much you rely on it until it’s not available.

I have an iPhone so I’m not completely cut off, which would be driving me nuts, but it hurts to have no Xbox Live or PSN, no new podcasts, no new TV shows, limited IMing capability… The list goes on.

I’m sure I’ll be congratulating myself over this little purgatory in a few days when my connection is faster than yours (probably), but for now I’m going to watch Blu-rays and moan that I’m collecting achievements without my score updating.

The hardships that we must endure…

Impressions, Movies & TV

Watching the Watchmen

08/03/2009 Olly Leave a comment

I just got back from seeing Watchmen, which is a film I’ve been anticipating since I read the graphic novel a couple of years back, so I just wanted to put down some thoughts while it was still fresh in my mind.

I’d been generally avoiding reviews, but what I’d picked up from friends and Twitterers who had seen it in advance it had been suggested that it was maybe too close to the source for its own good. I’d pretty much agree with that. There were parts that could have done with trimming for the screen that were left identical to the book, but then Snyder was happy to alter the ultimate plot twist to make it work better on screen, which makes letting other parts suffer a bizarre decision.

Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say that the ending doesn’t make as much sense to me as the one in the book did, but at the same time I can see how that one wouldn’t have worked on film. Not only would it have looked silly, but it would also have required a lot of exposition and bloated it further with the setup interspersed throughout. The film was labyrinthine enough as it was.

Could it have benefited by having a different director who is perhaps more comfortable with gravitas and directing emotional scenes? Possibly, as there’s one scene in particular that I’m not sure was being deliberately and ironically cheesy or if Snyder thought it was actually going to bring tears to our eyes. It wouldn’t take a genius to work out that this is the guy who gave us 300 because a lot of the action is very similar, and despite being set in the 80s we have a lot of the modern music video school of direction tropes like slow motion. I might be being pretentious here, but I’d prefer it to have been directed less stylistically, because I think – or hope – that this kind of direction will date horribly in a few years when people grow out of it.

Don’t let me put you off it if I’m sounding negative, though. Overall I enjoyed it, and I mean it as a compliment to say that it didn’t feel like the 163 minutes that it was. Getting Watchmen into a single film was always going to be tough – I’d still like to see it as a miniseries one day – and they did a good job, thankfully without watering it down for a lower age rating like we might have expected. Hell, the sex and violence quotient is higher than I can remember being in the source, which doesn’t happen a lot these days. There’s an awesome jizz gag as well.

For anyone who hasn’t read Watchmen in a while and has seen the film, I recommend perusing this fairly comprehensive list of the changes. There are quite a few that I’d forgotten about or not noticed in there. It contains spoilers, obviously.

Games, Impressions, Xbox

GTA IV: The Lost and Damned

05/03/2009 Olly Leave a comment

I got pretty bold a couple of weeks ago when I predicted a bright future for DLC in 2009, as it was swiftly followed by a disappointing insubstantial downloadable outing for Fable II and the divisive Operation Anchorage for Fallout 3, which I happened to like but probably didn’t live up to most people’s expectations.

I can count on Rockstar to bail me out, though, because The Lost and Damned is fantastic.

GTA IV: The Lost and Damned

For a start, I must comment on pricing. 1,600 points (£13.60) for a good 10-12 hours of GTA IV, with production values at least as high as the main game – sterling voice work, impeccable cut-scene direction, new licensed music, new things to do, etc – and some improvements of its own, not least of all the much-requested mid-mission checkpoints. It’s so far made me remember why I loved this game so much, and frankly puts the usual quick and dirty 2-3 hours that we’ve come to expect from DLC to shame.

Credit is also due for giving it a unique feel of its own, rather than being beholden to what was set out in GTA IV. It turns Liberty City, which remains a brilliant place to explore, into a platform for future expansions like this, and gives you just enough crossover to give you a kick when Niko makes a cameo or you hear about something from his misadventures on the radio. The biker culture that it revels in is also far from the immigrant experience of Niko and feels strong enough to support a full game. I’d even go as far as to say that people who disliked Niko and his friends and couldn’t deal with his frequent Anakin Skywalker moments will like this better.

Plus I didn’t hear one utterance about “American tee-tees”, which is always a bonus.

I’m making this quite a short post because I’ve written at length about how good GTA IV is (impressions, post-mortem) and this is ultimately more of the same, but I’m in love with the game all over again. Fuck the haters because they’re quite simply wrong: GTA IV rocks and so does this DLC.