Games, Impressions, PlayStation, Xbox

Going Off-Road

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I hate driving games, but I love racing games. There’s a subtle yet important difference, and the distinction is enough to make me thoroughly enjoy a Burnout, or even something more real-life like PGR or GRID, while rendering Gran Turismo as gaming kryptonite. The former are all A Few Good Men; the latter is sitting in on a trial for shoplifting.

MotorStorm: Pacific Rift

Off-road racers, though, are a slightly more difficult beast. Even if it contains such vile language as ‘gear ratio’ and tries to make me consider the state of my virtual vehicle’s suspension, thrashing around in the mud is undeniably fun – we’ve all known this since the first time it rained in our back gardens – and the fact that there are very few serious off-road racers gives it a hit ratio with me that’s far above straight racing games. How much fun could a game where your rider breaks his back on a ten-foot fall really be, anyway? If I’m racing along a mountain, I bloody well want to be jumping off it. Continue reading Going Off-Road →

Editorials, Games

That Annual Moan

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It’s that time again, where every gaming publication under the sun stops moaning that they’ve had no games all summer and shifts to lamentation about how abused their poor wallet will be over the next few months. As much as I’d like to, I’m not about to buck the trend. I mean, just look at my pre-order list:

  • Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts
  • Call of Duty: World at War
  • Fable II
  • Fallout 3
  • Gears of War 2
  • Left 4 Dead
  • LittleBigPlanet
  • Persona 4
  • Prince of Persia

And I’m also probably getting Dead Space, Far Cry 2, Mirror’s Edge, and Resistance 2 either depending on reviews or when I can get them cheaper than the RRP. (Or if someone sends me promo copies – hint, hint.)

No, the situation is no more ridiculous than it was last year… or the year before that… or the year before that. And I have no doubt that the same thing will happen next year. It still means that plenty of great games that could otherwise have been hits – out of my list, my money’s on Prince of Persia and Far Cry 2 being casualties – will be in the bargain bins sooner than the publishers might have hoped. It’s always a shame.

I just can’t see how it can be that much better to have a tiny piece of the big Christmas pie – up against the biggest juggernauts with marketing budgets big enough to end world hunger, of course – but I suppose it must work for them because they continue to do it. And hey, if they’re getting £350+ out of me again, they must be doing something right.

DVD & Blu-ray, Impressions, Movies & TV, Tech

Logitech Harmony One

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Harmony OneBack in 2006, I raved about how much I loved my Harmony 525, and I stand by it. The Harmony range is miles ahead of most other universal remotes, and I’ve used the trusty 525 almost every day since I got it to control my growing army of devices, with even sticky tasks like substituting in a new TV being quick and painless.

My only real concern was the build quality – I called it “acceptable for the price”, and the fact that the 525 now goes for £45 should tell you what that’s euphemistic for – and that’s turned out to be what necessitated an upgrade. It’s survived being sat on and thrown across rooms without increasing in creakiness, but heavy use of the colour buttons (they’re my ad-skip hot keys for my DVR) has left every rubber button on the thing requiring a painful degree of force to activate, if it decides to activate at all.

The 525 and its cousins are a holdover from before Logitech acquired Harmony, so in an effort to get something with the tank-like build of my other Logitech products, I went for a more recent design in the form of its flagship, the Harmony One. One may be a lower number than 525, but it’s spelled out so that you know that it’s better.

The first improvement is in the build quality, which is great. It’s solid, without creaking when you manipulate it, and the buttons are a huge improvement. Gone are the frankly rubbish rubber keys, replaced with ones that feel solid and all have a satisfying click to them so that you’re not reliant the glow of the remote to know if you’ve registered a press. The way that just the white button text glows looks a hell of a lot nicer than the cheap blue glow of the 525, which was itself an improvement on the old-school orange and green glows of the other models.

I’m kind of ambivalent about the touch screen. It allows for cool features like custom channel icons – although, disappointingly, no custom activity icons (yet), so no 360 logo on my ‘Play Xbox 360’ activity – but the screen with mappable buttons on the old one was much easier to use blindly, without actually having to look at the screen. Maybe it’ll come with practice, but it’s not as intuitive. Continue reading Logitech Harmony One →

Games, PlayStation

Warhawk is the Best Game on the PS3

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The above is a little-known fact, kept secret by a cabal of people who prefer to play good but overrated six-hour romps or watch their games more than they play. Some even say Resistance holds that title, but they’re simply letting us on to the ruse by saying something patently absurd.

Warhawk

I don’t know what it is that got me playing Warhawk so much – and I started playing long before the recent 1.5 patch added trophies, before you suggest that I’m interested in anything other than the gameplay – but it really is fantastic. It reminds me of Battlefield 1942 at its peak, even, unfortunately, down to the hit-and-miss infantry combat. But even if running around on foot with most of the weapons is generally as effective as hitting a tank with a damp flannel, when you’re in said tank or flying around the map in one of the titular aircraft it’s hard to find fault.

It’s now been out for over a year and is still getting significant content and balance patches to add everything from new skins to whole new modes, as well as three ‘booster packs’. People pretend not to notice that the boosters are £3.99 for one map and vehicle, but it’s only because the underlying game is so strong that they daren’t speak out, lest the free stuff go away. Continue reading Warhawk is the Best Game on the PS3 →

DVD & Blu-ray, Movies & TV, Reviews, Tech

IR2BT: Infrared Control for the PS3

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The PS3’s lack of an IR port is a problem that I’ve moaned about before, and I’m certainly not the only one. When you have excellent universal remotes that cost anything up to and beyond £200 and control dozens of appliances, from the TV and DVD player to the 360 and the lighting system, it’s not that appealing to have to spend £20 on a hulking great Bluetooth remote that isn’t even backlit.

Enter the IR2BT.

IR2BT

This isn’t the first way around the problem that I’ve tried. I bought a Darklite, which works mostly but co-opts the PS3’s first controller port, which is problematic for some games that require the controller to be there, and can’t fast forward and rewind any movie with BD-Java, which is a significant number of modern releases. Any one that has a loading screen before the menus load, essentially.

The IR2BT is notable as a Bluetooth-enabled way around Sony’s oversight that provides all the functions of the official remote. It’s a smallish box (size comparison here) with an IR receiver and a Bluetooth transmitter. All it does is translate the old PS2 IR codes – which any universal remote should support in some form – into Bluetooth for the PS3, and it’s even already in the Logitech Harmony database. That’s all most of us universal remote owners want, and it’s an elegantly simple way around the omission. Continue reading IR2BT: Infrared Control for the PS3 →

Games, Impressions, PC games, Xbox

Braid

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Braid

Man, you wait ages for a good XBLA game and then two come along at once…

So how do you reconcile the fact that, at first glance, Braid looks like any other quick and dirty XBLA platformer with the frankly daunting 1,200 point (£10.20) price? Obviously the reviews help, as does the fact that this isn’t PSN and so a free demo is a given, but I still think it’s quite a big psychological barrier for people to overcome. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but it is.

If you’re finding yourself hovering over the download button, biting your lip, I implore you to take the plunge. This is one of the best indie games I’ve played in a while, and although it might still be on the pricey side, it’s a brilliant little game, full of neat touches and homages, as well as some great ideas of its own.

The influences that Braid carries most overtly is certainly Mario, and not just in the way that it’s ‘inspired’ every platform game ever. There are moments like this, which becomes an amusing running gag, a Donkey Kong sequence, and early enemies that are in no way Goombas, but the structure of the game allows it to switch from one idea to another at a moment’s notice, and it’s done in a way that allows you to skip a more challenging puzzle and come back to it when you want, never blocking your A-to-B progress. Continue reading Braid →