Nuclear Monster

  • Snake LBP PaintinatorLittle Big Planet has recently captured my attention by being the most inspirational & creative game of 2008.

    Let me explain.

    I first gave LBP a shot during the beta. During which I had fun but wasn’t sure how polished the final product would be.

    The user-created content was a chore to trawl through for good levels. No fix was in sight and the developers own levels were too few to make a judgement call on what they would include in the final game.

    Later on when LBP was released I read about the server issues and declined to purchase it. Who knew if the developer would correct these issues?

    SOCOM: Confrontation certainly was proving to have similar problems and theirs weren’t fixed in anything like a timely manner.

    Another concern I had was with the lack of interaction. Until recently, sackboys could only interact with the levels through grabbing, jumping, and running. With the recently released Metal Gear Solid pack that has been fixed through the addition of the Paintinator. So now Sackboys can shoot, giving them another path to interact with their environment.

    Finally, Little Big Planet has been patched to remove most of the connection issues. Sure, I still get the occasional disconnection from the community servers, or lag. However, the bugs are mostly gone.

    If you’re one of the folks who fretted about the quality of the game before purchasing it, fret no longer, get Little Big Planet, have fun.

    LBP MGS Meryl

  • Mirrored for your convience is the first episode of Rebel.fm:

    Rebel.fm Episode 1
    rebelfmlogo

  • Having completed Mirror’s Edge I can confirm that indeed the plot continues on as if it were indeed created by the same creative forces behind Robocop 3. The ending is trite, and ridiculous considering the circumstances. I can, without spoiling anything, say that you have a tender moment with someone on top of a building while guards you saw just moments ago ignore you. I suppose they must now understand the error of their ways and decide to ignore the embracing duo!

    It is the interaction of your character with the environment that you play Mirror’s Edge for, and however ridiculous the plot, you come back for the running. Running is a fresh and exciting change from shooting nameless goons in most first person games. There really isn’t much depth to it: Run; Jump; Turn; Jump; Grab; Climb; Run; Jump; Die; Reload; Repeat. Nevertheless, that is all you need to have fun in the city.

    Too often, though, you’re dragged back into a shitty shooter when your character is swarmed by guards. Though you can run past them, sometimes you’re forced to disarm guards in order to continue. Combat is a kind of hit-or-miss affair involving lots of reloading from checkpoint saves. Maybe it was just that I found the timing of disarms intolerable, but I could never get past a series of guards without at least one reload.

    In any case, if you can look past the terrible story, combat, and the cut scenes with macromedia flash animation, you’ll find an enjoyable twist on speed-running that you never thought possible from a developer locked into the Battlefield genre.

    Eight out of Ten MSDN Subscriptions for Mirror’s Edge.

  • Call of Duty: World at War is critically under appreciated. By that, I mean the slights it gets for being popular. Some too-cool-for-school game critics think that CoD:WaW can’t be good because regular people enjoy it.

    If only they could see past their indie-rock-pete-esque hearts to the shiny gooey filling that is an improved and different Call of Duty.

    Improvements on CoD4:

    • Nearly the entire single player campaign can be played cooperatively online.
    • In-game friends list, including invites.
    • You can squad up with your buddies fairly easily during team-based matches.
    • Prestige, previously only available to console players, is now available for win-folk.
    • Large, open multiplayer maps enable a different style of play. Bolt-action, single shot rifle kills are now reasonable. As are tanks and other changes to gameplay style. This might not appeal to everyone, but it is a definitely visible change to anyone who has sunk time into CoD4’s multiplayer campaign
    • The Flamethrower, flame tank, and molotov cocktail all bring a new kind of area denial  effect to play.
    • Nazi zombie mode.

    You broke it:

    • Co-op isn’t continous, you’re automatically sent back to the lobby and the map is reset to the first map (Semper Fi). Good luck remembering the name of the map you were on.
    • Multiplayer squads aren’t retained between map changes. Boo!
    • The game seems to crash more than is usual.
    • Should have been released on steam on the day of the retail PC release.
    • Still different binaries for multiplayer and singleplayer.
    • While you can invite friends to the multiplayer game you’re in, you can’t see what game your friends are in without having to accept an invite. That is to say, you must request an invite to get to that server.
    • The name tags in multiplayer are colored red or green for differentiating  friend or foe. I can’t see those colors.

  • Multiwinia is a stand-alone multiplayer skirmish game based on Introversion’s 2003 release of Darwinia. Fans of this sleeper title might not have expected a sequel from the developer, one that tends to shy away from rehashes and instead focus on entirely new games. While Darwinia has a lengthy single player campaign, it lacks any kind of multiplayer. So, Multiwinia combines the action elements from Darwinia with six multiplayer gametypes.

    King of the Hill involves holding marked locations to gain more points than your enemy. Blitzkrieg is similar to King of the Hill, except the sectors you capture contain flags that are raised and lowered like those in the Battlefield series of games.

    Rocket Riot requires the capturing of solar panels to harvest their output for rocket fuel. Assault mode has one side defending a base while another attacks. Domination is a free for all. Capture the Statue has your Darwinians lug statues back to your base for points while the enemy is attempting to do the same and prevent you from capturing any.

    The spin on these modes is that you have to capture Darwinian production facilities (the only way to improve your numbers), and locate crates dropped from space which contain bonus units like turrets and transports.

    The six gameplay modes and the new selection methods offered make this RTS feel more like Pikmin on the Nintendo Gamecube than a conventional RTS game like Command and Conquer. This is both good and bad: good in that the bite-sized games only last a few minutes, but not so great if you’re looking for any depth, which is only to be found in making formations out of your Darwinians and using the crates.

    However good those modes are, there are some problems with the game. First of all, the tutorials are vague and not polished very well. Most of the interface changes appropriately when you plug in a gamepad except for the tutorial messages, which still refer to keyboard keys instead of the gamepad buttons.

    After each game you’re dumped out to the menu with no way to continue with the same opponents. The game also does not force you to change your nickname in order to be uniquely identified in online matches, nor does it tell you how to do this. You’re left to guess until you figure out that you have to click on it at the pre-game lobby.

    In-game, every player must ready up for the game to start, leaving the power in the hands of any one person to hold the game hostage. Routinely I’ve seen players online hold out, refusing to ready up, until their conditions are met for the game to be played. Granted, this particular issue isn’t the fault of Introversion, however these and other issues must be addressed for the community to thrive.

    Multiwinia is on the right track, as Introversion have already released a patch implementing text chat in the pre-game lobby.

    Even though it is more of an enhancement to Darwinia than a new game, Multiwinia is a worthwhile purchase if you enjoyed Darwinia and were left wanting more with the same theme. However, it would be a poor starting point if you haven’t played the earlier game in the series. So, try out the demo if you’ve played Darwinia and see if you like Multiwinia. It is a quirky RTS that should convert those who try it.