Phil's Blog
/2 Graduate Game Programmer LFW
Steam Sale vs. Wallet
It's not WoW, honest.
So that time of the year rolled around again… no, I don’t mean the Christmas / New Year period (although that was fun)! I mean when Valve decides to ruin my finances and put all their good games on sale with ridiculous discounts. And even though my wallet is empty anyway, I still managed to spend about £40 on games for myself, and £15 on gifts for others. Now, obviously I should see this as a good thing, getting so many games for cheap, but the problem I have is never getting around to play. Hell, I can go back and look at the games I bought in the summer sale, and see that I haven’t played any of them. Or I can go on my Backloggery page and see the huge list of games I already have to play. So why am I buying more? It’s some kind of addiction, the same reason I trawl around charity shops every other day looking for cheap retro games. Once I have a decent income it might be alright, but for now… bleh. Someone hold me back!
This time, I did play a few of the new games that I bought! Orcs Must Die seems like a rather fun mashup between the third-person shooter and tower defence genres, but it’s a big shame that I suck at any kind of strategical thinking. The dark, evil side of me that wants to go back to World of Warcraft decided to buy RIFT… and no surprises, it’s exactly the same game. Same spells, same monsters, same quests, even the keyboard shortcuts are the same! It’s certainly not a bad rip-off, though – It feels more like a holiday from Azeroth. I knew most of the lore and zones in Warcraft, so it’s nice to take a break and see a new world. I just need to make sure it doesn’t take over my life over the next month (I’m not planning on buying a subscription for it, not with The Secret World right around the corner), and actually do some productive stuff!
I guess I don’t have any big new year’s resolutions to break this year, just lots of small ones. I’m trying to read more (starting with James Patterson’s Along Came a Spider), do a little big of exercise every now and again (see: this), and try to hunt for my motivation to do anything. It’s been lost for the past year, and I’m sick of doing nothing all the time, so it’ll be around here somewhere. Maybe it fell down the back of the sofa? Have a good new year, folks.
Headshots and Hyrule
No waggling this time, boyo.
With so many fantastic new video games coming out this November, my laughably empty bank account and dust-filled wallet told me to not buy any of them. Unfortunately… I ended up buying two of them. Want some initial opinions?
The first is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which I should say that everybody bought, seeing as it’s made over £480 million worldwide. However… that isn’t the case for me, or at least in my group of 20-something friends, with only a handful of them actually picking it up. There seems to be some apathy regarding the latest game in the franchise, possibly due to Treyarch’s Black Ops leaving a slightly bad taste in everyone’s mouth – I haven’t played it myself, but I have a copy waiting for a rainy day. What I do know is that I enjoyed Modern Warfare 2′s fast-paced and ridiculously addictive online multiplayer, and the new instalment doesn’t disappoint when it comes to that. New maps, new challenges, and all at a smooth 60 frames per second (which is really strange to see, after playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2′s multiplayer a lot recently). So if you’re one of the ones that bought the game, pop it in your Xbox 360, add me to your friends list (GT: philcsf), and we’ll go crack some skulls together. Opinions of the single-player campaign will come at a later date, when I can pull myself away from pointless gun levelling and loadout customising.
Obviously, the second game isn’t Skyrim, because I have no interest in the Elder Scrolls series. Instead I chose Skyloft, and dove head-first into Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. I’ve always been a big Nintendo fan, so there’s no way that I’d be able to pass this up. And after a six-year wait from Nintendo for a proper Wii game in the franchise, I can say that it’s totally worth it. The art style is fantastic (a hybrid between Wind Waker and Twilight Princess that should stand the test of time), and there’s just so much detail that you take for granted in games nowadays. Roll into a wall, and physics shake lights, knock pots from shelves, and leave you feeling satisfied that you’ve managed to wreck a stranger’s house that you just walked into. There’s been some bitching in reviews about inaccurate controls, but I’ve had no problems whatsoever with them, and couldn’t imagine playing without. Eight hours in, and I only feel like I’ve just scratched the surface. More opinions later!