As I explained the other day, during ‘Gaming’s Silly Season‘ I shall most likely be doing ‘First Impression‘ pieces for the majority of games, and in these I hope to cover my initial thoughts and/or experiences of playing a particular game, but stopping somewhere short of hitting ‘Full Campaign Review’ type detail. I’ve been playing AC: Syndicate for a total of about 20+ hours at this point, so I figure that puts me in a decent enough position to cover some of the more general points. Also, Halo 5’s just come out, and given I’m both rubbish at multi-tasking and easily confused, I should pro’ly get this out of the way before I begin conflating the two games and start going on about Locke casually chatting to Charles Dickens and suchlike. Continue reading “Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate – First Impressions”
Firstly, if you’re one of the two people who’s read this blog a) thank you and b) I’d like to apologise for my absence over the last week or so. Rest assured, I haven’t gotten bored already, it’s just that I was in the US for a week, and the repeated shock of paying a bajillionty-twelve dollars for a soda at Disney and Universal left me with little time to actually, you know, write stuff. Continue reading “Notes on Gaming’s Silly Season”
In what shall henceforth be known as ‘VR Day – BOOM!’, I spent my last afternoon at Brasil Game Show strapping various contraptions to my big old head, spinning and bobbing around like a drunk pigeon, and just generally looking like a bit of a tool. Here’s the thing, though – I really didn’t care, and it was totally, totally worth it. I’ve been ridiculously excited about the coming of VR for ages now, and this was a great opportunity to have a crack at a few variations of it, and just generally see what our glorious VR future looks like. Continue reading “My First Experience with Virtual Reality”
I loved the Tomb Raider re-boot, and it was probably the highlight of my first year of next-gen gaming. It was great for many reasons, but not least because it got a stone-cold gaming classic back on the right track, and its more subtle (and ultimately more mature) approach genuinely marked it out as a title to be respected.
My one complaint, however, was that there weren’t really that many puzzles. Or tombs, for that matter. Continue reading “Rise of the Tomb Raider: Hands On First Look”
Black Ops III will mark the CoD franchise’s third foray into Next-Gen gaming, and the previous two proved at least as popular as ever – thus answering Edwin Starr’s eternal question (‘War…..HUH…..what is it good for?’) with a resounding ‘selling shitloads of video games, innit!?’. Whether you’re a fan of the series or not, I think it’s fair to say that the CoD games (from whichever developer) have really been nailing their next-gen shizzle, truly embracing – and pushing – what the new machines are capable of.
From what I saw, Black Ops 3 seems to be no different in that respect. Continue reading “Call of Duty: Black Ops III – First Impressions”
As a young ‘un, I must have spent in excess of a 100 hours playing on Street Fighter, and likely a hundred more on Street Fighter II – and they were probably the first games that really got me hooked on the medium. I’d always liked playing on earlier “games” – in an enjoyable enough to spend a few hours messing around kind of way – but it was the first two Street Fighters that turned Gaming into a full-time, hardcore obsession for me. Continue reading “Street Fighter V – Hands On First Look”
Tucked away in a tiny corner of the Xbox area at the Brasil Game Show is a curtain. I’m not what you could call a big fan of curtains – you know, generally speaking – but this one I liked. A lot. See, behind this particular curtain was my opportunity to have a first little look-see at Halo 5: Guardians Multiplayer. Yeah, I know right!? Continue reading “Halo 5: Guardians – Hands On, First Look at Multiplayer”
On Thursday I was lucky enough to have me a little go on the forthcoming Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, the next installment in the über-popular franchise from Ubisoft. All told, I got to play for around twenty minutes (10 minutes x 2, if anyone’s interested), and whilst it’s sometimes problematic to extrapolate from such a small sample, I’ma go right ahead and say it was definitely enough to get me pretty excited about the game.
The first thing that became obvious to me was that it looked fantastic. Even playing on a relatively small (and not particularly great) screen, I was extremely impressed with the quality of the graphics, and particularly with the (fairly obvious) time and effort that had gone into lovingly recreating Victorian era London. Continue reading “Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate – Hands On First Look”
There are things that Brazil does really well, and some things it doesn’t and, generally speaking, ‘organising stuff’ has an unfortunate tendency to fall into the latter category. Even though, eg. the World Cup (for the most part) went well in the end, the general consensus was that there was a distinct element of luck in that. And, at this point, it looks very much like the Olympics could go either way.
Accordingly, my (ridiculous) levels of excitement for this year’s Brasil Game Show were, in some small way, tempered by a niggling sense of doubt and apprehension. I knew there was going to be some really cool stuff on offer Continue reading “Brasil Game Show 2015 – Day One Highlights”
QTX 