Tomorrow's Just a Day Away...

Always a fucking day. Why can't it ever be two. Or three.

I've been sinking ever-so-slightly back into the post-apocalyptical self-distracting regime of gorging on 20+ episodes of whatever I can find in one sitting. It was House Season 1 that took the bait for yesterday. Despite Christopher's recent purchase of Mirror's Edge strutting about in its saucy graphics, I just could not stop watching the horrendously predictable series. Why? Well, the same reason as everyone else; Gregory House himself is a great character.

Each episode you got some dudeslashdudette collapsing someplace, then they get tested on by three doctors who seem to do pretty much all the work in the hospital (stitches, lab tests, breaking into houses, MRI scans, x-rays, injections... whatever), who also spend five minutes per episode streaming off a whole bunch of medical jargon that probably took the actors all week to learn; then they flatline a couple of times because the treatment they were put that was either going to cure them or kill them was starting to kill them; then House does his clinic rounds and amazingly spots precisely what is wrong with everyone the second they walk into the room.

So yeah, it's predictable. Yeah, alongside CSI this will be the TV series that replaces Quincy M.E. and Diagnosis: Murder in the daytime slots in about twenty years... but for now they're good, easy fun. You know it's going to be safe so you watch it for House himself; for his wit and dialogue. Got to admire his equality policy.

But the problem with spending roughly 24 hours watching House is that for the following week your friends will say "I've had this headache for days" or "I wonder what this is. Do you think it's a rash?", and you will immediately wonder just how long will they have left to live?

Scores an A for "All the cool things House says" and "All the time".

Gears of War 2 deserves a mention. Christopher caved and bought the Super Dooper Limited Swimited version, which is totally a different size to the rest of the games on the shelf which seems to be one of few things that triggers some sort of OCD-related anger whenever I look in its direction.

The game! Ah, the game... Well we spent a good amount of alcohol on playing and re-playing through the first Gears of War on co-op mode, so we jumped in at hardcore mode this time around. Mistake? No. The mistake we made was playing the game sober. Seriously; I played the first game so progressively drunk that it was way more than six months of playing before I could say I could ever say I knew where we were going in-game. The game itself? Not as tight as the original. They seem to have planned for two players a bit more, but not with ammo crates. The story is fairly good, but the dialogue is worse. The set-pieces aren't as tight, and there's no more kryll, which was a nice element to the first game that made us play differently. There's too much underground stuff and not enough overground, and the vehicle sections weren't anything special. They just felt like they were trying to emulate Halo. There were too many areas which were far too punishing if you'd forgotten to keep a sniper rifle. Stuff like that, yeah.

But! New achievement system that works wonders and fuels a bit of a competitive element in killing the enemies in certain ways. The Darkness had a similar in-game system that basically tracked stats and rewarded them at certain points. Unfortunately Gears of War 2's are mostly easy to get on a single run through, and there is no stats screen to find anywhere. Everyone loves stats! Stats should be mandatory in all games. There's an achievement for killing 100,000 enemies, and I've got waay less than 1,000 after a single play through the game. It's the Horde mode which will beef up this counter, no doubt.

While the single player (and co-op) campaign is far from awful, it does feel slightly disappointing. Horde mode more than makes up for this. It's basically you and up to four mates (via Live) on a multiplayer map taking on wave after wave of enemies. The first 10 waves get progressively harder due to a shake-up of the enemies you encounter. The first map is largely wretches and drones, but the latter ones are full of boomers/butchers/grinders. With each ten rounds the waves repeat in terms of enemies, only their attributes change; round 11 means the enemies have twice the health and increased accuracy but, luckily for us, damage remained the same. There are 50 rounds in the game and by the last 10-set you'll be facing horrendously strong and evil hordes of enemies. Or at least we predict you will. We're still a long way off.

Scores a B for "Being able to chainsaw a crawling locust in half".

Mirror's Edge is the most recent gamely member of our distracting xbox family. The game is much touted as a refreshing, original concept - and that it is, but it is also one of those "ah man! Imagine if they did this instead" things; the combat is too frustrating and feels like the difficulty was ramped up because the game areas are too small. There are too many lifts, and not really all that much freedom in the gaming world. I suck at the time trial modes, too.

The game feels like a spiritual successor to Portal, only without the cool gun and pads on your feet to stop the pain whenever you lad badly. There is a puzzle element to some of the areas - a necessity for strategy that I think is both underused and, sometimes, poorly executed. The game can be overly harsh when it comes to accuracy, and the enemies can recover from being hit waaay quicker than you can, which leads to many deaths/restarts when facing more than three SWAT dudes.

Scores an I for "I'm going to give this a score when I actually finish it".

So enough of all of this blabbering. Stuff I forgot to talk about; Left 4 Dead Demo, Ghost Town, Saw V, Max Payne, Supernatural, Smallville, Jam, Fable II, One Piece, Music, and Dead Set.

Generic Self-Welcome

Hello ME! Here's hoping this website gets a little further away from the ground than our previous encounters with the intarweb. I must admist most of the responsibility for any failures to use effort that might've contributed to the downfall of forares which, if I had tried, could very well have been awesome.

But this time I have the cosy living arrangements to maintain my momentum. Christopher watching over my shoulder as I drum each finger onto the keyboard, plastered smile over my face to ensure he keeps the Whip in the cupboard.

Yesterday I completed The Darkness on normal difficulty, after many an early-morning/late-night gaming sesh. I did get rather into it, every always due in a large part to the achievement hunting, but also because the game fits into the demographic of games that can be wholly described by one word; cool. True, it is a bit like playing an interactive movie, but with mobsters and goths and gargoylesque demons with british accents and guns and grafitti and swear words and the guns and the blood and the-- Oh man, yeah, it's definitely cool. I didn't really know what to expect when I picked this up in a two-for-£30 deal, but what I got was a game that reminded me a little of Kingpin: Life of Crime (in particular the durge and grime of urban citiscapes, the civilian dialogue and the slight ability to roam where you please), and also, which may sound a little harsh, Die Hard: Vendetta; specifically the difficulty in just running in with your guns out, but again the similarities are drawn through the witty NPC banter.

I like a game where I can collect stuff. I like a sort of completeness, and I like the feeling you get when you get there. Yes, a bit mad, if not lame, but there you go. Darkness delivered it's own fair share of picking stuff up, including some fairly daft, and some fairly neat, costumes for your darklings, as well as, of course, the chance to rip the hearts out of all those arses you kicked so excellently, what with your tentacular strangulations, or your black Hole-ish whirling abilities.

Perhaps some could see the game as a little disturbing - certainly the game takes a large twist from the orphanage onwards (One thing that got to me a little at 3am, besides Suicide Corner, was the "ARE YOU INSANE?!" guy. I hope you'll agree...), and the achievements encourage you to act out a whole bunch of nasty deaths including the - ok, they're pretty cool - Execution move, where you pull the trigger when you're right up close to them, and you watch as your character Jackie Estacado proceeds to plant several seeds of led amongst the shattered shards of skull and rib. Nasty, but awesome.

Now, the game is most certainly worth a rent, but is it worth any money?

I would say that not many games are worth the full £49 at all, and the most I'll spend on a single game would be £25... But then I've slipped from being a hardcore gamer, my obsession seeping into other forms of media such as books and movies. I'm certainly not a generic casual gamer (HA! I scoff at thee) but I no longer preorder games, I no longer complete games three or four times through. But The Darkness can be found £15 or less in most dedicated stores, and is well worth the money.

As for replayability; well of course, it's not a given that you'll find all the collectables the first play through (I didn't :( ), and the Tunnel Workers and 7 kills in 15 seconds achievements will demand repeated attempts. Playing through the game without worrying about achievements is also something I want to do anyway, to see if it changes the feel of the game, but the game does offer an online multiplayer - but, er, I don't have XBL just at this moment, so I'm afraid I have no idea how good or bad it is!

I certainly want to acquire XBL, though, if not only for getting all the online achievements after already having acquired most/all of the offline ones for several games.

So uh, there you have it. My first blog, and my first overview of a game and stuff! For summary's sake;

The Darkness is an FPS that offers less longetivity than the killer apps like Gears or Halo 3, but it approaches the genre a little differently, focusing on light and dark areas and RPS-style upgrades and self-improvements.

Score: B, for "better than average".

Non-Review: Most of Sweeney Todd

Well, I considered starting off the venture with Sweeney Todd - The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

The three of us went to see it today.

Unfortunately, the cinema decided to have a localised power cut two thirds of the way through the movie. So we have no idea how it ends.

Until the moment of 'evacuation', I loved it as a Burton fan, Nikki was mostly enjoying it, and I believe James struggled to see past what he considered useless music wasting time in an otherwise badly paced plot.

All Bets Are Off.

Will this one make it? There have been many ventures from myself and my flatmate, James, to publish something on the internet. I've had some solo ventures, one with modest low-level success, a fan-site for a band who have since disappointed me, but the duets have never made it. We tried creative writing, designs, wallpapers, game news and reviews (well, that was with a whole team, we were n-gamer.com, way before it became a magazine - since deceased but a wayback machine never dies, gamecube fanatics). Successful has never been an applicable adjective in these 'projects'.

If I was a scientist, I would imagine this trend would be enough to predict the outcome of this particular expedition. But I'm an optimistic person. Let the irrelevant commentary begin.



P.S. We're ones for in-jokes, but hopefully our needs have been satiated by the header and the URL. Perhaps one day, if anyone ever cares, we'll explain that.