Yes, I know, there was no Tuesday Cap last week, and guess what, there isn’t one this week either, and before you get your hopes up there won’t be one next week.
Commence your pelting with rotten vegetables now.
The news roundup isn’t dead. I’ve just been too damn busy to do it. Grown up responsibilities and all that, a combination of work and family commitments that has me busy for almost every hour of the day. So, please accept my apologies and I promise to try gosh, darn hard to get back on schedule in February.
I have two reviews I'll post before the end of the week that will hopefully tide you over.
There has been a stack of excellent game demos appearing for download the last two weeks. Asura’s Wrath, Darkness 2, Final Fantasy XIII-2, a real smorgasbord of free game bites for people too cheap to spring for full games, and people like with no time but a bites worth.
The stand out for me was Kingdom of Amalur. This is a demo that sold me in a huge way putting the game firmly on my preorder list.
When I first read about Kingdom of Amalur I was excited, a few screenshot and gameplay videos didn’t enthuse me much. But after playing the demo I am psyched. For a start, it’s a timed demo, not some rough cut of the tutorial stage. You get to go out and explore some of the huge world, find your own quests and complete them, within forty five minutes. The gameplay is a very slick and pretty hack and slash style with charge moves, combinations, counters and violent finishing moves.
Immediately you think ah ha! This is one of those hack and slash games with middling level up bonuses that pretends to be an RPG. Not so, the game is massive, open world and has deep crafting elements that are easily the rival of Skyrim. The levelling system is complex with lots of options to customise your character in all sorts of directions, cross pollinating abilities between the three classes, rogue, warrior and mage. I’ve played through the demo four times so far using very different characters.
The world is far more cartoon like and animated than most RPG games, looking more like Warcraft than Oblivion, far more fantastical fantasy than mediaeval fantasy. The closest comparison would likely be Fable, only with a far smoother and action friendly control scheme and a bigger focus on fighting than farting.
Still not convinced? Well playing the demo unlocks a special item in Mass Effect 3, and playing to the end of your allotted play time earns you another special item. So there you go.
Sorry for the late Tuesday Cap but I have a really good excuse this time, that image above is cyclone Heidi which is about to hit where I live, so I spent last night sorting the house out for cyclone conditions. And now, well now things are a bit boring just waiting for it to happen. So I'm taking a moment to post the Cap. It’s week two of 2012 and between shooting down hokey apocalypse theories and generally annoying people, I’ve been combing the air waves for exciting game news.
And there isn’t any, nothing really exciting at any rate. So here’s some other news.
I’m not a hardcore gamer by my definition of the term. I’ve been playing games since they were invented, but I’ve had more positive experiences in recent years, courtesy of the power fantasies most games provide, than the dignity crushing games of yesteryear. I don’t remember the pre checkpoint and automatic quick save times with nostalgic fondness, I remember them with the dull ache of childhood terror.
So it is with some dread that I started playing Dark Souls a game made to flay your dignity and crush any foolish belief you had that you were ever good at anything.
It’s not that easy to pigeon hole a game like El Shaddai Ascension of the Metatron; it’s definitely different, it’s artistic and you might even say a bit pretentious. So me being a smart arse, pretentious douchebag who once wrote a Bioshock review using the term a ‘haunting lullaby that squeezes the soul’ for a video store magazine, you would think I’d be all over El Shaddai like a post modern artist on a free pastry buffet.
To my complete lack of shock and horror almost nothing happened in the mysterious limbo week between Christmas and New Years. When you’re a kid this week buzzes past in a haze of sensory overload brought on by sugar and new toys, but when you’re a grown up you find yourself sitting in a nearly empty work place wondering why you didn’t have the foresight to takes a week leave and reading incredibly boring ‘Best off 2011’ Lists.
So there’s not a lot of news for the last whole fortnight, but if you’re hungry what I could scrap from the jar is below.
Well it's almost 2012 and the much hyped end of civilisation as misinterpreted by quacks and loonies who think the Aztec's and Mayan's had magical and/or alien powers.
2011 was a pretty big year for games. Maybe even the biggest with event titles like the end of Gears of War, the greatest license game ever made in Batman Arkham City, the first triple A shooter playable with motion controls in Killzone 3 and the WIi's swan song, and best game, in Skyward Sword. There were some serious cowbell like duds thrown into the mix as well, the long awaited Duke Nukem didn't quite win new fans at it's debut and much vaunted Call of Duty killers like Homefront and Battlefield 3 fell short of Activisions iconic behemoth.
On top of that we saw new portable devices from Sony and Nintendo released new handhelds, unfortunately the same year the mobile gaming became the hot topic, either as the future or end of gaming depending on who you ask.
Here's a retrospective video of some of the last years most popular titles with some Placebo over the top, how many did you play?
