360, slide, fanboy blogs and Lite.

Roz and I bought a slide for Elliot on Friday and I spent the good part of the weekend building it for him in our back garden. Until you’re a parent, I don’t think that you realise the level of responsibility you have when building something for a child. I certainly couldn’t be slapdash and made sure that everything fitted correctly and that every knot was tightened.

Elliot certainly seems to enjoy it though and certainly whizzes down it at some speed… head first…

I’ve stumbled onto a few good blogs recently on the joystiq site. These are fanboy sites dedicated to current and next gen consoles… Regular reads for me are:

DS Fanboy
PS3 Fanboy
Revolution Fanboy


My new DS Lite is here… Yes it’s finally arrived and looks gorgeous in its stylish crystal white glory and thankfully, with no dead pixels!

I’ve only had a quick chance to play it last night, but the sharpness, quality and overall brightness of the screens really are something. It puts the old DS to shame and previously I had no real complaints about the DS at all.

The best thing of all is that I have plenty of games to keep my occupied on my DS Lite with even more coming out in the not too distant future.

Did I mention how gorgeous the DS Lite is? Thought so, but its worth mentioning again :)

I’m a very happy gamer…

Games played:
I went down to a friends house over the weekend and had my first go on an X-Box 360.

I have to say that the console itself certainly looks very stylish, although the fan is damn noisy, I know if I owned one, it would start to get on my nerves very quickly. Also I still can quite gel with the X-Box controller, it just doesn’t seem comfortable enough in my hands.

I played a couple of games and though I’d quickly post my impressions:

PGR 3

Graphically - phew, very impressive stuff indeed. Even on a non-high definition TV, this certainly looks the business, certainly streets ahead of the current generation racing games out there. Also the car handling seemed quite astute and as realistic as you could possibly get with the current setup.

The only downside is that nothing feels new here. As soon as you get beyond the sublime graphics, you quickly come to realise that this is exactly the same type of racing game that has been regurgitated numerous times on several platforms. Certainly nothing truly next-gen…

Next?

Perfect Dark Zero

I was really looking forward to seeing this as I was a big fan of Perfect Dark and also Rare (although they have slipped in the past few years). Initial impressions were very positive, the presentation of the game really is top notch.

Unfortunately as soon as you pick up the controller things slam down to earth very quickly. It just feels so damn awkward to control! Maybe it’s my dislike for the X-Box controller or maybe it’s because I played Half Life 2 recently with the mouse, but it just felt like I was battling with the control system all the time.

Other than that it just looked exactly the same as Perfect Dark, with slicker graphics and very slight enhancements to gameplay. So again, nothing new here…

Overall, I’m glad I’m waiting for the next generation. Bring on the Revolution I say!