Games, Demo’s and Elizabeth

The PSN has recently been graced with a relatively healthy selection of demos (I am of course talking about the US PSN – the UK PSN is still a little lacking), as such, I thought I’d take a moment to give my 2 cents worth on the more interesting of these:

FIFA 08
On the rare occasions that I play Football games, I’ve previous much preferred the Pro Evolution series. Nothing has changed, as well presented as Fifa is, it still feels clunky and well, not as enjoyable as it should be.

Stuntman: Ignition
A relatively large demo, with 3 full sections to complete. As a game, it seems rather good, but I think that I’d quickly get frustrated by having to restart everything from the beginning when more then 5 errors are made during the stunts.

SKATE
I also downloaded the latest Tony Hawks demo last week and to be frank, that seemed pretty dreadful, SKATE on the other hand seems like a breath of fresh air compared to the seemingly tired Tony Hawks games. The reason? The control feels much more appropriate to a skateboard game. Also, the area in which you skate around isn’t OTT, instead it’s a realistic well thought out skate park. I must confess that I was quite impressed by this.

As well as downloading demo’s, I also purchased 2 games recently. Locoroco for the PS3 at a bargain price of £1.99 from the PSN and Super Paper Mario for the Wii. Locoroco, is well, odd. It’s more like Lemmings than the PSP Locoroco and to be fair, I haven’t had chance to give it a good go, however for £1.99, it’s worth buying for the art style alone!

I’m thoroughly enjoying Super Paper Mario at the moment. It’s a bit of an odd game really, it certainly isn’t as challenging as a normal 2D platform Mario and not as deep as a standard RPG Paper Mario. Instead it’s like a normal Paper Mario game with the RPG elements stripped to the minimum and platforming and exploration pushed to the fore. All great fun though, and very amusing at times.

Film watched:
Elizabeth

Fantastic performances by Blanchett and Rush. Golden Years looks promising!
7.5/10

School

Elliot started school this week and so far, he seems to be enjoying the experience. Unfortunately for him, he has also come down with another case of tonsillitis, which is making him a little on the tired side, thankfully, however, he is still managing to make it to school and it isn’t bothering him as much now that he is on medication.

At present he is doing just over 2 hours at school in the afternoon, so only time will tell how he adjusts to full school life for 5 days a week. I know that I was less than enamoured by the whole school experience, but then again Roz was the other end of the spectrum, so maybe he’ll take after her in that respect.

I’m very proud that my little boy seems to be taking things in his stride, the thing is, he just seems to be growing up so damn fast!

INDY 4

So, the final title on Indiana Jones 4 has been announced.... and this is....

Drum roll ...................

Hmm?!?

“REALLY fat” and Warhawk

I thought I’d note something on my blog for posterity…

The other day after taking Roz to line dancing, I was walking Elliot out of the venue where this is held, which requires walking through a bar/restaurant. As we were walking out we passed a rather plump woman, at which time Elliot made the following comment (rather loudly).

“Daddy, that woman is REALLY fat”.

I quickly apologised to the woman and tried rushing Elliot out of the room, but not before he could add the further comment…

“She stopped growing big upwards and instead started growing big outwards!”

Kids…. You gotta love them.

Game played:
Warhawk

First of all the negatives…

* For an online only game the community aspects of the game really are strikingly poor when compared against Resistance. It could just be that Resistance did everything so well and that I just took this for granted, but several things about the community aspects of Warhawk really bug me, as follows:

* Trying to find ranked games and getting to join them is surprising difficult. In Resistance, all you needed to do is choose “ranked game” and it would plop you in the next available game – very quickly. In Warhawk you have to manually find them and join them, and even then by the time you’ve tried the game is normally full. As such, it can take an age to join a ranked game.

* For an online game which comes with a mic (with the Blu-ray version) there is very little online chatter, and when there is the quality of this isn’t as good as Resistance. It could just be the games I’ve played have been unusually quite, but Warhawk would really benefit voice communications to outline strategies.

* There is no way to track people you’ve just played against (available in Resistance).

* There is no way to block voice communications with specific players – i.e. if they are being offensive prats (available in Resistance).

* There is no quick and easy way to add a friend/buddy (available in Resistance).

* There is no way to add squads so that voice communication is always on and also no way to create a party to enter games (available in Resistance).

* The creation and management of clans is also rather limited.

Despite all of the above, Warhawk is immense fun. The battles in the game are fiercely fought and the likes of capture the flag and zone games can be very closely fought affairs. Also the feel of the game is very different to Resistance, as vehicles play an integral part of the game and players are seen in third person. Also, although there are actually only 5 different areas to explores, these are all very big and play differently depending on the type of game you are playing.

Dogfights (on advance setting) are initially difficult (i.e. you won’t last long at first), but after some practice, they can be thrilling as you dodge around canyons and over towns in pursuit of other Warhawks.

Overall, although a little flawed and lacking in the features that I would have liked, this is great fun to play and that at the end of the day, this is all that is required.