Sunday 31 January 2010

Completion update 2

Just a quick update on how my quest to complete my back-catalogue of games is going. The short answer is that it isn't. I'm still engrossed in Modern Warfare 2, hitting 2nd prestige earlier this week and already soaring my way up the ranks to the mid level 40's. I'm pretty much concentrating on a small set of weapons this time round as opposed to my usual 'level-up-as-many-guns-as-possible-for-the-XP-bonuses' method. My main weapon of choice is the UMP45 sub-machinegun, with two different setups. The original one which I don't use much any more had marathon, lightweight and commando as the perk setup. This arrangement is great for getting around the maps quickly and getting in for the up-close and personal kills. I used this setup to unlock all the attachments for the gun, earning a nice shiny title for my trouble; I even maxed out my throwing knife kills using this loadout, picking up a bunch of bonus XP and some sweet titles and emblems along the way. Once I'd unlocked everything though I changed tac, switching to a more accurate and stealthy approach. First of all I switched out the marathon perk for the bling perk, allowing me to fit two attachments to the gun in exchange for losing the ability to sprint permanently. Then the lightweight perk got dropped in favour of cold-blooded, a perk that makes you invisible to enemy radar and airsupport, and the commando (enhanced melee range) perk was dropped for Ninja, which makes you invisible to enemy heartbeat sensors, and once leveled up enough will grant me silent footsteps. The Bling perk allows me to use the red-dot sight for better accuracy as well as fitting a silencer, which combined with the cold-blooded and ninja perks makes me a very sneaky bugger indeed. Coupled with the Thumper grenade launcher as a secondary weapon and claymores in the equipment slot its become a very versatile loadout. I'm really enjoying the stealth play so far, though weather I'll be able to stick to it until the end of the prestige remains to be seen.

As a change of pace for when I get stuck in a rut of dying a lot, or for playing on wasteland, one of my favourite maps, I have a loadout with my trusty Barret M107.50cal sniper rifle set up. The beast itself is silenced and is complimented by the PP2000 machine-pistol as a secondary; with marathon, stopping-power and steady-aim as the perk set it becomes a highly mobile, highly effective long and close range setup.

When I'm not playing MW2 I can usually be found behind the wheel of a fantastically expensive car in Forza 3, (currently a Koenigsegg CCGT). I'm now into the 5th season of racing and at driver level 41 (out of 50), meaning I'm very close to "completing it". That statement is massively wrong on two levels however. Firstly, although season 6 is the last one you get an achievement for, the seasons just keep rolling over, basically repeating season 6 over and over again, plus there's still loads of races that won't have been raced during the previous seasons as you can only race one of the three offered each month, meaning there's plenty more to do in the 'race events' menu. Secondly, even assuming the completion of season six is the ultimate goal, it's still going to take aaaaaages to get there as the races are starting to get very long indeed. Not only that but there are more of them for each event now meaning it could still take weeks to reach my goal!

As an added hindrance to my goal of completing all my old games, I seem to be buying lots of new ones! Probably more in the last two months than in the last year combined! For Christmas I got Batman: Arkham Asylum, then I bought Mirrors Edge, Colin McRae Dirt 2, Fuel, Red Faction Guerrilla (which I haven't actually played since claiming it would be my next completion target last week), Saints Row 2 and Brutal Legend because they were all dirt-cheap and it would have been rude not to; then I got Dragon Age for my birthday and just this last week I've used up old clubcard vouchers and some left over birthday money on Mass Effect, Bayonetta, Gears of War 2 and Dead or Alive 4! I've had about two hours in the company of Bayonetta, (which was immensely enjoyable) and about six hours on Red Faction, but haven't even had time to open the boxes on the others! Damn special offers and tempting new releases! How on earth am I supposed to keep up with all that lot AND find time to play games I've already got!

Monday 25 January 2010

Modern Warfare 2: Glitchers Paradise

Since the beginning of time man has looked for the easy option. We're like water, we look for the path of least resistance and then exploit it as best we can. When it comes down to it, it would seem that hundreds of thousands of years of refining our competitive edge means that when there is no-one there to keep order, our natural instinct is to cheat.
Imagine what a boxing match or a premiership football match would be like without a referee.... Welcome to the world of Online First Person Shooters!

I've just been playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It's a fine game. The single player campaign is dramatic and exciting, but the meat of the game is in the multiplayer. Get online and fight with and against fellow gamers from around the globe in a test of skill, tactics and blind luck! A huge array of game types, more weapons than you could shake a stick at and the mother of all stat-tracking systems... rank up your character, level up your weapons, unlock new guns and equipment, adorn yourself with rare and collectible titles and emblems! All this over various and diverse maps, from the deserts of Afghanistan to the snowy wastes of Siberia, from close quarters house-to-house combat to the snipers realm of open farmland.

There's so much to do you'll never get bored! And if you aren't very good at it, don't worry, Infinity Ward have made the code so full of holes that you'll just be able to glitch your way to the top! First there was the Javelin glitch. This involved running around with the Javelin Missile rocket launcher equipped and performing some shenanigans with switching between it and the equipment slot, then, once you died the missile would explode in your hands taking out any nearby enemies, so what did a seemingly endless stream of people start doing? That's right, running around with the Javelin equipped, combined with the Lightweight (sprint faster) perk and just rushing into the middle of a group of enemies. Hey presto, get shot, blow up the entire enemy team.

Fair play to Microsoft who were whaling on people with the ban-stick during this whole episode, and to Infinity Ward who quickly implemented a patch to stop the glitch from happening. A patch that also fixed the less often seen glitch of getting inside a wall so you could shoot people without being seen.

But then, no sooner had that been fixed than some enterprising young scally realised that if you ran around with a care package grenade equipped instead of a gun you could actually move faster than the server could keep track of you, meaning you jerked from place to place on your opponents screen making it incredibly difficult for them to shoot you. Combine this with the Commando perk, which increases the range of your knife attack, and you need never carry a gun again! Again, IW were quick to get on top of this and a patch including a fix is winging it's way through the system as I write this.

Earlier this morning I was listening to the Vanhemlock News Show which included an article about how some people had found a way to hack the system resulting in anyone they killed losing experience points, which is a fairly sinister turn of events; a glitch that doesn't give the glitcher any benefit, but that exists solely to annoy and upset others.

Then, as dawn was breaking and my nightshift friends were getting home and online I decided to fire up MW2 myself, only to be confronted with a brand new and blatant glitch in the very first match I entered! Pissed off with this we left that lobby and joined another of a different game type and guess what, the same glitch was being exploited in there as well, only this time by someone on our side so I was able to watch what he was doing. It seems that repeatedly changing weapons while doing something else i won't mention here so as not to give anyone any ideas, will grant you with a free 'Emergency Airdrop' killstreak reward. You get killstreak rewards for getting a set number of consecutive kills, eg, 3 kills gives you a UAV, which highlights the enemies locations on your radar, 6 kills in a row grants you an airstrike to call in where and when you want, etc, etc. For 8 kills you get to call in an Emergency Airdrop, which consists of 4 crates dropped from a C130-Hercules plane which can contain any of the other killstreak rewards. So you can basically call in several high powered killstreak rewards without actually having to kill anyone, whenever you want, as often as you want. An 'Instant Win' button! Brilliant! My research done I promptly reported his ass to Microsoft, I just wish I'd taken note of his gamer tag so I could name and shame him here. Hopefully a ban will be finding him soon enough.

After quitting that lobby, joining yet another lobby and finding the same thing going on in there I quit out completely and booted up Forza. I'm not going to willingly pad the stats of some cheat. I just don't understand the mentality of people who feel the need to do stuff like that.

If you can't win on your own merits then either practice more, live with it, or quit!

Turtle Beach Earforce X1 Gaming Headset


With the remnants of my Christmas and birthday money I figured I'd treat myself to a Turtle Beach headset. After all, the majority of my XBOX time is spent playing Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer and everyone says that to experience the game properly you need Turtle Beach! Their exponents promise great things from them, not least of which is being able to hear when someone is coming up behind you, something I could really use! Let's just say that my deaths outweigh my kills by quite a significant amount, which really isn't ideal! So in my hunt for non-hacking, non-glitching ways to get the edge and try to improve my stats I figured I'd give a set of these bad boys a try.

What you get in the box is a well made set of over the ear headphones with a built in mic that is substantially larger and much more positionable than the standard XBOX one. You also get a profusion of leads which enable the X1's to overcome the biggest problem with gaming and headphones. You see, if you want to get the 3-D sound experience without shelling out for a home theater sound system, or you just want to play late at night, then headphones are the obvious answer. Unfortunately, if you've got a set of headphones on for the game sound, what are you going to do with the XBOX headset? How can you talk to your mates over the in-game chat? Answer: You can't wear two sets of headphones at once, so it's one or the other buddy! The way the X1's get around this is by a clever system of interconnecting leads.

The headset itself terminates in the traditional green and pink (speaker and microphone) jacks traditionally found on any PC compatible headset, which means that the Turtle Beach's are PC friendly straight out of the box. When connecting to the XBOX though, the green jack plugs into the end of a stereo splitter lead. First up, you take the red and white audio leads that run from the console to the TV and you unplug them from the back of the TV, then you plug the stereo splitter lead into the red and white sockets on the TV and then plug the red and white leads from the console into the back of those. So now you've got the audio signal coming out of the XBOX going straight to the earphones and straight to the TV, so you get no sound quality loss by going through the TV's headphone port. The second clever bit is that there is now a third cable that connects between the X1s and the XBOX controller in the same way as the regular XBOX headset does. You've got seperate volume controls for the voice chat and the game volume so you can get the balance just how you like it. Also, the quality of the mic and the fact that the live chat comes through the X1's built in amplifier means that the usually weak and crackly voice signal comes through loud and clear.

The first time I used them I played on the Favela map, (a small section of a shanty town in Rio de Janeiro), and the overload of sound had me playing like a total n00b for a while as I adjusted to my new and vivid aural surroundings! What was once just a cacophony of gunshots and explosions was suddenly enriched by myriad ambient sounds! Birds singing in the trees, dogs barking at all the noise, the distant murmur of traffic as the rest of Rio went about it's daily life in the background. I was quite shocked at the depth of sound design I'd been missing thanks to not wanting to turn the TV up too loud.

Overall the sound quality is very impressive. It's a little bass heavy, which I personally like, but which may not be to everyone's taste. You end up feeling totally immersed in the game as all outside distractions disappear once you have the headset on and the volume up. Since getting the X1's I've even started watching DVD's through the XBOX, something I would never normally do as the machine itself is so loud it would ruin the movie, but the X1's not only drown that noise out, but enhance the movie audio to the n'th degree. I saw Transformers 2 in the cinema and was very much underwhelmed by it, experiencing it again with the X1's I was (almost) blown away!


It's quite astonishing the difference fully realised audio can make to the gaming (or movie) experience, and if you can afford one I would thoroughly recommend getting a Turtle Beach Headset. That is the key issue here however - if you can afford it. They aren't cheap. The X1's are the bottom of the range and don't actually offer positional 3-D sound as I thought, (though the high quality stereo is still very useful), they weigh in at a hefty £50. As you head up the range and go wireless with surround sound you are looking at over £200 in some instances! Availability is something of an issue in the UK as well as they are an American product aimed mainly at an American market. I had a lot of trouble finding one online, with many reputable retailers having them listed but all of them were currently out of stock. Good old Game came to my rescue though. You may be lucky enough to find a set in your local Game shop (ask at the counter, they don't seem to want to put them on display for some reason), or failing that the Game website seems to have an abundance of them.

Sunday 17 January 2010

A brief round up


Just a quickie to take note of the last few days games:

Modern Warfare 2 - Standing proud at level 66 at the moment. No chance of hitting second prestige by the time I go back to work though, which was my original goal, mainly because of playing too much of the next game...

Forza 3 - Just hit level 36 and a little over halfway through season 3. The races are starting to get a bit long now, lucky to find one under 15 miles, nearly all taking well over 10 minutes a pop.

I was going to make Forza my next target for completion, but I think it's going to take way too long, plus I think it may get a little tiresome if I play it too intensely. I think I'll pick at it over the next few months, just dipping in now and again when I fancy it, similar to what I'm doing with MW2 really. As such I nominate Red Faction Guerrilla as my new main game. Been playing it on and off for a couple of weeks now and finding it quite enjoyable, so I think I'll step it up a gear and see if I can get it finished.

To PC or Not To PC, That Is The Question


I think I'm finally ready to admit that the PC is not a good gaming platform. First of all I must profess my love for my PC, it's seen me through thick and thin for several years now with hardly any complaint. It's been my main gaming platform for most of that time too; I may have had an XBOX 360 for two years now but I've only really gotten into it heavily in the last few months. Most of my PC gaming experiences have been positive ones, until recently anyway, and I have some very fond memories of nights in front of the Keyboard. From the original Unreal Tournament and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, through MMOs such as PlanetSide, LOTRO, Warhammer Online and City of Villains, it's been a blast. But the shine is starting to wear off. I first noticed that something my be wrong when I tried to play Section 8, a futuristic first person shooter that played well, looked stunning and had some fantastically innovative ideas that would have brought new life to the genre.... only no-one played it. Yes it didn't do as well as it could have on the consoles either, but there appeared to be NOBODY playing it on PC. Not a good sign for a multiplayer centric game. I tried several times to get into a match and failed every time because there just wasn't anyone else online.


I recently bought the new Ghostbusters game off Steam... ah Steam, both a blessing and a curse, incredibly useful for buying games whilst being utterly infuriating as a means of playing them. So yes, Ghostbusters, for a start it took something like seven and a half hours to download. What the hell is the point of the "convenience" of a digital download if it takes longer than it would take me to drive the 20 miles to the nearest game shop, buy the disc, drive back again and install it myself? And that's assuming Steam doesn't crash while it's downloading. Sorry, I was tangenting there, Steams quirks aren't meant to be the focus of this post, although they do have a bearing on it. Anyway, Ghostbusters on PC, it looks wonderful, but even with the graphics settings minimised it runs like a lame pig, even on my not-inconsiderable gaming rig. Terrible frame rate when there's any kind of on-screen action, long load times, freezing... it's not fun. It takes what could very well be a great game and makes you notice all the bad things instead. Would I have got this on the XBOX version of the same game? The graphics may not be quite as pretty as a PC running it all in high detail, but then again, I couldn't run it in high detail anyway.


I've been using the XBOX a hell of a lot recently and as a result I haven't really touched the PC for weeks. Today though I thought I'd have another crack at Ghostbusters as I'd like to finish it so I can get on and free up the 11Gb it's currently hogging. I turned on the PC, all fine and dandy, I sat back and waited as Steam and Xfire automatically ran their updaters, no point trying to play a game that already struggles by itself, let alone if the processor is busy doing other stuff, while that's happening. So fifteen minutes and a restart later I was all ready to go, only as the game was starting up Steam crashed out on me and locked up the whole system. Right, ok... another restart, Steam launched without complaint, the game (eventually) loaded up to the menu screen and I clicked "resume game". And then nothing happened for ages. I ALT/TAB'd out and opened task manager to find that 'Ghostbusters is not responding', so I ended the task and again  nothing happened. Then after a few more minutes of not being able to click on anything the screen went blank and I was booted back out to the desktop. I'd spent almost half an hour in front of the keyboard by this point and still hadn't got to play anything, while all the time thinking how much simpler it would have been if I'd bought it on XBOX instead! All this on a machine that runs Left 4 Dead smoothly and sweetly and without complaint, (most of the time). It just seems to be the fickle nature of the beast.


I really miss keyboard and mouse controls for 1st person shooters on the xbox, and I'm still dying too often in MW2 simply because I can't use the controller properly, but that sacrifice is a small one compared to the benefits of the simplicity and reliability you get from a console. I've recently bought Mass Effect for PC, (the reason I wanted to get Ghostbusters finished and uninstalled to make room!), but I'm seriously considering giving it up as a bad job before even installing it and picking it up for the 360 instead.

Saturday 16 January 2010

Getting My Money's Worth


Why don't I ever complete games? And in this day and age of achievements, side-quests, collectibles and online multiplayer goodness, what does it even mean to complete a game? I suppose the standard definition for most games would be to get to the end credits, playing through the main story arc of the game and seeing it to its conclusion. I've managed this a few times in recent years, most notably on all the Guitar Hero games. Though while I've seen the end credits on all of them, there are still plenty of achievements outstanding, I've never finished a tour on expert difficulty or more recently completed the tour for every instrument, so can I really say I've completed any of them?

Some other notable "completions" in the last few years have been Prototype, (still a dozen or so challenge missions to do and loads of orbs to find), and the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series. In the case of these last two, the single player campaign is finish-able in one (admittedly long) session, but getting all the achievements involves playing through on Veteran mode, which is so hard the game stops being fun. Then there's the HUGE multiplayer aspect to the series! Can I truely feel comfortable saying I've finished the game without trying it? Without hitting level 70? Without going into prestige mode at least once? Without hitting 10th Prestige? Without leveling up all the guns and completing all the challenges and earning every single title and emblem the game has to offer? The scary thing about the online play in these games is how much of a time-sink they become, a fact pointed out quite blatantly in the online leaderboards. For example, in MW2 I'm coming towards the end of 1st Prestige and I've spent a total of FIVE AND A HALF DAYS getting there. That's a measure of actual online gaming time mind you. Five and a half of the finite number of days allotted to me playing one computer game. Getting to the end of 10th Prestige is going to take over a MONTH of actual online time at this rate! That's quite a frightening prospect.

Of course, my most recent game completion has also been my most... er, well, complete. Assassin's Creed II saw me finish the main storyline, complete several collecting quests and earn every XBOX achievement along the way. It's still not 100% complete though. There are still a few side missions left in some of the cities, a race here, an assassination there; and that's not to mention the scores of treasure chests left littered about the place. But the question then must be, 'Can I be bothered?'. There aren't any achievements hanging off any of them, and there are plenty of other games sat on my shelf that I'd like to be playing, and as we've already seen, some of them are real time-hogs!

If I look at this list of completions and then look at my shelf of games it strikes me that the completed titles are heavily outweighed by the uncompleted ones, some of which (yes Halo 3 and Gears of War, I'm looking at you) I actually got with the console over two years ago! This then begs the question 'Have I got my money's worth out of these titles?', and the answer surely has to be 'No'. Some of these things are forty quid a pop! That's a lot of money to spend on something that's played once and then put on the shelf never to be touched again.

I'd been thinking about this for a little while anyway, but then I was inspired by Jon Shute over at www.Vanhemlock.com to actually do something about it. He's set himself the goal of completing all his old games by the end of the year, setting complicated targets for achievement percentages and stuff, and he's got hundreds of games so it's quite a daunting prospect for him. I on the other hand only have 20 or so games in my 'to-do' list. so here are my goals:

By the end of 2010 I aim to have:
end credited all of my old games,
achieved roughly half the achievements for each (100% where possible),
got to the mythical 10th Prestige in Modern Warfare 2.

Friday 15 January 2010

From Firenze to Forza


My adventures in 15th Century Italy are over. No longer can I cry "My name is Ezio Auditore Da Firenze. You killed my father. Prepare to die!" before stabbing an Archbishop in the face.

Yes, Assassin's Creed 2 has been completed! I finished the main story a few days ago, including finding and deciphering all the glyphs and discovering all of the assassin's seals and unlocking the armour of Altair. It took me a little longer, (and the help of an online guide - gah! Unclean! UNCLEAN!!!), to locate all the feathers though. I finished that particular quest yesterday which unlocked the 'In memory of Petruccio' achievement and also granted access to the Auditore cape, the wearing of which in each city also granted me the 'Show your colours' achievement taking my gamer score for Assassins Creed 2 up to 995 out of a possible 1000 points. The achievement I'd missed? 'Flyswatter', where you need to kick a guard while using Lonardo Da Vinci's flying machine, which just happens to be specific to the final part of the 8th mission. There's no way of going back and re-playing individual missions so for the sake of FIVE gamerscore points and my very first 100% completed achievement list I spent most of today running through the whole game again from the very beginning!

What is remarkable about this is that I enjoyed it almost as much second time around as I did the first. There is just so much depth and diversity that it never gets boring. The acting is of the highest quality, the main story is gripping and entertaining, and running over the rooftops of Florence or Venice will never ever get old. Assassins Creed 2 is an astonishing milestone in gaming history and not just because it's the first game I got all the achievements for! It's my nomination for Game of the Year 2009. (Although I haven't played Arkham Asylum yet).

After all that excitement, and some food, I was hankering for some multi-player online action. I'm right up to my neck in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) at the moment and at the start of play today was at 1st Prestige - Level 60. For those unfamiliar with the prestige system, after hitting the maximum level, level 70 in this case, you get the option to carry on playing with all of the weapons unlocked or you can take the plunge and enter Prestige mode, essentially putting you back to level 1, with nothing to show for it apart from the "prestige" of having a nifty little emblem next to your name. So first Prestige level 60 is effectively level 130 (70+60). Hit level 70 again and you get to make the choice again, right up until you get to the Holy Grail of 10th Prestige, or level 770! Anyway, I like to try and make at least one level every time I play, which from about level 50 up can be a bit tricky as the number of points needed to level gets greater each time. But with the help of a few ten thousand point challenge unlocks, (namely ACR Veteran I, ACR Marksman VI and .50Cal Marksman V), I managed to get two whole ranks under my belt and walked away an hour or so later happy to be at level 62.

Finally in today's gaming marathon (all this snow makes me not want to go out much, and there's bugger all on telly) I returned to another fantastic game from last year, the mighty Forza 3. The greatest racing game ever made? I think so. And right up there with AC2 as a contender for game of the year. I've been dipping into this monster of a game regularly for a few months now and today saw me hit the half-way stage by completing my third season of races and reaching driver level 25. There's some beefy gamerscore rewards hanging off these two milestones, but they are nothing compared to the beautiful Lamorghini Reventon that's unlocked for hitting 25. No idea how it drives yet, but I could just sit and look at it all day long.

Thursday 14 January 2010

The Obligatory First Post


Hello. This is a blog. More specifically this is my blog. Even more specifically, taking specifics as far as it is possible to take them in fact, this is my blog about my life in and around video games.

Computer games have been a part of my life since I was a child, some 30-odd years ago now, and I can vividly recall some of my first gaming experiences. From the hand-held delights of Space Invaders, (a big chunky piece of yellow plastic with a cool turned steel control stick and a big red fire button), and two player pac-man; through the arcades of the '80's, the ZX Spectrum, the SNES, Playstation, PS2 and the PC, right up to my console of choice in today's next-gen market, the XBOX 360. I'm not a professional gamer, I'm not even a hard-core one. I'm more what you may think of as a keen amateur. I believe the term is a 'casual gamer' although that sounds more like some sort of dress code to me. Still, I'm finding myself playing more and more these days and I thought I'd share my experiences, triumphs and disasters here on the interwebs.

This is a bit of an experiment for me. I've had plenty of general, non-specific blogs in the past and they've always failed, mainly because I'm too bloody lazy to keep them updated, but also because I can never think of what to fill them up with. Hopefully that won't be the case here as the topic is always there at my fingertips.

2009 was a good year for gaming, let's hope 2010 can better it.
Cheers,
Dok