Re(tro)cycling
Originally published on Ready Up on 6th October 2011.
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I’m clearing out my room.
In a bid to sort the house out, I’m going through all the stuff that’s currently in my bedroom and tossing away all the crap I don’t need anymore. It’s weird seeing all the things that I’ve owned that used to mean a lot to me that I’ve forgotten about over the years: books I’d made with my mum when I was learning to write, boxes stuffed to the brim with Beanie Babies, even a couple of Neopets plushies (collectors’ editions, supposedly. They’ll be going on eBay). I’ll be keeping all the sentimental stuff, binning all the rubbish and punting all the stuff I no longer want.
Midway through my clearout, I stumbled upon these bad boys.
A Week in the Life of a Halo Reach Credit Addict
Originally published on Ready Up on 21st September 2011.
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Getting such medals isn’t too difficult: all you need to do is kill the player that was responsible for your last death. It’s not a common occurrence, but not so rare that you hardly see it. This weekly challenge is perfect: it’s not so difficult that you won’t bother attempting it, but requires a fair degree of playtime to achieve. The healthy 7777 credits only serve to make it more tempting.
Being the Halo nut that I am, I immediately delve into it. I suit up with a couple of Halo buddies and jump into Team Slayer. We play for a couple of hours and I manage to rack up about 20 Revenge medals. Not bad for a night’s worth of playing.
Hard Reset Review
Originally published on Ready Up on 13th September 2011
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In our Hard Reset preview a few weeks back, it showed itself to be a competent, satisfying and high octane piece of shooting fun. Eschewing all the conventions of other modern shooters, it aims to rejuvenate the shooter genre, taking it back to its roots while still remaining up to scratch with its contemporaries. We loved the ‘unashamedly burly balls-to-the-wall action’ offered throughout the short two level preview build.
So does the full version remain a rigid pillar of enjoyment for its entirety, or does it fall limp under the weight of its own hot air?
Hard Reset places you in the shoes of CLN Agent Fletcher, who gets caught up in a violent robotic uprising taking place amidst a dystopia plagued by impoverishment. With the aid of his buddies, who are snug-as-a-bug holed in command headquarters, it’s up to Fletcher to find out who’s behind the mechanical uprising and put an end to it.
Dumbfounding Premonition
Originally published on Ready Up on 10th September 2011.
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The week I was banned from Xbox Live was a bloody boring one. Upon turning on my Xbox 360, I discovered that I was disconnected from the service completely, meaning that I basically had a useless, noisy white box under my television. I couldn’t play any games; I couldn’t download any DLC for single player games to play offline; I couldn’t even access the Zune service to watch a movie or two. Without being able to play my beloved Halo and being unable to make a start with Deus Ex: Human Revolution thanks to weird international release dates, I had to find something else to pass the time.
So I went to town and popped into HMV to see if I could grab any bargains. I had no idea what to look for, so I scanned the shelves for something cheap and cheerful to last me the week. I looked at row after row of titles, not really being pulled in by any of them…
Hard Reset
Originally published on Ready Up on 29th August 2011.
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Let’s face it: the first-person shooter is becoming increasingly stale these days. Sure, the occasional gem appears now and again, but every shining example of the genre is accompanied by twice as many substandard copies. For every Halo, there’s a Haze; for every Battlefield and Call of Duty, there’s a Homefront; for every Timesplitters, there’s a (Christ) Duke Nukem Forever. Gone are the days of blasting everything in front of you until it falls down dead. These days it’s all about ducking into cover, popping your head out every so often, aiming carefully to conserve your ammo and not getting hit to regain your health like a pussy. The genre is in dire need of a reset.
So it’s a good thing there’s a Hard Reset on the way.
You Have Been Banned
Originally posted on Ready up on 20th August 2011.
Earlier this week, I woke up to find I’d been banned from Xbox Live.
This is the second time I’ve been suspended from the service ‘due to inappropriate content in the profile for my gamertag’. The first time was for something completely ridiculous: I thought it would be hilarious to put ‘Fanny Bum’ as my motto. There it stayed for months alongside my long, wanky bio (which included the line ‘never gets the girl, but always saves the world or some shit’) and a link to my blog.
Reach Rage
Originally published on Ready Up on 10th August 2011.
Halo Reach has me raging again.
As you may have gathered from my previous thoughts on the game, I’m a total whore for the Halo credits. For me, there’s nothing better than watching that little bar at the bottom of the screen edge ever closer to the right with every single credit I acquire. Finally ranking up and being able to afford a piece of armour you’ve been lusting after for ages is possibly the most blissful feeling on earth.
But getting these credits is an arduous task, one requiring a huge degree of hard work and dedication. You gain space cash after every game you finish, with the average amount being around 1000 creds per game. With levelling up requiring tens, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of credits, that equates to playing a lot of Halo.
As Mad As A Hatter
Originally posted on Ready Up on 6th August 2011.
Welcome, dear lady and distinguished gent,
to a blog that was written by a mind long since bent,
warped by a game that showed mountains of promise,
but from which my mind now in madness seeks solace.
Enchanted by assurance of a rich, dark game world,
but ultimately from the ledge of sanity I was hurled.
Star Trek Online: Captain’s Log from The Final Frontier
Originally posted on Ready Up on 21st July 2011.
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So, it’s been a good few weeks since we ventured into Star Trek online and held the reins of our very own starship. We’ve ventured far from Earth Spacedock to every sector of the galaxy, travelling to a multitude of planets and systems both new and familiar, aiding friendly alien species, battling hostile ones and working our way up the Starfleet ranks as we did so. Having spent so much time in the StarTrek universe, we’ve now got a solid idea of our thoughts on it.
The first thing you’ll notice on your maiden voyage is just how huge the game world (well, galaxy) truly is. Each portion of the map is split up into ‘blocks’, each with their own number of ‘sectors’. These sectors host a multitude of planets, meaning there’s a huge number of worlds to visit and investigate over the course of your adventure. As a result, nearly every location from the series, movies and books you can think of, be it Deep Space 9, The Briar Patch or Memory Alpha, can be explored. The fact that you can also travel to a number of ‘clusters’, each with an infinite amount of randomly generated systems, means that the scale of Star Trek Online’s landscape is truly vast.
Alice Madness Returns
Originally published on Brash Games on 18th July 2011.
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Almost 11 years ago, American McGee’s Alice, a radical reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s beloved Wonderland fantasy realm, was released on PC. Continuing on from Alice Liddell’s last adventure Through The Looking Glass, the intervening years saw the family household go up in flames, leaving her family dead. As a result, Alice’s mind snaps, causing her to be committed to a mental asylum where, ten years later, she’s recalled to a version of Wonderland that’s more twisted, deranged and horrifying than ever before. With the aid of The Cheshire Cat, now hairless, tattooed and pierced, Alice must overcome her madness to defeat the evil Queen of Hearts and restore Wonderland to normality once and for all.
It became a critical darling on the basis of the story: the acceptable and mechanically-sound gameplay was outshone by the daring reinvention of a world many gamers had grown up with. Look past the often simple and uninspiring gameplay and you’d find an intriguing world corrupted by the macabre mind of its designer, one worth investing your time in.
So it’s strange to find that, over a decade later, nearly the exact same thing can be said of its sequel, Alice Madness Returns.
Read the rest of this review on Brash Games.
