Dizzy: Prince of the Yolk Folk Good(egg)ies
Originally published on Ready Up on 11th January 2012.
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Eggs are awesome, aren’t they? You can make so much with them: omelettes, cakes, pancakes, a big mess on the kitchen floor after a particularly nasty entanglement with a beloved family pet. In fact, there are only three ways to improve such an already awesome foodstuff: stick some shoes, some gloves and a big smiley face on the shell.
And that’s exactly where Dizzy comes in. After an 11 year hiatus, everyone’s favourite albumen casing is back in the remake of his greatest adventure, Prince of the Yolk Folk. It’s once again up to the oospore to do what he does best, jumping and tumbling through locations including the leafy boroughs of Keldor and even to hell itself.
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.
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.
First Contact with Star Trek Online
First published on Ready Up on 20th May 2011.
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MMOs are hard to do properly: you need solid gameplay mechanics, interesting lore and, most importantly of all, a lively, respected and well looked-after community. Numerous RPGs have come and gone, but only one remains standing strong to this day, which is why Cryptic, the studio charged with creating an MMO out of the Star Trek IP, has a massive challenge on its hands.
I bloody love Star Trek, I do. I used to detest it. I’d skip past channels that were broadcasting episodes of it, thinking about how pointless it was and blah blah blah, you’ve heard me say all this before.
Fatherhood
Originally posted on Ready Up on 16th May 2011.
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Being a father is an amazing thing (or so I’ve heard, anyway). Creating a new life is a miraculous event, forever altering your outlook and perspective on existence and perpetually moulding your judgements and beliefs afterwards. This little person you now have is your responsibility, a blank canvas that will forever be influenced by your actions and morals and who will eventually carry on your legacy. They will depend on your care and wisdom for the rest of their – and your – life and the bond you share with them will shape them as a person. This bond between father and child, the attachment, friendship and love shared between the two, is one of the greatest and most precious things in the world.
Why I Like Dead Space
Written for a friend’s blog, but never published.
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I’m not the biggest fan of the survival horror genre. It’s not because I’m scared of them (I like to think I’m quite brave when it comes to encountering the unknown), but mostly down to the characters you play as. Most titles, especially the Silent Hill series, have you controlling someone that is weak-willed, weedy and inevitably terrified into inaction by the situations they find themselves in and the monstrosities they encounter. I’d rather tackle adversaries head on and defeat them permanently, rather than retreat with my tail between my legs in the hopes I can outrun them and avoid coming across them in future.
Which is why playing as Isaac Clarke, the protagonist of Dead Space, is such a refreshing change to play as compared to your more typical survival horror character.
While he slots into the ordinary-person-in-an-extraordinary-situation regularly seen within the genre, he has one main characteristic that many others seem to lack: his doggedness and determination to survive. While the main characters of other titles can spend the duration of the game constantly questioning why something so horrible is happening to them and cowering in fear whenever they’re attacked by monsters, Isaac sees the horror’s occurring around him and accepts the fact that he’s going to need to do everything he can to have any possibility of surviving his exploration of the remains of the USG Ishimura.
Isaac’s obstinacy in the face of such terrifying adversity is felt throughout Dead Space’s story. With no formal combat experience (he’s a lowly engineer, after all), he relies on his construction tools, he some of which has brought along with him and some of which are made available to him over the course of the adventure. As such, his weapons consist of devices such as line cutters and heavy duty flamethrowers. Isaac’s proficiency in using such instruments against the Necromorph threat means that they are no less suited to the occasion than the orthodox machine guns, shotguns and sniper rifles.
What really demonstrates his conviction to survive the events taking place on the ship, however, are his physical actions. When close enough to an enemy, Isaac can swing his weapon at them or viciously stamp on them if they’re lying on the ground. While most survival horror characters attacks can seem weedy, Isaac puts as much force as he can muster behind each of his melee attacks, roaring with effort as his weapon or boot makes contact with the abominations created by the alien infection, the vibration of the pad and shaking of the screen highlighting the ferocity and viciousness behind each blow.
This resourcefulness, determination and sheer willpower combined with a conviction to survive flows into the player, in turn boosting their bravery and stubbornness to never give up. The threat you face may be hideously terrifying (not to mention terrifyingly hideous), but they’ve got another thing coming if they think that Isaac, and in extension the player, are gonna go down without a fight.
Edinburgh Interactive Festival 2010
Originally posted on Ready Up on 31st August 2010.
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Edinburgh: It’s an awesome city. Home to cultural figureheads such as Robert Louis Stevenson, J.K. Rowling and Irvine Welsh, alongside Rockstar North, one of videogaming’s most prolific games companies, the capital city of Scotland has long since been known as a cultural hotspot. There are loads of places to visits in locations made famous by films such as Trainspotting, which include tonnes of shops on the high street, a multitude of galleries, museums and libraries to visit, the famous castle to scope out (or perhaps catch a gig at), a science centre to boost your intellect and also a fantastic zoo where, if you’re lucky, you may witness a Penguin Parade, perhaps one of the greatest spectacles on the planet.
Yay, penguins!
Crackdown 2 Preview
Originally published on Ace Gamez on 8th July 2010.
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Back in 2007, the original Crackdown was a breath of fresh air for those looking for something new from their open-world gaming. Placing the player in Pacific City, you worked for ‘The Agency’ and took control of one of their super-soldiers, capable of marvelous feats such as the ability to jump higher than the average human, precision targeting with weapons and super-strength. The fact that these attributes were leveled up over the course of the game meant you became capable of some exceptionally satisfying accomplishments, such as kicking cars a considerable distance and jumping entire tower blocks in a single bound. This superlative silliness, along with the fact that you could play alongside a friend, led to some fantastic (if eventually repetitive) action gaming, with tonnes of baddies to wipe out and a whole lot of vehicles to blow up.
Microsoft’s E3 Showing: All The Important Details
Originally published 14th June 2010 on Gamebrit.
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Microsoft’s E3 conference last year first revealed Project Natal, the motion-sensitive hardware that supposedly surpasses Nintendo’s Wii Motion technology, along with early and rather basic implementations of the hardware. So it was with more than a large degree of excitement that many viewers were waiting to see the different uses of the technology a year on. The promise of new trailers of some extremely-anticipated games certainly didn’t help.
