E3 2012 Part 2 - EA and Ubisoft

Sorry EA, even though you were chronologically first, you've been relegated to second place in this post because Ubisoft absolutely blew your press conference out of the water. And all that in spite of the awful Ubisoft hosts for the second year in the row. Tobuscus should stick to making Literal Trailers on YouTube and Aisha Tyler should stick to... playing Charlie on Friends for like five episodes... has she done anything else? Terrible attempts at banter aside, Ubisoft had some really impressive looking games on show - here are my thoughts:

Ubisoft Press Conference
Microsoft had an Usher performance for Dance Central 3, so Ubisoft also had to splash the cash and get Flo Rida to come out live and rap and attempt to dance for Just Dance 4. The actual dancers were all fairly attractive women wearing tight shirts and short shorts (probably to make up for the fact that Just Dance is generally thought of as the inferior dance game).

And then, more boobs. This press conference was very uncensored, strange considering how early in the day it was, but hey ho. The Far Cry 3 trailer opened with a topless woman writhing on top of you, and then there were guns, bows and arrows, knives, tigers and fire. Damn Cry Engine is good at fire. Then there was a sequence where the character was injected with something, then started tripping out and was walking through a dream world on television screens and then he shot the bad guy, but his face changed just before he did it. I'm not entirely sure what was going on, but it looked interesting and I'm enough of a fan of the previous games to be pretty excited about this one.

Probably the most underwhelming trailer of the conference was for Marvel Avengers: Battle for Earth. It showed some fights between some recognisable Marvel characters, but not much else, and it was barely talked about.

Rayman Legends was next, and suddenly became my most looked forward to game of the show so far (although that didn't last long, you'll find out why later). It was demoed on the Wii U, with a new character shown to be controlled using the touch screen controller, while two other characters used normal Wiimotes to platform. The touch screen was used to move around the screen and manipulate environments to help the platformers. Then there was a sequence when things on screen were happening in time with the music, and it was very impressive. Definitely something to look forward to on the new Nintendo console.

It's the Queen's diamond jubilee this weekend, so there was a trailer with the British national anthem playing over it! God save the queen! Oh God, zombies are killing everyone in London. Zombi U is the new winner of worst game name of the show so far (the previous holder of the title was Lococycle, although strangely that also held title of best named game), and apparently it's a zombie game, because that's a revolutionary concept.

Assassin's Creed 3 had a large segment of the show, and deservedly so, as it looks very (I'm going to use this word again) impressive. Being able to free run over trees instead of building is fresh and looks very cool. New mechanics such as firing squads and not being able to run as fast in deep snow and so on all look like they are going to make this game one to watch this year, despite my trepidation of it only being a year since the previous game. Also the shape of Connor's tomahawk is still awesome. His unexciting name is still not.

Trackmania 2 was one of my favourite games of last year, I love the speed, I love the craziness and I love how janky it is. So when Shootmania Storm was announced a few weeks ago, no one was more excited than me. Ubisoft had a live demo, with 'famous' names from the world of eSports taking part in a girls vs boys match of Elite Mode, where each round is 1 v 3, with the one person having the advantage of using a one shot kill gun. And the boys won, woo.

Finally, Ubisoft had a new IP to tell us about, and God damn it looks cool. It seems to be a third person action game, where the protagonist has access to a wealth of technology, as well as guns. The tagline is that "the city becomes your weapon", and that certainly seems to ring true, as we see the main character hacking in to traffic lights to cause a car crash involving his target, being able to gain someone's personal information just be looking at them, hacking into phones or turning off all signals in an area to cause a distraction and more. Then there was a twist at the end of the gameplay demonstration as the camera switched to another character, who certainly had what looked like a multiplayer gametag above his head. On top of all this the city the player roams around looks gorgeous, with great lighting and weather effects, and there are some top notch long coat dynamics. Watch Dogs got the largest cheer I've heard so far at the show, and rightly so, we love new games that looks awesome! The one thing I will say is that I'm unsure whether Ubisoft are targeting current generation platforms with this game, but if they are, sweeeeet.

EA Press Conference
I didn't realise the finale of Game of Thrones was going to be longer than usual, which is annoying as it made me miss the Dead Space 3 reveal. Apparently they were touting a co op campaign and a new playable character. I loved Dead Space 2, and I hope this one will live up to that.

Do you know what else I loved growing up? Sim City. And EA are making a new one, super excited. Did anyone say "roads that aren't straight"? The one downer of this presentation was that it's not coming out til next February, booo.

EA then rolled out their sports games, Madden and Fifa, which I talked about in my first post, so go and click that link on the right if you haven't already.

Battlefield 3: Premium was announced. Right now you can pay the low low price of $50 and get access to 5 unreleased expansion packs! I'm not a fan of this whole "pay now and you can get stuff later!" payment model of late, but who knows, maybe the new stuff will be super amazing.

EA's other big war game came out next. Medal of Honor Warfighter showed itself, and damn it looks pretty, that Frostbite 2 engine is niiiice. Other than that though, it looks like...a war game. We've already got BF and CoD, and the new MoH doesn't look revolutionary, which is a shame.

Then EA announced a few year and multi game partnership with UFC, which I don't really have an interest in, even though they hammered home the point that apparently it's the fastest growing sport in the world. Good for them.

Criterion make some damn good driving games, and Need for Speed Most Wanted looks like it will keep up with the trend- wait a minute wasn't that the name of a previous NFS game? On the current generation of hardware? Weird.

They closed out the press conference with Crysis 3, what else? It looks nicer, but the gameplay looks veeery similar to Crysis 2, which is a fine game, but I'd like something a bit fresher like what Ubisoft are doing with Assassin's Creed. Also, I'm guessing that Cry Engine has some new bow and arrow technology, as both this and Far Cry are using them...

So that was EA and Ubisoft. I'll be back later with Sony and Nintendo! Thanks for reading, have a good day.

E3 2012 Part 1 - Microsoft

The biggest press event in the gaming calendar is here! E3 2012 started today and I'll be attempting to watch all of the press conferences and write about what has been sparking my interest.

Microsoft Press Conference
The entire theatre started awash with Microsoft's familiar green light, and then there it was - a FMV Halo 4 trailer! Now I've never been the biggest fan of Halo, and my hopes of something new were dashed when I saw that the first enemies to be seen were Grunts, Jackals and Elites. But wait, that Elite just disintegrated... wait, what are those glowing crawling animal robot things? Awesome, something new from the Halo franchise, perhaps I'll be excited about it after all.

Next up was Splinter Cell Blacklist. I remember when these were highly unforgiving stealth games, but not any more. This origin story sees Sam Fisher running and gunning his way through hordes of enemies, and scaling walls like a monkey. I haven't confirmed this, but I don't think Michael Ironside was voicing young Fisher, which made me a bit sad, but we'll see.

I know lots of "proper" gamers don't like sports games, but that's only because they're wrong. Fifa 13 will be the new slightly improved football game for this year, and will feature Kinect support for the first time. You can make substitutions without going into menus, can call for passes and so on. My favourite part was when they showed a player being caught by the offside trap and swearing at the Kinect (it was beeped out, kid friendly show). The Kinect picked up on this however and the commentator began saying how the player was unhappy about being caught out, very amusing.

Madden 13 too will feature Kinect support, and the presentation even featured legendary quarterback Joe Montana! I found it funny that no one seemed to be acknowledging that Sega made the largely unsuccessful Joe Montana football games back in the nineties, but anyway. Montana began to call plays using his voice rather than a controller and then proceeded to score a touchdown! Against the Seahawks, with the Niners, what a dick.

Fable The Journey is a Kinect Fable game. Yay.

Gears of War Judgment got a trailer too, sparking many debates about what the correct spelling of that word is. The trailer didn't show much other than confirming that it is indeed a new Gears of War game, so there's that.

Then there was dubstep, which can only mean one thing: a racing game! Forza Horizon was on show, and this time they're leaving the track and heading out into the open world, and it looks very, very pretty. I've never been drawn to the Forza franchise despite being a big racing fan, hopefully this will do something to persuade me.

Last year we saw the new Tomb Raider game, and this year we got to see a bit more! The gameplay looks incredibly fast paced, seeing Lara running, jumping, shooting and stabbing her way through the level at breakneck speed. I'm hoping that there will be more of an exploration element to the finished game, but I guess they have to show off the exciting sections here.

Then three new titles. Ascend New Gods seems like a fantasy beat em up, in the same vein as God of War, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it from what they showed. Then they showed a trailer for a game called Lococycle, and in the notes I made for the press conference it says "Wat???????", so there you go. Go and watch the trailer. Then finally 343 Guilty Spark was floating around a test chamber from Portal and apparently that's going to be called Matter. 


But that doesn't Matter because Resident Evil 6 was next, and much like Tomb Raider the action was fast and action packed, with explosions and fire and helicopters and quick time events out the arse. I wasn't particularly interested, but then I haven't been interested in a RE game for a long time now.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park then made an appearance to grant some much needed levity to the press conference. They were showing off South Park: The Stick of Truth, well not so much showing it off as showing a trailer which gave no indication of what the game will be. You will be playing as the new kid in town who is trying to become cool and be the fifth member of the group. It remains to be seen just how this will be done and whether it will be any good or not.

Then for some reason Usher came out and sang a song and danced. A lot. And then he left and apparently that was them showing off Dance Central 3, huh.

Finally, Microsoft closed out their star studded show with the big guns, quite literally. Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 or CODBLOPS2 if you're feeling that way inclined showed the public what they've been showing press since the game got announced a while back. There's a female president and holographic devices, so you know it's the future. Also there's a gun which you can "charge up" which apparently means it can shoot through solid concrete to kill guys on the other side. The gameplay demonstration takes place in Los Angeles and shows the branching storylines and differing tactics you can use to approach your mission. At one point you can choose to either snipe from the top of the broken freeway or rappel down and shoot guys that way. Okay fine, it's not really revolutionary, but at least it's a step in the right direction for the ageing franchise. The most interesting part for me was the use of drones which could be controlled using a PDA thing on your wrist, and that there was a pilot-able jet. I'm unsure whether the jet is on semi- rails, as there didn't seem to be a way to alter your altitude when you wanted to, but I could be wrong about that. Also, the future is black, apparently.

So that was Microsoft's press conference. I'll be writing up EA and Ubisoft's respective press conferences early on tomorrow, and then I'll hopefully be able to do Sony and Nintendo's later in the day.

Excited about games yet? I sure am, and we're only a couple of hours in to this epic event. Thanks for reading, see you later.

Diablo 3, Max Payne 3 & The Walking Dead

It has been over a month since my last blog post, and I'm glad to be back writing again.

The reason for my hiatus was my university finals, and now that they're over I am no longer in full time education! How did I celebrate? By downloading the games I had been missing out on over the past few months of course.

Diablo III
This was the one. Of all the titles I wanted to play during my revision, this was the one that was tempting me the most, not least because half of my friends list on Steam were playing it 24/7, and that's only the ones that had bothered to add it to their non-steam game list. So, this morning, the morning after what I hope was my last ever exam, I downloaded it (very quickly, Blizzard have definitely upgraded their downloader since I last played one of their games) and logged in, after a minute or so trying to find the authenticator app on my phone.

Oh, this thing, I remember reading about this issue that was occurring over the first few days after the game's release. Maybe it was just giving me the full experience?

Nope, not working. Okay, I'll play that later.

The Walking Dead
Since Diablo was walking, I thought I'd jump into one of the other games I had been itching to play. I've never read the comics or seen the television adaptation of this series, so I wasn't really sure what to expect. After reading multiple favourable reviews I thought I would give it a go though, and I definitely wasn't disappointed. It also makes me want to at least watch the TV show, if the writing is up to the same quality as it is in the game - which will be another huge time sink, but hey, I'm technically unemployed now, time is one of the things I do have.

It's a game about zombies, which I continue to say I don't enjoy the idea of, yet still seem to keep playing them (Dead Island, Dead Space, Dead Rising, etc). Telltale Games, the masters of episodic adventure titles strike again (they kinda struck out with that Jurassic Park one, but we'll forgive them for now), with more item collection and quick time events! It's a lot better than it sounds though, as the entire thing is wrapped up in a great little story which really makes you empathise with the characters over the short play time with clever dialogue sequences and tricky decisions to make along the way.

There's only one episode out at the moment, but there are four more to come and I am very much looking forward to playing them, after the huge CLIFFHANGER at the end of the first. Spoiler: The woman says "I think everything is going to be okay" - and then all the lights go out. One of the weakest plot moments of the entire episode I must admit.

Max Payne 3
I was considering getting this for console, but now I'm going to be reviewing the PC version for Hooked Gamers, so I'm waiting a few extra days for it to be released on Steam. Check back for that!

For now though, I'm going to revel in my new found mountains of student debt - thanks for reading, have a good one.

What to do in Dota 2 - Part 3

I was scared again. I had managed to score my first Dota 2 victory, but it was only against computer controlled bots. Now I was joining a game against real life humans, who had most likely played a lot more of this game than I had. What if I messed up and they made fun of me? Oh, I remember, I couldn't care less what people on the Internet type in text chat to me. Although one time a guy said my story was cool, and then called me bro. He was nice.

Windrunner was my hero of choice this time. She's a feisty redhead with a bow and arrow with shots that can shackle enemies to each other or to trees, and an ultimate ability which increases the rate at which she fires at a target for a period of time. Within the first five minutes I had gotten my first enemy hero kill, FIRST BLOOD. I got an extra bit of gold and experience for getting the first kill. Either I was getting better, or this hero was good for the way I played.

I was paying more attention to the minimap this time, seeing where the enemy heroes were, and where my allies were. If an enemy hero was all on their own and a few of us were nearby, we could go and kill it, and it was working well. A couple of us got caught out though, and a group of enemy heroes made quick work of us.

"Stop dat feed."

Clearly someone on our team wasn't pleased with us for dying. Feeding is where you needlessly die to enemy heroes, thereby granting them extra gold and experience with no gain for your team. That's bad. Woops.

It was a close game. We were trading kills and towers were getting destroyed on both sides. Some barracks on opposing sides of the map had been destroyed, which meant that "Mega" Creeps had started spawning, which can sometimes even pose a threat to heroes if there's a large enough group of them. The game was nearing an end, probably all it would take was a big hero battle to decide it.

That battle soon came. I didn't feel like my ultimate ability was as powerful as a lot of heroes', who do massive area of effect damage. Mine simply allowed me to focus fire on one hero, which wasn't doing the battle as a whole much good. We lost all of our heroes, and three of theirs were left standing, this meant trouble for our remaining structures. Since most of us had a fairly lengthy respawn timer by that point, the enemies were able to destroy the towers surrounding our Ancient and start attacking it. We all managed to spawn just in time to drive them back with our Ancient barely standing on around 15% health.

While all this was going on, it became apparent that our creeps were making some headway on the other side of the map, unbeknownst to us, and more importantly the enemy. They had managed to destroy the towers surrounding the enemy ancient and were beginning to attack it! And the enemy heroes were either dead or halfway across the map.

Radiant Victory!

We had won the battle, and man was it close. Our team had all assumed defeat, and yet with no help from us, our creeps had won us the game. I was beginning to really enjoy this game now, and couldn't wait to join some more games and try some new heroes out.

Thanks for reading, have a good one.

What to do in Dota 2 - Part 2

If you haven't read the first part I posted yesterday, go and read it now. It's fine, I'll wait.

Surprisingly, considering the stories I had heard, there wasn't a lot of hostility towards me as a new player. Maybe I had learnt enough about the game before going in, or maybe the people I was playing with were just being nice.

Sadly, it turns out the latter was true.

I started my second game, this time as the Dark Seer. He has abilities like being able to suck all the units in an area into a vacuum for a short time, dealing damage to them, and a handy support ability which cloaks the target in an ion shell, which does damage to nearby enemies. His ultimate ability creates a huge light wall, which, if crossed by an enemy hero, will create a copy of that hero which serves under the Dark Seer's will. Not only is it handy, it looks REALLY cool.

So, the game loaded. Apparently that day Blizzard had added a new class, the Brewmaster into the game.

"I'm just playing against bots to try and Brewmaster, why are you all here, lol?"

Oh good, some know it all veteran come to test a new hero amongst the plebs.

The game went much the same way as the first one, we were all levelling up, getting new items and so on, and at about level six or seven our resident expert piped up again.

"DS why don't you help?"

I checked all of the heroes that people on my team were playing, DS could only stand for Dark Seer, my hero. I had no idea what he meant... it seemed that everyone on my team had suddenly decided without any communication to group up on one side of the map and were engaged in a battle with a group of enemy heroes. Had I missed something? Perhaps there's a certain time when everyone groups up and starts the "team battle" phase, but I sure as hell didn't know when that was.

I trudged across the map to go and help, laid down my "Wall of Replica", and helped kill a hero or two. But then I got sniped, by the aptly named "Sniper". Two of the people on my team spoke this time.

"Omg seriously?"
"Got killed by a bot LOL"

Okay, maybe they're right, maybe I need to step up my game a bit. I decided to start following the more veteran players to see what they were doing.

The trick when the creeps are fighting each other in the middle of the map is to try and get the killing blow on enemy units, whilst also trying to scare away enemy heroes so they don't get the bonus experience and gold from killing friendly units. Sometimes an enemy hero would stray too close to our group, and everyone would use their stunning effects to give time for the gankers to deal the massive damage. I felt proud of myself for using my Vacuum ability to suck a few heroes in before they got finished off by our melee units. Clearly my allies weren't as impressed, maybe it's something they see every game, or maybe they just don't speak unless they're insulting you, who knows?

"I'm going for two Daedalus, lol"

Professor Dota was talking again. The Daedalus is one of the better weapons in the game, with +81 damage and a giving you a 25% chance to critical strike, which does 2.5x normal damage. They're fairly expensive, so getting two of them is no mean feat. This player was clearly good enough to rack up enough cash to do it though.

This game was a lot easier than the first. I reckon that there were a lot more new players in the first game than this one, and it definitely showed. We were destroying enemy structures like nobody's business, and eventually we were able to just walk up to the opposing Ancient and hack it to pieces.

My first Dota 2 victory! It felt good.

I figured it was time to do away with the bots, and start going against human opponents, that's where the real competition was to be had after all.

And indeed, it turned out to be the most exciting game yet, but that's a story for another day.

Thanks for reading, see you next time

What to do in Dota 2 - Part 1

Hey all, this is a mini series I'm going to do describing my experiences with the Dota 2 beta. I've never seriously got into playing games like this, so it's from the perspective of a relative noob... that'll probably come across...


Anyway, here's the first instalment: 

Signups for the Dota 2 Beta began all the way back in August 2011, at a time where Valve were targeting a release later that year for the follow up to Defence of the Ancients, a multiplayer online battle arena game which started life as a Warcraft 3 custom game. The wave of MOBAmania hadn’t quite swept me up at that point, so I thought I’d sign up and see what all the fuss was about. You had to complete a short questionnaire describing your experiences with the previous game. Alright, I thought, standard stuff... but there was no option in any of the questions for “I haven’t played the previous game”, so I just kinda...lied. “How many hours a week did you play Defence of the Ancients?” 1-2 hours, sure, that’ll do. There were only a few beta spots open at the time, so I wasn’t expecting to be receiving anything.

Now it’s April 2012, the game still isn’t out, and I had all but forgotten that I had signed up. Yesterday however, I received an email: “Congratulations! You have been selected to play Dota 2”. Great, a spam email telling me I had won a beta invite, similar to the ones I receive inviting me to play the beta for a WoW expansion that was released two years ago. But sure enough, I went to my games folder in Steam and there it was, Dota 2 just waiting to be installed.

If anyone has no idea what I’m even talking about, MOBAs are RPG based real time strategy games, where players on teams of five each pick a hero and do battle on a large map where the goal is to destroy the other team’s main structure. You level up your hero and earn gold by killing creeps, small weak enemies, which are constantly spawned and will run to the enemy base, meeting up in the middle with enemy creeps and fighting there. When you level up, you can upgrade your stats or unlock new abilities. The gold you accumulate can be used to buy special items which will improve your numbers or give you special powers.

I’ll admit I was a little apprehensive of joining a game straight away. I had heard multiple horror stories from people saying that the MOBA community is notoriously unwelcoming to newbies like myself. There was a tab on the start screen saying ‘Learn’, so I thought I’d click that and there might be some tutorials or something which would help me on my way. All that was on this page were pictures of the dozens of possible heroes you could choose, outlining what abilities they had. This was no help at all! All I was learning was that I was even more overwhelmed now than I was before. Oh well, there was no use putting it off any longer, it was time to jump into a game.

Luckily there was an option to play a game with people against computer controlled characters, as well as an option to team up with people who were also new to the game. Now to pick a character to play as. Each character has a ‘role’, such as ‘Ganker’ and ‘Support’, which I kind of understood, but there were also unhelpfully named roles such as ‘Carry’ and ‘Initiator’. I have since found out that a ‘Carry’ hero is one that usually sits on the sidelines for much of the first part of the game, accumulating experience and gold and will then be able to tons of damage later on.

I chose Enigma, because he looked cool and had an interesting name, and it turned out he was an ‘Initiator’, which means that he is good at teaming up with other heroes to take on groups of enemies in what are called ‘Team Fights’. Initiators have skills which affect large areas, and are good at getting the first blow in to disable enemies while your teammates do the rest of the work. I had no idea of any of that going into the game, maybe I should’ve spent more time on the Dota 2 Wiki beforehand.

So the game loaded up, and straight away someone said in the chat: “Sorry for any noob moves, this is my first game, lol xD”. Phew, at least someone else won’t know what they’re doing. I knew the basics. I had been told at the start of the game that you should buy regeneration items, which will help you survive and will allow you to gain mana quicker, which is used for your abilities. There are three ‘lanes’ which the creeps will run down, top, middle and bottom. Usually two heroes take each of the top and bottom lanes and one hero will go up the middle for the early part of the game, where the focus is on levelling your character. It looked like everyone had already chosen which lanes they were going in, so I took the remaining space at the bottom. The match began, and it was time to kill some creeps!

Thing seemed to be going well, everyone on my team was levelling up, unlocking new abilities and earning gold and buying new items. I decided to record some footage so I wouldn’t forget anything for writing it up later, so I quickly loaded up the capture software and hit F9 to begin recording. The game froze. Wait, people are spamming the chat with question marks. Oh, F9 is the key to pause the game. Great. Sorry guys.

Everyone on my team was around level five or six by that point. Level six is where you can unlock the first rank of your ultimate ability. I had just unlocked mine when suddenly, BANG, someone on my team got killed by Zeus, an enemy hero. How embarrassing, to be killed by a computer controlled he- BANG. Oh, I’m dead.

Zeus’ ultimate ability allows him to send a thunderbolt straight onto the head of all of the enemy heroes, no matter where they are on the map. I mean sure, my ultimate ability with Enigma creates a black hole, but I have to channel it, and unlimited range thunderbolts just seem unfair. He was getting kills left, right and centre without even having to see anyone, and every time he did get a kill, he would gain a whole bunch of experience, quickly making him the most powerful hero in the game.

My team got a few kills here and there, and managed to destroy a few enemy structures, but in the end the computer controlled team scored a fairly easy victory. A little disappointing for my first game. I had fun though, I can certainly see why people spend many hours in this game. It seems simple to get into, but has a real depth to it making it ideal for competitive play, and indeed, there are tournaments with hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of dollars on the line. I’m not quite there yet, I probably need a bit more practice, so I jumped into another game.

The tale from my second game will be coming soon. It contains a lot more people complaining that I wasn't good at the game, so at least that will be entertaining.

Thanks for reading, have a good one.

PAX East + Alan Wake

The Penny Arcade Expo in Boston, abbreviated to PAEX East happened at the tail end of last week. It's pretty much the gamers' E3, where the atmosphere is a lot less "shut up and tell me about video games", and more, "hey guys, we love video games!"

Also I picked up Alan Wake when it was cheap on Steam a couple of weeks ago, and had more fun with it than I thought I would. Maybe that's because I got it cheap, and usually when I play a game I'm left thinking "damn I wish I held off on getting this til when it was cheap."

On an unrelated note, Giantbomb co-founder Ryan Davis just retweeted me, so basically I'm a big player in the video game journalism industry now.

PAX East
Borderlands 2

I wrote a preview for this game a few months ago, but they've come out with some new information about it this weekend. There's a new class called the 'Mechromancer', which is this female cyborg who can control this big robot called D374-TP (can you work out what that's supposed to mean?). There was also a demo that people could play where you shot things, you know, like in Borderlands.

Assassin's Creed 3

I was hoping they'd spend an extra year on this game, but it's coming out this Autumn, like it or not. Although, what Ubisoft showed off at PAX made me a lot more excited for it than I was. It seems as though the tree free running is going to be great, with Connor adapting to the tree shape rather than in previous games where there were obvious paths you had to take over buildings. 

There's a human shield mechanic, helping the up close and personal nature of the assassin against the more modern firearms, and they also showed off the "rope dart". Connor can fire this rope at an enemy, grabbing him round the neck with it, and then jump off a tree branch to hang him from it, oh sh-

Far Cry 3

The last Far Cry for me quickly went from a pretty cool game to just a beautiful fire and tree simulator. Somewhere where I could come to take a new screenshot for my desktop and occasionally set a fire in a bush and watch it spread through an enemy camp.

They were only showing off the multiplayer for the new game at PAX, but it looks kinda fun, especially the aptly named "inferno mode", where the action takes place on an island which is slowly engulfed in flames throughout the course of the match.

Alan Wake

So as I said, I bought this because I was bored and it was cheap, thinking I'd probably play a few hours of it and then get bored and never play it again (much like the vast majority of my Steam collection). 

But it turned out it was exactly what I was looking for in a horror game. I'm more into psychological thrillers than straight up, in your face, "I'm a monster and I'm going to eat your flesh" type deals, and Alan Wake is the former in abundance. 

The combat is a little fidgety, you have to shine your flashlight (which has a boost button for some reason) onto enemies to fight away "the darkness" before you can shoot them, and it works fine, just the mechanics remain the same throughout the game, so it gets a bit old after a while. 

What really keeps you going is the story, which is actually quite compelling, in a "this could never happen but is kinda interesting" kind of way. In classic horror story fashion, bad things start happening, no one believes you, then REALLY bad things start happening and everyone is like "oh, Alan, I'm sorry, what do we do??". Also Alan has never fired a gun before, but he's pretty damn good with them. He also manages to find light sources wherever he goes, which is quite handy considering the type of enemy he's facing. 

The game's use of light and shadows is fantastic though, and during the daytime, it looks effing GORGEOUS.

Anyway, it's fun, if you see it's cheap again, I recommend you getting it.

By the way, I did a video last week, but then the file got corrupted and I was too demoralised to start again.

Thanks for reading, have a good week.