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I've now completed Mass Effect: Andromeda, and here's my follow up post to this . Do I still like it? Got bored? Fed up with a thing? Time to find out! Random thoughts ahoy, no major spoilers but maybe some mild ones: * The final mission(s) was great. No spoilers, but everything major you worked towards in some way paid off - or not - throughout the long last leg, and made for a dramatic conclusion. * The story does, eventually, move on from "help us live on all these planets" but even then, you'll still be better equipped to deal with the finale assuming you keep on with the whole Pathfinding thing. Part of me wishes writers wouldn't rely on magical ancient space alien tech as the quick fix for a story (good thing you ended up in a new galaxy with gigantic terraforming / atmospheric processors everywhere, huh), but having said that, you don't need to use them to make the planets habitable. Still, this feels like a missed opportunity to go in har...

Yeah, I saw all the bad reviews and laughed at the hilarious wonky animations. I've discovered ways to make Ryder either do a crab-walk shuffle or look like she's on rollerskates. Sometimes I load up the Tempest and she's vibrating up and down while team mates stand on tables. My biggest concern was that after having played an hour or so of Andromeda's demo, I didn't like it. The introductory planet feels wanky, with vision obstructing grass and awkward to climb rocks all over the place - not what you want when trying to get to grip with a new game and its mechanics. The combat seemed like some weird throwback to ME1 where everything is floaty and underpowered. Once you get past the first not particularly well done first hour or so, the game opens out into something I'm finding to be hugely enjoyable. It's gonzo ME1. It's all those Mako planets from the first game, but jammed with stuff to do on them. If the original ME, which felt like a lost s...

You need to repair the fence before raiders trash it. A quarter of your group is sick with food poisoning. The one science guy you have needs to make antibiotics for the infected members of your team, but you're low on ammo so he needs to sort that out instead. The car broke down so you're on foot for today, but if you walk to the nearest supermarket to pick up as much food as you can carry you won't be back until after midnight and hit a fatigue penalty. That one racist guy is picking a fight with the kid ready to up and leave and take half your stuff with him. There's a militia at your gate asking for food in return for a safe evac within a month, assuming you can last that long. DEAD STATE, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. This turn-based combat zombie apocalypse sim has gobbled up 90+ hours of my time this year, and I'm surprised to see only one other person on my Steam friends list who owns it (and that was because I bought it for them). Staggering out of a bur...

Steam updated the look and feel of the Store page , along with some fairly major revisions to how things work. Some things to note: 1) A while ago, Steam altered the tabs on the front page. In terms of what was on sale,  you used to see the new releases tab before anything else , then could dip into best sellers. At some point, they changed it so you'd  see top sellers first . This used to grind my gears for a number of reasons, and it has been  covered extensively elsewhere . The way the tabs function has now changed again, so you default to "POPULAR new releases". To see what are presumably not high selling new games, you have to scroll to the bottom of the game tiles then click the "See all new releases" button. You're then taken to a feature-bare page of games, but at least you'll see new games which aren't AAA blockbuster pre-orders. As a final note, things like daily deals are currently way down the page. This all seems like a really...

Many moons ago I took part in an episode of Gamespot's Reality Check, on the subject of Watch_Dogs and videogame hacking . Out of that came a shorter segment based around good and bad examples of hacking in videogames. Fair warning: it mainly looks at the trend of turning hacking into minigames, instead of titles which are primarily all about hacking like Uplink. A couple of games not mentioned up above were given a shout-out in a  spinoff blog from way back when. And yes, I really did sit there for an age trying - and failing - to figure out the hacking minigame in Alpha Protocol. Bonus points for mastering this on a PC with mouse and keyboard. The (rather distracting) mouse pointer which controls the right box often ends up moving outside the terminal screen, resulting in two eyeballs trying to track two boxes and an increasingly distant pointer crawling across a sea of flashing green letters and numbers. The frequent reward for managing to not get a migraine in the fi...

The best of the best from the recent Steam Sale. I bought a lot of stuff, but I'm only mentioning things I've played since picking them up. 1) One Finger Death Punch All you do is hit left or right. "All you do". If you think your reflexes are up there with Neo then feel free to give this a shot. It's like Space Channel 5 with punching. 2) Doom 3 BFG Edition You have to understand, playing this game all those years ago freaked me the hell out, even while running it on an underpowered Pentium 2 (or whatever it was). I never managed to get more than a few hours in before saying "nope" loudly and doing something else instead. Weirdly it feels like I'm cheating in the new edition due to being able to wave the torch and the gun around at the same time. I'm too fast. I should be more sluggish. Maybe that's just the Pentium 2 talking. 3) Ghost Control Inc. Okay, a bit of a cheat here because I don't remember if I bought ...

I did an interview with Gamespot a while back on the subject of hacking in videogames. Off the back of this, I wrote a piece on the history of hacking in videogames. If you'd like to see some of my favourites (alongside a few "What were they thinking" efforts) then here comes Christmas .

Mass Effect 3 spoiler warning. Game dev makes ill judged post on forum: Instant demotivational poster in the most unfortunate way imaginable .

I picked it up, only to find the much touted "Back to Karkand" maps aren't actually included as DLC codes - no, they're included as DLC "coming soon" flyers because they don't actually arrive until sometime in the future (as the flyer put it, "when it is released". Thanks for that). I mean crap, at least give me a horrifically overpriced statue, half a soundtrack or a set of night vision goggles. I'm going to break out a marker pen and rename it the Complete Lack of Anything Extra addition.

Oh dear, it seems people with the expensive editions of Deus Ex are rather annoyed that the Augmented Edition version only has a handful of songs. I'm a little dissapointed at how limited the Augemented Edition's soundtrack is. It's missing a ton of good tracks, almost all of the ambient music, most of the combat music, the only boss theme on it is the weakest one (Yelena's track is fantastic but Barret's is really weak), and doesn't have any of the character's liefmotifs on it, Icarus notwithstanding. The hell? - Link Fuck this. My Aug Ed has half as many songs. =/ Worst special edition ever. - Link "Well that's some fantastic gouging, advertising that the limited edition has the soundtrack when it's less than a third of the actual music, and then releasing a separate one..." "I think it's more cause people liked the OST alot and there was enough demand to warrant an actual full OST. Don't think there were ...

I'm sort of "meh" on hacker games really, as they all pretty much do the same thing: reduce it to "click a box, watch a meter count down and then you've hacked it". Uplink is entertaining for a while, but hack one machine and you've hacked them all. Thought I'd try Duality - after ten seconds, I have a crazy mouse pattern onscreen and I've completed a level. I didn't do anything. Maybe I beat the hidden "Draw a picture with my mouse" level or whatever.

15 hours in two weeks (less, actually) pretty much tells you all you need to know about Atom Zombie Smasher (£5.99 on Steam ). 1) I like it. 2) It has zombies in it. 3) I get to kill millions of zombies. Atom Zombie Smasher is a cheap and entertaining top down “make the little dots move around and kill other dots” strategy / resource management effort. The pink dots are the zombies. The yellow dots are the people. Save x amount of people before the time runs out with your helicopter or they all get eaten, or finish the level by wiping out the zombies before nightfall. Click to Enlarge The campaign gives you a map filled with terrorities (they all look the same though, which is a bit of a wasted opportunity). Click to Enlarge Each one has a number attached to it, the higher the number the more zombies you’ll find. As the game progresses, the game will change things up a bit with landscape hazards, tougher zombies, equipment malfunctions, shorter days and so on. You'...

http://www.humblebundle.com/ Now that you've clicked the above link, bought some games and donated your money to whoever you like (game devs, EFF, Child's Play and so on) I think this is worth looking at: We need to have a little talk, Windows users.