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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...

No Man's Sky has had a rather large update after months of silence. I've been playing around with it, and here's what I think so far: 1) Every single action in the game now has a lot of weight behind it, and I mean every...single...action. The first half dozen planets I spawned on before giving up were all extreme temperature / weather conditions. If you don't craft your scope quickly and *really* look in every direction before setting out, you're going to run out of life support and die. If you don't zig zag looking for the smallest outcrop of rocks overhead in order to ward off radioactive / cold / heat effects, you're going to end up exposed and die. If you make the wrong choice in terms of the elements you pursue first, you're going to die. If you stagger your last to the one single chunk of heridium on the planet so you can take off, only to realise it's a thin outcrop laid over a regular one and you fall short by like 6 units...you'r...

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...

My favourite five games of 2012. Why five? Don't know. In order? Not really. More questions? Probably not. 1) Sleeping Dogs . If you've dabbled in the wonders of Hong Kong for any length of time (or China in general) you'll have had a whale of a time with Sleeping Dogs. The acting was top rate, and though they didn't push the policeman / triad schism far enough it still did enough to be one of my entries here. Shame the DLC looks to be the all too common "cheap pricepoint and little content" so beloved of most games around these days. Fighting tournaments and "spooky" Halloween events? Bleh. You have a rock solid storyline to flesh out, guys. Don't waste it. After a wonderful experience on console, this game almost soured me completely due to the infamous hkshop.exe error on PC (go Google it, then weep). In fact, this sounds more like a rant about things I hate than "my top games" so I'll shut up now.   2) FTL . A powerh...

Here are my FTL protips (buyer beware, I've died horribly on the seventh wave every single time so maybe I'm not the right guy for the Protip job). Having said that: 1) Comb as much of the first map as possible, because you won't be able to hang about on later sections of the game. At this point, the enemy ships chasing you are fairly weak and you can afford to get caught by them once or twice as you forage near the exit. 2) For the first few levels, passing through a red area isn't quite as bad as it seems. It's worth passing through them if taking the "safer" route means you'll end up in a bunch of nebula sections which almost always mean instadeath later on in the game. 3) When upgrading the ship, a lot of players start powering down the medbay because other bits of the ship need to be up and running (you know, like oxygen and guns or whatever). Don't neglect the medbay! It'll stop you getting dead (important) and you can also use...

Yep, the continuing adventures of " How many mods I can add to a game before it explodes and takes half the street with it ". This time around, I've mostly focused on adding extra clothing, armour, quests, building interiors and a stack of extra people. There doesn't appear to be any real impact on the game as yet, and there are only two things I simply cannot get working (only head retextures so no big deal really). In no particular order, here's a bunch more mods I'm running. I'll cover some of the others mentioned above (like additional people and buildings) next time, as I haven't actually come across all of the content I've added yet. 1)   Wasteland Seeker Armour . Not gonna lie - this might be my favourite armour in the entire game, modded or not. You do a little quest to grab it (there's two versions, actually - the other comes with a rebreather but it's surrounded by about a million high level enemies so I don't h...

I've been meaning to write a thing about Skyrim for a while now - or, to be more accurate, a thing about Skyrim via the barren lands of New Vegas. This review of Skyrim prompted me to write the below ramble. I think I've covered most of the things I wanted to whine about, but I may throw in the odd update. It seems to me there's a lot of things Bethesda simply ignored en route to Skyrim via the glorious path that was New Vegas. Of course, NV was put together by Obsidian and where Obsidian listened to the things players practically begged for, Bethesda seemed to throw up their hands, proclaim "didn't read lol" and just built Skyrim on the much older Fallout 3 model. Why they did this, I have no idea. Things that Skyrim was crying out for yet are somehow strangely absent: 1) Hardcore mode . How the Hell this goes AWOL from New Vegas to Skyrim I have no idea, but given all the hunting, skinning and eating you can do it seems absolutely insane that Bethesda...

Playing NV on PC instead of the console is quite an eye opener - might as well be a different game, given how much extra content you can jam in there at no added cost. This is the best of what I'm rolling with so far, with no horrible crashes or explosions in sight. I'll be looking to throw in some gameworld expansions , but I at least want to play through the official DLC before I inevitably murder the coding with deathbricks. 1) Black Wolf Backpacks . How this game didn't come ready rolled with backpacks I'll never know, but this mod adds a collection of nifty carryspace onto your frame. You can double up the large backpacks with the small bumbag thing too. (Note: giving your companion a backpack increases their carry capacity forever, but this is hardly something you're going to complain about). I'm still waiting to see the heaviest weight for sale, so I'm having to make do with the next size down for now. You can pimp out your bags here ...

The above image speaks for itself really, but this time around I did damage to my wallet with the following: Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout New Vegas, Mount & Blade Warband and Fire & Sword, Shogun 2, Unreal And Quake packs, Hacker Evolution Duality, Defcon, Left 4 Dead 2 and the Hitman pack. I also got Swords and Soldiers as a freebie from the coal crafting thing. Thank goodness it's over for another year...

I'm about seven hundred years late to the party but I've started playing Oblivion on the PC and am taking random screenshots of my journey through the place that isn't Skyrim. Link here .

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.

I had a few whines about this game , and it seems a lot of other people have had the same problems. Step forward, useful forum post .

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'...