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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...

It's an incredible thing to strip out all the mods from Fallout 4 and have a pop at the vanilla version. The settlement stuff feels empty, deep armour customisation choices have gone out the window and those poor old Minutemen go back to being...uh...really good at hammering the same spot of wall for six hours at a time. There's no contest as to which version of FO4 wins, and modding has never been so fun - or so complicated. See, the settlement additions to the game has pretty much turned things into House Builder 2016 (or is it Hobo Simulator 2016? I forget) and brought with it a number of very specific modding complications. As a result, it's easier than ever to absolutely shatter your game and saves into a thousand non-functional pieces. I've tallied up a good 600 or so hours in the wastes of Boston, and a fair chunk of that has been rolling around in a pile of the very best mods FO4 has to offer. I'm here to guide you through the perils of a fully ...

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 .

Problem : I have a safehouse and a ton of offshore money / loot stashed in said safehouse. At present I can't do much with either . How to make them more interactive? The dev team are going to bring in safehouse customisation, but I don't want to just spend thousands of dollars making it look nice. I wonder if it's possible to do the following: 1) More than one safehouse. maybe 3 or 4. I don't really care if they all look the same. 2) It makes sense that the police would be constantly looking for your safehouse / money. The less stealthy you are in accumulated missions, the more likely they are to find your safehouse. 3) Imagine being in a heist and getting message that one of your safehouses is being raided. Do you bail and go to defend it or finish the job you're on? 4) The safehouse customisation should be about shoring up the safehouse. The more cash you spend, the harder it is to breach (locked doors, metal doors the cops can't shoot open a...

Flawless victory

I've mentioned Sleeping Dogs before , but one of the best parts of the game - the soundtrack - is also one of the most frustrating. A combination of low availability and baffling Amazon listings makes it a fair trek around the block to simply buy some of the music on offer. Worse still, many of the tracks are listed as being sung / composed by what I can only assume are fictitious, in-game entity style characters who you won't find within a million miles of HMV or wherever by virtue of the fact that they're the creation of "Some music person in a sound studio somewhere". Does anybody know who sings the parts of  Vivienne Lu , of "Yellow Fever" fame, for example? I've no idea. Nobody seems to know for sure , although if this post is accurate then it definitely isn't Lucy Liu. Similar issues abound for many of the in-game tracks, especially when dealing with some of the stations such as "Soft". Well, fret no more because I put a fair...

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...

I finished Sleeping Dogs today, and I'm here to tell you that you should probably go out and buy it. If you ever wondered how Shenmue 3 would pan out, this is pretty much it assuming Ryo turned into Jackie Chan: Supercop and started mashing heads into freezers. As someone who has spent a reasonable amount of time wandering around Hong Kong (and also wrote an altogether too long dissertation on the politics and symbolic imagery of 90s HK cinema back in Uni) I was dying to see how this would pan out. After an hour or so of playtime, I was close to being overwhelmed at how damned Hong Kongy everything was. That first walk around the market? INCREDIBLE. I think the devs went for trips to HK to record the sound and capture general observations, and it shows - everything from the ding ding the shops make when you walk in / out to the perfectly replicated noise of the pedestrian crossings is all here. My opening game highpoint was jumping up onto some rooftops and suddenly hearing a...

Sleeping Dogs is a very good game indeed. The music is phenomenal, and a curious mix of jazz, classical and straight up Bruce Lee 70s vibes . You haven't lived until you've staked out a drugs bust with that tune playing in your car while sizing up the best way to take down 18 or so heavily armed goons down the nearest alleyway. I wasn't familiar with the artist linked above, and did a little Googling. Sure enough, the album containing that track (and a bunch of others from the game) is available to buy for 69p in the UK , and (from the looks of it) $9.99 everywhere else. It is fantastic . You know what to do... / 2016 update : NEW LINK .

What's amazing about the latest videogame fiasco isn't so much the latest tipping point (" girlfriend mode ", just in case she holds the controller upside-down HAHA) as fact that it keeps on happening over and over again in the first place. Steps for success: 1) Say something anybody with ten seconds experience in talking publicly about stuff could tell you is a bad idea on the grounds of it being a) silly b) offensive to a decent slice of your paying audience and c) silly 2) Watch as it becomes the focal point of said article, exploding across the internet at a million screaming people an hour 3) Ensure the head guy says something that suggests he hadn't actually seen the article in question before weighing in 4) Dig that failtrain all the way down to Chinatown in a horrible, horrible example of "it's broke, so I did the exact opposite of fixing the shit out of it". There is a time and a place to use the "...but, but..." de...

If you told me I'd be doing nothing but grumbling about a new Max Payne game, I'm not sure I would have believed you. However, here it is and here we are. If you don't want to read this long dissection, then you can summarise a lot of the frustrations by clicking this link . If you're still with me, then here comes a rather long, somewhat spoilerish ramble. I also spoil the ending to Splinter Cell Conviction, but I don't think anybody will care about that. I should also add that the soundtrack for this game is fantastic, and well worth buying. Where is Max and what have you done to his bullet time? Anyone familiar with the early games knows Max is not a guy to screw around with - a quick tap of the button and he dips into bullet time which is typically the most efficient way to take out a room full of goons waving uzis. Max Payne 2 deepened and enhanced bullet time by making Max plunge into a more bullet timey state of mind the longer you blasted bad guys, cu...

I just finished a game that had been sitting on my "to do" pile for months and months. That game is Binary Domain, and I was horrified to discover that it only sold 20,000 copies at launch . The videogames industry is bad and you should feel bad. The last time I came away from a game feeling this pumped (mixed in with absolutely nail biting moments of OH MY GOD THEY'RE DEAD THEY'RE ALL DEAD NO WAIT THEY'RE ALIVE YAY) was the finale of Mass Effect 2. Everything you do here can get your team killed, and I'm still not sure if it's possible to save everyone / get the whole team horribly murdered. That alone is replayability you can take to the bank, especially as my first runthrough chalked up a considerable list of casualties. I got the end I wanted for my character, but I have a feeling I could have done so much better for the team which becomes a primary concern as the game winds to a close. I mean, nobody is a Mordin or a Zaeed but you won't want...