What Game Are You currently Playing?

[EalingBlue]

Originally Posted by cooder

They totally disregarded the non-online 2 player co-op though. Pissed me and my brother off properly with that. We clocked Resistance 1 in that mode on every difficulty level - more than once (We've had various PS3's - first one crashed on a software update, another got stolen when we were burgled).

Twats. Why did they have to do that?

I have no friends tbf so only do 1 player, the daughter is too young and the missus hates games

[cooder]

Also, finally clocked GTA4 the other day. We were trying to 100% it and so didn't just go hell for leather for the missions (plus I moved out of home a year ago, so not played it as much).

Great game, but kinda loses its momentum. Bit too much stuff to do. Think we're about 75% done

[cooder]

Originally Posted by EalingBlue

I have no friends tbf so only do 1 player, the daughter is too young and the missus hates games

can still have great online co-op, but just wish it wasn't at the expense of the non-online co-op

[BiscuitBlueCheese]

Originally Posted by DarloBlue

You've kinda invalidated your credibility by this comment. Metal Gear Solid 4 is generally considered around about the best game of the current generation (on the PS3, along with Uncharted 2).

Yes, 'one of the best of the current generation' would have been fine, not 'probably the best game of last 10 years'.

Originally Posted by EalingBlue

He likes to dismiss things out of hand. And whinge, like a little bitch.

Oh good you as well

[EalingBlue]

Sony unveils PlayStation ‘Move’
Thu Mar 11 12:04PM by Yahoo! UK Games Editor


Don’t call Sony’s motion-sensing joystick the ‘Arc’ or the ‘Gem’, and certainly don’t compare it to the Wii Remote – this is the PlayStation Move!

Sony formally unveiled the new device during a presentation at the San Francisco Game Developers Conference late last night. Actually, make that devices, plural, since the blob-ended controller comes with a wireless nunchuk too (see below for photos). Although please don’t call it that either – it’s the ‘Sub-controller’. Exciting name, eh?

A few details, dates and prices, then. The Move is 20cm long and weighs a paltry 145 grams. The barrel houses a three-axis gyroscope, an accelerometer and a magnetic field sensor. In layman's terms, this means as the player moves the controller the movement is replicated within the game, similar to the Nintendo's Wii. There’s also rumble support, an array of the usual PS3 controller buttons, an analogue trigger and a colour-changing sphere at the end. This is tracked by the PlayStation Eye camera, which is a necessary component in the whole Move set-up.

Less crucial is the Sub-controller unit. This partners with the Move wirelessly and contains an analogue joystick and a selection of useful buttons. Sony claims that it’ll be possible to play through the whole of SOCOM 4 using the Move and Sub-controller – that sounds like lots of fun. Both units are fully rechargeable and sync with the PlayStation 3 using Bluetooth.

Sony boasted that it will support Move with 20 games that will either be built for the device or be compatible with it. They’ll all arrive before the end of the current financial year, which is 31 March 2011.

A further 36 software publishers have pledged their support too, with all the big names – Activision, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts et al – fully on board and champing at the bit to provide thrilling games by the bucketload. No doubt.
Meanwhile, Sony showed off a fistful of first party titles. Highlights include Dukes, which is a bare-knuckle brawl ‘em up that requires the use of both the Move and Sub-controller units – at least it does unless you think you’re hard enough to take on all comers one-handed. After that Move Party is the family fun game of the bunch, with its compendium of daffy mini-games. Then there’s Sports Champions, which features a collection of athletic activities such as archery, table tennis and what appears to be gladiatorial combat. TV Superstars is an interactive quiz show that places you at the centre of the action. Slider is a martial arts action game with a unique twist involving office furniture. Finally The Shoot has players using the Move to blast a selection of on-screen targets – cowboys, ghosts etc.

Sony will announce further details on all of the above, and more, soon. So that leaves us with the questions of price and release date. In each regard – and rather typically of Sony – we’re still in the dark. A $100 (£65 or so) price point has been suggested for the Move and Eye Camera together, but gamers will also be able to buy the Move unit on its own, as part of a console bundle and even as a component of some of the bigger software launches. Prices for all such iterations are still TBC, alas. Likewise the release date, which remains undefined as this ‘autumn’.

In terms of first impressions, it’s all too easy to judge the Move as a Wii wannabe. We guess it is too, really. But that’s a disservice to the unit itself, which is not only slick, but is sophisticated and surprisingly precise in operation. The games look a lot prettier (than Wii) too, which is the very least you’d expect for the PlayStation 3.

Time will tell whether Move rises to prominence in the console market, or is overshadowed by Microsoft’s controller-free solution – Project Natal – or whether they both remain also-rans next to the Wii. That’s still the market leader by some distance with both feet planted firmly in the mainstream, after all. However, based on what we’ve seen of Move so far, we’d say it has a big fight on its hands

Well, there it is. We’re still waiting on a few crucial details, but what do you think of it so far? Will Move have the muscle to beat the Wii at its own game? More to the point, will you be buying it later on this year?

http://uk.videogames.games.yahoo.com/blog/article/9150/ For pics if anyone is interested.

[Bastard]

Just finished Arkham Asylum. Need to get gold on some of the combat challenges to get 100% but might not bother - I'm pretty shit at them tbf.

Borderlands next.

[hogeymack]

Got borderlands yesterday, only tried it out momentarily, it was fine.

[Markered Man]

A nod to a great game on the PS1, Abe's Oddysee

http://www.computerandvideogames.com....php?id=240385

I have just started Oblivion Elder Scrolls. I have been messing around for ages getting a stove installed, its more or less finished so it is now worth my while setting my Wii up again - a bit of Mario Galaxy and Resi 4 will be on the cards soon.

[davidfitz22]

Originally Posted by Markered Man

A nod to a great game on the PS1, Abe's Oddysee

http://www.computerandvideogames.com....php?id=240385

I have just started Oblivion Elder Scrolls. I have been messing around for ages getting a stove installed, its more or less finished so it is now worth my while setting my Wii up again - a bit of Mario Galaxy and Resi 4 will be on the cards soon.

love that game have it emulated on the laptop just never gets old,anyone considering getting god of war three, do so. probably the best playing and best looking game out to date.

[gibbonicus_andronicus]

Video games: the addictionTom Bissell was an acclaimed, prize-winning young writer. Then he started playing the video game Grand Theft Auto. For three years he has been cocaine addicted, sleep deprived and barely able to write a word. Any regrets? Absolutely none
(411)Tweet this (269)Tom Bissell
The Observer, Sunday 21 March 2010
Article history

Niko Bellic, the lead character in Grand Theft Auto IV.

Once upon a time I wrote in the morning, jogged in the late afternoon and spent most of my evenings reading. Once upon a time I wrote off as unproductive those days in which I had managed to put down "only" a thousand words. Once upon a time I played video games almost exclusively with friends. Once upon a time I did occasionally binge on games, but these binges rarely had less than a fortnight between them. Once upon a time I was, more or less, content.

"Once upon a time" refers to relatively recent years (2001-2006), during which I wrote several books and published more than 50 pieces of magazine journalism and criticism – a total output of, give or take, 4,500 manuscript pages. I rarely felt very disciplined during this half decade, though I realise this admission invites accusations of disingenuousness. Obviously I was disciplined. These days I have read from start to finish exactly two works of fiction – excepting those I was also reviewing – in the last year. These days I play video games in the morning, play video games in the afternoon and spend my evenings playing video games. These days I still manage to write, but the times I am able to do so for more than three sustained hours have the temporal periodicity of comets with near-earth trajectories.

For a while I hoped that my inability to concentrate on writing and reading was the result of a charred and overworked thalamus. I knew the pace I was on was not sustainable and figured my discipline was treating itself to a rumspringa. I waited patiently for it to stroll back on to the farm, apologetic but invigorated. When this did not happen, I wondered if my intensified attraction to games and my desensitised attraction to literature were reasonable responses to how formally compelling games had quite suddenly become. Three years into my predicament, my discipline remains awol. Games, meanwhile, are even more formally compelling.

It has not helped that during the past three years I have, for what seemed like compelling reasons at the time, frequently upended my life, moving from New York City to Rome to Las Vegas to Tallinn, Estonia, and back, finally, to the United States. With every move I resolved to leave behind my video game consoles, counting on new surroundings, unfamiliar people and different cultures to enable a rediscovery of the joy I once took in my work. Shortly after arriving in Rome, Las Vegas and Tallinn, however, the lines of gameless resolve I had chalked across my mind were wiped clean. In Rome this took two months; in Vegas two weeks; in Tallinn two days. Thus I enjoy the spendthrift distinction of having purchased four Xbox 360 consoles in three years, having abandoned the first to the care of a friend in Brooklyn, left another floating around Europe with parties unknown, and stranded another with a pal in Tallinn (to the irritation of his girlfriend). The last Xbox 360 I bought has plenty of companions: a GameCube, a PlayStation 2 and a PlayStation 3.

Writing and reading allow one consciousness to find and take shelter in another. When the minds of the reader and writer perfectly and inimitably connect, objects, events and emotions become doubly vivid – more real, somehow, than real things. I have spent most of my life seeking out these connections and attempting to create my own. Today, however, the pleasures of literary connection seem leftover and familiar. Today the most consistently pleasurable pursuit in my life is playing video games. Unfortunately, the least useful and financially solvent pursuit in my life is also playing video games. For instance, I woke up this morning at 8am fully intending to write this article. Instead, I played Left 4 Dead until 5pm. The rest of the day went up in a blaze of intermittent catnaps. It is now 10pm and I have only just started to work. I know how I will spend the late, frayed moments before I go to sleep tonight, because they are how I spent last night and the night before that: walking the perimeter of my empty bed and carpet-bombing the equally empty bedroom with promises that tomorrow will not be squandered. I will fall asleep in a futureless, strangely peaceful panic, not really knowing what I will do the next morning and having no firm memory of who, or what, I once was.
The first video game I can recall having to force myself to stop playing was Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which was released in 2002. I managed to miss Vice City's storied predecessor, Grand Theft Auto III, so I had only oblique notions of what I was getting into. A friend had lobbied me to buy Vice City, so I knew its basic premise: you are a cold-blooded jailbird looking to ascend the bloody social ladder of the fictional Vice City's criminal under- and overworld. (I also knew that Vice City's violent subject matter was said to have inspired crime sprees by a few of the game's least stable fans. Other such sprees would horribly follow. Eight years later, Rockstar has spent more time in court than a playground-abutting pesticide manufactory.) I might have taken better note of the fact that my friend, when speaking of Vice City, admitted he had not slept more than four hours a night since purchasing it and had the ocular spasms and fuse-blown motor reflexes to prove it. Just what, I wanted to know, was so specifically compelling about Vice City? "Just get it and play it," he answered. "You can do anything you want in the game. Anything."

My friend's promise proved to be an exaggeration, but not by very much. You control a young man named Tommy, who has been recently released from prison. He arrives in Vice City – an oceanside metropolis obviously modelled on the Miami of 1986 or so – only to be double-crossed during a coke deal. A few minutes into the game, you watch a cut scene in which Tommy and his lawyer (an anti-Semitic parody of an anti-Semitic parody) decide that revenge must be taken and the coke recovered. Once the cut scene ends, you step outside your lawyer's office. A car is waiting for you. You climb in and begin your drive to the mission destination (a clothing store) clearly marked on your map. The first thing you notice is that your car's radio can be tuned to a number of different radio stations. What is playing on these stations is not a loop of upbeat midi video-game songs or some bombastic score written for the game, but Michael Jackson, Hall and Oates, Cutting Crew and Luther Vandross. While you are wondering at this, you hop a curb, run over some pedestrians and slam into a parked car, all of which a nearby police officer sees. He promptly gives chase. And for the first time you are off, speeding through Vice City's various neighbourhoods. You are still getting accustomed to the driving controls and come into frequent contact with jaywalkers, oncoming traffic, street lights, fire hydrants. Soon your pummelled car (you shed your driver's door two blocks ago) is smoking.

The police, meanwhile, are still in pursuit. You dump the dying car and start to run. How do you get another car? As it happens, a sleek little sporty number called the Stinger is idling beneath a stop light right in front of you. This game is called Grand Theft Auto, is it not? You approach the car, hit the assigned button, and watch Tommy rip the owner from the vehicle, throw him on to the street and drive off. Wait – look there! A motorcycle. Can you drive motorcycles, too? After another brutal vehicular jacking, you fly off an angled ramp in cinematic slow motion while ELO's "Four Little Diamonds" strains the limits of your television's pound-coin-sized speakers.

You have now lost the cops and swing around to head back to your mission, the purpose of which you have forgotten. It gradually dawns on you that this mission is waiting for you to reach it. You do not have to go if you do not want to. Feeling liberated, you drive around Vice City as day gives way to night. When you finally hop off the bike, the citizens of Vice City mumble and yell insults. You approach a man in a construction worker's outfit. He stops, looks at you and waits. The game does not give you any way to interact with this man other than through physical violence, so you take a swing. The fight ends with you stomping the last remaining vitality from the hapless construction worker's blood-squirting body.