Archive for October, 2008
FPS by numbers
I finished Call of Duty 4 today, which was sort of surprising as I thought I had ages left to play through. Turns out ‘Act I’ was the longest of the three, so without even trying hard, I suddenly came to the end.
Probably took me about 10-12 hours to play, which I know these days is seen as “Too short” but for me it’s just right. (I like to finish stuff, and preferably not over a period of months and months – unless we’re talking some super-engrossing strategy game, and those don’t often appear on console.)
Overall experience? Pretty good, but I came away thinking it wasn’t the breakthrough FPS experience I thought it might well be, judging by some reviews. Perhaps that’s because it’s not that up-to-date (it did come out in 2007) but actually, I think it’s because I felt like I’d seen it all before:
- The ‘hold off the bad guys for X amount of time’ mission
- The ‘escape under heavy fire’ mission
- The ‘fire on people from a flying thing’ mission
- The ‘shoot from the back of a moving vehicle’ mission
Re-learning to love City of Heroes
As I’ve said many times in many an interview and to many people in person, City of Heroes was the reason I joined NCsoft.
In April or May 2004, I can’t recall, I was playing the game (on the US servers, natch) and enjoying it so much that I was considering starting a fansite about it, based around a twinned blog – one character based, one player based. A very good friend of mine said to me: “Instead of making all that effort for nothing, why not go and work for them instead?”
The rest is history. (Funny thing is, I never did get around to that blog idea.)
While I worked for NCsoft I never stopped playing City of Heroes (Well – not altogether), but of course I was privy to a lot of behind the scenes information. Which meant often, very little came as a complete and total surprise. (And if it did, it was often not a good surprise.)
Which is why it’s great, now, to start to look at the game from a genuine, uninformed player’s perspective again. Today the EU site is hosting a Developer Diary focusing on the Day Jobs system from Issue 13, and it makes for a very interesting read. Read the rest of this entry »
Limited Edition 3 of… a lot
Posted by Rockjaw in Links of Others, Nerd Alert, Personal, Pimpin' on October 7th, 2008
Spent a very enjoyable couple of hours over the weekend blabbing about comic books, movies, games and so on with John and Matt for Limited Edition, episode 3.
Somehow John managed to cut our two hours of chat down into a relatively svelte 90 minutes, so if you fancy a listen head on over to the Limited Edition site for more info, and to download.
Lots of work related stuff happening right now – both in my actual work and in potential, possible work. When/if any of it breaks I’ll let you know.
In the interim, I’ll try to come up with a few more things to say around here, but honestly, life’s keepin’ me busy….
Eurogamer Expo: are you ready to rock, etc.
Posted by Rockjaw in MMO-related, Pimpin' on October 6th, 2008
Our promotional poster – in rock festival stylee. Click to make bigger:
PS – There are two new big games confirmed above…
Spending October inside
Autumn’s here, and it’s not going to let you forget it.
After a brief respite last weekend, where I lay about on green grass near my house reading Piers Paul Read’s biography of Alec Guinness, the weather since has just gotten progressively worse. To the point where I didn’t even want to leave the house today. The fact that I was supposed to be going to the gym had nothing to do with it, you understand.
I did leave the house though, and I even made it to the gym. If I hadn’t though, I’d probably have stayed in and played games. Which is as good a segue as any, I suppose, to what I’m playing. Read the rest of this entry »
You said what?