I as you may have gathered, I play Eve Online. I also play console games. In the past combining the two usually meant using my PC to look for tips on how to beat the console game I was playing at the time. Well no longer! When Dust 514 comes along, I’ll be able to shoot people in the face on my PS3 and have an influence on things going on in outer space! How? Watch the video…
Outside of Metacritic related bonuses, do they really matter any more?
Name whatever series you want, we’re all invested in one title or another. We all have an attachment to at least one game that’s so strong, review scores become irrelevant. For me it’s games like Mass Effect or Gears of War, for you it could be Battlefield. Whatever it is, chances are it’s a sequel of some kind. And that’s not a criticism, publishers are businesses and sequels are where the low risk sure-fire profits are at right now. Despite the fact that most of us like to think we want new IP, the sales figures say we want sequels. But that’s not all they say. If you listen carefully they also say that the whole practice of reviewing games and giving them a score is fast becoming a pointless exercise.
Let’s take Call of Duty Black Ops 2 as an example. Anybody involved in this hobby will be able to tell you this game will be the biggest launch of the year regardless of the reviews it gets. Call of Duty fans buy Call of Duty games, so what relevance does any score have? The same immunity to a 1/10 score also renders a 10/10 score meaningless. Why even bother reviewing the game at all if the very best score possible has no real impact on commercial success? You have the holy grail of video games here, a title so strong that it’s a guaranteed sales blockbuster, and at the same time impervious to negative write ups.
At this point you’re probably thinking that I’ve missed the point of reviews entirely, but it’s not the text I have a problem with, it’s the outdated mechanic of putting a number at the end. Even though the write-up is someone else’s subjective opinion, it still gives you a much better flavour of what the game is like than an arbitrary mark out of ten. So come on, isn’t time we ditch the review score and rely solely on the text of a review? I’d argue we’d all be better off if we did.
A pictorial post today, and more PS Vita wallpapers. These two Metal Gear Solid themed ones are part one of two, and hopefully I’ll find some inspiration for the next two soon. When I do they’ll be posted up here, enjoy.
There was a post here, it was me moaning about Battlefield 3′s terrible campaign mode. It wasn’t pretty, and Moderator Kitteh made me delete it*.
Here’s a cat meme instead, normal service will resume next week.
*Moderator Kitteh doesn’t really exist, it was me that deleted the post, mainly because I realised nobody wants to hear me moan about a game. Not even my wife.
It’s ten past nine in the evening, and right now I’m sitting in front of my monitor, glued to Twitter in the hope that someone from Arenanet tweets that they’ve fixed whatever it is that’s stopping me from logging into the Guild Wars 2 beta. I’m patiently sitting here, not raging, because I understand it’s a beta test, and beta tests are sorting out exactly this type of thing. So imagine my surprise when I realised I’d been extremely unforgiving with another beta test this week, the Ghost Recon: Future Soldier beta.
Over the course of two days I’ve played a grand total of one game. The rest of the time was spent stuck on loading screens, and so I wrote if off fairly quickly, unfairly it feels now. Tonight’s teething issues go to show that a bumpy ride can be part of the beta experience, so tomorrow I’m firing up my Xbox and giving it another go. Ghost Recon, I forgive you.
Now, back to waiting for the GW2 beta to be fixed…
A bonus post today, and very probably of no interest to most people as it’s about Eve Online…
As a Stealth Bomber pilot I watched this video, specifically the bit showing the new bomb launchers, and I geeked out. CANNOT WAIT!
Happy birthday ZX Spectrum! Even though it’s 30th birthday makes me feel quite old, I still can’t recall it’s rubber keyboard without a little smile. I never had one myself, playing it meant taking part in the multi player of the day – going round a friends house, but I remember thinking it was one of the greatest things I’d ever seen. Coming in both 16k and 48k (RAM) flavours, with no screen of any kind, and no tape player as standard, it required generous parents to both buy the extra bits needed, and to be willing to let you commandeer the house telly. Once that screechy tape loader had done it’s thing however, you were in a world of never seen before colour graphics!
The Spectrum +2 was the first spectrum I actually owned, it followed weeks of convincing my dad that it would be an educational tool. I had to straighten the keyboard after losing my temper with a game and punching it, and at one point I had to solder a new joystick port in to it after that broke (not bad for a kid doing his work experience), the poor thing had a hard life. Nevertheless, I loved it and it retains a special place in my personal chronology of gaming.
So happy birthday ZX Spectrum!
If you squint hard, really hard at a calender, Wednesday looks like it’s part of last week and therefore this post isn’t late :-p Anyhoo, I’m not going to bog you down with two lots of my nonsensical ramblings this week, so I’ll keep this post light with some shots from Lord of the Rings: Online. I hope to make more posts on Lotro, so this is a good way to kick things off.
I’m going to talk about something fairly niche in this post, my love for one little space ship in Eve Online called the Manticore.
The Manticore is a Caldari stealth bomber, it’s role is to de-cloak, deliver a high damage alpha strike with torpedoes and a bomb, and then get out alive. I love this little ship, it’s defences are paper thin but it does some real damage. I used to think it looked pretty cool too, but that was before I saw CCP’s concept art for the new model. I think the new model looks sexy as hell, and combined with the new missile and bomb launcher modules, it’s going to be my ship of choice for a while.
Apologies for no post last week, a stomach bug has been sweeping through our house and one of the casualty’s was last week’s post. I did have a long old speech about Bioware’s artistic integrity not really being under attack three quarters done, but as it’s not really that relevant now the post is lost to the mists of time. A lucky escape I hear you mutter.
Anyway, I’m still not quite 100% so this post will be short and sweet, and not really about anything at all. This weekend I’ll be trying to fit in two multi-player event weekends, one on Gears of War 3 and one on Mass Effect 3. If you fancy joining me hit me up over Xbox Live – Gamertag: SGT Benton.
Details incoming!
Gears of War 3
Gears Weekend 2x XP in versus, beast and horde. Guardian has a new xp multiplier. Horde bonus objectives every 2 waves. Custom gnasher skin.
Gears Weekend playlist is Raven Down 24/7. First to 10 Execution with Gnasher and golden snub loadout on Raven Down only.
Gears Weekend features tophats and flower blood for the Raven Down massacre playlist.
Mass Effect 3
Join the war against the Reapers online between 5PM PST Friday, March 30th to 5AM PST Monday, April 2nd and promote at least 2 characters to your single player campaign.
This operation includes PC and Xbox 360; we are continuing to work with Sony to enable these types of Operations on the PlayStation 3 platform. We appreciate your patience, and we expect an update later this week regarding Operation Raptor and the PlayStation 3.
Commendation Packs will be awarded to individual soldiers who complete their training, and a Victory Pack will be awarded to everyone if the Allied Goal is achieved. Packs will be available to download the following week. Please note that participants need to set “Upload Gameplay Feedback” to “on” in the online options to be able to participate in Operation RAPTOR.
