Peter Reviews

My thoughts on Amy are covered by my last post on the subject, but this statement from the people at VectorCell confirms one of my suspicions.

Amy was intended to be hard with few checkpoints.
Continue reading →

Amy was a promising new release for 2012′s promising first quarter in which we were to be treated to several horror games. It was universally panned. Did it deserve to be so? Well, probably, but lots of games are praised for the very same things that Amy was slammed for.

IGN’s Colin Moriarty starts by calling it “a supremely muddled mess of controller-throwing frustration and piss-poor game design choices”. The poor game design choices? “Want to pick up that item on the ground? You better be positioned in a pixel-perfect fashion … How many times can a gamer possibly be expected to do the same few things over and over again? … Amy’s checkpoint system wouldn’t necessarily be so unforgiving if the game was even remotely playable, but since so much of the game requires insane amounts of trial and error — and a myriad of unfair deaths due to terrible controls both in and out of combat — this might be the most frustrating aspect of the entire experience … replaying the same 20-minute segment of a chapter a dozen times as you try to figure out what you’re actually doing wrong … gave up out of sheer anger and frustration”. Continue reading →

So it seems that due to a run of bad luck, I am down to being a PC gamer, since the PS3′s media drive has died.

Now I have to do the requisite things. Like complain that the gaming industry isn’t catering (high resolution textures we can’t use) to me and the seven other PC gamers enough, well the seven gamers who aren’t playing the casual games I’ll use to prove that PC gaming is relevant. Or that games are bad console ports because they don’t have a DirectX 11 mode that only 30% of PC gamers can actually use. Complain that 64-bit versions of games should come out to take advantage of the over 4 gigs that most PC Gamers don’t have. I can also talk about how the technology in consoles is really old and dated now on my far superior mouse (1963) and keyboard (1940) system.

Complaining about console games and gamers and ports now takes up all of my time, so I’ll quickly add something about how games are ruined by dumbing them down for the wider console audience. Then go frag some d00dz before even thinking about starting the ‘story-driven plot’ single player of the latest shooter. Leave a comment with your specifications so I can discount anything you say based on your hardware.

Actually, I think I’m going to turn on my rather neglected Wii.

With thanks to Wikipedia and the Steam Hardware Survey. Piracy.

Of course, if they gave it a new title, I wouldn’t have to include the year.

As I suspect was the case with most people who played the original X-COM games, the original announcement of a new X-COM game was a source of hope rapidly followed by a sense of disappointment. The problem being that outside of generally being about aliens and having “XCOM” in the title, it had almost nothing to do with the, and let’s just be honest here, better X-COM games (why have both new “XCOM” games dropped the dash?). Continue reading →

I co-wrote a couple of articles recently.

Next Generation Features – With a rapidly approaching next generation of consoles, it seems like a good time to look back on the last generation and the lessons we have learned from it to try and make the next one even better than before. These are the features we think should be in the next generation that either were not in this generation, or were not universal.

RE: 12 Innovations We Want From PS4 and Xbox 720 – Recently IGN published a list that supposedly “predicts 12 innovations for Microsoft and Sony’s next generation of games consoles”.

After rightfully rejecting Nintendo from the discussion, IGN quickly gets on with the list.

First item on the list, first sentence.

“We don’t need a hard drive.”