Cevert

I gave my rental copy back yesterday, I'd been playing an on Offline profile and had reached a point where I had tos top or I'd spoil the rest of the game for myself. Will pop in to work and collect my copy later on today and start anew

I've borrowed a rental copy from work (I work at Blockbuster) I've just done the bit and have mixed opinions. As I intend on buying it I've been playing it on an offline profile on Normal difficulty and yet it feels far far too easy (admittedly I normally do Heroic but this is sill easy) also the Grunts sound completely different. Not sure about all the stuff about Master Chiefs origin either, just doesn't feel quite epic enough to be the focus of a Halo game (I've read Fall of Reach and enjoyed that for what it was).

Most press events take place in London from what I understand, thats where most of the big PR companies are. As for VG24/7 aren't they (and RPS) part of the Eurogamer network?

Apparently they were deleting some comments too. But anyone who expected anything to change was seriously deluded, did anything change after the whole Gertsmann Kane & Lynch thing? Did it bollocks, Wainwrights been made into a scapegoat due to her own naivety and the media will continue as normal, in fact the gaming community will continue as normal and we'll see it once one of this years big big releases gets a slightly lower score on one site compared to elsewhere (and as mentioned in the NFS Most Wanted thread I expect something to kick off at CVG).

Really not sure where to put this, mostly because he's a sportsman (his "part time" job is racing motorcycles in road races such as the TT, his "normal" job is fixing lorries) but as he's recently been on the tellybox I thought it worthwhile sticking it in here. Watched the first episode of his "How Britain Worked" series the other night and thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it, the guys enthusiasm for pretty much everything shows through no matter what he's doing although I was highly amused by how chuffed he were when he made the bacon and eggs in the Steam Engines burner using the shovel he'd made earlier in the episode. I've got the second episode on TiVo and may just watch that in a moment once I've stuck tea in the oven for when the missus gets home, think I'll sit down with a nice cuppa (seems entirely appropriate considering the mans own obsession with the nations brew).

Hmm not sure what to make of CVG's review, I can see them getting alot of stick for the score (which would be highly amusing considering the current issues surrounding games journalism) and the writers final paragraph sounds like someone who went into the game wanting something more like Forza Horizon than what Most Wanted seems to want to deliver. On the other hand, my favourite Burnout Paradise moments were heading out into the hills where things got twisty rather than driving around an American city grid system.

Dug this back out, I do really like it but sometimes its so depressingly difficult and in all honesty I'm not even that far (I'm still near Undead Parish...)

As much I'm enjoying this game, it falls short in a few areas. I've seen someone somewhere suggest it feels like PGR, and I sort of agree, but Playground haven't really jumped on that. They've included all those points you tot up by drifting, drafting etc but aside from improving your rank it doesn't really do much, they missed a trick by not making it like Kudo's and giving you events that are based around earning a certain amount of points, the "Festival" also feels a little half-arsed, beyond racing theres very little else to do, they could have included drifting events for example, but in hindsight they have included things like the Mustang v Mustang race which is really rather cool. Onlines very odd too, its incredibly secluded, you can't just decided to have a race whilst free-roaming. So if you find a great piece of road, you can't just set a start line as a waypoint on the map, get everyone to drive to it and then create a race from there (which I'm sure you could do on the original Test Drive Unlimited). The free roam (multiplayer) challenges hint that they could have done this which makes it all the more disappointing. It is a very good game however. Its genuinely enjoyable to play and I've find myself using one car to just drive around the map in and then changing cars when I get to each individual event. I also feel it was a mistake to not allow tuning, that Mini race that you do fairly early on for example is made all the more difficult by the fact that the car hasn't been upgraded properly or at least balanced out. I know tuning isn't for everyone, I'm not the type to spend hours and hours doing it, but on Forza 4 I'd build a car and then make a few minor tweaks in order to make it pleasurable to drive and competitive within the confines of what people were posting on my friendslist, because a big part of "Car Culture" (which is what the Forza franchise has always been about) is making your car awesome. That being said, and I don't want all of this to be negative, so I'd like to re-iterate that I am really enjoying it when I'm playing it and the ground work is there for them to build upon, so heres hoping that he get a second game where some of the above is addressed in some manner.

I think this year has been more about finding something new and all the "established" names being a bit of a let down. Mass Effect 3 I've pretty much abandoned, I wanted to love it and managed to get the cash together in order to buy it when things were pretty tight but now it feels like a waste of money as it sits there, unfinished and I just don't have the enthusiasm for it to stick it back in the XBox and play it where as its predecessors were the only games I played until I'd completed them. But on the other side of the coin Sleeping Dogs, a new "IP" (albeit it on that started life off as something fairly old) that felt like the days when GTA was actually fun (I still say it feels like Vice City) and whilst my progress has been slow I've absolutely loved what I've played of The Walking Dead (although it feels more like an interactive novel than a "game"). I only had a very brief play of Dishonored but from what I did get to play it felt very much like everything that Bioshock promised it would be (I loved the setting and atmosphere of Bioshock but not so much how it played). The amusing thing is, I work in retail, and the company I work for likes to target us on pre-orders, things like Call of Duty look after themselves, everyone pre-orders that (even though they're incredibly tired and cliched now) and you try and say to customers (who have genuinely asked you for your advice) that a particular game looks like it could be pretty special, no one listens then come the weekend of the release everyone's scraping around trying to find a copy because its sold out and they didn't pre-order.

I remember VG24/7 when they were still fairly small (prior to being bought by Eurogamer) ran a news piece about Patrick getting a PS3 in the post from Sony. One thing I think ought to be pointed out is the immense pressure that some journalists feel under to give a game a positive review, not just because of PR influence by also because of people on the internet. One incident that springs to mind was Play magazines review of Dragons Dogma, the guy who reviewed it quite clearly had a mixed opinion of it, but he'd been asked to cover it by his editor and simply did his job. The article was leaked and he received a fair bit of abuse from some of the less intelligent types that couldn't accept that the review was his opinion. If he was of a weaker disposition his next review may have been a bit more positive (I've no idea if it was or not) despite his own feelings about the game purely because of the pressure extolled on him from external sources. The people in question hadn't even played the game at the time, the demo had been released but was (widely) criticised but the forum posts I'd read were all from people who'd had their own mind made up by the Capcom PR machine. Having written the odd article for a couple of smaller sites over the years even receiving the game free can make it difficult to look at it objectively as that personal investment of having handed over your hard earned isn't really there, although that feeling can easily be destroyed when that free game turns out to be Marvel Nemesis!