Some things
2009-03-11
Lately some things have been good, as expected or otherwise.
Mass Effect is awesome. Excellent game, for so many reasons. Sure, the vehicle sections are annoying, but the third-person stuff is really good. Besides that, it's excellently written; a marvellous setting with superb attention to detail and solid dialogue. Moreover, that dialogue is good regardless of what choices your character makes: granted it's not massively non-linear but while your choice between the whiter-than-white hero and the gets-things-done-no-matter-the-cost type isn't going to do much to control the events themselves, it does make quite a difference to the tone of the game.
The new series of Skins is surprisingly good. It's not hugely realistic (I hope) but suspend for a while and it's worth watching, in my opinion. It's a nice ensemble affair with a different character in focus each week, all of them interesting and thought out. Not everyone's cup of tea, I'm sure, but I'm a sucker for plot and characters and whether or not you like them it has both.
Gears of War 2 is similarly great. I bought it after some guys from work invited me to play Xbox360 games online with them; this one and Halo 3 (of which I'm less fond) were on the list. It's the first I've bothered to play online with my new console (which isn't all that new any more, even to me) and the real strength is a cooperative 'last stand' game of seeing how many waves of the invading horde you can survive. It's great to play with people you know, but also perfectly reasonable with the game matching you up with random folk online. Even one time it went 'a bit WoW' with people storming out of the group because it was no longer full, the game just scaled the difficulty down and the two of us went on to get me a personal best for highest wave.
XNA is Microsoft's framework (by which I mean library, essentially, although it's well documented) for developing games for Windows (perhaps that should be 'Games for Windows') or Xbox360. It's a set of .NET libraries best used with C#, which is in itself a very well structured and thoroughly useable language, even for those of us who never got around to learning and understanding C or C++. It's clearly learnt the lessons of watching the rise of C, C++ and Java, and at the same time Microsoft have pretty much got the XNA libraries right.
Mass Effect is awesome. Excellent game, for so many reasons. Sure, the vehicle sections are annoying, but the third-person stuff is really good. Besides that, it's excellently written; a marvellous setting with superb attention to detail and solid dialogue. Moreover, that dialogue is good regardless of what choices your character makes: granted it's not massively non-linear but while your choice between the whiter-than-white hero and the gets-things-done-no-matter-the-cost type isn't going to do much to control the events themselves, it does make quite a difference to the tone of the game.
The new series of Skins is surprisingly good. It's not hugely realistic (I hope) but suspend for a while and it's worth watching, in my opinion. It's a nice ensemble affair with a different character in focus each week, all of them interesting and thought out. Not everyone's cup of tea, I'm sure, but I'm a sucker for plot and characters and whether or not you like them it has both.
Gears of War 2 is similarly great. I bought it after some guys from work invited me to play Xbox360 games online with them; this one and Halo 3 (of which I'm less fond) were on the list. It's the first I've bothered to play online with my new console (which isn't all that new any more, even to me) and the real strength is a cooperative 'last stand' game of seeing how many waves of the invading horde you can survive. It's great to play with people you know, but also perfectly reasonable with the game matching you up with random folk online. Even one time it went 'a bit WoW' with people storming out of the group because it was no longer full, the game just scaled the difficulty down and the two of us went on to get me a personal best for highest wave.
XNA is Microsoft's framework (by which I mean library, essentially, although it's well documented) for developing games for Windows (perhaps that should be 'Games for Windows') or Xbox360. It's a set of .NET libraries best used with C#, which is in itself a very well structured and thoroughly useable language, even for those of us who never got around to learning and understanding C or C++. It's clearly learnt the lessons of watching the rise of C, C++ and Java, and at the same time Microsoft have pretty much got the XNA libraries right.
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