Thoughts on pre-owned gaming and the whole mercenaries 3D save file thing....

If any of you haven't heard about it yet, resident evil mercenaries 3D will limit users to one game save, limiting users to one playthrough and the inability to trade the game in.

Capcom are a great game company, I love everything they usually produce, but one thing has to be said is that they are becoming a very greedy company....again.
First with the whole street fighter thing, bringing out super street fighter 4, then the arcade edition..What's next super street fighter 3D the new contenders champion edition 3D alpha beta omega flubber?


Originally I was excited for mercenaries 3D, fast paced gaming on the best extra mode of any game ever.Hell yeah. Then the problems started flowing in. First there was a problem with content, a major lack of characters (namely leon) and a horrible lack of maps. Since this is a full priced game I was hoping for a lot more than what is essentially the add on to resident evil 5 (Which I already have the gold edition of).
Secondly, Gameplay footage. Seeing the jerkiness and oddness of the animations, it looks terrible and it's not something easilly overlooked.
Last but not least, the fact that save files are not erasable.

The latter is the cherry on the top. After seeing the lackluster offering of mercenaries 3D my thoughts where to buy it used, something I do with games that I don't like too much. (I'm 17, a student and don't have that much money to spend on  games, plus OoT came out two weeks ago.)
Mercenaries 3D is actually one game I thought would benefit from used sales. Why because it includes the demo for resident evil revelations, the upcoming title which I hope is nothing like this game.

So what about used sales, why are they good in my oppinion.
Firstly, from the creators point of view it is obviously not making them any money at all. They have tried everything, the whole buy idea of buying certain part of the games if you buy it used (I.e online modes),
Capcom have chose the complete wrong solution here as by eyes, I can see people not buying this brand new and then the brand new price being driven right down, which will lose profits for everyone. Capcom won't ell as many, and the few they do sell will be way cheaper, game retailers will lose money as they will end up selling the game for a lot less than they bought them in the first place. Obviously used sales won't be made to make up for it.

There are a lot of reasons used game sales help developers.

First, the obvious one, in most cases the game is part of a series. One that I can say for myself is uncharted, I bought the first game used since I didn't have high hopes for the game, I then ended up liking it and buying the second game new. Another example is metro 2033, I bought it last week off ebay and i'm loving it, so when the sequel last light comes out i will buy it at launch.

The second reason. Games when they come out are usually £30-£45, that's quite a lot of money for say something short like bioshock. A lot of people trade the game in straight after they complete it and get a decent fraction of the game's price back in credit or cash. So it's an incentive for people to buy things new, the developer get's paid for the new price and the person get's a bit of their money back to do the same thing all over again.

The third reason, Games go out of print. Think right now, if you were to go buy resident evil 4 on the gamecube right now, would it be easy to get it used? Hell no, if it was sealed it would cost about £60 and all of the money would go to the person they bought it off and not the developer, and since shops don't stock it anymore they won't get any money either.Think about how annoying it will be for people who want to play Mercenaries 3D in a few years time, finding a new copy will be impossible and used copies won't be playable. Even people's own copies won't be usable since they can't play the game through again.

I am probably not going to buy mercenaries 3D at full price for many reasons, I'll wait a week or two until I see this game in the bargain bin for about £5.

TUROK Review for XboX 360

 Turok

Xbox 360/PS3

First Person Shooter

I love the original Turok games, with a passion. The games were so fun and were enjoyable titles for the N64 and I think the PC. So obviously I was excited hearing that a new Turok was going to be coming to the next gen consoles, especially after the underwhelming yawn that was Turok Evolution. This game should have been awesome, but instead we got this....

Ok, Ok on the box it doesn't look too bad, but if you were to play the game you would see.
In this version of turok, you play as Turok (Which wasn't even the name of the original protagonists) who is a marine for a future group of mercenaries. He is a 'bad ass' who once apart of an elite assassin team called wolf pack, but has disbanded from them to take wolf pack out on an alien planet somehow infested with dinosaurs.


Just before we start, this game has literally nothing to do with turok, except for the name and the dinosaurs. Nothing!

Gameplay: Gameplay is typical FPS fair. Controls are typical, right trigger shoots the gun, left trigger either zooms a bit or shoots a second gun if it's dual wielded. There are also a few things like evading by pressing A and a direction. Controls are fine, but at some parts of the game there was a bit of frustration where I had to use the dodge move and it didn't work.
In the game there are dinosuars and guards, in which surprisingly, the guards are the more dangerous. Both come in hoards and aren't too hard to dispatch. Dinosaurs however, are really not utilised well, I literally killed nearly every dinosaur by equiping the knife and just activating the quick time events.
Another thing that annoyed me was the randomness of the game, It just felt like a load of random maps joined by BS dialogue. Basically you are running through a jungle for the majority of the game, without giving away any spoilers, you end up in a cave. However after a constant romp for a few hours through a jungle without any special events except for a random assault on the base, you get a boss. A very random boss just appears in the game, it just felt stupid, for half the game we got loads of dinos but no bosses. However going to a cave, a very repetitive cave, we are assaulted by a very frustrating boss battle.


Graphics: Turok uses the unreal engine like most generic FPS', it looks decent still and looked pretty good during it's release. I can't really comment on the graphics.
However the aesthetics do get really repetitive as the jungle just decides to drag on, continuing the backdrop like a hannah barbara cartoon.Character designs look ok, but the facial expressions they give are really unbelievable and just detract from the game.
Dinosaurs are extremely boring, they are nearly always brown, and I think the only time I saw variation was with a few white velociraptors that appeared for about 6 seconds of the game.


In terms of being a turok game, this is shameful, actually it shouldn't even be called turok. This game from now on should be called Generok, because that's basically what it is GENERIC. It amounts to nothing, it doesn't even include any of the cool weapons that the original turoks were so cool for. Instead, we get SMG, Shotgun, Pistol and oh the obviously original pulse rifle....Woo. Turok does have the Bow and a Knife, which are staples of the orignals but then again brown was a staple to the last shit I took.
In all fairness, this game can be gotten very cheap, and in all fairness it is a cheap bit of fun....if your not a turok fan. I picked this game up for about £5 for the tin edition, I completed it in about 5-6 hours with little challenge.

I'd say it is a buy, however, it is only a buy if you find it really cheap and you have absolutely nothing else to do with your time.


I'm giving this game 6/10. So buy Generok at your own whim, it's ok and may offer a few hours of entertainment.

The deal With E3 and my picks.

So it looks like E3 is well over and done with and the dust cloud is starting to settle, I think it's safe to safe it's time for a recap....


So who won:

I think this year none of the big 3 brought their A-game at all. But I think it's safe to say that nintendo definitely won hands down. In terms of the other two, sony was better than microsoft, but I think even EA's presentation on fifa was better than microsoft's snore fest of kinect exclusives. I didn't mind what sony had to show, but nearly everything we already knew of already.

My favourite part:

What else, the WiiU. After all the wait, all the leaks, all the fake info....We finally got to see what the elusive project cafe was:

Yeah this.....

I think a big problem with the unveiling of the WiiU was that the actually didn't show the new console enough, all they were able to show was the controller, which in term has created mass confusion among the gaming community and also stock holders. (Nintendo's stock instantly dropped after the event, but the same happened after the wii was shown)

But for all people who haven't seen it here is the new WiiU console, I will be doing a thoughts post soon so look forward to that then.

Looks nice doesn't it.









TBC

The Spammy Character :(

It took me a while to really realise this, but it seems that nearly every 3D fighting game I play these days has 'that' character. Yaknow, the one that can always cause trouble and take about 50 tries to beat. Yeah that one:

This all started when I decided to get Soul Calibur IV. Now I actually don't suck at fighting games, I loved soul calibur 2, street fighter 2, tekken e.t.c. And as a result I was very good at those games. Getting into SC4 I noticed that although i could beat nearly every character on medium or hard difficulties, I would always get to The Apprentice and get my ass handed to me. I would change my playing style to offensive, defensive, throwing you name it, but whatever I did my skills were to no avail. Even with an easy difficulty I would require about 7 tries to advance. This just wrecks the whole experience for me, I really hate being good at games and then being taught a lesson due to some horrid balancing.

This is not the only case either, I finally decided to get a new psp after mine broke like 3 years ago, with it I had tekken dark ressurection, which I also used to be very good at back when I had my PSP base pack all those years ago.
But this guy always flattens my advances, one punch at a time.

Yeah STEVE!!! I hate this australian gimp with my back teeth :(

Now your probably just thinking, you just suck at this game. On the contrary my questioning reader, I can play through tekken DR on the second to hardest difficulty, but getting to this guy requires me to lower my difficulty to easy and still lose. Grrrrrrr.

Just a small rant there!

The start of something new......

So, after being basically bored with my stagnating gaming life, I've decided to pursue a bit of a more intellectual manner of playing games, by writing about them. I am personally a very 'hardcore' gamer that spends a lot of time playing and actually just admiring the games as the art style they are.


So hopefully you can expect some reviews and stuff from me.
Well providing your actually reading this.