Far Cry 2 Review is Up

When not making or playing games, I sometimes write about games. At the moment I only write for NTSC-UK, a wondeful import gaming site full of intelligent people and great discussion. Recently I graduated from just being a forum member and into being a writer for them.

NTSC-UK is a little different from most review sites in that we don't get sent games to review (publishers don't like our pro import stance) and so we review games that we own and feel that we have something to say about. This is why I think the writing on there is so good, people aren't just reviewing any old bilge, these guys have something important to say.

The reviews sometimes aren't timely either for one reason or another. In this case, Far Cry 2 came out last October. My review only just went up as I only completed the game in January/February time and because NTSC-UK likes to give each review a refreshing amount of breathing space it took a while for it to get posted. Normally each review gets top billing for a week with full banner support before another review is posted and takes the banner spot.

This was an interesting review for me as my time with the game was pretty uneven. I spent the first six hours absolutely hating the game. At the six hour mark something just clicked and the next fourteen hours were absolutely wonderful and I fell in love with the game. I wanted to focus on this love and also to talk about the questions the game asks and the kind of metaphors it brings up. These aren't fully explored in this review as it was hard for me to articulate them and talk about the rest of the game in the word limit.

It was great fun to write and the writing staff at NTSC-UK are a great bunch to work with and have proved invaluable in my recent reviews. I have spent a number of years writing almost nothing but bullet pointed lists of rules for programmers and very brief reports for work so this kind of critical writing was hard to get back into but I was given excellent support from the guys.

The Far Cry 2 review can be hit up here, and the rest of my reviews are here. If you like reading about games in a way that isn't in the god awful Gamespot style, please browse through the rest of the site, there is some great content up there.

Retro Game Challenge

I've been playing Retro Game Challenge over the last couple of days after all the talk it's had recently on various podcasts. For those not in the know, the game is a collection of pseudo retro games and the player is tasked with completing specific challenges while playing these games. The player is aided in these challenges by reading tips and cheats for the games in mock magazines.

The game tries it's hardest to recapture the feeling on the old days of playing games and completely succeeds. The games are delightfully 8-bit and the magazines are how they used to be; content generated from rumours and whispers coming out of Japan.

I don't play a lot of DS games as I'm not really into JRPGs or shovelware and I don't have a lot of friends that play DS (even the ones in the goddamn industry) so it's hard to get recommendations. Every spring/summer I go through a phase of buying DS games as something will happen that will leave me stranded outside the house and away from my 360. This DS phase normally leads to me getting burned by my purchase (The World Ends With You last year) but this time I appear to have struck gold.

The game's challenges are all happily achievable after a few attempts and provide nicely bite sized gameplay. I can happily while away the time whilst my compatriots are in lectures with the games and the last couple of nights have seen me retire to the hotel room after a few drinks to play it.

I'm hoping this success in game buying will carry when I go and pick something up for the horrifically long trip home which will probably be China Town Wars after the guys at NTSC-UK have been pimping that ish.

I also just tried a demo of the new Ghostbusters game. I hate playing demos at conventions as there is invariably loud music blaring around you or someone leaning in a tad too close ofr comfort. This demo was more to showcase Nvidia's new processor as it was at the Nvidia stand and as such it threw a boss at you that was made up of physics objects. The mechanics weren't explained and the boss didn't have much feedback as to my attacks being successful. Although that could be because the game has no HUD and a lot of stuff is communicated by Egon and Ray and the techno music around me prevented me from hearing them.

Anyway, blogging time over, I gots to find food that will hopefully not make me want to throw up. Which probably means looking outside of the convention hall.