Gaming notes (charlesr)

[chopemon]

Thanks for the answer John!

Do you find this process goes smoothly?

And do you find everyone has the same idea about what a score means? As in what the number represents? I'm kinda referring to the recent Assassins Creed scores from the big sites where people on the internets are saying that a 7 is a slating score.

Thanks for taking the time to answer the questions, like I say, I'm really interested at the moment about how games are reviewed and the way we discuss games.

[charlesr]

We try and keep scores consistent with the text and consistent with other scores on the site in terms of 5 being an average game that's worth playing but you wouldn't get excited about it. It doesn't always work and we hope most people are reading the text. We talked about ditching them, but a reader poll said that you wanted to keep the scores and they are important for gamerankings and gamestats (when they work properly gah....)

I think most people that read our reviews know how the scoring works. i.e. we don't give all the good games scores between 9.2 and 9.8.

The process goes smoothly enough, but is time consuming. We could bang the first drafts up and give reviews quicker and in some cases this wouldn't be much different from the "after-process" version. But in many, there are useful changes that the writers are pleased to make. Most comments from the writers suggest they think it works well.

[charlesr]

Elemental Gearbolt:

PS1 lightgun on-rails shooter set in a fantasy world with women with unfeasibly large breasts.

Borrowed it off Sean, but unfortuantely can't get it to work with my lightgun on the PS2 and it's unplayable with the pad

Music and intro are fantastic though.

[Swallow]

And taking the time to add screenies and/or videos is a good thing imo.

[chopemon]

This may have been answered before so forgive me if it has but do you guys ever get games given to you for review by the affiliate stores or any publishers?

Or are they all bought by the reviewers?

If they are bought by the reviewers, have you ever approached anyone about getting review copies?

[charlesr]

Majority are just games the writers own. We get a few games from affiliates every now and then. We've not got active PR at the moment so no review copies. Even when we have had someone, the fact that we promote importing used to tend to put as at the bottom of the list, although these days, it's probably just a case of getting the time to ask.

[charlesr]

I started playing Forza2 at 8pm last night. Finished at 11pm. Only 3 hours, but I was doing the "factory spec" races. I'm not that great at it (compared to the peeps that endurance race weekly) so it makes for great racing, having to try each race a few times to get the win. By 11pm I was shaking and had to stop. Concentrating that hard for so long How do the people in real life Le Mans 24 and GT racing do it?

Tonight was CoD4 online. I thought the way the high skill people had loads of extras was cool because when you killed them it was very satisfying knowing you took them down even though completely outgunned and also pushed me on to try and improve. Seeing how you die was interesting too.

Sorry about the site being down. Hope you got lots of gaming done.

[charlesr]

Tried to play CoD4 online last night. Hopeless. Was in a party of 4 friends. Whenever we tried to join a match we either got booted or separated and had to restart the party. One time I even got sent into a game they weren't in.

Last time I played it was fine and worked every time. You'd think they've been doing this stuff long enough now to get it right. Especially since I pay money for the service (live).

On the plus side, I got to bed early \o/ Pipe and slippers please.

[charlesr]

PC Gaming

I used to enjoy PC gaming. But that was back in the day when pretty much everything ran on a really rubbish PC and people weren't constantly pushing the graphical boundaries. Sopwith for example.

I then came back to it in the Doom and Quake days. Everyone CHOSE to run quake at low resolutions so that it would be smoother and easier to kill people.

Since then, every game I've tried on each PC I've owned has had driver issues, random crashing or just was too powerful for my PC (mostly that these days). So I've given up on it.

So now Crysis is out and the First Play thread is full of mumbo jumbo about ram and clock speeds. Posts vary from "It runs great on my giant penis" to "I can't get it to run on my 3 month old PC". Those that can get it to run then eventually go on to talk about the game

I don't miss PC gaming at all. Given the choice of sitting on a chair at a desk in front of a 20" monitor with some rather rubbish speakers or sitting in a comfy sofa with a giant screen, pumping surround sound, a 10" sub.... oh hang on. We're back to the giant penis again.

[Yoshimax]

I'd put money on your COD4 online problems being down to somebody in your party having a poorly setup router.

[charlesr]

You're probably right. PMd.

[charlesr]

Had a few 4 player CoD4 bomb games last night. I'm level 5 and my friend is level 8. His friends on the opposite team are level 55 and 48. We gave them a run for their money though. We managed 10 minutes at one point with neither side scoring. So it just goes to show that with a bit of teamwork and thought, people with ****e weapons can still compete with fully loaded guys. We got murdered 0-3 on the scores, but that didn't tell the full picture of how close it actually was.

I then went on to play some more of the single player. Have to say that my jaw dropped on a couple of occassions and that's not happened in a videogame for a long time. In fact only this and skate have managed that for me this gen. I'm totally looking forward to what the rest has in store.

[charlesr]

Today I've been playing the fantastically appelled Koro Koro Puzzle: Happy Panecchu. Thanks to David for his review which tempted me to the purchase the game. I'd tried someone else's a while back but didn't have time to get into it. I found a faq on gamefaqs that told me how to switch it so it understood I had a GBASP rather than a normal GBA, so thanks to the guy that wrote that.

The cartridge has a tilt sensor in it, so what happens on screen is related to what you do with the gba. In typical puzzle style, you tip the on screen objects to get similar colours next to each other to eliminate them.

So far so good - I'm still learning the ropes so it's all a bit random at the moment, but I'll get there. It's only a few quid on playasia. If you have a GBA, give it a shot. Crazy JPN stuff ftw.

[charlesr]

I'm trying to keep my posts quite upbeat without too much ranting.

But today's post will be a rant.

Having to pay for a track that was in the original Forza and removed from Forza2 and then offered back to us as DLC later (Road America).... I know it's only £1 but it's wrong I tell. Wrong.

So what would be right then? Right would be: here's a pack with all the tracks we took out of Forza that weren't rubbish and a brand new track. For £1

[charlesr]

I'd had a week without internet and consoles. I did have my DS and GBASP though. On the DS I had Loderunner on which I'm still trying to finish Championship Loderunner. I'm stuck on one of the levels and it's just brain bashingly hard. I'll get there though. On the GBA I continued replaying Guru Logic Champ and even got my father in law to play it. He's never played a game before, but when I told him it was a puzzle like sudoku, he was up for it. It took him a few minutes to get used to the controls and another 10 or so to understand the rules and aims, but after that, he was trying some quite advanced levels successfully. He stuck at it for 30 mins which is pretty amazing really. You could see the satisfaction on his face when he solved each one.

That's all for now apart from to say that the music in Elemental Gearbolt on the PS1 is lush. Shame my lightgun doesn't work for ps1 games.