Category Archives: Games

Melbourne, Australia Day weekend: Lego

Doesn’t time fly? It seems like only last year Brickvention was on, but it was two years ago. This time ’round it’s being held opposite Flinders Street station, details at the Brickvention 2008 website. As to what to expect: check out the 2006 website, which has some pretty impressive models on it.

LEGO string

If you find a small white box with 4500584 written on it, it has Lego string in it. Googling 4500584 lego didn’t find anything, but now it should.

Crysis Single Player Demo

The big gaming news this past weekend was the release of the Crysis demo by EA, Crysis has been the “next big thing” in PC gaming since it was first shown over a year ago. I was lucky enough to grab the single player demo, which weighed in as a hefty 1.7Gb, on Saturday afternoon. Sunday afternoon I installed the demo and spent an hour or so running through the jungle in the mission available.

I was very surprised to see after installation that Crysis is available in both 32 bit and 64 bit versions and whilst I’m sure the native 64 bit version does have benefits over the 32 bit version I don’t know what those benefits are at this time it’s just nice to have native 64 bit executable to run.

I really enjoyed playing Crysis, graphically its outstanding where BioShock was graphical champion for indoor and underwater action Crysis is going to be the outdoor champion. I only had my settings on medium but the whole environment looked fabulous.

One of the ‘cool features’ of Crysis is that the environment can be shot up and destroyed, not everything can but the trees can be shot and felled and buildings can be rammed with vehicles and fall apart as if they’re real, even bullet holes appear in walls when shot. Kudos to Crytek for the attention to detail that so many other games lack.

With the release of DirectX 10 a few months ago people have been wondering what difference it will make to gaming, BioShock did look a little better using DirectX 10 but Crysis appears almost lifelike running under DirectX 10.

Performance wise the game averaged 20 – 30 fps on medium settings for me. As my gaming system has dual 1900 series ATI graphics cards in CrossFire I would have expected better performance but I’m not even sure if CrossFire was working for Crysis and ATI haven’t released an updated driver for Crysis as of yet whereas Nvidia have in their 169.01 Beta drivers.

Overall I think Crysis is a very good game, I’m looking forward to buying the full version when it is released in a few weeks time….. which is just enough time to decide what upgrades I need in order to play the game at it’s maximum settings <evil grin>

 Edit: A pair of Nvida 8800GTX’s will be running in SLI tonight, wife not going to be happy. But dangnamit, we need more power!

Gaming for luddite scrooges

If you’re like me, and clinging to your “classic” XBox while you ponder upgrading to your next console, now’s a good time to go out game shopping. Arm yourself with a copy of Metacritic’s index of XBox games (if you copy it into Excel and only print the half-decent games, say those rated above 70, you can probably get it down to a fairly small and inconspicuous size) and hit the shops.

For those in Australia, JB Hifi in particular are selling a lot of well-regarded games (and some crap ones as well) at good prices. Pro Evolution Soccer (rated 91 at Metacritic): $15. Want a racing game, but can’t decide between (the late) Colin McRae 2004 (84) or Rallisport 2 (87)? $10 each. Lego Star Wars (76): I think that was $15. Forza Motorsport (92): $15 too I think, but don’t quote me on it. They also had Star Wars Battlefront (80), Destroy All Humans (76), Oddworld: Strangers Wrath (88), Sonic Mega Collection Plus (75).

Or if you just paid $30 for Harry Potter: Goblet Of Fire for the kids a few weeks ago at EB (and it was secondhand), seethe with rage as you spot it for just $20. (Grumble)

(Different games showing up in different stores, natch.)

Top games

Edge 100 best video games For Aussies wanting to grab a copy, Edge’s 100 Best videogames of all time (air freight) has landed in newsagents (well, a few of the better ones), though all but one copy had been snapped up by the time I visited MagNation today at lunchtime, so you’ll have to be quick. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait a couple of months for the sea freight edition to arrive.

The release of the list of games made the news worldwide, with Legend of Zelda: Ocarina being awarded the top gong.

Meanwhile, GameTunnel has named the top 100 indie games of the last three years.

Game writing stuff

Microsoft already opened up the XBox 360 to recreational coders with XNA.

Now Nintendo is opening up the Wii with the WiiWare developer tool, with games to be made available for sale and download to Wii owners via Nintendo. More details in the Newsweek blog’s chat with Nintendo’s US president.

Meanwhile, Sean Howard is designing 300 little gameplay mechanics that people can steal and implement if they like. Neato.

Is the (original) Xbox dead?

It’s amazing to see how quickly (original) Xbox games have disappeared. There’s still some on the shelves, but their space has shrunk markedly to make space for other platforms, and there’s nothing in most advertising — it’s all gone onto the Xbox 360.

Contrast that to the Playstation, where PS2 games are still being promoted along their PS3 companions, and even the newer games are still being developed and released for the PS2. Which reflects the massive install-base of the PS2 against the Xbox, I suppose. In fact, you can still buy a PS2 in the shops.

I have an old Xbox… I’m not ready to upgrade yet. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I rarely have time for it, but I’m still enjoying PGR2 and Halo. Will I still be able to find games on the shelves in six months’ time? Probably. Twelve months? Who knows. You can still buy GBA games new.

When I bought my Xbox a few years ago, I pondered that buying it was actually a good way to fight back against the dominance of Microsoft, because they lose so much money on them. Turns out Microsoft reckoned they lost US$4 billion on the venture.

Influential games

Henry Lowood curator at the Stanford University History of Science and Technology collections has named the 10 most important video games of all time: Spacewar, Star Raiders, Zork, Tetris, Sim City, Super Mario Bros 3, Civilization, Doom, Warcraft and Sensible World Of Soccer. And I can understand why he’s gone for the most influential, rather than the most popular.

Pacman didn’t make the grade, but the new Pacman Championship edition for XBox 360 has just come out (available via XBox Live). And it appears to be a re-design (not just a graphical revamp) that attempts to bring new gameplay in, while not trying to break the fundamentals of the game (like the 80s and 90s Pacman sequel games did, trying to make the field 3D, or turning it into a platform game). Pictures. Review from Joystiq.

Games, games, games

GTA R18+The Age reports that the ACMI Games Lab in Melbourne will be hosting the Game On exhibition of video game history, which has already been seen in London, Chicago and San Jose. Should be a nice followup to the Melbourne House/Beam Software exhibit they had recently.

Speaking of games, ArsTechnica continues its series on writing in games (eg plots and backstories, rather than code).

Meanwhile in Australia there’s more campaigning for the OFLC to be allowed to give games an R 18+ rating (rather than having to refuse them classification), to bring games ratings into line with movies.

Though interestingly, a catalogue from discount chain KMart that arrived during the week reckoned Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories is rated R — it’s actually MA15+.