Mass Effect 2 Review

Head on over to Resolution to read my review of one of the greatest games ever made.

http://resolution-magazine.co.uk/content/review-mass-effect-2/

Random game-o-rama!

Every so often I’m going to pick a random game out of my vast collection, play it and write some stuff about it. The game could be from the Amiga, DOS, windows, SNES, Megadrive, gameboy, arcade, N64 etc. I may do more than one a week if I get through it or get bored because its shit though. Also don’t expect any deep insights into the games, its just for fun.

First up is…

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic is one of the only first person fantasy games to primarily focus on the ancient art of kicking people. Orcs, Goblins, big spiders, zombies, evil guys etc can all be kicked, repeatedly, in the face. You can kick them off the edge of cliffs, into conveniently placed wall spikes, down bottomless chasms, into fires, into each other. This is one hell of a kick fest of a game.

This is my foot connecting with the face of a zombie!

The disgusting prick only went and poisoned me though.

The hand to hand combat in this game is frigging awesome it has to be said, it really feels like sword fighting. Or axe fighting if you’re that way inclined. I didn’t really bother with stealth or much magic because I wanted to kill everything, right in the face. I mean the baddies are there to be killed, that is their sole purpose in life, to die in the most entertaining way possible. Right?

Finishing off a...whatever it is with a hefty stab to the guts.

Lots of gore too, with heads, arms and legs spinning off. I even managed to slice a goblin in two. If I’d played this on the 360 I’d have probably got an achievement for that. The problem with Dark Messiah is that the story just doesn’t grab you at all really, I found myself carrying on with the game just for the next fight. theres nothing wrong with generic fantasy if its done well but this isn’t, story wise that is. It still looks goddamn gorgeous at times though.

Its got some really nice HDR effects going on in some levels, like the one in the picture above. One of the main reasons I do actually like the game is the obvious nods to Robert E Howard’s Conan stories, not in the way the story is told but the world it’s set in. Its an ancient world with an even more ancient history. Descending into dusty tombs and underground temples buried away for thousands of years you dodge lethal traps by the skin of your teeth. A bit like a dark age Indiana Jones really. Thats why the game gets two thumbs up in the atmosphere stakes.

Unfortunately as I was approaching the end of the game it suddenly dumped me back to the desktop for no apparent reason so I uninstalled it. By that point it had got a bit old and I was just playing it for the sake of completing it(even though I have finished the game before) in that OCD way us gamers get, or it that might just be me.

Battlefield 2 1.50 patch Invalid CD key crash.

If any of you lovely people out there are have the ball ache crash on trying to join a multiplayer server after the last patch then this solution worked perfectly for me.

Go to Start>Run> type ‘regedit’ and hit ‘Ok’
In regedit go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Electronic Arts \ EA Games \ Battlefield2 \ ergc

Your Data may have only ‘x9392′ and that’s it. This is the reason why you have been having problems.
You need to right click and select ‘Modify’. In my case the CD key was there but not the ‘x9392′, so i entered that instead and bingo it worked!

Type in x9392 and then your CD key. NOTE: There are no hyphens and put on your caps lock.

example: x9392THECDKEYGOESHERE

 

This was on windows XP by the way.

Alien vs Predator hands on.

I was at the leeds Eurogamer expo this week and got to play some of the big upcoming titles including the new Alien vs Predator. Read my hands on here:

http://resolution-magazine.co.uk/content/hands-on-alien-vs-predator/

The terrible world of Jan Moir

In Jan Moir’s world every gay man will die of a drug overdose or some kinky sex game gone wrong. Every gay male couple will have threesomes every night and then probably try and kill each other. Jan must be terrified constantly that she will wake up to a world gone completely gay, wild orgies in public! The streets running with rivers of poppers!

By now you’ve probably heard about this bitter old crone’s article on the death of Stephen Gately but if you haven’t here it is for your reading displeasure.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1220756/A-strange-lonely-troubling-death–.html

Before we continue, lets look at what the article was originally titled shall we. Look at the ‘femail today’ section at the  right hand side of the picture. Oh no, you’re not getting away with it that easily you twats.

http://www.twitpic.com/lqchu

Its just appalling but you cant really expect anything less from The Daily Fail to be honest. This is the kind of woman who speaks before she thinks. She probably starts frothing at the mouth and works her self up into a frenzy while she writes what she would like to believe as opposed to the truth. She should go on Loose Women, she would fit right into the curtain twitching gossip mongering and wild unresearched knee jerk opinions about things they know nothing about, all over a lovely cup of tea.

She’s even a bit of a ghoulish character, although she thinks she isn’t when she quite clearly is;

‘Robbie, Amy, Kate, Whitney, Britney; we all know who they are. And we are not being ghoulish to anticipate, or to be mentally braced for, their bad end: a long night, a mysterious stranger, an odd set of circumstances that herald a sudden death’.

There she goes, slyly predicting other celebrities deaths, probably so she has something to write about. I doubt there’s much else in that vapid brain of hers.

This kind of journalism(if you can call it that) really pisses me off. How do people like this get such a loud voice in the media? Well all you Daily Mail readers, you only need look at yourselves.

Fuck you and fuck Jan Moir.

The knee that jerked

Today at 11.42am in some shithole in the UK, a Daily Mail readers knee jerked so fast it actually broke the speed of sound. Reports are still vague as to what article caused the phenomenal reaction, as when pressed the Daily mail reader, Bob Pointless 45, only had this to say ‘Well it was probably about immigrants or the gays or something like that, violent video games like Grand Theft Auto causing another massacre. I don’t really know as my knee generally jerks up to twenty five or thirty times a day. It could have been anything really, I never really understand what rational, unbiased  news articles are about and I get angry because of this, The Daily Mail takes a story, distorts it and then adds simple  keywords so that people like me can understand clearly what kind of hate it is that we need to be stirring up inside ourselves. The knee usually does its stuff after I’ve finished reading the article and taken it all in, which can take a while.

When asked if he reads any other newspapers Mr Pointless replied ‘No, well, my wife buys The Sun so I sometimes look at that so I guess I get a broad perspective on current events’.

The sonic boom generated by the knee jerk could be heard a mile away and resulted in a small shock wave that, amongst other damage, blew a framed picture of the Queen off the wall.

The Daily Scoundrel

Four of the Resolution crew(Including myself) have started a new pop culture site called ‘The Daily Scoundrel’ go have a look! Go now!

http://thedailyscoundrel.com/

Wolfenstein review

Check out my new article for Resolution here:

http://resolution-magazine.co.uk/content/review-wolfenstein/

Yep Wolfenstein is back once again!

The evolution of a hero.

Have a read of my new article over on Resolution.

http://resolution-magazine.co.uk/content/?p=1852

Do you agree or disagree?

Thief 2X: Shadows of the metal age

If you are a fan of the Thief games then I highly recommend this mod. I say mod but its pretty much an entirely new Thief game using the Thief 2 engine. A very impressive effort indeed, with full voice acting and new graphics. Its not exactly new but I don’t think its well known, I for one hadn’t even heard of it until recently.

Anyway, check it out. You can find it here:

http://www.thief2x.com/default2.asp