Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Game Diary: PlayStation Notwork

Another week has gone by and most of my gaming time was once again taken up by GTA IV: Episodes from Liberty City - this time on the Lost and Damned portion of the game. I actually took the time to finish all of the optional side quests and events and achieve 100% completion. This entails: winning 12 bike races, completing 25 gang wars, dealing with 5 pieces of “dirty laundry” for the corrupt politician, Stubbs, stealing 9 bikes, and killing 50 seagulls. All of this will take a considerable amount of time, but for the most part it is all entertaining. This is with the exception of the seagull killing, which is very tedious. Luckily other people have gone to the trouble of finding all the birds and making a map – there’s no way I would have had the patience to track them down myself.

My current GTA bug has spread to the PSP, and I have begun playing Chinatown Wars which I picked up around Christmas time. It’s very much a throwback to the very first GTA game, with its overhead viewpoint, but it is in full 3D. There’s a ton of stuff to do in this game as well, and I’ve barely scratched the surface yet – I did complete a quite addictive game that involves you branding your gang members with tattoos though. Plus my current enthusiasm for Rockstar games has me eagerly anticipating the release of L.A. Noire at the end of May - I expect the story telling and free roaming elements to be of their usual extremely high standards, but the game is also set to shake up the genre just as much if not more than Red Dead Redemption.


I also bought a copy of DC Universe Online last Saturday, but events that you may already be aware of have prevented me from playing it. First Sony were telling everyone that they were performing routine maintenance to the PlayStation Network, then a few days later they were admitting to being hacked. Now, almost a week after they first shut down PSN they have informed everyone that their personal details (name, address, email, credit card info) may have been stolen. Luckily the card I have on file isn’t my current one, but it is still quite a worry. I can only imagine what kind of damage this will have to Sony, both financially and from the amount of trust they will lose with their customers.

Finally I spent half an hour checking out the first level of Dead Space Extraction for the Wii – the on rails shooter that is the a prequel to the first game in the series. I was surprised just how good the game looked, and the controls have been very cleverly implemented too. I will play some more and possibly be back with a review soon. Episode 2 of my RMGB Radio podcast should hopefully be up this weekend, and I am hoping it will be a slightly more professional affair than last time, as I’m going for a semi scripted approach. You can expect recaps of all of this months written reviews, a new one for Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master, and plenty more fantastic video game remixes. Make sure you tune in!


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