The Xbox One- Six months later
I received my Xbox One back in November. I have some observations to share after something approaching six months living with the big black box. …
Console hardware
Console hardware
XBox One- initial impressions
I’ve had my XBox One for a whole 16 hours, give or take. So far, my experience with it is completely positive. I’ll be updating this post a bit over the next couple of days as I experience more with this Generation Eight console.
Here are some quick observations in bulleted form:
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Game reviews
Star Wars: The Old Republic
| Title | Star Wars: the Old Republic |
| Developer | Bioware |
| Type | Massively Multi-player RPG |
| Platform(s) | PC |
| Kelly Score ™ | 95 / 100 |
Massively multi-player role playing games have, with very few exceptions, a standard motif. You create a character, complete a few “orientation” or introductory quests, and are then left to your own devices. Thousands of boring and repetitive quests combine with your character having complete lack of any perceivable impact or even place within the background story to encourage a kind of hamster like behaviour. You run in your little questing “wheel”, seeking levels or gear to help you continue to run in that wheel. Your long term goal: running in the wheel long enough and fast enough to eventually jump to the big, shiny end game hamster wheel of raid content. Raiding is where you get to spend all of your time staring at a wall, or the back end of some other person’s character, for hours on end as you beat some giant monster to get more shiny gear so you can do the next bigger raid. Most people don’t even read the story associated with each quest, and in many MMOGs that is a blessing: the stories are vanishingly thin and comically trivial. They have to be, since your character has no impact on the world whatsoever.
Star Wars: the Old Republic (SWtOR) breaks out of that motif. It plays more like a single player RPG, where your character is the hero of his or her own story. Other players and “group” dungeons (flash points, operations, and Heroics in SWtOR parlance) certainly exist, but the personal story your character is playing through is paramount. It is a refreshing and welcome change, even though the basic mechanics of the game are otherwise pretty traditional.
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Game reviews
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
| Title | The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim |
| Developer | Bethesda |
| Type | RPG |
| Platform(s) | XBox 360, PC (reviewed on XBox) |
| Kelly Score ™ | 98 / 100 |
I have played a few games in the Elder Scrolls series, and each successive one seems to be a little bit better- at least in my opinion. I played Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and now Skyrim. And, with a few caveats, Skyrim is basically the best computer RPG I’ve played to date.
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Game reviews
Risen: Spiritual successor to Gothic 3
| Title | Risen |
| Developer | Piranha Bytes |
| Type | RPG |
| Platform(s) | XBox 360, PC (reviewed on PC) |
| Kelly Score ™ | 75 / 100 |
Risen is an old-school role playing game that does very little to make itself appealing to the more “casual” gamer. In terms of overall characteristics, Risen is similar to games like Oblivion- but whereas Oblivion tries to make it easy to progress and overcome your mistakes, Risen makes no such allowances. Interestingly enough, although I generally like “easier” games, I’m actually really enjoying Risen… on the PC. From what I’ve seen and heard, the XBox version should be avoided.
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Game reviews
Bayonetta: Everything that is wrong with this type of game
| Title | Bayonetta |
| Developer | Platinum Games |
| Type | Action/Fighting |
| Platform(s) | XBox360, PS3 |
| Kelly Score ™ | 40 / 100 |
Action games are a genre that I really didn’t understand until I played Bayonetta. I could therefore say that the $60 I spent on this game was educational: I have been taught that I should not buy this kind of game. The kindest things I can really say about Bayonetta from my perspective are that the graphics are impressive, and the main character has one of the finest digital rumps in computer history.
If you generally agree with everything I say, you have no need to read further.
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Bayonetta: Everything that is wrong with this type of gameRead More »
Game reviews
Wet: definition of a wasted opportunity
| Title | Wet |
| Developer | Artificial Mind and Movement (published by Bethesda) |
| Type | Action / Shooter |
| Platform(s) | XBox 360, Playstation 3 |
| Kelly Score ™ | 55 / 100 |
The title “Wet” supposedly refers to the term “wetwork”, a word commonly attributed to cold-war era secret agencies and referring to assignments involving killing so intense that the workers hands become literally wet with blood. The game definitely has death and blood galore, with kill counts in the hundreds per chapter as the game’s female protagonist, Rubi Malone, slices, jumps, and shoots her way through room after room of “bad people”.
I’m all for a bit of mindless violence in my games, particularly when the main character is a sexy but psychopathic woman, but somewhere along the line Wet becomes… boring, and worse: irritating. It is telling that I had to force myself to finish the game- I wanted to call it quits several times after the midway point of the twelve to fourteen hours of playtime I got for my money. This is unfortunate, as there are a number of good ideas in Wet- sadly, it feels a bit like there were one or two hours of good ideas cut and pasted a dozen times to fill out the game.
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Game reviews
Old-style destruction- the return of MechWarrior
There was a series of games I played many years ago. In these games, I was injected into a world where giant robotic machines cut lumbering, awe-inspiring paths of destruction through cities and each other. That was the universe of BattleTech and the MechWarrior game series, and it was good.
Unfortunately, the MechWarrior series came to an end some years ago- the last “real” MechWarrior game was MechWarrior 4, which came out in the 2002 timeframe. The good news: a new MechWarrior game is coming sometime in the next couple of years. And if the video (see below) is any indication, the makers of this “reboot” understand at least a little about what made MechWarrior fun.
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Games
Week of weird occurrences
It is funny how many things have appeared this week in the news that made me pause. There is really no relationship between any of these things, other than whatever connections exist within my mind. But this week seems full of oddities and changes that interact in unusual ways for me.
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Console hardware
New XBox stuff announced at E3: Natal and full downloads
E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) has suffered through some setbacks in the last few years. The industry show is basically a venue for the manufacturers of computer games and game related products to communicate with the media. Normal citizens like you and I are not allowed to attend. The big vendors like Microsoft and Nintendo decided a few years ago that the show was costing too much money for not enough return, and they withdrew en masse. E3 went through some gyrations to try to re-invent itself, but has basically come back identical to what it was, just a bit smaller. I’m not sure what has really changed, but the big vendors seem to be back.
This post isn’t about E3, though: instead, it is about a couple of interesting (to me) announcements that Microsoft made at the event. Project Natal, a full-body motion interface with no actual controller, and XBox Live full game downloads.
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New XBox stuff announced at E3: Natal and full downloadsRead More »