Consolation Prize

It seems to be traditional during the festive season to offer up some sort of list, whether it’s the “Best”, “Worst”, “Overhyped” or whatever adjective fits the agenda – well it’s my turn so I’m going to dish up my top 5 favourite games played this year.

There is, however, a small caveat – and that is to be considered for the list I must have at least played the game to completion this year. You will therefore notice that some high profile games like Fable 2 and Fallout 3 aren’t on the list, as even with the best will in the world there just aren’t enough hours in the day to play EVERY game that’s released in the mad rush towards Christmas. This isn’t a vapour-ware list of games I think should be worthy, but just a plain and honest list of games that I’ve enjoyed above and beyond my expectations this year.

5. Castle Crashers (Xbox 360 - Arcade)

There is something incredibly joyous about returning to the good old simplistic hack ‘n slash genre that is so representative of Castle Crashers. It’s as if the shackles have suddenly been thrown off and your inner child has suddenly been released and you’re free to play a game just for fun again - without worrying about “what it all means”. Castle Crashers wraps this shackle free gameplay up with some beautiful art design, adds a smattering of guttural humour and gives you a game that’s a joy to play time and time again.

Read what I thought of Castle Crashers here.

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Rounding off looking at a couple of iPhone games that I recently purchased, today for your perusal we have Galcon by Phil Hassey; an incredibly fast paced real time strategy game of galactic domination. Imagine playing something similar to Risk, which has been given a dose of amphetamines, and is based upon the conquest of planets rather than countries - then in a nutshell you have Galcon.

The primary aim in Galcon, for the majority of the game modes at least, is to obliterate the other player by conquering their planets. Starting with just the one planet you can attack another simply by selecting your world, and then selecting the target. An invasion fleet comprising of a definable percentage (in 25% increments) of the planet’s forces will then blast across the stars on an attack vector. If your force is large enough then the opposing planet’s defences will be annihilated and it will then become a part of your expanding galactic empire.

Each galaxy map in Galcon comprises of a number of planets, some of which are grey neutral worlds, and all of varying sizes which indicates the production rate. The larger the planet the faster it will expand and thus strategically speaking it’s wise to look for neutral planets with a low defence to conquer before tackling your opponent.

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Whilst not immersing myself completely in Fallout 3 for the last few days, I’ve been sampling a bit of mobile gaming for the iPhone – primarily Fieldrunners from Subatomic Studios.

Fieldrunners is a great little Tower-Defence game that’s perfect for the iPhone. Not only does it look and sound great, have a decent touch screen interface which apart from the odd hiccup works rather quite well, but importantly it’s easy to play for either extended periods of time, or in short bite sized chunks as the game’s state will be instantly saved whenever you leave the application. Thus, a game can be stopped in an instant and resumed at a later time whenever convenient - a must for mobile gaming.

A tower defence game has a simple aim – to stop swarms of enemies, which can enter from multiple points on a map, from exiting the screen on the opposite side from which they entered for as long as possible. So that it’s not a stroll-in-the-park for all these enemies, you have at your disposal a selection of weapon towers which can be purchased and placed anywhere on the map so long as they don’t block an exit.

It all starts off easy enough, but each successive wave of enemies will be tougher than the last, and some creative defences will need to be constructed if you’ve any hope of defeating the 100th wave and being declared the victor. It’s completely up-to the player how they go about their defence and what towers to use, but personally I prefer to construct some sort of maze come “rat-run” that will force the hostile swarm to traverse the map for as long as possible whilst under a constant crossfire.

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Over the years we’ve learnt many things courtesy of the film industry; chief among them is the fact that space is certainly not a safe place for humanity to explore. And we’ve also learnt that when contact, be it with a colony, vessel, or even a town has suddenly and inexplicably been lost it’s not because of something simple like a communications malfunction, or due to static interference, it’s usually because the crew/colonists/residents have all been horribly slaughtered.

Alarm bells should be ringing loudly in the ears of whichever bright spark has decided to lead an expeditionary mission to determine the cause of the silence, but instead they will wander unconcerned (mostly) into danger like the proverbial lamb to the slaughter. This blasé attitude, although not good for promoting a long and prosperous life, does however provide the perfect setup for horror films, or alternatively in our case a Sci-Fi survival horror game.

The reason I’m making such a tenuous link to the film industry is that in some respects Dead Space feels like it’s borrowing aspects from some of the great Sci-Fi flicks of the last 30 years. However, instead of just being a carbon copy of something like Aliens, Event Horizon, or even Solaris there’s enough originality here, and delivered with such panache and polish that makes it a game that is worthy of your attention.

Playing as Isaac Clarke, an engineer aboard the USG Kellion, you and your crewmates are dispatched to the USG Ishimura – a “planet cracker” class mining vessel that rips planets apart in search of valuable minerals and ores. As you may have surmised contact with the Ishimura has been lost after an initial distress signal was received, and on rendezvousing with the stricken vessel above the planet Aegis 7 a decision is made to dock with the ship and provide any help required. It is however, only a matter of time before things go completely pear shaped leaving you to repair various systems on the Ishimura so that you can escape the nightmare.

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It’s a fact that gaming is now starting to become more socially acceptable. I am no longer completely embarrassed when I admit to being a gamer, and neither do I feel the need to hide this fact from the world at large, although admittedly I’m still a little apprehensive regarding people’s reactions whenever I list “Video Gaming” as one of my hobbies or interests.

You see, although gaming is gradually crawling out of the shadows of the bedroom towards the light of the living room, there’s still some stigma associated with being a games player. I’m sure many of us are still attributed as being “Geeks” or “Immature”, and are assumed to be lacking in any form of social skills beyond those required to set-up a death match on Halo 3 or converse in “leet -speak”. In fact, I quite happily label myself as a geek, and often do so before anyone can even think about using the term in a derogatory manner in order to confound and leave whomever I’m speaking with in search of another stereotype.

Anyway, I need to get to the point. What got me thinking about the acceptability of gaming was the fact that a well known BBC Radio One DJ, Chris Moyles, freely admits to playing on his Xbox 360 regularly. And often during the course of his breakfast show he will quite openly talk about playing Call of Duty 4 or Call of Duty: World at War, seemingly without any regard for the admonishment he may receive from his colleagues or the millions of listeners that have tuned in to listen to his show. I genuinely find the show highly entertaining, but knowing that Mr Moyles is an avid gamer provides me with yet another reason to tune into the show just on the off-chance that he may regale us with stories about his gaming habits.

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A quick note to mention some scheduled maintenance. The About page has been revamped to hopefully provide some additional information about Consolation Prize, Myself, and to include some specific information regarding comments, review policy, and copyright.

So the NXE (New Xbox Experience) finally got its official debut yesterday replacing the old “blades” dashboard with a visually slick update. I’m sure Microsoft’s Live servers were being hammered all day and were probably groaning under the pressure but I must say that from a personal perspective the update was painless, and surprisingly quick – clocking in at about 10 minutes to download and install. A time I thought was an impressive feat for such a major system update that was concurrently rolled out worldwide.

After the brief but flamboyant video lauding a whole new experience I got down to the nitty-gritty of creating my avatar. The process itself is simple to use but I’m slightly disappointed with the initial selection of features and clothing options available. For me, the creative flexibility on offer feels far more limiting than say its most obvious comparable counterpart the Nintendo “Mii”. But, I’m sure it’s not going to be too long before we see some premium content popping up on Xbox Live Marketplace that will allow further avatar personalisation and customisation. I do however like the overall artistic direction of the avatars finding them to be a nice balance between the extremes of the overly cute and the ultra realistic.

As always there’s going to be a slight learning curve when presented with any new system and NXE is no different. Overall though, I’ve found it to be intuitive and it’s certainly no more difficult to navigate then the old dashboard. Having the fallback of being able to use the “X” guide controller button to bring up a miniature mock “blade” dashboard in the center of the screen is a nice feature and it’s certainly better than having that monstrous left side bar menu screen appear.

Personally speaking the biggest boon for me is the ability to install games to the hard drive. I’ve been looking forward to this ability since it was first announced and after a brief tour of the new dashboard I installed Gears of War 2 to the hard-drive. The speed difference may be negligible on fully optimised games, but the noise reduction is amazing!

And finally I’m now able to delete all those damn arcade trial games with zero gamerscore that have been cluttering up my achievement list for the last three years from the system by simply highlighting the game from within the list and selecting “Delete Game History”.

So far I’m impressed with what Microsoft have delivered with the NXE. There appears to be the odd fault or two that needs to be ironed out, like the occasional error message when attempting to view some content, but it’s a step (or maybe even a jump) forward in the right direction.

I saw an interesting statistic the other day over at Gamasutra in an article by Matt Matthews regarding the estimated “attachment” rate for each console after 23 months on the market; or in layman’s terms: How many games on average are owned by a person for each console.

The article basically shows the ratios for each console, broken down by 1st and 3rd party titles, but for simplicity’s sake and for use within this post I’ve just totalled them as:

• Sony PS3 - 5.3
• Nintendo Wii - 5.5
• Microsoft Xbox 360 - 6.6

What I thought would be interesting would be to put the attachment rate into a personal context and analyse the statistics for retail games in my possession as of this moment in time. As regular readers will know I tend to have a bias towards the Xbox 360, favouring the Microsoft banshee over the PS3 and the Wii, but to be honest I was shocked at just how many games I had accumulated for the Redmond beast over the last few years. It’s amazing how quick you can forget what games you own when they just get stuffed into a cupboard once complete.

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