HEAD BLOG

10:54. Missed call from @EGVroom. Stuffing what remains of a sausage butty into my mouth I head  back down to the main entrance to meet my expo wing-man. Apparently the queue outside is now stretching so far round Earls Court the powers that be have decided to open the doors 5 minutes early. That time is now! Making my way through the ensuing chaos I find EGVroom, give him his wristband and we make our way inside. Coincidentally he brought along a little friend, @SuperTwario, a rising star in the Twitterverse with a penchant for carrots, we’ll no doubt be hearing more from him in the very near future. After a brief pause for a caffeine pit-stop we launch ourselves into the fray on the hunt for the next hands-on experience.

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit
As a big fan of the Burnout series I never really got into Need for Speed. Burnout was all about the fast, frantic and more importantly fun aspect of racing fast cars around the streets. You can pick up the controller and within minutes be in the midst of a chaotic battle for first place, ‘taking down’ opponents with stylish moves. Need for Speed lacked this immediacy – certainly in latter installments. To this end I hadn’t really given the franchise much consideration. That changed with Hot Pursuit. One word, or rather one name can explain why. Criterion. A cursory glance walking past the stand and you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a new Burnout game on display. Taking up position next to EGVroom we await the start of our first multiplayer race. Going back to it’s roots Hot Pursuit  is all about the high speed police chase. Players get to decide whether to play as a cop or a racer, and choose from a healthy list of licenced supercars. From the moment the race begins it is clear this Need for Speed is all about action packed fun.

Whether cop or racer you have an array of weapons and equipment at your disposal to help you become the top cop in the county, or the most wanted racer. Playing as a cop I get to choose from: a helicopter, to help keep the racers I am pursuing ‘in sight’; an EMP to fire at vehicles, frying their systems and sending them out of control; a spike strip to be dropped ahead of the chase to damage or immobilise the racer/s car; and the ability to call in a roadblock to stop, or at the very least, slow down my prey. As I quickly found out these can also be used against your fellow cops. Only minutes into the game I had caught up with and was in pursuit of a racer. Before I get chance to score my takedown and claim the subsequent bounty I am hit with an EMP and sent careering across the freeway into the path of an oncoming car. As I slam helplessly at full speed into the car I am overtaken by a cop badged Dodge Viper who goes on to bag my intended target. Not only are you out to beat the racers but also your fellow cops – there’s only room for one top cop! All the while I’m playing, part of my mind is telling me not to be fooled, Hot Pursuit is nothing more than Burnout in a new dress. But even if that’s the case, it isn’t a bad thing. Based purely off the multiplayer part of the game I got to play, Hot Pursuit  is promising to be a great, fun, action packed addition to the Need for Speed stable. With talk of the single player portion of the game offering an open-world of over 100 miles of road and freeway to own, 4 times larger than Burnout’s Paradise City, it should keep gamers occupied for a while. I’m curious to see though how it sets itself apart from the Burnout franchise. For those wondering, I can’t remember who won between EGVroom and myself! ;o) Burnout Need for Speed Hot Pursuit is released in the UK on 19th November for Xbox 360, PS3, PC and Wii.

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood
Parting company with EGVroom for a while I make my way to one of the many Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood stands. Having only recently started playing the first Assassin’s Creed (don’t ask) and thoroughly enjoying it I am very keen to get my hands on Brotherhood. Chatting with the Ubisoft rep it’s clear multiplayer is a major focus of the latest installment in the franchise. I try to draw him on the other multiplayer game modes recently announced, Hunted and Alliance, but he is having none of it. Initially skeptical of how they’d manage to add multiplayer without it feeling too contrived and shoe-horned in I was happily surprised. The demo on display consisted of an 8 minute round of Wanted, the only mode to be fully revealed so far. I have 8 character skins available to choose from which include the Priest, the Courtesan, the Executioner and the Doctor, each with their own unique weapon and signature move. On selecting your character, the sinister almost spy vs. spy looking Doctor in my case, you then have to decide on your special abilities. Abilities come paired together and choices include smoke bombs and morph, speed boost and throwing knives, disguise and hidden gun, and poison and decoy. By gaining XP whilst playing you progress through 50 experience levels which at set milestones unlock additional abilities, skins, perks etc.

When the game starts I am dropped into a smallish map, apparently an area within renaissance Rome, populated by NPCs made up of the various playable character skins. Within seconds I am assigned my assassination target, an image of the Priest appears in the top right corner of the HUD. At the same time I acquire a pursuer – another of the player assassins who now has me as their intended target. The aim of Wanted is simple, achieve the highest number of assassinations before time runs out, as stealthily as possible for maximum experience points and more importantly… stay alive! A very simple ‘compass’ at the bottom of the screen gives you a general direction of your target, the larger the ‘cone’ the closer you are. The trick is to find them without giving yourself away to your pursuer. By blending with, and acting like an NPC I move freely and unnoticed through the crowds zeroing in on my prey. Moving towards him the compass is now fully illuminated indicating I am right on top of my target. I am stood next to him at a market stall, the other player completely oblivious to my presence. With the press of a button I perform a perfectly silent assassination, a kid two seats down swearing in unexpected surprise. The key to my success was in acting as much like an NPC as possible, not only does it allow you to get close to your target but it keeps you relatively well hidden from the player pursuing you. Often all this boils down to is simply not running on scaling buildings – the two dead giveaways that that person is not an NPC. Unfortunately for me as I perform my pre-scripted assassination animation I am spotted by my pursuer. The HUD prompts me to “Run away” with a big red warning bar and a small red indicator on the compass showing their position relative to me. Much like the Assassin’s Creed single player mode I need to break the line of sight the other player has on me. When I do the red bar changes to a decreasing yellow ‘evade’ bar and I need to stay out of sight or hide in a haystack. When the bar reaches the end a pop up tells me I successfully escaped my pursuer and awards me 100 bonus XP – the other player has now lost me as his contract and must wait until they are assigned a new one. I am now free to pursue my next target. It is whilst evading and escaping a pursuer that your special abilities come into play. Using the smoke bomb for example I can temporarily incapacitate everyone in the immediate vicinity allowing me extra time to get away. Alternatively I can use disguise to temporarily transform  myself into a different character thereby throwing off my pursuer, just as long as I am out of sight when the effect wears off! Each ability can be used as often as you like, only limited by a cool-down period after each use to prevent continuous use. Had I used up my abilities but still not successful lost my pursuer there is one last resort – “chase breakers”. Ubisoft have cleverly placed these environmental features throughout the map which can be activated to delay my pursuer giving me valuable seconds in which to further distance myself. Identifying these breakers is made easy by way of a shimmering silver animus visual effect around them, and they include gates that slam shut as you run through them blocking the path of your pursuer and pulleys that when activated zip you to the roof of the building in seconds, forcing your pursuer to take the much slower route of climbing up after you. The more of a menace you become by scoring lots of assassinations without dying, the more pursuers have you assigned as their target. If you are running away with the points you can end up with four other players all hunting you down at the same time!

Wanted is just one of the multiplayer modes so far made playable, if the others are half as much fun then it should shape up to be a great addition to the single player campaign. My only niggling doubt is just how long this mode will remain appealing, as fun as it is I suspect once you have played with the different abilities, characters and maps it will get pretty samey. That being said it was probably the highlight of the expo for me, I played it 5 times over the course of the two days I was at the expo, crashing 3 PS3s in the process. Consider it pre-ordered! Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood is released in the UK on 19th November for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

This post forms Part 2 of a series of posts coming over the next few days rounding up my thoughts on Eurogamer Expo 2010. Part 1 can be found here.

Right. Start again. This is supposed to be a quick few thoughts on E3 2010 but quickly turned into a ramble on Kinect. That ramble has now been spun out into its own post going up in the very near future.

So, E3 2010, good eh? Wasn’t it?

Okay, maybe that wasn’t the right question, of course it was good it was a big huge gaming expo after all. The question I’m searching for should be was it disappointing? Even that doesn’t seem quite right, how can loads of great games being shown off disappoint?! How about… did it meet your expectations?

Each year I bemoan my inability to head off to LA and take in the spectacle that is E3. Not because I want to go networking with industry types but because I want to experience the utter madness of the launch events and be surrounded by the not-yet-released and newly announced games. But that is where my expectations would have sadly been left a little wanting this year.

There’s no denying the raft of spectacular and must have games that were on show this year. Fallout: New Vegas, Halo: Reach, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, Assassins Creed: Brotherhood, Fable III, Medal of Honor, Gears of War 3, Dead Rising 2, Brink, Crackdown 2, and Call of Duty: Black Ops to name but a few(!) of those I am looking forward to.

Now read that list of games again. You’ve heard of them all haven’t you?

There in lies the problem. Almost every game or piece of hardware on show was already firmly on my radar. It was great to see new trailers and find out more information on Title-X but I really wanted something unexpected to wow me. I understand in an age of leaks and online journalism it is pretty difficult to keep things secret for long but still. The only titles I wasn’t aware of pre-E3 were the new Silent Hill game and NeverDead, both from Konami. No doubt there were more but none within my scope of interest. And I suspect these too were probably already known to many just that I hadn’t stumbled across them!

The same can be said of the new hardware announcements. Nothing I didn’t already have some degree of awareness about. Nintendo’s 3DS came close, I knew and had heard very little on it. Once again it appears Nintendo have got it right – introducing 3D to their already successful and established platform but ultimately keeping it simple and, more importantly, fun. Now for the obvious. I can’t talk about E3 without mentioning Kinect and Move. I have little interest in Move so more or less skimmed anything from Sony on the subject. Being an Xbox fan I was much more interested in Kinect and there’s nobody who can say it isn’t an impressive piece of kit. Technically it blows the competition clean out of the water but to be honest it’s big Cirque de Soleil showcase and subsequent presser left me feeling rather flat about the whole thing. Last year it was positioned as a real game changer, literally, with far reaching implications and possibilities. Nobody saw it coming, it was genius. Fast forward 12 months. After a very long build up the result was rather anti-climactic. The problem was too much was revealed the first time around. All that was left to show this year was an unfortunate name change, a new form factor not a million miles away from the dev kit and the games you’re going to be playing on it. None too surpassingly these were nothing we hadn’t seen before on the Wii which in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Even the announcement of a new ‘slim’ Xbox wasn’t enough to appease me (it didn’t help that I’d bought an new Super Elite only 6 weeks ago). Again, the rumours had been circulating for a while and really took the wind out of the sails when it was officially announced.

Ultimately there might not have been any real stand-out revelations but when you have so many talented developers and great publishers flooding the market with fantastic games you’re never really going to get a ‘disappointing’ E3. I may have been left a little underwhelmed overall but I’ll take solace in the many great games I’ve got to look forward to in the next 18 months, and if anybody would like to take me to E3 2011 then by all means do!

Nothing beats mince pies after a big Christmas dinner!

Christmas without mince pies is like Cannon without Ball, Paul without Debbie – it just doesn’t work. You could always pop down the supermarket and buy in your mincers but where’s the fun in that?! The recipe below, spotted in a Sainsbury’s magazine and tweaked ever so slightly, is supposed to make 24 mince pies – trust me, whilst the pastry is enough for 24 the mince meat will probably make in excess of 36! It’s also worth bearing in mind they calculate the 24 based on cutter sizes of 7.5cm and 6cm. So stick on some cheesey Christmas music, pour yourself some booze and get stuck in…

Brown Sugar Pastry
350g Plain flour
75g Brown sugar
125g Cold butter, diced
1 Large egg yolk
Vanilla extract

Begin by preheating the oven to 200˚, fan 180˚, gas mark 6.

Now, sift the flour into your mixing bowl and add in the brown sugar.

Next rub in the butter until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.

Making a well in the centre, add the egg yolk, a few drops of vanilla extract and 4-5 tablespoons of cold water.

Now for the messy bit, get your hands in there and start to combine the ingredients until they form a soft dough.

Tip it out onto a lightly floured work top and knead briefly until the dough becomes smooth.

Divide your pastry up into 2 or 3 smaller balls, wrap them in cling-film and place in the fridge to chill for 30 minutes.

Whilst waiting for the pastry to chill it’s time to make the mincemeat.

All you need for your own mince meat

Your mincemeat should be a nice thick, sticky consistency

Mincemeat
25g Blanched almonds
50g Ready-to-eat Dried figs
50g Ready-to-eat Stoned dates
50g Ready-to-eat Pitted prunes
50g Dried cranberries
50g Cut mixed peel
50g Regular or Vegetarian suet
1/2 tsp Ground mixed spice
1/2 tsp Ground cinnamon
Grated zest & juice of 1 tangerine
75g Dark soft brown sugar
1 Small Bramley cooking apple, unpeeled & grated (and it really does need to be small!)
2 tbsp Dark rum or Brandy (or Whisky or Orange Liqueur or any other alcohol really, not sure why they only suggest those two)
Demerara sugar for sprinkling

For some reason when you say to most people why don’t you make your own mincemeat they give you a look of both mild contemplation and utter despair, usually responding with “Oh it takes far too long” or “It’s too much faffing and arsing about, you might as well buy it”. Now, it may come as a surprise to learn that from weighing out the ingredients to spooning it into your pastry it will take you around 15 minutes. Yes. 15 whole minutes. Ages isn’t it? Admittedly it may work out costing a little more than buying a jar readymade but I can guarantee it will taste a whole lot better!

Firstly if your almonds aren’t already, blanch them by covering with boiling water for no more than 1 minute. Drain off the hot water and immediately rinse with cold water. Drain again and pat dry to remove excess water. Now holding the almonds between your thumb and index finger, squeeze gently and the skins should slip off.

Put the blanched almonds, figs, dates, prunes and depending on their size, cranberries into a food processor and pulse until roughly chopped.

Transfer to a mixing bowl and add in the remaining ingredients stirring until well mixed.

At this point the recipe states to add 2 tablespoons of your alcohol, personally I felt this was woefully inadequate, you could barely taste the brandy in the first batch I made. If you follow my lead you will stir in a good 4 tablespoons (more if you are so inclined) and leave the mix to stand whilst you turn your attention back to the pastry.

Nothing beats mince pies after a big Christmas dinner!

Having chilled for 30 minutes remove your pastry from the fridge.

Lightly flour your work surface and roll the pastry out thinly.

Using the larger cutter, cut out 24 pie bases and push them into your bun trays.

Add a spoonful of your mincemeat, careful not to add too much as it will bubble over.

Roll out the remaining pastry and cut out the 24 tops with the smaller cutter.

Brush the underside of each top with milk and place on each pie, pinching the edges together to seal them.

Brush your pies with milk, sprinkle generously with demerara sugar and make 2 small cuts in the centre with a knife.

Lastly, bake in your preheated oven for 20-25 minutes.

The best thing about making your own mincemeat is that if you make too much simply put it in an airtight jar and store it in a cool dry place until next year. Alternatively, festively label and decorate your jars and give them out as stocking fillers!

Time for a nice warm mince pie, smothered in cream – enjoy.

Microsoft’s first foray into ‘social networking’ on the Xbox 360 came with the integration of Live Messenger back in May 2007 as part of the then ‘spring update’. Fast forward to 2009 and, whilst Messenger is still popular, people are more likely to be found messaging through Twitter and Facebook so it hardly comes as a surprise that Microsoft have chose to add these to the Xbox. Forming part of a new “Community Channel” not available until later in the year I managed to get myself on to the ‘Xbox Live Update Preview’ to see what all the fuss is about. Read more…

Standard Edition. Special Edition. Collector’s Edition. Limited Edition. Limited Collector’s Edition. Legendary Edition. Survival Edition. Deluxe Edition. Premium Edition. Gold Edition. Prestige Edition.

Sometimes they get it right!

Typically when a game has launched in recent years it is available in 2 or 3 different editions. No matter what its moniker, it heralds the promise of bonus extras, special packaging or exclusive content, and as you’d expect more money. Read more…

Tuesday 6th January 2009.

To many nothing more than a typically dreary day, that point in the week where you have got over the despair of having to go to work on Monday morning, realising that the next weekend is one day closer. To me this particular Tuesday, the evening in actual fact, was the last time I actively played a game on my X360. Hardly Earth shattering news to most people I know, 16 weeks of not playing video games, for a 32 year old adult? “About time” many a detractor may shout. Now, I would never describe myself as an addicted gamer, merely an avid gamer. Whilst I thoroughly enjoy spending time online with friends, taking down terrorist cells and destroying zombie hoards, I know where gaming sits in the order of things. Despite putting in numerous hours over the years I have great personal hygiene, I wash daily, I sleep, I don’t eat junk food (often) and I do set foot outside into the Real World of sunlight and fresh air. I know where gaming sits, it rides back seat to my personal life, work and responsibilities. Read more…

At a time when the credit-economic-global-crunch-downturn-recession is at full steam and people are finding themselves devoid of an occupation, short of watching endless runs of Jeremy Kyle (other ‘Lifestyle’ shows are available), it is good to see people can still have fun when it comes to handing in their notice - I QUIT!