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.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Facebook on Xbox 360

FACEBOOK – To be perfectly honest I can’t really see why I will ever have the need to visit my Facebook account on the Xbox. For obvious reasons it is a somewhat abridged copy of its web-based parent, but it has been ported across remarkably well. Sure you can update your status, see friends profiles, view yours and friends’ photos in nice little slideshows and check out the newsfeeds but frankly why would you want to when you have a perfectly good computer in the house!? When you look past the great work done to bring the service to the console you really need to ask yourself why they bothered. After the initial 10 minutes of ‘oh that’s cool’ you quickly realise that it’s far quicker and easier to fire up you laptop or desktop, log in, and do on Facebook whatever it is you need to do before returning to your console. No doubt there will be plenty of people who will while away the time on Facebook whilst waiting for friends to come online for some button mashing but the question still stands, why not do that on a computer?

Twitter on Xbox 360

TWITTER – Now Twitter on the other hand I use, often. Admittedly I have it on my computer through TweetDeck and my phone with Tweetie but its integration into the Xbox really caught my attention. Imagine, you’re in-game, you’ve just done something to be truly smug about, you have finally conquered that epic level or fragged a mate beyond recognition and you really want to brag about it. You pause your game, fire up the guide button, navigate down the menu items and…. FAIL! Twitter hasn’t been so cleverly integrated as you’d have understandably expected it to be, opening up the guide mid-game and firing off a quick tweet is nothing short of to be expected but alas is not possible.

You see, like Facebook, it is a standalone application accessed from the dashboard, completely segregated from everything else. If you want to access Twitter (or Facebook) you have to launch the app from the dash and log in. If you are already in a game you have to quit to the dash first, if you decide to launch a game after tweeting you have to exit Twitter, logging you out in the process. Now, it makes perfect sense to have the standalone app available on the dashboard to read through tweets, check out trends and view profiles but why not include the basic function of tweeting from the guide?!? It really is a shame as Twitter on the Xbox is otherwise a great app, and something I imagine I’d use a lot. And the most annoying thing of all? Fundamentally it would be no different than opening the guide mid-game and sending a message to a friend through either the message centre or Live Messenger! Hopefully this is something that Microsoft will look to further integrate before it’s launch to the greater populace because at the moment it is a fatal flaw. Twitter by its very nature is supposed to be spontaneous, the ability to share what you are doing or thinking in that exact moment, not minutes later once you have quit your game, launched and logged in to the app and then tweeted.

I fully intend to further explore the functions and limitations of both Facebook and Twitter on the Xbox 360 but at this point neither seem more than a flash in the pan. Facebook is nice but rather pointless, whereas Twitter has the potentially to be fantastic and useful but is seriously limited with the omission of something so simple.

Oh yeah and another word of advice, don’t even bother with either unless you either: a) own a chatpad, b) have a spare keyboard plugged in to a USB slot, or c) have very little to say, typing 140 characters using the onscreen keyboard would be nothing short of painful!

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

Bet you I can jump ten flags on this

For weeks now, GTA IV hasn’t left my Xbox 360. I’ve played nothing else. To be more specific, the “Free Mode” Multiplayer element of GTA. I’ve hardly scratched the surface of the single player game itself. I realise that a lot of people cottoned on to the pleasures of Grand Theft Auto a long time ago, but my habit of waiting for most games to come down in price has made me a late starter.

Something about the freedom of a sandbox game has always attracted me. Assassin’s Creed, Just Cause and now GTA IV (my first foray into the realm of GTA) seem to be the games I’ve enjoyed the most in recent years. They all stand up as solid, fun games based in a world that the player can explore at their own pace, and even revisit again and again. But something about my recent spate of hurtling around Liberty City had me stop and wonder why I’m drawn to it so much… Then one night, a few weeks ago, giggling to myself as my brother suggested we “try jumping a scooter over a helicopter and into a river”, it struck me.

This is the closest thing to “playing out” I’ve done since I was a kid. A huge virtual playground – and one that you have complete control over.  Open that world up to your gaming mates, and suddenly, all the old memories of the playground come flooding back. The key element that keeps me going back is that there’s no direction to our meeting.

As a kid, my friends and I would aimlessly wander to each other’s houses, with no plan of what to do with our time, just knowing that it would be better spent in the company of friends than alone. This is what it feels like to open up a game the size of GTA IV to multiplayer. I can start a game, sit and wait, and watch my friends leave the game they’re playing and drift into mine. I can lose hours at a time to my friends’ pointless suggestions:- driving around the streets of Liberty City with no predetermined destination, flying a helicopter as high as possible then leaping out of it into the sea, trying to jump a car onto a passing boat…. all frivolous wastes of an adult’s time, but unabashed fun, for one good reason – it’s a shared experience.

I know everyone’s gaming tastes change all the time, and that the next big amazing single-player experience is just around the corner somewhere, but for now, GTA’s free mode is gaming perfection. It’s like the developers have handed me and my friends the keys to an entire city, and it’s brought out the kid in me.

Why don’t developers do more of this? Why don’t they open up the worlds they create to multiplayer free mode? I understand that game developers want to develop ‘games’, but sometimes, just giving a group of friends somewhere to hang out can be just as rewarding. I’d love to roam the islands of Just Cause with my mates at my side… Or have access to a landscape as beautitul as that in Assassin’s Creed, just so I could see how many market stalls I could clear by jumping off a roof.

Developers of v.2 of these games – take note. “Pointless mode” could be the reason I buy your game at full price.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

So where does that leave the Wii? An underpowered anomaly or a still relevant gaming machine? Pricing no longer gives the Wii an edge to mainstream families who like a little light gaming with their evening telly and Natal means that the Wii experience is no longer exclusive. Unless Nintendo begin to innovate again then it’s not hard to predict Microsoft moving past them. Way past them.

Nintendo have led the way in opening up games to the mainstream. They offended some gamers in doing so but delighted far more (me included). The experience of seeing a grandparent waving around in front of the motion sensor is rewarding. But it’s true that every other publisher has followed this success in diminishing returns. Replicating rather than innovating. And nowhere is this more evident than in the advertising. As one commentator points out:

“I hate those Wii adverts for bowling and fighting simulations that try and make it look like the typical family having a great time.”

The Nintendo approach of family friendly actors interacting with the Wii was fresh and helped convey the core values Nintendo were aiming for. But as we’ve seen all too often, setting a style that succeeds just seems to prevent others from innovating for themselves. There is, after all, more than one way to skin a family friendly ad.

If Nintendo aren’t careful we’ll all be needing that pulse monitor they are developing in order to check whether they are still around.

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.

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.

Coincidentally Tuesday 6th January also happens to be around the time my relationship with my partner, Miss Non-Gamer, took a VERY satisfactory step up to the next level. Times were great, Christmas went off without a hitch, I started the new year in a much happier place than I started 2008, I had a great new job – in video games no less – things surely couldn’t be any better. Or so I thought! Somewhere in the midst of the hectic Christmas festivities things had changed, Miss Non-Gamer and I no longer had a relationship, we had a life together. My Xbox was left behind, sat alone under the plasma slowly gathering dust, cut off from the rest of Live. Almost every waking minute was now spent in the company of Miss Non-Gamer or The Beast (the 4yr old terror!). Barely a second thought was given to the gaming glee I was now consciously shunning in order to spend time with my family. And it didn’t matter one bit! Admittedly it also helped that my console was several miles away and Miss Non-Gamer despises current generation video games more than anything in the universe – Mario yes, Master Chief no. Fast forward to 14th March and I had completed enough side quests, amassing enough experience points to make the next big level-up – marriage. Living together and engaged, planning to wed in 5 short months, destined to spend the remainder of our lives together, forever. The impending unity of Gamer and Non-Gamer, surely something so potentially cataclysmic had been prophesied. The question now was, does this prophecy of together forever have a place in it for an Xbox 360?

Can gaming and marriage live together peacefully?

Bravely, Miss Non-Gamer had allowed the X360 into the house a little over 2 months ago. Sitting patiently under the TV it’s true nature untapped, being used merely as a way to watch the occasional dvd, it has waited. Despite having the console sitting in front of me day-in day-out the thought of “when can I play a game on it” barely skirted my thoughts. The console was there but the controllers and games were not. And again, it didn’t matter one bit. It was one thing to have access to the console but another to find the time and opportunity to use it. As much as I enjoy playing video games I enjoy lounging on the sofa with Miss Non-Gamer more. The time has now come to begin moving the remainder of my possessions into the house, the wardrobe full of [ice] hockey jerseys, the vast dvd collection and the array of video games and consoles. The prospect of bringing even more video game related material into the home has been very much at the fore of my thoughts in the past couple of weeks. Living with someone I love so very much and bringing in even more of something she doesn’t really like just wouldn’t be fair. Any good marriage is apparently made of good compromises and as such I have decided to dispose of my console ‘collection’. Gone will be the original PlayStation, the PS2, the Dreamcast, the Atari 1040 STe, the Commodore 64, the Sega Mega CD and all their associated controllers, memory cards, VMU’s, light guns and games. And it makes me happy to be rid of them, simply because I know it will go along way to making Miss Non-Gamer happier there is less clutter sitting around doing nothing more than gathering dust. This whole chain of events and thoughts have now led me to one moment of uncertainty, what next for my gaming?

The big question is how will gaming fit into life married to a devout Non-Gamer? Even though hating most things video game Miss Non-Gamer has clearly said she doesn’t mind me occasionally playing video games. As long as they remain a pastime, nothing more than a distraction, and still riding back seat to my other priorities it shouldn’t be a problem. Now for the crux of the problem, do I WANT to find time to play video games. On the surface of it the answer is a resounding yes. The problem is the answer to the question “Do you want to spend lots of quality time with the people you love?” is also a resounding yes. What seems like a simple conundrum is in reality a complex minefield of various factors to way up. Having the time is one thing, having the opportunity is another but balancing those with getting home from work, making dinner, playing Lego, feeding the dogs and actually feeling like shooting people in the head is easier said than done. Yes there are the times when Miss Non-Gamer is watching things on TV that I have little or no interest in, furnishing me the ideal opportunity to grab some gaming but it also gives me the time to play with The Beast, or get other chores done, or simply be with Miss Non-Gamer. Which raises another issue, we might well have more than one TV but is it fair to oust Miss Non-Gamer from the comfort of the living room each time she is watching something I don’t want to? The glory days of having a TV all to myself are quite simply consigned to the history books. Add to that the fact I’d never even consider playing on the Xbox until The Beast is in slumber and the window of opportunity is open barely a crack.

The more I ponder the subject, trying to come up with a solution to the unfathomably complex problem the more I believe there simply isn’t one. This is the gaming equivalent to the elusive unifying theory of everything physicists and mathematicians have been scrabbling for for decades. An elusive nirvana where both Gamer and Non-Gamer can peacefully coexist, where there is enough time to play video games and spend time together in equal measure. I suppose the only way to truly find out if something will work is to give it a try. This weekend I will chance bringing some games into the fold. If I have opportunity to play them in the coming weeks then great, if not then so what? They’ll still be there if and when I get chance. I’m not ashamed to say I thoroughly enjoy playing video games but nor am I ashamed to say I enjoy loving my family and spending time with them. I’m confident there exists a place for gaming in my impending nuptials, where and in what form I’m not sure but we’ll see soon enough!

Watch this space!

And P.S. before you say it, I know I’m no illustrator!!

©2012 HEAD BLOG. All Rights Reserved.