Game Junkie

Gerard Campbell, chief video game reviewer for The Press, has been playing video games for what seems like forever. He still remembers when he had to load games for his Sinclair ZX Spectrum from a tape player. Gerard blogs on events in the gaming industry.

Spec Ops: The Line hands-on

10:50am 08 Feb 2012

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As promised, here's my impressions of 2K's Spec Ops: The Line, which I spent time with last week.

Sand is full of surprises.

Pack it together tightly in a bucket and children can turn it into sandcastles with moats and towers. Pack tonnes of it up against a floor-to-ceiling window in a luxurious Dubai hotel, though, as Yager Developments has done in 2K's Spec Ops: The Line, and it's a means of escape: an escape plan consisting of millions of tiny golden particles.

In Spec Ops: The Line, sand is the unknown quantity.

Players take the role of Captain Martin Walker, a special forces soldier sent to investigate the disappearance of soldiers from the 33rd Division after a devastating sandstorm hits Dubai, dumping thousands of tonnes of sand on the futuristic city of glass and steel on the edge of the Arabian desert.

Digital copies need to be cheaper

02:00pm 03 Feb 2012

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Gameplanet reported this week that digital copies of PS Vita titles in the US and Japan look as if they'll will be cheaper than their retail counterparts - an eagle-eyed NeoGaf reader had spotted a 10 per cent discrepancy between digital and retail copies at US retailer Best Buy - but for digital copies of games to become the preferred option for gamers, publishers are going to have to do better than cheaper by 10 per cent.

Game prices are a subject of contention for gamers, especially in New Zealand, where it's not unusual to pay $130 for a console game at a bricks-and-mortar retailer. That's a lot of money for a game so it's not surprising that some gamers buy only two or three new games a year.

But if digitally distributed games were cheaper, would you buy more games?

With distribution services such as Steam, Origin, Xbox Live and PlayStation Network offerng full-priced games, more and more publishers are pushing for digital distribution as a means for gamers to buy their games. For publishers, it means less cost in terms of packaging and producitin costs. For gamers it means you can get the game pretty much immediately (depending on the speed of your internet, of course) and you don't have to leave the comfort of your home to get it.

I believe that retail games will be around for a good while longer but for publishers to persuade gamers to buy more digitally distributed games they need to be much cheaper than their retail copies: much cheaper. I reckon 25 per cent cheaper at least.

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Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning interview

11:00am 01 Feb 2012

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Amalurblog Morning all. I'm off to Auckland today to spend some quality hands-on time with 2K's war-themed game Spec Ops: The Line today so here's an interview that I did just before Christmas with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning developers Sean Bean (not the actor) and Ian Frazier.

Sean Bean, the producer on EA's action role-playing game Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, has a lot to thank Sean Bean, the actor, and George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series for.

For starters, Sean Bean, the actor, and Game of Thrones has made high fantasy more popular, says Sean Bean, the producer - who, by the way, also has a lot of Twitter followers thanks to his namesake actor.

''I think it's worked out well for us in that we've hit a spot where people are into fantasy - when you see things like the TV series Game of Thrones doing really well you can see that people are really hungry for high fantasy as a genre and they're really interested in exploring these big, wide-open worlds and they've got a taste of that and they want more, but they see that some things in RPGs aren't working and they want better and so we're here to make them better,'' he says.

Bean says being confused with his famous namesake has had spinoffs. (With apologies to Sean Bean, the producer, when I first accepted this interview I wrongly assumed I'd be talking to Sean Bean, the actor. Oops.)

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Things that go bump in the night ...

10:50am 30 Jan 2012

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blogcirclepadpro Call me a softy, but I don't think I'd be that keen to go searching about an abandoned cruise ship, at night, in the middle of a storm when I've already been attacked by half a dozen shambling mutant creatures out to nibble on my neck.

But that's what I've been doing over the past couple of days - on my Nintendo 3DS, of course, not in real life - and it's all thanks to Resident Evil: Revelations.

Revelations reunites Resident Evil regulars Chris Redfield and Jill Vallentine in a story that involves biochemical experiments and terrorist plots, as well as said abandoned cruise ship, floating somewhere in the Mediterannean during the middle of a huge storm and crawling with mutants out to nibble on our heroes' necks.

Revelations is the first RE game I've played on a Nintendo handheld console and it's also the first to make use of Nintendo's new Circle Pad Pro accessory that adds a welcome second thumb stick to the 3DS - something that is sorely lacking in the handheld.

The Circle Pad Pro is a bulky battery-powered attachment that comes in black (and only black) that cossets the 3DS rather snugly (thanks to six small rubber pads). It also offers two new buttons, ZR and ZL, with ZR acting as a trigger in RE: Revelations.

Nex-gen consoles: what do you want to see?

12:00pm 27 Jan 2012

46 comments

currentxbox The internet is great for a lot of things but it's also a great repository for gossip, rumour and speculation, and this week the net has been going CRAZY with all sorts of rumours on what the successor to the Xbox 360 will be like.

"It'll have this," reports one site that has been speaking to a source close to the project. "It'll have that," reports yet another site that has also been talking to a close source. Just how true is any of the speculation?

Rumours coming out this week suggest the next Xbox will come with a Blu-ray drive, which makes a great deal of sense, and some form of anti-used games ability that will prevent it from playing second-hand games, something that sounds less true but could be something big game producers would back. Big name publishers have been trying to put a squeeze on the used games market for some time now so if a console did come with something that somehow prevented the playing of used copies of games they'd be behind it (how would it work though: would they use a single-use registration key for each disc perhaps?).

It's also rumoured that Microsoft's next console will have a graphics processor six times faster than Nintendo's Wii U, itself rumoured to be twice as fast as the current Xbox 360 and expected to be released in major markets "in time for Christmas this year", and come with the next generation Kinect sensor built in.

I can see the move to Blu-ray as a positive one for the next Xbox as Blu-ray discs can hold up to five times more data than the DVD, which is what the Xbox 360 uses - something that would be a good move for future releases, especially now with games getting larger and more complex and graphics becoming more realistic.

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