It’s been a quiet couple of weeks on this blog, for which I apologise for. I’ve been quite busy as well as lacking in motivation which isn’t a great combination for this blog, nor for a budding writer such as myself! Writing wise, I’ve just finshed up a review of Codename Panzers Cold War, the white sliced bread of the PC RTS world. It’s my first paid review and my first review to soon be featured on playboy.co.uk so I’m rather happy with that. Pity it was such a mediocre game and so terrible to review. Terrible, not because it was a bad game, but because it felt like there was so little to say. It was a real challenge as it was just so middle of the road, nothing positive or negative stood out! I’ve just finished writing up the review for Lord of the Rings:Conquest which I was rather disappointed with. I generally love a good hack n slasher. Despite their repetive nature, they are my guilty pleasure. However LoTR:Conquest just doesn’t cut it for me, it’s just too slow compared to the likes of Dynasty Warriors amongst many other things. Review will be up here in the next few days as well as a link for Codename Panzers.

Back to gaming for fun, I’ve been busy with a few games.

I finished off Prince of Persia at last. I never did figure out if I enjoyed it or not. I assume I must have as I played it to the end but it had a lot wrong with it. A lot of the time it felt like an on the rails platformer, if such a thing could exist, where I just had to press a, b or y from time to time to progress further. I didn’t particularly like the two main characters, and certainly didn’t like having to stop every few minutes to listen to a conversation that I couldn’t skip. As well as that, the combat was very tedious. Yet I still played it, and I’m still not 100% sure why. I guess it was because it was easy so it was a nice stressfree simple game. So yeah I guess I enjoyed it. Wouldn’t recommend it to anyone though.

Next up in the pile was Sega Mega Drive Collection, otherwise known as a nice walk down memory lane. I know Nintendo never will, but I would kill for a similar collection of Super Nintendo games rather than be restricted to the Wii’s Virtual Console. Anyway, back to the Mega Drive. I’ve enjoyed replaying the various Streets of Rages, especially 3 as I never played that originally. Also enjoyed playing the Sonics again. When I have some time I’m going to play through the Phantasy Stars and Shining Forces as I also missed those when they first came along. I guess that’s the problem with being a kid in those days, I couldn’t afford many games so I missed out on so many classics! I used to love playing The Story of Thor but I never actually owned it. Instead I rented it as often as I could in my local Blockbuster. Of course the problem there was it had a battery back up save system on its cartridge. There were two copies of The Story of Thor in the store so it all depended on if I got the right copy as to whether I could progress much further in my game. Plus on a few occassions some git had deleted or overwritten the save anyhow. As you can guess, I played through the opening stages of the game a lot, and never actually completed it! One day I started it the other day and was surprised how much harder it was than I remember. Maybe I’ve actually got worse at games with age?! That’d suck. It certainly reminded me of how much easier games are now, and so did a few other Mega Drive games. I don’t know what I’d do without a save function now.

I’m finally starting to get into Fallout 3 after erm about 3 months of just not getting into it. I’m about 15hrs in and I’m finally starting to enjoy it. I still don’t think it’ll be in my Top 10 games of all time or anything like that but it’s certainly gone up the list of all games I’ve ever played. I love it sometimes, then sometimes I hate it. It is immensely satisfying to headshot a raider with the very nice VATS system, and then it goes and pisses me off. Usually by my getting lost in a tunnel because it all looks too samey, or when an NPC gets stuck walking to somewhere that I have to follow them to. I have no doubt that I’m probably being excessively critical (there are more irritants, I’ve just managed to have a blank moment and forgotten them all!) and yes it is the definitive first person RPG, but you have to remember: I don’t tend to like Western RPGs, I much prefer JRPGs. I really enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic, but I found Mass Effect disappointing and lacking soul, and Oblivion was alright but not the be all and end all that others found it to be at the time. On the other hand, I loved Enchanted Arms and Eternal Sonata both of which suffered a few mixed reviews. So ultimately, I guess, like everything else, it all comes down to personal opinion! Mind you if everyone accepted that, I’d be out of an aspiring career so don’t listen to me

Finally, I picked up Tomb Raider:Underworld for £10 (after using a voucher from Christmas). Only played the prologue and the start of the first level. First impressions were not as I hoped. I found the first proper level a bit vague and open for my liking. I like being in a Tomb, I don’t want to be in the middle of an ocean. But ah well, I’ll crack on with it when I have the time.

As my final comment tonight, my iPhone is unfortunately a bit unwell and off for repair at the moment. I had no idea how useful I found it to be until now that I’m without it. When I bought it last year I was worried I’d be lured into the ‘ooh shiny gimmicky gadget’ bug, which I had been. However it’s very useful too. The mp3 facilities, the video playback facilities, being able to twitter on the move, facebook on the move, email, wi-fi, train times etc. I miss it. I hope it comes back soon It’s been about 10 days now.

On that note, feel free to add me on Twitter if you like my random musings: JenjeaHaly is the name on there

However finally today I thought I’d give it a go. Initial reactions? Jack Bauer’s in the Second World War! Poor Kiefer Sutherland, I know he did The Lost Boys etc but he’s always going to be Jack to me. Although I’m sure the countless fortunes he’s made from 24 must make him feel much better about things, there must be a niggling thought in the back of his head thinking ‘Nooooo I’m more than just Jack damnit!’. According to IMDB, he has spent 15 hours a day, six days a week, for the last five years on the set of “24″ in which case I hope he gets paid bloody well as surely that would get tedious after a while!
Anyhow, excluding the Jack Bauer in the Second World War thing, the early stages of CoD:WaW weren’t overally amazing for me. It didn’t really grab me, it just threw lots of Japanese soldiers at me to shoot and a few Banzai attacks for good measures too. I can see how this would be horrendous on Veteran though!
However, just before turning it off to go get some dinner, I started the Stalingrad level which is just plain nasty at the start, watching ‘your’ fellow countrymen get shot by some nasty bloke, while lying dying anyway. I liked the way the story was going, it felt more personal than usual and less gung ho than the previous level. I had to sneakily shoot some German soldiers, as they’d helped kill my countrymen, all very vengeful stuff that kept me quite hooked on the story, I was forgetting to go make dinner. And then a damn dog came jumping over a wall and killed me in two bites…..I need food!

This article’s come about thanks to my mother. She’s been gaming off and on for much of my life thanks to me. I got her into the Gameboy and it came to a point where she was playing it more than me, always Tetris. So she moved onto a Gameboy Advance and then a DS. We now own a DS each to stop any chance of fighting! She’s never been the quickest of gamers physically due to a disability which has made the choice of games a little more restrictive but her enthusiasm has always been high for them. Due to recent events, she’s had a lot more time for games and a much more urgent need to keep her brain occupied. The DS puzzle games like Bust a Move and Gunpey helped keep her busy but didn’t really keep her mind off things. So along came me with the suggestion that she try a few new games as I’ve always found them great stress relief. As we had a recently acquired Wii that was fairly untouched, it made perfect sense to start there.

We picked up Zelda:Twilight Princess. Great game, she loves it, only problem is she gets stuck very easily. So I bought her the guide, problem partially solved. All that was left was the awkwardness for killing monsters in it as sometimes her arm just couldn’t cope with it. Plus some bits are a little frustrating as she’s just not used to the gaming conventions we all have engrained in our brains after so many years of the same concepts.

So she thought she’d go a simpler route, which made sense. Start at the basics, just like where we used to be when we were first gaming and work your way up. She’s now currently downstairs from me playing Casper and The Ghostly Trio on the PS2, a game that I would be embarrassed to go near and a game that appears to have gone under the radar due to mediocrity so much that I can’t actually find a review of it! But I think if there was one, it’d be a pretty low mark. I’ve watched her play it and wondered just how she can manage to play it for more than 30seconds without discarding it with disgust, but she loves it. And you know why that is? Because currently, she doesn’t know any better. It’s all new and exciting to her, and when something is new and exciting, you want to get your hands on anything remotely connected to it and not let go until you’ve had your fill. Something that I suspect many of us cynical gamers that have been gaming for over 10 years or more, have forgotten about.

That’s not to say that I don’t have any plans to re-educate her in the world of what counts as a quality game in my eyes of course As soon as I reckon, she won’t be scared off by them, I’ll be trying her with some RPGs. I think she’ll love them once she’s understood the basics. Gaming is just like anything else, you need to learn to walk before you can run. So don’t go confining your parents or your grandparents to the casual gaming world of Wii Sports and Wii Fit, get them into some real games. You may well be surprised one day!

I came in from work feeling creative, yet now I can’t decide whether to have a mess around with photoshop, 3d studio max or maybe even get round to doing my Mum’s website that I promised her far too long ago.
I sort of blame the minute attention span that I have. The problem is I want to learn everything…….and I’m not exaggerating either. I’m the same with books, I never get round to finishing one these days because there’s so many I want to read that I move onto the next.

Back to the subject at hand, despite knowing that this is what every games fan thinks, I feel like I should do something within the industry. I suspect my best talents would lie at writing, and again I have so many thoughts, it’s quite hard to tame them at times.

Everything I remember of growing up has a game associated to it…….it sounds cliched but it’s true.

When I was probably only about 5, my parents got me an LCD Sonic the Hedgehog game as they couldn’t afford a Master System and I remember sitting under the Christmas tree playing it obsessively for hours.
I got a Commodore 64 the year after and along came the memories of Flimbo’s Quest, Fiendish Freddy’s Circus, Klax and International Soccer. And the tapes, the lovely tapes that took seemingly hours to load and even then you weren’t guaranteed that the games would load. Yet to get to play Lords of Midnight or Football Manager, it was worth it. Provided you had plenty of time to wait for them of course.
I loved trying to make games in BASIC too, I was addicted to text based adventure games so I tried making my own. When I was about 7 or 8 my family visited my ill grandmother a lot so I couldn’t play on my beloved C64 so I’d sit there with a notebook and start writing out BASIC code……it worked too once I got home. They were crap games but that was the extent of my love of games. My great Uncle was very intrigued by it, I remember.
As I grew up, along did the love and the amount of games I could play. My Grandmother became more ill so we spent a huge amount of time staying there and I befriended the boy next door, he had a Mega Drive with loads of games. I’d never played one before but we spent hours playing Sonic 1-3, Sensible Soccer, Street Fighter 2 and Streets of Rage 1-2. The day my Grandmother died, I spent all day and evening round there to avoid the happenings next door, so somehow my memories of her death are mainly Sonic 3 related.

When she died, she left my Mum some money and she decided to buy me a Sega Megadrive with some of it. I still remember going to the Toys R Us as clear as day and the excitement of it all, we were only going to look originally. But I left, with the Mega Games Collection (Columns, Super Hang On and World Cup Italia 90) and the creme de la creme, Sonic 2.

It just goes on and on, summers full of Goldeneye and Perfect Dark. Winters full of Final Fantasy VII (the memories for FF7 alone are vast, I could quite confidently say that game made me go from liking games to being a games fanatic) and breeding chocobos. My first boyfriend is linked to Everquest and Soldier of Fortune, and my ex Knights of the Old Republic as I’d got it the day he started pestering me on MSN and I wanted to play the game more than talk to some bloke, subsequently it was World of Warcraft as we played it together. And he was the one who introduced me to the X-Box as I was never interested in Microsoft consoles at the time.

Some of the traumatic events for relatives of mine are intertwined with memories of me getting my PS1 thanks to Halifax becoming a bank and giving me a load of shares (well my Dad as I was a kid at the time), I was sitting there in their lounge not quite realising the severity of the situation, just wanting to go play Discworld on the PS1.
Then my Uncle bought a gameboy with Super Mario Land 2 (I only had the first one, the second one was way better), then got slightly addicted to Tomb Raider games so I got to play them all.
That’s forgetting the BBQ I went to that the older brother of a friend introduced me to Tomb Raider and Wipeout.

So, yeah, amazing what a part of life they’ve become for me. Sometimes I wonder if it was all a waste of time but I don’t know. They seem to be the only thing that can tame my attention span.

I’ll let you know when I decide if that’s a good thing or not.

There’s been many games since then but none in a while, until now. Bioshock on the surface should have been something I’d have no interest in, scary games….well they scare me, and I’ve never been a huge fan of the FPS genre really excluding multiplayer FPS games. I even looked at some previews and wasn’t interested, till I saw the demo played by DaveyPitch on a 32″ HDTV, and that was when I decided I needed it.
Luckily, I have no willpower at times so now I am a proud owner of the steel tin edition

I’ll write more once I play more.
I just love how much I want to play it more.

I’ve played my fair share of MMORPGs but the more I’ve played, the more of a loner I’ve become. In my EQ1 days I’d play with random groups all the time and it was great, but with the days of WoW, I just don’t want to do quests or raids with random people, usually out of fear of them completely mucking up and wasting my time.

This has extended for me with XBL, and in a strange sort of way I become a bit shy about talking much on there which doesn’t help the matter.
But along comes the knight in shining armour to near force me to play socially.
The online achievement!

I rented NBA Live 06 a little while ago, I got 960 points with no problem at all. It’s an incredibly easy game to get points on, however the final 40 points require you to play an online game and win.
As this game is comparatively old for a 360 game, and most importantly, pretty crap for a basketball game. It was impossible to find anyone online to play a game with at any time, plus knowing my luck they’d be amazing and beat me and I still wouldn’t get the achievement!

Enter X-Box Achievements.org a forum devoted to finding the best ways to get certain achievements and devoted to matching up online players with the same aim: to acquire the online achievements in the fastest time possible. The key thing being here is as it’s a community, for the most part people are fairly reasonable. Everyone wants the same things so I guess it forces everyone to be nice because you don’t really want to get a bad rep on the board as someone that buggers off once they get their achievement or is abusive on voice comms.

So I sign up, enter the NBA Live 06 forum and add a post to the thread of people looking for online games. And I meet up with this guy Krazy Bass Ted who according to the profile is the same age as me and in Durham. We arrange a game and spend most of the night ensuring that we both get the achievement.
I say most of the night because EA are crap and their servers are incredibly laggy and slow, so a short game manages to turn into nearly an hour for each game, and we both need the achievement! But we get it sorted, while we’re playing we exchange messages and it’s good fun. And a nice sense of accomplishment.

This is happening for all sorts of games.
Gears of War has the ‘Seriously’ achievement where you need to gain 10k kills in ranked games and there’s people arranging meet ups to do that right now

It’s a nice thing to see. Some may see it as cheating in the case of the GoW example, but when it comes to games like NBA Live 06 I think it’s good, it means people still get their achievements when ordinarily people wouldn’t return to such shoddy online games.

MS seem to have really cottoned onto a good idea here with achievements. It’s fairly safe to say it has been one of the biggest revolutions in recent years imo, only beaten by the Wii’s ability to get families involved. But it’d be impossible to compare them.

In Everquest 1 (My first MMORPG, I played from 2001 till 2003), you die and you respawn at your last ‘bind’ point, if it’s 10 zones away, well tough, you’ve still got to run it, no I don’t care how long it’ll take to do. Oh yeah and you respawn alive and with none of your gear so it can be very dangerous depending on how far the run is. Oh yeah and you lose a fair bit of experience, and you can only get your gear right where it is, so if there’s a high level mob on top of your corpse, well tough basically, you’re just going to have to somehow loot all your stuff extremely fast and run for it. Odds are, it’s not going to work and you’ll need some mates to help you out.

Plus, you know that nice little hearthstone everyone gets in WoW? Oh no you don’t in Everquest 1, not unless you’re a caster class. If you’re a warrior or any kind of melee class, tough, you’re running everywhere.

And maps with a quick press of M? Pffft you’ll be lucky. You could after about a year of me playing EQ1 thanks to a new expansion pack but before that you were just stuck memorising the routes. Or in my case, I printed out maps that I needed most.

Like I said, I enjoy WoW but it’s certainly simplified compared to EQ1 that I used to play. Not played EQ1 for more than 5mins in nearly 3 years so for all I know it could also be simplified now too. I hope not though, or at least not too much.

Street Fighter 2 and Goldeneye were both games me and a mate, Tom, used to play nearly obsessively. We played Goldeneye some days for so long that we’d still ‘see’ the crosshair in our vision when we turned it off. We’d make our own rules for them both, i.e. neither of us could use fireballs in SF2 and we weren’t allowed to shoot the other person until we both had guns, otherwise we’d end up annoying each other.

Christmas 1997 I got Final Fantasy VII for the PS1. I was so excited to get it, I wasn’t sure if I would as it cost £44.99 at the time and my parents were a bit strapped for cash but I did and I think I spent the entire following Winter playing it. I was determined to complete it fully, I’d spend every night breeding chocobos near obsessively.
Tom used to sometimes just watch me play the game because he found it so engrossing (I did the same when he played Zelda: Ocarina of Time) and I remember even calling him one night just to tell him I’d finally beaten Demon’s Gate at the end of Disc 1 lol.

Other bits of memories: First time I played Metal Gear Solid was at another friend’s house, Sian and her brother Gaurav. As soon as I saw it, I had to buy it and luckily I had some money spare so I bought it the next day along with a ‘limited edition’ MGS memory card. We spent the summer imitating Solid Snake’s silly walk everywhere we went.

For earlier memories, and not as happy. I got my first megadrive with money that my Grandmother had left my mother when she died. My PS1 the day we as a family had to visit my Aunt because she was badly ill at the time.

I reckon I could look at the excessively large amount of games I own and stick a memory to every single one of them, or a period of my life. Suppose it’s the same with all hobbies.

Even now I’m sitting here typing this and in another window is a game of Football Manager 2006.

Gaming has a lot of positives that I think are greatly overlooked by the media, things like what I’ve written above but also the social aspects it can provide. But guess that’s for another day.