Hello and Happy New Year to you all. Taken a bit of a break from posting over Christmas so I could enjoy the time off and game as much as possible. I hope you all had an enjoyable time and didn’t have too many hangovers.
It’s been a while since I posted anything and there’s been one exciting changed for me since then – I’ve started reviewing games again. I initially applied to be a reviewer on XboxGameZone, and I was initially unsuccessful in my application. I started frequenting their forums though, and stayed chatting with the lady in charge. Just through normal chatting, she mentioned how busy things were and they had a big backlog of reviews to get through. I offered to help out if she would like the help, and it just went from there. After a couple of reviews I was formally offered a place on the review team, which I was very happy to accept. I’ve had 3 reviews published there so far – Don King’s Prizefighter, Rock Band 2, and Blitz: The League 2. I’m now working on my 4th review, which is Call of Duty: World At War. Needless to say I’m very happy to be reviewing again. As I’m sure everyone knows, I love playing games and I love talking about them, so being able to do it officially is a huge thing for me. Hopefully it’s something I can carry on doing for some time. I’m also well into double figures for published reviews now as well, after my time at Tech-PC (now defunct), Deaf Gamers, and Xbox360Achievements.org. One day I’ll get around to copying them all here much like Haly has done on her blog.
On the gaming front, I’ve been quite busy there lately. As well as playing the above games for review purposes, I’ve played and finished both Dead Space and Prince of Persia since my last blog post. Dead Space was simply awesome from start to finish, and is probably just behind Fallout 3 in my game of the year list. It’s probably the best survival horror experience I’ve had, possibly even better than Resident Evil 4 (Dead Space had no annoying “protect” sections bar one that lasted 20 seconds). Of course, Resident Evil 5 is a mere 2 months away so Dead Space may not hold the crown for long. Dead Space had some genuinely scary moments though. I won’t go into too much detail as I don’t want to give anything away, but there are some enemies in the game you absolutely hope you don’t meet, at any time. After meeting them for the first time, you know you’ll do so again, but you don’t know where, and you don’t know when. It’s tension like this that creates the brilliant atmosphere in Dead Space. Add in beautiful graphics and amazing lighting, and you have one of the most atmospheric games in recent memory. If you can play horror games, you owe it to yourself to play it. Just make sure you play it alone at night in the dark, it’s the only way to do it 
I’m in two minds about Prince of Persia though. It was an enjoyable experience while it lasted (probably about 10-11 hours), but it’s very repetative, with no real challenge to it. You can’t die in the game, as your companion will always save you, which takes away any fear when playing the game. You have 4 main bosses in the game, which you will each face 5 times. Given that the tactics of each boss is nearly identical, the combat becomes extremely boring after a while, with you just trying to get through it as quickly as possible. The acrobatic side of the game is fun though, travelling from place to place by wall running etc. The most fun part I found though was the light seed collection. There’s 1001 light seeds in the game and finding all of them makes for an enjoyable experience. You need to collect 560 to finish the game, so you’ll need to collect a minimum of 400 or so above an beyond that, which should take no more than 3 hours or so, once you understand how to get them all. Some are hidden out of the way but when you realise where you need to be looking they’re all relatively straight forward. I’m glad I bought the game in a sale though, I would have been annoying had I paid £40 for it. £15 is a much more realistic price for it. Hopefully the inevitable sequel will improve the combat a lot as it would go a long way to making the game better.
A final note now to say that my willpower is worse than ever. The 20 game collection I mentioned I wanted several posts back is not even close to being a reality any more. After my birthday and Christmas, buying games in the sale and trading stuff around, I’m left with a collection of 37 games. There’s at least 8 of them I’ve either not played much, or not even played at all. At least now the new releases are drying up again I’ll have plenty to keep me busy!
