[People ask us] for a game like Skyrim or Prey 2, why doesn’t it have multiplayer?  Well, our question is always the opposite when we talk to a developer. If you’re doing multiplayer, why are you doing multiplayer? What are you trying to accomplish?

If you’re doing it just to check a box or because every other publisher says you’ve got to have multiplayer, then just drop it, don’t bother, it’s a waste of time, a giant distraction and it’ll make for a worse overall game.  We want the best game possible. If that’s a singleplayer game that’s 15 to 20 hours, then make that! Don’t waste your time on features that don’t make the game better.

-Pete Hines, vice president of marketing at Bethesda Softworks

How many hundreds of man hours were put into Dead Space 2′s multiplayer I wonder?  Judging by the number of used copies that still contain an unused online pass I’d wager a decent percentage of buyers would have preferred that development time be dedicated to the single player campaign.  I traded Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions for a used copy of Dead Space 2 this week, so I’ll get a chance to see for myself how (or, if)  they’ve improved on one of the better games I’ve played on this generation of consoles.

As for 3D:

Honestly, I couldn’t care less – having to wear those glasses! I’m not a 3D fan. It ruins the image for me.  I want the clarity.

I think everyone’s going to keep trying,  But I’m not sure.

- Todd Howard, Skyrim director

If Bethesda come out next week to denounce the practice of shipping DLC that adds only a fraction to the gaming experience for a price comparable to a quarter of the full game they’ll complete the holy trinity.  I hold out little hope for this though, given their track record with the last two Fallout games.

1. Civilization Revolut’n: 32:45 (4 sessions)
2. Blue Dragon: 18:05 (4 sessions)
3. TigerWoodsPGATOUR® 12: 8:25 (3 sessions)
4. Xbox Dashboard: 0:30 (5 sessions)
5. Trials HD: 0:25 (1 sessions)
6. Boulder Dash-XL: 0:15 (1 sessions)

Online 41% of the time!

Maybe it’s just a formula that hasn’t aged well?

No, I’m pretty sure it’s not that; from the art style to the sound effects everything about this demo just grated with me.  Surely a game like this would benefit from a more cartoony, hand drawn art style rather than the cheap looking 2D-3D world they’ve built.

You can’t really get the game mechanics wrong — they’re so simple afterall, but it takes something more than this to bring back a much loved title from the dead after close to 20 years.  The game needs to have character, and this title is completely soulless.

I really hope the Choplifter HD remake does a better job of recapturing what made the original so much fun and does more than simply copying the game mechanics into a half-arsed game engine.

Although I wouldn’t put Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions on the same level as Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoys simple combo-based 3rd person action games, the kind of which were all the rage about a decade ago.  Spider-man was one of my favourite Saturday morning cartoon’s back in the late 80′s, but as much as I have a soft spot for Spidey I think it’s fair to say that the storyline has never been up to much.  [i]Super villain does bad thing; Spidey stops them, making smart ass comments on the way[/i] is pretty much the order of the day, and always has been, and this game certainly does nothing to diverge from that formula.

The various alternate universe Spider-men are well after my time, and as such I’ve no real attachment to them as characters, however from a gameplay point of view they are a great addition.  Each plays in it’s own way, and the subtle (and not-so-subtle) differences between each Spider-man’s abilities really help to keep the gameplay fresh.
The web of Destiny challenges on each level were a nice touch, providing small goals to aim for each level, sometimes things like this can end up just creating an end-game grind for completionists, but these challenges were mostly just rewards for exploring the various gameplay mechanics.

• Manifest Destiny

As for collectibles, this game wasn’t too bad to be fair.  There are just 8 hidden spiders on 12 levels.  Most are easily located, however some are so well hidden I honestly think I would have gone crazy searching for them without a guide.

• Bug Collector

Each level can be mastered in 3 categories:

1. Combo – Each attack is has a different combo score, there is no penalty for overusing a single combo despite what many mis-informed people on the Internet will tell you.  I found that spamming the Y Y Y attack was enough to beat the platinum requirements for all levels.
2. Emblem – Dotted throughout the levels are Spider-man emblems, collecting these refill your health.  90% of them are in plain sight, with a few scattered high up in roofs/just off the beaten path.  The platinum medal for each level does not require you to even collect 100% of the emblems; I hit the platinum requirement for all but one of the levels on my first playthrough.
3. Time – Comparing the par times to the times my first playthrough took I thought this would be a real challenge, however by the time I attempted these on playthrough 3 for each level I nailed nearly every level at the first attempt, and those that I failed were seconds out rather than minutes.

After playing through the game once normally, I was well short of a platinum medal in many categories on most levels, so it wasn’t as if I was only replaying to search for hidden spiders, and it actually works out quite well truth be told.  I played each level 3 times:

Playthrough 1

No guides, no goals, just doing what comes naturally.

Playthrough 2

After completing the entire game this was my “refresher” playthrough, reminding me of the level layout & boss strategy in preparation for the speed-run on playthrough 3.  This was also the playthrough where I picked up any missing platinum medals in the Combo and Emblem categories. This is the only playthrough I referred to a guide; using this to find any missing Hidden Spiders — I only managed to find all the hidden spiders on 2 of the 12 levels on my first playthrough, and I was pretty thorough in my exporation.

Playthrough 3

My final playthrough; a speed run for the timed medals.  Playing each level right after playthrough 2 really helped with this, as I breezed through the levels well under the par times.

The end result of these 3 playthroughs is a very satisfying, non-grind, 100% completion.

• Spectacular

If you’re gaming time is limited I couldn’t recommend this over the similarly priced, yet superior and much more engaging Enslaved: OttW.  However, if you’ve already played that game, or have room in your heart for two new single player games you could do much worse than Spider-man: Shattered Dimensions.

From a completionists point of view I cannot fault this game.  There is a constant sense of progression, many games offer up 90% completion and then put the final 10% behind a massive grind, Shattered Dimensions paces the achievements well from start to finish.  The goals in the Web of Destiny certainly add to the sense that everything you do is bringing you closer to that tingly feeling that only 100% can bring!

I held out hope of getting to Elite without rubber bands for many years, but realising that I’m still less than half way there despite putting in what must be close to a hundred hours of terrorist hunts over the past 5 years I figure I need all the “free” XP I can get if I’m going to ever get 1000/1000 in this game.

Since the early hours of Sunday morning my 360 has been running round in circles racking up XP. Which leaves me at a bit of a loose end so I finally logged back into PSN to pick up my two free games (Little Big Planet & WipEout HD/Fury).

LBP took longer to install and update than it could hold my attention when I finally got into the game. I can see it being something that I use to kill a half hour here and there, maybe. I certainly don’t get why people go bat shit crazy about it.

WipEout was a blast, WipEout 2097 was one of my favourite Saturn games and WipEout 3 was the fastest feeling racing game I’d ever played. A couple of hours just disappeared here, this could be the game that gets me back into using the PS3 as a games console.

I also took the chance to play a little further into Black Ops on the PS3; I really don’t “get it”. The story is a mess, there’s all these character names floating around, but I honestly couldn’t even tell you which one is the character sitting in the chair because they are all so generic and replaceable. As for the plot, I’m about 7-8 missions in now and I have not got a fucking clue what’s happening, it’s enjoyable none-the-less, with some fun set pieces, but it just jumps from one seemingly unconnected sequence to another far too often for me. Maybe it’ll all make sense in the end, maybe it’d feel less disjointed if I sat down and played it from beginning to end in a weekend; maybe I would if it wasn’t so bland in the first place.

I also fired up “Zombies” from the title screen for the first time. I can see they thought long and hard about a name for this mode… I’m in a theatre, wondering around seeing “You must turn on the power first” flash up at the bottom of the screen every 20 seconds. How? Where? Why? This really could have done with an introductory cinematic explaining what the fuck is going on and what I’m supposed to be aiming for.

I spend 80% of my time running around trying to find something to shoot, eventually I score enough points to unlock a door – exciting much!?, which just seems to give me even more empty space to run around in. Still no signs of a power generator, nor any idea where one would be, or how I’d turn it on if I did find it. Bored now, switch input to the 360 and stare at my characters feet as he runs in circles … switch back, quit to dash, watch half a dozen episodes of Big Bang Theory. A Sunday afternoon well spent.

If you enjoy story-driven single player games & science-fiction, you have to play this game.  I finished my first playthrough of the campaign in around 8 hours on hard difficulty, unlocking the majority of the achievements, without a guide.

I’ve just completed my achievement clean up playthrough (3-4 hours max), collecting the couple of achievements that aren’t possible on Hard

• Got the Horn
• Bad Doggy

and finishing off some of the cumulative achievements where I did not use a specific power enough times on the main playthrough, but mainly collecting the missing Masks and Energy Orbs that I didn’t collect on the first playthrough.  I’m really not a lover of “collect everything” type achievements as a rule, but this is one of the cases where it’s done pretty well.  95% of the orb are in plain sight, and the few that aren’t are not that difficult to find.  With the difficulty turned down to Easy and a guide it didn’t take me much time at all to locate the orbs I was missing, and it gave me an excuse to watch all the cutscenes again

• Tech Curator
• Mask Curator

I’m going to get the Pigsy’s Perfect 10 DLC pack as I’ve read that it offers another 2-3 hours of gameplay, I think it’s a tad overpriced at £7 given the core game cost me just £10, but that’s the thing with DLC; unlike retail products, supply and demand do not factor into the pricing.  This is why I will never understand why consumers want digital downloads to take off, it’s just not in our interests.

The last year has been pretty good for single player games despite the industry seeming obsessed with throwing multi-player into anything and everything they can.  Vanquish is next up on my playlist; another game where it would have been so easy to waste development time on a multi-player component.  Of course, the good news continues with upcoming releases such as Saint’s Row 3 having confirmed it’s dropping the terrible multi-player from previous games and focusing on the single player/co-op campaign.

Two major game changers were up next, with Meunier first explaining a new concept for AC multiplayer in “contested kills.” In so many words, rather than being stabbed by someone clearly running at you full speed, should you spot them in time and press the punch button, a “contested kill” will result in both players being stunned. Take that, game breaking perma-runners!

In the same vein, assassination animation times have been changed dramatically. In Brotherhood, all kills cost the same amount of time — everything from an obvious running murder to a stealth assassination. In Revelations, however, stealth is rewarded with shorter animations, incentivizing players further toward clandestine kills rather than open deathmatch.

- Joystiq

Sounds like they’re also doing away with the levelling system, hopefully they’ll introduce something with more reasonable limits, if I’m being successful in an online game I expect to have hit max level within 20 hours.  Any more and it’s just stretching out the progression for the sake of it in my opinion.

They’ve certainly addressed two of the most annoying aspects of what has been my favourite online multiplayer game in a long time.  Usually I’d just quit out when I ended up in games full of people charging around like agitated gibbons and search for a new game where hopefully people are playing “the right way”.

Sherlock Holmes: Now for the motive. Despite my almost complete lack of practical experience on the subject, I have a rather precise idea of the usefulness of a uterus and a vagina. Nonetheless, once they are separated from their usual envelope, I am more circumspect as to the uses one can make of them. What do you think, Watson?

- Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper (EU)

Could not make it up if I tried

Hello First Access Member,

As the launch date for Duke Nukem Forever approaches, we would like to offer a heartfelt thanks to you, the true believers who have already placed your bet on Duke with your pre-order, or Borderlands Game of the Year purchase. As a sign of our appreciation, Gearbox Software and 2K Games are thrilled to present every First Access Club member who has registered as of today the very first Duke Nukem Forever multiplayer downloadable add-on for free!* Surprise! Thank you again for all of your support. We’re almost there.

Hail to the King, Baby!

Gearbox Software and 2K Games

I’m pretty excited about this game even though I’m trying hard to keep my expectations low. Duke Nukem 3D on the SEGA Saturn was one of my favourite games back in the mid ’90s. I remember looking forward to this game when it was first previewed in the Official SEGA Saturn Magazine (back in the days when magazines were still relavent, not that this makes me feel old at all).

This is the fashionable thing to say these days though, even amongst gamers who don’t appear to be much older than the MegaDrive sitting in my loft, not quite sure how that works 

On a whim I decided I’d have a crack at GOAT/Hall of Famer in Rockstar Table Tennis this weekend, taking advantage of the free XBL gold for all silver accounts.  I made trip into town and ventured into the den of vice that is GAME, holding back the vitriol I payed the £4.99 they were demanding for a used copy of Table Tennis, relieved that it was not among the dozens of 5 year old used games they are still charging over £15 for!

Now for people that haven’t played the game before GOAT is rediculously easy.  My first account reached GOAT within 3 hours, starting from absolute zero.  From that point on I could get a new account from 0 to 50 in 5-6 matches.  Sadly I play my games properly before I chase achievements when I’m bored of the game, in RSTT this kind of left me with a mountain to climb due to the way the ranking works.  I started the weekend with a record of P78 W54 L24, which isn’t too bad imo.  That left me with a TrueSkill of 29, but with so many games played I was not going to be able to take advantage of the faster ranking up when games played is low.

12 accounts later, all but 2 hitting GOAT themselves in the course of over 600 “matches” in the past 24 hours, and I’d managed to boost 85 wins off high level accounts to finally unlock what I feared I had made a near impossible achievement by playing the game for fun in the first place.

• The GOAT

If I could find someone interested in Hall of Famer I’d knock that one out too for the 1000.  That may be more of a challenge though, I’ve discovered this weekend that boosting is much easier when you don’t need anyone else to help you

• The Hall of Famer