I picked up Stranglehold at the weekend, it's a fun game though once you get past the jumpy shooty max payne style slow mo effect it's fairly standard.

It's good fun though I'm pretty sure I've nearly finished it just due to having gone full on John Woo tastic bullet frenzy and nearly killed everything while doves fly past the camera. I've been a bit distracted by Guildwars as well.

I'm getting more and more excited by Mass Effect, there has been a lot of excitement about the revelation of a sex scene including a lesbian alien option if your main character is female.

Bioware's games have often had romance between the main characters and the party as an option even back to the baldurs gate days. Jade empire had the option of lesbian relationships though it didn't have any sex scenes but the engine at that stage lacked the visual fidelity to do any sort of sex scene in anything remotely tasteful other than some hot coffee cheap nasty rubbish. Often this level of believable characters makes the game more compelling so the level of depth is a good thing it is the only way the art form will evolve (or justify itself as an art form to the people still rooted in the age of film).

The current rating of 12a probably means it wont be nearly as exciting as some people have been speculating.

It's getting to the point where I almost don't want to look at the features and videos that are appearing for fear of spoiling the game when it finally comes out sometime in November, the sort of things I'm reading about the more refined path in the game and the interactions and interrelationships the system models sound fascinating not so simple as a dark path light path as they have had before where you can simply cancel out bad deeds with good ones and only the global net effect at any one point is relevant.

I'm sure this sex scene will have it classified as ultra mega porn in the US where due to their lack of evolution teaching in schools even the glimpse of a nipple is enough to cause children to spontaneously combust so they must be shielded at all costs.

After much uming and ahing I decided to order Halo3 I wasn't that convinced by it and the screen shots look like nothing special but I do remember the first game being quite a lot of fun so I though I'd give it a go. The recent crappy videos have done nothing to encourage me to buy, unlike the ones for mass effect, assassins creed, and bioshock before them where each new glimpse only reinforced my desire to own them, any new halo stuff seems to have the opposite effect.

I've just started playing Guildwars again with Byrn and Will I have forgotten almost all I knew about the game so chose a random class of Messmer Ranger which seems to work reasonably OK so far. I've just gone post searing so not got very far yet, but far enough for some child to wander up to us and say "lol u iz noob! I iz teh l337 lvl 20's" or some such other drivel which made me remember why I stopped playing star wars galaxies, well apart from the fact it changed progression system every five minutes with a sort of Alice in wonderland "CHANGE PLACES!" mad hatter esq dev scramble.

Had the summer bbq the other day I brought along Guitar Hero 2 and Wii Sports it made me want to dig out the PS2 and play GH2 some more but not quite enough for me to actually do it, I really should investigate the adaptors that let you use it on the ps3. Maybe next week.

I've picked up Heavenly Sword for the ps3 one of the ultra hyped supposedly must have will make the console titles.

It's well short and reasonably fun but nothing special

Sony has stocked the promise of their machine in titles like Heavenly Sword and Lair with a fairly ineffectual PR campaign, and now that they are appearing and turning out to be not nearly as ground breaking as they would have you believe they are looking a bit silly. It's far from game over for the shiny plastic grill lookalike but it's looking like it will be a bit longer before there is a title that the fan boys can claim justifies the machine.

Right now as far as anyone buying a console would be concerned the 360 is where it's at, it has the games it is dropping in price and there are a load of back catalogue to play as well. Wii is all well and good but it still lacks any really good titles there are a few on the horizon metroid 3 and mario galaxy but right now pickings are slim.

Anyway back to Heavenly Sword, it is a very pretty game and has some of the best in game cut sequences I have ever seen approaching rendered levels of detail. The work Andy Serkis did to get the cinematic feel in there really shows the extensive motion capture for the characters makes it a lot more like watching people than something an animator hacked together. Ninja Theory and Serkis certainly deserve a lot credit for the wonderful visuals and the detailed performances it's just a shame the rest of it is a touch weak.

Play wise it is a rip off of god of war it innovates very slightly but leaves out things that might have made it more engaging. You play Nariko a young woman part of a clan who exist to defend the titular Heavenly Sword a magical weapon. The sword for all it's power has a nasty drawback it drains the life out of anyone who wields it. There was a prophesy that a man would be born who could wield the sword and save the world or some such, instead Nariko was born and her clan looked on her as a bad omen a curse.

At some point King Bowhan (who is played by Andy Serkis) decides he wants the sword there is a fight and Nariko uses the sword to try and save her clan. The story essentially starts at the end from the point of her death due to the sword then switches the point she first wielded the sword. As stories go it's fairly rudimentary with quite a few holes that aren't filled in, a lot of it I can't tell if it's openings for a sequel or just bad story telling.

Game play wise you mostly play as Nariko wielding the sword with occasional goes as her nut job friend Kai who uses a cross bow and is generally quite mad and feral.

The sword has three modes fast with medium damage, ranged with light damage, and heavy with large damage. Each stance gives a different set of moves but mostly it's button mashing. There is no block button Nariko auto blocks assuming you are in the correct stance so if an enemy attacks with speed they light up blue, heavy orange, and red is unblockable so you just dodge.

Ranged weapons or anything you can throw can be controlled in flight in slow motion using after touch (you can even do this with bodies which is funny) it can be done with Sixaxis but it is extremely hard to control that way so joypad is easier. This is a nice little refinement that is one of the few differences in Heavenly Sword. Other than that it is a straight button masher kill everything from end to end with the occasional gong puzzle thrown in and a few of those annoying button press sequences where symbols appear on screen and you have to match them in time.

It lacks any remotely challenging puzzles everything is straightforward, the game is over pretty quickly as well a short little romp rather than an epic.

Graphically it's very pretty, the cut scenes are excellent with just a touch of ham in the acting, the battle sections where Nariko is against armies of people are quite impressive with the number of characters on screen at once.

All in all it's a fun if a little short game that lacks any sort of depth in the gameplay or the storytelling.

I guess sony fans will need to wait longer for their Bioshock to come along, as for me I'm off to get a copy of stranglehold for John Woo action

I've been a bit under the weather for the past couple of day's, hopefully I'm through the worst of it now. It's probably due to too much gene splicing in bioshock. On the plus side I can now electrify my enemies with a mere thought and then shoot waves of flaming bees from my arms. It does then to sting a bit tho and it means you go through t shirts like nobodies business.

I finished my first run through of Bioshock on good setting on Saturday and used my time convalescing to try the evil option. In the game you are presented with a choice which I won't detail so as not to spoil it. I think I can safely say without spoiling anything that the choice contains both good and evil options for it's resolution. This is the much vaunted moral dilemma. I was a little disappointed to find that it makes very little difference to how the game plays out. It gives you a different ending but has very little impact on the flow of the story otherwise.

Theoretically the evil path should be easier but I'm not actually sure it is. At the end I was not significantly worse off in the good path to the evil path, though I played the evil on the hard difficulty setting instead of medium for good so it might be that.

If anything I think the good path is advantageous since you get access to some otherwise unobtainable plasmids and tonics.

In some ways the evil path has sections that don't make any sense given your actions. There is a point about maybe half way through where if you have been playing it evil what happens makes no sense from a story perspective.

I was rather hoping for it to have a more branching plot at that point. Given the fuss they have been making about the importance of this moral choice I was a little surprised it didn't have more impact.

Anyway it is still a damn good game just minor niggles. The interactions between the characters in the game are very well done, most notably the big daddy little sister relationship. The small child skipping along needle in hand with a huge hulking brute in a diving suit following her as her guardian. The little sisters babble on talking to the big daddies and themselves in a sort of childish sing song way which is a little disturbing. When you finally do get rid of the escort (which is not an easy task Big Daddies are tough bastards) the little sister sits there crying over his corpse. It's very emotive stuff and for an FPS these are non major characters with presence and emotion beyond anything that we have really had before. The first time playing through was a real blast, second time was fun but less fresh and since the path really identical there was less juice to be "harvested" ;)

Apparently my copy of bioshock was shipped yesterday.

I was cheap and only went for first class postage so I probably won't get it till tomorrow, I'm now wishing I'd sprung for the next day delivery so I could be playing it tonight.

The game has been getting some phenomenal scores I think Eurogamer gave it 10/10 and they are not ones to idly give out such high praise.

The only thing that worries me is that I've read it has an infinite lives mechanic something that so ruined Prey. Though having said that in that case it wasn't the only thing that was wrong with that game.

I'll just have to wait till my copy turns up to get into the game proper and see if it spoils the sense of achievement, with prey it effectively meant there was no need to bother with tactics you just ran at them blasting till they or you died. If you died you shot a load of things to regenerate health + mana then were back in the game again. Rinse and repeat till you finish the game.

It really meant the whole game had no real challenge to it, it was also something that only really became apparent in the full game the demo was short enough to mask this. I hope this doesn't turn out to be the case with bioshock, from the reviews I've seen it has a lot more going for it so I'm hopeful, lots of plasmids to enjoy, reactive environments, weapons, hacking, rpg elements, and an interesting story and morality tale rather than being kidnapped by random aliens and I need to save my girlfriend who has rocket launchers for legs or what ever the hell prey was supposed to be about.

Also graphics wise Bioshock just looks awesome using the new engine du jour the Unreal 3 Engine, which unlike preys doom 3 based engine can be used for things other than slick gooey biomech humans fused with machines environments.

It also angers Jack Thompson which on it's own is enough to make me want to buy it.

Anyway I've gone for the hyper special limited collectors pro edition of the game which I comes with all the normal stuff making of stuff in a metal tin with a big daddy figurine and one of the less useful developers from the bioshock team encased in carbonite to have in your living room, which will go nicely with the rancor pit I've had installed. I assume the game is in there as well.

I read some stuff on Silicon Knights Dev and Unreal Engine 3 hater Denis Dyack's talk at GC, about how he reckoned standardisation and hardware comditisiation was the way forward, to make a unified games console. He then went on to talk about how the PC was dead. Which is a bit odd because what he had described, a standardised platform that all hardware manufactures could work to a universal target for software people to design for is a PC. Consoles may becoming more and more PC like in there implementation but I would suspect that they are unlikely to ever take that final step of creating a unified platform.

He talked about how it would be like the DVD forgetting that the successor has gone in two separate directions because it's very very very hard to get the big players to agree to any one format ending up with Bluray and HD-DVD shooting big holes in his argument.

While the idea of a unified platform for console gaming might seem like a good idea it would end up being a PC with all the problems and issues associated with that. Compatibility is the main problem, PC has an accepted standardised graphics API (well two of them but Microsoft is doing it's damnedest to kill off openGL) so you would think that so long as you met the spec for it on your software it should function identically on all hardware that also meets the spec. You'd be wrong, as someone that works with this sort of interaction you end up finding that there are many ways to skin a cat and a slight difference in the way one type of hardware handles things can lead to radically different outcomes in the eventual function.

This means either the games or the hardware people need to tweak things to each particular setup of the hardware. This is partly as a result of the second issue, differentiation. Now if the function of the platform is all but identical what would cause you to buy the Sony unified game console over the Microsoft UGC or the Nintendo UGC. One reason is price this will partly feed into compatibility in that manufacturers working to a spec will cost reduce as much as possible and as a result cut corners changing the behaviour. They will try and differentiate their machine from someone else's partly on brand and mechanical design but also on features, they will tweak their UGC hardware to achieve higher frame rates or better sound quality or some such.

As a result you get further and further away from identically functioning units more towards what the PC is a general purpose machine with nominal uniformity but in reality a huge compatibility nightmare for both sides of the thing.

He also said something about making the console a commodity which is another idea that is not thought through. Ideally it would reduce costs if it became a commodity but he's forgetting that the hardware in the current HD consoles (excluding the Wii which isn't HD) is heavily subsidised. To get a lot of that kit off the shelf would cost a load more than the console would be a retail. If it's commodities then the subsidy probably becomes more dicey. You get the sort of fast moving niche market Taiwanese outfits swinging in to try and undercut the big boys and they have to compete on price and the way they will do that is likely by breaking the spec. Then you have a subset of consumers who by a cheaper machine that works for most games but not all of them and get annoyed with the games makers when their works on everything platform doesn't work on everything. Now you may say well that's the hardware peoples problem (As Dyack seems to indicate is his preference) but the chances are they will not care. They sell a load of these cheap machine into the market but they likely offer no come back when the thing doesn't work on everything, so then software people have to issue a patch or accept that it won't run on some machines.

All in all I doubt the universal games console is likely to happen, the PC may be dying (I have my doubts on that score but that's by the by) but part of the reason for that is the slightly standardised nature of the machine which leads to the compatibility issues and the cost of the parts given the unsubsidised nature of the machine.

You wouldn't believe some of the hoops you have to jump through on USB or 1394 or ESata to get a device to work reliably on most systems and that is 3 interfaces with full standards and published specs but slight differences and foibles in the software the hardware and the firmware lead to a myriad of possible problems. With a whole console that incorporates drive, graphics, hard disk, sound, IO interfaces, network, and OS you wouldn't have a hope in hell. Better to leave well alone.

On a sadder note I read today that Perry DeAngelis from the popular skeptics guide to the universe podcast has died. I regularly listen to the SGU and Perry was an important part of that excellent podcast an intelligent man of reason promoting sceptisim who was funny and interesting to listen to his upfront attitude and opinions were a nice mix with the other personalities on the show. It's strange with this sort of thing where you listen to a weekly podcast and from listening to their voices every week hearing their opinions and interactions with others you get to feel you know people even though you have never met or interacted with them. I will be sad not to hear Perry's voice each week as I listen to the SGU podcast. He was one of the beacons of light in the current age of endarkenment and it is a sad loss.

Anyway I dedicate this post to the memory of Perry DeAngelis (An US Sceptic of Some Note) for being a voice of reason fighting the good fight in this age where pseudo science, religious dogma taught as science, and magical thinking are always trying to tear down science and reason.

If you aren't familiar with the skeptics guide I recommend you check it out at www.theskepticsguide.org They have the archive up there so you can hear some of Perry's work.

I downloaded the demo of Bioshock yesterday and then played it a 1am when it finally finished. It looks amazing and is fun to play from the brief taste I had of it. You get a feel for some of the different powers with electro bolt and ignite available in the demo as well as a few of the weapons.

I spent a while zapping then hacking security bots so I had my own flying army for a bit, the hacking mini game being one of those route a liquid from one pipe to another in the given time. I also enjoyed the few plasmid powers you get to try, electrobolt shot at an enemy stuns them so you can then smack them in the head with a wrench, ignite sets them on fire and gradually burns them alive. They each have an effect on the AI and the environment though so shoot electrobolt into water and it takes out every enemy in there in a zap frenzy. Once something is on fire anything it touchs burns too and if you ignite an enemy with water nearby they will leap screaming into the water to put themselves out allowing you to zap them with electrobolt. I'm sure more of these using combinations of powers and aspects of the environment to your advantage will crop up in the full game.

Graphically it looks gorgeous probably the best looking title on the 360 to date, with the art deco styling of the decaying under sea city of rapture and the 1930's sound track over setting the grim mutated nightmare of the city. The twisted inhabitants all dressed in masks and formal wear shrieking as they attack with nightmare ferocity. The freaky innocent and yet monstrous little sisters skipping about hand in hand with their lumbering almost steam punk diver suited big daddy guardians going about the task of collecting adam from the corpses.

The brief look at the story you get shows you thrust into the midst of this decaying society meant to be a utopia but with now distinctly dystopian trappings was interesting and it left me hungry for more. It is a wonder to behold and I look forward to sinking my teeth in come august 24th

Another game I am chomping at the bit to play is mass effect every time I see something on it, it gets better and I grow more anxious to play it. This video is the latest titbit to escape from bioware it looks amazing and the first of their games where the main character, the players avatar, is actually going to be talking less a silent face to stare at like kotor or jade empire.

This new footage had I think edged it into my top most wanted game of the year slot from maybe a joint first with Assassins creed. Of course videos of that usually feature the lovely Jade Raymond who can go toe to toe with the other top producers and looks a hell of a lot better too so if they release some new stuff I may revise my opinion ;)