I’ve almost been civilised this last week I’ve been spending most of my time (out of the office that is) curled up on my bed with a book.

I can’t remember the last time I sat and just read for a while, it seems that the Xbox is spoiling me slightly… oh well I just can’t stay mad at that machine, especially not with Modern Warfare 2 coming out next week (anyone else preordered?). Anyway back to the world of the paperback, considering such a hiatus from books I have been consuming the written word during the last week or so.

So far the victims of bent spines and ravaged word are:
World War Z by Max Brooks
Stories fronm the survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse. A chilling novel that leaves you wondering if you could survive as these people had a global pandemic of the Zombie infection.

Halo: The Cole Protocol by Tobias S Buckell
A further expansion of the Halo universe, exploring the divide between the UNSC and the Independents near the start of the Human-Covenant war.

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
If you have ever watched the movie, do yourself a favour and read the book it’s nearly completely a different story from the movie.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
From the S.F. Masterworks range this depicts a war fought between Humans and Taurans where relativity and the limits of light speed turn a war that has lasted over thousands of years for the population of Earth but only a few decades for the soldiers on the frontline.

Outbound Flight by Timothy Zahn
Like the prequels this is part of a back to front duology. Set decades before Survivors Quest this tells the tale that leads up to Outbound Flight as it leaves Republic Space and begins it’s ill-fated mission.

Gears of War: Aspho Fields & Gears of War: Jacinto’s Remnant both by Karen Traviss
Two books expanding on the story told in the two Gears of War Xbox 360 games. These are actually really good, while much of the games storyline is easily overlooked in the high action of the gameplay these two books tie the games together and builds on the foundation already in place. The characters of Delta squad are fleshed out and built on all while building a bigger picture of the world around that the Gears find themselves fighting in.

I recommend all 7 of these books if you like s.f, they are well worth having a read through at least once.

Here lie my thoughts and feelings about Halo 3: ODST. I have attempted to keep this as spoiler free as possible, however my comments occasionally touch upon game features that while well publicised before the games launch may still be considered minor spoilers by some.

Anyone who knows me will be able to vouch for my love of the Halo universe. Halo: Combat Evolved dragged me back into the world of console gaming and Halo 2 was the first game whose development I paid attention to. Halo 3 was the first game I took annual leave for the release day. So you can imagine I was awaiting ODST with bated breath. However I had mail ordered ODST from the website of my usual store. This resulted in a full day of fretting and worrying in the office as to whether the game would arrive, followed by when I got home a brief moment of panic where the game wasn’t on the other side of the door waiting for me. Fortunately this was immediately relieved when I closed the door to find the package caught in the letter plate, and hanging from the back of the door. In future I will stick to going into town and collecting my preorder in person.

Now if Halo can be said to have one weakness in my eyes it would be how powerful the Master Chief feels in each successive instalment of the series; while the enemy AI is still a threat quite capable of defeating a player, the presence of regenerating health and the lack of a visible health meter left me feeling that I was nigh on unstoppable. By not having that feeling of desperation evoked by having a sliver of health and only your shields between you and death that could easily and frequently occur In Halo: CE some threats just did not seem as intimidating as they were in the past, no matter how capable a foe they really where.

In ODST however the health bar is back, and for me it makes all the difference in the world, when you hit the redline and the sound of your ODST gasping for breath is ringing in your ears making even the lowliest of Grunts appear to be an almost inevitably fatal threat to you, you have to hide, use cover and fight smart as well as hard in order to survive. On Legendary a Brute armed with a Plasma Rifle will kill you in mere moment if you don’t play smart and use cover. I very quickly established after dying three times during my first visit to New Mombasa’s Streets just how vulnerable I was as an ODST, stamina is not as hardy as the shields the Chief has and on higher difficulty they provide the merest impression of protection as a city full of aliens tries to take you out.

As I played I found that the game feels like the weapon damage has been altered to balance the available sandbox, with some of the weapons from the Halo Trilogy cut from the game this does give the feeling that pretty much every weapon in the game has a defined purpose and is good at the job it designed for. Vehicle handling has definitely improved, you can still roll a Warthog or a Mongoose if you aren’t careful but they feel nicer to drive, which makes the inevitable driving levels much more of a joy to play. Ghosts especially feel fantastic, and I’m told the Chopper has been improved though I still can’t control that beast.

Overall the campaign is shorter than Halo 3, playing in the evenings after work I managed to complete the Campaign on Legendary in about 4-5 hours, and some of those missions I died a lot on as I got a feel for the game. Firefight is fun, but is crippled by its networking problem. If you don’t live geographically close to your teammates lag will happen, the further away the worse the lag. I’m in England, one of my Live Friends is in America, and the lag was so bad it was like watching stop-motion being filmed. B.net Game Link. A great game mode let down by bad decisions on networking by Bungie, it could have been an online hit, for now I will save it for solo play and LAN parties.

As for the Halo 3 Mythic disc, the new maps are pretty to look at, and the gameplay on them is fun, worth getting if you enjoy playing Matchmaking as well as Campaign. However if you are not interested in playing ODST itself, then the three maps alone are not worth the cost of the game.

Overall: Worth the wait, I am very happy with this game and fully expect to be playing it for as long as I am still playing the Halo Trilogy.

It’s quite an imposing structure is it not, a massive edifice thrusting up out of the ocean though you will never guess what it is. Well you might guess the lighthouse bit, but go on have a guess at what is so special about it.

It is one of many Atomic Powered Lighthouses that the Soviets built. That’s right atomic powered. You see the Russian Northern coast is a vast territory that runs for a few thousand of miles and is all inside the Arctic Circle. The long polar winters mean no daylight at all, each day passing without any sign of the Sun rising above the horizon. There is only darkness for 100 plus days a year.

Now back before GPS these waters could be difficult to navigate easily so the Communist Party decided to build a chain of lighthouses like the one above along the coast, however because they were situated hundreds of miles away from any populated areas these lighthouses had to be unmanned and fully autonomous. So they developed and installed special lightweight atomic reactors, and left these lighthouses to get on with it. Crazy eh.

See more photos at English Russia

I’ve spent a good chunk of my gaming time recently playing Call of Duty 4, and quite often a routine part of the postgame lobby has been muting players who are complaining about another player ‘camping’. Well I say complaining, what I actually mean in this context is that they were either hurling abuse, or having full blown temper tantrums. Now maybe I have had a bad run of gamers to play against, but it does appear to me that there are a fair few people out there that really get angry at this topic, so I thought I would put fingers to keyboard and try and put my thoughts on this subject down in a manner that hopefully will be easy to understand, and leave itself open to well reasoned debate.

To set the scene my playing style is not that of your typical camper, I tend not to have the patience to stay in one spot during a match; I like to run and gun with an SMG or Assault Rifle, if I find a good perch I may try some ‘sniping’ with an M4 or M16 but I generally find that I’m not consistently accurate enough for this to be a reliable strategy for me, so I tend to hoof it and pray while I spray. However this does not mean I disapprove of camping as a multiplayer strategy. I personally have to go with the Rooster Teeth definition of camping “it’s a legitimate strategy”, though it has become apparent that not everyone agrees with me on this, and some even consider it cheating.

To me Call of Duty 4 is essentially a military simulation, in multiplayer you take on the role of a soldier in the British SAS, US Marine Corp, Russian Spetznaz or the Opposing Force taking part in a variety of combat scenarios. The game’s major selling point is the realism of gameplay; as such real military tactics are very effective when used in game. For example two soldiers fighting side by side as a fire team can take down lone opponents quicker than if they were playing solo; another example would be someone acting as a spotter and using the team talk feature to call out targets for their team’s sniper to take out. By using simple military tactics, you can be more effective in game, and camping is one of these tactics that can be used.

Indeed in some cases the classes in the game seem designed to camp. Take the sniper for example. Even the semi-automatic rifles like the Dragunov are not well suited for a head to head confrontation against most of the other main weapons in the game. If you get close to someone playing with a P90 or MP5 chances are they will unload into you and kill you before you can even line up the scope. Sniper’s in the real world of modern warfare are usually a highly trained marksman that shoots targets from concealed positions or distances exceeding the capabilities of regular personnel.

Other forms of ‘legitimate military’ camping include holding a thoroughfare for a tactical advantage; this is the most common form of camping I run into while playing. I will be moving through buildings only to find that someone has hunkered down with the intention of cutting off that route for me and my team. I usually get a face full of FMJ as a reward for my discovery.
This however raises the issue, when faced with an opponent in a superior position, with the capability to take you out in a rapid manner, how do you counter that? It seems like an untenable position to be in, what’s the secret?

Keep Calm! As infuriating as it is, if you foolishly charge in you’ll only get killed again, and again, and again! I speak from personal experience; my abilities as a player are inversely proportional to my blood pressure. There are a few things you can do to deal with a determined camper:

1. Take advantage of the kill camera to get an idea as to where he is, it seems simple but if you wait those few seconds rather than furiously mashing the X button you can get a very good ideas as to where they are;
2. Use the map’s terrain to keep yourself in cover as you approach them;
3. Let your teammates know where he is, they might be better placed to get the drop on them;
4. Make use of your grenades, a well placed smoke grenade can provide cover for moving closer, and a fragmentation grenade can outright kill or injure the camper enough for you to finish them off with gunfire;
5. Switch class. Before hitting X to re-spawn, go to the start menu and pick a class more suited to the situation. Try a spot of counter-sniping, or utilize the shotgun for some close-quarters combat if you can;
6. Avoid the camper.

Often overlooked is that final tip which is easiest done on larger maps. It sounds ludicrous at first, and smacks of cowardice to some. However if you can stay away from the field of fire of the camper and work your way around via another part of the map; deprived of kills the camper may well be forced to up sticks and move elsewhere. Though even more satisfyingly, you may also find yourself approaching the camper from the rear. Shoot them in the back of the head or give that sniper a taste of your knife, I assure you either way it will be quite satisfying to have gotten one up on them.

There is however a form of camping that cannot be defended by the proponents of legitimate camping; I am of course referring to the act of spawn-killing. While legitimate camping tactics can be countered this reprehensible ‘tactic’ is where an opposing player sets themselves up in a position where they can kill players as they spawn into the match.

This usually results in the targeted player dying before they even have any chance to move, shoot or defend themselves in any manner. With all other forms of camping, the opposing player can, through using their head, counter the camper’s tactics; however in these circumstances the limitations of the games spawning system are used to deny the player any chance of having of fighting back.

By playing the game in this manner you remove the possibility of having any kind of game played in the spirit of friendly competition. Instead you have moved into the realms of malicious griefing, and nobody wants to play with people like that. Hold back and let them spawn. Yes your final score may be lower, but you will have so much more fun if you play the game as Infinity Ward intended. After all as Sir Winston Churchill once said; “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

There’s an interesting article up at BBC News talking about research at Oxford University using Tetris of all things to combat the effects of PTSD.

I do find while playing games like Tetris, Pac-Man and Zuma that my mind does tend to ’switch-off’ as I focus entirely on the game at hand, so I’m not that sceptical about the claim myself.

What about yourself, video games as therapy, what do you think?

Welcome, welcome to Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza headed by bs angel! Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deeply insightful to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!


The gaming industry has been good to me in recent years; there have been a good number of games that have combined excellent gameplay with an engrossing storyline, From Baldur’s Gate to KOTOR, Halo CE to Gears of War 2. As I type I can see nearly a dozen such games sat next to my XBox 360 crying out to be played again, and I want to indulge them I really do. However between working full time and all the other “fun” commitments of being a socially well-adjusted adult there is not the time to give all of them the attention I would like. Bearded misanthropy looks more attractive after each and every Christmas party.
 
Fortunately we are entering the holiday period and most new releases are the same old rubbish they release year in year out. I have all the games I want at the moment, except for one. I still want a re-release of the greatest space flight simulator ever. I want Tie Fighter. Some of the younger gamers reading this may not remember this title, it was first released in July of 1994 and I can remember this as one of my earliest introductions to PC gaming.

While I am hesitant to use this description for most games, in the eyes of my peers and I Tie Fighter was Perfection! Every other game I have ever played that has warranted that 9/10 or even the coveted 10/10 score from the reviewing press has always had a least one minor irritation that annoys me.
Be it the sometimes awkward cover system in Gears of War, to the driving controls in Half Life 2, and even the whole second half of the last level of Halo 3 all of these irked me. Don’t get me wrong these are games I love and keep going back to, but I would be hesitant to refer to them as perfect in all things. Brilliant, fantastic and amazing I would use without a second thought, but not perfect.
 
Tie Fighter on the other hand I can think of nothing bad about it. Don’t be left thinking that this is merely nostalgia on my part speaking, I still have my copies of the game discs and spent many hours in the summer replaying the campaign on DosBox, well when DosBox would work properly I was. My MacBook doesn’t seem to like DOS very much.
 
The gameplay in Tie Fighter was simply amazing. The basic controls were easy to pick up and the more advanced controls were simple to grasp as you played through the game. The storyline to this day is as engrossing as it was to that 10 year old who played the heck out of this game back in 1994.
 
As I sat and listened to the first of the mission briefings I was transported back to my childhood, and I could remember trying to play this game without my Mother’s knowledge. My Mother was a bigger Star Wars fan than me, and she was very much on the side of the Jedi, she would never have forgiven me for flying under the Empire’s flag, let alone flying as Lord Vader’s wingman. How could I not though? This games greatest strength was its story, I quickly found myself sucked into this world of duty as I did my bit to combat pirates and restore order to the galaxy, you felt like a one of the good guys. It wasn’t until you got deeper into the game that events began to remind you that the Empire was the bad guys of the whole saga.
 
Next year is the 15th anniversary of this game, if I could ask the gaming industry for just one thing this year, I would ask for Tie Fighter to be released on the XBox Live Arcade. This title in full HD and surround sound would be the perfect combination of that exquisite gameplay of 1994 with the technological audio and visual marvels of today’s high definition gaming.
 
While they are at it LucasArts can do the same with Dark Forces, Monkey Island and the rest of the early LucasArts stable. These games were the games I and I’m sure many others loved as a child and with many classic console games making an appearance on the XBLA it would be nice to see some of these equally classic DOS games put in an appearance as well.






Other participants!
What I want in 2009, The “Roxanne” Edition, Dear Gaming Industry, if the industry gave us all presents this Christmas, Demands for the industry, Santa, Don’t Bring Me Toys I Have To Share, All I Want for Christmas Is…, My Wish for the Year, Crossing Over, Checkpoint Unobtained. errr., Loading Requests, LISTEN BITCH!!!, One Wish, Dear Video Game Industry, More games like Portal and Braid, Imagine, Dear Video Game Industry, A Wish for 2009!

My Lancer rumbles,
Blood is on the floor,
The Locust is dead.

Gears of War has had a strong grip upon my gaming time since it was released. I had passed the first Gears game by in favour of Halo 2 and only played it because of Rob’s overwhelming enthusiasm a few months before Gears 2 was due.
Oh how I wish I had listened to him earlier, it was such an enjoyable game, and while the writing is not going to win any awards I found myself genuinely caring about the characters of Marcus Fenix and his merry band of miscreants as they threw themselves into danger again and again.
By the time I had finished the single player story of Gears of War on I was hooked, I had to know what happened next. fortunately for me, though less so for my wallet, I pass a video game store on the way to and from work every day and I was able to pre-order Gears of War 2 the next day.

Five days pass and release day is upon me and bright and early I pick up my copy as the store opens, for a brief moment all is good, then the reality that I have eight hours of work followed by an hour and a half commute to go before I can play hit me. Next time a big release is coming I will book a couple of days off work, like I did for Halo 3, and make an event out of it.
Still over the next two evenings I was able to sit back and enjoy the game on casual mode. Yeah I know what a wuss my excuse is the same as ever first off I want to enjoy the story, then if I enjoyed the game I will then go back for the challenge of the harder difficulties.

At the present moment I am on Act 2 Chapter 5 on Insane mode, and boy they weren’t joking with that descriptor. I have not played a game that has left me feeling such extremes of emotion.
My mind is filled with an inense feeling of disappointment in myself when I die after doing something stupid, furthermore when I hear that riff in the soundtrack signifying that the battle is over and I have emerged victorious, I actually feel proud of my accomplishment. I haven’t felt proud of myself for beating a game ever, I have felt satisfaction yes but pride, never.

It’s an amazing challenge I am loving the fact that not only am I pushing forward on Insane mode, but more importantly I am doing it solo. It’s even more fun because I am not really a hardcore gamer, I only got through Hardcore on Gears of War playing coop with Rob. He thought I wouldn’t be able to get through Gears of War 2 on Insane mode and was genuinely surprised when I told him how well I was doing, though to be fair I am surprised how well I am doing. Here’s to me continuing this streak all the way to the end of the game.

I finally got round to playing Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 this weekend. Admittedly the two sessions I spent playing only totalled up to four hours or so of gameplay.

For those of you who are unaware of what the team in Rainbow Six are all about, then I could be mean and direct you to the Novel ‘Rainbow Six’ by Tom Clancy. However that is a little mean so I will briefly explain it for you. By ‘I’ I really mean wikipedia, who have an excellent write up of the team available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_6.

So RAINBOW are a NATO counter terrorist special forces unit, and in this title you are playing as the leader of a four man squad, as you infiltrate and assault terrorist held positions in the casinos of Las Vegas.

While playing this I had the good fortune to be in Co-op mode, where I was squad leader, and my friend Idle Han was playing as one of my squad. This led to my first complaint about this game. Only I could give orders to the two AI controlled squad members, more realistic maybe having a clearly defined chain of command, but when I am pinned down and stuck returning fire, Han while in a better position to direct the troops could not give orders to the AI troops to assist.

However that little problem aside for the most part this game is very, very good to play! The AI squad is easy to control, with the A button acting as a contextual button, and the back and down buttons switching between actions (hold, regroup) and behaviour (assault, infiltrate).

It is a fantastic feeling you get as you watch your troops get into position and then storm a room, watching as they drop smoke grenades to hide their positions and execute a quick clean takedown of a room full of terrorists. All as per the orders you gave them with few clicks of your controller.

However the AI were very happy to hold position everytime you ordered them up against a doorway, and then entered yourself. If you didn’t remember to order them to regroup they would stay there indefinatly. They also on one occasion glitched as they both tried to enter a doorway at the same time and got stuck running into each other, rather than one letting another through first.

The actual manner in which you play the campaign is quite different from Halo 3, my usual frame of reference when playing an FPS on the Xbox. For starters like Call of Duty 4 the game features a more realistic damage system, you can only take so much damage before you are killed. Switching between weapons is slower, again more realisticly portraying a soldier pulling out his backup weapon out from his webbing, before being able to open fire.

I never got a chance to play the online multiplayer aspect of this game myself, which is a shame considering the high quality of the single player campaign. I would have loved to take advantage of the online cooperative play to get four of us in versus the single player campaign.

If you liked Halo I would definatly say Rent this title, as I feel you might not enjoy the game-play transition. However if you are a COD4 fan and if you can put up with the few minor flaws in what is otherwise an excellent game then I would happily recommend that you Buy this title. I will be to.

I really cannot review games to save my life.

You see the problem is I tend to enjoy playing games even if they are crappy. Not so much Joe Loves Crappy Movies, but Jim Loves Crappy Games. Though to be fair I define crappy to mean that the game is more like a B-Movie than a Hollywood blockbuster.

Games that have been poorly implemented and turn out to be full of glitches and broken drive me mad. I cannot stand it when I am playing what would otherwise be a fun experience and it is ruined by stupid little problems that a little playtesting should have picked up.

So when it all comes down to it I realise that when I start talking about a game in the blog I can only really offer one of three possible review scores; Buy, Rent, or Avoid.

Not really the most in-depth ratings but it is the one I will endeavour to use when talking about a game; at least that way you will be able to understand whether my ramblings are meant to be read as an endorsement or a criticism of the game or not.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Call of Duty 4 campaign this week. Between the Xbox Live downtime, and some problems with my ISP I have been unable to join multiplayer matches without lagging out mid-game, so I have returned to single player campaigns to keep me entertained.

I am a Bungie fan, and I loved the Halo series. After playing the campaign of all three games to death, the first thing that I noticed about Call of Duty 4 was how ‘gritty’ everything looked in comparison to the shinier more cartoonish look of the Halo 3 single player campaign. It immediately sent back to eight years ago when I was playing an entertaining FPS called ‘Delta Force 2′.

This game was introduced to me by two guys that I was on an IT course with, after listening to them talk about how great this game was they slipped me a CD-R and a slip of paper with a CD key. That night I had my first experience of Software Piracy and of Online FPS Multiplayer. For those of you wondering I went out and bought my own copy of the game that weekend; it still gets used on the odd nostalgic occasion, along with my copies of Dark Forces and Tie Fighter.

As I played the first few missions, I became amazed at the almost dual nature of the game. While playing as the SAS you have to play the game more like a stealth game like Splinter Cell than say a game like Halo where you can just charge in and let your shields take a pounding. Then you switch to the US Marine Corps, and the game changes slightly. You are now in pitched battles with insurgents. The usual tactics of sneaking up and knifing the opposition will not work. They know you are there and they want you dead.

This tonal change in gameplay threw me at first. I had done the SAS missions on Veteran difficulty without to many problems, but playing as a Marine was kicking my arse so hard it had turned me into a hunchback. I had to drop down to Normal to progress through the storyline. It amazed me how difficult more ‘realistic’ games could be compared to the typical sci-fi shooter I was used to playing. Grenades could, and routinely did take my legs out from underneath me. Death came on swift wings for me on more than one occasion, I was left staring at the screen wondering how I died.

For the first time in ages I actually found myself stopping to think before I acted. Even on Legendary in Halo 3 you could get away with infrequent acts of stupidity, but in COD4 stepping into a doorway without checking first could and would leave you face down in a pool of your own blood. After the initial confusion and frustration wore off I found myself quite fond of this game and cannot wait to get on to my ISP so I can jump into the multiplayer as well.