dean

Sony Fanboy
I purchased Rugby 2008 last night. Its quite good, a little bit fiddly, but you know, I love them there sports games. But yeah...I played it for about an hour. However, before I started, the PS triple informed me that there was an update required. So off I went, and updated her.

Now I can use wallpapers - awesome!

I then wandered over to the PSN store, and guess what? I'm still able to download 10 year old games for $10!

"Fuck that" I said to my Cat, and we hovered over the demo's.

"hmmm, Heavenly Sword" my Cat mused: I agreed and we clicked, and downloaded the 1GB demo.

First impressions? It looks quite good - lots of detail on the mixed race main character with the quintessential British accent. Shame about her cohort, who sounds like a fucking pixie (FYI: My wife thinks David Beckham sounds like a pixie...work that one out, Brits).

The game itself? Not impressed.

It plays like a borked version of God of War, who happens to have fucked the original (and very underrated) Genji. There were times when you're simply getting pummled, and you have no idea what to do, except roll away. Also, the game just throws enemies at you. Example; you're stuck on this random pillar, about 400 feet in the air, and the only way up or down, is the jump. You start out with around ten enemies to kill, and after ten minutes of killing, you find out there are now twelve enemies on the pillar.

Thats great design guys.

"Here's what we do...to increase the game length, while keeping the locations short and sweet, we'll just add an increasing number of enemies to keep the player hammering square and triangle for fifteen minutes before they can move on."

Yeah, colour me very unimpressed. I'm not sure that I'll pick it up: Don't get me wrong, it looks lovely, but really, surely it should? Its been in development for about four years...

So, fuck that. That Kojima MGS4 playthrough loomed.

Looks good, eh? I very much doubt you and I will be able to play like they did though...Did you see how smooth they were.

"See that guy there? You see him, he's about 2 miles away...BANG! See, he's dead"

"Oh, yeah, see, I'm now camouflaged, I'm going to sneak up to these seven guys, dressed as a barrel, and slit their throats. See? BANG!"

But seriously, if the game throughout has that level of detail I'm sold. I'm mildly looking forward to it.

Another thing though: While the game looks good, it doesn't actually look all that different to any other MGS game. Sure, higher textures, smoother framerate, etc. But nothing has really changed in 9 years.

Is this a good, or a bad thing?