Valve is one of those game-companies I love but hate. I love them because everything they seem to make (over looking the early years of Steam) is classic and also because it's nice to  see a small games company doing so damn well considering their up against the likes of EA and Blizzard/Activision. Alas at the same time I hate them because although their doing well, they take the piss a lot. Their only new franchise in years was Portal and they had to bring in a team to simply re-hash their old game concept with a more Half Life style plot and graphics (don't get me wrong, I loved Portal and the fact even friends who hate FPS have fallen in love with it). It seriously felt like Valve were printing money from giving us a fuck you in the form of such classic titles as Half Life Source...what was wrong with Half Life? or how about Counter Strike Source...once again I found no issues with the original.

 

I'm happy to say today though that Valve have won back a bit of my love to replace some of that icky hate though releasing the demo of Left4Dead...my god...I'm in love.

The demo was about a gig to download so if you have low bandwidth limits you might wanna hope they stick the demo on some magazine's promo-CD or something but if you can afford to download the demo it's well worth the download time!

The graphics are amazing, I mean as a console gamer I've come to accept that what we see on consoles is normally not what you'll see on a high end PC but it's normally good enough to over look...L4D was gorgeous. The environments captured the feel of an 'end of the world though evil running zombies OH SHIT THERES ONE!' city and the Zombies themselves, there was nothing quite as creepy as running backwards loading my shotgun desperately as a screaming female zombie charged at me, her eyes wild and her mouth soaked in blood.

Audio wise the game is...ok I'll admit I have a bit of a gripe here although the sound effects worked perfect, the screams of the zombies scared me silly at times, and in the underground car park hearing the whaling of a child made me wee myself, but all of this was spoilt a little by my NPC team-mates shouting 'reloading' over and over in moments when I was holding my breath in fear of a zombie hearing...kinda, you know, kills the feel of realism a bit.

Game-play is where the game picks back up again. From the second the level starts, after about 3 seconds while the camera zooms into the back of your head (when did games start doing that and why do they still do it? Never made sense of it) your dropped right into the action with a mad dash to grab a gun of your choice and some ammo and for the love of god don't forget your med pack! The second you open your first door the action truly begins with you picking off zombies around every corner as quick as you can before they realise your there and charge at you with a pleasant scream which calls for the need of a change of underwear.

There are so many game-play mechanics I love in the game based on what I've seen so far, the smooth and basic weapon switch is useful because if you go shotgun like me after 8 shots your fucked if there are zombies left so a quick hit of the Y (or whatever it is on PC or PS3) and you have your handgun out. Zombies nibbling on your nipples? Don't worry just pull the left trigger and you'll smack them away giving you some much needed time to empty a round into their heads or run like the wind. There are also little details which although wouldn't have been missed if not there, make the game feel more whole including the fact if you get too close to some cars their alarm will go off which will notify a horde of zombies to where you are to rip off your big toes.

In truth I could go on for ages about the mechanics of the game which makes it spooge-worthy but I don't want to spoil finding out a lot of them for you in-fact I should stop now before I spoil anything more for you, this is the kind of game that no video dose justice (but there'll still be a video at the bottom for you to check out) and you really should discover for yourself...in a dark room...alone. Seriously, I know it's a multi-player game, and no doubt there is a lot of fun in playing online, but you should play level one in single player just to enjoy the scary feel of the game before it's spoilt by some knob who only cares about their game-score stealing all your kills and running though bits that if you haven't played before, you'll be crawling inch by inch though in fear of zombie-rape.

Good Game, Give it a Go!

Been A While...

Wow, almost a week without updates. Sorry about that, was ill Monday till yesterday and had work which I'm still getting used too so I was knackerd every night but now the weekend is here! I just need to get my room to a slightly respectable state, move my Xbox 360 up to my TV and get it connected to the net and wehay I can get the Left4Dead, Mirrors Edge and Banjo Kazooy demos! :-D That should give me a little to write about.

I can't promise that means updates ahoy because I have a knack for losing motivation 3 paragraphs into a post (It took me 2 days to finish the Dead Set post...don't know why).

So, I just finished watching E4's Dead Set, now I must admit I didn't know about this show till a few days ago when two of my friends were talking about it, I was totally confused and spent about 5 minutes trying to work out what the hell they were talking about and how much crack they'd smoked. Anyway, soon after I popped down to HMV and found the DVD, the moment I saw the E4 logo I died a little inside but decided to give into the peer pressure thought "if everyone else has seen it I have too!"...now this is unlike me because everyone has seen Skins but I would rather be fiddled by Garry Glitter than watch that televised abortion. Anyway, tonight with the encouragement of my house-mate I finally settled down and watched all 5 episodes of Dead Set back to back, I've got to admit E4 have managed to do something right!

If your from anywhere outside of the UK although the show might still appeal to you if you like zombies and so on, you wont get ANY of the references like Divina McCall, the genuine Big Brother "stars", and this years UK Big Brother House.

So, what's the show about? Well as I've mentioned so far, Big Brother and Zombies. The plot follows the survival of a group of staff and contestants from Big Brother at the dawn of a Zombie Apocalypse, which I'm surprised NO ONE has done before, I mean we've all thought about the concept of the house-mates being stuck in the house and so on, about time someone actually did it. Anyway, the story feels very much like it drew all it's inspiration from the 'of the Dead' series, which of course is a good thing because they are the 'how do to a Zombie right' of the movie world. Of course the plot it's self is pretty slim, and to explain any of the sub-plot would mean giving away spoilers which I'd like not to do, but all in all it's a good foundation for some more British Zombie movies above the humorous tone of Shawn of the Dead.

Of course there are some down sides. While all of the actors play their roles well, it feels like the 'bad guy' of the story was a bit beyond belief which is a same because most of the other characters felt real and at worst a little exaggerated. There is also the issue of a lot left untouched. I mean some of the characters seem to act as if there is a tone of background story to them but you never get to see it, also the Zombie outbreak is never explained, nor is it really looked into much. There is an odd moment in the show where on the radios people start picking up a french repeating broadcast, the only world any of them can translate is something like "shelter", they never translate the rest or even bring the whole thing up again for the rest of the show, I'd like to know more about the world outside this one show, but although I complain as if this is a bad thing it is also a good thing because the world the story is based in leaves so many questions unanswered it screams out for a spin-off show of some sort and I really hope they listen to the screams and make it because the writing and production value of the show were both top notch and beyond anything I've seen on E4 in a looooong time.

So, interested in watching the show? There are probably torrents out there for the whole thing but of course I can't condone the use of illegal downloads, one thing worth checking is 4oD, I don't use it so I don't know if it's on there but give it a check out, if not you can always buy the DVD. If your a Zombie fan I REALLY recommend this, it's VASTLY better than the horrible piece of crap known as Diary of the Dead.

Ooo, I say! Some news! Well I Never!

No, nothing about Obama and the U.S Presidency, I'm from the UK, I'm happy to say I don't entirely care so long as he stops America fucking up the world for the rest of us.

No, this news is Den based. As you may have spotted there is now a picture of poo on the right hand side of the site...why? Because I'm currently trying to fiddle the site to make it more, I don't know, human? I mean I've been churning out posts but I get the feeling with each post I'm typing as if I'm a wannabe editor, not just some guy posting on a blog. This place is my little corner of the Internet and I feel it should reflect me a little more, hell, some people might even wanna know a little about the moaning git behind the last 41 posts.

I might fuck up and the whole site will go down, me and HTML have a weird relationship which normally results in a lot of stuff being deleted and me shouting at my screen then crying on my keyboard, so brace yourself for a bit of a choppy time with the Den.

So, what have I done so far?

• WikiPedia
  I've added a little plug-in to my Live Writer so that I can link and word to the world wide wiki for you guys to get a little more info with the click of a link, this will help when I go off on rants about stuff people don't know or care too much about but their curious to understand. It also makes the site look kinda intelligent...kinda.

• Profile
  That picture of poo is not just there for fancy decoration, no, it's the start of a small profile about me which I'm still writing up. Yup it's one of those god awful favourite movie?' kinda profiles but I can't be arsed to write up one less run of the mill.

• :-)'s
  As you may have seen in the last post I've removed the :-)'s and the :-('s and instead use and although I don't like the way these stick out and look kinda odd based on the style of the site so expect them to go by the time I'm done editing unless I can fix the black space around them.

• Topics
  I love video-games, that's been an obvious theme though my blog for a while, but I feel I'm tight casting myself to being a guy who moans about games which feels far too restricting for me so as you no doubt noticed (if you red) my last post was music based, I intend to also post on news topics as they pop up and I quite fancy going back to my old ways of ripping apart movies in the same fashion I moan about games.

• Packing Up & Moving
  This isn't set in stone but I'm thinking about when I get my new web-site setup moving the blog into the hosting there, although I've become quite settled into my little spot on Blogger so I might keep the Den open as my little hide away from my site, expect some shameless self promotion though.

• Art
  When I started the Den I had hopes of starting a small gallery on here, then losing motivation I had plans to bring my Deviant Art account back to life, but as anyone who's clicked the link knows that's gone about as well as brain surgery with a brick. I'm hoping to inject a little more art into the blog soon, I can't class myself as a wannabe comic artist and general artist if I don't show my workings. Speaking of which Zom-B isn't dead yet, but A4e and the Charity Shop are taking up most of my time so I'm gonna pick it back up probably in February.

So there you go, a wall of text which is no doubt tl;dr but if you did read it I hope all these updates give you a warm feeling in your belly...because if they didn't give you that feeling, then you might have stomach cancer...might wanna get that checked...

<3

Fridays here, let the weekend begin!

So, not been an update in a little while, sorry been bogged down with A4e's new training course and working in a Charity Shop. Now though the weekend is here and I get 2 days of relaxation, late nights, too many computer games, and wishing I had a social life Joy For All!

Anyway, beyond Fallout 3 I don't really have anything new thanks to my money being shit right now so I can't promise a lot of updates over the weekend but I'll try my best to bring you a few. In the mean time here's something to give a listen too, I've mentioned the band Sigur Ros before, an Icelandic band who specialise in ambient and beautiful music which they believe musically shows the beauty of Iceland, and although I haven't seen Iceland I can believe them. These guys are the inspirational music I stick on when I'm drawing, writing, or playing a challenging game of Solitaire (and have gotten me out of a few scrapes in Minesweeper too!) so if your looking for some music to get you into an artistic mood I'd recommend giving the play-list below a listen.

Before I embedded a song by Sigur Ros but this time I'm going to embed a collection of my favourite and what I think are their most defining songs in one, give them a listen if you have 5 minutes and pick up one of their albums if you've got some spare cash

Enjoy, I did:

5 Reasons To Get Fallout 3...

So, I've been playing Fallout 3 the last few days, I've got to say although I HATE it when people over hype a game cause there is no way it lives up to expectations, when it comes to Fallout 3, seriously, I'm not saying it's perfection, but it's the best game of it's kind. So, instead of reviewing the game seeing as every site on the net already has or will have a review up soon, I thought I'd just list a few things I've noticed which I think combined warrant anyone taking a look at the game.

NOTE: I played the game on Xbox 360, I've heard nothing but bad mumbles about the PS3 version so nothing I say below should be applied if you only own a PS3, although the PC version apparently runs just as well as the 360 one.

1. Battle System
I'm the kind of person who doesn't like change in my games. I mean I like new game mechanics but I like them in new games, I don't like it when an old series tries something too new (Final Fantasy XII). Due to this personal stance on change I was a bit nervous of Fallout 3 because the original 2 were VERY different (top down 2D rogue-like games with turn based action) from the new one which uses a real time first person shooter system with your character stats effecting your hit/miss ratio as well as effecting the V.A.T.S (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System), but oddly it works and as you level up as your hits are more well aimed you feel you've truly improved which is quite hard for a first-person shooter to pull off. The battle engine comes into it's own though with the V.A.T.S, I can't really explain it very well, so I'll just say, LOOK!:

2. Visuals
Know when you play a game that's really going for beauty you can see amazing views in the distance and you think 'wow' but really you know their just impressive textures you'll never get to actually explore? In Fallout 3 there are endless times when you'll see something miles away and think 'wow' and then get to run up to it and explore it and find awesome stuff! And some of the structures in the game are beautiful, I mean even factories look amazing standing on top of a hill in the dark only lit by the moon. It truly is a beautiful game but in a grim way because it truly gets across the feeling of a depressing world after a nuclear Armageddon.

3. Humour
As you no doubt know by now the game is set in a future where the a-bombs were dropped, almost everyone is dead, and anyone out side of vaults lives in shit holes and there is no sign of humanity repairing what's happened ever 200 years after the war. Oddly though the game still manages to be funny in such a grim world, but at the same time they've used the right amount of humour so that it doesn't take away from the feel of the game, but also not so little that the game depresses you.

4. Play it YOUR way!
With so many titles out these days that offer open ended worlds with a story you can take or leave and make your own adventure this sounds like a run of the mill thing to point out as a plus, but name me one game that did it well? Oblivion kinda, but a lot of the quests felt a bit boring and with little reward, and they just felt like quests disconnected from the game world, when you finished one people wouldn't talk about you and what you'd done or anything. Fallout 3 changes that. I mean I've been playing for 3 days and done hardly ANY of the games main story, but though sub-quests and so on I've done some world changing things, and not only do I see the effect in the form of peoples reactions to me (do evil things and people fear you or treat you like crap) but also though the radio stations where news stories follow my every move telling people what I've done, encouraging people to treat me good or bad based on my actions. Also though sub-quests I've changed the face of the game. Any fan of the game will have heard the example where you get to pick weather to blow up a town or keep it, well this isn't a main plot device, no, this is a sub-quest that actually effects the face of the game world, which makes quests feel so much better than other games.

5. Messy Fun
About an hour before writing this I went into Rivet City, bought 30 hand grenades and went hunting in the city for super mutants. Trust me there is nothing quite as beautiful as using the V.A.T.S with grenades and perk which causes every death to be messy...true art if ever I saw it.

So, there you go :-D now I'm back off to play my game one last time before I start a Job Centre course tomorrow...joy...pure...fucking...joy.

I'm Not Dead!

Hey just a quick post to say I'm NOT dead :-D

I'm currently hooked on Fallout 3 which I swapped Fable 2 for after one too many fuck ups and no sign of a fix before Xmas.

I'll try to post tomorrow with a mini-review of the game otherwise some kind of random thrown together 'Top 5' list of something or other to keep the site from gathering too much dust while I'm hooked on Fallout 3 ^_^

<3