Gears of War has a great little feature whereby you can upload your screenshots taken from within the game. They get uploaded to the gears website, and you can login and download them. A lot of the quality seems to be lost when you have them on your PC, possibly due to compression, or maybe just most PCs run at a higher resolution than TVs. Anyway, does anyone have a killer screenshot they would like to share?
Man this is frustrating. The best thing about Street fighter 2 was always kicking the arse out of someone, and measuring yourself against your peers. Well it seems there’s a massive bug with the leaderboard system on the XBLA version of this game. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been playing a lot of ranked matched and I haven’t moved at all in the ranking system. The guy above me has a much worst record than I do (1 loss and 0 wins compared to my 64 wins and 52 losses) so this is pretty annoying. Apparently a guy who only played one game and lost it is better than me, even though I win the majority of games I play.
Mildly frustrating admittedly, but it does take away the point of having a leaderboard. When will they fix it? My guess is never as the bug is not well known. When I tell my friends about it they tell me I just haven’t played enough games, even though I try and explain the details.
This happened to me and I did loads of Google searching trying to find a solution. In the end, the answer was just silly. My sister lives in France, and I’m over here in the UK so when I heard that she got an Xbox 360 I was very happy as I rarely get a chance to speak to her. Xbox Live seems like a great free way to talk. The only problem was that I could talk to everyone else except her. I did loads of router configuring and port forwarding stuff in an attempt to get this sorted, but nothing seemed to work. Many conversations were done using a mutual XBL friend who would act as a relay. Obviously this wasn’t ideal.
One evening, one such friend asked my sister to check her settings to see if she had accidentally muted me. She said that she had already checked that. We asked her to check again, just to make sure. Guess what? Yes, that’s right, she had indeed muted me. So for the last 3 months I have been pulling my hair out trying to find a solution only to find out that it was a simple case of human error. I find the whole thing quite funny now. I would say to anyone suffering with this problem to make sure both parties check their mute settings, and also make sure that they have not given each other negative feedback.
There are some amazing games that often get overlooked by many people. Perhaps, many are playing too much poker online or are so engulfed with RPG games that they forget that there are other quality games out there. Looking at my friends list, I often notice that when a new game is released the majority of people rush out to buy it impulsively. What they forget is that there are a load of classics that are far superior. Here is my list in no particular order.
Dead or Alive 4.
My Score: 9.4
Comments: Great fighter with an amazing online system. One day I will get a An rank and keep it! I used to sit up until the earlier hours of the morning playing this classic Xbox 360 game.
Halo 3
My Score: 9.2
Comments: Well the odds are that you have this game already, but if you don’t then you should be asking yourself why it’s so popular. Ok, it’s a bit old now compared to say Gears of War 2, but it set the benchmark for online FPS games. Halo 3 is still popular so getting a copy for £15 is tricky, but not impossible.
Fight Night Round 3
My Score: 8.9
Comments: You can pick this game up for £10 in many shops. Its a great boxing game with fab graphics. You really feel like you are there in the ring.
Pro Evo Soccer 6 (AKA Winning Eleven in the US)
My Score 8.5
Comments: ok, now this is old, I know, and you could say the later version of the game are better. Me personally I love playing Fifa 09 right now, so why recommend this game? Because you can buy it for £5! it’s a great way of finding out if you like soccer games.
Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (XBLA)
My Score 9.0
Comments: I love this game. I loved the original. It’s street fighter, online, what more needs to be said? I guess I could mention it costs 1200 points to buy which isn’t bad considering you can download it straight to your hard drive.
I received this game at Christmas after reading many glowing reviews about it. IGN gave the game a whopping 9.4 out of 10 score with Gamespot following not too far behind with a healthy 8.0. I should have remembered not to trust any website that would give Grand Theft Auto a perfect 10 – sure it’s a good game, but let’s be honest, they both got a little excited over that one. Anyway, that’s another story.
I have heard the new Prince of Persia game being compared to a jar of Marmite: you either love it or you hate it. For those of you that don’t know what Marmite is, it’s a yeast based spread that looks like poo but tastes surprisingly good, although rather salty. I think the analogy works best in reverse – this game looks fantastic but there is no depth to it, it plays like poo. After you have been wooed by the lovely visuals there really is not much left to do. Jump. Jump. Jump again. Avoid some black goo stuff. Jump. Fight a predictable boss, then more jumping. Sound familiar? Mario used the same formula, but it has to be said that all of the Mario games were much more fun and satisfying than this one.
Another major problem with this game is the fact that there is no learning curve. The game does not get progressively harder and so you do not feel like you have achieved anything. If you can beat the first level you can beat the last one (although I still have yet to beat the game out of sheer boredom and frustration).
You cannot die on this game. That’s right – you don’t die, well it never happened to me even though I did try. You see, the whole point of the original Prince of Persia game, and in fact the following incarnations, was to avoid falling to your death by jumping about over platforms. If you take away the ability to die then there is no challenge as it just doesn’t matter how careful or skilled you are with jumping, it’s just a matter of time before you manage to get across. A monkey could do it. Oh, by the way, the reason you don’t die is because Annika, your annoying American sounding side-kick will use magic powers to stop you falling…
There is no multilayer or additional game modes to save this game. You just jump about.
All in all I would say that it’s best to avoid this game. Some people think it’s great, but I have no idea why. The game does boast beautifully rendered graphics based on the the Assassin’s Creed engine, but it is nowhere near as good a game. I have the special tinned edition of this game, which you would think has a lot of extra goodies inside it, but instead you can download a single extra skin (which makes you look like an Assassin), but only after registering with Ubisoft. Waste of time.
