GH: Aerosmith it ain't

Either you like their music or you don’t. That’s kind of the theme of this game. If you like Metallica, then you’re guaranteed a solidly built game that will probably constantly get dragged out for a bit an afternoon thrash. If you don’t like Metallica, but enjoy Guitar Hero, then this game is great fun for super fast licks and chunky, heavy chord progressions. If you don’t like Metallica, or Guitar Hero, well I’m not sure why you’re even looking at this page. Seriously, why? A friend put you up to it? What a jerk. You should tumble dry all their cotton t-shirts.

I love Metallica, one of the more favourable byproducts of growing up with a metal-head brother. And you have to admire (if nothing else) the band’s knowledge of their fans. This game is built for Metallica fans. Need proof? Check the track listing:

• Total number of Metallica songs: 28
• Songs from questionably received albums released after “Load“: About 5 or so

This game is for the fans of classic Metallica tunes, Black Album and earlier pretty much. The selection is fantastic. They probably couldn’t release a Best Of collection that does as much justice to their earlier work. (more…)

Metaphorically, of course

As it turns out, only a day after complaining about how long it was taking online, Rock Band 2 arrived in my mailbox today. I haven’t had a solid chance to give it a spin yet (I have a previous engagement at a Mexican restraunt to get quite drunk tonight), I’ll be sure to give you my impressions soon.

Mark also promises to get in on the action.

For now all I can tell you is that the game runs fine on an Australian system, and Xbox Live has no problems recognising the disc. My original Rock Band tracks exported just fine (after the 400MP licencing fee), no problems there. So if any of you fine Australians were wondering if it was a feasable option or not, I can say it is.

My only real problem now lies in the fact that Guitar Hero: Metallica is due for pick-up tomorrow. And while I’m at the games shop I’ll probably end up buying something else (pays to be efficient, you know!) to try out. But it looks like it’ll be a stint of music games for the next little while.

Oh well, what are days off work for? I just hope Infinite Undiscovery gets my apology note for having consistently put it aside.

Some time ago it begain plain to Australian gamers that EA Music and MTV Games doesn’t really have much ambition when it comes to our wide brown land. Harmonix’s superbly crafted music game Rock Band was released way back in the mists of yester-year, or the end of 2007 to be more precise, in the US. It then took around a year for a higgelty-piggelty release to reach Australia, and even then it would be with limited stock.

This came as an upset to some, as after getting their hands on the game it could be said that Harmonix had obviously been the inventive half of the team in the early Guitar Hero games. Rock Band took the basics of Guitar Hero and built interesting, useful variations to improve on the basic formula. Some variations, I might add, that Guitar Hero is only just getting around to copying (if the slowly filling star ranking gauge in GH: Metallica is anything to go by).

(more…)

As a long time fan of the Guitar Hero/Rock Band franchises, I dutifully pre-ordered my copy of Guitar Hero: Metallica yesterday so I can be playing it as soon as possible. I love Metallica’s music, so I’m looking forward to what the demo presented as quite a compitent addition to the Guitar Hero series. Rock Band: The Beatles is also slated for release this year, and I’ll probably grab that too. Adding to the already published RB: AC/DC Live and GH: Aerosmith, it’s obvious that publishers have found a new, cheap and easy way of expanding their music titles (even though some may argue that the quality of a music release is often in it’s range of different musical tastes).

Band tie-in games are obviously an untapped gold mine for developers, and to prove my point, I give to you 8 band branded music games that I’m sure we’d all like to see: (more…)

Even Hello Kitty thought this design was cutesy

On starting this site there were a few games that I figured I’d drag back out of my collection to review, if simply because, at the time, they actually managed to have enough of an effect on the frontal lobes to warrant a mention.

Eternal Sonata is one such game. I purchased it originally while looking for some extra RPG titles for the 360. The cover looks a bit kidsy and the story is beyond the ability of a short blurb to encapsulate, but it was cheap and definately an RPG, so I bought it. The other deciding factor was that the game advertises co-op (more on that later), so I figured it’d be good for a laugh. It turns out to be one of the strangest little titles I’ve seen in a long time, and with an oddly mature theme for a game soaked in a cutesy-manga visuals.

OK, where to start on the plot on this one…

This game’s world is set (perhaps, the game could get a bit metaphysical on this one) in the dreams of 19th century classical composer Frederic Francois Chopin. In the “real world” he’s on his death bed, being watched over by his mother, his sister and a doctor.

(more…)

Man up Matthew, don’t let the readers see you cry …

True to my word, I went out trawling today after work to find myself some Thief.  It didn’t actually prove as difficult as I perhaps thought it would have been.  The very first store I wandered into had a double-DVD pack of both Thief 2 and Deadly Shadows. And sure enough, it’s only $20AU.

“Splendid!” I think, “A pity they don’t have Thief: Gold, but this will suit me admirably” (apparently I’m more verbose in my thoughts than I am in real life)

So I get home, slide the laptop out and get to installing Thief 2 (I played Deadly Shadows a while back, so I thought I’d begin with 2).  Installation’s fine, up and running in no time.  Let’s start …

… Huh, that’s odd, where was the intro video? Strange.  Oh well, the menu is up, I’ll start the game …

… OK, now the mission brief doesn’t play and I’m skipped right to the start of the mission.  Something must be wrong with the FMV. Oh well, I’ll fix it later, for now let’s go for a …

… System freeze, eh?

And thus it goes.  Perhaps I should have done a little internet trawling before game trawling, because as I now find out, getting Thief 1 or 2 to work on a modern computer is a challenge.  A challenge requiring the patience of a stone and the luck of the devil.

After repeated re-installations, patches, 3rd party patches, driver upgrades, driver downgrades, several very nice similarly minded FAQs and a compatibility test, I’m now fairly certain that I’m doomed not to play Thief 2.  At least, not on this computer, or not without some basic HEX editing.  The best setup I could arrive at so far was a working game, no FMV, and undithered textures.  Which means that even if I run that set-up, all the textures are going to look 8-bit and gamma adjustment isn’t going to help the shadows.  The shadows being, you know, where you’re supposed to spend the whole game.

Still, it shows the dedication of the fans of these games that there is such an abundance of FAQ material out there, suggesting fixes and even making their own patches.  There was even a patch to make Thief 2 widescreen, which looked like an impressive endeavour.

Oh well, Deadly Shadows does work on a modern system, but it irks me to think that I now own one of the original games and I can’t play it because my workstation laptop is too advanced! *sigh*

As a highly informal introduction to the topic I’m about to cover, I’ll simply say:

New Thief game on the way, son! God daymn!

Eidos Montreal officially announced on the 11th (after playing the making it fairly obvious game for a while) that another installment in the Thief series is about to begin production.

Now those who know my style of gameplay will know that I’m a completionist at heart. Nothing drives the wife crazier than to sit next to me while playing an RPG, because to watch me means that the story runs at a snails pace as I proceed to poke around all corners of a given area hoping to find bonus items, chests, content or whatever. To create an of example, my style of play kind of runs thusly:

“Quickly Player Character, the volcano has exploded and we must flee down this mountain as fast as we can!”
“Certainly! Let me first just check that we didn’t accidentally miss something right in front of the lava flow!”

And you’d be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t, who am I, John Edwards?) to find out how many games actually let you get away with that. So for me, playing a game is mostly about thoroughly exploring as much as possible of the world a game creates. And if it’s an Xbox game, unlocking as many achievements as possible (like the achievement whore I am). (more…)

Howdy all, and welcome to Armchair Diplomat! The site really is still in development, but we’re opening it up for the public to have at it for the time being.

We’re still tinkering with the site, so the finished product will probably end up looking a lot different. Amongst the things we’re going to be altering will be:

• Segmenting up the site into four catagories, Matt’s Blog, Mark’s Blog, Articles and Site News.
• The article page will be an open planned archive of all our content
• Basic user profiles and customisation for comments
• More AD manga artwork provided by our friend Bone
• A site-unique review rating method

In the meantime, all our content will be posting traditional “blog style” into our home-page. So if you’re on the site in the next few weeks and notice things going wrong or strange things cropping up, it’s probably just myself or Mark tinkering around with the code. We’ll try to post to let you know when this is happening too.

At the moment you might notice that it’s mostly me posting. This is because as far as site development goes, Mark is the experienced coder, and so gets lumped with the job of straightening out the site the way we want it. So for the time being, he might be a bit pre-occupied.

Leave your thoughts and suggestions inside the comments page or you can drop an email to either me or Mark. You can follow us on Twitter, and our account will automatically let you know when new content arrives. You can also share any post you like around whatever social media you may be involved with by using the share widgets at the bottom of each post.

Enjoy the site, and expect to see a fair few alterations over the next fortnight!
-Matt

Maybe it’s my 90′s upbringing, but the mind boggles at technology sometimes.  What technology you ask? Is it the various advances in medical science?  The steady advance in robotics that will one day gain self-awareness and kill us all?

No, frankly I’m slightly amazed, outraged and impressed all at once by the fact that you can now play Quake 3 Arena in your browser.

Good Beta Best!

Quake Live brings for free what used to be the cutting edge of FPS, and with seemingly no real drain on your computers resources.  This was the game that used to be first choice of LAN events across the country in the new millenium.  Times were that your computer may actually struggle to run a game as resource heavy as Quake 3 (may you burn in hell, Pentium 2!), and to get a decent game going you better have been ready to use all 56k of your dial-up modem.

Well crack open a Jolt Cola, because now you can play it as a browser plug-in with hundreds of other players online. And even poor little old shaped me can get a decent connection.  It also supports friend lists and clans, so everyone can their dusty tags back out for an airing.

Which gets me to wondering if we’re at this level of technology now, what other great multiplayer games (that I probably still have mouldering away on CD-Rom) could now be played in browser? Unreal Tournament? BattleZone 2? Team Fortress Classic? Starsiege: Tribes? It would appear the options really are only limited by their respective copyright owners.

I’m also interested to find out if the eventual product will include a few of the classic Q3 mods.  It’s been quite a while since I engaged in a bit of Rocket Arena.

Anyway, those interested in a little nostalgia for no extra cost, come notch up a few humiliation kills with (or on, more likely) me.  Registration and installation times are minimal and there always seems to be an active game going on somewhere online.

GG everyone …

Here’s a series of one line summaries about the new Star Trek:

• It’s hard to imagine a more brilliant cast cast of dazzling actors to really make this story shine out brightly in the Star Trek universe.
• At a time where some movies can be a little hard on the eyes, the new Star Trek really provides a very polished production for the viewer.
• It has our nostalgia glands ablaze.
• That said, newcomers to the franchise will find this movie illuminating without overwhelming them with glaring references to the previous shows.
• It’s obvious that J.J. Abrams and crew have gone all out to provide a very glossy movie experience.
• The dialogue left me with a big beaming smile on my face.
• Abrams really showed off his creative flare (spelling deliberate) in this film.

If you noticed the constant element amongst the previous statements, you’ve also managed to notice the element which impeded my enjoyment of this film. (more…)