Halo 2

Been revisiting this game over the last couple of days, played a few games on live with a few of my old chums and it really brought back some great memories. It hasn't been too long since it's release really, only a couple of years, but it had all but vanished from my mind. I played Halo 2 with my sixth form mates for a good few solid months online, but after that I lost interest as I usually do with games.

It seems different though, I've gotten so used to keyboards and mice for FPS games now (I only got a PC capable of playing 3D games a while after Halo 2 was released), and everyone else seems a lot better. I'm not one to brag, but I was pretty damn good at Halo, got to around level 15 (yeah I know, not that high) before I kind of lost interest in the game, and then all the stats got reset at some point. But at that level, I was doing pretty well and was making my way up. Now however, it seems like the levels are pretty much the same, I played with a few level 30's with my friend in a game of team slayer, the guys I was fighting in rumble pit seemed roughly the same skill level, and they were all around level 5. I'm finding it a lot harder now, a combination of me finding an analogue stick now completely alien to me, and the lower level players seem to be more skilled that they were at the start.

I also don't really like the selection of games anymore, I really enjoyed objective games, like CTF on Zanzibar. Most games now however tend to be generic variant ## of slayer, there was nothing I liked more than 1 flag CTF on big, asymmetrical maps, but now that seems to have disappeared. I'm still finding it fun and frustrating as before, but unfortunately less fun and more frustration.

I also remember the great fun I had playing Halo into the small hours with a group of really great mates round, now I remember it, I really miss those good old days, and wish I'd made more of them. Damn I sound like an old fart.

Catan

A new XBLA game, called Catan was released on wednesday, it's based on a hugely successful board game from Germany called the Settlers of Catan. At 800 points it's a steal IMO, I've not played the board game personally, but I've seen it being played, and it always interested me, so I snapped it up when it became available on xbox live in the morning. It has become probably my favourite of all my XBLA games, there are a few games I really enjoy, like RoboBlitz, Texas Hold 'em and UNO, but none of these compare to the addiction I have with Catan.

A little bit about the game, as I said, it's based on a hugely popular board game, in fact, one of the most popular board games. Forget what you know about other board games, this is nothing like the board games you may have played, like Monopoly or Cluedo. In many European board games, instead of having a fixed board like you do in most British and American board games, the board comes in many, usually hexagonal, pieces and fits together to make the board you play on. In some games, like another popular one, Carcassonne, the foundation of the game is laying these tiles in a fashion similar to a dominoes game. Other games, like Catan, the tiles are laid at random at the start of the game, this creates a unique board every time you play, giving added depth to the game.

The board is made up of 19 hexagonal tiles arranged to make an even larger hexagon. This large hexagon is Catan, an imaginary island that you and your opponents must race to colonise. The winner is the player who reaches a set amount of victory points (VP) first. There are a number of ways to earn VP, the most basic is constructing settlements. Each tile on the board represents a natural resource, there are five different types, Wood, Brick, Wool, Wheat and Ore, on the board there is also one desert tile. You begin the game with two settlements, settlements are placed on the corners on the hexagons, and have to be placed at least two corners apart, so you can fit a maximum of three settlements around one tile. At the start of each players turn, they roll two dice and add the values together, each tile has a number value between 2 and 12 (but there are not tiles numbered 7), if say, you roll a 9 at the start of your turn, all tiles with a 9 on produce resources in that turn, and give one resource card to each settlement placed on it. Players can then use these card to build various things, like settlements and roads. Obviously, some numbers come up more often than others, so it's a good idea to have settlements located next to tiles that have a number with a high probability of turning up. On a roll of 7, the 'robber' is activated, the robber starts the game on the desert tile, anyone with 8 or more cards in hand will have to discard half of them when a 7 is rolled, and whoever rolled the 7 can then move the robber to a different tile. This has two effects, it stops any production of resources on that tile while the robber is present, and you can then steal a single resource card from one player who has a settlement present on that tile.

Since it's likely that no player will be able to regularly receive all five resources, trade of these resource cards between players in a big part of this game, and add another layer of strategy. Need stone to build a road, but the only player willing to trade is close to winning? Do you risk the trade that might get him closer to victory, or do you hold off for a lucky die roll? Then theres the opposite, have you got cards in hand that could put you only a few points from victory, but do you use them now? If so, your opponents will be hesitant to trade with you, if you keep hold of them, you risk losing half on the roll of a 7.

As you can see, Catan is anything but a simple board game, that being said, it's quite easy to pick up and play, especially on the 360, since lots of useful information is only a trigger pull away. The basics of the game are very easy to get your head around, but learning all the strategies is another thing.

So if you don't have it, I urge you to try it out, it's only 800 points which is a real bargain in my opinion. The free trial has also been released, it was delayed due to some bugs or something.

C&C3 vs. SupCom Redux

I'm bored and I've decided it's about time I updated my blog, don't know why really but oh well. It will also be a test of my sanity, since this damn connection is going very slow.

I've now managed to grab copies of both C&C3 and SupCom, and I've decided, I prefer C&C3. This, however, is based solely on single player experience, this is due to the fact I don't play multiplayer RTS because I suck balls, really big balls and I suck them hard.

The single player campaign on C&C3 was fantastic, I played through all the campaigns, GDI, NOD and the extra Scrin missions, and I was throughly entertained by the entire experience, but now I've finished that, it's been put away. SupCom, I didn't even bother completing one campaign, SupCom is a multiplayer game at it's heart. I'm sure I could learn to love playing this game online, but I really can't be bothered, it's not worth the effort to learn how to play IMO. The thing I don't like about SupCom, is how long it takes to play a game, it takes far too long to tech up for my liking. I know it can be done very quickly with the right amount of engineers and a good supply chain, but that takes far too much management for my liking. I also don't like how similar the sides are, when I say similar, I mean exactly the same. Well not really, but on the surface, they have pretty much identical units, and it's only really the aesthetics and super units that are significantly different. If you're a SupCom vet, I'm sure you can tell me the differences, since I bet there are subtle ones, but each army doesn't really feel like it's different from the others. With C&C3, the armies are significantly different, yes, they all have stuff like anti-infantry and anti-tank troops, but the units can be radically different. GDI is all about brute strength, with it's mammoth tanks with rail guns, NOD is all about stealth and sneak attacks, with their very fragile, but fast (and sometimes invisible) units.

But alas, all that talk is wasted, 'cos CoH absolutely prawns both games, now that is a game I don't mind learning to play online, it is one of the best RTS games ever made.

But anyway, I've picked up Dead Rising again so I need to go and see what happens when Frank turns into a zombie, hes covered wars y'know.

Supreme Commander vs. C&C3

Had Supreme Commander for a few days now, only played the single player campaign so far, but I'm impressed, not as impressed as I'd hoped I would, but I can still see it's a great game.

The problem with it, it's it's just too epic, the games take a really long time to play out, sure you can increase build speed by making engineers help structures churn out units faster, but to get it going really quick, you need a very good resource supply chain, which takes a long time to set up.

I've also recently played the C&C demo, and quite frankly, I love it, back to good old C&C gameplay and style, but with a few needed improvements. They've finally added squad based controls, while not as great as the ones you got in DoW and CoH where you could customise the squads for almost any purpose, those games were infantry game at their heart. C&C is a vehicle game really, it's about smooshing your enemy with the biggest tanks you can build. So while the squad based gameplay would seem like a good idea, they made a good decision to not make it too much in-depth like DoW and CoH, since C&C isn't about levels of micromanagement like that, but by doing so, they've kind of made the system pointless. From what I could tell, you couldn't re-enforce units when they take losses, upgrades you give them are global to all squads, so all it really makes it, is back to square one. Single man production, but instead of that single man looking like a...single man, it's a group of men, so all they've really done is changed the aesthetics of the game, they haven't really ended up adding any extra functionality with this feature as far as I can see. I'm not saying this is bad though, I do prefer it, but it just seems like they're going to be fooling a lot of people with this.

I haven't really played the game a lot, I played the prologue, saw that it was back to good old C&C, and then uninstalled the demo, I don't want no spoilorz! What I really like, is the speed of the game, it's fast, faster than ever before, harvesters work quicker, meaning supply of resources isn't such a large deal as it was before, and theres less waiting around for cash to come it to build stuff. The graphics are very nice, people have been complaining that they're rubbish, I think they're great, especially since it's the same engine as generals, people have just seemed to got it into their heads that if a new release doesn't have the best graphics seen so far then it's not worth playing. The graphics are no worse than CoH IMO, so I'm not sure why people are making so much of a fuss.

Random link

This post on kotaku really made my day today, cracked me right up. Completely forgotten about the awesomeness of Bananaman until I read this XD

Crawled out from my cave

Well it's the day I'd thought I'd never see, I've crawled out from my dark, damp cave and have decided to make my very own blog and embrace this new Web 2.0 malarkey that these young'un's seem to like. I thought, "Hey, I like ranting about stuff, and sometimes when I'm trolling various forums, there just aren't enough threads for me to force my inverse logic and opinions upon people, so I'll make a blog and then no-one can escape! MUHAHAHAHA!" Or something along those lines at least. As with almost every blogger, I'll make a few posts, no-one will read it, and then I'll forget to update it for a bazillion years.

You never know, I could end up podcasting as well, I'm not quite sure what it is, but I heard it's quite popular all over the internets, and according to this guy, pod casting is about feeding apple pies to whales. That sounds cool to me, so I'm up for that.