This is possibly the most interesting toy I have bought in a while. I took a bit of a gamble buying it, unsure if it was a crappy gimmick, or something actually usable.

Turns out, with a good bit of practice, it’s probably going to be the latter. There’s a lot of fiddling involved to get it working, and a REAL LOT of practice just to get the hang of making it do anything meaningful at all, but after less than an hour of mucking about, I was able to play Unreal Tournament 3 with some semblance of competence.

Now, the above isn’t exactly a display of my finest moments playing an FPS - the bots are on Novice level, and I’m clearly jumping around randomally, killing myself with the occasional rocket, running into walls, and generally acting like a retarded rabbit. However, outside of using a mouse to move the camera, everything else - forward and backward movement, side stepping, jumping, main and alt weapon fire - is being achieved via micro-movements in my facial muscles. If you can’t be bothered watching all the way to the end, I managed 3rd place out of 6. I’ve actually placed 1st a couple of times, but of course I wasn’t recording those…

The future is coming, folks.

UPDATE [14/09/08]:

After a few more hours practice, it seems I am improving. The below video is from this morning - a win, including 2 Killing Sprees, on the Shangri La map. I’m still fighting Novice bots, and I still have a bit of trouble at times, but I do feel I’m improving. As before, I’m using the mouse to aim, but everything else is via the NIA.

I have a Zhevra!

It’s totally raining MMO beta keys at our place right now.

I wonder what’s next?

Seems I got invited to the Round 3 Closed Beta for Age of Reckoning.

That was unexpected. The only reason I have a beta-center account was because I entered my Open Beta key from Preorder.

It’s all NDA’d and such, so there wont be any exciting news here about it, but I’m looking forward to trying to crash the client. :)

So, once I got over the “rhythm games are silly” phase of my life - thanks to Guitar Hero 3 - I have opened myself up to a whole new range of gaming.

Unfortunately, most of it is crap, but I have found something quite wonderful. Called Audio Surf, it’s a rhythm-game influenced “puzzle racer” apparently. No, I hadn’t heard of puzzle racers before either, but think a “match 3 colours” game combined with.. racing. yeah. something like that.

The real beauty of the whole thing though, is that you supply your own music - in any of a number of formats - and the game makes the track to suit the music. And make the track to suit the music, it most certainly does.

The speed of movement, the placement of the blocks, the amazing background visuals, everything is perfectly timed to the tempo and intensity of the music.

I tried a number of artists and genres, and the results were all entirely pleasing, in one way or another.

KMFDM and Ultraviolence made for a fast and furious edge-of-your-seat freefall experience, whilst Brian Eno’s more  sedate Music for Airports 1/1 led to a suitably ambient ponderous game.

What really made it though, was playing the entirety of Blur’s Parklife album back to back. The resulting experience was a true rollercoaster of cheeky bouncing, upward meandering wonderment and downhill thrill-riding. Easily the most fun you can have with brit-pop without pills and a bad head in the morning.

All of this made better by the fact that the whole game only costs us$10 and you can download it over Steam. Happy days.

Ah, holidays. 2 weeks of not having to deal with customers. Good stuff.

To celebrate this event, we went and bought ourselves a PS3. Seemingly unnecessary, we justified a second console with the twin virtues of “it’s a cheap BluRay player” and “Metal Gear Solid 4” - the latter of which is a convincing argument all by itself even if it has been delayed *again*.

It came with Virtua Tennis 3 which is a steaming pile of turd, but we also picked up Folklore and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, both of which are awesome. The former is a quirky adventure in a Netherworld populated by odd little faery Folk, while the latter is a very competent Tomb Raider clone with some excellent ‘Cover and Fire’ shooting action thrown in, along with a rocking good storyline.

Speaking of which - the move toward solid story lines in games beyond “go kill the bad guys, quick!” is really making me a happy camper. Story lines are really getting involved, with intricate cutscenes drawing you into the game. Love it.

We also hired and completed Call of Duty 4 which again had an excellent story and was great fun to play through.

I’ve also been writing a good deal of music - more on that later.

So, rhythm games. I have to say, when it comes to this genre, I have never been a fan. DDR, Amplitude, In The Groove, and about a bazillion clones and homages - they just never struck me as “fun” and since “fun” is why I play games, they never really got much time in any of the various game machines I’ve owned.

This all changed a couple weeks back, when a demo of Guitar Hero III was released on XBoxLive. For some reason, I decided to give it a chance, and it really really grew on me. I’m now the proud owner of the retail version of the game, complete with a wireless Gibson Les Paul-alike controller. I should actually have two of these controllers, but that is a story for later.

Playing with the not-quite-a-guitar-but-almost controller makes the game even more fun. And while I am being forced, in Career Mode, to play some songs I would rather not [Stevie Ray Vaughn's 'Pride & Joy'? As an encore? REALLY??] there are also some tracks I love, including Dead Kennedys‘ Holiday in Cambodia and Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. Better still, I’m being exposed to good music I’d never heard before, including heard-of-but-never-heard Die Toten Hosen’s Hier Kommt Alex.

The difficulty ramping of the game is well done. Playing on Easy mode [I'm a wimp, shuddup] I found that it started as a complete doddle, but a few hours in, it’s gotten to the point where it’s obviously more difficult, but I’ve gotten better at about the same speed, so there’s a good feeling of “hey! look at me rock!” as I play more complicated note progressions and chords.

Now, if only I had that other controller, Chelle and I could be playing Co-op Career mode.

So, on the 25th of September, I dutifully rocked up at my local Game and bought Halo 3. The ‘limited edition’ steel case version, because She thinks they look better on the shelf.

I’m not sure what is so ‘limited edition’ about it - I didn’t have a pre-order, and the sales clerk looked a little befuddled when I suggested that asking if they had any left might be a stupid question.

Now, I haven’t had a lot of time to invest in Halo 3 yet , but what I have seen - a small amount of the solo campaign, and a couple hours of online Slayer - is quite enjoyable. I quite definitely intend to put in the effort required to complete the campaign, and I know from the ‘beta test’ that I’ll probably log a good lot of hours in online play, even if I do suck at it.

What I am having trouble fathoming is the Halo 3 hype-machine. Why is this game getting 100% reviews from most of the mainstream press? It’s a good game - a great one, even. But it’s not exactly ground-breaking. It is visually attractive, but certainly not as stunning as Gears of War or Bioshock. To call the gameplay ‘derivative’ would be an understatement. And while I haven’t seen enough of the story to give an accurate appraisal, I will certainly be surprised if it is a better story than Bioshock. I’m personally expecting something of about the calibre of Gears of War as far as Halo 3’s story is concerned.

I can’t help but feel that a lot of the reviewers awarded their 100% ratings before the game was even out of the packaging, mistaking ‘how badly I want to play this game’ for ‘how good this game actually is.’

Then we come to the ‘amazing’ ‘ground breaking’ ‘new’ features in Halo 3. Theatre, and Forge. Both excellently implemented, and both wonderfully suited to a game like Halo 3. But I am reading people in awe that the recording is done as a data file format, rather than a straight live camera video, like it’s a new idea. As if it isn’t the Way Things Have Been Done for god-knows-how-long, because a 5 mb data file of an entire match has significant performance and storage advantages over a 5gb video file of same.

I’m not bagging out Halo 3 here - it’s an excellent game, and I’m excited to find the time to play it properly. But no more excited than I am to find the time to play Stranglehold, nor than I was to play Gears of War; and not as much as I was to play Bioshock.

So why is this game selling hardware? Why are people swallowing everything the MS/Bungie hype-machine spews at them and having nerdgasms spontaneously as they respew the same hype back to eagerly awaiting others? Why is ‘Xbox 360 Exclusive “Halo 3â€? Registers Biggest Day in US Entertainment History with $170 Million in Sales’ an actual, real sentence?

It’s a good game, and I’m going to enjoy it, but the majority of the press I’m reading about it is just making me think BFW.

I’m glad the game is selling well - it deserves to. But there are plenty of other games that deserve to sell as well, if not better.

Update: I’ve now put a decent number of hours into Halo 3’s single player campaign, and everything I have said thus far holds true. Additionally, I am noticing something… When did reviewers decide it was a-okay to give 100% reviews to a game which stalls for 1 to 5 seconds while ‘loading’ part of a level? I’m not talking about a loading screen while I transition between areas, I’m talking “game freezes in place while I’m mid-step and ‘loading…’ appears in the bottom left corner” kinda thing. It’s doesn’t happen every time - sometimes the ‘loading…’ thing comes up and it is as seamless as I have come to expect from current games. But more often than not, it at least lags for a second, sometimes longer. It’s not game-breaking, but in a world-without-hype, it’d certainly rate a mention in a review, and at least a 1% rating loss.

100% awesome.

It’s shaping up to be an expensive month for gaming, with the next few months looking to be not much better.

Firstly, just around the corner we have Shadowrun -  a First Person Shooter based on the old p+p RPG that is seeing simultaneous release on PC and xb360, and cross-platform online play. Criticisms I’ve seen so far range from “no depth” through “no single player campaign” to “this is nothing like the old RPG” and similar sentiments.

The latter seems a bit dumb, since it’s not an RPG. If you don’t like shooters, you’re not going to like a shooter based on an old RPG any more than one based on anything else.

The lack of single player campaign would be a bit of an issue if the game was being released at full price, which it seems *is* the case in the USA. However, here in Australia [and I believe the situation in the UK and Europe is similar] it is being released at $65 - a smidge over half the price of many regular XBox360 releases. And besides, there is an offline single-player mode - it’s just bot-based matches, much like Unreal Tournament had.

I played the demo for a little while before work this morning, and I have to say it plays beautifully.  The graphics aren’t amazing, but they’re good enough - what makes it for me is the gameplay. I think this is a must-buy for me.

A little further ahead this month we have Overlord - somewhere between Dungeon Keeper and Black & White,  this looks like a real fun time. The demo is downloading while I work, so I should get a look at it tonight, but the screens and videos I’ve seen so far look great. Another probable must-buy.

Tenchu Z,  The Darkness, and Armored Core 4 are all also coming out this month, and look interesting enough to at least have a closer look at.

In the following months, GTA4, Mass Effect, Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, Halo 3, and many others will be vying for my attention and dollars - I think I’m going to need a second, and possibly third job.