Ok, so the new Video Delivery Service has been online in the UK for a couple of weeks now and the collection of titles is fattening up nicely so it’s about time we got stuck in.
First up I tested an SD version of Escape from LA (101 mins) starring Kurt Russell. The file size was 1570MB and my ‘20 Mbps’ broadband was running at its typically poor Friday night rate of around 10 Mbps. Wanting to test how good the film would play while it was downloading, I gave it a few minutes head-start, during which time it got up to 5%. Continue reading Testing the PSN VideoStore on PS3→
You are Sean Devlin, an Irish racing car driver who becomes The Saboteur on his road to revenge against the Nazis. While the visuals are painfully average and the open-world gameplay offers nothing new, you might just get find yourself sucked right in anyway with fun gun battles and the optional stealth approach.
A neatly condensed Paris and its nearby countryside make up the landscape of the game. You help out members of the French resistance and British spies to help liberate Paris and send the Germans scurrying back to sausage country. Continue reading The Saboteur (Review)→
With Devil May Cry’s creator, Hideki Kamiya directing, it would be fair to say that Bayonetta could be Dante’s ideal date, as comparisons between the two are obvious. Bayonetta might just prove to be a little bit more, well….mental. And we like it. Continue reading Bayonetta (Preview)→
Who would have thought one of the Wii’s most engrossing games of recent months would totally forgo any motion controls and be a 2D side-scrolling RPG slash-em-up? That’s right; you can sit and play this Wii game all afternoon without worrying about waking up the next day feeling that familiar tightness in every muscle. Well, your thumbs might take a slight pounding, but nothing the little brutes can’t handle. So dust off the pad for this one folks. Continue reading Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Review)→
It’s been years since the last F1 game and it’s a little surprising to see Codemasters test their newly acquired license on the Wii first, but probably a wise decision seeing as Dirt 2 and Forza 3 are keeping the non-Wii crowd busy for now. While Codemasters’ modern classics of Dirt 2 and Grid were developed in-house, Sumo Digital are in the driving seat for this one. Sumo do have a history of racing titles, but admittedly nothing that comes close to Codemasters’ recent output. Continue reading F1 2009: Formula 1→
Well, it took more than a while but UK PS3 owners can now rent and buy films over the PlayStation Store by downloading them straight to their hard-drives.
The game that has been looming over the Christmas release schedule is finally here, after most of the competition has fled for a release early next year, leaving you plenty of time to clean up online.
The first Modern Warfare wowed shooter fans with its gripping story scenes and peerless multiplayer, and you should prepare to feel the love again. There are a few flaws in the single player game but they’ll fade into memory soon enough as the multiplayer experience dominates Modern Warfare 2. Continue reading Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Review)→
This ‘fright simulator’ loosely borrows from the films to provide a few cheap jumps and puzzles. You control a girl that enters an abandoned warehouse to retrieve her wandering dog. Naturally it’s cursed, now you are too and you better start to work out how to appease the spirits of these spiteful child ghosts before they claims your soul, or something.
You navigate your way around the darkness in a first-person viewpoint with your wiimote controlled torch that works well when moving forwards but struggles to keep up if you try and turn too quickly. Poking around the chilling locations in the dark does feel quite immersive though as you are in direct control of what you aim the light at. Continue reading Ju-On: The Grudge (Review)→
Insomniac live up to their name once again by providing another Ratchet and Clank game that’ll keep you playing long into the night. The only problem facing the series is the lack of competition to keep it on its toes. Nevertheless this is still an awesome addition to the series.
Following on from the end of Tools of Destruction and Quest for Booty, Ratchet is still looking for his robotic side-kick, Clank, who has been kidnapped by the returning nut-job, Dr. Nefarious who wants to use Clank to gain access to the Great Clock that controls all time in the universe. So yeah, there’s a fair bit going on, but there’s a quick summary at the start of the game to refresh your memory and ease in newcomers (welcome by the way). Continue reading Ratchet and Clank: A Crack in Time (Review)→
Former racing car driver, Irishman in Paris, Sean Devlin, is out for revenge against the Nazi’s after some of his friends are murdered. He’s not trying to save Paris, but his actions are certainly going to help the city and endear him to her citizens and have the resistance calling on him for a favour or two. Expect a noir inspired adventure rather than your traditional overly-patriotic WWII story. Continue reading The Saboteur (Preview)→
After over 120 hours of play, this is the end of Fallout 3. The vault dweller isn’t rummaging around post-nuclear war America anymore though. Or post-nuclear war earth for that matter.
After being foolish enough to investigate yet another troubling radio signal he’s beamed up to an alien spaceship poised above the planet. He wakes up on a table surrounded by little green men with imminent laser probes getting too close to comfort. Continue reading Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta (Review)→
Eddie Riggs (voiced by Jack Black) is the best roadie in the business, but modern times have seen him forced to work with some awful bands as he’s seen his beloved heavy metal get watered down to suit a ‘tween demographic’. After saving one of the dipshit band members from certain death onstage, Rigg’s huge stage set collapses on him. As his blood drips into his Motorhead-esque belt buckle a metal monster erupts from the stage wasting the band, and Riggs is transported to a whole new dimension. It’s got the crazy turned up to 11 all the way from here on in. Continue reading Brutal Legend (Review)→
It’s about time you got to go on holiday in Fallout 3 after all you’ve been through. The new setting of Point Lookout feels like a lost Silent Hill waterside boardwalk, complete with deserted buildings and an eerie fog smothering everything. Sure, it’s no Hawaii, but choice is quite limited in a post-apocalyptic world.
The majority of this substantial map is made up of swamps populated with rednecks, mirelurks, tribesmen, ghouls, toxic bogs and enough radiated water to wade through to guarantee the vault dweller will never have (normal) children. Continue reading Fallout 3: Point Lookout (Review)→
The team at Naughty Dog and Nathan Drake may just have saved the day for the PS3. The console has had plenty of great games, but many doubters still thought it was missing its ‘killer app’, a true system seller. No longer.
No other game tries so hard to entertain and excite you. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is a constant barrage of ‘Wow!’ moments, one after another, just wiping out previous favourites with each spectacle. In just under ten hours the likes of Uncharted 1, Gears of War, Tomb Raider, Arkham Asylum, and God of War become just a footnote in gaming’s distant past. Continue reading Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (Review)→
Many PC gamers swear by (and most definitely at) the Operation Flashpoint name. This harsh, tactical first-person-shooter is also making a full appearance on consoles too for a change. It’s comparable in nature with the excellent Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway, but based in the very near future.
Dragon Rising is a much fiercer beast than BIA though with its claws severely dug into the realism side of things. So that means one shot could be it for you and you won’t even know what direction it came from. Continue reading Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising (Review)→
This is more like it. The first of the Fallout 3 expansion packs that feels truly worthy of the Fallout name. The Vault Dweller is off to Pittsburgh, or what’s left of it. Now aptly renamed as The Pitt, slavers have taken over the city and its still working steel foundry.
You have answered the call for help from one of the escaped slaves who wants to start a rebellion against their masters. As if the misery of working in the Pitt isn’t bad enough, they face the prospect of becoming a Trog, the equivalent of the Capitol Wastelands ghouls, due to a radiation related disease. There’s a cure for this condition but their masters aren’t exactly sharing. Continue reading Fallout 3: The Pitt (Review)→
Last years quality game firmly put FIFA back on top over their Konami rival, so what next? A tougher challenge and enough off the pitch enhancements to last you till well after the end of the season and beyond is what.
The tougher challenge is made evident by smarter AI that closes you down mercilessly and some questionable refereeing. Last year’s problem of players constantly wondering offside has been fixed. Unfortunately it has been replaced with them constantly giving free kicks. While getting flagged offside was annoying the replays always proved that you were. It was never wrong and EA explained they couldn’t show officials to be making mistakes because of the official FIFA branding, fair enough. Shame they couldn’t extend the courtesy to fouling as the replays will leave you baffled as to why you’ve given away yet another free kick as the slightest nudge is penalised. Continue reading FIFA 10 (Review)→
It was a bit of a surprise to all of us finding out that the next game to follow the excellent Dead Space would be on the Wii. It might be an ‘on-rails shooter’ but fans will enjoy this prequel to the original game, especially the first level which has a neat twist that they or anyone that’s seen the anime might appreciate.
The game starts before the Ishimura planet cracker mining ship was overrun by an alien plague causing severe psychosis and mutation in their human hosts. Haven’t played the first game? Don’t worry, the prequel nature of the game welcomes newcomers by letting them play through preceding events. Veterans will enjoy some familiar locations and characters and being a part of earlier events from a different perspective on how the shit hit the fan in the first place, as the first game had you starting well after the infection had already spread. Continue reading Dead Space: Extraction (Review)→
After Broken Steel raised level caps to 30, PS3 players are totally ready to get their teeth stuck into some more missions. This time you’ll get to interact with a bit of Fallout history that you may be familiar with from scraps of info picked up along your travels.
Using a virtual reality pod you can get involved with the famous battle at Anchorage, Alaska where the US forces had to repel the Chinese invaders. It’s not just a game though. Some members of the Brotherhood of Steel Outcasts need you to beat it so they can gain access to a sealed vault in a bunker, promising you a share of the spoils. Free stuff? Plug me in kiddo. Continue reading Fallout 3: Operation: Anchorage (Review)→
James Bond, The Bourne Trilogy, and 24: all great viewing, brimming with gaming potential but they’ve never quite replicated the same excitement and intensity in gaming form. None of them really made you feel like one of the starring JBs. Bond’s Quantum of Solace was a decent shooter with some nice cover-based gunplay but never really felt like a Bond movie. Bourne’s effort was basically a long line of QTEs with some ropey gunplay and 24 tried to do too much and resulted in an average Jack (Bauer) of all trades and master of none. Continue reading Alpha Protocol (Preview)→
Gaming reviews, previews and features by Brendan Griffiths
Ok, so the new Video Delivery Service has been online in the UK for a couple of weeks now and the collection of titles is fattening up nicely so it’s about time we got stuck in.
The No Sleep Gamer 
