It’s been a rare weekend where I’ve found myself playing games purely for my own recreational purposes.

Having spent the week trying to negotiate with a viral infection coughed up by the Dark Lord Beelzebub himself, I finally finished Gears of War 3 and played enough multiplayer to get the gist of it enough to splutter out a rather huge review for the guys at Techday.com, for their Games Console section. You can read my Gears of War 3 review here.

Before playing though Gears of War 3, I also had to (start and) finish Gears of War 2, which I’d had lying about for the last few years without bothering with. After putting Gears of War 3 to bed (and back on my shelf), the completest in me turned to the original Gears of War, which I also never completed. I 99.9% finished it, tight up to the final fight with General Ramm. At the time, it fell into the too hard pile and I lost interest. Having spent the best part of the last week doing nothing but shooting grubbs, I decided to give old Rammy another bash…and killed him on the third attempt. Easy really. So in one week I finished all three Gears games. A Gold Star for me. Continue reading Playing games for fun →

Welcome back to another cop-out of a post where I’ll retread stuff that you can read elsewhere and make excuses as to why I’ve been “too busy” to write any actual content on this site all week.

It seemed a bit strange that in the week that saw the retail release of highly anticipated Gear of War 3 and yet I still  found myself playing a three-year old Xbox 360 game and an Xbox Live Arcade offering, instead.

So OK, I was playing Gears 3 for a few day the week before it came out, I had been given a review copy and intended to put a review up on these pages. I’d also, the week before, promised the folks over at Game Culture NZ a review of the Xbox Live Arcade action RPG, Crimson Alliance. A bit of prioritising put both a review for The Gunstringer and first impressions piece for El Shaddai: Accension of the Metatron before Crimson Alliance.

I’d never finished Gears of War 2; the truth be known, I’d not really started it. So I found myself hurriedly trying to get through Gears 2 in between Gears of War 3 sessions. Apart from being confusing, Gears 2‘s plot mixing with that of Gears 3, my obligation to review Crimson Alliance was also preying on my mind. Continue reading Vic B’Stard’s week in review →

New Zealanders are renown worldwide as being a fairly easy-going and laid-back bunch. There’s not much that’ll rattle a kiwi.

Talking about South African rugby will raise the temperature a bit, but New Zealand has nearly got over the 1995 Rugby World Cup final. The French government’s terrorist bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour back in 1985 will also cause a bit of a stir and not really a topic for polite conversion.

Messing with the Haka is also a big no-no. Continue reading Rabbids Rugby 2011 Haka video released →

When I was kid back in the day, picking up a new game was a big thing for me. The game cassette would be packed in hard behind a concertinaed pamphlet that would expand to reveal the game manual. It the days before, actual video game graphics, when a vampire would simply be represented by a pair of quotation marks, the manual was an invaluable catalyst for the players imagination. Without reading the game’s back story and plot the player was simple chasing pound-signs around the screen with an asterisk. After reading the obligatory prose on page one of the manual, the player understood that the asterisk-knight was, in fact chasing down pound-sign-snakes.

Even now, when I pick up game, the first thing that I do (if I can’t immediately put on and play it) is open the manual and take a look at the gaming delights that await me. Continue reading Gears of War 3 RTFM?* →

I was intending to spend the week playing the most excellent Dead Island (which I’ve now tuned to perfection on my PC, honing it into the perfect zombie apocalypse simulator). After that I wanted to get on with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which has been gathering dust for a week. The rest of the time was to be split between finishing off Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood on the Xbox 360 and a bit of The Witcher 2 on PC.

Sadly (or rather not), it wasn’t to be.

First a call from Techday.com, could I review the PS3 Assassin’s Creed Revelations multiplayer beta? As I’d been playing it the previous week, no worries there. You can check out what I thought of the Assassin’s Creed Revelations multiplayer beta over at Game Console.  Then Game Culture NZ sent over a some codes for the Xbox Live Arcade RPG Crimson Alliance for a review. All good.

Things then started to get a bit busy. Continue reading Vic B’Stard’s week in review: The Gunstringer, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron and Gears of War 3 →

I loved the first Gears of War, right up to the last bit, which I never bothered to finish (to my shame).

Gears 2 on the other hand just pissed me off. I was a bit late to the party, but even then I just didn’t get into it. It failed to engage me. I enjoyed a bit of Horde, but other than that my Gears of War 2 Collector Edition has sat gathering dust. I’ve tried to give it another go a few times, but I’ve since been spoiled by the likes of Killzone 2 and Halo Reach (Killzone 3 still sits in my “shit, why the hell haven’t I played this bloody game yet?” pile along with Fallout: New Vegas).

This morning a review copy of Gear 3 turned up on my doorstep, a game that I’ve no interest in playing at all. So I scribbled out my name and address with a black marker, circled the Microsoft PR company’s details and wrote “return to sender” on the front in big fat capitals before slamming it in the post box. Bugger this, I’m too busy playing The Gunstringer on Kinect to be bothered with Marcus Fenix’s latest splatterfest. Continue reading First impressions: Gears of War 3 – the first five minutes →

Hands up who thinks that the PS3 earpiece/mic is a bit shite.

It may be wireless as all that, but the way it hangs limply from your ear makes you look like a reject from the early 2000s, when pricks would walk around the supermarket with bluetooth headsets in their lugholes. Like anyone is that busy. Continue reading Posh-looking Sony PlayStation wireless stereo headset coming soon →