by ·Comments Off on Making Friends in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is the latest form of media to make me question whether I was even present for the majority of my Ancient History degree.

Ditching a surprising amount of the Assassin’s Creed baggage to the point I sometimes find myself thinking “this actually plays a bit like one of those Assassin’s Creed games”, Odyssey takes you on a wild romp through Ancient Greece, set in the midst of the Peloponnesian War, or at least I think it’s this and I’m too scared to look it up in case I’m wrong and I have to hand my degree back in.

It features running, jumping, assassinating through stealth or in my case attempting to assassinate through stealth and then having to blunder your way through half of the Athenian/Spartan army to run away.

It also apparently includes surprise emotional trauma for me. Spoilers for a minor side quest called “Making Friends” after this paragraph. If you’re not sure if you’ve done this one or not, it’s the one with the little girl in the clay pit. If that doesn’t ring a bell, you haven’t done it yet.

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by ·Comments Off on No Man’s Sky: Space for busy people

It takes two years to train as an astronaut. They must undergo intensive training in how the space shuttle and International Space Station functions, further sciences, medical procedures and survival training. If they are to crew the ISS, they will also need to learn Russian so they can communicate with the Russian Mission Control centre. You also need to be selected in the first place and applications are numerous whilst places on the training program are few. There are no clear guaranteed routes in, but it’s safe to say you have to be pretty high up in your field to qualify.

It takes 45 minutes to watch an episode of Star Trek. Anyone can watch Star Trek.

Pulse engine space travel effect No Mans Sky

A stunning blend of Star Wars’ jump to hyperspace and the psychedelic colours of 2001: A Space Odyssey

No Man’s Sky is to most of the space game genre what Star Trek is to real world space travel.

Of course, a lot of players dabbling in the space game genre like the idea of massive universes with planets and stars respecting the right scales in terms of travel, but then once you get down to it, there’s a lot of waiting around between moments of wonder and sometimes we don’t have time to wait.

No Man’s Sky cuts out a lot of the waiting. Instead it jumps from moment of wonder to moment of wonder very quickly. You blast off from a planet and leave the atmosphere, you engage the warp drive, you arrive in a new system, you land on a new planet, you name your discovery and you come face-to-face with a giant flying hippo-wasp. The problem with this is that if you present a moment of wonder too many times in quick succession, then it stops becoming a moment of wonder and instead becomes the norm. Ironically, an experience that is literally full of wonder is not wonderful, but merely just ok.

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by ·Comments Off on What’s the fuss about Fallout 4?

My Twitter feed is fairly video-game heavy, but there’s a chance that yesterday at approximately 3pm, you saw Twitter explode with tweets about the announcement of Fallout 4. That and everyone making some kind of comment or joke about the dog in the trailer.

So what’s the fuss about Fallout 4? Is the series worth getting in to and do you have to start from the beginning?

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by ·Comments Off on 9 things to love about Evolve

hellooooHunting giant monsters with your friends or being a giant monster hell-bent on destroying your friends sounds like an excellent pitch for an online multiplayer game to me. Evolve lets you hunt monsters and gives you the option to become the monster yourself if you feel like it.

Is it any good? I’ll be running a proper review soon once I put a few more hours into it, but here are nine things that you can love about stomping around as a monster, or chasing after a monster that’s stomping around in Evolve.

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by ·Comments Off on This is how The Last of Us will make you cry

The Last of UsThe Last of Us is a zombie apocalypse survival adventure game that will push your emotional buttons.

If it does not make you cry, it will at least give it a good go and at the very least, you will experience your brain triggering that cry response that simulates the feeling of a golf ball being lodged in the back of your throat.

Read on for how The Last of Us will make you want to cry and generally make you feel at the end of your emotional tether.

(This post includes some mild spoilers about things that happen early on in the game, but stuff that I’m glad was not spoiled for me.)

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