Computer games.


http://thisandthatmikey.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/dominik-diamonds-are-forever-orange-box.html

My latest blog post

The Orange Box – Part One: Introduction

I’ve never been much of a PC Gamer. I still have tragic flashbacks to my youth when I used to attempt to play Actua Soccer 2 on my Windows 95 Packard Bell, which had a whole 16 MB (Count em!) of memory and a graphics card that would have barely challenged a ZX Spectrum.

I’ve just never really taken the time to properly invest in the sort of PC you actually need to play games with any reasonable joy. I did have “The Movies” on my old Windows XP PC as well as FIFA 07 and they ran reasonably well but they were also hardly games that required a lot of graphical power and processing speed.

As a result of my PC woes, I’ve been pretty much exclusively a console gamer through the years and thus I wasn’t a member of the cherished “PC First Person Shooter Appreciation Club” of the late 90’s and early 00’s. I did play Deus EX but that was on the PS2. My review of that is wildly simple, It's bloody good but I could never be bothered to finish it.

I briefly played the original Half Life on the PS2 and found it to be a strange and unnerving experience. From what I recall, it involved walking around some sort of super-secret science lab and the game wouldn’t let me do anything until I pushed a tray, possibly containing deserts and assorted liqueurs, into some energy thing, which promptly caused everything to hit the bloody fan and the entire world went to crap.

I then spent the better part of 15 minutes walking around with a crowbar, not knowing what the hell to do, before falling down an elevator shaft to my death. This being the days before you could hop on You Tube and watch a video walkthrough, I instead opted to switch the PS2 off and slink away with my tail firmly betwixt my legs.

When Half Life 2 came out on the PC I never played it and I didn’t care to play it when it was released on the X-Box 360 either as a part of the curiously titled “Orange Box”. For those who aren’t aware of said Clementine Holding Device, “The Orange Box” contains 3 games on one disc, these games being “Portal”, “Team Fortress” and “Half Life 2”. TOB was originally released way back in 2007 but I never bothered to check it out.

However, I recently watched the Zero Punctuation review of The Orange Box and it made me want to finally take the plunge and play it. So thus I purchased it and over the next 3 reviews I’ll be reviewing each game on the disc, starting with Half Life 2.

I've not got a specific timeline as to when all this will be done and I may do other blog posts in between. All I will say is that you can expect me to finish this review before North New Hampshire Wanderers win the World Soccer Super Bowl Series Challenge Cup (I'm hoping this will manage everyone's expectations to a satisfactory level)

So brace yourselves people, cos Mike’s going to be playing some games, and he’s probably going to do a really bad job at it! Huzzah!
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Mikey_Fitzgerald said:
Lemmings

Anyone here play that?

Used to go round my mates house and play it on his AMIGA

Frustrating as anything the further into the game you go

That level with no walls where you had to sacrifice 5-6 Lemmings just to get through it. Heart breaking
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I used to love herding them all between to "stop" lemmings then blowing them all up :)

Nah, it was a boss game, there's a browser version somewhere or other on the Internet with all the original levels.

Took me ages as a kid to do all the levels, then I lost my sheet of paper with all the level codes on, I was devastated
 

Furey1878 said:
You missed me and Mogsy jizzing all over the place about it after E3.

Don't worry dude, you're not alone.
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It was a massive jizz fest. Your deffo not alone mate.

My mate who is as obsessed as I am said he had more stuff to discuss when I get back from holiday about it tomorrow. Apparently there was a press pass in the last few days for MGS5 and gameplay was shown, IGN have done an article on it but as I'm on holiday and haven't read it your going to have to find it yourselves.
 
Anyone pre ordered FIFA 14 and GTA? Where's the cheapest and most reliable you've found? Need to do my pre orders tomorrow as i get back from holiday then.
 
Mogsy_Efc said:
It was a massive jizz fest. Your deffo not alone mate.

My mate who is as obsessed as I am said he had more stuff to discuss when I get back from holiday about it tomorrow. Apparently there was a press pass in the last few days for MGS5 and gameplay was shown, IGN have done an article on it but as I'm on holiday and haven't read it your going to have to find it yourselves.
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Yep I read it. Apparently there's now regenerating health and if a guard sees you, you get a brief moment of slow-mo/bullet time to take him out. I didn't like the sound of that personally, dumbing the game down for me. Of course we'll have to wait and see.
 
Furey1878 said:
Yep I read it. Apparently there's now regenerating health and if a guard sees you, you get a brief moment of slow-mo/bullet time to take him out. I didn't like the sound of that personally, dumbing the game down for me. Of course we'll have to wait and see.
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Yeah my mate was breif in saying it caused a bit of a stir. Have to judge for myself when I get back and when I see in future trailers etc. there needs to be the right balance between MGS3 and MGS4/2 game mechanics myself. I really liked the fending for yourself of Big Boss but to portray a story as such as this its going to need some modern mechanics too. Going to be interesting.
 

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