A Gaming Selachimorpha

When it comes to gaming I am, it has to be said, much like a shark. No, not in a “will bite your leg off as a playful hello to see if you are worth eating” kind of way but of a “if I stop moving then I die”. This always leaves me with something of a problem during this time of year, or as I like to call it “those summer months when the lazy games publishers ignore me!”

Retail releases are few and far between and so my back catalogue gets some love. This never seems like going forwards though so I get a bit on edge and start wondering what will happen if no more games are ever released. What if games publishers realise that in the two months of not releasing anything they haven’t had a single flop? What if they all realise that most games don’t make much money so they just all give up?

Luckily Microsoft have been doing their best to keep me occupied with a couple of Xbox Live Arcade games. In fact a whole month of what promise to be good games has just started with the excellent Bastion, a game with a constant and novel running narration that I haven’t yet played long enough to get bored of.

The other game of note is Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. Those of you who know me will know that this is one IP I will always run towards (in fact although I have decided that I am unlikely ever to start a newly released MMO again to play seriously, I will play the 40k MMO if it ever releases just so I can get annoyed with the liberties it will take with the IP). This is a twin stick shooter in which you play one of four Space Marines trying to stop a space hulk full of Orks reaching a Forgeworld. It’s a cheap-ish publicity game for the upcoming Space Marine 3rd person shooter and as a precursor does its job somewhat solidly without straying into anything other than “OK-ish” along the way. The big problem is the lack of online multiplayer that is preventing me from Ork killing with certain friends. It does fulfil its primary goal of getting me interested in the main game so that is nice. And making me paint 40k models so the secondary goal works too.

These have been two small games in the sea of nothingness caused by not quite clicking with the large big release, inFamous 2, though so I’ve had to dip back into the past pile in order to have things to play. Some rather long hours with DiRT 2 have resulted in the single player game being completed. Yes, I won every single single player event and that took a while. I can eye DiRT 3 now without feeling guilty and with a week or two rest between them I think I can get started on the herculean effort that will most likely entail.

There has actually been another game that I have been toying with: Alice: Madness Returns but I’m not quite ready to give an opinion on that. So far I’m enjoying it more than anybody else I know, or in fact any reviewer seems to have and so I’m wary of commenting until I’ve played more than the first couple of chapters. It seems very much to be a Sunday Afternoon game and I have trouble wanting to play it any other time.