I was a bit dubious when I first heard Perfect Dark was coming to XBLA, I figured it would be some re-hashed mess probably only single player and minimal multiplayer, the usual kind of hack-job. 4J Studios have however done a fantastic job of porting this masterpiece to the 360 and have included everything from the original game and more, who can groan at 1080p resolution and remastered textures. Read on for a lot more nostalgia and some actual opinions on the 360 version.

Dr Caroll, world’s first AI eunuch

It’s been 10 years since Perfect Dark was released for the N64 but memories of Rare’s fantastic shooter are still fresh. I was following the game’s release online and via magazines at the time and even wrote a preview for the website I ran back then. When it was released I spent hours upon hours playing through every difficulty, every gun range, every challenge and unlocked almost everything the game had to offer. I enjoyed every second of the weapons, gadgets and level design, however an act of fate was to seperate me from Perfect Dark for a decade… The save game on my cartridge became corrupted and I was no longer able to access anything I had unlocked, needless to say I didn’t play the game much after that, it was a bitter ending to a great experience.

Now, ten years on with trepidation I boot into the Perfect Dark XBLA trial game and expect the worst, however as soon as I finished a game of multiplayer and it prompted me to buy I couldn’t hesitate for a second and slapped down those 800 gamerpoints faster than you can say Mr Blonde.

From then on it was pure nostalgia meltdown! I started off a bit of co-op with my brother, we blasted through a good few levels, seemingly a lot faster than I remember. It was great fun playing split-screen co-op, shouting at each other for failing missions and getting stuck in doorways. We both loved the original and played it to death, it felt like riding a bike. We played some multiplayer and then got down to completing the game and unlocking those all-important cheats: all weapons & infinite ammo. It’s funny how even after all this time the game can still pose a great challenge and be so much fun. Of course there is now the added leader-board system so you can see how well you are doing versus everyone else. A great addition.

Graphical comparison

Speaking of additions, the new high resolution remastered graphics are great, they add quite considerably to my rose tinted glasses however they have also re-modelled all of the weapons in the game, they now look a lot more chunky and there is a lot more detail to be seen but they do act exactly the same as the original. There are some great improvements in character detail too. It seems 4J Studios have spared no expense in bringing us the greatest balance between historical accuracy and bringing it more up-to-date and I salute them for doing an almost perfect job.

The other main addition is of course online multiplayer, something that is commonplace in this generation was almost unheard of in the days of the N64, we were confined to huddling around our CRT TVs grabbing a controller each and getting into brawls after each game. There’s something to be said for that old-school purity because the online mode can seem a little vacant, at least compared the the original frantic friend losing scenario. I still need to get a good group of friends together and have some private matches, I’m sure they’ll be great.

The single player campaign is still fun today, especially if you play it at the higher difficulty settings. The story is somewhat lacking by today’s standards but the nostalgia effect is enough to compensate for any shortfall. I’m still having fun playing through the levels on Secret Agent and Perfect Agent difficulties and still ready to unlock more cheats.

The one disappointment in the port is Elvis… I don’t know how to put this… They’ve made him look all sensible and gritty. Whether or not this is closer to Rare’s original vision of Elvis I do not know but I think he lacks that little bit of quirky-ness he had in the original. Not really a big issue, just a tiny niggle.

I don’t think I have a bad word to say about the original or this port (except for the Elvis thing), if you liked the original then you should definitely get your hands on the 360 version if you haven’t ever played the original it will probably still be a great little game to waste some hours on, who knows you may fall in love with it as I did all those years ago.

I learned of this game from adverts on TV, they were sponsoring all the shows I watched apparently, the adverts made the game look really nice and so I got it on rental. The first thing needed to be said about Darksiders is that the game’s title floats entirely on it’s own, no reference is made in game to “Darksiders” and it really doesn’t describe any part of the game. Secondly this game is not really a God of War copy, a lot of people seem to think that because the fighting is similar the rest of the game is the same, but it’s not, if I had to liken Darksiders to another game it would be Zelda. Same kind of dungeon/room setup where you have to work your way through puzzle type rooms and fight the bad guys until you get to the boss and kill it, but the similarities end there, read on for more Darksider crap.

The game starts with you thrust into the apocalypse, demons and angels are raining down from the skies hell bent on destroying each other and pretty much everyone on earth, you control War, one of the four horsemen who is on neither side. You fight some angels, you fight some demons and then get smooshed by a really big demon. After that there’s a pretty long and boring cut scene informing us that somehow War has broken some seals and set about the apocalypse early and as punishment you must return to earth and annihilate the bad guys. Oh and all of the angels want to kil you because they for some reason think you killed one of their top brass or something. And it’s 10 years later!

By this time the earth is pretty much in ruins and a giant demon fest, you have to fight and puzzle your way through dungeons full of bad guys to collect the hearts of large demons to give to another demon who will lead you to the bossman demon… Yea… It’s a little strange. There really isn’t a lot of story development through the dungeons, you just hack and slash and learn a lot of minutia but no real plot.

Graphics wise Darksiders isn’t going to be winning any awards, it’s the standard graphics level for this generation, combat effects are nice, enemies look pretty good but the scenery for the most part is pretty bland. Most notably War is very detailed and colourful, as are his weapons and his horse, ruin. Being mainly confined to subterranean rooms and… Subways there isn’t much scope for beauty.

Nice sword!

The combat system is pretty simple and basically anyone can pick it up in a few minutes, to start with you’ll basically be hammering the X button until you get more weapons and more abilities, but they mainly consist of hitting X or Y repeatedly. That’s not to say that combat is boring, it’s nice to have a simple system where you can pull off a lot of different moves pretty easily and knock the living snot out of a bunch of demons. The addition of different weapons along the way keeps the combat fresh and interesting. There are also a bunch of limited use weapons you can pick up off enemies, they are generally big and overpowered, my favourite is the big shard gun which fires remotely detonated explosive shards. Again it adds more variety to the combat and gives you some truly overpowered moments. Also of note is Ruin, War’s horse, once you get him back there’s some nice horse riding scenes and some action again reminiscent of Zelda.

The puzzle aspects of the game for me were a little underwhelming and not always completely obvious what I had to do, in this way it diverged away from Zelda like play as sometimes I would enter a room and not know whether to explore, puzzle or if it was a dead end. At least in Zelda most of the puzzle rooms locked so you knew you weren’t wasting your time.  I wasted a lot of time in this way, some of the puzzles were just too fiddly and other times the controls seemed to want to have a mind of their own when doing puzzles. This area really needed more effort, something a little more obvious and entertaining.

There’s really not much else to say about Darksiders, it is an adequately engaging action game combining exploration and puzzling, the story may be lacking any kind of substance and awe but after a little while I found myself quite enjoying the game, quick time events are actually useful and the combat is good enough to continue to engage and although there are some lulls in the exploration part where you’ll be doing nothing but running/swimming around it always seems to pick back up. It’s definitely worth a rent and play through.

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Wallpapers:

And here’s a little close up shot of those dreaded X-Clamps you’ve been hearing so much about:

Any way, here’s some more Xbox innards:

First off we get the Xbox ready by removing the hard drive and taking it into the kitchen so in case something does go wrong I’m not going to damage anything and it’s close to a water source. You may also notice from the first picture how dirty my Xbox looks, I think it’s his age maybe I’ll give him a good clean when I’m finished.

The next step is to lay out the towels and wrap the Xbox up nice and snugly, it’s probably best if you turn it on before you start wrapping it up, otherwise you’ll be fumbling around to find the power button later on. Make sure to have everything wrapped up snug and tight so none of that warm air can escape.

As you can see I chose 2 white bath sheets, these were chosen because of their softness, I wanted the little bugger to be comfy. After you have wrapped it up all snug and warm leave to simmer for around 25 minutes you should be able to feel the Xbox getting all hot and steamy under the towel.

Once it has cooked in it’s own juices for 25 minutes or so unwrap the little blighter and leave to cool for a little while, I put mine in the fridge for a slightly more rapid cooling effect and because it makes a good photo op

Once cooled (or chilled) you should now be able to switch the Xbox on and start playing your favourite games once more. And what do you know it only worked a treat

Supposedly this is only a temporary fix so I think my next project will be to get one of those X-Clamp repair kits and try and fix it for good. It will be nice to have a working launch console in a few years, one that I have have formed a relationship with, one which has been in my fridge and one which I will have lovingly taken apart and put back together again.

So yea, I was in the middle of a fast paced game of Halo 3 when I got a crap load of artifacting and then it froze, when I switch it back on again guess what happened, I got the dreaded Red Ring Of Death, three red lights or simply RROD. I had a mess about and it worked again for a few minutes until it froze, now all I ever get is the 3 LEDs blinking a horrible shade of red.

My xbox is no new model either, it has survived so far with no red rings, no scratching of disks or anything and looking at the back it seems it was manufactured in 2006, launch model I believe and therefore has weathered the storm of RROD criticism well. Sadly it does mean that my warranty is well and truly over and I have no hope of a replacement from Microsoft. So basically I’m pretty much screwed and I was going to go out and buy a new console today as I am shamelessly addicted to Halo, however it seems there are a couple of avenues open to me and I will probably try them all before I go out and buy a new one, although, having two xboxes might be nice

Option 1: The Towel Fix
This involves wrapping up the xbox in some towels and leaving the console on for about half an hour. This makes the xbox cook in it’s own juices and heat up to a very high temperature then leaving it to coool. Apparently the RROD issue is caused by the “X-Clamp” processor sinks becoming loose or losing complete contact with the processor bed. Somehow the heat causes the chips to settle in again but is supposedly a temporary fix. I was thinking of banging it in the fridge afterwards to set it a little better. Maybe it will work I don’t know, but either way I’ll update here with what happened with the towels. Don’t worry I’ll have a bucket of water on standby in case it sets itself on fire.

Option 2: Fix the X-Clamp

Repair Kit

There are lots of guides online on how to open up your xbox and replace a loat of small nuts, bolts and washers to fix the heatsink issues of the “X-Clamp” it does take an hour or so to do but people swear by it. The main problem is having all the parts, thankfully there are many dealers on ebay who are selling all the correct parts to repair the box and quite cheap. If the towel trick doesn’t work I will buy the kit, put on my working gloves and operate on the box, it’s probably a much more efficient solution than buying a new console.

And that’s about the size of it, I’ll report back to you after the towel trick with photos so you can see how it goes. Hopefully it will not be a post entitled “I killed my xbox” and of course I will continue to look into other resolutions to the situation, and ooh this site looks like a good place to start: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcyYG-boWvM

Press whatever not to die

The new Turok couldn’t be a bigger disappointment, I’ve not played very far, but I’ve played enough to know I’m not going to play any further. For a start; any imagination and flair in the storyline has been replaced with bland copy and paste stellar marine type crap, sure you’re a native American called Turok and there’s dinosaurs but beyond that it’s just another sci-fi romp.

Graphics wise the game looks clunky, I had to strain to make sure I wasn’t playing Unreal 2, some of the dinosaurs looked nice but even then they couldn’t seem to animate themselves across the floor without sliding around, helicopters zipped up and down like they ignored the laws of physics and there was something about character animation that just wasn’t right…

And the third strike… You guessed it, a boring and confusing weapon system, you seemed only to be able to carry a limited set of weapons and the game likes to make you dual wield, which isn’t such a problem until you come to pick up another gun and the prompts telling you which button to press to pick up which weapon can get a little confusing. The weapons are the usual pistol, shotgun, rifle etcetera… Yawn.

When actually playing game you’ve got to either have overdosed on coffee or some kind of drugs cocktail because the dinosaurs in this game jump about the screen like schizophrenic spider monkeys on pro plus. Aim assist would have been a welcome bonus here. I found it quite hard to hit some of the dinos because either there were so many of them, they were so small, they were moving too fast or all of the above. You’ve also got to remember that they’re close range and trying to bite/claw you, with no melee button you’ve just got to go crazy on the pad and it feels like such a futile effort.

Ugly is the new beautiful

I’m sure none of you will be glad to know that QUICK TIME EVENTS make an appearance in the game too, and it’s not even a small appearance. Half the time when a dinosaur gets close to you he’ll jump all over you and you have to press or wiggle any number of buttons or sticks which it deems appropriate. Yawn!

An honourable mention has to go to the great achievements distribution too, unlike most games which reward you for completing each mission, giving you a steady rise of gamerpoints so you can at least gauge your completion and if like me you hated the game at least get some gamer points out of it. However, Turok gives you a grand total of 40 gamerpoints for completing the game and all at the end, there are some for killing things in certain ways and some for “co-op map #” but it’s never explained what a “co-op” map is!!?? Most of the gamerpoints are multiplayer related and no-one wants to play that…

oh wait, I almost forgot, HAVING NPC DINOSAURS IN MULTIPLAYER MAPS WAS THE WORST IDEA IN THE HISTORY OF BAD IDEAS!! /phew

In closing; Turok is a dog of a game, don’t bloody touch it!

Yep, that’s right, get used to looking at air vents and dingy enclosed areas if you’re going to play Mirror’s Edge. In my older post I wsa very impressed with the Mirror’s Edge demo, it looked and felt brilliant. However the full game for me was a big disappointment;

Firstly you can forget leaping from rooftop to rooftop with grace and a feeling of ‘flow’, after the first few levels you’re pretty much confined to subways, sewers, air vents and cramped buildings full of the worst AI EA have on offer. The game seemed to tout this ‘flow’ thing as a way to enjoy the game, using runner vision to guide you effortlessly making you feel free. That would be great if runner vision actually worked but after the first few levels on rooftops it’s mostly lacking, obvious anyway or completely misleading. For example, there was on [cramped] bit where runner vision indicated I should go up some pipes, after a good while trying to make the jump from where the pipes were I had a good look around and found it actually possible to do it another way. Nice.

The other major problem is the margin for error, after I had played the demo I conluded it was me being a noob that caused me to drop off rooftops like a lemming, alas the entire game is filled with relentless and unforgiving jumps. There are places where you could make is straight away but they were trumped by jumps I had to try more than 3 times, there was even one instance where I had to try a jump way over 50x and when I finally made it i had done nothing different than the million times before, yet somehow made it with room to spare. This leads me on to another problem: Consistency the game seems to decide on it’s own which jumps are high enough for you to have to make a hard landing, which falls mean you “die” and normal landings. There are many examples throughout the game where I could fall from a really high platform and land fine and ones where I jumped from a low platform and either did a hard (ow it hurts) or it all went dark and I had to start again.

The other major problem I had with it is combat, it was completely and utterly superfluous. I can count the times I had to actually fight anyone on my fingers, having guns was completely pointless and the AI for the most part was just the following algorithm;

10 Get closer
20 Shoot
30 Goto 10

The bits I found good were the first few levels where Faith was placed on rooftops and where they deployed unarmed enemies that could jump across rooftops after you. That’s it really.

If you liked the demo of Mirror’s Edge then keep that, do not buy the full game because you’ve got some of the best levels right there. Rent it maybe, but you won’t rent it for long either because the game is so short. As in my first post about Mirror’s Edge I applaud the uniqueness of the game, but I feel that something went wrong right around the time the developers decided to swap beautiful outdoor cityscapes, leaping from roof to roof with dark, sewers and enclosed spaces.