Game Craic

Welcome to Game Craic

Since we made our very subtle switch to Tumblr, we haven’t yet properly introduced ourselves. We are Game Craic, and I’ve just read the title of this post out loud, in a “welcome to GameSpy” kinda way.

We’ve been around for quite a while now, both as human beings and as a website, but I’m talking about the website. We thought it beneficial to meld with a social network, just to get our craic out there for our readership in a more effective and accessible manner, perhaps sparking more interaction with our readership, which we would thoroughly enjoy, and it’s one of the things we are ultimately aiming for.

We love games, we love gaming and we love people who love to game. Help us to grow, and build a great gaming network right here on Tumblr! Like, reblog, and talk to us! We only bite when it’s appropriate to do so.

Thanks for reading!

Reviewed: Don’t Starve!

Silly Wilson, always mucking about with technologies you don’t really understand. And who listens to their radio when told you could build a mighty machine that would be your break through. Well Wilson, you did, and look where it got you.

Wilson is now stuck in a land, one which he isn’t familiar with. Shortly after being teleported, a suspicious looking chap appears before Wilson telling him that he’d best find some food before the night falls. This mysterious chap, appearing and then disappearing into thin air, dressed in a suit and smoking a cigar, is rather devilish. However, the place to where he has brought Wilson doesn’t seem like hell at all. It’s just a wilderness without your local convenience store, and that’s it. I guess all we have to do as a player is find some food, and Don’t Starve!

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Bioshock Infinite - Just Short of 100% Perfection

Because I’ve been away from home for Easter, for the best part of a week, I haven’t been able to slap down my thoughts on the utterly mind-blowing Bioshock Infinite since I completed the story, which seriously had me hooked from start to finish, which is now a feeling I think’s quite hard to find from a video game because of the mad rush for more and more franchises to annualise their titles.

However, you’ll always get a game like Bioshock Infinite, a masterpiece of story-telling, which unexpectedly grabs you by the cubes and lets go only when you’ve beat the game, so to speak, which for me was about 13 hours. My cubes have since been released. To avoid spoiling the game for anybody who hasn’t yet completed Infinite, I will only say that I was rendered speechless by how the story unfolded. It had so much depth, and so many twists, that it really was that immersive experience I’ve wanted to lose myself in for a long while. It was like a really good novel, an interactive one, that revolved around me. Not just some mindless, herp-derp rollercoaster of derpness. Refreshing, indeed.

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Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Cyborg ninjas have been a staple of the Metal Gear Solid series for just as along as Solid Snake has sneaked past guards with his signature cardboard box trick. From Gray Fox in the original Metal Gear Solid to the revamped Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 4 these ninjas have frequently showed off fearsome sword skills coupled with an athleticism that would turn Olympic gymnasts green with envy. Raiden’s transformation from a whining rookie in MGS2 to the ass-kicking, sword-spinning samurai of MGS4 boosted his cred with fans so much that he has been afforded his own spin-off that finally lets players experience the Metal Gear universe from the perspective of an impossibly agile sword wielding maniac.

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Mr. Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage

No introduction, No filler content and no delay: Mr. Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage is, by far, the very best DLC Gearbox Software and 2K games have produced in either Borderlands or Borderlands 2. In a previous review I talked about the concept of DLC and how for DLC to be successful it needs to be relevant to the game so as to not seem too pointless, yet individual enough to avoid appearing like content for contents sake. Mr Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage is the epitome of how it can be done correctly and the yard-stick at which every future DLC should be judged.

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Impire

If I had to pick one type of game that I would regard as my least favourite, or one that I usually stay away from, I would have probably said RTS games. Therefore the surprise that I have been given the opportunity to review Impire is only outdone by the shock that occurred when I found myself actually enjoying it. Here’s why:

Impire is a RTS-style-dungeon-defender game that has drawn comparisons with both Dungeon Keeper and Dawn of War. I’d like to either confirm or deny this but as I’ve explained me and RTS’s are hardly good mates.

Impire begins when the bumbling buffoon of a demonologist Oscar van Fairweather summons our evil protagonist Baal-Abbadon from hell in a less than impressive physical form to carry out his evil plans on the living world. As the game progresses Baal can be upgraded to a frightfully evil creature in the form of customisation which affects his appearance and also awards stat increases. But at the beginning you will have to make do with this little fella to control your demonic legion of imps.

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Need For Speed Most Wanted

There’s something intrinsically entertaining about racing cars at extremely high speeds. Even for non-petrol heads like myself there’s a basic fist pumping satisfaction in driving fast, zipping past opponents and crossing the finish line in first place. There’s also a more curiously universal appeal in watching cars crash, seeing a fifty thousand pound high performance vehicle spin through the air, bend and crumple on impact is morbidly entertaining when viewed from the comfort and safety of your own sofa. These two factors are the reason why Burnout Paradise is one of the finest automobile based games ever made, combining reckless high speed racing with incredible gut churning crashes, and it serves as the perfect template for the latest game in the perennial Need For Speed series.

Although in name it is a remake of Black Box’s 2005 attempt at Need For Speed, Most Wanted is certainly the spiritual successor to Criterion’s classic Burnout Paradise. The setting is a wide open city with a variety of terrain and locales from the industrial dock yards to the winding roads of the rural mountains and everything in between. Destructible billboards, chain-link fences and drive through repair shops all make the transition from Paradise City to Fairhaven City and race circuits are given some freedom with a number of shortcuts and alternate routes available if you choose to stray off the tarmac.

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Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate’s Booty

Reviewing DLC is almost impossible without at least highlighting my dislike for the concept of even having to purchase downloadable content. Sadly its inclusion is something we’re all going to have to come to terms with as it shows no signs of going away. That said there is a right way and a wrong way of going about it and I believe Gearbox Software and 2K games has, for the most part, managed it pretty well. Maybe not CD Projekt kind of spectacular but who is? They avoided the 1st major sin by not including day one DLC. The first installment was available a good few weeks after Borderlands 2’s initial release allowing gamers a chance to actually complete the content first. Secondly, they once again incorporated a season pass allowing gamers to get all major expansions for a discounted price instead of buying them all individually. The only flaw in this was that for some reason didn’t include the Mechromancer pack, meaning anyone wanting to try the class would have to shell out yet more money for this addon. However that can’t be judged too harshly given the way a lot of other companies are going.

The first major content DLC was Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate’s Booty, is it worth the extra money? Let’s find out:

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The Cave

Adventure game logic has baffled and amazed me in almost equal measure in the past. Who’d have thought that a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle of it would operate as a perfectly serviceable mode of transportation before The Secret of Monkey Island? Not me, that’s for sure but rubber chickens now form a central part of my thinking when planning any journey. Lucasarts adventure games were some of my favourite games growing up and one of the driving forces behind those point-and-click classics was Ron Gilbert, the designer responsible for games like Day of the Tentacle and the aforementioned Monkey Island.

The Cave marks Gilbert’s return to the adventure game genre, and under the banner of fellow Lucasarts alumni Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Productions, but does away with pointing and clicking in favour of side scrolling running and jumping. The platforming is light and the focus is squarely on solving item-based puzzles to advance through the labyrinthine cave. In groups of three The Cave’s visitors have a number of obstacles to overcome that draw inspiration from those seminal adventure games of the past but presented in a new fashion that requires the smart use of all three characters to overcome some of the challenges.

The platforming elements are inconsequential to a fault as the floaty controls can sometimes leave a character plummeting to their death only to magically reappear where they came from with no repercussions. It’s a minor inconvenience really but it can make traversing vertically needlessly frustrating when you are forced to slowly climb down ladders to avoid dying when death doesn’t really affect anything at all.  

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Medal of Honor: The Freezing Of A Long-Struggling Franchise

So EA have finally pulled the plug on the Medal of Honor franchise… for now.

I think it was clear to most people that this was the best thing to do, considering there have been very few, great MoH titles since the start of the franchise. It also started to look like MoH had become Battlefield Lite, and that isn’t what MoH should be at all. But that’s how it made me feel, anyway.

In my honest opinion, there hasn’t been a better MoH game than Allied Assault, the franchises’ début on PC. That game was quite simply fantastic, both offline and online, and is right up there with my all-time personal best FPS games. 

There have been few MoH titles that have even come close to how good Allied Assault was, in my opinion, and one of those efforts is MoH Airborne. It’s such a shame that the game is riddled with bugs, errors and glitches, along with a stinking graphics engine that goes about rendering textures and such completely the wrong way. Unless you had an absolutely stellar PC back in 2007, and I mean stellar, most people would suffer from a needless hindrance in the frame-rate department.

 

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