Unfinished

People of my generation probably cannot appreciate the simplicity of Pacman. They're all too busy with their explosions and their guns and questioning the sexuality of 12 year old boys who sound like girls to care for the elegance of how you dodged that ghost to grab the fruit or earning number 9 spot on your local arcade machine back in your heyday. Right grandpa? Pacman Super Crazy Ultra Deluxe Edition v2.0 Turbo retains it's core gameplay from way back when but builds upon it in a way that makes the game so much more than simply dodging ghosts and wracking up points. The DX edition now adds sleeping ghosts, which appear handily along your course right next to, or not too far from the pills you pick up. As you stroll (eat?) past them, they will wake up and follow you like you're the pied piper of ghost town. Build up enough behind you and pick up a power up and you suddenly have a huge chain of points behind you. This implements an incredible risk-reward mechanic to Pacman that instantly heightens the tension of your quest for pills. Do you let the line get long enough so that you can build a high combo, but can easily squash you should you make one minuscule fault? Or do you play the short game, playing it safe with a few ghosts here and there alongside your pills and fruit? Obtaining these ghosts allow you to build up the speed of Pacman, giving you more opportunity to either get the points faster or to run into trouble, dependent on your reaction time and pre-planning. After nomming the line of ghosts behind you, you can often lose the rhythm you build up from simply going for the pills and fruit, especially at the higher speeds. Thankfully, Pacman has taken a leaf out of Neo's book and gains a super slo-mo effect before hitting a ghost that may have simply ended your game there. A prompt will also offer you the chance to use one of your bombs, knocking all of the ghosts following you or roaming around back into the centre square; incredibly useful to keep the game flowing and less stop-start, but they will reduce your speed and should you not get yourself on the right track in time, you may find yourself giving the bomb button a good too many pushes than you'd like. There are 3 main modes to Pacman: Score Attack is, unsurprisingly, the mode which sees you trying to earn a high score within a specified time limit, Time trial consists of the player meeting a certain criteria, mostly eating X amount of fruit before the time runs out and finally Ghost Combo demands you stay continually powered up and eat as many ghosts as possible. I found myself having the most fun in the score attack modes. Time trial mode's goal is simply to eat the fruit, meaning the newly introduced sleeping ghosts can be simply ignored and are largely pointless in most cases. Ghost Combo's goal is to do the opposite. You have infinite lives and the only point of the mode is to build the highest possible combo, meaning the fruit and pills are largely worthless aside from getting you more ghosts. The combination of both modes in score attack means your brain needs to be constantly switching from one mode to the other, focusing on building that chain of ghosts while trying to maintain the constant supply of points is arguably more tense and exciting. Graphically, the game is as intense as the gameplay it offers. The game offers you 8 different visual styles, each with a host of colours to choose from. There are also 6 different versions of Pacman from down the years, each with their accompanying style of Ghost for you to choose from, should you have a favourite. The in-game visuals are also extremely vibrant. To the point that you may question if you're in Charlie Sheen's bathroom (Yes, we're jumping on the Charlie Sheen bandwagon too!). The flashing points indicators, although small, can be blinding at times and at the higher speeds can often cause you to completely track of your pill-gobbling chum leading to an untimely death at the hand of a sleeping ghost you didn't even know you were headed for. In closing, Pacman brings to the table the whole host of gameplay you loved from when the world was black and white, but adds a little something new for the current generation that won't lose any of your beloved nostalgia.

Destiny: Year One in Review

Bungie's foray into the genre-bending FPSMMORPG has polarised the gaming community for the past year. With The Taken King almost around the corner, we're going to take a trip back to look at the game that's gone through numerous reiterations in it's relatively short time span.

Destiny began in a physical form in June as the game's alpha was released to a select few, giving players a taste of the Cosmodrome; a glimpse of Russia after the catastrophic event setting the game's events in motion: The Collapse. Starting in a small conglomeration of rusted cars, a small robot would wake you from what seemed like an eternal slumber and instruct you to run for your life. We all had a lot of questions as to what was going on but had high hopes for Bungie's renowned universe-building reputation to kick into the main game. The Alpha allowed players to get to grips with the gunplay that is so beloved of the main game now as well as the powers that would be unique to Destiny over other FPS games.

Warlocks, wielders of Space Magic, able to expel force from their hands and launch purple explosive magic projectiles at your foes. Titans, the backbone and the main fighting-force of the resistance with the ability to strike their foes with their fists and blinding grenades. Finally, we come to the Hunters. Bearing long glorious capes, throwing knives and a Golden Gun, bathing in solar light to unleash destructive bullets.

Oh how I miss thee @destinythegame @bungie #PS4share pic.twitter.com/TbUXvIkP5o

— C_Stewie (@C_Stewie) June 28, 2014

This was my Alpha character. Warlock glorious master class. 

"We got another glimpse into how far our civilisation had gone..."

July rolled around and along came the Beta. Not much had really changed from the Alpha except the introduction of the Moon to the game's playable areas. We got another glimpse into how far our civilisation had gone from our days of taking pictures of small planets and complaining about our bad our phone signal was. This small leap was in part due to the Traveller, Destiny's iconic sphere that may have saved us from probable extinction. It's motives lay unknown to us, but again, we had continued hope that the radio silence on the mysterious object would only further the narrative in the main game. We learned that our characters we had invested so much time in would be deleted post-Beta, much to the dismay of most. Little did we know that our attachment to such things would be just the beginning of a trend that would plague the relationship between Bungie and it's community for the months to come. 

Before we knew it, Destiny was upon us. 

So I got my first Legendary item... for the wrong class! :( #PS4share pic.twitter.com/IRjfHMwJ8T

— C_Stewie (@C_Stewie) September 15, 2014

Champions. @Timothydclark #PS4share pic.twitter.com/RH4zLTPnfd

— C_Stewie (@C_Stewie) October 21, 2014

#PS4share pic.twitter.com/YeqYgmsdYu

— C_Stewie (@C_Stewie) November 9, 2014

Review: Halo: Reach (Unifnished)

Providing you've been over our First Impressions of Halo Reach, you should know that the intial impressions I got from the game were nothing but spectacular. Even only after finishing the first three missions of the campaign, everything about Bungie's latest had proved to live up to it's expectations.It is somewhat scary then that those three missions pale in comparison to the sheer genius that is displayed in the missions after. Bungie have developed a reputation for telling great stories and Halo: Reach is no different. From the first mission to the last, the game does an excellent job of bringing you into the famous Spartan armour of Noble 6. Reach depicts the events directly leading up to Halo: Combat Evolved. The Covenant have landed on the Planet Reach and it is imperative that the human race holds on to this stronghold to maintain any hope of winning the war. Unless you're entirely new to Halo, you should know what happens on Reach, but it is the twists and turns on the way that make Reach great. The crescendo moments, heart-wrenching musical score and excellent story-telling we've come to expect from Bungie's Halo games are on show throughout. On top of this, the game also helps you understand some of the people behind the armour. Your character, although not terribly chatty, still speaks and shows brief sparks of personality. The rest of the Team Noble are heavily humanised, they all have names that are seen above their in-game character and are often seen without their helmets, giving the player a sense of camaraderie between them and their fellow Spartans. Reach introduces "Armour abilities". Little perks you can pick out throughout the levels that unleash the full force of your Spartan armour. At the start of each mission you start out with the rather vanilla, sprint function. You can trade this for other ones dependent on your play style or as the mission allows them. It's unfortunate that you can't choose your ability before the mission starts, as some of the more obscure ones (Like Active Camoflague or the Jetpack) are tough to find or not used often throughout the campaign. Despite the glowing praise, Reach's campaign is not without faults. Aside from the spectacular space flight combat mission, displayed at E3, the game rarely deviates from what you'd expect from a Halo game. There is the occasional vehicle mission, as well as a few short parts within the missions where the player shoots a grenade launcher or a turret out the side of an A.I. controlled vehicle however these moments are often short-lived though and are mere means of getting you back to more shooting. Not to say that the shooting is bad, just that it had been nice to get some variety into the campaign. The multiplayer though, leaves you with more variety than you will even know what to do with. There are a huge variety of game modes available to you from the standard free for alls and team deathmatches to the more crazy fun from Infection (One player is a zombie and must infect the other players until nobody is left) and the new Headhunter. To list them all here would make the amount of modes and their variants bigger than the actual review, so I'll leave it to you to see the variety available. There are a small number of maps, only eight, if you discount Forge World and it's variants (Not sure on this bit) but the sheer number of modes make each of them fresh. One cubby hole might be your doom in Infection, but might be a great spot to sneak in a few sword kills in Slayer. Forge returns, giving you a massive map known as Forge World full ofvarieties of terrain from your flat, closed indoor area to large expanses of land for you to build your own maps upon. The sheer number of options and pieces you can place will have those with creative minds drooling at the mouth, but for those of you who are less-so, you can easily find the best and newest maps from the File Share system to find that remake of Shipment from CoD4 you've been dying to try or the latest version of Grifball. For those of you who do delve in after trying Forge from Halo 3, the improvements made will be instantly noticeable to you. The introduction of physics to certain pieces mean that should you wish to have an object floating in the air, you needn't build it on top of some pieces below and delete the pieces below it; instead, you sift through the item's options and make sure it is set to the "fixed" option. The bottomless pit of options extends itself to the popular Firefight mode too, returning from Halo 3:ODST. The return of Firefight, one of the highlights of ODST, brings forth a few changes. Playing some of the more wacky modes, such as Rocketfight (Everyone has infinite rockets) and Gruntpocalypse (all of the enemies are grunts) with friends is as much fun as the matchmaking or playing the campaign co-operatively. Taking up defensive positions with the odds highly stacked against you can cause some tense moments and some cries of triumph as one man finishes off a fleet of Covenant with no lives left and their team mates down. From the beginning, you know the end. The game's tagline. I can assure you that the game, Reach, won't be falling anytime soon. Graphically very impressive. Scale is incredible, especially seeing Reach fall later in the game. (Kat's death scene, body being carried through a tunnel) Multiplayer: Teamwork is essential Weapons feel just the same as their single player counterparts A team mate quitting is completely catastrophic to your team's chances of winning. As is the influx of n00bs (Will balance out as more people settle into their skill set) Tonnes of fun. Map design is reasonably good, some poor spawn points and points on the map that are great positions, but are held too easily. Firefight, Forge, File Share: File sharing and movie saving are a lot faster and quicker than in 3 Firefight is tonnes of fun, tonnes of new options and customisations mean you can cater to all tastes. Generator defense and other new co-op modes (name them, look it up faggot) Forge's improvements are plenty. Forge World is huge, plenty of varieties of terrain