That guy's a Maniac...

Recently I was gifted a PlayStation 3 and a fairly comprehensive catalogue of games which is great for two reasons. Firstly, free games! Secondly by being gifted one it allows me to maintain that the PlayStation 3 never reached a critical mass of games for my tastes that warranted a purchase of the (still) overpriced console. One of the games that was on the shortlist that never reached critical mass was Valkyria Chronicles.  Released in 2008 to generally positive reviews, Valkyria Chronicles is a mix of all the best bits from Advance Wars , Battalion Wars and quirky PlayStation 2 game Ring of Red . It's a 3D turn based strategy game which is a lot of fun with a beautiful art style. Playing games slightly time shifted from the climate in which they were released is interesting. Although I can see the appeal of VC when it came out, having played and loved Fire Emblem: Awakening last year, VC is probably lower in my estimations as there are some great mechanics which shou...

Recently all of the Guild serie s titles were on sale on the Nintendo eShop for 3DS. Before we go on it seems like Nintendo have been watching the rest of the gaming field and taking bits and pieces to significantly up their own online shop to maximise success. In the last couple of months there have been a number of good titles on sale. A worrying amount. A potentially bankrupting amount. We snapped up Resident Evil Revelations with 50% off. But with titles like the Guild series, Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D and 3D classics like Super Mario Brothers 3 and Sonic the Hedgehog being discounted to mere pounds, to less than the price of a standard measure of whatever beverage you prefer to drink, then what the heck. Why not? Weirdest of all is that retailers are matching the eShop prices or perhaps the eShop is matching retail prices. Either way we're a million miles away from when your average decent game cost upwards of £50 and you had to go to a fucking brick and mortar s...

Since 66% of this blog is situated in Scotland, and I am actually in the games Industry, I suppose we are expected to comment on this one. For those of you who don't know, APB flopped, and as such RTW went into administration. Now, did anyone NOT see this one coming? I certainly saw this... not as a pessimistic prediction, more a painfully apparent inevitability. I have seen many people come and go from this company, each time I would pose the question, "why, realtime worlds?". Just to be met with an almost blind ignorance that this company could 'do no wrong', when specifically they were working on a supposed WoW-killer MMO. An ambitious task, anyone would agree. And the premise of this WoW-killer? Cops and Robbers. Realtime worlds I roll my eyes at thee. Though I do have to tip my hat to them, during the time (years) leading up to the launch they did manage to create some hype about a 'GTA-like MMO' (lies), and at one point made micro-transactions s...