SteelSkin.net – The Ramblings of Chris Nutt

Happy 2009 you all!

My good friend John got me a GameStation voucher for Christmas. So just after Boxing Day I headed into the Kirkcaldy to see what I could get with it. I managed to pick up Valkyria Chronicles for tidy price of £19.99. ‘Bargain’ I thought.

I am no strategy fiend, in fact I am pretty bad at them. I have tried a couple of RTSs in the past and a strategy RPG in the form of Ring of Red for the PS2. Never with much success. However I had hope after hearing that Valkyria Chronicles was developed by much of the Skies of Arcadia team. Which is my favourite game of all time. Please bare in mind this is the game that got me to try and try again Japanese RPGs. So they could make just about any genre (bar rhythm music games) and I would play it.

Valkyria Chronicles is awesome, wonderful and lovely. The art style is inspired, the characters almost universally likable and the game play somewhat unique. It is a Strategy RPG, but with real-time moves and aiming. It’s parallel world of the Second World War could have been crassly handled, but they don’t pull their punches in delivering some hard truths.

I am currently half way through, so no doubt I am in for some exciting times.

Yes I caved in and bought a PS3. It is a nice piece of kit, but really what I have been bowled over by the most is Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction.

This is one of the most charming games I have played in a long time. It’s obviously American, but the kind of intelligent American that doesn’t nearly get the praise it should. Pixar does come to mind, as does the original Shrek movie. It’s all a bit tongue in cheek and all the better for it. Like a good meal its staples are platforming and shooting these are incredibly well done, neither punishing nor overtly easy. There are a few ways to tackle difficulty, one is to make things punishing and robotic, another is to make things a great big puzzle, R&C uses the latter. However any staple if over relied on will result in boredom. R&C solves this by spicing up the mix with mini-games, not the quick time awfulness of the competitors, but small juicy morsels involving the Six-Axis or Clank exclusively.

If this game carries on like this I would have put it in my Top 5 ever.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Need For Speed.

Need for Speed is a series I have always held in disdain, a chav racer only that wasn’t worth looking at versus arcade racer king Burnout or simulation champion Gran Turismo. I saw The Fast and the Furious, whilst entertaining it did little to contradict my view of shiny glowy night time racers like NFS:U, NFS:U2 and NFS:C. The first inkling I had that it might not just be a chav racer and something of a good arcade racer to have as a wing man to Burnout was 4 Color Rebellion‘s take on NFS:Carbon for Wii.

So a couple of weeks back I asked my mate to download the demos of NFS: Carbon, Juiced 2 and PGR 4 on his Xbox 360. I tried NFS first and was confounded, it was hugely enjoyable and certainly looked nice if a little low on FPS. So we tried Juiced 2, it looked a wee bit nicer, but the game handled like 2nd rate racer, not bad just not great like Auto Modellista did. PGR 4 is the latest in a series of games that after every retry I have disliked immensely. No great surprise when I thought it was made of huge amounts of ass when I played it, nice rain though.

So fast forward to this weekend and my mate John decided to trade in his PS2 Slim for the shiny monolith that is the PS3. Whilst we were in Gamestation Kirkcaldy I found a rare copy of NFS:Carbon for the Xbox 180. I was informed by a bemused Gamestation Edinburgh employee that the Xbox version was always sold out and he didn’t have the foggiest idea why. The simplest answer is MS dropped the Xbox like a hot potato and there for EA followed suit. This is a great shame as the Xbox Carbon looks great, not as great as say Motorstorm in 720P on the PS3, but pretty flipping amazing for the little black box.

I started on tuner as the muscle cars feel as crap as they look and until I have mastered some skill in NFS I feel my nice shiny RX8 tuner will meet my needs. The game plays really nicely and has a free roaming aspect that I didn’t expect, I really am enjoying it and the ability to play in bite size chunks makes it all the more appealing, like GTA: Vice City.