Sorry about the long time between posts but I’m going to make a concerted effort now to make sure I keep the post count up and worthy of your time.

OK, today with Glenn “Wammo” Williams we chatted about the new re-imagined Halo, the game that essentially launched the original Xbox console way back in 2001.

I remember playing the original Halo way back in the day and I didn’t think I’d be keen on replaying through a better looking version, but I’ve been proven wrong: I’m slowly making my way through the campaign and realise what a great game it was all those years ago. How much had I forgotten? Well, I managed to forget where the heck the control switch was to activate the first bridge!

Check out the video: oh, and if near the end you see a pair of black trackpants suddenly appear in the sliding door behind me, don’t fret: it’s not a burglar trying to break in, but my daughter who was home deciding she’d try to come into the house using that door. She’s not there for long – but it’s a bit of a distraction!

Look out for an interview with Halo CE Anniversary’s executive producer Dan Ayoub later tonight or tomorrow. I promise.

Today is Tuesday, so that the day that I chat to Glenn “Wammo” Williams about all things gaming and today we chatted about Naughty Dog’s latest in the Uncharted series, Uncharted 3.

I liked the game a lot and it’s probably the closest thing you’ll get to a cinematic experience on a gaming console but thinking about it, I don’t think it’s perfect: it has some wonderful set pieces but the difficulty spike in the last quarter is crazy (in one section I had to contend with a sandstorm, two armoured vehicles with gun turrets, several baddies with laser sights and a guy with a rocket launcher)  and some of the melee combat gets a little too samey. I almost felt the melee combat against the tougher enemies was like a rhythm game: square, square, triangle, circle, triangle, square, square.

I’ve also heard people mention that they’re not loving the gunplay compared to that of Uncharted 2. It’s visually stunning, and some of the locations are absolutely huge. I loved when the camera pulled back and Nathan Drake, the game’s hero, was nothing but a speck in the landscape.

Thinking about it today, too, I also realised there are a lot of loose ends in the game, such as the two main baddies Marlowe and Talbot. I’m still not sure who they actually worked for and what was their motivation behind wanting the water hidden deep in the “Atlantis of  the Sands” in the Middle East. Will we ever know?

Even with those criticisms, it’s a great game that is one of the best on the PlayStation 3. I loved the narrative and thought the final battle was very fitting of the series.

Anyway, watch the review and let me know what you think.

One of the cooler gadgets I’m assessing at the moment is Kaiser Baas’ Series 8 Game Recorder – an amazing little piece of kit that lets you record gameplay footage from a PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 or Nintendo Wii.

It’s about half the size of a ball point pen but has a USB connection at one end, that slots into a free USB port on computer, and on the other end has three RCA connections: red, white and blue which you plug your console into (you need to use an RCA connection not HDMI). What you do is plug the Game Recorder into your computer, connect the RCA connections to your console’s RCA connections, turn your console on, click the Game Recorder icon on your desktop and voila: your console’s dashboard image appears on your computer monitor.

Recording is a one-button affair as is stopping and it saves the file as .avi files, which you can edit in CyberLink’s video editing software. It records in high (720×480, 720×576, 60 frames per second), medium (720×480, 720×576, 30 frames per second) and low (360×240, 360×288) resolution at aspect ratios of either 16:9 or 4:3.

I’m impressed, to be honest, and can see the Game Recorder being a great tool in an upcoming project that I’ve got planned with a colleague at work.

Anyway, I intended uploading some footage I captured from Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood using the Game Recorder – but typically my internet upload speed was so ridiculously slow that it crapped out at almost 100%. So I gave up.

Here’s Tuesday’s chat with Glenn “Wammo” Williams where I reviewed Batman Arkham City instead. Enjoy it.

It’s been a pretty busy week despite it being a short week here (due to a public holiday on Monday) and my return from New York on Monday. Let’s start with the games I’ve been playing, eh?

Or perhaps that should be “game” that I’ve played this week: Batman Arkham City. That’s all I’ve played for the bulk of this week – at least till this afternoon when I played some Kinect 2 with my son and some of the inFamous 2 DLC, Festival of Blood.

I finished the campaign yesterday morning and without a doubt it is the best super hero game I’ve played in all my years of gaming – and a fitting sequel to Batman Arkham Asylum.  Ever play a game and once you’ve finished it you just sit back and soak it all in and say “Wow”? For me this year, Batman Arkham City is that game. It’s just made my Game of the Year list even longer!

I’m now working my way through all the side missions that I didn’t complete before completing the game and trying to get the achievements I didn’t get.

I’ve already talked about Arkham City here so I won’t tread over old ground but everything just seemed to work with the game: the story made more sense that Arkham Asylum, it’s one of the most beautifully realised game worlds I’ve played in some time (if a grimy, gritty and depressive city can be made to be beautiful) and the combat is some of the best I’ve ever played. It flows and you can almost feel every punch to the sternum when Batman delivers the final blow.

In today’s recording of the Well Played podcast a topic that came up was whether the game is courting controversy with its language toward the female characters in the game, namely Selina Kyle aka Catwoman. In the game banter between inmates of Arkham City (parts of which are now a prison closed off from the rest of the city) as you wonder the game world, you often hear the prisoners referring to Catwoman (and other women) as “bitches”.

Personally, the language didn’t offend me – and actually, I didn’t notice it until an email from someone on the Well Played crew telling me were going to discuss it.

Why didn’t it offend me? Because it fitted in with the story and fitted into the context of the narrative: these are hardened criminals who aren’t going to have tea with their grandmother on a Sunday after and chew on cucumber sandwiches. They’re psychopathic killers who no doubt call women “bitches”, so the language doesn’t cause me any concern.

Perhaps one part of the game that was little more contentious was the sexualised nature of  the outfits worn by Catwoman and the other female characters in the game. The black catsuit is skintight, revealing and doesn’t leave much to the imagination – neither do the outfits of Poison Ivy or Harley Quinn.

I know that since the dawn of time,  female comic characters women superheroes have worn provocative costumes (Wonder Woman for example. Sorry, I can’t think of any other female comic book characters) but is it really necessary? Ok, I realise that catwoman can’t pounce across the rooftops of Gotham City wearing a trenchcoat and a loose fitting blouse but does her outfit have to show off an ample amount of cleavage that it does? As Aylon Herbet on the Well Played podcast said today: he was surprised Catwoman didn’t have a wardrobe malfunction like Janet Jackson during the game. I agree with him on that, actually.

This week I also had the pleasure of chatting with Naughty Dog’s Keith Guerrette, who lead all the special FX work in Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. I’ve yet to transcribe the interview – I’ll get onto that in the next day or two – but he was the most obliging and pleasant to talk to developer that I’ve talked to in a long time. He was here to present a talk on Uncharted 3 at the weekend’s Armageddon event in Auckland.

On the hardware front, I’m looking at Kaiser Baas’ Series 8 Game Recorder software and it’s pretty darn good. It’s a USB dongle that connects to your PC and console of choice then records the footage of your favourite game to your PC or laptop. You can then edit it using CyberLink’s PowerDirector 8 editing software.

OK, that’s about me for the past week.  This week I want to play the Festival of Blood DLC for inFamous 2 as well as get an Assassin’s Creed Revelations interview written up. I’ll post that one when it’s done.

As much as I love Batman (greatest super hero ever, don’t you know?) my knowledge about Dick Grayson and Nightwing is pretty abysmall. In fact, it’s pretty much nonexistent.

From what I understand (comic afficionadoes correct me if I’m wrong), Dick Grayson becomes crime fighter Nightwing sometime in his early 20s.

Incidentally,  an episode of The Big Bang Theory that ran here on Wednesday night (a repeat, of course) saw Sheldon and Howard playing tug-of-war over a Batman comic book that mentioned Nightwing. I can’t remember much more about the episode but as soon as I saw this trailer for the Nightwing DLC for Arkham City I remembered the show.

Anyway, the Nightwing Bundle will set you back 560 Microsoft points or $AU11.45 off the PlayStation network (why on earth a press release to New Zealand gaming media didn’t have an Australian to New Zealand conversion is beyond me but I’d say it’s close to $15, depending on the current exchange rate.)

Nightwing will be playable in all Arkham City’s challenge maps, and the DLC adds two new challenge maps – Wayne Manor and Main Hall – and offers a Nightwing character skin based on the animated series. The DLC will be available on November 2.

Talking of Arkham City, I’m still working my way through the main game – I’m pretty sure I’m just about finished – and am about to take on Joker and his thugs once again. This time in the steel mill and there’s him, his thugs, one of those one armed dudes that swings a hammer – oh, and a bloody titan to make things interesting. I smell the finale very close but time will be short this weekend (and I’ve got several stories, interviews and reviews to write up).

I’ve deviated from the main story a little, just to complete more side missions (blowing up the titan silos for Bane, trying to track down Oneshot) and perhaps the best boss fight so far has been the one against Victor Fries (Mr Freeze). It required quite a bit of creativity to bring him down.

I was planning to post this last week – while I was in New York – to coincide with the lifting of the New Zealand embargo on reviews for Batman Arkham City – but for some reason this blog and my Samsung tablet didn’t want to play nicely so I was forced to waiting until I got home (today) and post it.

Batman Arkham Asylum was so close to becoming my Game of the Year when it came out  – it was by far the best superhero game ever, with the best superhero ever,  and the way the combat flowed just made for a superb game. It was atmospheric to the max and if there was any fault, the Dark Knight’s detective vision made the game too easy.

I didn’t think developer Rocksteady could make a better Batman game. Well, they have, and that game is Batman Arkham City. I got my copy mid-last week and have been playing it solidly and I love it. In fact, I’ve been neglecting other games because I’ve been playing Batman Arkham City.

Before I left for New York I’d played about 15% 49% of the game, including a handful of Cat woman missions (retail copies of the game come with a one-time use code for Cat woman DLC) so these are my impressions so far. Short version: I’m loving it a lot.

This time much of Gotham City is a prison for the depraved and dastardly, a quarantined portion of the city fenced by high barbed wire-topped fences and searing search lights. Areas have their own feel, too, depending on who they are ruled by (ie either Joker or the Riddler). Batman’s foes are roaming the streets of the giant prison set up in a rundown quarter of Gotham, prowling every corner in this “facility” run by Professor Hugo Strange, who has a personal vendetta against Bruce Wayne. The Joker makes a return, too, this time a little worse for wear after injecting the titan formula in the first game and the Riddler’s influence is never too far away. You’ll also be reunited with Harvey “Two Face” Dent, Killer Croc, Poison Ivy and others.

Where do I start with Arkham City? Perhaps one of the most notable improvements is the batclaw, which in the first game was a tool used to scale buildings and towers. Now, it’s a super tool that can not only be used to scale heights but can be used to slingshot the Caped Crusader upwards, used in tandem with his glide ability. Batman can now also dive-bomb enemies, knocking them down the blast such a high-speed landing makes, as well as use the dive-bomb to game momentum for upward gliding.

Arkham City is a sprawling, atmospheric place highly detailed with the chaos of a society in turmoil, with thugs on every corner and plenty of gargoyles for the Dark Knight to do inverted take downs and hide from foes – many of which are much smarter this time. The combat flows perfectly, with Batman able to move from foe to foe with such fluidity that you almost feel  l part of the action. The cryptographic sequencer, the device that Batman uses to crack door codes, is now much, much improved on the original, too: instead of having to move the analogue sticks until you’ve got the right frequency often all you have to do is rotate the sticks until letters spell out the correct word.

The scale of Arkham City is much broader than Arkham Asylum, too, with a huge number of side quests that can be completed either while you’re completing the single player missions or once you’ve done with the campaign.

Look, there’s much more I could say about Batman Arkham City but I’m just going to leave it here for now. I want to play more of it, explore a little more and see how it ends. I’ll let you know my final thoughts when I’ve finished it.

Yes, you read that right: I’m heading to New York on Sunday (New Zealand time) to attend a Microsoft Kinect event in the Big Apple on Tuesday.

I’m really looking forward to it and have a couple of interviews lined up already, one with Kudo Tsunoda, one of the creative’s behind Kinect, and hands-on time with new Kinect games. It seems that Microsoft are really pushing what children can really do with Kinect and this is the focus of the event.

I’ve never been to New York before either so am really hyped about what the future holds for Kinect (and checking out all the touristy things in the few days that I’m there).

So, over the past few days I’ve been thrashing the hell out of Batman Arkham City – and it’s bloody brilliant – but despite worldwide reviews running left right and centre, it seems New Zealand games writers are still lumbered with an embargo which lifts on Oct 19 – which is Wednesday and I’m away!

I’ve also played a little bit of Rage but I’m not sure what I think of it so far: it looks beautiful – perhaps one of the best looking console games around – but the gameplay is less than stellar – at least from what I’ve played. There are a tad too many fetch quests for my liking (head to this settlement and pick up these parts, head up to a radio tower and realign the dish, etc, etc)

OK, I’ve got to finish getting packed (note pads, dictaphone, Samsung tablet, mobile phone, pens). Have a good week, play games, and I’ll update the blog (hopefully) while I’m in New York.