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This month on TGS Replay Xantiriad and I took a look back at Valve’s bargain gaming bucket, The Orange Box.

Click here to listen to the Replay show.

We also took a quick look through some of the games released in 2001 and went through the nominations for March’s Replay (Rainbow Six Vegas, Bully and The Club)

If you’d like to get involved in TGS Replay next month then pop along to The Gamer Scene Forums.

I was recently a guest on the January edition of the  TGS Replay show together with  Dits, Major Lag, Leg of Time, James Batchelor, Ostemb0r and  Xantiriad. We spent almost two hours discussing the strengths and weaknesses of Bioware’s  Mass Effect.

Click here to listen to the Replay show.

We also find time to share our gaming highlights of the year 2000 and make the nominations for February’s game of the month.

My game of 2000 was Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. A strange choice, perhaps, considering the other possible contenders but it’s a game I look back fondly on as being both a decent first person shooter and also a effective (and different) use of the Star Trek license. My nomination for February’s Replay game was Overlord. I don’t think it’s got much of a chance this time round.

If you’d like to get involved in TGS Replay next month then pop along to The Gamer Scene Forums.

What is it with all the whinging about Band Hero? Why bother with such displays of rock snobbery? Anthrax fans don’t waste their time whining about the music of Michael Bublé. Do they? So why is Band Hero getting so much flack?

To me it seems that complaining about Activision producing Band Hero is a bit like complaining about Walkers making Cheese & Onion crisps because you only like Ready Salted. Or it’s like complaining about Ferrari making cars in yellow because you think they only look good in red. The fact is that if you’re moaning about Band Hero then it’s probably because it’s not aimed at you. Read the rest of this entry »

The Game Within The Game

Microsoft may have popularised in-game achievements but reward badges, both in single titles and across multiple games, have been around for ages. My first proper full-blown obsession with a reward system was in the game City of Heroes.

City of Heroes is a superhero-themed Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game that launched back in April 2004. Its badge system arrived several months later as part of the second free update of the game. It was a seemingly minor inclusion at the time, alongside the more headline grabbing embellishments such as power re-specification, the much requested inclusion of capes and two brand new game zones, but the reward system was arguably one of the most important additions ever made to the game. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know how important a role in gaming history the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 will ultimately play but it seems to me that we will look back on this as being the open world generation. This style of game may have been introduced to the mainstream in the days of the PS2 but it’s become incredibly popular during the current console cycle.

Games like Crackdown, Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Faction: Guerrilla have all featured large, expansive playgrounds as have RPGs like Oblivion and Fallout 3. Titles such as inFamous, Prototype and the outings of more traditional characters like Spider-Man and The Hulk have been set in sandbox environments to more effectively showcase the super-powered abilities of their protagonists.

The developers of these games have tried to create worlds without walls. Of course virtually all game spaces are finite; there are always some obstacles or boundaries that prevent you from falling outside the game world into the abyss. Open world games, though, try to give the player realms so vast, so detailed and realistic that they forget they are inside a digital cage.

But the bigger the developers make the worlds, the emptier they can potentially feel, particularly from a narrative point of view. Open world games bring a whole host of problems when it comes to storytelling. Read the rest of this entry »