Formats: PSP, PS1
Format Played: PSP
Import: N/A

Ok so those who know me will know I am a huge Final Fantasy fan and the whole reason I picked up a PSP was because of Crisis Core which should be coming soon. I was going to wait until that release but when Square-Enix decided to remake the PS1’s Final Fantasy Tactics I was all for it.

The game opens with a spectacular opening cut scene and I really feel they have done wonders with the drawings they have produced. The graphics to the game has not improved much from the PS1’s version and from time to time there is some noticeable slowdown when casting larger spells or healing a big party.
The game doesn’t really explain much unless you go through the tutorial but me being me skipped that and it took me 2 hours before realising you can equip potions and phoenix downs early on the game. You start with your main character who you need to keep alive, once a player falls you have 3 turns until that player is officially dead and there will be no way to get him/her back. This is annoying if you can not reach that character in time or your heal spells fail costing you another turn.
If your main character is not healed by the 3 turns the game will be over. Also there are missions where you have to protect someone these missions are the games downfall which I will focus on later but again if these players die even once your game is over.

The turn based system is fun and just like the first as you move around the map you encounter random battles. The main missions are full of stories which you can not skip, this is annoying if you die and have to retake the mission and some stories go on for quite a bit.

Upgrading your characters with weapons and skills take time and it is an achievement when your character finally masters a job title. Once you get your characters to certain levels on certain jobs a new job will open for that character some are pointless but it your character can always have a secondary job, just make sure you can perform the spells or attacks with the weapon you are holding for example you cant have a black mage use sword attacks as a second skill.

There are some mini missions and hidden characters to gain including Cloud from Final Fantasy VII, you also bump into Aerith too!!

My downside with this game is the missions when you have to protect a character you have no control over. These characters act on their own will and normally attack the weak characters and walk straight into the enemy. One mission had that character getting killed before it was even my go which is very frustration and had me shouting at the screen.

On a whole I have not put the game down and have been playing in none stop until I have my main character learn every job and I have cloud in my party!
Other things you can do is send off some of your characters to do side quests and they come back with more experience and job skill points. Also you can pop into shops to outfit your characters and also read rumours and play co op with friends.

On a whole it is a great game minus a couple of annoying points this is a definite pick up for Final Fantasy and RPG fans alike.

7.5/10

Formats: Xbox360, PS2
Format Played: Xbox360
Import: N/A

I know this is a late review but I have only just picked this gem up! After travelling to my friends in Wales and I am still without sweet alcohol we did what we both could do best and that’s play video games.

Now I have never been interested in Guitar Hero at all and I always thought it sounded like a silly idea to play a plastic Guitar in front of a screen but like anything I gave it a go because as we all know, if you don’t try you can’t make a valid comment.

So anyway my guitar was hanging from the strap around my neck, I was looking at the TV all ready to go and the game was set to umm easy!!!!
When you first play Guitar Hero your fingers can’t seem to respond to the colours that appear or if they do they are a micro second late and I was mistiming my hits a lot. At first play I could see that this would be a game for patience!
After failing the first song twice I was starting to get the hang of it until the next day where I stepped up from Easy to Normal and a new key was added. This throws you off like crazy and when I panic and miss one note I tend to miss the next 6 which in turn frustrates me to my core and I balls the rest of the song up.

When I got home from the weekend I decided to go out and purchase the game fore myself because lets face it, it’s addictive! After a while of playing even you will be moving along with some of the songs just remember that singing along to sweet child of mine will break your concentration.

The guitar itself is nice to hold and has 5 colour buttons on the head and a strum which you can click up or down depending on you like it! There is also the whammy bar which you can use to distort the tone of the sound when holding down a note; you will find yourself using this when you get more confident.

The game is based on a score system, when you hit 10 notes in a row your score multiplies by 2 another 10 notes it’s 3x and another 10 and you hit 4 which is max, if you hit a wrong note or miss a note your multiplier goes back to 0.

You also have sections of the song where you get a chance to fill your star power bar. This bar once you fill to at least the middle will get the crowd on your side, this is used to either double your multiplier points or help you out when the crowd are getting on your back. You must hit all the star notes when they appear on the screen and also once your bar is up you can increase it a little using the whammy bar. The length of the star power depends on the length of the bar and to activate it you have to lift your guitar so the head is pointing up or a quick shake should do the trick!

It is hard at first to get into but trust me the more you play the easier it becomes and sometimes you find that you will be playing tunes without realising what you are doing. Currently after a week I have polished off Easy getting 5/5 on all songs also finished medium getting 5/5 on 80% of songs and I have started hard which added the last colour button meaning you have to move your hand up and down the head of the guitar and also the speed at which the notes you have to strike speed up a notch!

All in all this is major fun as well as buying new guitars changing and updating your characters looks and buying extra songs and videos.
My only downfall with it is if you have a plasma TV and you play it for a while you will get screen burn of the points bar and rock bar into your TV!

Formats: Xbox360, PS3
Format Played: Xbox360
Import: N/A

So, Assassins Creed! I have been waiting for this game for so long and Pre Ordered it before actually seeing any game footage whatsoever! The only thing I had see was the trailer and the design of the character made me want this game alone. Assassins Creed arrived on Friday 16th November from play.com in a shiny pointless metal case which was 2x bigger then the contents. This aside I put in the disk to my dodgy X360 and loaded what seemed to be the trailer! What the hell I’ll watch it again before I play the game! I click start! By the gods I am in the future! Have I picked up the right game? You start off as some guy (Desmond) in the future and everything you play is in the past as Desmond’s ancestor Altair and this scientist is using some sort of matrix system to pull the details from him. Once you travel back the first thing you do is some basic training which teaches you to climb walk through crowds and fight. Once you are starting the game and running around you start with all your weapons but do not get too used to them as they are taken away from you as soon as the first mission is over! And you have to start at the bottom and work your way up. The game consists of you Assassinating 9 leaders around a massive city and I mean massive! As soon as you leave your main town and get on your horse you will see how big the kingdom is divided into four cities from the 12th Century: Jerusalem, Damascus, Acre, and Masyaf. Each city is split into 3 sections which are not fully open until later on. You get a poor and rich area and people will act different to you as you walk around. The first thing I must say is the graphics are simply amazing, you can watch people as they go around and do their day to day tasks like carry wood to places. Not everyone will interact with you but the Cities are packed and people will stop and look at you if you do anything out of the ordinary like climb a wall or kill someone. You can assassinate anyone using your hidden blade but you will be punished if it’s an innocent person. There are people you can interact with these are guards, mental patients who will get in your way buy shoving you or punching you (these can be taken care of with a quick punch), Beggers who you can punch or grab and throw (into market stalls will kill them and attract the attention of the guards but its so funny), Thieves who you later will pickpocket for throwing knives and informers who will give you information for help. In each mission you have to find out about your target by walking the city and listening to people. There are 3 out of 6 things you have to do but it’s worth doing them all. These involve - Interrogation speakers up for information - Eavesdropping, on conversations - Pickpocketing - Working for informants It’s the same for all 9 targets which is why people moan about the game getting to much of the same thing but I enjoy everything and walking around the cities is wonderful and fulfilling in itself. The battle system works well and you can either fight with a small knife or with a sword. You can counter the people you fight and some of the kills are graphic and fun to pull off especially taking on more then 5 guards at a time. You can climb anything in the game but you might have to work out a way to get to the top of what you are climbing. There are high places where you can perform a leap of faith with looks fantastic and an easy way of getting away from guards. Ever seen jump London? Well I call this game Jump Jerusalem, because you can free run along the tops of the city buildings, jumping grabbing ledges, climbing and diving. If you choose to run from the guards there are lots of hiding places to find and get away from them and guards will follow you pretty much everywhere. And don’t think that climbing walls will help you as they will throw rocks at you or archers will shoot you down! So if you are going to climb ladders or walls are quick! In each section you can also help out citizens in trouble who in return will lend you help if you are being chased by guards. They will either grab them or hold them up or you will get scrollers who you can pray with and blend into the background. There also high points to climb and 60 Templar Knights dotted around to take on and kill as well as flags to find in each city and in the kingdom itself. There are a few glitches here and there but noting to worry about on the whole, the things I didn’t like were if you land in water you die! And ever now and then you can’t climb things but always seems to happen when I am being chased. The flag chases I could have done without to! On a whole this is my game of the year so far and up there with my favourite games of all time.

I know that most people who read my blogs are from gaming websites so I thought I would write a blog about my history of gaming. I would not class myself as a hardcore gamer but I am a gamer and always will be. My earliest memory is having the Sinclair Spectrum 128k, man I loved that thing; I used to play Dizzy with the massive black keyboard with the cassette player attached to the side and a massive joystick which broke easy with excessive force. As my sister had a bigger room we would sit on the floor with the Spectrum connected to a black and white TV which actually made the games look better. If you were lucky enough to play it on a colour TV you would get blurriness from the poor gaming design. As well as going through the Commodore 64 and of course the God of Console/Keyboard machine the Amiga 500 with syndicate and Cannon Fodder (ohh what days); anyway where was I going? Umm oh yes first console experience was around my Uncles and they had an Atari 2200 with games like Pac Man and Jungle Hunt. Skipping on a few years I remember cycling around one of my friends house to check out his new console, it looked fantastic with control pads instead of joysticks. Also it had a D-pad and two red buttons and took these carts that slotted into the front flap of the console. I am of course describing the Nintendo Entertainment System or as it became know as the NES. The controller was so uncomfortable having sharp 90 degree angles and in the shape of a rectangle but we didn’t care, seeing the Super Mario Brothers for the first time was pure heaven. I needed to have this console. So next Christmas I asked for one, but I was at that craft age where I knew there was no Santa and I went looking through my dads wardrobe when they where out one day to see it sat there. I remember that Christmas I had to put on a surprised face when I unwrapped it knowing full well what I already had. It’s caught on video and if you are ever lucky you might see my award winning performance. After unwrapping it there was little more to do then get a TV and hook it up, of course in those days my dad would never let me use the BIG TV to play video games, uh no I had to use the small tiny 14” screen to play duck hunt on. Again going back to that classic video moment you can see my sister playing duck hunt with the light gun less then an inch from the screen….Happy Days Things moved on quite fast from there, with the delights of Sega vs Nintendo I bought the Master system before splashing out on the colourful SNES with that nice rounded controller and pretty coloured buttons and what was this? Easily breakable shoulder pads. I say this because when I went through 3 controllers because I dropped them and every time they would land on the shoulder. My favourite memory of the Snes was just completing Super Soccer against Germany after hours of play only to chuck the controller down hitting that massive reset switch!!!! Did it really need to be that big? It was no where as good and we designed to say the megadrive. Yes you knew it was coming and one of my greatest consoles was the Sega megadrive. With its batman like controller and games like Castle of Illusion, Sonic and Strider. 1996 and the console sat under my same 14” colour TV was the Nintendo 64, Wow this to the day remains the only console I was excited about the night before release. I had one on pre order and I could not sleep. During some Temp work I spent a few weeks working for Future Publishing in Bath, once at Total Magazine where I spent most of the time playing Earthworm Jim and another where I worked for the OPM (Official Playstation Magazine). When working there Edge magazine which worked in the same room had an American N64 with Mario Kart 64 and Mario 64. Every time we finished for the day all the magazines would go to the Edge area and we would have a knock out competition on Mario 64, it was class to the maximum and this would have been my dream job if the money was better. Keeping on the lines of work at future I managed to finish Mario 64 within a week nearly a year before its UK release but that never stopped me buying it with my N64 along with Killer Instinct. When I started working for the company I work for now in 1996 I bought a guys PS1 off him, this became one of my greatest consoles. I got worms with it which got boring fast but with the release of Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil and the game that still remains my favourite game to date…. Final Fantasy VII. Each of those games brought something new and different, with Resident Evil it was the chill factor, the moments that made me jump like the first time the dog comes through the window, with MGS a game where you had to sneak around and take out the enemies with stealth was amazing. And Final Fantasy VII the first RPG I ever played which dragged me into its own world and for once it was more then a computer game, It was like being there, free roaming I could do what I wanted. All these games have one thing in common and that is deep storylines which have since expanded over time and still alive today. Before I move on I would like to add a quick mention to GTA, a game where you had to sale drugs, kill people and nick cars…… how did they get away with it? But then again who cared at the time. Playstation 2……………. Before I start I would like to just say that before I had this console I had the Sega Saturn and Sega Dreamcast which I do regret getting rid of 1 month after buying it. The PS2 didn’t really hit me like the PS1 had, I had Tekken Tag and SSX as my launch games which I thought where brilliant at the time but Sony had failed to recap all the fun I had with its first console. The Final Fantasy games where good but not a patch on 7 & 8, MGS 2 was a let down and Resident Evil Code Named Veronica wasn’t up to much scratch. GTA 3 and Vice City where two games that got my wow factor and even though FF didn’t hit me enough Kingdom Hearts sure did. But what I really want to talk about for the PS2 are two games that never got enough credit and both will lye in my top 20 games for a long time. ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, both games where so simple and so beautiful it has been a pleasure to have been able to play them. After the PS2 I bought the Nintendo Gamecube which I will pass over very quick like the lifespan of the console. Mario Sunshine, Mario Kart where a huge disappointment but the Gamecube released a few titles which where simply breathtaking and still would stand up to games of today. These being MGS Twin Snakes, Resident Evil Remake, Zelda Twilight Princess and of course Resident Evil 4. When the Xbox was released there was a lot of bad hype, and the only game to get credit was Halo, It took me a year to buy an Xbox but when I did I could see why everyone was so excited about it. It wasn’t just because Halo was a kick ass game but the real strength behind the Xbox was Live. Playing over the internet with people around the globe was such a thrilling and new experience, games like Halo 2 and Splinter Cell had me playing for hours and hours at a time which increased the value of the games. No longer where you paying £40 for a solo game that lasted 30 hours but you had another 50 hours plus playing people on Live. It’s Live that made me pre order a Xbox 360 and it’s live that will keep getting better as years go on. We now have a web cam and mini games like Uno which are so simple but you will play them again and again. Hope I haven’t bored you but I have to cut this short as I should be on my way home by now. Bring on the PS3.