Happy New Year everyone!
Well, that’s that. Christmas, New Year it’s all done, now back to normality and back to work.
I actually had a pretty quiet new year this year. I’m never really that bothered by it anyway, I always feel like it’s a bit of an anticlimax. But as we were going away for the weekend on New Year’s day I didn’t really fancy a big night.
So come New Year’s day, we headed off down to St Ives for a few days. Most of the time was spent eating and drinking and just generally being sociable. Obviously being away for the weekend meant that I wouldn’t be participating in any gaming of any kind, but it didn’t stop me from catching up on a bit of reading.
I’ve decided to give up buying individual comics, mainly because it means I have to head to the comic shop almost weekly, which is a faff. Plus, they only provide a very short amount of reading. Instead I’m going to wait on the trade paper backs of comics so I can get more of a hit in one go. In December Saga Volume 4 was released. I’d been eagerly waiting to start reading this again after the last story arc ended a few months back.
Saga was probably my favourite series of last year, and I’m glad to say that Vol 4 was great too. The story picks up with the family living on the planet Gardenia, and Alana acting in an underground entertainment program called the Open Circuit, in which all the actors wear masks. Hazel has now grown up a little bit and is starting to speak in simple phrases. Meanwhile Prince Robot IV’s son is born, but the Prince isn’t around to see it, a decision he will come to regret.
Saga is mental, but I love it. The characters are so weird – who the hell thought of a race of people with TV’s for heads? But for some reason it kind of works.
I also picked up Volume 1 of Revival. This series has been on my radar for a little while, and for some reason I just hadn’t picked it up.
For one day in rural central Wisconsin, the dead came back to life. Now it’s up to Officer Dana Cypress to deal with the media scrutiny, religious zealots, and government quarantine that has come with them. In a town where the living have to learn to deal with those who are supposed to be dead, Officer Cypress must solve a brutal murder, and everyone, alive or undead, is a suspect.
I know it kind of sounds like it’s just another story about zombies, but actually it isn’t. When the dead come back, they are basically still the same person, they can still talk, still communicate. Ok, some of them are a little unhinged, but I won’t say any more than that.
The series is up to issue 26 now, so there is a decent amount of backlog to catch up on which is nice!
We came back home early evening on Saturday. Which meant I had a little time to get some gaming done before I was back to work
As I’m sure many of you are aware the Halo 5: Guardians Beta kicked off on the 29th December. I did actually get a little bit of time to play it before I went away, but only a few games here and there.
I actually plan on doing a bit more of an in depth write up on what I think of the Beta later on, when I’ve played more. But, so far, I’ve mostly enjoyed it. It seems really slick in terms of gameplay, most of the changes in it are welcome so far. I know that a lot of people are pretty pissed about the ADS now, and sprint being implemented, but honestly I don’t mind them too much. ADS doesn’t really seem to give you much of an advantage, and I find myself mostly still firing from the hip.
The one thing I don’t like about Halo, is that it feels like if you don’t play it a lot, then you will quickly get owned by the people who do. Now, in a way this isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it means that skill actually counts, I just don’t like it because I don’t have that skill… I can hold my own most of the time, but there will be games where I just get completely owned. One such example was a game in where our team was losing 20 kills to 3. This caused two players on our team to quit, and left me and one other guy try to tough it out. We ended up losing by around 30 kills, if not a few more, which is just embarrassing.
The people we were up against were good, but they weren’t amazing, they were just holding down one position on the map, and not moving much. It was very frustrating.
For a Beta it seems pretty polished too. I haven’t encountered to many problems bar the odd bit of lag here and there. In fact the only oddity I’ve come across was this.
Anyway, like I said, I’ve mostly enjoyed what I’ve played, and I’m looking forward to getting some more time on it over the course of the month.
– Will
Ah a new year, everyone is motivated to get fit, get healthy, clean their teeth twice a day etc etc. Yes I shall partake in the standard fortnight of trying to be good, knowing that i’ll fall into my old routine fairly soon. Even if I do get as close as to the end of January without having a pint, it’ll be all to waste as I’m off to Prague on a stag do in the last weekend of January. But moving on, a more ambitious new year resolution of mine is to complete more games in my backlog.
For Christmas I got 4 PS4 games. Assassins Creed Black Flag, The Last of us Remastered, Knack & Call of Duty Advance Warfare. I’ve yet to finish Killzone or Thief on PS4 already. So I’ve got a lot to do.
Fortunately this weekend after a massive tidy up of the house on Saturday and a brief spell out to the mall with wifey the weekend was all mine to get to work.
I’d been playing AC4 for quite a while prior to the weekend, but Saturday I went full ham on it playing from 2pm up till 11:30pm. I love this game. It’s the most fun Assassins Creed game I’ve played yet. I can’t get enough of taking the Jackdaw out onto the open seas and boarding Spanish and English ships for their loot. I made good progress on Saturday getting the Jackdaw to a high enough level to start tackling Man o War’s from both the Spanish and English fleets. I’ve been adding them to my own Kenway fleet which is now successfully heading down as far as Portugal and Africa bringing back good scores of money.
The game is so much fun I actually forget that it’s an Assassins Creed game, that is of course until you have to do a tailing mission, or a stalking mission. Then it all comes back to the game being an AC game. Unfortunately in the latter stages of the game I found myself dreading doing memory sequence missions as I was just enjoying pirate segments of the game so much.
As for Sunday, well very much more of the same, although I did complete Black Flag which means in 2015 I’m 1 game completed so far. Woo. But i’ll be spending time on it ensuring that I defeat the 4 legendary ships, fully upgrade the Jackdaw etc etc.
I installed COD: Advanced Warfare and took straight to the multiplayer. It’s pretty good, but I don’t quite have the bug for it as I once did. Saying that though I did reach level 10 in about 35 minutes, which when compared to other users around the world at my level, they’d got to that in over an hour or so which is odd.
The campaign frustrated me to start with. I found the opening mission to be incredibly boring despite all the futuristic shit going on around me. It wasn’t till the 3rd mission in and you’ve got an idea of Atlas and meeting Kevin Spacey that the campaign picked up for me. However I get the feeling this will be a short game. 3 hours in and already 20 trophies attained and bang on halfway through the campaign. Granted I’m not looking for collectibles yet, but still.
The game does look stunning though, the cut scenes are another world in terms of previous COD games, and Spacey so far is doing an awesome job. I feel that there’s a massive plot twist to come if some of the missions I’ve done so far are to go by.
So that’s my weekend. 1 game completed into 2015 already, and very confident that it’ll be 2 by next weeks Geekly Review. I’m hoping to be nice and deep into The Last of Us by then too.
– Murr
