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NOW PLAYING: Lots of different things for 30 mins each

A rather social weekend meant cleaning our house first. In turn gaming was low on the list but that didn’t stop me getting a few rounds of World at War during the double XP weekend. Also I managed an hour of GTA: Chinatown Wars on the plane ride home until the wind buffeting the plane became so intense that I couldn’t hold the stylus straight enough to tattoo my newly recruited Tong members.

Also another stab at GTA: The Lost and Damned. I take back my earlier comments, it does seem dated in comparison to the new sandbox games. Well, it feels slower (pressing A to move faster than a crippled turtle is kind of absurd) than games like Infamous, Crackdown, et al and just clunkier overall. The DS game is just more fun. The story of the bikers is interesting to watch as the sociopath leader Billy unleashes havoc, much to the dismay of Johnny- the playable character. Johnny just wants to keep things on a business level. All of this mayhem interferes with all of the drugs, loose women and grand larceny.

Red Faction Guerrilla- a game I wasn’t overly impressed by during our Focus Test of the demo- has turned out to be a fair bit of fun. Red Faction was the game I bought with my PS2 back in 2001 and was a game I have fond memories of, memories that the sequel was not super kind to. So open world Red Faction seemed to be a rather desperate move on the part of Volition, whose Saint’s Row games aren’t the most polished GTA rips there are. But despite implied uses of the same tech as SR, Red Faction looks pretty nice considering YOU CAN BLOW UP ALMOST ANYTHING!

As someone who has an affinity for audio in videogames, I was slightly shocked to find that the game booted up with all of the audio options set to 0. That’s right after the intro videos- there was no sound at all. There is even a switch to disable the sound in the menu options.

It’s as if RF:G is the game Mercenaries 2 wanted to be. After initially deciding to pass on the game several things happened- I finished inFamous and decided I didn’t want to play Prototype, I have nothing new to play after Ghostbusters (which is meant to be rather short), it was on special, I’d heard other site’s podcasts banging the drum about how much fun the game is and lastly and most importantly my wife bought it for me as a present while I was out of town.

So it sounds like Lost and Damned will get the boot while I concentrate on Red Faction and Ghostbusters. Expect ‘Now Playing’ articles for both over the coming weeks.