Can’t believe it’s been 3 whole months since I last posted on my blog, it doesn’t seem that way, but sadly it is. I figured it was time to give a little update and try to get back in the swing of things here.

Firstly, I’ve been quite busy, I’ve begun working on a Left 4 Dead modification back in February which is still very early in it’s days called Dead Safe, which is a take on 28 Days Later in that it’s based around London, or Capital City as it will be called, but will feature obvious landmarks from the city to make it recognizeable. The modifications website can be seen at http://www.deadsafemod.com/ and it’s currently taking on staff if you’re interested. It’s quite an ambitious project which is being led by a group of industry professionals from the UK.

I’ve also joined work on another modification, this time on the Unreal Engine as part of the ‘Make Something Unreal‘ competition that is run annually on a modification called Prometheus, which fortunately just won the phase 2 heat and is now in need of new, clean models with nice textures, which is where I come in. I’m about to begin quite an intense bout of modelling to try and push some stuff out for this in the coming weeks where I will be taking my PC to a friends house and working alongside him to get more work done and try to maintain a level of consistency between models. There is currently a playable beta available.

Other than that I’ve been trying to enjoy myself as best as possible, getting some games done such as Resident Evil 5, which is a hoot, a review by my friend Jennifer over at HalyCopter can be read which pretty much shares my views on the game in it’s entirety as we played the game through co-operatively. The review can be read here.

UFC Undisputed has also been in my console a lot lately and it’s a fantastic game, though does suffer from some fundemental online gameplay mechanics where people can quit after being beaten and not suffer the defeat which also stops the winner getting the victory, resulting in people quitting to dashboard as soon as they get knocked/tapped out. As a game, it’s very accomplished, the stand up element to it is competitive with Fight Night Round 3 in terms of standard, but also features the best ground wrestling game yet seen on consoles, resulting in a two-for-one standard of game. On top of this the character models are possibly the best yet seen and all feature very nice animation. As a game it’s quite hard to fault, it has a lot of modes, a solid online mode, great graphics and a solid achievement list, barring the online quitting, the only aspect that could do with work would be the career mode which could have more involvement with the player when it comes to training, something to the standard of FNR3 for example where you take part in the training regime as opposed to simply choosing to train Strength/Speed/Stamina and having it done for you.

I’ve recently purchased Star Ocean: The Last Hope and Sacred 2, both of which were less than £18, which is bargain tastic, and I hope to give them a good going over in the near future. I’ve only had a chance to try Star Ocean so far and the impressions are good. The graphics themselves aren’t fantastic and the characters follow every JRPG cliche you can think of, the story isn’t anything near the standard Square Enix are capable of and it probably isn’t as immediately impressive as Lost Odyssey, but the fighting gameplay mechanics in battles is certainly a fresh approach to a stale arena and a welcome change.

Fuel, the new massive open space racing game from Codemasters is the other game I’ve dabbled with and it really is quite awe inspiring. It has a widely publicised gameplay arena of 5,000 square miles, although I’m not sure how that’s been worked out… It’s a pretty game with a daylight system which has a beautiful array of colours where you get Oranges, pinks, reds, purples and blues amongst your standard day and night which is a truly nice touch. It has plenty of race modes and even a freeroam mode which is playable both online and off where you can drive and find ‘hidden’ things on the landscape such as vehicle liveries, vista spots or further races to compete in. There is also a rather impressive ‘create-a-race’ mode, not so much in what you can create, by that it’s simply a point to point checkpoint race where you drop markers on the map and go, it’s actually a bit too simple and the ability to add some crazier stuff would have been nice, but it’s impressive in its scale, you can create a race with a maximum distance of 93 miles(!) to race online with if you wished, and considering it’s quite hard to stay above 70mph, you’re looking at quite a length of race.

Other than games I’ve been doing the usual, playing sports with friends where I play 5-a-side every Wednesday and Sunday which is nice as both games are with completely different groups of people. Playing Snooker where I’ve totally sucked ass lately which has put a bit of a downer on things and simply hanging around with friends, which is always fun.

It’s also Big Brother season which means you can either embrace it and try to enjoy it, or try to ignore seeing it advertised on TV, live streams on TV, news on the Web and on the cover of every paper for the next 12 or so weeks. I’ve decided that this year I’m gonna embrace it. It should be made more interesting by the constant open conversations of it through Twitter which I’m using more and more now, I can still be found here for anyone wishing to follow me.

Ahhh, it genuinely feels nice to have added an update to this blog, especially one that’s just surpassed 1,000 words, it brings back memories. I’ll try to get a constant supply of posts up much, much closer together.

Thanks,
Karl.

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