What We’re Playing – Week 18

This week is all about ranting. Katy rants (nothing new there), Kovacs rants (he’s been known to go off on one at times), even Tom has some gripes. That said, at least he’s got a genuine reason to be grumpy with exams and all. The other two are just naysayers who will always find something to moan about.

DJ-Katy:

The week started well with the acquisition of Lost Planet 2 but quickly turned to mass seething, anger and a general sense of apocalyptic-scale doom as the DHL man brought a four foot by two foot box containing a 10cm long 640GB disk drive to upgrade my PS3′s paltry little 250GB shoebox.

I’ll save the full rage-filled debacle for my rant column, suffice to say it took three full days to upgrade, meaning I completely missed the PSN update ‘til Friday and couldn’t play anything. In a reluctant and shameless decision I wound up playing MotoGP 09/10 on my 360 for a fair while and got a decent way through the season.

My PSPgo didn’t escape recruitment to alleviate the progress bar blues either. I played the ModNation Racers PSP demo for the second time, after it left me feeling completely uninspired first time round. It still left me feeling completely uninspired. I also had a stab at the first dozen levels of CUBE.

Once order was (mostly) restored I have pretty much only played Lost Planet 2 in online co-op, ripping through the first two-thirds of the campaign before next week’s glut of big hitter releases arrives. For those reviewers who complained about the train level and the objectives being hard to understand, you are idiots: this game is a total blast. The sparse checkpoints are a bit of a bind, and single player is completely unplayable, so this is a strictly online-only affair, but if you stick to that with some friends, you’ll have a ball.

Zuler:

Not been playing much this week. I guess just bits of The Secret of Monkey Island, AfterBurner Climax and Pokemon SoulSilver. I look forward to playing episode 2 of this season’s Sam and Max which should hopefully come to the store this week.

ColinBarr66:

I’ve been playing some Super Street Fighter IV with a friend this week. Despite doing well on the single player I was yet again destroyed. Thankfully a few games on 2010 FIFA World Cup and Anarchy Rush Hour got me a few victories.

Anarchy Rush Hour has been my most played game this week. I really do not like the way the cars handle but I am having a lot of fun with it. Worth the surprisingly low price tag, especially with a platinum trophy up for grabs.

Played a little bit of Skate 3 and it reminded me how much I love skating games. The analogue controls take a bit of getting used to but this will certainly be a purchase for me.

Completed a few more Spec Ops missions on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 with a friend and on my own. Some of the missions are ridiculously hard and with my low skill level, I doubt I’ll complete them all.

Quick games on Formula 1 2009 and Killzone 2 wrap up what I’ve been playing this week.

tom_lord:

This week I finished GTA: The Ballad of Gay Tony and thought it was absolutely brilliant. Super excited for Red Dead Redemption now and have started GTA IV again in honour. Only two levels in but it feels like an old pair of slippers. Plenty of SingStar too as I finally got round to transferring my SingStore downloads from my old PS3 to my newer Slim this week.

Aside from that I am currently doing my finals at university so mega crammed. I have a few days off now before revision picks up again so my PS3 can get some attention.

Kovacs:

Still dipping into some Uncharted 2 multiplayer and came across the shambolic decision on Sony’s behalf to region lock the DLC . This is within Region 2 I might add. It’s not like I bought a copy from Ulaanbaatar and I’m trying to get it to work with content from the European store. I currently have a call in with Sony Support (I practically have a direct line with these guys at this point. Hi Anna! – if you’re reading) who don’t know why a UK version of the disc, with a UK account and the UK DLC downloaded, still won’t work. If there’s a prize going for ringing up Sony with issues that they’ve “never heard of before,” I think I might be a shoe-in for the ignoble reward.

Other that that, I’ve caught up with some MAG duties after spending the week defending it here on TSA. I picked up some new sights and some nifty abilities, the game dishing up an even better online experience than before. That said, MAG also has the unenviable trait of administering some of the worst multiplayer games imaginable if you so happen to be linked up with a bunch of mike-less douchenozzles. Especially if they decide to just run about the place disobeying direct orders to “get down” and “stop getting shot in the face.”

I’ve also completed a few levels of Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction (quite enjoyable) and fingered every single one of the Blue Toad Murder Files’ murderers. The less said about that experience the better. It’s rare I finish a title and feel like I am clocking off at a mundane factory. It’s also usually not a good sign when the best thing about your time with a game is how the narrator says “There’s been a MAADAAAA!”