What We Played #64: Portal 2, Fallout NV, Halo: Reach

Following the same pattern as last week I’ve been playing Mass Effect 3 online and returning to older mobile games to see how they fair on my Nexus 7. This week it was old favourite SteamBirds that got a fresh start freed of the confines of smaller smartphone screens and as with Fieldrunners last week it works brilliantly with the increased finger room on Google’s 7” tablet.

Keith has become addicted to the new Pro Evolution Soccer demo and is “loving it”. Darksiders has seen a couple of false starts due to the fact that he just can’t seem to stop playing Fallout New Vegas.

[drop2]Halo: Reach has proved “really enjoyable” for Aran who’s now almost all the way through the single-player and has found it “really well crafted” with a “decent amount of variety in the gameplay”. Bizarrely persisting with his spell of managing Everton in Football Manager 2012, he’s somewhat unrealistically built a star-filled team and is expecting to challenge for a virtual spot in Europe.

Kris’ week has seen a bit of variety, with the Pro Evolution Soccer demo featuring on both 360 and PS3, as well as a good chunk of Ghost Recon Future Soldier’s campaign. His thoughts? Well he preferred the 360 version of the PES demo to the PS3 build, complaining that “replays on the PS3 are juddery, suffering from major frame rate issues, and overall the performance isn’t up to what the 360 offers.”

As for Ghost Recon he found it a “very enjoyable experience, in particular the drone really shines out.” However, he did feel it ripped off the Modern Warfare series a bit, noting that “the campaign cutscenes could literally be from Modern Warfare 3, and they don’t even have the good grace to use them to hide loading.”

However, the highlight of his week was a trip to That London to see the Olympics. I’ll let him tell you about it:

On Monday I headed off to That London to see just what the Olympics have to offer. Unfortunately I didn’t tickets for anything at the Olympic Park, but I did get to see the archery at Lords. I’ve never been to Lords before but it’s a wonderful venue, and has been brilliantly converted for the games. Although competitive archery hadn’t made it’s way into my life before, the commentators did a brilliant job of explaining it and getting the crowd invested in the athletes’ performances. Overall it was a great day, and the organisers deserve a lot of praise for their organisational skills, everything went off like clockwork.

Lastly Toby is “still living it up in Cornwall”. Replaying Portal 2 while listening to the developer commentaries has been his primary gaming focus. He highly recommends you do the same if you get the chance as “the majority are really interesting and provide an insight into the development process and the ideas behind many of the puzzles and characters”. He says the game has not been diminished despite this being a replay for him “and unbelievably, a small robotic core is still close to topping my videogame all time favourite characters list!”

While we wait for the seasonal flood of game releases to begin have you been replaying any favourites?