|
I'd intended to finish off this series on Sunday with another 6 game post, but I decided in the end that I wanted to spend Sunday on other things, like sleep and games. Also one thing I realised I had failed to note earlier, unless stated otherwise when talking about buying games these days it is safest to assume that I'm talking US dollars, most of my games purchases are done on Steam these days.
 Flatout Ultimate Carnage:
This is the latest game in the Flatout franchise. It basically amounts to a remade Flatout 2 with a prettier engine, a few new modes, and Games for Windows Live. It was released for the 360 in 2007, and for the PC last year. It somewhere in the transition lost LAN play.
Games for Windows Live began as a terribly poorly implemented extension of Xbox Live, it has slowly become less and less half-arsed, implementing features that should have been there from the start and removing the old "You should be using a game controller" interface that it used to use. I've not personally had any issues for it and I do like the ability to send messages and chat to friends crazy enough to do most of their gaming on a 360, I also like achievements and like the overall idea of gamerscore, though I'd prefer to have a mode where I see comparative gamerscores rather than absolute. i.e. I'd see only the gamerscore others have for games I have played.
That said, with what I have experienced of Flatout UC, other than the look, you could pretty much use my Flatout 2 review. I did decide that I would play Flatout UC with a 360 controller to see how those controls work out and I'm pretty happy with them overall. One of the modes I tried was the time trial mode which I could not quite get a decent score at, but did get an achievement for my persistence, which I found to be pretty amusing.
As someone who particularly likes LANs (RanLAN IV: Endgame should take place in October by the way. Maybe the October Long Weekend, any thoughts?) I would recommend grabbing Flatout 2 over this one, Ultimate Carnage plays a little better but lacks a core play method. I grabbed this during the Steam end of year sales. It is currently $19.99
 3D Ultra™ Minigolf Adventures:
This game was a bargain. Sadly it is not a bargain any longer. I bought this when it came out on Steam where, due to presumably a clerical error, it was 10c. It is now the bizarre price of $13.33 in Australia (and $9.99 in the US, bad Activision, no cookie!). It's a minigolf game with 3 course themes, Wild West, carnival and Space, limited avatar selection (4 character models, each with several costumes).
There are 36 different holes in the game though it does come with a course editor which I have not explored, and to be honest am unlikely to.
Whilst I don't play them very often I do quite like minigolf games, they do however have a minor problem of difficulty, especially with the control system used by default the game is not very hard. You pick the right angle and power and in not a small number of holes you immediately will get a hole in one. The courses are full of shortcuts which will if you get them immediately give you a hole in 1. The AI evidentally doesn't use these (not that you get to see them play), but this typically means that over the course of a tournament you will get so far ahead that even if you royally screw up a level or two it won't affect your position.
It fun and I really should see if there are any collections out there of well made courses. I could see using this game at a LAN but now I have played through all of the holes that came with the game I'm not sure I'm likely to bother opening it again elsewhere. It was a great deal at 10c, I don't think I would recommend it at $13.33.
 Two Worlds:
Price and time can make a woeful game into reasonable one. Two Worlds has a metacritic rating of 65. When it was released it was apparently a very buggy open world RPG. These days it is merely a slightly buggy open world RPG.
Your character is off to rescue his sister from whomever abducted her and of course this spirals into a large save the world plot. My primary game experience consisted of running around the game world killing things and making stat up potions. It has a plethora of quests and gets around the issue of a large gameworld by having a vast ancient teleport network to which you get a key, but you need to activate the teleporters to be able to use them. Strangely no one else ever bothers aiding you with this.
It certainly is a game with scaling problems, there were enemies in the end game that were able to almost kill me with a single hit, and so I had to wear them down by using a spell to temporarily hold them, and then heal whenever hit and just wear away at them that way. Magic started off as my only way to wear things down when combined with running and ended up completely useless for damage dealing as it simply didn't do as much damage as my swords did to larger monsters.
If the story seems slightly disjointed, you might want to check to see if you are being shown the prerendered cutscenes, I was missing them for the latter part of the game which made for a slightly confusing experience.
Despite what I am saying here I did actually actually enjoy some of the basic gameplay in the game, there was little in the way of loading, you could always see off into the distance unless the in game weather was bad and I did enjoy going combine harvester on my enemies (lots of attacks with dual wielded weapons). I got the game during a weekend sale on Steam for $9.95 in March 08. It's currently $19.99 I finished the game during the one session of it during the week of random gaming. |
RANdom Games Week 4
