Terahawks Corner

The first of two new videos on the Youtube channel: Tiny Troopers is a top down twin stick shooter - anyone who has played the Call of Duty Dead Ops games will grasp the controls - with the schtick being that you can have several soldiers under control at once. It's very reminiscent of the classic 16-bit game Cannon Fodder and has the same issue of not being able to control individual troopers but is more light-hearted and makes for a fairly enjoyable game, with 3 separate campaigns available. The other free PS3 game of the month - Hyper Void - is also harking back to a classic game; in this case Tempest . Like in that game, enemies come towards you and your ship is restricted to only being able to move in one plane. It gives 3 difference types of laser weapon but there doesn't seem to any particular reason to choice a particular type of laser on enemies, other than your personal choice. There are 30 or so levels according to the Trophy descriptions - I felt no

Okays, so finally responding to my post in early September regarding games that I would be playing ... The game I didn't mention was finally obviously Destiny . And I have to admit that that game kinda swallowed up my gaming time from late September until early November - anyone checking our the ReprobateGamer channel on Youtube will notice the mass gap in video's from September to November. For a game that can frustrate as easily as enthuse, I certainly put a lot of hours into it. In part, this was helped by having a fire team pretty much waiting on me to get to a point where I was raid ready. I did capture some footage from early on in playing and I do have raid footage from Vault of Glass and Crota captured that I still haven't gone through (it is around 3 hours of capture ...). This was with 4 long time players (LL around 370) and myself and another at around LL330. We made a push on The Taken King and made it to the final area but that took a little doing. And ha

I've realised that I've participated to a greater or lesser extent in a number of beta's this year. Largely these have been public tests (such as with The Division , Overwatch , Battleborn , and Titanfall 2 ) but there have been a couple of closed beta's and even a private test session. The public tests seem to have been largely for shooters but the rest has been across a variety of genre's Even as someone who has essentially volunteered his time, I've had to sign NDA so no game or studio specifics but some thoughts. Firstly, is this a way of replacing paid employment? I remember being recruited by a survey company to go to a private session that ended up being Pursuit Force , a very enjoyable riff on the Chase HQ formula (think loosely of Burnout / Need For Speed meeting Prince of Persia acrobatics). I actually got paid to attend that and play a couple of levels on a game that had it stayed on the PS2 I was testing it on and not ended up on PSP, I would

For once, I have no video's in this update - instead I'm following up on my previous post and the things to come. Well, the Overwatch open weekend came and went and I didn't even get as far as downloading it. Currently only really have a couple of hours a days at most to pick which games I play and that same weekend had the Pit People closed beta running. There will be Pit People video's coming onto the Youtube channel over the next few days. Behemoths next game is a lot of fun. Recognisably in the Castle Crashers style, it's a turn-based strategy game, with co-op play if wanted, set on a world that is somewhat skewy. It's post-apocalytic state was caused by a bear crashing into the ground (and actually visible on the world map ...) and the weapons and armour are not standard weapons (my hero started with a fence post shield, a sword and a moustache and is currently rocking a filing cabinet, toilet brush and mollusc hat in those same slots). Being a be

New Month, new Games With Gold, new video's on the channel. I'm starting with Xbox this month and we have an older game: the lovely Forza Horizon . I gripe about the arrow line that changes colour depending on whether you are at the right speed or not but it is actually quite helpful for someone like me who learn to race in the age of the d-pad (there was acceleration and not, and not the gradulated analogue that is the standard now. The other video is: Earthlock Festival of Magic . This doesn't fair so well. In part this is because only giving 15 minutes or so for an RPG means that it hasn't really got going. Of course, the game hasn't really grabbed my attention within that time either which doesn't bode well. Not that I'll be giving this game any time any time soon. Overwatch is on a Free Play Weekend 9th - 12th September, I'm part of the closed beta of Behemoths Pit People , my fire team is enthused for The Division Underground havin

I'm noticing that a larger portion of my gaming these days is comprised of demo's, tech tests and free play weekends. The latest addition to the partial games taking up my Xbox One disk space is the tech test for Titanfall 2 with a First Time Play: and a following Thoughts of the Game vid: The game itself is quite enjoyable but the front-end is very cluttered and I'm going to predict that it's going to lose out against some of the other upcoming shooters coming out this season (not least Battlefield One ) and the larger names still holding their own ( Destiny , Overwatch , Halo 5 , Black Ops 3, stop me when appropriate ...). I do like this trend towards a more objective led gameplay. As popular as the deathmatch game mode has and is, I prefer this more team based approach to games (it's why I stuck with Unreal Tournament 2004 for three years) - I'm not the best aimer in the world so getting points for objective completions helps me and I'm a

One day my internet will work properly again - hopefully soon enough that I'll actually be able to play GTA Online on my Xbox One. It does encourage me to play other games at least, and Xbox buddy WatchingSeven and myself have been slowly working our way through the Nightmare campaign on Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 . The concept behind this is great: take the story campaign of Black Ops 3 , swop out the original story for a bioweapon virus that turns people into zombies and go! Even the cutscenes are re-used and by altering the voice-over (and removing character voices) they have been able to put a story in that uses the locales from the main campaign and 'remix' it - helps when the levels don't need to be in the order that they originally were. It's also nice to be able to play zombies and be able to utilise the cyber abilities - however Treyarch also made the decision to alter how weapons are handled. The weapons themselves are the same as you'll fine i

Last month was a little quiet from me in the upload stakes - picked up a rather nasty cold bug mid May that continued to linger well into June, with some sick days taken as a result. This in turn has shot my sleeping patterns to all hell. Combine that with a particularly busy stretch at the day job and I've not had much time, and not much energy. The busy season is easing off though at work - the cold bug has departed (though I think I may have just replaced it with a summer flu instead ...) and my internet connection remains a known qaundary (there will be no twitch recordings any time soon. Back to the games. Largely this month when I have reached a console, it's needed to be a child-friendly title. As generally has been the case this last year, Lego steps quite handily into the breach. And currently Lego Indiana Jones 2 has been the choice. As Telltale always seem to do, it's moved to a different set-up from previous games - a pseudo open world mini version of the

With May rolling around, that means new games available for download. For this month that means Sunset Overdrive on Xbox One: On Xbox 360 I think it's Grid 2 . As I'm a Burnout man at heart, this game is unlikely to be checked any time soon And finally on PS3, we have LocoRoco : And Bionic Commando 2: Rearmed [if you are reading this then I haven't yet uploaded the video] Rather than talk through the games in the blog (seeing as I do so on the videos), I'm instead going to sidestep (or strife if you like) and go into a mini-rant on technology, as I seem to do from time to time. The following is a first world problem. Depending on what point you read this, the chances are that there are three videos above. However, as I write this, there are only 2 video's and Bionic Commando is waiting. This is largely due to my internet connection which it can be easily guessed from those who watch the YT channel is not great. Ookla when we test it regularl

Traveller's Tales Lego  games have become a staple within our household. The quality of the games is somewhat variable - so some I will go back to and play; particularly as the younger members of the family get older and some some won't be quite so high up the replay list but there is one feature missing from every Lego  game I've played since the original Lego Star Wars  - a customised party I've found in every game that there are characters that I prefer to use - often not the primary characters. For instance, in Lego Pirates of the Caribbean , my female character choice would be Park (one of the supporting pirates from the Singapore segment) or my preferred webslinger in Lego Marvel is Venom. Yes I can pick a preferred character, but every game will auto-select the other characters in the party. Yes I can select other characters on the fly (in Free Play at least) but it won't remember previous selections. I'd firmly expect this to be something not ne

this weekend, I've so far sunk 8 hours into the open beta for Tom Clancy's The Division . and I suspect that I'll sink a few more hours into it before it closes. First impressions are very good - it's basically a RPG with a 3rd person cover based shooter approach set in a virus ravaged New York City. I caught one forum comment liken it to Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, which is actually a very apt summation of it's strengths and weakness's. It plays well, and it is a realistic vision of a city that is under siege from within - it's the trappings of video games that go towards breaking this (bullet sponge bad guys, for instance). As with ME3  multiplayer, it plays better if you have friends to go to town with and I like that the base of operations is instanced for each player. The Dark Zone area with it's PvPvE set-up works very well - though I wonder if it's a little easy to go rogue. That said, making it easy to go rogue was very satisfying when I

This month I was reminded that when updating software, you need to check the settings before using it in anger. So, new month means new subscription games. The first one that I pick was  Hand Of Fate on Xbox One: The game itself works well and I recommend it to anyone looking for a pick up and play RPG. However, when setting up to record it, my GameCapture informed me that version 3.whatever was available up from 2.2.some number. Ran the update, then went straight into the capture. I noted the updated GUI but didn't look any further, particularly as my set tags were there. It wasn't until I'd done the capture and moved it into MovieMaker that I noticed the commentary track was missing from the folder. Checking the raw files I also didn't find it there then realised that the commentary was embedded into the video - and as I didn't alter the audio settings when I started playing, the commentary was all but inaudible. However, because I have the audio set

So, a little after the fact but there is a First Time Play up for the game Zheros. A side scrolling beat 'em up IN SPACE! The concept reads a little like Double Dragon in a Ratchet and Clank universe - the execution is a little more lacklustre sadly. Graphics are good but not great, audio does the job but is not outstanding, it does allow for co-op gameplay but with stereotypical characters but the worse part is that it's just somewhat clunky - something which is not that much of a desirable factor in any game, never mind a beat 'em up. There doesn't seem to be much going for this game, as you notice in my video: However, one thing it does have going for it seems to be an extraordinarily huge TrueAchievement score. For this 1,000 Gamerscore game, you could get potentially 25,194 points. To note though, at the time of writing, of the 26,200 members of True Achievements not one has completed it. A challenge perhaps for someone out there ... or an indication t

This month's 1st First Time Play is Medal Of Honor: Warfighter , currently available for free for Playstation Plus subscribers for the month of January 2016. It starts badly for the game as it needs an update before it even starts. As I mention in the video, and have done previously, I do not understand why a digital download game requires post download patches. I've just purchased GTA V for my Xbox One and whilst that did require an update, it was also a physical disc - there's enough dlc for that game I understand why the disc isn't up to date. But for a game that I entirely download, which has been released for a period of time and which Sony will have decided ahead of time to release for PS+, there really doesn't seem to be any good reason. The opening level is shown in the video - the graphics are fine though not amazing but the sound effects are far too loud, a magnitude above games like Call of Duty or Halo which I also expect effects to be not

In my last post I mentioned that I would shortly be able to be undertaking higher res recordings and also be able to start gaining HDD space. Anyone who's checked out ReprobateGamer on Youtube by this point will already have been able to guess the answer, as there is now a number of Xbox One captures up on the channel. Yep, finally joined the current gen of consoles with Microsoft's offering. The PS4 remains tempting but there aren't currently any games available on that system that I can't also get on Xbox One and I know more people on Xbox Gold to actually play with at the moment. The older consoles are still hooked up so there will be still recordings coming from them both (I haven't forgotten about the Gunslinger  playthrough that has been in abeyance since last summer) but I'm currently working on a Top Tips for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 Zombies  newcomers which is definitely proving how much of a hassle MovieMaker is to use - predominantly that I hav