All you have to do is dial these on your mobile phone (press up on the D-Pad twice to get ‘manual dial’ mode)…

Advanced Weapons - GUN-555-0100
Climate Change - HOT-555-0100
Health - DOC-555-0100
Health And Weapons - GTA-555-0100
Spawn Cognoscenti (Mafia Car) - CAR-555-0142
Spawn Sanchez (Dirt Bike) - MBK-555-0150
Spawn FBI Buffalo - CAR-555-0100
Spawn Turismo - CAR-555-0147
Spawn NRG900 - MBK-555-0100
Spawn Comet - CAR-555-0175
Spawn SuperGT - CAR-555-0168
Spawn Police Chopper - FLY-555-0100
Spawn Jetmax (Boat) - WET-555-0100
Weapons - GUN-555-0150
Wanted Level Down - COP-555-0100
Wanted Level Up - COP-555-0150

Note that on the 360 if you use these codes you’ll no longer be able to gain acheivements on that save game.

This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.

In November 2006 Microsoft added the ability to have your Xbox 360 automatically download new Xbox Live Arcade trial games, it’s a great feature but for too long I’ve just let it stack up with millions of trial games and it’s about time I sorted the wheat from the chaff and decided if there’s anything worth buying. I’m going to chip away at my list of 81 games (although some I’ve played and own) until I get rid of all the trials and today’s my first 10…

 Asteroids & Deluxe - Some old rehashes work (Pacman CE) and others don’t. This seems like an utterly pointless remake and doesn’t seem to provide any of the old-school fun it ought to.
Battlestar Gallactica - Not my cup of tea but seems well put together, kind-of odd that it’s a space flight sim yet you seem to be retricted to a 2D plane.
Bliss Island - no idea what the bloody hell is going on here, don’t seem to be able to actually do much.
Every Extend Extra Extreme - WTF? Seriously, I can’t see the game here - you just wait until you’re surrounded, press A then watch the pretty colours. It seems bizarre to play a game, not have a clue about what you’re doing and still score 7,056,824,249 points.
Ikaruga - Back in the day I used to like scrolling shooters, I always wanted to try Ikaruga but I never got to. The gameplay doesn’t really disappoint, it’s more the narrow vertical nature of it leaves me feeling empty - like I’m wasting two thirds of my TV screen whilst squinting at what’s left trying to work out what’s going on.
Metal Slug 3 - Fun game, a bit silly but definitely not worth 800 points. Oddly this game seemed to screw up my Xbox Live connection I was in a voice chat at the time so I was rather pissed off.
Omega Five - I lasted for about 15 seconds in total and I would rather be punched in the face than play this for another second.
Street Trace NYC - I think the publishers would like it to be “Tony Hawks on Steroids” but it’s actually “Tony Hawks on Life Support”. Do yourself a favour, keep your cash, go on eBay and buy yourself an Original Xbox copy of a Tony Hawks Pro Skater game and you’ll get way more value for money.
Track & Field - Oddly this is as fun and compelling as it ever was, I’m not 100% sure if I’ll buy it yet but it’s definitely a candidate.
Tron - Terrible, it upsets me that this game exists. It disgusts me that it’s been remade.

So it’s as I thought - they’re mostly rubbish. On a side note, all hail to the glorious Microsoft Points Converter - what an awesome little tool.

This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.

The original Gran Turismo game was a triumph in my eyes, the first time a game had ever made driving feel even remotely realistic and it was the main reason I bought a Playstation. I spent hours and hours tuning up cars and racing the same tracks repeatedly to gain minor improvements or to win special prize cars, but on the release of Gran Turismo 2 I had moved on to other gaming pastures and didn’t really find the time for all of the tweaking and racing that the series demands of it’s players. Between then and now I did get to play both GT3 and GT4 and there wasn’t really a whole lot to draw me back to the series because by then I’d gotten back into the FPS genre and was loving Unreal Tournament, Half Life & Red Faction more than anything else. In more recent years though my interest in driving games has been piqued once more, starting with Project Gotham 1 and 2 which though ‘arcadey’ in style were pretty involved racing games. On the current generation of consoles I found myself disappointed in PGR3 but enjoyed Forza 2 considerably, though I never really found the time to plumb the depths it had to offer. So if there’s been any time in the last decade that I’ve had the potential to get back into racing sims then now is the time, and I’m actually quite excited.

I got hold of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue a couple of days after launch, on a nice lazy Sunday afternoon following a lie-in and a McDonalds breakfast so naturally I was in a good mood. Unfortunately the mood was soured slowly and gradually as I spent 15 minutes installing the game only to find I had to spend an additional 45 minutes updating it before I could start racing, clearly - this is not what I bought a console for. Once the hour of admin was out of the way (in which I spent £30 on eBay, checked my credit rating and helped bake scones) I launched the game and watched the intro which is graphically stunning but doesn’t quite manage the spine-tingling brilliance of the original GT1 intro. The menus are straight-forward and offer a couple of cool little features including a live rolling display of world track temperatures and when you leave the controller unattended the display shows panning shots of your current car in various pretty locations then flips to a replay if you leave it a little longer.

As with the other GT games the main menu presents you with access to an empty garage, a small sum of money and freedom to peruse a variety of dealership, I started off by buying a purple Mini Cooper S for 28,500 credits of the 35,000 you start with. The first thing I noticed about the game is that once you buy a car, that’s it - you just have to get in and race it, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to buy parts or tune the car at all - from what I’ve heard you unlock the ability to tune certain elements of the car once you’ve completed the A, B and C car classes. Getting into playing the game is pretty easy and once in there it’s relatively compelling and if you’re a noob like me you really can feel that there’s a lot to learn before you’ll have mastered the complex physics of the game. To help those of us who aren’t GT monsters (you know who you are) there’s an optional racing line indicator which not only gives you the best position to be in, it also shows where to break and calls out the required speed for certain tough corners. Regardless of your experience though I think everyone should at least turn off the traction control, by design it limits your ability to drift in the corners and makes the cars feel much too rigid and unfriendly.

The arcade section of the game adds a slightly different twist, offering the choice of all six tracks (High Speed Ring, Daytona Superspeedway, Fuji Speedway, Eiger Nordwand, Suzuka and London) on which you can enter a Time Trial, Drift Trial or a regular race. Before launching into the race you are offered a “Course Guide” which shows real video relating to the selected track accompanied by some annoyingly cheesy musak (along with much of the game), these are amusing but would be better accompanied by voice-over rather than scrolling text. The multiplayer facilities include a 2 player split screen mode (which appears to be as bearable as any split-screen racing) and the ability to race online, which consists of events similar to the single player game and seemed a little picky about which cars you were allowed to enter into which race. Once into the online game there’s a brief period of matchmaking before you’re thrown into a race, after which it plays just like a regular game. The play was a little laggy and a few cars seemed to ‘shimmer’ in and out of existence (though none dropped out) but I’ve seen worse in the past and I did have bittorrent running in the background. The most noticeable problem however was that the race was largely a jostle-fest with little semblance of fair play, I do wonder whether online racing games can really work with such a high number of players (my race had 11).

The other noteworthy features are the News feed, GT-TV and Rankings, all accessible from the main menu. News offers a mix of useful tips (currently talking about router setup, UPnP and port forwarding) and information about game issues, one mentions a workaround for a bug with the Rankings feature which allows you to see how you compare to other players online though there doesn’t seem to be any notion of ‘friends’ against which you could compare yourself.

All said and done, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue does exactly what it says on the tin – it offers a taster of what is to come and whilst really doesn’t feel quite like a full game I think there’s enough content in there to make it worth the £25 retail price (though if you’re savvy you can pick it up for £18 online). Will GT5P get me back into sim racing? Probably not. With GTA IV on the horizon I doubt I’ll spend too much time playing Prologue but the landscape may be different when the final game is release so who can possibly say?

Score: 8 / 10

This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.

So everyone’s buzzing about Microsoft buying Yahoo and I’ve been trying to work out what my opinion is. My first thoughts were that (in Search at least) it’s just one ‘also ran’ buying another ‘also ran’, nothing too inspiring. I still think that’s true but it’s worth underscoring the fact that Microsoft are betting their business on Search and in turn on advertising. Over the last few years Microsoft have started transitioning to a ‘Software as a Service’ model and services in general (think Xbox Live), this is clearly an important extension of that. A lot of people see this as a bid to rival Google in Search but if you start applying the advertising model to IM, Flickr and perhaps even gaming.

As an industry gaming has grown to be larger than both the movie and music industries and the power to be able to sell-through ads into the Xbox dashboard and even into billboards and scenery inside games could be a huge market. I’m not sure that we (the public) will find out but look for signs of an API allowing developers to integrate Yahcrosoft ads into games, the buzz about in-game ads has been building for a while but it’s been crying out for a standard for developers to work to, well - here it is. On top of all that remember that there’s plenty of other cool stuff in the deal including Flickr (note that things like this are exactly the reason I stayed away from Flickr). It’ll be a while before this actually make a difference but keep your eyes open…

This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.

Anyone that’s used to seeing me around on forums, Xbox Live and occasionally the PSN may have noticed that I’ve been around less, in fact I’ve hardly been around at all and do you know the reason? I’m bored: bored of being treated like dirt by the games companies, bored with the lack of decent compelling games that have been coming out, bored with the useless online gaming services that are available, bored of the unsporting behaviour exhibited by the general FPS community and finally I’m bored of the childish fanboyistic attitude that pervades the gaming space (even among ‘adults’).

Now I’m not saying that I’ve left gaming for good, it’s my number one hobby and probably the one single activity I’ve done most in my life other than sleep, eat and work. I’m waiting for my problems to be solved, one way or another or perhaps like the majority of people in the gaming community I’ll just have to lower my standards and put up with the crap we’re being dealt. Here are but a few of the lowlights…

We’ll start with some history, the RROD saga was a brilliant example of gaming companies treating us like dirt. Microsoft denied the existence of a problem for ages, then finally came out with a half-arsed 3 year RROD warranty program which didn’t help much and still resulted in punters being sans-Console for anywhere between 4 and 10 weeks. On a different tangent there’s the lack of compelling games, last year’s much hyped “Perfect Storm” of games was little more than marketing and over-zealous reviewing. Bioshock was a good game and did the ‘FPS Story’ thing better than any game to date but I just found it underwhelming and almost nobody replays it more than twice (that being just for the achievements anyway). Halo 3 was the probably the biggest disappointment in gaming ever, many a fanboy will wax lyrical about how good it is but the truth is that (direct competitors) Orange Box and Call of Duty 4 outstripped it in almost every way - not just my opinion, check the wider gaming community and sites like Metacritic and you’ll see what I mean. Mass Effect had a lot of promise but I found it to be almost unplayable. Lately I’ve probably enjoyed the few games I’ve played on the Wii more than I have the Xbox games (read on for reasons) and the PS3 is still dead to me. I sold all of my PS3 games, had a fit of optimism and bought more only to find that they’re still only average and not worth the money so I sold them again - it still makes a brilliant upscaling DVD player though.

More recently we’ve had the Xbox Live service issues, whilst also being another example of games companies treating us like crap this meant that after finally finding a game I loved playing I could barely get into a stable game for at least three weeks - made all the more irritating by the fact that it coincided with me having some time off of work. On the occasions that I could get in a stable game I ended up playing with and/or against a bunch of useless camping arseholes who managed to suck almost all of the fun out a fantastic game. Microsoft’s response? To give us an already released game for free, probably meaning that it wasn’t selling well in the first place and anyone who had it already gets bugger-all, nice one Microsoft - you really learned from the RROD saga didn’t you. The next issue on my list (we’ll call it the ‘Camping F***tard’ or ‘CF’ problem) has been building for a while, I really don’t understand what compels people to boot up a fast-paced FPS game only to go and lie at the back of the arena with a sniper rifle, hide in a corner for the whole match with a Saw, sit next to flag points without taking/defending them, or just constantly throw frag grenades at spawn points and gain kills for doing bugger all. These people don’t even win most of the time, Private Custard and I go into these matches and cream everyone most of the time but come out the other end having not enjoyed a single minute of it, it’s just not fun if everyone else on your team is being a wanker.

Finally to address the fanboys out there: it’s OK for people to have a different opinion to you. No, really. If I have one opinion and you have another we can discuss it without having to result to insults and if you like a game and I think it’s rubbish that doesn’t mean I hate you, it doesn’t mean that I think you’re a bad person, it just means that we’re different. At the end of the day neither of us are dissing eachother’s friends, family, race, religion or political affiliation (things I find people tend to get touchy about), next time you feel deeply hurt and wounded that someone doesn’t think that [INSERT GAME HERE] is the OMG-est thing in the world just remember that it’s a game and games are meant to be fun - if you like it and somebody else doesn’t then it’s their loss. The one thing I tend to do when I’m bored of my games collection is chat on forums and frankly, you guys are making bored of doing that too.

Well, that’s my little rant over with. I’ll keep up with the gaming news and eagerly look forward to GTA4, I still trust Rockstar to pull something awesome out of the bag but until then I might see you online or I might not. I’m starting to enjoy my photography a bit more now and work’s getting busier so with my limited time I’ll probably not be gaming so much - unless everything else pisses me off!

This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.

I’ve given up, that’s it - I finally admitted that the PS3 is worthless as a games console and I’ve traded-in all of my PS3 games. Admittedly I only had three, but those three are often the subject of much adoration from Sony fanboys desperate to justify their expenditure, for me they break down as follows:

Resistance Fall of Man
A passable FPS, would’ve stood out about 5 years ago but now feels dated. Clearly a first-cut by a developer used to creating kiddie platformers, I mean no disrespect as the Insomniac guys because they seem quite amiable but on any other console this would’ve gotten lost amongst all the other titles.

Motorstorm
I can’t say too much about this since I only played it a few times and each time I did a few laps and almost died of boredom, the feel of the game was pretty good but the arbitrarily difficult physics (’smack into something solid and survive’ vs. ‘barely clip something and get trashed’) got on my nerves and at no point did anything make me want to persevere, hell - Need For Speed Most Wanted had me hooked for longer.

Warhawk
What can I say? After so much raving from the community I thought “this is a game I have to buy” so I did. I really should stop being so optimistic. For starters the whole SixAxis control method is way to spongy, I just seemed to flop around and not really get very far so I turned it off only to find that it’s the game that’s a bit weird and I find the third-person perspective made me feel so disconnected from the experience. On the plus side I will say that the maps are nice and big (though that seemed to make for long games with low kill counts) and the connection seemed to be very smooth even for very large matches (when managed to get into a game).

So now I’m left with my PSN titles - Super Rub-a-Dub (I love it), Tekken Dark Resurrection (I love it), Flow (it’s OK) and Calling All Cars (thoroughly disappointing). I don’t really plan to buy any more PS3 games until I’m certain that they’re any good, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune seems to be getting love from the community but the rest of the top games on the PS3 are multi-platform anyway so I’ll just stick with the 360.

This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.

Actually, this post would be better titled “Things I Hate about people in First Person Shooters” because in multiplayer FPS games it’s people that cause all of the problems. I can break this down into three broad categories:

1. Campers & Snipers.
2. Cowards.
3. People who are crap at objective games.

I really don’t understand campers, I mean how much fun can it be sitting in the same few spots for the entire round just waiting for people to walk past? It shows a complete lack of skill and a pathetic desire to win at all costs, disregarding the enjoyment of all others - especially those on the same team. Snipers are even worse, these guys hole themselves up miles away from the action in hard to reach places and just picking people off, they’re both a subset of campers and subset of my next group - cowards.

As an example, I’ve been playing team deathmatches and domination (a.k.a. king of the hill) all night and have spend so much time stuck behind idiots that are cowering in doors or taking pathetic little pot-shots at the opposition. So many times have I been running towards a doorway only to have one of my teammates stop dead and completely block my exit, in about 6 or 7 times this evening such behaviour was directly responsible for my death. As I happen to be playing COD4 there’s no friendly fire but if there were I promise that I’d be a very unpopular guy by now as I instinctively go to melee anyone in my way.

But depspite the bitterness caused by the above two irritants, nothing comes close to how annoyed I get with the fact that 95% of people are crap at objective games. This is a problem I first noticed in Halo 2 where almost every capture the flag game was full of people who were aiming purely for high kill counts and nothing else. This sort of behaviour completely screws over any serious players as nobody will provide any decent support when you end up being the flag carrier. Tonight’s COD4 session was also typical of this pattern (as is every other session I’ve played), you’ll find that out of a team of 8 you’re lucky if you’ve got two other players who actively seek out objectives and/or will provide cover/supressing fire whilst you’re capturing objectives. I’m not sure why these people are the way they are, some are just simple - they clearly don’t understand the game as you’ll see them run with you to an objective and just keep on running (even when it’s easy points). Other people though probably fall into my first two categories and the rest must not be team players - I can only hope that natural selection catches up with them at some point.

Well, that concludes my little rant - time for bed now to meditate on the evening’s deathmatching, sweet dreams people, sweet dreams.

This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.

I was just posting in the Call of Duty 4 thread over on Red Rant and mentioned that I think COD4 deserves a spot in my Top 5 First Person Shooter games, that lead me to start wondering - what are my Top 5 FPS games?  It’s a tough call as it’s my favourite genre of video games so it’s like choosing between children, to make life easier I’ve limited this to the multiplayer (deathmatching) aspects of the genre.  Here goes…

1. Red Faction 1 (PS2) - the geomodding was great and the game had a wicked pace.
2. Unreal Tournament (PS2) - the first uber-fast run & gun FPS that I played on a console (loved the PC version too), foe a while it was in class of it’s own.
3. Halo 1 (Xbox) - I know the sequel had Xbox Live but nothing ever beats the System Link games I used to play with a bunch of friends at the regular mini LAN Party events we use to have.
4. Call of Duty 4 (Xbox 360) - a recent release but one that feels instantly familiar yet adds all sorts of cool features to the genre (the Perks are brilliant).
5. Ghost Recon Series (Xbox, PS2 Xbox 360, PS3) - much more tactical than all of the above but these games gave an immense scope for teamwork in the co-op modes.

One game many would expect to see on this list (and many would feel is conspicuous by it’s absence) is Perfect Dark, I didn’t own an N64 until a couple of years ago and so never played Perfect Dark back in it’s glory days.  Consequently when I tried to play it I found the stubby single-analog control method to be extremely odd and impossibly frustrating so I couldn’t be bothered to play any more.

I’ve not long since got back to my hotel after attending an event in Washington DC hosted by the Microsoft Xbox (and Games for WIndows) PR guys from the Gamerscore Blog, it was a great night and good to finally put some faces to names / gamertags / forum handles.  The event started with some food and drinks whilst we were able to play a whole slew of games including Shadowrun, Project Sylpheed, Forza 2 and a bunch of Xbox Live arcade titles (one of which was Track & Field).

I was impressed with Shadowrun, other than what I’ve heard from blogs and podcasts this was the first real concrete information I’d seen and it definitely clarified a few points for me.  The things I’d heard were that it’s complexity might prove to be a barrier for people who just want to jump in and start playing and in my experience this definitely wasn’t the case.  Other than a brief run of the first tutorial and some on-the-fly coaching from Chris I was pretty much running and gunning right away, sure it’ll take a while to master the finer points of tech and magic but if you’re a fan of the FPS genre then you’ll feel at home immediately as it handles exactly how it ought to and I was very quickly “in the zone”, ignoring everything around me and trying to get some decent headshots.

Project Sylpheed is essentially a 3D space shooter / flight sim and handles pretty well, I didn’t get to see a great deal of the mission structure so I can’t comment on the overall arc of the game but it was certainly put together well and once I’d inverted my flight controls (up vs down) I was flying quite easily.  As I said, I didn’t really get far enough into the game to know but I’d love to see a more in-depth and interactive mission structure as opposed to the “enter arena and kill ‘em all” style of mission that most console flight sims have had recently.

I was also reasonably impressed with Forza 2, I wasn’t really a fan of the original and hated it within about 15 seconds of playing the game so I was pleasantly surprised when after 15 minutes of playing the sequel I was still enjoying myself.  I’d still need to spend a little more time with the demo in order to be sure of it’s purchase value but that has more to do with my fussiness about control methods and handling than it does with the game itself.

Anyway, that’s about all the info I can regurgitate before I fall asleep and I have a flight tomorrow so I’d better get some shut-eye.  Catch y’all later (well I am in America after all).

So, what’s been going down in my absence?  After a three month absence I thought I’d better catch up by posting my thoughts on the recent (and not so recent) news stories, so here (in no particular order) are the ones that caught my eye.

Suitably following on from my last serious post, the Apple TV finally launched - I pretty much stand by all of my previous comments, especially that the Apple TV’s success is probably in the hands of the hacking community.  I actually had a play with one in the Regent Street Apple Store the other day and wasn’t too impressed, scaling low quality video up to an HDTV (they were using Sony TVs) looks pretty bad and given that HD content takes an age to download and isn’t that prevalent I really can’t see the need, I might consider it for £99 for the hacking alone but for £199 you can jump.  Also, given that Microsoft are adding more codecs to their Xbox 360 player there’s even less of a need for it, I do agree with the crew from Macbreak Weekly that it’ll give video podcasts a realistic shot at getting HD content into the living room but I’m not convinced it’ll get the critical mass to make a difference.

In further Apple news, the announcement that EMI would be offering DRM free music.  I really think that this will be the start of a sea-change in how the record companies view digital music one way or the other.  Personally I welcome the move and will definitely begin purchasing music from iTunes if I know that I’m not tied to their platform.

And finally, in the gaming arena there was the launch of the PS3 in Europe, despite a couple of facts and figures about “record breaking” sales the whole thing went with a bit of a whimper and to date there’s still a lot more supply than there is demand.  The problem right now is software and with only two viable titles on release right now (RFoM and Motorstorm) the prospect of laying ot £400 for one is hardly attractive.  We’ll have to wait and see, in the long run I expect Sony will catch up but even if they do I doubt that they’ll achieve anywhere near the dominance of the PS2 - those days are over.  The other niggling thought at the back of my mind is that Sony were originally touting the PS3 as having a 10-year lifecycle, if that holds true then just as they’re hitting the middle of the curve I’d expect both Microsoft and Nintendo to come out with another generation of hardware to challenge whatever momentum Sony have gathered up to that point.   For my money, I’d pick the soon to be released XBox 360 Elite with a larger hard drive, HDMI, better online support, better games, better price, etc. etc.  As for the Wii, I really don’t play it as much as I expected to but because it cost less I’m not too upset - I’m sure that at some point they’ll release a serious killer app and I’ll be straight back on it for a while.