Legal Difficulties

Ten thousand apologies but I've just started at law school (selling out to the MAN - oh yeah!) and so have hardly any free time. That precious little I do have (bolstered illicitly with time I should be spending on the intricacies of constitutional law) has been gleefully spunked away on catching up with Prison Break and Entourage.

The former has once again captured my imagination, after a major league dip in interest towards the end of Season one - however convuluted the story, a prison can only be so interesting. Now the various fugitives are roaming America in some weird amalgam of The Fugitive and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as they try and recover some - literally - buried treasure. It's great and totally bonkers.

Entourage is also worth a few hours (there are only eight thirty minute episodes in season one). It's not the scathing satire in the manner of The Player that I imagined, but manages to make interesting characters out of Hollywood bottom-feeders. Neither is it quite the male equivalent of Sex in the City, but it has some good jokes and a deceptively engrossing storyline (though the party scenes are a bit FHM 'glamorous').

Sadly have hardly touched my Xbox or DS in the last week. I can feel my Battlefield 2 skills weakening as I type.

Hiatus

Currently deprived of Dead Rising (which is not necessarily a bad thing given its fear potential) but thought it worth noting in passing the audacity of the savegame mode. It's got a lot of bad press for limiting each user id to a single save but this acively contributes to the gameplay - after a fashion. It extends effective use of resources beyond the gameworld and adds to the tension already inherent in having to find certain locations to save. It's tricky to say how far this can logically be taken, but it adds something beyond the traditional debate over how far apart save points should be.

In related news Tom Nook's vile exploitation of the world of Animal Crossing continues - I'm currently in the hole to the tune of a cool 250,000 bells - that's a lot of sweetfish. The game's appeal is beginning to pall slightly, which is a bit of a shame, but it remains something that can be picked up and played for the odd 15 mins. Guess I just haven't had that many odd 15 mins recently.

Oh, and Xbox 360 Star Wars Lego is MINE ... once the price comes down in CEX that is.

Wii-k

This looks rather exciting. Previously I'd been pretty lukewarm towards the Wii,but this attitude is - unsurprisingly - beginning to change.

In other news Dead Rising has almost justified itself. It's not an easy game, and the temptation is strong just to dick around. There's an emphasis on tricky escort missions that's rather off-putting but it's very well executed and my initial criticism of the graphics turns out to have been unfounded.

A trademark change of heart

Saw Dead Rising on the shelves of Virgin today. Within two hours had placed an order with Play.


/Shame.

Dead reckoning

Despite the genius of the trailer and the enthusiastic reviews its garnered I think I'm going to hold off buying Dead Rising, either til it drops in price a bit or til it turns up in CEX. Fact is that 50 quid for a game is a lot of money, even when the likelihood is that the game will be good. I don't think I've bought one at face value since getting my 360, and if I'm going to do so at all this year I think I'll hold fire until Just Cause, which is genuinely jaw-dropping in a way that Dead Rising... well, isn't. Not that the latter looks inferior - far from it, they're different animals entirelly one a claustrophobic slaughter-fest the other an explore-em-up with a GTA mission structure and some beautifully thought out free-roaming controls (parachute, grapple gun etc). Thing is Just Cause has the next-gen polish of Oblivion, GRAW, Battlefield 2 and Rockstar Table Tennis - i.e. the games for 360 I've enjoyed the most (contradictory to this, I believe The Outfit is still on my 'Most Played' list but that's only because - for reasons unknown - I chose to grind through the tedious single-player campaigns). Dead Rising, for all its high zombie count, does not, retaining a degree of clunkiness in both looks and control methods.

Superficiality is not normally my thing in video games but having finished off the boat-based section of the demo roaring into a dazzling sunset, I've pretty much been sold.