Some thoughts about a more recent game now. Possibly my favourite shooter of 2006.

• I bought a squad based game set in Vegas. For the first level I’m by myself in some boring Mexican town. I already shot the crap out of Mexaco in Ghost Recon Advance Warfighter.
• Voice control in single player is cool, or at least it would be if it worked consistantly. Shame the video feeds and teammate chat don’t come through your earpiece too – it would be so much more atmospheric.
• Casino levels are awesome. Sewer level was cack. (I liked the bits of levels that were “behind the scenes” of Vegas though. The back alley just before the sewer level, for example, where you can still see the glitz just one street over from you.)
• Multiplayer levels feel quite badly designed. Would have been better entirely custom built instead of cobbled together out of pieces of single player levels. Graphically they look ‘a bit Counter-Strike’ (and not the Source version either).
• Cover controls are nice, but shame it doesn’t have the SWAT turn for doorways. Gears of War had some nice cover to cover moves.
• Some of the terrorist comments are very funny “He was my best friend you bastard!”. I keep expecting to come across one talking about how he’s going to get married when this is all over.
• Inverse rappelling and shooting people through windows feels extremely cool.
• Enemies seem to be overly dense when it comes to kills with silencers. If two guys are stood next to each other and you shoot one through a window with a silencer, his friend won’t start shooting at the window where the shot obviously came from.
• Hate the multiplayer experience system. Co-op terrorist hunt on normal difficulty always gets you 300 points. Even if you do one of the hard levels and your friend dies leaving you to clear the whole thing yourself, 300 points.
• Because it’s a bit realistic, it doesn’t try and balance the shotguns at all – they’re as stupidly dangerous as you’d expect, instead of the usual game “shotgun only damages 3m in front of you” thing. (This is a plus point, in case you couldn’t tell.)

Okay I know it’s a bit late, but “old but still maybe useful” content is better than none at all, right? Well, moving on…

CoD2 is quite good. I’m not into the whole World War thing, so I found the story quite boring (ha, take that, history!) but as a shooter it works nicely. It has

• Some very cool set-pieces
• Some incredibly identikit Egyptian and European village missions
• Infinite Nazi generators that imply there are hundreds of facists hiding in a single house at the start of a level
• And tteam mate AI which wobbles between very cool and deeply annoying (I suspect a lot of the cool stuff is scripted).

Apparently it’s almost identical to the PC version, which doesn’t surprise me – it has a feel of ‘developed for keyboard and mouse’ twitch controls that recent console shooters seem to be trying to move away from.

But on the whole you feel like it’s a proper war, and I suppose that’s the idea. Christ, just don’t get it for the incredibly difficult achievements.

Ha ha, see what I did there? It’s a joke about idiots who post tat in the comments fields of games websites. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Hello, I work in the games industry. It’s not entirely unrelated that I play what I would describe as “a lot of” games, and that I have opinions about them. Because they are mine, I think that those opinions are worth writing down. In time maybe someone will even read them, and possibly even agree with me.

A few ground rules are probably a good idea at this point:

• I won’t be writing about any of my employer’s games, or (hopefully) anything else that will get my botty spanked at work. I’ll also mention right now that anything I write here is very much my own opinion (or at least someone else’s that I thought was good enough to steal), and certainly not the opinion of my employer. If you quote me and try to imply I’m some sort of company spokesman you’ll not only be very wrong, but you’ll also hurt my feelings, because you clearly haven’t read and understood these very important words.
• I will be writing about games that I’m currently playing, and probably also ones that I have played in the past. I won’t just be saying nice things about them, but I will always say more than just “this is shit”.
• I’ll also be talking about some development stuff that interests me. Lots of that sort of thing can end up either very boring, or just whinging – so I’ll try and keep it a bit shorter.
• Since there’s no way I could fill an entire blog of just those things, I’ll probably throw in some guff about general games industry news that I find interesting or just funny.
• I will be using too many commas and brackets and trying to refine some kind of writing style.

Right, that’s enough for now. Don’t worry – I’ll be talking about games soon, I promise!