As some of you may have read in one of my last posts, I recently returned from Singapore with an awesome haul of goodies (at extremely good prices), which included the awesome (and currently unavailable in Australia) Rock Band. Some of you may also know (although I doubt it) that me and my wife are moving to Melbourne in a week and a half,so the last few months and weeks have been fillled with packing and fixing up our house so its fit for renting out. In addition to this a good friend of mine who also happened to be a long time gamer buddy, recently returned from world travels (breifly) to catch up with family and friends. So as you can imagine, things have been pretty intense but also alot of fun.


My haul minus Time Crisis 4

So we had our first big session of Rock Band, it was only three player because we only have one guitar, but it was a blast, and I have to say I do kind of get a kick out of owning a game that 99.9% of Aussies haven't played and many haven't even heard of. We started with a quick game fo Time Crisis 4 before going straight to Rock Band which we played for hours interspersed with small doses of Perfect Dark Zero (Shut up all you haters, I like the games multiplayer and me and my old friends used to play alot of Goldeneye on the N64 so we played the facility map) and Skate which is an awesome game. We then later tried to get a WLAN game of RA2 Yuris Revenge working (classic) but one guys computer was not having it so we gave up and played mor Rock Band. Lots of fun was had.



Before I left for Singapore I did some game shopping at JB HIFI (great store) and picked up a copy of Assassins Creed (PS3) and Dead Rising. Assassins is better than I expected, sure it has problems, but its beautiful and I enjoy most of the voice work and each Assassination victims story and motivations for being horrible, all in all its pretty good. Dead Rising is an odd one, its awesome but as one Alex Navarro (former Gamespot, current Harmonix employee) put it, the save system is verging on being broken, and yet its got great characters and story, and its just plain goofy. Walking around in tight childrens clothes with a costume horse head on, bludgeoning zombies with a bowling ball never gets old, also word to the wise, Katanas are extremely effective for slicing up bodies, if the need ever arises.


Zombie killing = awesome

I also feel I have to comment on Capcoms proprietary game engine which I believe they have used for all their current gen games, Its simply beautiful, Dead Rising is a stunning game and it runns amazingly well. I kind of wish Capcom would farm it out to other developers like Epic does with UE3, because I'd love to see what other talented hands (perhaps non Japanese dev teams) could do with the tech.

In addition to all of these awesome gaming sessions, I've also been trying to fit in finishing GTA4 (nearly there, I think), and playing Burnout Paradise (PS3) which I love. Burnout isn't the kind of game I'd normally play but its just so much fun and it looks stunning, more developers should aim for 60fps, theres a pretty amazing sensation of speed in the game.

The other game I picked up in Singapore was a Japanese copy of Folklore. Now its all in english which is great, but for some reason my PS3 doesn't recognise it as the same game as the Aussie version of Folklore that I hired and my wife got quite far in. So we have all these save games that we can't use with the game. Its quite weird because when I make a new save the file goes into the same folder as the other version saves, but the thumbnail is slightly different featuring the Japanese font for the title text, very odd. Even stranger is that in the manual theres a picture of the title screen which has the cool Japanese title font, but when I load it up it has the PAL version font, its like the game is detecting which region its playing in and adjusting the title screen accordingly. Also worth noting is that my box art says Folklore, not Folksoul, strange.



This is the difference in the box art.

This is my copy

This is the Jap title screen

So this coming monday all of my consoles, my TV and games are going into boxes and being shipped accross the country, off to bigger and better things, wish me luck.