EMMA THINKS…IT’S OK TO HURT A GAME’S FEELINGS

CUNT! …Have those who are easily offended left? Good. I get bored of those guys.

Nevertheless, apologies for the Tourette’s-style welcome to this article, I just thought I’d set the
tone for that which is to follow. After my last piece discussing my downfall of not saving enough,
I have become all too aware of the other terrible gaming habits that I seem incapable of ironing
out. One of my more noticeable habits catches the attention of most people who know me; I am a
swearer.

SCROLL EXTREME TABLET – FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I know it’s a little early to be abandoning the reviews of not-quite-new games already and hop on the gismo reviewing bandwagon but I wanted to write something about the device on which I’m currently writing this on…yeah I’m confused too. You see I tend to write much of this blog on long train journeys up the North of England and up until now I’ve been using an old Asus Eee PC netbook loaded with Ubuntu 11.04. Perfectly fine for writing a blog once you’ve loaded Open Office but a total ball ache the rest of the time. It’s not Ubuntu’s fault, the machine just doesn’t have the grunt. Simple things like switching tasks or program windows takes forever and it just becomes quite a frustrating experience after a while. So after much deliberation and hunting around on various electronics web sites for the right tablet I finally settled on the Scroll Extreme 9.7″.

OUTLAND REVIEW

My experience with Xbox Live Arcade has been varied to say the least. At its best it has supplied me with some of the best games I have ever played, regardless of platform, size, price or genre and at its worst has shovelled a ton of  poorly designed and badly executed crapware onto my hard disk which oddly all seem to be of similar price to the aforementioned gems.

I suspect I’m not alone in this finding and I also suspect that I’m not alone in noticing that a large number of the games in the ‘good’ category seem to be 2D platformers, which brings me nicely onto the game at hand. Outland is brought to us by Housemarque, a studio under the Ubisoft umbrella, so while you couldn’t call it an indie game by definition, it certainly feels like its hanging with the same crowd. Calling it a 2D platformer alone might be a little unfair, there is after all a bit more to it than that. It’s packed with adventuring elements, a fairly well fleshed out combat system, plenty of exploration and the game’s defining mechanic which will seem familiar to people who played a certain shoot-em-up in the days of the N64. In fact there are 2 games that Outland is so similar to that it immediately begs to be compared to them, namely Metroid and Ikaruga so let’s get this bit out of the way.