Box of Hats and Wigs |
Hello. I'm Jonathan Cresswell. I used to blog here daily, but that fell through and now I store bits and pieces on here. I'm a journalist/web designer/madman. Read my actual blog or find out more about me on my website. I also tweet. |
Being a games journalist (or in my case pretending to be a games journalist) has several perks. These include free trips, free games and free swag. On the other hand, you also have to review games such as Vancouver 2010.
It’s Sega’s official Winter Olympics game, and it’s fallen to me to review it for British Gaming Blog. My lack of enthusiasm isn’t particularly as it’s a bad game, just that it’s… well, it’s an Olympics minigame collection. It’s not going to be that exciting.
Thankfully, to share my pain I have what I call ‘flatmates’, who can make any game entertaining. Working our way through many of the 14 sports in the game it might seem boring as many of them are similar to eachother but nothing fails to be entertaining when Dean, whose blood boils hotter than… uh, everything, gets in to a nerdrage as he stands up and shouts obscenities at the screen. And he wasn’t the one drinking.
In order to play the game in what I’ve decided is the first of a few testing sessions (got to play it thoroughly, it’s only fair I give an average and forgettable game the appropriate time of day) Dean had to be dragged away from Mass Effect 2, a game he’s more than willing to give an endorsement of.
I’ve not yet got the chance to play it, but from what I’ve seen I’m not sure what the fuss is about. This might be because during the time spent watching Dean play the game for an hour or so, he mostly wandered and looked at shops.
Rather than anything involving action, he spent more time wandering around a version of Bluewater but set in Space. After walking past adverts for insurance and a TV screen showing the news (to which on sight of the news anchor he exclaimed “I remember her! You could hit her in the first game!”) Dean proceeded to just go in to shops, ask what they were selling, and offer them an endorsement.
Although it’s entertaining to walk in to every shop and hear your character say on a recording that it’s his favourite shop in the Citadel (choose one, you selling out bastard), I’m slightly worried that Dean’s obsession with this feature will lead to him walking up to a woman in a bar and asking if she’d be interested in getting an endorsement from him.
I also got to have a look round Dean’s in-game room, which contained a space-hamster, something that pleased him more than anyone would think is humanly possible. It’s not just any hamster, it’s a hamster IN SPAAAACEEE!
Oh, and you can also get adult alien magazines in the game. That’s worth giving a game ten out of ten there.
I’ll keep playing Vancouver 2010 for the review in the vague hope of having something interesting to say about it (like this blog, after 365 days I might have come up with a joke that doesn’t involve masturbation)… though it’s a bloody minigame collection of sports. No-one really wants to buy it, no-one really wants to play it, but sadly “take a fucking guess what it’s like, there’s been hundreds of these” doesn’t constitute a review. I wish it did, mind.
