Week in gaming

I've been playing a lot of Madden recently.  Might be the fact that it's the off-season or because I started playing for real again recently but I just can't put it down.  On Xbox live, it's particularly hard because all of the competition is American and especially good.  They know exactly what a dime package, cover one while blitzing the safety on the weak side means.  Having said that, I know what it means too but they don't just know what it means they know how and when to use it. meaning that they get pick-six after pick-six (apologies to everyone that has this going over their heads).  In other Madden news, I lost in the semi-finals of the playoffs.  Lost to the Rams.  I stupidly went for 2 points after scoring an equalizing Touchdown in the final minutes, only to have Brandon Jacobs get taken down on the 1 yard line.  Gutted!

N+ is an Xbox live Arcade version of the well renowned flash game N, a great platformer where you star as a futuristic ninja.  N+ takes the game to console and it's even better than the original.  There are far more levels that are even more inventive and the console controls work so much easier.

In Call of Duty 4, I'm on level 35.  I tend to play Free-for-all these days.  I like playing team-tactical but you have to be lucky not to get at least one complete cock!  I find that I can sometimes be on a complete roll and win free-for-all everytime and sometimes I come near to the bottom.  I usually use a sub-machine gun and martyrdom.

Apart from that, nothing much else is going on.

XNA

This is why I love Xbox. News broke at the GDC a week and a half ago that XNA, a developers kit for Xbox 360, was to be released onto Xbox Live as of that day. This means two things. One, for indie developers, there's a kit that allows them to develop games for the 360. This really is a first. Before, the only chance that a developer had at making a console games was to make a Flash game for PC and hope that somebody picked it up. Either that or spend a lot of cash on buying a less professional dev kit and making bad games that way. Now, there is a fully licenced kit and it's free.

Two, gamers can download these games at no cost. This means cheap, often innovative gaming made by some great unknown developers. There may well be some badly made tat out there but the standards are sure to be high. Indie developers often have some more innovative ideas too because it is ideas like this that gets their games discovered.

Already there are some great games to grab, and while they are only trial versions for now, it is still a great way to see what is to come. One of the games, Dishwasher, is one of the best 2D scrolling fighters I have ever seen. It is games like this and the fun puzzler, Jelly Car, that are going to make XNA a brilliant idea. After all, you can't argue with free games!

Nintendo makes me a better person?

Recently I went out and bought Brain Training again. I had it before, played it every day, then I was poor so I traded it for a different game (damn Game and their trade-ins!). I also bought the Sight Training with it. The two games are different but also very similar. They both work on this "age" system whereby the better you do, the younger your brain or eyes are. Sight training has some very repetitive games but also has some great sports games, such as volleyball which involves spiking the ball when it is in a certain highlighted area. It measures you on how many you successfully scored without getting blocked and also judges how close to the centre of the ball you were. This may seem like a bit of a tenuous link to training your sight but I'm sure it's doing something.

My Mum, who was given a DS for Christmas and has been playing Brain Training, More Brain Training and Sight Training since then, pointed something out. She had the first Brain Training for a while before she got More Brain Training and, for a little while at least, she had two different brain ages. One, on the first game, was reasonably low, in the twenties because she'd been playing for some time. The other, the More game, was high, in the Fifties. Surely this means that the games are not improving anything. If a person has an IQ of 150, they are not likely to get an IQ of 50 if they take a different test. A person should be able to achieve a similar IQ no matter what questions are in it. Brain Training obviously doesn't work in this way. It kind of takes away from the big picture, but Brain Training seems to measure how good you are at these particular games, not how intelligent you are.

Obviously, there are elements about these games that will make you better at certain activities in real life. There is no point denying that doing a little mental arithmetic everyday is going to make you quicker in general at adding, even if it's just counting your change at the Post Office. Some games do make me wonder what relevance this will have to my everyday life. I suppose it's not important in the long run.

Where the sight training really comes into it's own is with its descriptions of what you are training to achieve or what the games are used for; some games are for Hand-Eye-Co-ordination, some are for peripheral vision. I suppose the point is that you are given some explanation as to what this particular mini-game is doing to improve your sight.

The main difference between these games and most others is their style of play. Whereas some game could be played for 10 hours straight and when complete might never be played again, the training games are played for 15 minutes a day and technically never end. While the novelty soon wheres off, there is some guilt felt when you pick it up after a week of not playing and Dr Kawashima says "Long time no see!". There is a compulsion to play every day for fear of losing all intelligence.

All in all, the training games are a different style and have invited a new type of player to join the world of gaming, and that's never a bad thing.