Category Archives: Games

Tonight: Midnight Openings For FIFA14

  By Peter | September 26, 2013 - 2:11 pm | Featured Post, Games
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ea sports, fifa14

As the countdown to FIFA 14 continues, games retailers around the country have confirmed they will be opening their doors at midnight tonight, September 26th 2013. I have played it. And yes and as always with EA and FIFA it is good. More on that to follow…. Suggested cost I’m told will vary around €64.99 - that said, if you know of any good deals or promo’s around the country feel free to note ‘em below or over on the Culch.ie bookface. Of note to taller people. It is the one game I have always owned, even when I was wi-fi less that lasts a full 9 months. If you are gonna buy 1 game etc… Midnight Openings: Gamestop will open 24 of its stores at midnight at Letterkenny; Dundalk; Castlebar; Cork (Douglas, Blackpool, Wilton SC and Patrick Street); Tralee; Mallow; Killarney; Dublin (Henry Street, Santry, Donaghmede, Clarehall, Pavilions SC, … There’s more →

Stars Come Out for Medal of Honor Launch

  By David Sheehan | November 28, 2012 - 3:30 pm | Games, The Culch
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Neil and Eamon McGee

The worlds of GAA and rugby collided in the Sky Suite on the seventh floor of the Radisson Blu in Dublin as one set of sporting brothers pitted their wits against another. All-Ireland winners Neil and Eamon McGee went head-to-head with Rob and Dave Kearney at the launch of EA’s Medal of Honor Warfighter. With all four men being keen gamers, testing out the latest addition to the Medal of Honor family was something they were only two happy to do. “Part of our job is that you’ve a lot of downtime, you can’t be out every night. There’s a lot of time spent on the couch resting up and just looking after yourself, so what better way to spend it than playing some EA games” said Rob Kearney. The McGee’s for their part also admitted a liking for the games. “Eamon would be more into the war games than … There’s more →

Games Review: FIFA 13 (Xbox 360)

  By Anto | October 1, 2012 - 9:36 pm | Featured Post, Games, The Culch
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fifa-13-2

“Predictable unpredictability”. That’s what FIFA Lead Producer, David Rutter, picked out as the defining feature of FIFA 13 when we interviewed him back in May. It’s got to be difficult for the EA teams working on annual titles like FIFA to give punters something to justify the yearly outlay but, whilst 13 may not be as big a step on as 12 was, the unpredictability and realism is a key strength here. Gameplay There’s been a number of game engine improvements. First up is the revised First Touch mechanic, which is significantly different to previous titles. This means that even particularly talented players are no longer guaranteed to control the ball upon receiving it as it may be a bad pass or they may be under pressure. The attacking AI has also been revised in that players will bend and delay runs to ensure they get the best opportunity to … There’s more →

Games Review: Rocksmith (on XBox 360)

  By JustGeorge | September 29, 2012 - 2:59 pm | Featured Post, Games, Music
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Rocksmith

My first draft of this review was a huge long post giving details of all the features, what I liked and what I didn’t. But really it boils down to this…. If you want to learn to play guitar, go buy yourself a basic electric guitar and a copy of Rocksmith on Xbox 360, it’s cheaper than most guitar lessons and you’ll be playing tunes in no time. If you want to pretend to play a guitar then grab yourself a copy of Guitar Hero or Rockband, but why go to the effort of learning to play a plastic guitar when Rocksmith makes learning real guitar as easy and fun? Yeah I could pick holes in the included tracklist, it’s easy when there’s no Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Jimi Hendrix, Rory Gallagher, Metallica, Satriani, Vai, ZZ TOP or Guns ‘n’ Roses included. Yup, the “No Stairway” rule is very much … There’s more →

Game Review: FIFA Street

  By Anto | April 14, 2012 - 1:08 pm | Games, The Culch
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If there’s one sport franchise that was well overdue a reboot, it was FIFA Street. The original game, released in 2005, and it’s subsequent titles weren’t really taken seriously and they were quite cartoonish. The past five years has seen a major shift in football games with the rise of FIFA as the dominant, accurate simulation (for my money anyway). The advances they’ve made in terms of player models, game engine, variety and depth are really something to be admired and they’ve brought that passion to the reboot of Street. The focus here is all about individual ball skills, trick dribbling, faking out opponents and building up fluid momentum while moving the ball up pitch. The controls are similar to the main FIFA franchise and the left-stick, for example, is used for flicking the ball around to produce heel-chops, feints and step-overs. Some practice and rotating it in set patterns … There’s more →

Game Review: SSX

  By Lisa McInerney | March 7, 2012 - 12:00 pm | Games, The Culch
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The goal of SSX – EA Canada’s reimagining of the much-adored snowboarding sugar-trip – is simple: get to the bottom of the mountain either faster than your competitors, or with more trick points than your competitors. It’s unapologetically direct. The gamer is let loose on an open world from the beginning, with no grander objective than going bigger, better, faster than on their previous run. There’s a ton of tricks, pick-ups and routes to discover, and it’s gratifying to know that for every successful run, there are five unexplored alternatives that will produce a different successful result. Its controls are a triumph, responsive enough to quickly become instinctive, so it’s a game that lends itself beautifully to the “one more go” compulsion. The competitive aspect makes up the meat of SSX, and it’s designed to be maddeningly compulsive. The game keeps track of your friends’ times and achievements, and baits … There’s more →

A Humble Voxatron Debut

  By Will | November 13, 2011 - 8:57 pm | Games
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You have a day left to get the latest Humble Bundle offer. As per usual it started off with one independent game (with Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac and Linux versions of each game), this time its “Voxatron Alpha” by Lexaloffle Games. You don’t actually buy the game to get the game. Humble Bundle is a charity drive, and you can split your payment between developers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Child’s Play Charity. Voxatron Alpha is a randomly generated, Legend of Zelda-esque dungeons flavoured with Minecraft with a bit of run ‘n’ gun action added to a RPG progression, yeah its packed. An update at Halloween added a lot of content. As happened with previous Humble Bundle deals, it stopped being a single games and other indie games were added to make a bundle. The current line up is Blocks That Matter by Swing Swing Submarine, The Binding of … There’s more →

Game Review: Anto on FIFA 12 [Xbox 360]

  By Anto | October 7, 2011 - 11:36 am | Games
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Peter’s given his two cents on FIFA 12 on PS3 here so my take on the Xbox 360 version is below: I had the privilege of travelling to EA’s offices in London a few months ago to preview FIFA 12 and it was clear at that point that the team had done a lot of work on this year’s release. So now that we actually have it in our hands (it’s the #1 game this week in Ireland having gone on sale Friday), how does it compare to to FIFA 11 and is there enough to justify a fresh purchase?

Uncharted 3 : Drakes Deception - Preview

  By Andy Gaffney | October 7, 2011 - 9:17 am | Games
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We have all been there, you love something with all your heart but alas you had reached the end, and yes while the terms you parted on were friends who deeply cared for each other, but perhaps it is time to move on. Yes the next couple of months will be spent looking at photos of Christmas, sat around in an oxtail soup stained ‘Play it cool Trig’ T-shirt hoping that if someone is lucky enough to be experiencing their company right now, they know how to make them happy but knowing that they never will. Yes the months after ‘Uncharted 2 : Among Thieves’ were tough but now she wants me back. The game was nearly pitch perfect, the world of dashing tomb raiding Indiana but cooler Nathan Drake was one of the most fun and playable worlds that had been seen on this generation of gaming. It also … There’s more →

Game Review: Peter on FIFA 2012 [PS3]

  By Peter | October 5, 2011 - 10:15 pm | Games
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One of the joys of writing for Culch.ie is definitely when a package arrives. Special delivery. Please sign. Bam ! FIFA12. A note of thanks to the crew at O’Leary PR for organising a PS3 and an XBOX copy for Culch.ie. That aside and to more pressing matters. The Game. Welcome Back FIFA - Summer was excitement level Pat Kenny without you Changes - Culch Towers knew changes were on the way - for EA told us - remember the blog post The low down on FIFA12 ? Read it. It has relevance here and saves much paper. I chose to do two things when I got my copy. One online game - unranked. Which became three games. I lost them all. Manager mode. Professional. Five games. Lost them all. Disaster. Manager mode - Semi Pro. A one-all draw with Chelsea. I’ll setlle for that. And then i got sucked … There’s more →

Do Over: Mortal Kombat 3

  By Lisa McInerney | September 6, 2011 - 9:00 am | Do Over, Games
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For as long as there have been violent video games, there have been hand-wringing numpties complaining about them. From the days of running down pixels pedestrians in Death Race, our moral guardians have been foretelling the end of childhood as we know it, predicting that reverence for one’s elders will be replaced by a lawless dystopia where teenagers roam in vampiric gangs, hacking the heads off clergymen and razing libraries to the ground. There have been a lot of video games that shocked and upset conservative non-gamers, but not many as successful as the Mortal Kombat franchise. I was far too young to play Mortal Kombat and its sequel. I was still too young to play Mortal Kombat 3, which was plastered with warnings about its fantastical gore and vicious objectives , but this time, I was old enough to want it. And once I got my mitts on it, … There’s more →

Game Review: Old World Blues (Fallout: New Vegas)

  By Lisa McInerney | August 26, 2011 - 9:00 am | Games, The Culch
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People are strange when you’re a gamer. They presume that video games are inherently strange, and that the people who play them have skewed priorities and half-shot receptors and retarded attention spans and bad skin. I generally - loudly - rail against this notion. Video games are no stranger than novels or movies, their aficionados no more eccentric than any other kind of hobbyist. But just as the literary world has Chuck Palahniuk and the film world has Gaspar Noé, so do video games have their little oddities. I have quite a few of them. Killer 7. Katamari Damacy. Mr. Moskeeto. Psychonauts. Silent Hill. I’m not strange, yet I am not a stranger to the strange. And even so, I think the strangest thing I’ve ever done, as a collection of pixels, is stand breathing dramatically for an electronically-orgasming floating brain with a teddy bear fetish. How the hell do … There’s more →

Do Over: Gauntlet.

  By Lisa McInerney | August 25, 2011 - 12:00 pm | Do Over, Games, The Culch
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When I were a lass, there used to be one of those multi-choice consoles in the local Supermacs (yes, Supermacs. I’m a proper culchie Culch.ie), to which you could theoretically feed your pocket-money in return for a cheerful selection of the games of the time. I say theoretically because, as one of the games was Super Mario 3, chances of the player exercising their right to choose were slimmer than a hipster Luigi. You’d slot your 50p in, tease a level of Mario out of it, get cocky, fall down a hole, add another 50p, and before you knew it, puberty had taken hold and you’d missed the entire summer season of Knight Rider. But I was never one for respecting theory. I didn’t even turn up for my Leaving Cert chemistry exam. So, while I played far, far more than my fair share of Super Mario 3, I frequently … There’s more →

Do Over: Paperboy

  By Lisa McInerney | August 2, 2011 - 9:00 am | Do Over, Games, The Culch
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Video games are not just for children. One might expect that every lost nunky knows that, these days, but there’s a surprising amount of supercilious arses that won’t admit it. Firstly, games have become very rapidly more sophisticated – imagine Pong aficionados, back in the ‘70s, getting an eyeful of something like Red Dead Redemption – and grown-ups appreciate the finer things in life. And secondly, of course, the kids who jumped on mutant mushrooms with Mario, and beat competitors off their bikes with cattle prods in Road Rash, are now twenty and thirtysomethings with their own mortgage arrears. There weren’t a huge amount of parents playing video games in the early ‘90s, but there bloody well are now (especially considering that you can have virtual affairs in Fable III and get virtual lapdances in GTA). Fable III. Romantic. I say this because the notion that one plays video games … There’s more →