There was lot to like about Fallout 3, Bethesda Softworks’ take on the post-apocalyptic franchise. There was the excellent quest design, the flexible character progression system, the massive game world and the sheer depth of the content on offer.
Browsing: Weekend
There are few guilty pleasures as satisfying as a new film from Robert Rodriguez, especially when the director is on top form. Like takeaway hamburgers, his movies are deliciously excessive, mostly interchangeable, and leave you feeling somewhat queasy after you’ve consumed them.
Xbox Live is finally set to launch in SA on 10 November, giving local Xbox 360 owners official access to the service for the first time. The Xbox Live Arcade — a veritable treasure chest of downloadable games — is one of the service’s most attractive features.
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, the new game from Ninja Theory, takes its place alongside Heavy Rain and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves as one of the most memorably cinematic games of this console generation.
Few books arrive burdened with as much expectation as Freedom, the new novel from Jonathan Franzen. The book recently put Franzen on the cover of Time magazine, an honour he shares with only a small and elite group of novelists that includes JD Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov and John Updike.
Sony has fired an important salvo in the motion controller moves with the September launch of the PlayStation Move controller for the PlayStation 3. This control scheme is Sony’s bid to capture some of the casual gaming market that Nintendo currently dominates and that Microsoft will also target with its Kinect motion-sensing camera.
The news earlier this year that Bungie had signed a publishing agreement with Activision-Blizzard to create a multiplatform game rocked the game world to its roots. This is the developer that created Halo, the games series that has carried Microsoft’s Xbox brand on its shoulders from the day it was born. But at least Bungie gifted Microsoft with a magnificent parting shot in the form of Halo Reach before it leaves the franchise behind for good.
American indie films, at their worst, tend to confuse slightness with subtlety and artlessness with authenticity. Many of them take the form of inert slice-of-life pieces that have no greater ambition than to present the unvarnished reality of life of in middle-class America.
If Mafia 2, the new game from 2K Czech is to be believed, life as a mob wiseguy in the 1950s was less like The Godfather and more like Driving Miss Daisy. After spending 12 hours completing the game, the memories that linger are those of driving from one side of Empire Bay to the other at 30 miles an hour in a car that handles with the finesse of an ocean liner.
Nicolas Cage stars in two films that open on SA screens this week. Unfortunately, you’ll really need to hunt to find a cinema showing the more interesting of the pair. The awkwardly-titled The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans couples the mercurial actor with German director Werner Herzog in an offbeat character study about an unhinged policeman.