Remote Gamers

We Have Moved

2012-01-16T07:25:00.000-08:00

Let me first off wish everyone a happy new year from us at Remote Gamers. As mentioned in the last show we have moved. We have been picked up like a stray puppy and placed in the loving home of The Gamer Nights.

The Remote Gamers still exist at our new home in fact we have taken over there Podcast. What this means is we now have a hole bag of talented people who want to podcast with us. They include Mike and myself, James Saphir (Demon Saphire) , Kyle Braun (Last 2nd r3load) Belsh (Belsh) and of course our old pal Dan Barlow (The Judge XL).

With all this in place we can now start to build the community that i dreamed of when starting the show. What this means for you is, this blog will no longer be updated. Instead we will be blogging at our new home www.gamernights.co.uk And also the podcast feed on iTunes has changed, the old one will still be active for a while, But just look for RemoteGamers and you will find us.

And Further more we have our own proper website to give you gaming news and reviews, a whole package, and not just a podcast.

I just want to thank everyone so far, and i hope you all follow us across

David Quayle Remote Gamers

Our new home www.gamernights.co.uk

RemoteGamer/ Gamer nights xmas special

2011-12-24T07:26:00.000-08:00

This is our last show of the year. And we have a special announcement inside. Also we relise the Remotegamers Game of the Year.

Episode 12 - Skyrim, Skyrim, Skyrim.

2011-12-20T05:33:00.001-08:00

This week its just the two hosts, Mike and David talk about Skyrim, and David is also very late!

Episode 11 - Skyrim, Halo Reloaded, Saints Row 3 and A give away.

2011-12-14T02:17:00.000-08:00

This week are are joined by Demon Saphire From the Gamer nights Podcast, and he bring with him a Give away. We talk about Halo Reloaded, Skyrim and Saints Row the Third.

30 Week Game Challenge: Week 08 - Your Favourite Strategy Game

2011-12-09T09:19:00.000-08:00

As I'm still behind the podcast anyone that listens to the show will know my answer for this one. Civilisation IV will always hold good memories for me. Like most of the best games I've played I was introduced to it by a friend, well this time it was my former other half. We spent hours playing different levels, finding new ways to finish it.

I played through most of Civilisation Revolutions on the 360 and brought Civilisation V on Steam as soon as it came out. While Civ V was generally a better game, it really bugged me that it didn't have hotseat play. Most of the fun I had on Civ IV was in hotseat mode and I felt like it was a massive fuck you to the people who liked offline play as much as online. For example I couldn't share this game I loved so much with my new other half and while she enjoyed playing it on her own she never got into it like she would have if we were able to play it together. So can game developers please remember to include hotseat games in their future releases and i look forward to playing Civilisation VI with my future other half.

Episode 10 - Skyrim, Cod Mw3 and more Mass Effect

2011-12-06T08:43:00.001-08:00

This week, we are joined once again by Dan Barlow, And we talk Skyrim and Call Of Duty Modern Warefare 3 and more Mass Effect.
* Apologies for the delay, we had server issues

30 Week Game Challenge: Week 07 - Your Favourite RPG

2011-11-26T13:50:00.000-08:00

This for me is an easy choice. I've never been the biggest RPG fan and while I'm slowly enjoying them more and more, I'm nowhere near being in a position to speak about them with any proper knowledge. I have to choose one however and in true form I'm choosing one that I've never finished. When most people think about the Final Fantasy series, they think of 7 as being the best, I'm a little different. I love Final Fantasy 9. I don't think it's got a weak part. The characters are great, the storyline is fascinating and the graphics were brilliant for the time.

I still have my copy of it on the PlayStation and that's a big thing considering that's a very small club. Normally I can sit down here and at least give a little story about the game I'm writing about that I omitted from the podcast but there's honestly not much more I can say about this game. Everyone knows the Final Fantasy series and they all tend to be the same fare on a basic level. If you like RPG's and haven't played it then buy it but I have no more to say. So I shan't say a word more.

Call OF Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Review

2011-11-20T18:02:00.000-08:00

Is it business as usual for Modern Warfare 3? Will people love it? Or love to hate it?

Regardless of all above there is no doubting that the Call Of Duty franchise is smashing all sales records, because of this, Call Of Duty must be the best game ever, Right? Well Kind of.

Let me explain by first of all talking about the single player campaign. As what is expected from Call Of Duty games the single player is a thrilling ride with action at every point, and everything rushing by at a million miles per hour. The game play is the same fluid design we have seen before, and it is one that works very well, although if like myself you have been playing Battlefield 3 you will often find yourself stabbing the crate your trying to hide behind.

As expected the graphics are amazing and everything is so vivid and detailed with no apparent frame rate issues when there are loads of explosions or battles happing. I would urge all to just take a look around when completing the Sub mission at whats going on around, Truly amazing.

The story is short with some completing in under 5 hours. My play through was around 6-7 as I really took my time to enjoy the experience, and with that in mind I decided to play on normal. The few criticisms that I have with the single player campaign is there seems to be alot of turret action, Mount the machine gun etc. Reading through some reviews it appears that im not the only one to pick up on this, and it has been suggested that Sledgehammer used this method to finish of what was left from the Infinity Ward disbandment. Even so it is a real blast to play and at the end you will be left catching your breath.

Where Most of my criticisms lies with Modern Warefare 3 is in its Multiplayer.

For me the Multiplayer is Modern Warfare 2.5, with not a great deal that has changed. The look and appearance is the same, the feel of the game play is the same, with the same annoyances that have come with the last few, with issues with the lag detection and hit boxes can make this a frustration to play.

The spawns can also yield frustrations, with alarming regularity you are spawning directly in front of a enemy or having them spawn directly behind you, or in a area you deemed safe only 10 seconds ago.
Also quick scoping is back, some hoped that this particular skill would have been dead, with Black Ops making it harder for such feats, but unfortunately it now seems as easy as it ever was. Another bug bear is they have also used the same voices from previous games especially the Russians soldiers.

All this is not to say that this is a bad game, the fans of the series will love this with the new maps and the new modes such as Kill confirmed where you have to pick up the dog tags to confirm the kill. Also the return of Special Ops is welcome, with a horde mode thrown in. But it feels all of this could have easily been DLC for Modern Warefare 2.

In all the Multiplayer for me was a big let down, it wasn't the next step up that i was expecting it to be. The next Call Of Duty must raise its game or i fear it may not last.

In all Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 3 is a good game but much hasn't changed from the last one. The single player is a fantastic experience with the multiplayer letting it down.

With this is mind I award call Of Duty Modern Warefare 3 An 8 out of 10

Gamer Nights/ Remote Gamers Podcast.

2011-11-15T09:22:00.001-08:00

We talk about our gaming some BF3 and MW3 chatter and we are joined this week by Boosterdq from the Remote Gamers Podcast, this weeks featured band is Troubadour to find out more about them visit http://wearetroubadour.co.uk/ and R3load has a request and would like you to check out his Dad’s Cartoon site at http://toon-it-up.com thanks for Listening and if you’d like to send us in any questions audio files (News,Reviews,Rants), etc for our next show please feel free to do so.

Episode 9 - Forza 4, Battlefield 3, Mass Effect and GTA

2011-11-04T08:59:00.000-07:00

This week we are rejoined by Dan Barlow, and we talk about Fifa 12, Battlefield 3, Forza 4, The Mass Effect Games and this weeks hot topic Grand Theft Auto.

30 Week Game Challenge: Week 06 - Your Favorite First Person Shooter

2011-10-21T03:46:00.000-07:00

In Week 1 I talked about my favorite game which is Halo. Now being a first person shooter, this also falls under the banner of my favorite first person shooter. Now of course you don't want to read basically the same article as I wrote at the start of this article so I've decided to write about my second favorite first person shooter. As luck would have it, this is also my second favorite game and a very close second to Halo. This game is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

I'd never played a Call of Duty before I was introduced to CoD4 and that was probably the reason I struggled so much when I first started playing. My only experience of playing an online shooter was with Halo and that had a completely different style of game play. Learning how to play a game can be a long and frustrating process when you don't have a clue how to play and while most people online were CoD veterans.

I made the transition from Halo to CoD4 with a few of my close Halo teammates but we soon found other players who had similur game tastes and playing styles to us. Soon I was part of a huge online community of players all who would work together perfectly to dominate most teams in front of us. My personal favorite game types were Hardcore Team Death Match and Hardcore Search and Destroy but because of our community there were always people playing Headquarters or another game type so I could always find a game of what ever I fancied.

Our community was made up of a few different clans, these clans tended to stick together in their own game types and groups. This was my first taste of proper being in a proper clan/s, and while it was fine for a while, it was only a matter of time before I was introduced to the next level. For those that don't know, GameBattles is a website that pits top clans against each other and attempts to make a fair and level playing field for all combatants. Mainly it works but there's always a team that will try and bend the rules to give them an unfair advantage. Luckily, normally if you keep to the rules and go through the proper channels you'll normally get a fair result.

Unfortunatly after CoD4, Call of Duty 5:World at War, came out. This is where things all started to go wrong for me. The CoD5 demo was poor but this was understandable, any bugs could be found and taken out but when coD5 was released it still had a lot of the bugs and glitches and we ended up with a game that was a pretty poor play. I don't know why so many other people decided to keep playing but I decided my time was better spent taking on a wider variety of games. Variety is the spice of life after all.

30 Week Game Challenge: Week 05 - Your Favorite Adventure Game

2011-10-15T12:26:00.000-07:00

So this week caused a fair bit of confusion for us here at Remote Gamers, so much in fact that we skipped it completely on the show discussion but I couldn't let myself skip it on the blog so here we go. I've done some research and have come up with a few games I believe fall under the adventure banner, from there it was simple to pick my favorite and there was one specific game that shone brightly above all others.

Batman: Arkham Asylum was my game of 2009, I've never been one for platform games or comic's but Arkham Asylum sparked my interest in both. the game play is top quality, at no point did I have issues with camera angles or controls and the gadgets that you use to complete the game are all integrated nearly seamlessly. The only issues I had was with the combat, while I was good enough to finish the game, I could never really hit the high combo's needed to rack up high scores or get those achievements. That however is more a problem caused by me being pretty rubbish than a the game itself.

For me the highlight of the game was all the information and back story it gives you about, not just Batman and the villains in the game, but other villains who were left out. At one point you wander into The Penguin's cell and another you see Dr Freeze's. The information side is done by collected certain files that you can read in the menu's when ever you want. Added to that you come across interview tapes that give you a great insight into the minds of the main Batman villains in the game, particually interesting is the tapes of Harley Quinn interviewing The Joker, hearing as he turns the tables on her and gets into her head was a great touch.

So I haven't followed up on my interest in the Batman story since playing Arkham Asylum but that's more to not knowing where to start more than a lack of interest. It wasn't just me that Arkham Asylum got into it's back story, I saw more than a few people inquiring about more information on Batman Comics on twitter or gaming forums.For me the furthest I got was the late 80's/early 90's quartet of films that didn't really have much to do with the comics so that's a fail on my part. I'm massively looking forward to Arkham City and while I may not be able to get it day of release due to lack of funds, I know I will pick it up and thoroughly enjoy it.

Episode 8 - Fifa 12, Battlefield 3 Beta, Violins for mike!

2011-10-13T07:30:00.001-07:00

This week its just me and mike. We talk about Fifa 12 and the Battlefield 3 beta, We also talk about our favorite Strategy Game.

Episode 7 - Gears3, Dead Island and RPG's

2011-09-27T04:46:00.000-07:00

This week we have Dan Barlow on the show to tell us about Gears of War 3, Dave tells us about Dead Island and first impressions on F1 2011. And Mike has caught up in the iOS world and is happy this week.

Dead Island Review

2011-09-27T02:25:00.001-07:00

So as I promised to Mike on our last show, I was going to write a blog reviewing Dead Island so here it is.
For those of you that don't know anything about this game, Dead Island is a First Person zombie beat em up/Role Playing Game. The game starts with you waking up after a drunken night out on a holiday island that has become infected with "the Zombie" and your the only one that is immune. As you exit the hotel you see loads of luggage around and in most of them you can open and retrieve cash and odd items, many of which you will need later.

You get to pick one of four characters to start and each one specialist in different abilities such as blunt force weapons or firearms, As you progress as a character you level up using XP, you get XP by killing zombies, completing missions or killing zombies on missions!! The nice thing about this game is as you level up so do the zombies, that makes for a rpg where you don't become massively over powered compared to the enemy.

Weapons in this game are primarily melee, with guns coming a lot later in the game, to start with you will find weapons such as "flimsy paddle" or "weak diving knife" these will be level one weapons, the level on the weapon can only be used by a character of that level, from time to time you will stumble across a weapon that you can't use. Weapons also have a life span so they will break after a whie but dont panic as you can use that money you found to repair or upgrade them, the last thing about weapons is some of the rewards for missions are blue prints to make a super weapon, such as combining a baseball bat, battery, saw blade and duck tape to make a bloody baseball bat! This is why it is important to check in luggage and bins for items, if you don't use them for this you can sell them for some needed cash.

Missions I have found so far are off the fetch quest, mainly to help the survivors with things such as food, water or cars. Most are fun and enjoyable. One feature I really like about Dead Island is the co-op multiplayer, as your running about a message will pop up to tell you a player is near by doing the same or near same missions as you and would you like to join them, one press of the left arrow and you join in their game. Your game auto saves where you are. Any missions that you finish in co-op also finish in your game so you don't have to do them again, also any money found/made gets split between the up to four players.

Over all I love this game, I keep going back to it and have put in an easy 20 hours, and what I enjoy most is its a game where you can leave it for a while come back and not have forgotten the story (as it's simple) or the controls as there modeled on a First Person Shooter. My only regret is buying this game on the Ps3 as most people I know have it on Xbox

Dead Island gets a 8/10 from me.

30 Week Game Challenge: Week 04 - Your Favorite Fight Game

2011-09-15T03:25:00.000-07:00

Every week I post here saying picking this game was hard because and picking that game was hard because and this week is no different. I'm not a fighting game fan, I think I noted on the podcast last week that the only thing I tend to be good at on a fighting game is getting beat up. so its a no brainer to go from there to figure out that I'm not a massive fan of fighting games. But there are a few I've managed to get into and while this was like picking my favorite Cher Lloyd track I did managed to pick one.

In reality there's only really ever been one fighting game I've really enjoyed playing so the choice wasn't really that hard once I remembered that this game existed. This game has a fool proof recipe to grab the interest of a young hyperactive child and the ingredients for that recipe are as follows. Take two dinosaurs and make them fight in environments like a destroyed city or a volcano ridden island. Add a small amount of Sega mega Drive generated blood and then give the dinosaurs little human followers who grow in number every time you win a fight. Finally make each fight for control of a territory and have the game finish when you control the world. Put all that in a mixing bowl, pop it in the oven for 20 minutes at gas mark 6 and when you take it out you'll have a game called Primal Rage.

I still have a copy of this loaded on my laptop just for when I fancy giving it a quick bash, in fact I even stopped writing this to have a quick go after finishing the last paragraph. Often labeled as a Mortal Kombat rip-off, I believe that Primal Rage took the Mortal Kombat template and improved on it. That being said the game does have its downfalls. It could do with a larger range of characters, there's only 7 to start with and out of that 4 are just different variants of each other. Along the same lines, it could do with a few more levels to make it a bit longer. All in all its a pretty good game to play with a few friends, its fun and doesn't take itself to seriously and would go perfectly with a few drinks and some takeaway.

Episode Six

2011-09-11T09:06:00.000-07:00

This week, we have David Turners from Joypod on the show, and we talk about our best First Person Shooter,also if we could read minds, check the end for that. And mike is in a foul mood, Again!

Episode Five

2011-09-02T13:42:00.000-07:00

We have a guest this week, Mr Bullen, and we talk about a lot of stuff, even toilet habits, stick to the end for that one!!

Remote Gamers: Episode Four.

2011-08-18T02:06:00.000-07:00

This week we have Dan Bendon from Ready Up as a star guest, And we cox him to reveal the first game he has ever completed. Check it out and let us know what you all think.

Episode Three

2011-08-14T12:53:00.000-07:00

This week we talk about the "worst" game we have played! and Motivator Mike gives us some tips!

30 Week Game Challenge: Week 03 - First Game You Finished

2011-08-11T04:30:00.000-07:00

I've been playing games for a long time but I've never been much of a completist. Ok, well I'll admit to being an achievement whore from time to time but I tend to get bored of games before finishing them. It all adds up to that fact that I've never seen finishing games as a big thing. I actually sat down to write this yesterday but couldn't remember the first game I finished, I can't even remember the first game I got all the achievements on. This resulted in a long discussion with a close friend in which he told me to go back and finish some old games I'd never finished and he made the impressive statement that if there was an ounce of proper gamer in me I'd feel ashamed of not finishing so many games.

Now there was a useful outcome of this discussion. We decided that the earliest game we could remember me finishing was one of my personal favorite games ever, Hogs of War. Released when I was just 11, Hogs of War was basically a 3D worms, the only difference being that, unlike £D worms games, this was actually a really enjoyable game to play. Having the ability to promote your squad of 7 Hogs, up 4 different paths. Heavy Weapons, Engineer Espionage and Medic; culminating in Commando which is a mix of all three.

Its no brain fun all the way with an impressive scope for multiplayer fun. Firstly there's the mutliplayer itself that is great fun with some very well made maps and game modes. Now while thats great fun it still wasn't enough of me and my friends who would turn the singleplayer into a multiplayer type mode where we each took control of a certain number of Hogs and promoting them how you wished.

Now I've prattled on but I've yet to talk about what makes this game a real winner. The humor on the game is great from the banter from each Hog when they ether attack another Hog or have just been attacked, its filled with classic quotes. Personally that Japanese Hogs were always my favorite but every countries Hogs had their worth while quotes. The humor fits in perfectly with the game play and map style, that includes maps designed at babies blankets as the beginner level multiplayer maps. Oh and if you ever hear me shouting about using a bazzooooookkkaaaaaaa, this is where that came from. A life long quote.

Anyone that's played Hogs of War will know exactly where I'm coming from with this game, I hope, and if you haven't played it I would still suggest giving it a blast. The graphics may be despairingly poor by today's standards but it was never designed as a game that relied on graphics just good old fashioned fun, you know the old fashioned computer animated pig kinda fun. just writing this has given me a massive urge to play it again so I'm going to go dust off the old PS1 and leave you to find your own copy. You won't regret it........

30 Week Game Challenge: Week 02 - The Worst Game You've Ever Played

2011-07-28T16:03:00.000-07:00

So last week I was lucky enough to be able to talk about the best game I ever played, this week is not so good. This week is the worst game I've ever played. Now I don't have a specific worst game ever, just because I don't have much time to hate things. It takes time and effort that could be put to far better use and then fact that the worst games can some times be the most fun to play. So I've decided to talk about a game that ruined a video game series, pretty much just after I'd found it.

I loved Call of Duty 4, it was the game that helped my kick my Halo 3 addiction. Okay, so I went straight from my Halo 3 addiction to a Call of Duty 4 addiction but the point its it got me off Halo 3. I spent a year solidly playing it, my other half became a Call of Duty widow. I joined clans and had a friends list full of hardcore Call of Duty players, then game along Call of Duty 5 and my whole gaming world changed.

As soon as the beta came out I was on it and I was actually enjoying it, forgetting the glitches like awful spawn points because it was a beta and things like that get ironed out for the final version. Or in this case they keep them in the game, I couldn't believe that the full version actually had every bad glitch the beta had and more. People could glitch out of maps and then could kill everyone with out being shot and this wasn't a mod or hackers, this was part of the original shipped game!!!! It took a week for these glitches to be found and a month for them to become common place in pretty much every game you played.

Even when people weren't using glitches to ruin your game, the experience was poor. For me the maps are the most important thing for any game, if they are off it ruins the whole experience. Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 had brilliant maps, the Call of Duty 5 maps were so far away from that its unbelievable. I can't explain exactly what cause them to be so bad but they just didn't work and things only got worse when tanks were involved. Now from all this moaning, you probably think I was losing all the time and thats why I hated it. Wrong, I went 24-0 in headquarters and still couldn't bear to play that game any more.

Even games with poor multi-player can be saved by a decent single-player but even here we were conned. The story was tired and hollow and the AI was depressingly poor. On the higher difficulty's you were spammed with grenades making the game not just frustrating but pointless. The idea of the game was to be a World War 2 shooter not a race between different pieces of cover to avoid a torrential downpour of grenades.

This isn't to say that Call of Duty 5 didn't have its good points. The zombie maps were inspired and only got better with each map pack released, yes I got the map packs but only because of the zombie maps, it was a better time when I actually had money. I had a lot of fun playing on those maps, I could still quite happily chuck them on and spend the night frantically running away while my team mates save my arse.

This was the start of the end for me with Call of Duty. I got Modern Warfare 2 on day of release but, while it was much better than CoD5, it never really caught my imagination. I didn't even bother with Black Ops. Call of Duty survives on it name these days, a name that is quickly losing weight as more people break off to look for quality FPS gaming experiences. I can't see myself picking up Modern Warfare 3 this year, I've been hurt too many times by Call of Duty to trust them with my heart/money again. These days my obsessive gaming is looked after by Fifa.

30 Week Game Challenge: Week 01 - The Best Game You Ever Played

2011-07-23T13:48:00.000-07:00

For my first Blog for Remote Gamers I wanted to do something big. You may have seen 30 Day Challenges floating around online, they come in the form of song challenges, film challenges and video game challenges. I haven't got the time to write a new blog every day for 30 days but what I can do is one a week. So, welcome to my 30 Week Game Challenge. Week 1 is the best game you've ever played. For me this is a fairly easy challenge, there is one game I will always love, Halo: Combat Evolved.

I have always been, and will probably always be a one console gamer. Back when the first Halo was released I owned a PS2 so was sectioned off from Halo and its delights. Lucky for me my best friend was an Xbox owner. We spent many a night diving into the rich gaming environment, sampling its ground breaking game play and finding new ways to get through the massive levels. Finding Halo was the biggest gaming moment in my life. It changed, not just, what I expected from video game developers but the whole way I looked at gaming in general.

We got Halo 2 special edition, as soon as it came out, to fuel our late night gaming. I made the leap from Sony to Microsoft when the Xbox 360 came out just so I could play Halo 3 online, a game that I then spent a solid year playing. After Halo 3: ODST came out we organised gaming nights round my house every Friday night, where 4 of us system linked two 360's on two separate TV's with a couple of crates of Lager. I booked time off work for the release of Halo: Reach. I even enjoyed Halo Wars. My point is this, no game series has influenced my life more than Halo. If it wasn't for the stand out original this would never have happened.

While I can't see myself shelling out for the HD re-release of Combat Evolved, its only because I am still more than happy to chuck the original Halo Xbox disc in my 360 and remember the good times. It was only last year I did a play through of all the Halo games with my best friend and in my opinion, no matter how good the newer ones are, the original is still the best. I can't wait for the release of Halo 4 and the great memories its bound to give me.

Remote Gamers: Episode Two.

2011-07-13T05:16:00.000-07:00

After life getting in the way (damn you life) we have returned with our next podcast.
This week we talk about the games we are looking forward to, what we have been up to and I ask Mike one of the worst man questions ever!

Please have a listen and rate us on iTunes, and subscribe. Also check out our Facebook page (at the moment just search for Remote Gamers on Facebook)

And add us on Twitter @Remotegaming