Brad Gallaway's blog

The words on everyone's mind today are Grand Theft Auto IV. This is a big game, quite likely destined to be one of the biggest in history thus far. I hardly think I need to explain why, but for anyone who needs proof, look no further than your nearest newspaper or television newscast.

A few days ago, GameDaily ran a short story from EEDAR (Electronic Entertainment Design And Research.) In this piece, the gist was that one in five games becomes a “success”, and that games which do not have playable demos before release sell better than games that do.

In September 2007, GameCritics.com interviewed Mare Sheppard, one of the two great minds behind PC indie game phenomenon N and its newer incarnation on consoles and handhelds, N+. At the time of the original interview, N+ hadn't yet made its debut on Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade service. Now that it's available for download, Mare was gracious enough to take a few more minutes out of her busy schedule for a follow-up chat.

In other news, Sony’s Scott Steinberg was recently quoted at GameDaily Biz as saying that the 360-exclusive downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto IV wasn’t going to be a big deal. My first inclination was to say that the man was smoking crack, but after further thought... I’m not too sure.

Out of all four Ace Attorney games, this one was by far the weakest. It didn't start getting interesting at all until former main character Phoenix Wright came back for a while in the fourth (and final) case, and that one was a confusing mess of quasi sci-fi with a lot of nonsense evidence-gathering in two different time periods, one in the present and one in the past.

Spent the last day or two playing Endless Ocean on the Wii. There have been a few low-stress ocean-exploring games over the years, but this is by far the best of them.

Just finished Professor Layton and the Curious Village on DS. The art was great, the music was excellent and overall the presentation was utterly charming… There’s a refined, very Francais Triplets of Belleville thing going on.

Recently I wrote about Overlord for the Xbox 360 getting a new downloadable expansion for the singleplayer campaign called Raising Hell.

So, after what was a playtime that ran on for far too long, I finished (but not completed) the game tonight. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with it, and definitely had a good time in terms of the singleplayer mode. Apart from a length that overstayed its welcome, the difficulty curve was right where it needed to be and most of the tweaks that had been made to the PS2 formulary were good ones.

As anyone who spends even a small amount of time on internet websites or messageboards knows, the vast majority of people who post use aliases or 'handles' when posting. Whatever the reason, I've found that the percentage of folks who submit comments under their real names is quite small, almost to the point of being nonexistent.