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GF! Mailbag
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posted by: Matt James
publisher: GamesFirst!
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date posted: 12:05 AM Sat Jan 21st, 2006
last revision: 11:40 PM Fri Jan 20th, 2006



Click to read.It\'s the first mailbag of the new year. Did everybody get their 360s for Christmas? Did anybody? It is nice to see more and more of them trickle into stores and thus homes. I sure love mine. I really want to hear what you guys think about it. The 360 has taken over my life. All other systems have been renamed Not The 360. I\'ve played nearly everything out and finished many of the games. (Finished three in the last week alone, while devoting hours to THAW and the Final Fantasy XI beta on top of that.)

I\'ll admit it. I am an achievement whore. It started with my Fiance\'s competitive nature and mutated with my obsessive nature to become some sort of beast I dare not name. I have what I think is a lot, well over double anyone on my friends list. But, I know that there are people with more free time, more devotion, and are just better gamers. So in the grand scheme of all Xbox Live I am sure I fall somewhere in the upper-middle. This seems to be my lot in life, or Live. I just wish they had made some sort of leaderboard for gamerscores. They have one for everything else. Hopefully they add this in an update soon. I have to know!

What are your guys\' gamerscores? Do they drive you the way they do my friends and I? I have to know!

Our first letter is from a reader at Gameware Development who had a few points to make after reading Shawn\'s Creature Village and Exodus review. I always find it interesting to hear from the people on the other side of the games we love. Enjoy:

Hi Shawn,

Thought I\'d take a moment to reply to your review of Creature Village
and Exodus in Games First.

While I, of course, agree that the titles, as re-releases, don\'t stack
up to new games, I should point out that Exodus was never designed to
appeal to very young children. As you might gather from our
own (English-speaking!) forums, most of the current players of the
series are substantially older (13 and above - all the way to
grandmothers!). Creatures Village has no online components and so no
online community. The players on our site are players of the older
series, not Village. I feel I have to point this out as I think you
may have only tried Village for your review.

Exodus is also much, much different to Village as far as we\'re
concerned. Village was designed for 4 to 6 year-olds (and younger) and
so is mainly about the big colourful graphics. You should also be
aware that the Norns in Creatures Village do not \"go to school\", nor
do they ever learn to talk. It\'s possible we failed in this title, but
I don\'t believe we did with the \'regular\' Creatures series.

The original Creature series (Creatures 1, 2, 3 and Docking Station)
was always intended to appeal to a niche audience of rather techy
individuals who were interested in what was going on \'under the
hood\' and I think we succeeded in this, since, as you\'ll find, we have
a rather vocal core of extremely loyal players. It is also more about
the breeding, which, of course, is completly different gameplay to
the mini-game focussed approach of Village.

I would urge you to take a second look at the community behind
Creatures by visiting our forums, or better yet, the rather enormous
Creatures wiki at: http://creatures.wikicities.com/wiki/Main_Page

I feel it is a testament to the series that the community of users
created this resource with no assistance or urging from us and it is,
indeed, a site (sic) to behold.

Anyway, again, I admit that Creatures has become rather long in the
tooth, but when Kutoka said they wanted to release it for Mac, we
could hardly turn them down! And while I don\'t expect you to re-
review the game or try out Exodus as opposed to Village, I felt I had
to respond on Creatures behalf.

Best regards,

Lisa de Araujo
Gameware Development


Aaron wrote a piece about some PGR 3 screenshots and how they compared to real life. Some pretty amazing stuff. Unfortunately he made just a little boo boo.

Subject: Regarding Comparing PGR3 Screens to Real-life Locations

\"Very cool. Surf over to EvilGamerz.com (in German) for their original posting.\" (From Aaron\'s article.)

close guess: the site is actually in Dutch.

cheers, Georg.


Georg Gruber


Gosh, Aaron, after all the work I have been doing for our international relations. Don\'t worry Georg, Aaron will be beat profusely. It\'s really no problem, we were gonna do it anyway. Maybe this next letter will help smooth things over a bit as well.

Frank Lenglet wrote:

bonjour je sais pas si vous pouvez r?pondre a ma question mais j\'aimerais
savoir comment fait on pour calibrer le gamepad pour jouer a bloodrayne
je vous remercie


Since I don\'t speak a word of gibberish, I mean French, I handed this one over to Shawn for translation.

For the benefit of the Anglophones:

Frank wants to know how to configure his controller to play Bloodrayne. But Frank made a mistake we see all too often at GamesFirst! -- What controller is he talking about? Who made it? What model is it? On the off-chance that you catch us sitting around waiting to look up tech support pages for our readers, we can\'t even begin to help you without these details.

However, more likely you\'d be better served by contacting the support for your particular product rather than us. Check out forums relating to the specific game you\'re having issues with if it seems like a game-specific issue.

For the benefit of Frank(ophones):

Pardonez mon Francais...

Nous ne savons pas quel gamepad vous avez achete. Alors, nous ne
pouvons pas vous aider. Il faut que rechercher sur le website de le
gamepad. Googlez le nom de la companie qui a fait votre gamepad.

Merci pour ecrire,

Shawn


We get a lot of letters like this. Go back to the very my first Mailbag to read one of my favorites. Here\'s one I just got:

How do I get engineers to build seige weapons on top of large towers?
Nothing in any help file talks about this.


We love to help but we need to at least know what game you are talking about and the platform you\'re playing on would be nice, too. Otherwise instead of a helpful answer you might get made fun of in the next Mailbag. But we still love ya.

Keep it up with the letters and I\'ll keep cutting and pasting them, adding my bit, and walking around smugly afterwards as if I\'d written War and Peace.

Matt \"I played through King Kong in two days just for the Achievement points and I\'m not proud of myself\" James

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