Gaming Diary

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (PS2)

2009-04-13T23:02:00.001Z

Fucking awesome. The first 2 hours were tediously dull, hence me picking up my untouched-for-three-months save at 1:48 in on Sunday. By the end of tonight's (Monday) session I've broken the 14 hour mark. Utterly gripping. I've taken out The Pain, The Fear, The End, The Fury, The Sorrow and Volgin with his tank mole thingy. Just The Boss left to go. Brilliant. And I think I may be in love with EVA.

FIFA 09

2009-04-13T22:55:00.001Z

Ultimate Team is painfully addictively brilliant. Having poured endless hours into it, and having won all 18 single-player cups, my team is now pretty impressive. Bizzarri in goal; Maxwell, Puyol, Chiellini and Zambrotta across the back; Giggs, Toure, Lampard and Cameronasi in midfield with Luis Fabiano and Klose up front. Yet I'm still being relentlessly battered online. Not fair.

Sod all

2009-04-01T15:21:00.002Z

You might think I'm a bad person for going a month without posting. I'm suffering with severe ennui. I blame Eragon. I thought I was back in the flow with FIFA UT which is ACE. But then it broke. Completely. Forever. Because it's SHIT. Don't buy it. Until they fix it. Then buy it.

Seven days in gaming

2009-03-03T13:57:00.003Z

Cars Mater-National - 360
1,000G. A fun little game. Took about 6-7 hours. Surprisingly pleasant.

Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection - 360
950G. Now done everything but MBM. Evil, evil game. The collection has its moments, but is mostly a bag of arse.

Halo Wars - 360
Only the first two levels, oddly. It's well done, but it just doesn't feel like Halo.

Mirror's Edge - 360
Did the tutorial and first levels. I'm stuck on level 2. I am terrible at this. Pretty though.

FIFA 09 - 360
There's an update but they still haven't finished the interactive leagues bug. NRGH!

Tiger Woods 09 - 360
I think I'm going to have to give up the possibility of 1king this. GamerNet is just too damn hard and buggy.

Grand Theft Auto IV - 360
A few races done as well as finishing off Stevie's deliveries.

Midnight Club LA - 360
Played a couple of hours but made next to no progress. Annoyingly and unfairly unrealistic at times (like when the stats bear no relation at all to the AI flying past me in a statistically inferior car). I've been told to hold out till I get the Lamborghini. I shall try find the patience, but its making it very hard.

An assortment of stuff

2009-02-24T13:53:00.005Z

No update in nearly three weeks. I disgust myself. Especially given I've done a reasonable amount of gaming. Which I can't be bothered doing seperate posts for, so I shall list in here...

Soul Calibur - XBLA
Still. Can't. Get. 25. Extra Survival. NRGH!

Midnight Club LA - 360
Started a couple of weeks ago, did 8 hours over a few days but have drifted from it. It varies. The races are too long, the rubber banding is too extreme, and the vehicle stats are irrelevant (I have a bike with a 75% full acceleration stat, yet a Focus with 15% being driven by the AI can beat me off the line?!), but it's fun enough. Just too big. I seem to have been collecting massive racing games lately (BP, MCLA, TDU and PGR4 all acquired in recent weeks).

Monopoly - 360
It's Monopoly. But with more irrirating animations. Still, a couple of short and tolerable sessions netted me the 1,000G, so all is good.

Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned - 360
Started and finished. It's GTA IV, with less likeable characters and better weather effects. Well recommended for any fans of GTA, the 12 hours it will take to amass all the achievements makes the 1,600MSP asking price seem perfectly reasonable. It's not GOTY material like IV was, but it's still better than 99% of full-price releases.

Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection - 360
Sonic 1 & 2 are awesomely awesome. Comix Zone is cool. Vectorman is cool. The rest are pretty much all diabolical. Thank god for 3D.

Cars Mater-National - 360
A couple of hours in, a nice, relaxing and stress-free little racer, quite inoffensive and a nice game to unwind to.

Lent starts tomorrow. I will give up not writing on my blog.

Burnout Paradise

2009-02-05T22:42:00.002Z

This is the worst game ever for an achievement whore. Largely because it's glitchy as hell. The burning run achievement I won over a week ago unlocked randomly this evening. I've now found all the drive-throughs and the achievement hasn't popped up, so maybe that will turn up in a few months. It's good enough, but I don't really do open-world games. I like menus and structure and events that progress logically, otherwise my brain hurts.

Rock Band 2

2009-02-05T22:38:00.002Z

Have you ever loved a game unconditionally and sworn your life away to it only to have it rip out your heart and laugh in your face? Probably not. So you won't know the feeling of starting the Endless Setlist 2 on expert, an 84-song set without breaks or saving, having practiced the last two songs to make sure you can get through them, assuming they'd be the hardest, getting through the first 81 only to find the third-from-last song is an unlistenable hardcore metal thrash that makes Through The Fire And Flames seem positively easy. There's 12 hours I won't get back (that's 8 to get that far, and 4 retrying it furiously). Still, got all the multiplayer achievements out of the way, which is progress.

Rock Band 2

2009-02-02T23:57:00.003Z

Once again I jumped into a long set without bothering to check the last song on it. The impossible bass challenge must be easy, it's only bass, after all, I'll play it on expert. Oh, there's a 10-minute Dream Theatre song. Fuck.

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney

2009-02-02T23:55:00.000Z

Finished. That was fun, dull, exhilarating, frustrating and heartwarming in equal measure. The last half hour is just one relentless plot twist after another, but everything comes together with such beautiful precision that it's hard to hold the often tedious story against it.

Burnout Paradise

2009-01-29T18:41:00.002Z

Another new game. Played for about an hour last night, doing around six events, finding a load of car parks and generally crashing into things. Seems good on first impressions, but not as good as 3, and I seem to have lost the 1337 skills that let me 100% 3, lots of crashing taking place. But this must take a side seat to MGS3 for a while, so probably won't play much more of this for a while.

Pure

2009-01-29T18:39:00.003Z

C0mpl370r1z3d! Got first in all events and finished off with 585G. I suspect most of the remaining achievements are beyond my abilities. I may try, I may not. It was fun, although was starting to grate by the end. Recommended, anyway, especially for the tenner Play are charging for it.

Rock Band 2

2009-01-29T18:37:00.002Z

It took a lot longer than anticipated, but I finally have the Road Dog achievement. If I hear Charlene again I will die. And I've unlocked the endless setlist along the way. Fun.

Guitar Hero On Tour

2009-01-29T18:35:00.001Z

Finished. Hard was surprisingly easy, even with only 4 buttons. Track list was good in places (the Santana and SRV jams were fun), but ultimately the control setup is bollocks, and it's little more than a novelty.

Texas Hold 'Em

2009-01-24T00:54:00.001Z

Some gaming sessions should never be spoken of...

Marble Blast Ultra

2009-01-24T00:50:00.002Z

I haven't played this in two years. I now know why I stopped. I'm rubbish at it. Did a few of the advanced levels, finishing levels with 3 minute par times in close to 12 minutes (Witty has done them in 1:40, somehow), and I'm very good at losing the multiplayer.

Pure

2009-01-24T00:45:00.002Z

I'm rubbish at this. A few people on my friends list have 1kd it, and I will never, ever manage that. Having breezed through the first six races, I'm now routinely failed. My ATV is as good as I can make it, but I'm still often finishing as low as 10th on some races. On the sprints I have a tendency to be in the lead at the end of the fourth lap and take a corner badly somewhere in the final lap and finish fourth. Not really trying to finish all events as I go along, just unlocking and progressing for now. It's very good though.

Rock Band 2

2009-01-24T00:43:00.001Z

The hour and a half I predicted may be a lie. Did an hour and a half and still have 5 four-song sets to go. Another hour should do it, I reckon. Then onto the expert challenges.

Pure

2009-01-20T22:10:00.002Z

It was a tenner new, so I picked this up before Christmas. And only tonight have I gotten around to opening it. I did the first two events, winning all 4 races in the first and getting two 1sts and two 2nds in the second. First impressions are very, very good indeed. It's like a simplified SSX on ATVs. It's reasonably pretty, but plays superbly, the vehicles slide around satisfyingly and some of the jumps are really thrilling. The vehicle creation thing could get a bit irritating, but it's a great little game and one I envisage finishing.

Rock Band 2

2009-01-19T22:34:00.003Z

A bit of mindless slogging through to the play at all venues achievement. Probably about an hour and a half left to go. A make-your-own setlist of Doll and Charlene seems to be the way forward. Over in four minutes and ten stars guaranteed.

Call Of Duty: World At War

2009-01-19T22:30:00.002Z

Sod that. After spending over six hours dragging myself through the first five levels on veteran through extreme patience and endless frustration I gave up, and switched to normal and finished the last seven levels in around two hours. And having played them, I don't think I'll even think about attempted them on veteran, since they would be pretty much impossible. I may do an easy run to mop up some achievements, or I may not. It's an ok game, but really nothing special.

Call Of Duty: World At War

2009-01-18T12:32:00.002Z

Started my first game on veteran, which I may regret. Did the first two levels last night, and first impressions are it is utterly tasteless, needlessly overgraphic, frustratingly unrealistic (did every Japanese soldier really carry 600 hand grenades about their person and all have pinpoint accuracy within half a mile to a target they couldn't see?) and not as good as 4. But it's still a solid FPS, that plays like COD, and I mostly enjoyed the hour I spent on it, so I shall persist.

Guitar Hero On Tour

2009-01-18T12:29:00.003Z

When I first saw the reveal trailer for GHOT I laughed so hard at its utter ridiculousness. And I still do. I bought it many months ago when Morrisons were giving games away for a tenner with the intention of selling it on, but because it's so terrible its value quickly dropped to about £3. So finally I've played it. After 4 songs on hard I was hating its unresponsiveness, the fact that it just doesn't work at all, and then I experimented by putting away the silly plectrum stylus thing it gives you and just using my finger to strum, at which point my hit rate went from 75% to 95% and it became a lot more enjoyable. There's no way to hold it to stop the fret hand cramping up, so it's a couple-of-songs-in-a-session job, but I'll probably play through it.

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney

2009-01-18T00:19:00.002Z

A long train journey gave me the three hours I needed to finally finish off the third case. An intriguing conclusion, and it certainly got better towards the end, since the first two days had driven me a bit mental.

Mass Effect

2009-01-16T00:17:00.002Z

Mass Effect is, like Bioshock was, one of those games I'm convinced I must be wrong about. So much do so many people worship it, that the empty world, ugly graphics, frustrating loads, terrible combat and a vehicle control system that provokes suicide must be something that doesn't really effect anyone else. I've recently tried to get into it again with little success. Be it wrestling with the combat or screaming at the vehicles, nothing is clicking. It surely can't be me, given it has a combat system that is an apparent copy of the Gears one, which was also featured in GTA IV, and I finished both of those without any struggle in terms of controls, but Mass Effect just seems to provide one frustration after another. I really want to ditch it but don't really feel I can. Grrrr.

Fable 2: Knothole Island

2009-01-14T11:26:00.003Z

The first DLC for one of last year's most brilliant releases. An extra 100 gamerscore up for grabs. Splendid. So eagerly I bought it last night and started playing. And it must be said I'm a tad disappointed. Whilst it was fun to revisit Fable 2 for the first time in two months, the content is a tad on the small side. I started it, completed all three new quests, got all the new achievements, bought every property and emptied every shop on the new island of its stock in around two hours.

Basically it goes like this (spoilers ahead): You get a new quest message, go to Bowerstone market and a chap in a submarine takes you to the new island, where everything is covered in snow and ice. The chieftain of the village, a complete credit-seeking cock, says it's too cold. Your task is to go to a dig spot and using either a spade or a dog (which can now be ressurected if you chose sacrifice at the end of the main game) dig up a key for a temple. Then you go to the Ice Shrine, navigate a few rooms of fairly harmless enemies and use a thing at the end to make it sunny. Then you go back to Albion and waste some time until the next quest comes up, go back to Knothole Island, dig up the key for the Sun Shrine, go through that, doing much the same as before, only now with some very annoying flit switch puzzles, and use a thing at the end to make it rain. Back to Albion, then back to the island, dig up the Storm Shrine key, go through the temple and use the thing at the end to make it snowy again, completing the cycle. And that's it, all done. Just two other achievements, find the 10 hidden books on the island, which aren't particularly well hidden, and buy everything from the mystery shop, which involves getting a list of stuff you need to trade for other stuff and visiting all the traders in Albion to stock up on said stuff, before trading it in for other stuff.

And that is everything new you get from the DLC in one (admittedly quite long) paragraph. If, like me, you have already 1kd Fable 2 and are a completionist, you've probably bought it already. If you haven't, or aren't, and just wanted the new quests, at 800MSP it's very hard to recommend. The best thing it did was remind me just how beautiful and wonderful Fable 2 is. And that's worth £6.80 of anyone's money.

Resolutions

2009-01-14T11:17:00.003Z

I haven't made a post here in six months. That is going to change this year, for that is one of my resolutions. I hereby resolve to actually use this gaming diary to keep a diary of my gaming. There. In other resolution news, I resolve to finish as much of my gaming backlog as possible. This may take quite some time. I resolved at the start of the year on UGVM to finish (extended to account for new purchases):

Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney
Beautiful Katamari
Crackdown
Dark Sector
Devil May Cry 4
FIFA 09 (1k)
Gears Of War (Insane)
Gears Of War 2 (Insane)
God Of War 2
Grand Theft Auto IV (100%)
Half Life 2/Ep1/Ep2
Hitman Blood Money
Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess
LittleBigPlanet
Mass Effect
Metal Gear Solid 3
Metal Gear Solid 4
Professor Layton
Pure
Rock Band 2 (1k)
Shenmue (again)
Shenmue 2 (again)
Sonic Adventure DX
Soul Calibur IV
Super Smash Bros Melee
Tiger Woods 09 (1k)
Tomb Raider Legend
Tomb Raider Anniversary
World Of Goo
Zack & Wiki

So far my game completing for the year consists of Sonic Adventure DX, which I started from scratch and got 100% with all 7 characters in a little over 5 hours on 2nd January, and 1.1king Fable 2 last night, with the new DLC achievements. I'm not on target for the 52 completed games I'm aiming for this year, but things will improve. Wish me luck.

Further Neglect

2008-06-22T19:20:00.003Z

I'm really, really bad at posting on this thing. Since the last time I've mostly been playing Rock Band. Finished hard guitar tour the day I got it, and the hard drum tour a couple of days later. I've reached the last song on expert guitar tour and it's physically impossible. I'm hating it. I'll write a review for ugvm.org.uk soon.

Grand Theft Auto (Xbox 360)

2008-05-02T12:00:00.001Z

Splendid.

Grand Theft Auto IV (Xbox 360)

2008-04-30T10:02:00.000Z

My extended impressions follow. There are no story spoilers, but there are gameplay spoilers. You have been warned:

I've played around 10 hours so far. This has been divided roughly 70/30 into story/messing around. I've just (as in five minutes before I stopped for the night) unlocked Manhattan. The guns are slow to come. So far I have a pistol, a mini-SMG, a shotgun, a sniper rifle, an assault rifle and a molotov. No sign of a rocket launcher yet, and most of the guns in the shop are display models only.

The combat system is superb. Whilst I've noticed that blind-firing at certain angles (ie when an enemy is against a wall that your covering on the perpendicular wall he can't be shot blindly) doesn't work, the cover system and targetting is fantastic. If this was in VCS I'd have done that stupid swimming pool mission by now. Unlike Gears, you don't pop out when aiming, so you can hold the left trigger, pick your spot, and Nico doesn't emerge until you pull to shoot. It works very well.

I don't like the way the cars drive. In an attempt to make every chase an insane action-flick affair, cars simply will not turn at all if the brake is even slightly pressed, at any speed. This can be extremely frustrating, meaning to corner you have to either come to an almost complete stop, or rely on the handbrake to get around bends. But it's still fun trying to evade capture.

The mini-games aren't as good as they could (or should) be. The darts is simply a case of move-cursor-press-A, and is very easy (just about everyone on my friends list already has the 180 achievement). Something like the arcing hand on Shenmue would've been better. The pool is odd, the physics are weird and each ball appears to weigh several tons, and they don't roll naturally. I don't remember the bowling much, only did it the first compulsory time, but I seem to recall it feeling stiff and lifeless, like the pool.

The phone really is brilliant. Calling the womang whenever I want an easy shag works well, and arranging meet-ups for drinks is a nice touch. Though it would be nicer if they could make their own way to and from dates, as the lift-provider role can get tedious. Fortunately, this is all solved by the taxis, possibly the single most important new feature for me. Find a cab, call it over, hop in the back and it will take you anywhere, instantly. For people like me (I realise I'm in a minority) who find endless driving for hours between missions to be a grind, it's a godsend.

There are a few things I've read about that don't appear to be there to me. The web isn't as big as I've been led to believe, I could only get one level of service in the strip club, not three, and the intelligent bystander system where pedestrians will call the police from their mobiles when they see you jacking a car seems to be entirely fictitious.

And all this just sounds like a load of complaining. Which it is, but they're petty complaints (like my objection to the pronunciation of Bellic. Surely it should be pronounced 'Bellich'?). The story is great, the characters are superbly realised (although I had to turn the subtitles on to understand a word Little Jacob was saying), and the twists are mostly unseen and dramatic. All the little niggles can be overlooked, because GTA does just about everything so perfectly, with so much style, charisma and humour. The amount of stuff crammed into it is beyond belief. Up until yesterday I was firmly in the 'GTA doesn't work in 3D, the first two were the best' camp. I have been thoroughly converted. According to IGN, who I never, ever agree with, this is the first game since the Dreamcast worthy of a full 100/100 mark. For once, they got it absolutely right.

FIFA Street 3 (Xbox 360)

2008-04-30T09:55:00.002Z

Not only completed, and not just 1kd, but 1.25kd! My first >1,000 gamerscore, and it felt nice, even if it was very easy and I shamefully had to buy some extra arenas for 300MSP to get the last 250 (I'm using my free 500MSP for pre-ordering GTA4 from Game to justify this). The whole thing took me around 7 hours, four-ish on single-player and three-ish online. I got the 25 ranked wins after 23 wins. Which almost (actually, nowhere near) counters the 128 wins I needed to get the 100 ranked wins achievement on FIFA 08.

It's sort of fun but ludicrously samey. The only tactic that works is get the ball, juggle until you're a yard from the opposition goal, score, repeat. If you try doing anything else you will lose. The drags are rubbish, passing doesn't work, and ultimately the game is pointless. Not recommended unless you're a whore, in which case highly recommended.

Bah

2008-04-28T13:31:00.003Z

Once more I forgot to post for ages.

Since I last posted I have:

Finished Avatar
Finished The Club
Finished Sega Superstars Tennis
Finished Prey
Finished Halo 2
Finished FIFA 08
Finished Call Of Duty 4
Finished Bioshock
Finished God Of War: Chains Of Olympus
Finished UEFA Euro 2008

Hopefully I can finish FIFA Street 3 tonight in time for 'the big one'.

NHL 07 (Xbox 360)

2008-03-12T09:27:00.002Z

I know no shame. This is the easiest 1,000 gamerpoints I've acquired since finishing the 2k6 games over a year ago. I probably spent about two hours actually playing the game, then another two hours on my computer pressing A on the controller at ten minute intervals to set it simulating the next season. It's not very good. The fighting is laughable. 2K is better. But it's good for whoring.

FIFA 08 (Xbox 360)

2008-02-28T13:48:00.003Z

After a major loss of form it would appear things are looking up again. Last night's online play session saw 5 wins and one defeat on penalties from six games. However what I don't understand is why I'm yet to see the 50 Games Hosted achievement, when I've played 57 home games online. What is also infuriating is that the game has a 15-minute (in game time) grace period at the start of every online game, so you can assess the lag, and if necessary quit without penalty. A nice idea in theory, but on three occassions last night I found myself in front within ten minutes. Needless to say not one of these games made it past the 15 minute mark. But trying to pass around and maintain possession until the 90 seconds or so of realtime have elapsed has similar consequenses, as people assume you're trying to take the piss out of them. So the only thing one can do is to play normally and attack, whilst trying not to score. Not good.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (Xbox 360)

2008-02-28T13:46:00.003Z

I am a gamerscore whore. I know it, and I have no shame. But I have thresholds. Even though F4 is apparently an easy 800 or so points, with a 6 hour run through time, I played through the first level, amassing 60 points in the process, turned it off and set it back. It is so diabolically awful that not even I, a man who finished Shrek the Third for a measly 400 points, could tolerate its awfulness. Avoid.

Meet The Robinsons (Xbox 360)

2008-02-28T13:43:00.002Z

Completed! Took me around 9 hours to get the full 1k. A thoroughly enjoyable experience. I beat a giant hat with a varsity glove.

Twenty-two left

2006-03-21T09:14:00.000Z

Ico PS2

I've finished the legendary Ico, the game claimed to be the best ever by many. It is good, but it's not the best game ever.

It's a beautiful game, vast landscapes and an awe-inspiring sense of scale. The sound is quite unreal, no music, just a strange, haunting wind casting over you. The puzzles are varied and fun, but elements of the gameplay leave a lot to be desired. The battles against the shadow creatures are repetitive and infuriating, the animation when running with Yorda is horribly jerky, the A.I. is non-existent (Yorda routinely climbs down a ladder when I call her, gets to the bottom rung and climbs back up again, and the shadows are painfully stupid, taking two steps towards me then jumping back, over and over again) and the last boss is a joke, three minutes, first time, without trying.

To be honest, a lot of the game is just a frustrating experience, and I was told I would feel emotional towards the second half of the game. I didn't. But then I defeated the boss and watched the ending sequence, and that changed. It's strangely beautiful, as though it wants to eat away at you, strangely and eerily. And then I ended up on a beach and took a stroll. And in a brief moment, I completely forgot it wasn't real...

23 To Go

2006-03-11T17:05:00.000Z

Perfect Dark Zero Xbox 360

Just finished it. It was only on Agent difficulty, but still I don't believe I've ever finished two games in a day before. Did missions 9-13 in just short of two hours. It's a bit crap really, shocking AI, weak level design, poor sound, graphics weak in places but lovely in others. Well, it's probably not as bad as I make out, but as FPS games go it's very much average, and compared to the likes of COD2 and Halo it can't really compete. But it's another one off the list. I will now aim to complete Ico, Ridge Racer 6 and Max Payne 2, depending on my mood and which machine Mary is using at any given time.

Completing Games and my Marathon Task

2006-03-11T14:36:00.000Z

This month I have mostly been skint. Not only that, but I now have so many games, DVDs and CDs that my 2,000+ units of storage capacity are overflowing and I have about 10 huge piles of stuff that won't fit lying around. As such, I'm doing a huge eBay selling binge, to raise money and space. Not only that, but I've made a pact with myself to not buy any more games until I've finished a rather substantial list of games that I have. I drew up the list yesterday, compromising 25 games and how far in I am:

Call Of Duty 2 (360) - About five missions in on easy.
F.E.A.R. (PC) - I played about an hour but lost my save so a restart.
God Of War (PS2) - About half-way through.
Half-Life 2 (PC) - I think I'm on chapter 7.
Ico (PS2) - About three hours in.
Jak & Daxter (PS2) - About five hours in.
Lego Star Wars (Xbox) - Unstarted.
Max Payne 2 (PC) - On about chapter 6.
Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes (GC) - Unstarted.
Metal Gear Solid 3 (PS2) - Played an hour a year ago, will start again for recap.
Metroid Fusion (GBA) - About two hours in.
Perfect Dark Zero (360) - On mission 9.
Psychonauts (Xbox) - Unstarted.
Rayman 3 (GC) - About 60% through.
Resident Evil Zero (GC) - Unstarted.
Resident Evil (GC) - Unstarted.
Resident Evil 2 (GC) - Unstarted.
Resident Evil 3 (GC) - Unstarted.
Resident Evil CV (GC) - Unstarted.
Resident Evil 4 (GC) - Unstarted.
Rez (PS2) - On level 3.
Ridge Racer 6 (360) - 66% through.
Ridge Racers (PSP) - 60% through.
Shadow Of The Colossus (PS2) - Unstarted.
We Love Katamari (PS2) - Unstarted.

I do have to buy one game though, since I don't own RE:CV, but I need the set and want to play through them in order.

However, I'm now one down, twenty-four to go:

God Of War

The first game to be finished. 4 hours last night and an hour this morning saw me conquer the Challenges Of Poseidon and Hades, find Pandora's Box, die, recover from the Underworld by walking the Path Of Hades, defeat Ares, save my family from an army of myself, kill Ares again, attempt suicide, fail, and take my new place on Mount Olympus as the God Of War. I would like to award God Of War the honour of the title Best Game Since Shenmue, a masterpiece in every way.

So if anyone has any suggestions as to what to play and why (but don't say RE4, the RE games are getting played in the order they are written in), then lets hear your thoughts.

It's Been A While...

2006-02-21T16:29:00.000Z

I haven't posted in four weeks. I am a bad person. But I have been playing lots of games. My vow to play an average of 2 hours a day is well in swing, currently standing at 2 hours 17 minutes a day. Not bad. Since I last posted I have developed new addictions, new loves, new hates and new other things. And so, I have been playing:

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (DS)

My first 100% finished game of the year. 22 and a bit hours of genius, frustration, laughing and screaming. The most text I've ever read in a game ever (except a cumulative total of Championship Manager matches), and most of it was glorious. The best characters in a game ever and the best script, which more than make up for the graphics, sound and gameplay which, while great for the game, are pretty much non-existant. It's now on eBay, being a rare and valuable little piece which, brilliant as it is, has precisely zero replay value, and I'm hoping for it to bring me a few nice pennies.

Dead Or Alive 4 Xbox 360

I've been hyping it for ages. It turned up, and it was fantastic for about five minutes, which is as long as it took me to get from starting the game to get to the end boss, a young lass by't name of Alpha-152, aka evil Satan bitch. On my first run through I defeated every one of the first seven characters first time, no problem, and even got a few perfects. On my first encounter with the final boss I took, and a kid ye not, over 30 attempts to defeat her. That is not a good thing. However I persevered and defeated story mode as every character just to see what a Spartan looked like in HD (meh) and then took it online. Oh dear. Lag, lag and more lag, completely unresponsive controls and no idea what's going on. So basically single player is unplayable and online is unplayable. It's brilliant with a mate sitting next to you, without evil death computer AI or evil death lag, but that doesn't happen often enough to warrant a £50 game purchase, so it has gone back.

Perfect Dark Zero Xbox 360

I bought it on launch, limited edition one and everything, and then a fortnight ago I noticed I hadn't touched it in two months. I bought it on launch and played it twice. A very expensive coaster. So I threw it in and had a go. Pleasantly surprise I was. Single player is still crap, boring levels and crap AI, but I'm slowly bashing through it anyway. Online, on the other hand, rocks. The pace is very different from my usual style, so I'm not doing very well (I'm very much a Q3/UT2003 twitch-master) but I'm slowly getting there. The game modes are fun and varied (especially infection), and the weapons are, for the most part, nicely balanced.

Geometry Wars Evolved Xbox 360 Live Arcade

It has been debated by many people, many times, whether or not games can be classed as art. The most common argument that they are is Ico, a game that I can't get along with and find vastly overrated. However, I submit Geometry Wars for this claim. A completely insane, random, hypnotic, mesmerising audio visual orgasmic lovefest. You fly, things appear, you shoot, things explode. Repeat until you can no longer see where or what you are, surrounded by a hundred thousand particles of neon light falling around, whilst the insane dance beat powers through your skull. This is closer to art than most art, and whether it is 'art' or not, there's no denying it is a masterpiece.

I have become the proud owner of a shiny new Game Boy Micro, a wonderful (if a tad overpriced, but I got a great deal) bit of kit, so I have been indulging in GBA games, namely:

Metroid Fusion Game Boy Advance

I loved the first two hours I played of it, my first 2D Metroid experience. Beautiful, fun and rewarding. But then I got lost. Since then I have spent ages searching, but to no avail. It has been retired to the sidelines to make way for my newest addiction, which is...

Advance Wars Game Boy Advance

I hate turn-based games of any description. They are fundamentally wrong. I dismissed Advance Wars: Dual Strike within seconds, but was bored on Sunday night so stuck it in my Micro, expecting a five minute blast before dismissing it. An hour later I turned it off to go to bed. Three minutes later I turned it on again to play for another hour. Last night I played for two and a half hours in bed. I'm taking my Micro into the toilet at work to play it. I've finished field training and the first mission of the campaign. It is astonishing. So addictive, so tactical and yet so very, very simple. There's nothing to it. But I still spend every second trying to decide how far forward to push my medium tanks in my mind. I think this might be the best GBA game ever. Better than Wario Ware. If it can keep this quality up throughout, it's going to be a nice year.

In other gaming news, I've bought a few games recently but not played any of them long enough to really make decent comment, namely:

The Rub Rabbits (DS)

Resident Evil: Deadly Silence (DS)

Psychonauts (Xbox)

Lego Star Wars (Xbox)

Assorted PSP games

Assorted GBA games

And that's about it. Updates will be more regular (I know...) and I need to go play Advance Wars...

The engines sound like they're ready to go, are you all set?

2006-01-24T21:07:00.000Z

This week I have mostly been bumming a new game...

Ridge Racer 6

The best Ridge yet, the best arcade racer ever, the best game on 360, a masterpiece in every possible way. As an insanely passionate Ridge fan since 1995/6, I was looking forward to this a fair bit. RRV may have been a bit weak (but I still thought it was much better than it was given credit for) but the stunning PSP version got my hopes right up, and they've delivered.

First up, the gameplay. It plays like Ridge. It's exactly the same as the PSP version, but with analogue acceleration to ensure those perfect starts, and analogue steering that doesn't hurt. The rest is as it should be, which is to say that you work on the principle of cars don't slow down going round corners if you can make them go sideways. It's not realistic, and apart from the appearence, the 'vehicles' in RR6 bear about as much resemblance to a flying sack of potatoes as they do to a car. They glide everywhere and will happily go over 100ft in the air and land again without ever dropping below 300km/h. And that's the way it should be.

And it looks gorgeous. It doesn't have PGR3's detail or wow factor, and it will never make people buy a 360, but it's so razor sharp and stunningly hi-res that in many ways it looks better than PGR3. It might not have Brooklyn Bridge perfectly reflected in the 100% accurate wheel nut of your McLaren F1, but it's so easy on the eye (and at these speeds it has to be to stop you having a seizure) that it doesn't really matter. And it's a solid 60 throughout.

And it's bloody HUGE! I've put in about 14 hours into the main game, and it says I've done 48% of it. Bearing in mind the first half is ridiculously easy and I've won 98% of the races so far on my first attempt and it will get much, much harder from here, I can see this being a task close to 50 hours. Not bad for an arcade racer. Then there's the 14 player online, which I very nearly dismissed as unplayable as I was getting about a frame every second, then I discovered the one huge downside in the game, being the bug that causes this 1fps which happens when your 360 is connected to a PC. Even when the PC is off it still does it, I had to actually remove the 360's knowledge of its existence. A huge flaw as I now can't stream my music, but RR6 online is better than music, so it will stay disconnected until a patch is sorted out. There's also a problem in that it often screws up the last few positions at the end of an online race. A few times I've seen someone finish last by about ten seconds, only for the final table to put them half-way up and change the time. But these patchable bugs aside, it's perfect.

And that's taken up about 95% of my gaming time in the last week, but elsewhere I've finished the third trial of Phoenix Wright, and it's a great game but I don't feel a compelling desire to go back to it, especially as I now have Tony Hawk's American Sk8Land (wankers) on DS, which is very nice indeed, a proper 3D handheld version that doesn't hurt (much) to play, and it's cel-shaded to compensate for the fact that the DS couldn't handle it as it should be, but in many ways it looks the best of the lot (360 included). But the pop-up is a bit crap (getting told to skitch a police car then skating around trying to find it only to see it appear in the middle of the road without enough time for you to avoid it and bailing is annoying). And I've played a bit more God Of War, currently doing the Challenge of Atlas in Pandora's Temple. And I tried a PS2 game called Freak Out, which has to be the strangest gaming experience I've ever had. You play a small girl. You go around exploding ladies with ZZZ cups by stretching their breasts with a floating scarf. Odd.

And on that note I must leave, Ridge Racer 6 beckons...

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

2006-01-15T15:29:00.000Z

Well, I wanted to spend the weekend playing God Of War, but it appears that some not-so-friendly wasps have decided to occupy my attic, where all my games machines are, and I have an intense phobia of the things, so that didn't happen, so handheld gaming has been the order of the weekend. I'm really enjoying it so far, but the huge amounts of text can get a bit tedious. I'm about an hour into the third chapter. The second one was fun (I really wanted to punch Redd White in the face, it's not often that a game makes me feel so personally about the characters), though I was struggling a bit at the beginning, but I managed to squeeze some intense frustration out of Miss April May (DYSWTDT?) and go on to send that bastard who thinks he rules the world down for murder. Go me.

All I have to do now is find out who is pretending to be Will Powers and wearing the samurai costume whilst feigning a bad ankle. And then slap that Oldbag woman around the face. Then I will be a happy bunny.

God Of War / Phoenix Wright

2006-01-11T00:53:00.000Z

Wow. I like starting a new game and it having the 'Christ Almighty' effect. First impressions are 'how the hell is a PS2 pulling this off'. It's not hugely stunning with great textures and models, but everything is so well animated, and the amount of stuff going on and the scale of things are astonishing.

So, it looks pretty. It sounds pretty. And it's also one the very few 3D adventure games I've played this generation that gives you absolutely no camera control, doing it all for you, and it works brilliantly. I've put in two and a half hours so far and it hasn't stuck once, the only game in about five years I can think of where this has been the case (save for possibly Ico) and it's an example that everyone should follow.

Play wise, it's insane hack-and-slash, but with tons of different and effective moves, with massive combos possible, with loads of cool magic and dodging available. And it's incredibly gory. And there are lots of naked breasts, both in real-time and in very nice FMV. It's quite strange

Impressions from two and a half hours play: Buy it.

I've also managed to pick up Rez on PS2 for a tenner, so I've played through the first level of that, as well as my usual quick bash on all the Live Arcade games. And I finished the second level of Space Channel 5, in order to complete my mid-week challenge in time for tomorrow's deadline.

And I've just started Phoenix Wright in bed, done the first mission. Very enjoyable but I don't quite see the OMG GOTY TEH PHOENIX FTW that some have been claiming. Yes, it's original, funny and entertaining, but at the end of the day it is just a long text adventure with a few bits of strategic interaction and some cool anime design. I will be playing it to the end, though.

Happy 2006!

2006-01-10T11:09:00.000Z

Belated greetings and all that. It's my new year's resolution to play more games. I want to finish at least a game a month through this year. So I've started it off by playing some games (although not enough):

Call Of Duty 2

Last night I finished the Russian campaign, which makes up about the first 30% of the game. Although I am playing it on easy. It's a fantastic game, and surprisingly, the split-screen multiplayer is brilliant, way better than the shambolic online modes.

Mutant Storm Reloaded

Booted it up last night, aiming to beat my record score of 800,000. I got to just over 1.5 million, ranked 2,072 in the world, and got the Yellow Belt achievement. Not bad, but now I have to beat Michael Cargill's 2m+ score.

Project Gotham Racing 3

I decided to skip golds and go straight onto platinums. I did about the first 10 very easily a week or two ago, but it now seems very difficult. I tried for about ten, and failed for about ten.

Bankshot Billiards 2

The most expensive game on Live Arcade, but there's a lot there. It may be 2D, but there's a lot of depth in the play, you have pretty much all the control you'd get from WCS or VP. It's fun and relaxing, but hard at times. You really need to not make an error, because if the computer gets to the table chances are it'll clear up.

Animal Crossing: Wild World

I bought 350 turnips for 107b each. Yesterday I was offered 46b for them! Insulting. Hopefully I can make a vast profit!

And that's pretty much it, I've not been playing enough. Tonight I will start God Of War and play Space Channel 5, check turnip prices and hopefully play a bit of PGR3. My other resolution is to post more. Watch this space.

OUENDAAAAANNNNNNN!!!!!

2005-12-30T01:12:00.000Z

Christ, what a brilliant game. Having started it on Normal a month or two back and giving up on the second song because I didn't understand how the trackballs worked, I went back to it last night having being told how they worked and that there was an Easy mode. I have now finished easy and am about 70% through Normal and it's just a masterpiece. Every self-respecting DS-owning, J-Pop lovin' screen tapper needs to own this.

Easy mode is easy. It took me about 45 minutes to get to the last track, and about half an hour to do the last track. It is damn hard. Although, somewhat inevitably, when I eventually did do it it was pretty much a perfect run. Normal mode is a fair bit harder, but I'm still getting to grips with it, and finding that the hardest thing is that when things start moving fast and your working on the side of the screen furthest from your stylus hand you can't plan ahead or see what's coming as your hand obscures the near side of the screen completely. Bah.

Elsewhere, Live Arcade rocks, Animal Crossing novelty beginning to wear thin, and I'm playing Call Of Duty 2 (360) on the side of Ouendan loving.

Completion-a-thon!

2005-12-26T14:09:00.000Z

Well, having completed a half-game (Plump Pop on Taito Legends, in 45 minutes, doesn't really count!) in the last year, I've done two and a half in the last week!:

Project Gotham Racing 3

The first one down. Finished it all on Silver, and am now going back through to get Golds. A seriously fun experience, and on in-car view with a decent screen and speakers, nothing compares to it for sheer racing thrills. And yes, it might lack the variety that the class-based progression in PGR2 had, but unlike PGR2, there wasn't a point in this where I felt complete frustration (I'm looking at you, American Muscle class)!

Kameo: Elements Of Power
It may be short for a game that was meant to be a huge epic, 8 years in the making, but that doesn't make it any less of a masterpiece. Stunning throughout, the best graphics I have ever seen (for the most part, there are a few bits that look like an Xbox game though), amazing audio when turned up, and it plays like a dream. I really cannot begin to understand the beating it's received from the press. The game of the year.

Smash TV
Another half-game, and I used at least 3,405,453,596,024 ($hlmun) continues, so it counts even less! Obscenely hard, very ugly, but lots of fun. Although it is exactly the same game as Geometry Wars, Mutant Storm Reloaded and Robotron: 2084. It's better than Robotron, but nowhere near as good as the other two.

In the next fortnight I aim to finish Call Of Duty 2 and Perfect Dark Zero. It's not going to happen, but I can dream for nothing!

Lots of pretty pictures

2005-12-18T13:06:00.000Z

I've been threatening for ages now to post some pictures of bits of my collection and my setup. Well I finally took some yesterday, so here they are, starting with the novelty crap:

Lots of assorted crap there, including a Football Manager 2005 ball, a few keyrings, a Donkey Kong calculator and watch, a still sealed Game Boy, my Dreamcast towel and shorts (ace!), a Diet Coke can-bottle thing from a Tokyo vending machine and assorted merchandise of 'that turd', the mascot for one of the Japanese telecom companies.

Lots of Nintendo display boxes. I have a huge DS one too but it's in storage as I can't find room for it. On the shelf is the Nintendo keyring collection and assorted other bits, like the Hitomi zippo lighter, the DOAXBV beermats and a mini-Hang On machine.

Some posters, postcards, magazines and an inflatable Chomp.

My projector, complete with 6ft Donkey backdrop, and my sofa, where all gaming takes place.

A small selection of games and bits.

A few more games and a shoe rack from Argos bought to house controllers, and it does the job wonderfully.

The unit with my amp/DVD player, Xbox, PS2, Gamecube and Xbox 360, and sometimes other things, and the cupboard that is known as the Retro Cabinet, with a few old consoles that get rotated depending on my mood.

The latest new toy to end up in my house, my beloved Dreamcast demo pod, standing next to a big Resident Evil 4 promo stand, with a Yoshi's Universal Gravitation weird thing with springs on it on top. And the DC pod running a game of Rez in the bottom pic.

The view from the sofa, with a screen of my Gamercard just so you know it's really me! And a pic of Kameo being projected, taken from across the room to get other things in the shot to give an idea of size. The projected image, from corner to corner, is just over 96", and the sofa is about 2.5m away, so it pretty much fills your entire field of vision.

And saving the best till last:

My Shenmue collection, compromising, in no particular order:

Shenmue UK, Shenmue 2 UK, Shenmue 2 Xbox UK (not pictured), Shenmue Limited Edition US, Shenmue US (still sealed), Shenmue JAP, Shenmue 2 Limited Edition JAP (with Virtua Fighter disc), Project Berkely, What's Shenmue, Original, Orchestral and Jukebox soundtracks (two of each, one opened and one sealed), Shenmue t-shirt, two 8cm CD singles, Shenmue Movie DVD, Shenmue Movie VHS, EB and Game flyers for Shenmue 2, Shenmue strategy guide (not pictured), Shenmue 2 strategy guide (not pictured).

Yes, I really am that sad :-)

2 weeks later...

2005-12-16T19:09:00.000Z

Well, today marks the two-week-iversary since Xbox 360 was launched in the UK, and more importantly, in my house. Needless to say, it has had extensive playage. Here are my thoughts:

The hardware/dashboard/Live

It's a big bugger. The PSU is huge, as expected, but the main unit is deeper than I had anticipated. But it's quite sexy. The 'Ring Of Light' may have a wanky name, but it's very cool, especially the whole you-are-controller-number-3 thing. The pad is lovely, although I don't feel entirely comfortable with the positioning of the new shoulder buttons, even if they are much better than the black and white ones from the original and S Xbox controllers. The ring on the controller flashes whenever you get an important message, and circles when the battery is running low. The new headset is very comfy and, when the Live voice-chat isn't buggered (which is infuriatingly frequently) works very well. And you can turn the console on and off with the controller, which is ace.

The dashboard is beautiful and works like a dream. The 'blades', as the cool hip guys at MS PR insist on calling them, allow for very fast and easy navigation to anything and everything. The whole interface is really perfect. From one place you can access all aspects of system management, Live profiles, Arcade games, download and play demos and trailers, download assorted content like themes and expansions, access media files from USB devices or computers on the network, and send messages to other people over Live.

The media stuff is fantastic. I had to download an 80MB file for my computer to get it running, and sit for about 20 minutes in front of a setup program, which was annoying, but once it was set up it was wonderful. Now I can navigate to the media section in my dash, or just press the media button on the free remote that came with the console, and it launches Media Center, exactly as it is on my PC, giving me complete access to every media file on there, as well as the TV functionality, so I can watch and pause live TV and set up recording schedules through my 360. Nice.

This also means that the pissing about with custom soundtracks is a thing of the past. Anywhere, in any game, I press the big Xbox button on my controller, the game pauses itself, I scroll down to music, it gives me a list of the 7,000 songs on my PC, organised however I want, I pick an album, resume the game, and it replaces the soundtrack with the music of my choice, on the fly, still giving me the sound effects from the game.

The Live stuff is even better. I'd written most of it off as a gimmick until I'd used it properly. The Gamerscore thing is genious, and creates good rivalries between friends, and gives you incentives to actually play your games and see how well your doing compared to everyone else you know. Gamer pictures are pointless, though. Again, all this can be accessed through the Guide overlay. Press the Xbox button in a game and it pauses it, so not only can you change the music, you can navigate through your friends list to see how they're doing, and if you're stuck somewhere you can look and see who's got past the bit you're on and send them a text or voice message asking for help.

Live Arcade never appealed to me. I'm now addicted. Lots of simple games, that cost between £3.50 and £11 each, that run from the hard drive. It wasn't that appealing until I discovered that some of them are actually very good, and that they all have detailed leaderboards, and my competitive side came through. Now I must win at everything!

So that's the console, here are the games, starting with the Live Arcade games, since I'm on the subject:

Hexic HD

The new game from the maker of Tetris that comes free on all hard drives. You have a grid of coloured hexagons. Rotate them in groups of three to get a group of three the same colour, then they disappear, with lots of bonuses available for arranging colours in pretty patterns. Addictive as hell, another masterpiece from Alexey Pajitnov.

Smash TV

Just about the hardest game I've ever played. Run around with the left stick, fire with the right, with up to 1,356,286,325 ($hlmun) enemies coming at you from all sides. Fun, but tiring.

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved

The sequel to the mini-game from PGR2. It's in PGR3, but unfortunately only in 4-minute demo form, with leaderboards and achievements locked, so a £3.50 purchase from the Xbox Live Arcade is required. But it's worth every penny. Absolutely insane and frantics, it uses the same controls as Smash TV, but rather than looking like a very tired old arcade game, it's without a doubt the prettiest 2D game ever made. Hundreds of neon things fly at you from everywhere while you fly around like a madman looking for a gap whilst firing a cannon that warps the screen in every imaginable way until you hit something and it all explodes into a big neon mess. Mindblowing.

Zuma

You are a frog who spits coloured balls. There are other coloured balls on a track going around you, heading into a hole. If they go in the hole, you lose. Shoot the balls to make three or more in a row of the same colour and they'll disappear. Highly addictive, lovely sound effects, and very difficult after the first half an hour, but strongly recommended.

And now the 'proper' games:

Project Gotham Racing 3

Oh my. Where to start? Well, it looks utterly astonishing. Backgrounds are modelled so accurately they could be real, pretty much photo-realistic cars that reflect everything around them completely naturally, all flying by at 200mph without a problem, engine sounds blasting around your head, all controlled like a dream. Tons of cars, a great single-player mode, even better Live play, and an in-car view that redefines how a racing game should be made. The best racing game ever created, simple as that.

Kameo: Elements Of Power

It's had a lot of criticism. I don't see why. Yes, it might be a little short for a game that took 8 years to make, but what is there is wonderful. Probably the best looking game I've ever played. The controls take some getting used to, but after an hour it's second nature. Currently just over half way through and I've enjoyed every minute.

Perfect Dark Zero

This hasn't grabbed me at all. I've played a few games online and done the first four levels in the single player campaign, and while it's very pretty and there's nothing fundementally wrong with it, it just feels like it's missing something, and I don't really feel the urge to play it.

Peter Jackson's King Kong

Given that this is meant to be the easiest game on 360 I'm having difficulty with it. I'm only on chapter 6 or 7 out of 24, and haven't even played as Kong yet, but it's hard, dark and scary. It's very good game, with tons of atmosphere, but some bits are very tedious and repetitive, and I'm struggling to want to play it any further because I'm crap!

Call Of Duty 2

Amazing. Beautiful graphics, especially with big smoke explosions going on everywhere, unbelievable surround sound, very solid AI, great levels designs and an atmosphere to die for. Plays like nothing else, and if it weren't for the Live play, which supports a shocking 8 players when it works, which is rarely, I'd be really struggling for something bad to say about it.

FIFA 06: Road To World Cup

This has had some seriously bad reviews. I picked it up for a ten-day rental out of curiosity, and it is very promising. On a strictly gameplay level, it is brilliant. By far and away the best FIFA ever, it puts 06 on Xbox and PS2 to shame. The passing and defending are often at least on par with Pro Evo 5, although the shooting never has the same natural feel of Konami's masterpiece. But the problems are huge. Only 70 teams, two game modes, no longevity whatsoever (I'd completed all the main game modes and earned 750 of the 1,000 Gamerpoints on offer within about 3 hours), some dodgy character models and a terrible frame-rate. It's clearly a game cynically rushed out for a launch to make some easy money, which is a great shame, because if they fix the big issues and put some content in for FIFA 07 it could well turn out to be a genuine competitor to Pro Evo 6.

And that's what I have. I've also got Condemned but I haven't opened it yet, and have played the demos for NBA Live 06 (stunning, tons of atmosphere, but lack of content means it won't be getting a purchase) and Full Auto (very promising, needs some tweaks, especially in the frame-rate). In summary, it's fantastic. At first I felt stupid for not selling it on eBay for £1,200. I'm now very glad I didn't, it's worth more to me than that. It has the potential to be the best console ever. It's not the machine, and it's not the games, it's the way they work so well together to make it such a great experience. And all in stunning hi-definition. You need an Xbox 360.

Non-360-related gaming news

Elsewhere, I've just gotten Animal Crossing: Wild World for Nintendo DS. It's the Gamecube version, but slightly different and with some online bits. I've already paid off my mortgage, had my first house extension, and have 15,000 bells in the bank. I'm going to get addicted again, I can tell.

I also now have a Dreamcast demo pod/display kiosk thing. It took 6 hours to get it from the third floor of Game to my bedroom two miles away, but it was worth it. It stands 7 feet tall, with a 20" TV, and has been dismantled to change the horrible controllers that were in it and to put VMUs in them. It is beautiful, and I will post photos soon.

And so concludes the gaming news until something exciting happens. Ciao.

14 hours to go...

2005-12-01T17:45:00.000Z

It's been a long time since I posted, I know. But since at 7.45am tomorrow morning I will be saying goodbye to my life and hello to my Xbox 360, it may be another week before I get around to posting again. I have scaled down my pre-order considerably, and tomorrow will be getting the following:

Xbox 360 console with balls (not the neutered one)

Extra Wireless controller

Play and Charge kit

Rechargeable Battery pack

VGA cable

Wireless Network Adapter

Kameo: Elements Of Power

Perfect Dark Zero: Limited Edition

Project Gotham Racing 3

So once I factor in my Gamestation credit note, Game gift card and staff discount, the whole deal should set me back £205, which is rather nice!

So, since I last posted I have rediscovered Nintendo DS, a wonderful machine that I shamefully overlooked. Not as wonderful as some UGVM residents would have you believe, but great nontheless. I have also sold my PSP, to effectively make my Xbox 360 free. I didn't want to, but Christmas coming and my wallet is anything but fat right now, so sadly it had to go, which means for the first time in about 8 years, I don't own every current console. That hurts! But so far I don't seem to miss it. I've been playing lots of DS games and realising that although being able to play great versions of Burnout, Pro Evo and Ridge Racer on the move is great, I never really play games on the move as if I ever go anywhere I drive. I usually use my handhelds in bed, and I can't justify having a very expensive and very pretty device that serves only as a beautiful emulator and plays a bunch of games I already have on other formats in the next room. So, this last fortnight, for DS, I have mostly been playing:

Mario Kart DS: Well, it's been long enough. And it's here, and it's great. Enjoying it even though good at it I am not. Got mostly star and 2-star ranks on 50cc, having finished all cups, but on 100cc I'm struggling to finish first in the cups. Mission mode is a nice distraction, if frustrating at times. Just unlocked level 4 but not started on it yet. The wireless play is great when it works, which is rarely. I don't believe it should take in excess of two minutes to find three players anywhere in the world that want to play a game, but apparently it does. And that's when the connection on the DS's incredibly weak wireless connection holds up, which is rare.

OUENDAN!!!: This is weird. Ace, but weird. I can't do the second song, which as a drummer is incredibly embarrassing. Hitting the timing is easy, but I always fail because I don't actually know what to do with those ones that roll backwards and forwards in a bar. Hitting them all the time sometimes gives me big bonus marks and sometimes gives me an instant failure. Very confusing.

Sonic Rush: Meh. This is a bit crap. Poor music, boring levels, fast to the point of being unplayable, this much speed can't work in 2D as well as it can in 3D. The 2/3D bosses are cool briefly, but soon become repetitive. And I'm stuck on level 4.

Zoo Keeper: As good as it ever was. Needs no comment really.

And that's about it. My other half is beating me as far as games go. She finished Lost In Blue and Another Code last week, and is currently well on with Phoenix Wright, which I will steal from her when she's done with it. Plus she's just got Kirby Power Paintbrush, so I may steal that while I wait. Animal Crossing comes out on Tuesday, so knowing VG+ delivery times I'll have it in about two weeks from now, so hopefully the OMG 360!!!1! effect will have worn off by then so I can give it some quality time.

I haven't played any home console games for ages. After 6 months of hard work, the gaming room was finally finished last night (or at least as finished as it can be, there's a big gap waiting for my Dreamcast pod, but that's another problem) and for most of the last month has been in bits with huge boxes in front of the projector and holes in the wall, but tomorrow I can get home, plug it in, and sit back in my nice, complete room!

And that's about it for now. 360 reportage will come as soon as I can drag myself away from PGR3 long enough to write something. So, until next year...

Xbox 360 launch line-up - PLAYED!

2005-11-20T10:57:00.000Z

I was at the 360 event in Leeds over the last two days, and got a go on pretty much everything, so impressions are as follows:

Project Gotham Racing 3:
Ho Hum, where to start? BEST GAME EVER seems appropriate. This was the X05 build and the jaggies were quite noticeable, hopefully it's not that bad in the final build, but other than that this is the prettiest game ever made. And yes, I have HL2 and Doom 3, sorry PC owners but you just can't match this right now, especially on in-car view, it's mindblowing. I had 8 races on a 6-player system link with 2 CPU cars to bump it up to 8. 7 times I won and once I came second :) This game will pwn Xbox Live. Plays like 2 but much more sensitive, you need to use the analogue triggers properly, if you slam the accelerator down as you're coming round a corner you will spin out every time. It's not running at 60fps, but believe me it doesn't need to. In a word, SEXBEST.

Perfect Dark Zero:
Didn't get enough chance to form an impression. Picked it up in single-player mid-game, stuck in a room and I couldn't find a door, but I was getting shot so I went to the window but couldn't see anything but the screen kept flashing red, then I died! So I turned it off and did some 6-player system link deathmatching, which is pretty fun, I can see this being fantastic over 32-player Live. Gorgeous as well.

Dead Or Alive 4:
The second prettiest game there (aside from Kameo, which I didn't play along with COD2 and King Kong as I've had extensive plays on them), and utterly brilliant. People are saying it's not a progression, but two minutes with this and it looks and feels so much better than DOA3 or DOA2U. The new characters seem pretty cool, and the new levels are spectacular.

Condemned:
Gorgeous and moody, but I didn't play much as it's a very slow-paced game and I knew to get anything from it I'd have to give it more time than I had.

FIFA 06 RTWC:
WHAT THE FUCK??? The reviews I've read said this stays at a solid 60fps till it hits the cut-scenes. This is a complete lie. Passing the ball around the midfield without many players on the screen the frame-rate would just randomly drop into single figures, all the time. Plays like FIFA but is much harder to score, as has been documented, and without any responsive control whatsoever, which hasn't. Player models look ok, but are way too shiney and the facial expressions are laughable. Avoid.

NBA Live 06:
Stunning to look at, best loading sequence ever, and fun to play. Although apparently the game has no features and can be completed in about five minutes with no replay value! Thank god there's a free demo on the Marketplace, it probably has most of the game's content.

Tiger Woods 06:
Looks very pretty, plays like Tiger Woods. Again, apparently lacking in features, but as a game it's good. If you need a golf game it's more than adequate, but might be worth waiting for it to be in a sale or something.

Need For Speed Most Wanted:
If you absolutely HAVE to fuck your car up with neon and race the police than fine, get it. But it's an average game at best, and being on the pod next to PGR3 really didn't help. The screens are very misleading, it doesn't look anywhere near that good. Plays like NFS, really. Got in a few fun police chases, but can imagine that would wear thin quickly.

Tony Hawk's American Wasteland:
Utterly pointless. TH graphics don't appear to have improved since the first one was ported to Dreamcast. Paying £50 for this seems utterly pointless. It looks and plays like the Xbox version.

Gun:
Meh. Picked it up mid-level so was lost, but didn't look great and seemed a bit boring.

As well as pods there were 8 sofas with bigger versions of the Samsung TV and loose wired controllers. This is my first chance to play with the controller naturally, ie not bolted into an upright pod. It's very, very nice used this way. But I will say, and I don't know if it's the pad or the way it was held into the pod, the L and R buttons are VERY badly positioned. In PGR3, LTrigger is brake and LButton is change view. I don't have especially big fingers, but I probably managed to change view WHILST braking about twice a race because they're much too close together.

All this aside, my summary of thoughts for Xbox 360 is as follows:
NNEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDDDDDDDDDD!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In other gaming related goodness, I've been playing Sonic Rush on DS. Disappointing. Reports said it was a return to Mega Drive style Sonic. This is a lie, it looks, plays, and feels like Sonic Advance. To me this is not a good thing. Fast for the sake of being fast, weak level design, awful music, but it gives me something to play until Mario Kart next week.

Xbox 360 - PLAYED!!

2005-11-10T21:18:00.000Z

This afternoon news broke to me that the rather wonderful branch of Game where my rather wonderful girlfriend works had received their Xbox 360 demo pod/kiosk thingy. It is beautiful, and looks like this:

I went in to work at about 7am today as they said they were expecting it any day now, so I could leave early if it arrived. Word got to me at 3.40 it was around and at 3.55 I was there and waiting. I managed to get about 2 hours of time in with it and played all 3 game demos and watched most of the high definition trailers of other games on there. Here are my impressions of the three playable demos.

I had really high hopes for this. It delivers. Wonderful gameplay, wonderful design, beautiful as buggery. Jaggies very noticeable when playing as your head is three inches from the screen. When standing a few feet back watching someone else play it's stunning though, the scale and attention to detail is mindblowing. I completed the demo, which consists of one level based around the big castle plus a fairly easy boss. The level had a lot of variety and required the use of all three characters (Chilla, Pummel Weed and Major Ruin) and their individual moves and whatnot. I didn't get on too well with the camera as I couldn't invert it in the demo, but other than that, it's certainly one to look forward to. The demo took me about half an hour and about 5 lives :-)

Tons of atmosphere, great sound, on and off visuals. The overall look was great and some of the textures were stunning, but I tend to play FPS games looking at the floor, and the first thing I noticed was the terrible texture pop-in on the floor. Didn't notice anywhere else, but as I was walking along the sandy areas the floor a few metres ahead of me was a flat single colour, then it suddenly became a high-res detailed texture. Ouch. Plays well, again lots of jaggies, invert options on the demo which was nice.

I played the PS2 demo version of this a couple of days ago, and heard this was the same but a bit sharper. By a bit sharper they mean stunning. Really beautiful, way ahead of the current gen versions. Again, jaggies very noticeable close up, but they disappear from a distance. Invert options there, but I couldn't get the hang of the demo as on the PS2 version you were equipped with a gun with which to distract the T-Rex. In this one you appear to be fists only, making it much harder, so I didn't play too much.

The pad is lovely, much narrower than the 360, Start and Back buttons are quite awkwardly placed though, and I found myself pressing LB and RB by accident a few times (usually whilst lying down in COD, promptly throwing a grenade on my own head and blowing myself up) but I'm sure I'll get used to it. I doubt I'll return much to the demo pod though, it hurts so much. I'm 6'0" and the tv is exactly the right height for my head, but the pads are at thigh height, so I had to bend my knees slightly and look up, which after a couple of hours playing is extremely painful, my neck still aches and I stopped about 3 hours ago. But this isn't an issue for final release.

The manager told me it's the final retail unit, so one night next week or over the weekend after the shop's locked up we'll throw a big pile of Xbox games at it to see what, if anything, plays, and will post back my findings as and when.

First impressions: Ace.

Frustration

2005-11-08T08:28:00.000Z

Well, I played more Ico. After the unanimously flawless reviews, I thought this one be the game I completed before 360. I don't think I'll bother. For every well thought out bit of level design there's an obscure puzzle like having to drag 10 torch towers each a foot towards each other. For every touching bit of leading Yorda through the castle there's a 10 minute fight against enemies that appear to have roughly the AI of those robot bee things in Sonic 1.

I appreciate what it's trying to do, and if I had a bit more patience and gaming ability then maybe I'd bump it up to masterpiece status like everyone else has, but it's just pissing me off now, and according to my save file I've only clocked up about two and a half hours. Plus it goes for stupid money on eBay, so that could come in handy.

Fortunately I played some games that I did enjoy. Not least being F.E.A.R. on PC. This game requires some serious horsepower. On my rig (Athlon 3000, 1GB RAM, 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro) I play it at 1024x768 with most details on medium. When I ran the benchmark through at these details I was getting minimum 19fps, max 52 and an average of 29. Not ideal, but if I lowered the graphics any more it just looks ugly. When I maxed out the detail, turned on 4xFSAA and soft-shadowing and bumped the resolution up to 1280 I benchmarked in an average 7fps! Bearing in mind I can run Half-Life 2 at 1280x1024 with all details maxed out (but with FSAA off) and constantly keep it over 30 I was surprised by this.

But enough of the tech specs. It's brilliant. I've only played about half an hour in (on level 3 I think, or Interval 3 or whatever the game calls it), but it seems splendid. I'm a crap gamer. Really crap, so I'm playing it on low difficulty, but even on this the AI is leagues ahead of anything I've seen before, even Halo (which I did on Heroic). They might not take too much effort to take down, but they move so naturally. There are two guys in front of you, one to your left, one to your right. You're aiming at the guy at the right, when the other one starts taking shots at you so you switch your attention for a second. When you look back a moment later, the guy on the right has disappeared. You think nothing of it and start hammering the guy on the left again, when suddenly there's someone behind you, having seen you look away for a fraction of a second and run behind the crates in the warehouse. Fortunately their fire doesn't damage much, being on easy, but on an upper difficulty level I can imagine this being impossible.

Still on the PC FPS bit, I gave Medal Of Honour: Allied Assault a quick run out, as I managed to pick up the Warchest, containing Allied Assault and its two expansion packs. It's not the prettiest game ever, given its age, but it does the job. The audio is fantastic though, the atmosphere is electric and the whole experience is very immersive. I've only done the training mission and two levels so far, but I've enjoyed it and will probably play it through at least to the Normandy Beach level that was on all the adverts. I read a preview of Call Of Duty 2 on Xbox 360 saying it was basically like this but much, much better. Having played this, COD2 has just been bumped up my wanted list a few notches.

Elsewhere, I have played too much Pro Evo 5, but it's not a game that makes for interesting progress, so I won't go into detail.

I also played a bit of Halo 2 on Live, and got my Slayer rank up to 2 (yay!). Still got annihilated at every available opportunity though. And my girlfriend and I played through the first level on co-op. She's proved herself to be a fairly good Half-Life 2 player, but she's always struggled with console FPS controls, but she seemed to pick it up pretty well so we'll probably do a couple more levels over the course of the week.

This weekend saw the release of the fourth Singstar title (way too many versions with not enough songs, evil cash grabbers, but since I bought them all I can't complain), Singstar 80s. I got about 9,000 points singing Karma Chameleon, and 8,900 singing The Final Countdown, which suggests that I have stupid long hair and gay tendancies. Both of which may be true. Oh well. Once again, most of the songs are weak, there aren't enough, but I need to have it. At least this genre-specific version caters to a particular set of people rather than the random selection of previous versions where everybody liked about 3 tracks. Hopefully we can see some versions specific to music I care more about.

And that's my playing for the week. Hopefully by my next posting my local Game will have their Xbox 360 demo pod and I will have had an extended play and will be able to post impressions. Hopefully...

Ico

2005-11-02T22:17:00.000Z

Finally! I played Ico! I decided to resume my old save from a year ago rather than starting over. Big mistake. I was very early on, just after the bridge that collapses. Of course, I found the collapsed bridge having completely forgotten all of this and spent the best part of an hour trying to work out how to cross it, before realising I'd already come from there. Then I went into a big room, with a switch and a big block. Naturally I assumed I had to get said block onto switch to make something happen. Another big mistake. Another hour goes by before I realised that the block was originally on the switch and had to be pulled off, which I'd already done, and the staircase it reveals had been there the whole time.

So having gone up the staircase I found bad spirity people, who tried to steal my Yorda. And they succeeded several times. But they didn't finish the job, I managed to grab her hand and drag her from the mysterious spirit-pit thing several times. I am terrible at hand-to-hand combat in all games ever, and I am even worse at big-stick-to-weird-black-spirit-ghost-thing combat, they keep disappearing and flying over me and flanking me, and keep stealing Yorda. Bastards. But having killed them all off eventually, I found a series of ladders, which I navigated to a train track with a mine cart thingy on it. Which took me nicely to a save point, which is where I am now.

It's a brilliant game. It really does have a feeling that nothing else has managed to achieve. The sound is also astonishing, particularly the wind effects, in surround turned up loud. It does, however, suffer from "weird low res projector syndrome". A very small number of games (the only other one I can think of off the top of my head is the FIFA 2005 OXM demo) appear to run at a resolution even worse than PS1 games. I can tell the graphics on Ico are great, but it seriously looks like the whole thing's in 320x240 or something, it's so horribly pixellated. I need to plug the PS2 in the tv and see if it's the game.

Halo 2

2005-10-30T21:08:00.000Z

I had a friend round last night to play some big-screen games, and I found out that he'd never played on Live before, so we booted up Halo 2 at around 8pm. At 1am, we decided to call it a day. Blowing up Americans is surpringly fun, though I lost track of how many times I was addressed with "j00 teh GAY FAGG0TTTT". There was one guy who as soon as I joined the lobby started chanting "NIGGERS NIGGERS NIGGERS", and after about 3 minutes the "mute voice" function was used to great effect.

The single-player game may have been a huge disappointment, but the multiplayer more than makes up for it. 8 player deathmatch with real people when there are only two of you, on the couch in front of the tv, is a wonderful experience. We are fairly evenly matched as well, which made it more fun. I also played my first King Of The Hill. In any game, ever. Which is weird, given I've been playing online FPS games since Quake about ten years ago. After 5 hours I'm still only on level 1 though!

We also had a quick game of Pro Evo 5, which never ceases to be brilliant. I also happened to get the best goal ever as Mr. Lampard, not dissimilar to Tony Yeboah's effort against Liverpool back in '96 (or '95, I forget which).

He also brought round Buzz: The Music Quiz on PS2 which got a session in before the Halo-ing started. It is pretty cool, must be said. A bit of a large gap between questions for my liking, and the controllers aren't the comfiest things ever made, but as a whole, I can imagine it being great with four people being really drunk, and is the perfect game for when the family, made up of non-gamers, come round for Christmas.

I will play Ico. I promise.

360s, LIVE, and Pro Evo 5

2005-10-28T16:17:00.000Z

As you may be aware, Xbox.com changed a bit last week. I was strolling through it this afternoon over lunch, and found the whole displaying-your-gamercard-on-your-website thing they've been banging on about, so if you look over to the top-right of this blog, you'll see my shiny new gamercard, complete with cute anime girl with funny ears. I have no gamerscore or reputation, unsurprisingly, what with it still being 34 days until release and whatnot.

I also decided I didn't like the black, so the layout has changed. And I'm going to stop doing those pictures with the text down the side, as the page isn't wide enough and everything looks a bit poo really.

I have two new toys this week. I say new to mean very, very old. The first is my projector. I have a screen again, so after six months of sitting around a little 14" portable TV, I have jumped to 98", and after using the TV's speakers, I am back onto my 650W DD 5.1 setup. I'll post pics of the rig when I get round to it.

The other toy is Xbox Live. I've had it since before it came out, during the beta testing period, but when I stripped out my wired network to go wireless about 18 months ago, I couldn't get it working, as the crap LinkSys wireless B gaming adapter couldn't see my router and I never got around to upgrading, but now the house is smaller it can see it from the projector room, so I have been playing much Live, but mainly:

Pro Evolution Soccer 5 (more on this later)

Halo 2 (I've never played this on Live before. It is good. I am not)

Project Gotham Racing 2 (as good as it ever was)

Dead Or Alive Ultimate (not sure about this one yet, only had one fight and it was quite laggy, might have been the other guy's connection, not sure)

It also gave me a chance to use my Plantronics Halo 2 headset, which I've had for over a year and have never opened. It is fantabulous, so much better than the official one. Very adjustable, very comfy and very sexy, recommended to all.

And now to Pro Evo 5. It's brilliant. Massively improved. The defence works, it's now actually possible to score from a header (although the computer does it too often for my liking, about 70% of the goals it's scored so far have been headed), and the whole game just feels more polished than 4. The Live play is a bit off, often taking ages to get a match, and the search only showing 2 or 3 games, when I don't believe for a second there are that few games being hosted. In single player, it seems much harder to score. This may or may not be good, but it's frustrating to say the least!

As most readers of this blog know, I frequent a usenet newsgroup by the name of uk.games.video.misc. A rather clever chap by the name of James Luff came up with an ingenious idea of every Wednesday setting ourselves a series of gaming related challenges for the week, and then to post our results and set new challenges the following week. My challenges for this week are:

1) Play a game on PS2!

2) Play Halo 2 on Live for the first time.

3) Start ICO again!

4) Install Football Manager 2006

5) Play Midway Arcade Treasures 3

6) Finish a game. Any game.

So far I've managed to play Halo 2 on Live. The rest I'm hoping to achieve before Wednesday. I will post progress reports on here (or at least will try to!)

In the meantime I will be drooling over more 360 information releases. As people are aware, I hate EA. Their attitude, while sound from a business perspective, is extremely bad for the consumer, and they really don't care. So when they released some rather pretty pictures of NBA Live 06 on Xbox 360, I laughed and passed them off as pre-renders released in panic when they saw the amazing NBA2K6 footage and screens. Oh how wrong I was. It doesn't have the cloth dynamics that are responsible for most of the wow factor in 2K6, but other than that the whole thing is mindblowing. The playable loading screen, the character models, the 3D crowds, the whole presentation and on-screen displays, the reflective courts, the commentary, and the thing that really got me, the atmospheric audio. The presentation is brilliant, and this added to the commentary, sound effects and real crowds give a sense of atmosphere I've never known before. And all this from watching a 640x360 little in-game video. I can't begin to imagine how amazing this will be on the projector with surround sound. Four minutes of footage and it's a must buy, at least on a 10-day.

In other 360 stuff, Kameo is looking better by the day, but PGR3 seems to be looking worse by the day. In the latest build videos the reflections have all been turned off and other effects seems to be taken out, and it looks worse than it did 3 months ago. Hopefully pulling these features out to get a stable frame-rate out of it is a strictly temporary measure and the full game will see them reinstated.

And that is all I have to say for now. I shall be back shortly with an Ico progress report!

Painfully quiet times. BUT I FINISHED SOMETHING!

2005-10-18T08:56:00.000Z

It's been about two weeks since I last posted. Shameful. But then I've barely played a thing so it's not really that surprising. However, last week for the first time since Halo 2 last November I actually finished a game! Only I didn't really. Using a partner in co-op mode, and so many continues my arcade bill would have been many thousands of pounds, and taking me about 50 minutes, Plump Pop, part of the new Taito Legends compilation for Xbox, bowed to my masterful defeating skill!

In other gaming news, I set my Nintendo 64 up for a quick game of GoldenEye. Every time I play it, and this time is no exception, it manages to amaze me how it simultaneously is still utterly brilliant, yet has completely failed the test of time and is frankly terrible my today's standards. But for all its weaknesses, that in an age of games like Halo and Half Life 2 stick out a hell of a lot more than they used to. But I had forgotten just how impeccably flawless the cheat system is. You earn the cheats through good performance (one for each level, beating it on a certain difficulty in a certain time), and you can only use the cheats in single player on levels you have already finished and in multiplayer. It's brilliant, and has never been equalled, and some of the cheats are really fantastic bonuses (slow/turbo animation makes for some hilarious cutscenes). God knows why everyone hasn't ripped it off.

And it was also my birthday. The big (or not) 21. My rather splendid other half picked me up a rather cheap Nintendo DS (new and sealed for £60!) with Nintendogs (Labrador) and Advance Wars: Dual Strike. Nintendogs is, while completely different, very much like Animal Crossing, in that it's incredibly compulsive, forces you to play every day, is very cute, and has no real point. For all those reasons it's very annoying and often feels more like work than a game, but the cute factor is still dragging me back every day. About six months ago I bought the original Advance Wars for GBA due to the flawless reviews it got. To this day I haven't played it, so it's probably not that surprising that AW:DS hasn't had a look in yet either.

Along with these I got Burnout: Revenge on Xbox. Oh my god. They have killed Burnout. I can't be bothered getting into depth and displaying my anger, just do NOT buy this game. If you don't already have it, get Burnout 3: Takedown, because it is so much better than this abomination.

In other game playing news, I really want FEAR, which is out tomorrow. But since I'm poor right now, I probably won't. I also decided to finish the demo before buying the full game. But I can't. And I'm playing it on easy. So it seems a bit stupid to waste £25 on a game I know I can't get more than ten minutes into.

I also had a half hour burst on SSX: On Tour for PSP. First impressions are very promising. It's basically the PS2 version with scaled-down graphics (but still great), which is a good thing. The controls are very nice, but obviously compromised a bit due to the lack of buttons present compared to the home console controllers, and the steering with the analogue nub isn't quite as convincing as it is with the stick on the Dual Shock 2 or the Controller S, but other than that it plays nicely. The only real downside I can see is loading times. It takes a good 8 seconds or thereabouts to run the initial load from my memory stick, so I don't want to start thinking about what it will be like booting from a UMD.

Other than this, little to no gaming has taken place. I bought the Harry Potter three-game boxset on PC for £10.50 because it was cheap. I suspect they will be crap, but as a big fan of the books I felt I should at that price. I still haven't installed the Age Of Empires III demo I downloaded the day it came out several months ago. And I still haven't installed Rome: Total War which I picked up because it was £14 a few weeks back. Over the next week I hope to give both of these a quick go, as well as start on Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. It would also be nice to get some time for Jade Empire or something in, but these seems very unlikely.

At long last I have a big-screen-resuming date. Next Monday, a nice man with a van and a screwdriver will fit my rather large new projector screen (237cm across) so I can go from gaming on a 14" portable TV to the rather more substantial 100"+ I used to have before the move. I have also, rather stupidly, agreed to house and dog-sit for my dad from the 4th to the 9th of December. This means that 2 days after it comes out, I will have to spend the best part of a week playing my Xbox 360 in standard definition on a 24" TV. And even worse, I either have to spend £20 on a RGB cable for that one week only, or play with a COMPOSITE connection! Shock horror! Still, I booked the 2nd off work, so I've got the whole day plus the Saturday to hammer it to death in hi-def on my big wall.

I will post more. I promise. Honestly.

Quiet times...

2005-10-03T07:39:00.000Z

Still haven't got the projector set up. However the lady has finished Fahrenheit, which hopefully means more access to the tiny TV, so I might get some gaming done this week (but it seems unlikely as I still have to empty the room in order to accomodate the projector).

So this week I've done pretty much sod all. I've played the odd bit of Dead Or Alive Ultimate, which is wonderful. A bit of multiplayer on Friday night and a bit of single player just now, trying to get yet more costumes. Now have one extra for all characters except Tina (5), Kasumi (7) and Ayane (20). Really want to unlock Hitomi, but don't know how to. Apparently I just need to have a DOA3 save on the HDD, but I have, and I just get a question mark. Not a happy bunny.

Other than that, I've had the odd game of Winning Eleven 9: Ubitiquos Evolution on PSP, which is awesome, even when I can't read the words. But surprisingly hard when playing in the back of a fast car whilst quite drunk. PSPs are spectacular. All doubters should die (this is coming from a Sony hater).

In my spare time (and time when I should've been doing lots of other things) I've been getting hugely excited about Xbox 360. It will be the best thing ever. So there. Even the UI when there's no disc in has me excited. The recently released videos of PGR3 and NBA 2K6 have had me running around screaming like the hyperactive child that I am. I've not behaved so outrageously since I saw the big Kameo video a couple of weeks back. Disturbingly, I have already pre-ordered the following:

Xbox 360 premium package

3 extra wireless controllers plus a play and charge pack

Alan Wake

Call Of Duty 2

Dead Or Alive 4

Dead Rising

FIFA 2006

Frame City Killer

Full Auto

Gears Of War

Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfare

Kameo: Elements Of Power

NBA 2K6

Perfect Dark Zero: Collectors Edition

Prey

Project Gotham Racing 3

Ridge Racer 6

Saint's Row

Top Spin 2

Yup, pretty much the entire launch line-up, plus a fair few that aren't on launch. And no, I won't be buying them all, I can't afford it. I'll definitely be getting PGR3, Kameo, RR6 and DOA4, and probably Ghost Recon and NBA. But I'll be making more decisions nearer the time when the reviews from the US release start to come about. I really can't wait two months. Well, it's 61 days and counting...

Poorly me...

2005-09-24T05:15:00.000Z

Still house moving, still no time to play anything really. Went away for last weekend and took a few consoles for party games. The Singstar trilogy got a good session, as did Donkey Konga. I also got some PSP gaming in, a bit of Burnout Legends (disappointing yet brilliant) and Winning Eleven 9 (likewise, and the animations on this for PSP are way better than XBox Pro Evo 4).

Yesterday I got in half an hour of Half Life 2. Somewhat embarrassingly, my girlfriend is much better than me at this, and at times was directing me through bits I couldn't do that she'd done previously.

Today I got sent home from work early for being muchos ill and disturbing everyone, so I had an afternoon free to game. I'm determined to start and finish at least one game before XBox 360 comes out (10 weeks and counting), and narrowed it down to a shortlist of about 30 great games I've got and have never touched. In the end I decided I was in a gun and action mood, so I loaded up The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay on XBox. I'm an hour or two in, on checkpoint 10 out of about 70 (I think), and my first impressions are: very, very good. Great production, well directed cut-scenes and first rate voice acting, fantastic graphics due to being the first game to make use of the revolutionary normal mapping technique. To my knowledge the only other game to have used it to date is Halo 2, and it gives everything a much more believable look about it, particularly the characters and their outfits. The level design is pretty good, but I've noticed one or two flaws. Because it was the first game to use normal mapping, it hadn't been perfected, and there are one or two graphical glitches. The animations are sometimes a bit off, and the AI is weak in places. It's also apparently a bit short, but given the number of games I want to get through, that's a significant upside as far as I'm concerned. I'm hoping to finish this within a week, but it seems highly unlikely. And I will post more often!

Long weekend

2005-09-11T21:42:00.000Z

It was my intention to post in this thing every day. That didn't work so well!

So, this weekend I haven't played much. I've unlocked every costume (all 20) for Ayane on Dead Or Alive Ultimate (nice), played a bit of Snooker on PSP (still can't do single player, but multiplayer passing the console round is fun), and tonight I booted up Jade Empire. I'm still right at the beginning, my master has just torched a boat and killed the owner, some assassin or other. Other than that I've watched my girlfriend play Nintendogs constantly and the odd bit of Burnout 3, whilst having one or two multiplayer bouts of Worms World Party (still the best).

However most of the time has been spent decorating (grrrr), so hopefully in about a week I'll be back on gaming schedule. Though I am going away next weekend and haven't decided what console to take away with me yet.

First Post \o/

2005-09-08T20:48:00.000Z

Hey, I am Zomoniac, the videogame freak.

Anyway, this is where every day I will post my videogame doings of the previous day. Except for the next few weeks it might not be that interesting, what with the house move and all that. So in my few moments of spare time I'll probably be playing World Championship Snooker 2005 on PSP.

Shocking load times, impossible difficulty, and controls that just don't work. Yet every day for a week I've played it for several hours. It's so painfully addictive yet so fundamentally crap.

Hopefully tonight I'll get a quick game of the new Age Of Empires III demo in. Though it seems highly unlikely.