A Gaming Diary
Archive for April, 2006
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 Demo
Apr 14th
One gigabyte of data.
Four holes.
I used to own a computer with 1K of memory and you… could… do nothing with it. Okay, fair enough.
Anyway, the core golf seems pretty good. Got a triple bogey on the first hole, but an eagle on the final hole. It started to make sense quickly, then. And the analogue swinging seems a lot better than the last version of the game I played a few years ago. As it bloody well should, unless EA spend each year laughing and rolling around in piles of cash instead of actually changing their games between versions.
Still, nothing in there persuaded me to spend fifty quid on it. Fifteen, maybe, if I was desperate for some golf. (Would be twenty, but I need to be paid at least a fiver to put up with the crap EA smear all over their interfaces. While the demo has a nice, easy menu I’m sure the full game has some awfully complicated and confusing “world tour” type structure. And you probably have to say “Yes, I’m sure” eighteen times before it lets you save your game. And stuff.)
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
Apr 13th
Another gate closed, using the “sneak, sneak… leg it!” approach.
Did a quest where I had to kill some spies. Got told they turned up at a certain spot, so I lay in wait, saw one of them, let fly with an explosive arrow, one dead spy. She was the only one there and I got a nice message saying she was dead and I should go to talk someone about the rest of the spies. Riding my horse back to town I got a message saying another spy had died. Must have caught by a guard or a lion or something. Radiant AI doing me a favour, I guess. Odd. Also turned out he was the last spy, despite only being the second one, so the quest turned out to be a bit easy. Not that I’m complaining. There are enough hard fights in the game, I don’t mind things going my way now and again.
OutRun 2006 Coast 2 Coast
Apr 13th
Bloody hell. That fifteen stage continuous stuff is knackering. Absolutely exhausting.
Tried the OutRun 2 version on the PSP again. Got to stage thirteen, which is my best ever go, but still not good enough. Can I blame the framrate in Paris, please?
OutRun 2006 Coast 2 Coast
Apr 12th
Just a quick race online to check out my port forwarding.
Seems to work, but leaping online after over a week without playing maybe wasn’t the best idea. I came third out of four people. Well, I was in third when the race ended. I was right near the finish line, too.
Oooooooooh, I’m riled.
Animal Crossing: Wild World
Apr 12th
HOORAY!
P’anther – WHO IS OFFICIALLY THE BEST GIRLFRIEND IN THE WORLD – just popped in to Venture to drop off an Iguanadon Skull – the last fossil I need for my collection and the one I’ve been looking for for months.
Best!
Nemesis The Warlock
Apr 11th
To answer my question, yes, there is a second screen. And a third. And, I assume, a fourth, but I’ve not seen it.
You seem to have to kill enough enemies to take the counter on the left of the screen down to zero and then quickly run off the top right of the screen.
I’m starting to get into it, somehow. Controls could do with being more responsive, mind.
Spectrum Emulation
Apr 11th
Been trying out some Spectrum games I remember fondly. You can play them online, you know.
Turbo Esprit – It’s basically GTA 3 fifteen years too early. You can’t get out of your car, but you can roam the whole city freely and kill pedestrians. I can’t believe how much I played this game when I was a kid. I can still kind of see what I saw in it, but only just.
Batman – Fantasic, even now. Or it would be if the save points were good for more than one use. Restarting gets tedious. But I was so pleased when I worked out how to get the boots so I could jump. I rock.
Nemesis The Warlock – Definitely not as good as I remember. At all. I think I just thought the bodies piling up were really cool when I fourteen. Is there even a second screen?
Xbox 360
Apr 11th
Downloaded the Amped 3 demo. People have been sniffy about a launch game getting a demo, but I think it’s an excellent idea. I’ve been wanting to try the game out. Seems all right, as it happens. A nice big mountain and some nice relaxing play. The “throw yourself off a sledge to cause as much damage as possible” is fun, too. Random, could be better, but fun. Actually, that seems to apply to the game as a whole, though the main game doesn’t seem as random as the sledge mini game. Generous demo, too. Even lets you add stuff to the slopes. I added some sofas and buses and failed to grind on any of them.
Played that for a good long while, over half an hour, then raced through the Tomb Raider: Legend demo again. It’s good fun and though I noticed the framerate issues this time I can’t say they bothered me.
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
Apr 10th
I wasn’t going to play tonight, but I couldn’t resist a quick hour.
Read the gravestones of some of my victims, closed an Oblivion gate I came across (sneak, sneak, sneak, RUN LIKE FUCK, job done), fed on blood for the first time. Smooth.
Sonic Pinball Party
Apr 10th
Was bored at lunchtime, so pulled my Micro out of my pocket and this was the game in it. Played the NiGHTS table for ages and ages and ages and scored a massive 42,000,000 points, which I thought must be a good score until it showed me the high score, the lowest score on which is 56,000,000. Oh.
