A Gaming Diary
Archive for October, 2008
Feeding Frenzy 2 (360)
Oct 15th
My wife’s been playing a lot of this and asked if I’d like to play some multiplayer. So we played for an hour or so and had great fun. She was much, much better than me at first, but I got competitive in some of the events by the end. I also managed to get three Achievements, too. Excellent!
Slitherlink (DS)
Oct 13th
Meant to play some Disgaea, but ended up spending hours playing Slitherlink puzzles. It’s amazing how easy it is to completely break a puzzle so it seems impossible, only to restart and finish it in a couple of minutes.
Mercenaries 2: World In Flames (360)
Oct 13th
So, the story got finished, but I’m still playing. I decided to go around destroying, killing and capturing all the little green icons on the map. Got lots of side-missions done this way, but unfortunately everyone now hates me. (I got an Achievement for that, though, at least.) I’m also using too many nukes. Need to kill a guy behind some boxes? Nuke! Need to take out a couple of APCs? Nuke!
Mercenaries 2: World In Flames (360)
Oct 11th
Hooray! Story completed!
The game gets buggier and buggier the further in you get, culminating in the final QTE-filled climax to the game not displaying properly, leaving me to watch to some rotating polygons and button prompts while trying to work out what was going on from the speech and sound effects.
How on earth you can program a game where the camera goes wrong during a cut scene I don’t know, but it happened.
I think a helicopter was meant to take off, or something, based on the “We’re going to crash!” dialogue, but all I could see throughout the entire thing were some bits of helicopter back and tail sitting on the ground. After the Mission Complete message came up my character magically appeared a few feet away from where he’d been standing before the scene began.
It’s a insult to peple who paid forty quid for the game it and should never, ever have been let out of the door in the state it’s in.
Yet I still love it to death, despite myself.
Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness (PSP)
Oct 10th
Did the same level on this version, clustering my units in the same way. No frame rate troubles at all. I do miss the map, but the smoothness of everything is lovely.
Disgaea DS (DS)
Oct 10th
Just did the Corridor of Love level to get some experience and, well, just to have some fun. Frame rate suffers horribly when you get a lot of units clustered together on the screen. It shouldn’t matter, being turn-based and all, but it’s really beginning to annoy me.
Valkyria Chronicles Demo (PS3)
Oct 10th
If you have a PS3 you should download this from the UK PSN without delay. It’s a gorgeous squad-level, turn-based strategy game that’s quick, simple and immense fun.
Interesting mechanics – the ability to choose to move units more than once at the expense of not moving others, the quasi-real-time movement, etc. – and absolutely gorgeous graphics combine to produce a game that feels fresh, fast and which has bags of personality.
My only complaint is that it seems to be a bit too easy to run over your own soldiers in your tank.
Oops.
Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness (PSP)
Oct 9th
I advanced the story for the first time in months! Did the end-of-chapter level in Blazing Core, then did it again a couple of times. My ice mage lady, Emma, leveled up a lot and has now overtaken my cleric as my highest level character.
Exciting stuff, eh?
Beat’n Groovy Demo (360)
Oct 9th
Another stupid name. The game works okay, but the graphics and music are terrible – and there are only nine songs in the full game – so there’s no way on earth I’m paying any money for it.
Shadow Assault/Tenchu Demo (360)
Oct 9th
Stupid name, but not a terrible game from I played. Not a great one either, though. I had fun with the demo levels, but I can’t see myself ever paying 800 points for it. Maybe if I could work out which direction the spring traps would send an enemy it would be better.
