A Gaming Diary
360
The Orange Box (360)
Oct 20th
Half-Life 2 today. Just an hour of it, so I’ve not got far. The only gun I have is the pistol. It does look very nice on the 360 and plays fine, too, but it’s not been very exciting so far. If it doesn’t pick up I may just skip it and go on to Episode 2.
The Orange Box (360)
Oct 19th
Best value game disc ever? Well, that probably depends on how good Team Fortress is. I’ve not tried it yet. The only thing I’ve played so far is Portal, which I started and finished last night. It’s short, but one of the sweetest gaming treats I’ve ever had. It’s full of great puzzles, it introduces you so gently that you never get overwhelmed and it’s got one of the best scripts ever. As my wife said, “I didn’t expect a stupid boy game to be so funny.”
It may be short, but it’s probably worth the price of the disc on its own. We will all remember the first time we played Portal and those of us who have just played through it have had one of the defining gaming experiences of our lives.
It’s not too early to call it a classic.
Oh! And the possibilities…
Speedball Demo (360)
Oct 18th
I’m coming to this fresh. I think I did play it once or twice on a friend’s Amiga, way back in the midsts of time, but I don’t remember it at all clearly.
Anyway, it’s a very fast future sport and I can’t seem to score any points in the demo. It did start to make a bit more sense after a couple of games, I think, but not enough to tempt me to spend 800 points.
Every Extend Extra Extreme (360)
Oct 18th
I really enjoyed what little I played of this last night. Unlike everybody else on the Internet I’m not finding impossible to die, as I keep running out of time. I’ve not played a game lasting more than ten minutes or quarter of an hour yet.
I also enjoy watching the big chains go off, though I can see that it might get boring after an hour or two.
I tried importing by own music, but it didn’t work very well. I think Sweet Home Alabama is just abit slow – I wasn’t getting enough enemies to form massive chains.
Also, I didn’t get any Achievements from it last night. Not even a nice easy five-pointer to make me feel better.
Track and Field (360)
Oct 16th
Holding the controller on its side, I had some good fun with this, until I got to the Hammer Throw event. I just couldn’t get the timing right and didn’t get a single throw that counted. Game Over. I did improve my scores in the earlier events, though, and now I’m only bottom of my Friends Leaderboard in the 100m. I’m near the bottom in the rest, but there are some people below me, thank goodness.
I really love the announcer in this game. I get so nostalgic for my childhood every time I hear her synthesized voice. Back in the day I could only hear that sort of thing in the arcade. The ZX Spectrum, lovely though it was, wasn’t great for producing speech.
My favourite bit of eighties speech ever? “Here goes nothing!” on the Return of the Jedi arcade machine. I kept dying about two seconds after hearing that, but kept pumping money in, so it just hooked itself into my brain on a loop and has never completely gone away, even twenty years later.
Carcassonne (360)
Oct 16th
I started this up for the first time in ages while the wife was having a shower and thought I might buy the expansion packs they’ve released for it. However, it turns out that they’re three hundred points each. That’s over two pounds. Each. For, what? A few more tiles and a couple of rule changes? I could almost buy Every Extend Extra Extreme for that kind of cash.
A hundred points each and I’d have been curious enough to use some of my points, but three hundred is just too much for me, I’m afraid. I could see those prices being good enough for addicts who really want some twists to their favourite game, but I just don’t play this enough.
Various 360 Demos (360)
Oct 9th
Bladestorm
I had far too many games on my “must buy” list before downloading the (two gigabyte!) demo from Live Markeplace. However, the game seems to be completely ace and now I need it badly. Charging in on horses, leaping back to control some archers to finish off stragglers, running in with swords waving, it’s all good. Damn your eyes, Koei!
The Simpsons
A licenced game. A demo consisting of, urgh, a boss fight. A rubbish camera. Should have been very painful indeed, yet ended up being great fun and I couldn’t stop until I’d destroyed Lard Lad, which took a whole fourteen minutes. Doubt I’ll buy it for more than a tenner, but it was better than I expected. Looks really lovely, too, when the camera’s showing something useful.
Conan
“Ha ha ha! I chopped that guy’s arms off! And that guy’s! And that guy’s! Oh, now I’m being blocked by three big bastards and am dead. Oh, I’m dead again. I can’t be bothered to play this any more. Goodbye.” Maybe for a fiver, but no more than that.
Halo 3 (360)
Oct 1st
Started the evening with some Team Slayer action, which was good fun. I did okay, generally, though I was rubbish at Rockets on Narrows.
Then played through level one of the campaign on Heroic difficulty. Well, some of it. I still wasn’t done after an hour and so had to save and quit. Good fun and very satisfying, but it’s really a bit beyond my skill level.
Halo 3 (360)
Sep 29th
Today, I made my peace with level eight. It still wasn’t great, but by taking things more slowly I died less and didn’t get lost so much. It’s not up to the standards of the other levels and it’s much too long, but it’s not as bad as I thought.
Level nine, the final level, was just plain awesome. To both the extreme and the max.
And that was the end. I remembered to wait through the credits to see the final cutscene, and was very glad I did, as it explained something that confused me in the pre-credits cutscene.
Overall opinion of the single-player campaign? Well, I’m sure you can guess. It’s brilliant.
Then, of course, there’s multiplayer. I played three matches in Basic Training and actually won one of them. And not by a little. By a lot. The next match I came dead last in, but I had my moment of victory.
After that I decided to go back to the single player, with scoring turned on this time. I didn’t expect to see anyone, but someone on my friends list joined me. Not sure who they are, really, being a slightly random name, but we played through the first half of the first mission in complete silence and then they quit. Why I didn’t say anything, I don’t know. I’m regretting it now. But I was just confused at first at the fact that there was another player with me, which I hadn’t expected, and as the silence grew it became more difficult to break. I really want to try it with some talking friends sometime.
Clive Barker’s Jericho Demo (360)
Sep 29th
This is a squad-based FPS, which seems to be set in a crumbling castle or citadel of some sort populated by bondage-tinged horrors. It’s difficult to tell, as it’s just about the darkest game ever. Very atmospheric, but it’s really quite annoying. I took to using one character’s fire bomb move just to light the place up, rather than kill anything. Still, it’s good fun, if short.
If this came out in a February or a March I’d be cautiously interested, but post-Halo and pre-Orange Box and Mario Galaxy it’s really going to get lost. It’s on my “possibly pick up for under a tenner in the sales” list.
