A Gaming Diary
Archive for February, 2006
Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max
Feb 10th
Possibly the greatest thing ever to appear on this earth.
Except I’m awful at it. I can’t even get past the first round at the default Turbo 2 speed. (Not using continues.)
I’ve spent some time in training mode and I’m much better there, though I can’t even pull off Dragon Punches and Fireballs with any degree of real precision. And super specials are very, very hit or miss.
And that PSP d-pad has hurt my thumb horribly.
Xbox 360
Feb 10th
Hooray!
Thanks to Connect360 my 360 can now see my iMac and stream music and photos from it. I had to register to get more than 100 of each, but it was only ten bucks, which seems very reasonable.
I’m currently listening to Franz Ferdinand (wish it was someone cooler for the purposes of impressing y’all, but that’s shuffle for you) and it’s showing a slideshow of my pictures of my girlfriend.
Now it’s Modest Mouse. Are they cool? I have no idea any more.
Can’t play anything I’ve bought from the iTunes Music Store, which is annoying but not a deal breaker.
Hmm. The slideshow wasn’t on repeat.
Now it’s Dangerdoom. That’s probably cool. Bloody great, too.
Anyway, this isn’t a music blog, but I thought it was a useful piece of software. Spreading the word and all that.
Civilization 3
Feb 10th
There is no spoon.
Or rather, there are no naval units. That explains that, then.
And there is no diplomacy. Just war. And there’s only about eight different units ever available. Goes up to cannons and then stops.
Civilization 3
Feb 10th
GOOD – I worked out how to activate fortified units in cities and found that the one square I hadn’t looked at was, indeed, a land bridge.
BAD – There doesn’t seem to be any dimplomacy that I can see, just permanent war.
GOOD – I defeated some enemy units and built a new city.
BAD – The city got killed. It was built between two enemies, it seems. Not a good place. The dark blues came from the west, the light blues from the east. Squish. My settlers got killed. Most of my units got killed.
GOOD – My new chariot seems to be killing stuff.
BAD – There’s a general lack of information that I’ve found so far. I get messages every few turns that the bloody Americans have built yet another wonder, but are they the dark blue or light blue chaps? Dunno. I can’t highlight an enemy unit to get details of it or even see if it’s part of a stack, as far as I can tell. I can see a progress bar telling me how far through production my city is, but not how many turns that equates to. It’s possible this is available somewhere. I need to go online and look for the full instructions. The game gives a web address that I’ll look at later.
GOOD – The enemies fight each other as well as me.
BAD – Given the number of units pouring out of the west and the number of wonders the Americans are producing the AI must be cheating. And this is on Chieftan difficulty, the easiest.
GOOD – It made the bus journey to work absolutely fly by, despite me feeling a bit lost.
BAD – Still can’t seem to build ships.
Civilization 3
Feb 9th
The mobile phone version, you may be surprised to learn. I couldn’t find anything about it online, beyond announcements that it was being developed, so I took a chance. Started it up on the bus about ten minutes before my stop.
No option to start as the English, so I took the Romans. A small map, easiest difficulty, 3 civilizations.
Took a while to get used to the interface, but I’d soon built Rome (no option to rename it) and had some settlers irrigating and building roads. (They seem to do the jobs of workers here.) I seemed to be on a small island, so I was trying to work out how to build boats, but couldn’t remember what technologies I needed. Map-making didn’t help.
As I neared my bus stop a blue unit appeared in the bottom corner of my island and I then realised that there was one square I hadn’t looked at that could be land. Oops. I had a militia unit and a cavalry fortified inside my city and so decided I should get the cavalry out to go meet this new civilization that were trespassing on my turf. Except I couldn’t work out how to activate the cavalry and while I was frowning at the screen it was time to get off the bus.
Hmm.
I’ll have to see if the help, er, helps tomorrow.
Xbox 360
Feb 8th
Today was meant to be the day that I played Dead or Alive 4 for the first time. Didn’t work out like that.
After I finished fruit picking in Animal Crossing I turned on my 360. Thought I’d just download the demo of Crystal Quest before trying DoA4. Incredibly, it’s yet another shooter using the same old Robotron control scheme. Which makes it, what, the fifth Live Arcade in that vein? Not that I mind, it’s a control scheme I love and I reckon all the games that use it are different enough to be worthwhile. Crystal Quest seemed underwhelming from the eight level demo, but I unlocked it anyway. (When I got my 360 I shove tons of points on there so I wouldn’t have to worry about adding more for a year or so. Except it just made things too easy to buy. They’re going down rapidly.) The game actually turns out to be pretty good… but only after ten or fifteen minutes. However, that’s just on the default skill level. Whack the difficulty level up to 10 and it becomes very hard, very quickly. (Mainly due to one type of enemy that leaves a trail of mines. Not sure what to do about them. I hope they’re not game-breaking.)
Then I played Marble Blast Ultra. Just for a quick go… which turned into over two hours… on one level. I was determined to get an under-par time on Sledding, which meant not using any checkpoints, which meant restarting every time I fell off the level. Which was a lot. Each go lasted about fifteen seconds… so you work out how many times I must have tried it. I did it though, oh yes. It’s a real pity the Friends leaderboards are broken.
Anyway, I realised while playing Marble Blast that I hadn’t downloaded all the Robotron style games from Live Arcade. I’d missed out Smash TV. So I’ve just downloaded it to complete the set. A quick blast and then bed, I think.
King Of Fighters M2
Feb 8th
I do feel the need to point that you can win every fight by hammering the 6 button with your eyes shut, though. Well, I only tried it once, but I seemed to win quite convincingly and there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of a difficulty curve.
Just in case you got the wrong impression from my post yesterday. It’s really not good – but at least it does try to be. That counts for something. And for some reason I am still enjoying a quick button mashing at my desk every now and again, even though I don’t feel that I should be.
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 7th
Forty hours in. Still so no sign of it coming to an end. Nowhere close.
Didn’t help myself by getting stuck in one spot for well over an hour earlier. I thought I was missing an obvious solution to a puzzle and when I found it I assumed I’d kick myself. Instead, I felt like kicking the game because it turned out I’d tried to do the right thing but rubbish controls had meant that it seemed to be impossible.
(Basically as soon as a moving platform stopped moving I’d step off it, even though I wanted to continue walking across it. I assumed the game was making me step off it in a kind of mini cut scene way, but no. If I left the controller for a while and waited for the camera to stop rotating round and then tried to move I walked across the platform without a single problem.)
Still, it got me more XP so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
Anyway, after that sticking point everything went smoothly and progressed nicely until now, which is bed time. Tomorrow I know exactly what I need to do when I switch on, which is nice.
The translation is great in this game and there are some ace voices but, oh my, some of the accents are utterly awful. In a kind of brilliant way. One in particular today was just so, so terrible. It was ace.
