A Gaming Diary
Archive for March, 2006
Sonic The Hedgehog
Mar 29th
The music’s right, too. Which is very good. No sound effects, mind.
And I’ve got to the end of Green Hill Zone now, but the pathetically easy boss killed me. D’oh.
It really is a fantastic achievement this game and it looks absolutely wonderful. It’s just a pity that there’s a better version from fifteen years ago to compare it to.
Sonic The Hedgehog
Mar 29th
It’s come out on mobile phones now. A surprisingly faithful conversion. Controls aren’t as good as on a proper gaming device, obviously, but they’re far better than I expected them to be. (Using the K750i thumbstick.) It’s nice and fast, too, and seems to have the same level layouts as the Megadrive original, as far as I can remember.
Well, so far. I’ve not got past Green Hill Zone Act 2 yet. As I said, the controls are much better than expected, but aren’t perfect. Having to stop pressing right to press jump is a bit odd.
OutRun 2006 Coast 2 Coast
Mar 29th
Tried the PSP version briefly this lunchtime. Very difficult to control and drifts don’t seem as natural to pull off as in OutRun 2 on the Xbox.
It seems good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s going to take some getting used to is all.
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
Mar 29th
I finished the Thieves Guild missions last night.
The final two were excellent. The penultimate mission I used lateral thinking to get past and the final mission was all about the sneaking.
Fantastic stuff.
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
Mar 28th
I tried doing the main quest last night.
Unfortunately the game sees I’m level seventeen and throws hard enemies at me. Which is bad as it expects me to fight, but while my sneaking skills are high my combat skills are worse than a dead orc’s.
I’m not finding it hard. I’m finding it impossible.
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
Mar 27th
I’m not sure whether I should be feeling like a cheat or congratulating myself on my cunning and skill.
I did a mission a couple of nights ago that was pretty much beyond my capabilities. Enemies that I could just about kill one-on-one, but more than one and I was dead.
No spoilers, but it was just a “get item and get out mission”, though, so I found a way.
First up, part of the mission involved swimming through an underground passage. Just after it I ran into some horrible great bastard with a great big sword and eyes like a hawk. I ran. He followed me back to the underwater passage.
He followed me into it.
He didn’t follow me out. I used a Detect Life spell and couldn’t see him. So I gingerly edged forwards as slowly as I could with a diminishing oxygen bar and found his corpse floating by the ceiling. Seems he needs to breathe, too.
So the next few minutes involved me waving at enemies and then running away and diving into the water laughing to myself as they followed. Killed a couple more that way, but after that the enemies wouldn’t follow me back that far.
So I ran past them. I ran and I ran and got to the end, where the item I needed to steal was. Up some stairs, hammering my heal spell, a huge leap over a massive gap, into a room, picked up the item I needed, leapt on to a desk, back over the heads of the enemies that had followed me in and all the way back through the “dungeon” and out into the open air.
All that practice jumping over the rooftops of Brauma and the Waterfront paid off.
After that it was an easy matter to find my way back to my contact. I was torn between feeling cunning and cool (and some of that jumping was just excellent) in a Zorro type way and feeling like I’d somehow done it “wrong” and should have killed all the enemies like in a normal RPG. Even the “boss” was still alive, probably wondering what the hell had just happened.
But my very, very favourite so far was stealing an item from someone’s bedroom while they were asleep and then causally picking up an apple from their fruit bowl on the way to the door. I just felt so much like a movie-style cheeky kind of rogue.
I fell asleep on the train on the way home from London and dreamt about Oblivion. And I’m dreaming about it every night.
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
Mar 26th
Wasn’t go to play it this evening, because I new that I’d end up going to bed late. But I couldn’t seem to resist.
Did a quest – not too long, excellent rewards – and bought a horse and joined the Mages Guild and started another quest but failed it by getting the person who’d given it to me killed.
Animal Crossing: Wild World
Mar 26th
Why is Frobert sick every Yay Day?
Does he have something to hide?
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
Mar 25th
After a total of thirty hours or so it feels almost exactly like Morrowind to me. Do like the way the combat model means it’s possible to win fights that there’d have been no way to win in Morrowind.
In fact, it’s better than Morrowind in almost every way. I like the way Morrowind’s map filled in, Oblivion doesn’t do that on the main map. That’s an incredibly petty complaint, mind.
The other thing is that I liked Morrowind’s alien landscape and wildlife. So far in Morrowind I’ve just seen deer, horses, dogs and sheep as non-enemy animals. Not quite the same as giant flying jellyfish things.
I bought a horse today, finally. Almost cried when it died after riding it a bit too hard over some mountains. I normally fast-travel to places when doing quests, but this time I decided to ride over the mountains at night while it was snowing. Beautiful, until I got my horse to gallop down a steep slope and it fell out from under me and crashed all the way down, twisting in an utterly sickening fashion. Poor thing. We were only about fifty yards from my destination, too.
Also bought a house from somone. Cheap… but, er… needed some work done… There’s no way I’m giving spoilers for that quest. You’ll have fun.
The quests are just getting better and better, actually. And they’re all side quests.
One day I might even do some of the story stuff, maybe.
Tetris DS
Mar 24th
It’s an odd one.
It feels wrong somehow when I first start playing, but then feels natural within thirty seconds.
I’ve tried some of the new play modes. Not sure about them yet. They’re not as intuitive as plain old Tetris, but they might end up being worthwhile.
