A Gaming Diary
Archive for March, 2006
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
Mar 24th
Twelve hours in, character from old quest starts haunting me.
For reasons I won’t go into, I’ve not been able to close the quest off, so after a while the game seemed to decide to send this NPC around to haunt me in a way that’s very, very obviously not meant to happen.
In other words, the game broke.
So I started again from the beginning.
Tetris DS
Mar 23rd
Just tried standard Marathon mode.
It starts slowly and gets faster fairly quickly.
Controls felt a bit off to me at first, slightly clunky, but I stopped noticing once the speed increased. Still, a bit odd.
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
Mar 22nd
It’s brilliant. Of course.
What have I done? Ooooh, loads. Started a new character, a Breton. Custom class, Wanderer. Spells and thieving. Been caught looting a pub’s basement. Broken into a farmhouse to steal the few items of any value inside. Picked flowers and vegetables. Killed a highwayman. Found a horse. Killed the same horse after it went mad after I accidentally slashed it while we were fighting a wolf. Failed to kill any deer. Raided a tomb filled with imps and traps. Sneaked past a monster unleashed by a well-intentioned man. Wandered round the Imperial City, mostly lost. Stolen goods from the Imperial Prison. Walked into an Oblivon gate and died.
That sort of thing.
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
Mar 22nd
It is a glorious day.
I got out of bed at 5:15am. By 6:00am Oblivion had been installed on my PC.
(I’d downloaded overnight. I have two copies arriving some time this week, one PC, one 360, so I don’t feel guilty about downloading it a day or two early. I had to install some software called Daemon Tools to run it. I hope it’s not going to do anything nasty to my PC. I don’t know much about downloading games and that. I was so worried I actually deleted all the personal information – e.g. Firefox passwords – off my PC before running anything.)
I played it for just over an hour, through the helpful tutorial section (that will no doubt get annoying when starting new characters) and out the other side. On my PC it looks great. Once out in the world I died, a lot. I only had about ten minutes out there and about five deaths. It’s no less harsh than Morrowind in that respect. Do stupid stuff, you die. And I did a lot of stupid stuff, just to test things out. In fact, everything about it is very Morrowind. The combat system’s been changed a bit, the interface has been mucked about with, but it feels just like Morrowind to me. I didn’t, however, see any enemy health bars. Hopefully I just didn’t notice them because I was gawping at the graphics. If they’re not there then I may cry.
Anyway, I had to leave for work, but it’s a lovely sunny day and I read great interviews with Peter Ackroyd and the Pet Shop Boys on the bus and after all the anticipation and build up to Oblivion I now feel sated. Itching to leave work, go home and plunge back in, but at a manageable level. The wait to play it at all was sending me slightly crazy, I must admit.
Now I’m okay. I’m fine. It reminds me of when I used to be a hardcore smoker and lit up a fag after an enforced period without.
And I’m rubbish at sneaking.
Feeding Frenzy
Mar 20th
Unlocked full game.
Started a New Game.
One sitting later, had completed the game.
Oh.
Time Attack’s where it’s at, they say, and I suppose the main game can be replayed for high scores but… oh.
The Outfit
Mar 20th
Couple more single player levels down. It’s good fun, though the seige at the end of the last level went on a bit too long. Or there was too long between waves, anyway. I wasn’t in any danger, given that I’d set up $hlmun gun emplacements around the place I was meant to be defending.
Burnout Revenge Demo
Mar 20th
Downloaded it from Live Marketplace. Has saved me some cash. I just can’t play it. It’s too fast for me. I crash into things I haven’t even seen.
Burnout was decent. Burnout 2 was great. Burnout 3 started well, but got silly and had a horrible interface. Burnout Revenge just doesn’t seem very good.
Monkey Ball Mini Golf
Mar 20th
A well-designed little mobile phone mini golf game with a Monkey Ball skin.
Just gone through the eighteen hole course once. Got a total of 2,410 points, which is probably rubbish. Some holes I ran out of bananas on, so didn’t get any points at all.
