A Gaming Diary
Archive for October, 2007
Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron (PSP)
Oct 12th
I just tried this online. Oof.
The interface is easy enough to use, but finding anyone online in the EU is hard. (Plenty of US types playing, but the pings are bad.) I fought two matches against bots before finding a server with people playing. That was like playing against bots, except it was horribly laggy (teleporting stormtroopers, no thanks) and unfair. Unfair, because I got stuck on a team consisting of myself and seven bots against a team of four people and four bots. As the bots are utterly useless, that meant my opponents had a massive advantage.
Still, I played for over half an hour, so it can’t have been utterly awful, I suppose.
And then I went to the stats page… but I didn’t seem to have any. Maybe you need to play matches full of people and no bots, or something. That could prove tricky, unless things pick up a bit. I mean, maybe people are out on the town, as it’s Friday night, instead of staying home watching Emmylou Harris Night on BBC4.
Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron (PSP)
Oct 12th
What are lunchtimes at work for, if not for playing a quick couple of levels of a video game?
In this respect, Renegade Squadron is a perfect handheld game. I started it up, choose “Single Player”, then “Instant Action”, chose Endor as the map and Conquest as the game type and off I went. (Conquest is the only game type without flags. The idea is to control spawn points on the map. If your team can keep all of them under control for a full minute, you win.)
It’s a fun way to rewrite history. I’m not sure what triggered it, but in the first round I suddenly got the option to play as Han Solo. I accepted. A few seconds after I’d taken control, Darth Vader appeared. Proving that hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster, I ran around and shot him to bits. Don’t know why Luke had such trouble with the guy, really.
In the next round I played as an Imperial and – again, seemingly at random – got the option to play as Darth Vader. In the language of the Internet, I pwned all. I was an unstoppable force and turned the tide of the battle single-handedly. (Or so I like to think.) Pity I only realised I had a Force Choke move after all the rebel scum were dead.
There’s no denying that it’s clunky, but it is fun. Whether it’ll still be fun when the novelty wears off, I don’t yet know. Oh, how I wish the PSP was equipped with two good-quality analogue conrollers. Then we’d really be talking.
Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron (PSP)
Oct 12th
Seems to have divided opinion, this one. I can see why, based on an hour or so of play last night. It’s a bit clunky and easy until suddenly death comes out of nowhere. Not that death matters that much, you just respawn and get stuck back in again.
First up, I did the first couple of campaign missions. On the ground you lock on to people, run around them and hammer the fire button. In the air, you lock on to people, hit the autopilot button and hammer the fire button. That’s about it.
Then did a couple of skirmishes with brain-dead bots. Won the first one – a straight game of Capture The Flag with a single flag. The second game was something called Hero Capture The Flag, or something, which meant Kit Fisto and Jango Fett were carrying flags around. I didn’t quite work out quite what was going on and my side lost the match.
Really, it seems easy and fun to play without excelling at anything – other than being Star Wars, which it’s bloody good at. That’s probably the important bit. If you’re the type of person who, like me, gets a giddy thrill at going to the customisation menu for the first time and seeing you can play as a dreadlocked wookie then you’re going to be a lot more receptive than someone who would have trouble picking Admiral Ackbar out of an identity parade.
Sometime this weekend I hope to test the online play. I expect to die. A lot.
Jeanne D’Arc (PSP)
Oct 11th
I went back and tried the battle I’d lost by a single arrow again. This time my plan was to run to the target by the most direct route and slash his face in. Wasn’t a very good plan, as it turned out. Due to differing movement allowances, my force got split in two, with the stragglers being caught by knights coming from behind. They were slaughtered. Then my fast troops met resistance before the target and were having trouble seeing them off, while the knights who’d killed my other troopers were closing from the rear. When the caught up the end was messy, but was mercifully quick. Turn seven saw my final unit fall.
So I tried again. This time I took up a defensive position and slaughtered the first group of knights. Due to my own idiocy is not noticing how badly he was hurt, Jean fell early, which was a blow. But with five units remaining and the knights, the enemy healer and the enemy archer all dead, I moved on. The ensuing battle was tough and I lost three more units before the target finally fell, with two turns to spare.
But with that level completed, chapter two was over. I’m not my way to Riems with the Dauphin in tow… or will be once I’ve levelled up a bit in the new Free Stage I’ve just unlocked.
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.
Jeanne D’Arc (PSP)
Oct 6th
Fifteen turns, one target, the only condition is that at least one of my party survive.
I get off to a bad start. I misread the layout of the level and end up stuck and surrounded just out of reach of the target… to all but my archer, Marcel, who sends a poison arrow into him. As my target loses health from the poison I fight on and eventually, with a couple of turns to go, the rest of my merry band can attack. But the poison’s worn off.
It’s the final turn, only Roger, Liane and Marcel are left alive. Liane’s magic is depleted and her sword skills aren’t up to much. There’s only one square I can attack the target from, so she waits on the sidelines. Marcel looses off an arro from afar… but it misses. It’s all up to Roger. The target had started with over three hundred hit points, he’s down to 37 now. Roger attacks him from behind… hits! But only does 29 points of damage.
I lose. If only I’d used Marcel’s Sniper Shot skill. It does very little damage, but it always hits. I should have used that, but I just didn’t think. I assumed the normal attack would hit. I shouldn’t have.
That arrow’s going to haunt me.
Jeanne D’Arc (PSP)
Oct 5th
Well, last time I played I’d just started a level I thought I’d never be able to do. As it turns out, it was really very easy and I did it first time.
This may sound obvious, but the trick was just to go for the objective, which was to kill a specific enemy unit. So instead of clearing out all the units before him, I just got to him as quickly as I could and threw everything I had at him. On the way I just kept healing, rather than attacking the other units, so managed to keep everybody alive and healthy.
Pretty obvious stuff, really, like I said. I missed out on all the lovely EXP and bonus items I’d have got from killing everyone on the field, but that’s a small price to pay for victory.
However, now I’ve got another battle straight after that one, with no way to return to the World Map and level up or buy supplies before the fight. Gulp.
Halloween (Movie)
Oct 4th
I don’t usually talk about movies here, but I’m really baffled by the reception to Rob Zombie’s Halloween and I feel the need to redress the balance somewhat. It’s been sneaked out in the UK with no notice (a week and a half before it was eventually released it still didn’t have a confirmed release date that I could find), minimal publicity and no reviews. It’s got an exceptionally poor rating of 25% on rottentomatoes.com and the IMDB score is a reasonably-okay-but-not-great 6.1.
The reason I’m baffled is that it’s clearly a nine out of ten movie. (And it’s not that I can see any reason to mark it down from a ten, a nine just feels better.) The only way I can see people not liking the movie is if they were never going to like the movie.
Okay, if you don’t like boobies and/or blood, then you won’t like the movie. But then your criticisms are of horror movies, not of this movie.
If you don’t think movies should ever be remade then, well, maybe this will change your mind. The remake of The Wicker Man wasn’t a bad movie because it was a remake of a classic movie, it was because it was a quite incredibly awful remake of a classic movie.
I’m sure I’ll be pulled over by the movie thought police for saying this, but the original Halloween isn’t without its problems. The main one being that it drags. Zombie’s version never does. He’s made the story from the original movie the second half of his version and filled the first half with more back story for lil’ Michael and family. It’s a decision that works well. Michael Myers was never a character whose mystique came from his history. We knew a lot about him in the original movie and now we know more. As well as being interesting in its own right, this allows the second half of the movie to move along at a cracking pace. It’s not all super-fast quick cuts, though. Rob Zombie is a talented director, who’s as adept at using stillness and easy listening as fast motion and loud rock.
It’s interesting, it’s tense, it’s scary and it walks the fine line between horror and comedy that Zombie seems to have chosen as his own particular path. A lot of people seem to have missed that in quite spectacular fashion. You may be able to get through without laughing out loud if you’re particuarly stone-faced, but I don’t see how you’d get through without craking a smile. It does, I’ll admit, settle down on the horror side of the divide for the majority of the second half, but until then it’s one funny film and isn’t without amusing moments even near the end.
In a sense, I feel that Zombie’s movies are for healthy people. They may sound odd to some, filled as they are with guts, screaming and death, but my theory is that you need to have a well-balanced mind to be able to appreciate all the dark shades he uses. The comedy in his movies is often very, very black, but it should be easily discernable if you’re open to it. Halloween is on another level to his earlier movies, though, I think. He seems to have toned down the scattershot approach of House of a Thousand Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects. Enjoyable as they both were, they didn’t hang together nearly as well as this movie.
And to top everything off Halloween’s sprinkled with appearances by Zombie regulars, Brad Dourif and the mighty Malcolm McDowell in a big, crunchy role.
As I said earlier, if you don’t like modern horror then, no, you probably won’t like this, but Halloween is on another level other recent makes, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, and there’s more story and life to it than the likes of Saw and other gorno features.
It’s the masterpiece of the current wave of post-post-modern, seventies-influenced horror movies, it’s actually better than Carpenter’s original and it sure as hell deserves far better than it’s got.
Sin & Punishment (Wii)
Oct 3rd
Bah. I spent ages last night deleting loads of games so I could fit this on to my Wii, only to find that my brain can’t handle the controls at all. Seems I can’t aim with the left sitck, for one thing – half the time my brain wants the controls inverted, the rest of the time it doesn’t, so vertical aiming is lottery for me. And moving using buttons with my right hand feels very odd. And firing with the left trigger is very uncomfortable indeed after a while.
I’ll try it again, but I’m not hopeful that I’ll be able to get anything out of this, which is very unfortunate. More of a Stretch Panic than a Gunstar Heroes for me right now.
If I used smilies I’d use a big old sad face here to show my disappointment.
Race Driver: Create & Race (DS)
Oct 3rd
Just had a very quick go on this sat at my desk. Went straight to the track creator, made a track, tested it, saved it. All very easy to do, though I did keep overwriting bits I’d already laid down and having to redo sections. Only place I could easily find to race it was in Simulation mode, so I did that. Handling felt a lot weightier than in the testing mode. I got a couple of cautions for careless driving, but easily pulled away from the pack.
Graphics are DS-nasty, with pixels and pop-up galore, but they’re pretty clear and are nice and smooth, which is more important than eye candy.
It definitely seems to be the best car-based racing game on the DS by a mile, based on this quick go, but I’m not sure based on this if it can compete with my favourite PSP racers – the PSP version of TOCA is awesome, then there’s OutRun, Sega Rally, Ridge Racers, etc. – but the track designer gives it a different kind of appeal. It’s amazing how much the (pretty random) track I made felt like a proper race track. It’s really very well done indeed and could give this real long-term appeal for me.
