A Gaming Diary
Archive for January, 2008
Singstar (PS3)
Jan 19th
Got four new songs today, none of which I can sing. No surprises there. As well as those, my wife and I took it turns to choose songs to duet from our existing library and it was great until my voice cracked and died. Cough cough, like.
Burnout 3 (360)
Jan 19th
The worst great game of all time, definitely. It’s got the worst interface of all time and I still can’t figure out how they got it so wrong. The difficulty curve is strange and burning lap events are much harder than anything else in the game. However, the actual game part of the game is great. The graphics have dated a little, but the fun hasn’t. It’s also a lot more palatable now than it was on release simply because all the flaws are known and don’t keep coming as horrible surprises. Well worth a download.
Doom (360)
Jan 19th
Decided to see if I could get the Nightmare achievement, which you get for completing any level on Nightmare difficulty. This Ultimate Doom, which added a shortcut on the very first level, so it wasn’t very difficult.
Boogie Bunnies Demo (360)
Jan 19th
It’s a colour-matching game, but the red and orange bunnies look too similar to each other.
Apart from that, it seems fun enough and a definite 400-point buy and a definite 800-point miss.
Turok Demo (360)
Jan 15th
Not awful. Well, okay, it starts off utterly awful, when you’re in the caves, but once outside it improves significantly, from “destroy with hammers” to “play if it was free” – which means it’s about a billion times better than the last Turok game.
Football Manager Handheld 2008 (PSP)
Jan 15th
My PSP died at lunchtime. Sony are sending out a replacement for delivery tomorrow, though, so no real harm done.
Anyway, before it died there was some oddness. Seems there’s a weird bug that means that when you’re over wage budget you can’t buy players – which makes sense – but the game lets you make offers, but then you never hear anything more about them, or something. I’m not too sure yet. I’ve been trying to buy players to fill the gaping hole in the right of defense, but after making bids for players I’m not getting any more news stories or anything.
I’ll have to investigate further tomorrow.
Oh, and we played a match against a terrible team and lost horribly. Sigh.
Football Manager Handheld 2008 (PSP)
Jan 14th
Played this on the train to London today. (On the way back I read pop -sorry, rock – magazine The Word, which is annoyingly pompous and snobby, but has some good stuff between huge swathes of infuriating tosh.) I can’t quite remember what happened, but I know we didn’t do very well. Or maybe we did. I’ve completely forgotten. I could check, but after a day walking round London looking at Terracotta Chinese guys and plastic American/Japanese guys I really can’t be bothered to fetch the PSP to check.
So, anyway, I played. Stuff happened. One thing I do remember – one of my most important players has been bought by Crewe. I wouldn’t have sold him, but he had some sort of release clause in his contract. Very annoying indeed.
Football Manager Handheld 2008 (PSP)
Jan 13th
Ack, this is awful.
We’ve lost our winning streak, but more importantly it’s time for contract negotiations. I can’t lose anybody, but all my players are demanding huge wage increases which I just can’t afford. I don’t know what to do. I went through the squad list looking for players to sell and there just isn’t anyone I can do without. Plus the current wages are so low selling a player or two wouldn’t get me back under the limit.
It’s very stressful.
Football Manager Handheld 2008 (PSP)
Jan 13th
Well, Mansfield kicked us out of the FA Cup, but we’re on a winning streak in the league, our goal difference is now positive and we’re up to seventh. Didn’t hurt that Weymouth were down to nine men in the last match.
