A Gaming Diary
Archive for September, 2008
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (PSP)
Sep 21st
Yes, I’m a sad old Start Wars geek. As soon as I finished the PS3 version, I turned on the PSP.
Same story (if cut down a little), completely different level design, decent controls, horrible camera. I’ve been having fun with it, though it’s definitely not perfect. The camera is a real issue and I think it might get a bit too hard later on.
One very nice thing is that it has game types not in the big console versions. There’s a series of one-on-one duels against saber-users from throughout the Star Wars time line, there’s a survival mode, a series of short arena-based missions from the Star Wars film and, er, I think there’s another game mode I’ve forgotten. Best of all, you can choose your character for some of these modes, so I get to be Asajj Ventress, which is always nice.
It’s a real shame these modes aren’t in the major console versions, as they’d really help to pad out a very short game.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (PS3)
Sep 21st
Started and completed in one thoroughly enjoyable seven-and-a-half hour session.
Bit buggy, but generally solid. Lots of stormtroopers to kill. No complaints here. (Apart from having to play the PS3 version because the 360 version was out of stock. Still, I assume they’re pretty much the same.)
Picross (DS)
Sep 19th
I spent over an hour on a single puzzle last night. Goodness, it was tricky. And then I had to go back and do it again because I didn’t get the pretty animated picture.
Picross (DS)
Sep 17th
I made some nice pictures of sea creatures. Hardly compares to Mercenaries in the excitement stakes, does it?
Mercenaries 2: World In Flames (360)
Sep 17th
Last night I played this for a little over an hour. In that time it gave me three Great Gaming Moments, which is very good going indeed.
The first two involved an assault on an island fortress. The mission was to blow up every building on the island, including the huge sixteenth century castle on the south and west edges. Trouble was, sitting on top of the castle were a couple of radio jammers, meaning I couldn’t call in any air strikes or support drops.
So, GREAT GAMING MOMENT #1 was when I decided to destroy a jammer by driving it off the tower, into the middle of a bridge several hundred feet above a bay and then jump out at the last second before momentum sent it to a watery grave. The jammer would fall into the water and die, I’d be on the bridge ready to take on the next jammer. Except I jumped out too late and fell a long, long way into the water below the bridge. Meanwhile, the jammer was stuck on the bridge, hanging over the edge, like the van at the end of The Italian Job. Oops. Great comedy moment.
A few tries later and the jammers were disposed of. (Blown up by C4 this time.) I called in an artillery strike on the fortress. Then I ran, but not fast enough as everything started exploding around me. I turned round to see I was standing by an edge, empty space just a few steps behind me. I thought I’d got away with it, until I suddenly noticed a wall rushing past me. Turns out the chunk of fortress I was on hadn’t been spared and I was standing on it as it plummeted to the ground. Ouch. More comedy. That was GREAT GAMING MOMENT #2.
Anyway, despite all that I survived. (Chicks dig scars. And shrapnel.) The next mission had me blowing up an oil rig. The advised method was to plant C4 on the legs and destroy it that way. I had a better idea. Instead I stood on top of the rig and called in an artillery strike. (I do like them.) Then I ran. I ran across the rig, across the helipad on the side and then jumped hundreds of feet into the water below. As I fell the artillery started landing on the rig. As I hit the water it started to explode. Then as I swam away it collapsed into the water. Job done. It was superb. More than anything else I’ve ever played, it was like being the star, writer and director of a great Hollywood action movie set piece. I was gibbering on to the wife for thirty seconds or so just repeating, “Did you see that? Awesome. That was AWESOME. Did you see that?” GREAT GAMING MOMENT #3.
In no other game do I turn the camera so often to show the view behind my character.
I love this game. I’m so glad I got it. I wasn’t going to, it’s just it happened to be a new release and I got more trade in credit than I thought I would when I went to get Spore. Thank you Blockbuster, for your reasonably fair trade in prices.
Mercenaries 2: World In Flames (360)
Sep 16th
Had an excellent bug last night where nobody could shoot except me. NPCs would shout at each other, lob the odd grenade, melee if in range and point their guns menacingly, but would not fire them. Which made things quite easy for a couple of minutes, until I restarted the game.
I spent a lot of the time driving a prototype jet boat through mine-laden waters. Not sure why the guerillas wanted me to do that, I expect they were just having a bit of fun at my expense. Took a few tries, but I completed the mission in the end – and with a bonus for not damaging the boat too much. Excellent.
Then, as I was in the area, I called in a bombing run on a huge oil tanker and stood on top of the bridge as it sank, pretending to be the captain of the Titanic.
And then I called in a helicopter and flew around admiring the view – I’d never been in a helicopter before – until I noticed I was above an HVT (High Value Target) site. Landed the chopper, ran into the compound, grabbed the target and ran down a steep hillside with him slung over my back, bullet whizzing past my ears. When I got to a road I called in a helicopter and sent him back to Universal Petroleum with my compliments.
Another HVT decided to commit suicide before I could get to him, so I had to photograph his corpse and only got half the bounty. (I’m not sure how he managed to drown simply by stepping into three inches of water at the edge of a beach, but I guess he was determined to end his life before I could get to him.)
Then I got a mission that sounds ace. Basically, I have to blow up everything on an island, including a castle being used as a fortress. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do the mission before I had to stop playing, but I’m looking forward to it.
Sega Rally (PSP)
Sep 14th
Oh, yeah, I played a bit of this yesterday while waiting for OSX to install. Not much to say, mind. Car goes fast, car crashes, car goes fast again.
Mercenaries 2: World In Flames (360)
Sep 14th
I didn’t play this nearly as much as I hoped this weekend. This morning I had to go to Maidstone. Friday evening and all of yesterday were spent trying to get my Powerbook working after a nasty crash. It froze up trying to import a photo from my digital camera, then wouldn’t restart. Got as far as bringing up a nice blue screen, but without any log in window on top of it.
Trying safe mode just shut the computer down. Disk Utility on the 10.2.3 install disc I have (I was running 10.4.11) claimed to run, but never fixed anything. (Even when left overnight, the next day it was still sat there churning the disk, but not doing anything useful.) Disk Utility on my 10.5 upgrade disc just failed, refusing to even finish checking the disk.
I have, annoyingly, completely lost my 10.3 and 10.4 discs. Yes, I bought them. Direct from Apple. At full price. And I’ve lost them.
Anyway, I could get to a command line in single user mode. Using my PSP’s web browser I learned how to mount my USB stick, so managed to copy off some essential data. Took a few hours of fiddling, but I got there.
Then I tried upgrading 10.4 to 10.5. This was naughty, as it was an upgrade disc from work that I shouldn’t have been using. (It was in my house because I’d brought it in to use Disk Utility to test my iMac’s hard drive, which is dead, and I’d never taken it back.) Seems the gods of software piracy were watching, because after a few minutes the upgrade disc reported an unknown error and told me to try again. When I rebooted and tried again it refused to run at all, because it couldn’t find a 10.4 installation on my hard drive. Well, no, probably because it had just deleted it.
So only one thing was left. A reformat of my hard drive and a clean install of the only version of OSX I had left to try – 10.2.3. Well, it works. And is 10.2.8 now. I’m missing some features, like native zip file support and Exposé and Spotlight. (I am not missing the Dashboard and widgets one little bit.) The latest version of Safari that runs on an OS this old is awful and crashes to death when I go to my favourite forum, so I can’t use that. The wife uses Firefox. So I’m using Opera, which – apart from a deeply annoying lack of autofill and spell checking – seems fine. A bit ugly, but fine.
So that was my Friday night and Saturday. And this morning was the emergency drive to Maidstone. And then I made lunch.
And then I finally, finally, finally got to blow some stuff up in Mercenaries 2. And, oh, it felt sweet. So, so sweet.
…Even though it made me do the really hard mission I’d done last time I played all over again, because either it didn’t save properly or somehow forgot I’d done it. Never mind, it was a lot easier this time round and was great fun. I’m not complaining too much.
Mercenaries 2, I love you. You’re completely broken and a technical mess, but I love you.
Picross (DS)
Sep 14th
The DS charger I bought a couple of weeks ago died yesterday, so I had to rush out to Maidstone this morning and pick up a replacement. Stupid chargers. Anyway, once I got home I played a little Picross. More animals. Had to get the wife’s help on one of the puzzles and kept making mistakes on another one. Shameful, really.
Viva Pinata: Trouble In Paradise (360)
Sep 14th
I stand by my first impressions. It’s good some more good stuff, but it’s also got more bad stuff. By reckoning the extra bad stuff wins out and the game is a fair bit less fun than the original as a result. It’s a big disappointment, really. My wife is addicted all over again, but feels the same way. The whole thing’s just taken a wrong turn. If anything, it needed to be less challenging, not more so.
