A Gaming Diary
Archive for April, 2009
Red Faction: Guerilla Demo (360)
Apr 17th
Played through two more times last night. It’s just great fun. The initial on-foot shooty section is great, the stompy walker section is great and the mounted gun section is great. It’s all great!
OutRun Online Arcade (360)
Apr 17th
Got a couple more Achievements yesterday. I thought they’d be hard, but I got the “get 1,000,000 points” one on my second try (TIP: put the difficulty of the game to Normal, it’s on Very Easy by default) and then got the “go at over 300kph for ten seconds” one randomly while trying time trials. I had been trying to get the “complete Time Attack in less than 4m30s” achievement, but I’m way, way off that. I think my best is about 4m38s or something. That’s a lot to try and catch up.
Animal Crossing: Let’s Go To The City (Wii)
Apr 17th
Pascal gave me a keg. Also, I put a flying saucer in my basement.
Pokemon Platinum (DS)
Apr 16th
I defeated the first gym leader, hooray! The first time I tried he brought out a Crandios that could kill all my Pokemon in one hit, so I levelled up my Psyduck to level twelve, then spammed Water Gun at him. Killed his three Pokemon in five turns, no trouble.
It’s super effective!
Red Faction: Guerilla Demo (360)
Apr 16th
Had another quick go as my 360 was on. Just as fun as it was the last time I played. I do hope the full game doesn’t spend hours buggering about with simple tutorial missions before giving you access to all the toys in the demo. If it’s fifteen hours before you get those sticky bomb things and you’re always constantly running out of them, it just won’t be as fun.
OutRun Online Arcade (360)
Apr 16th
OutRun 2 is one of my very favourite games of all time. I utterly adore it. So I’ve been saving up my points for this release.
And it’s lovely. It’s only got the SP courses – the original courses better appear as DLC soon, as they’re just that little bit better – but that’s good enough for now. I haven’t done much so far, just played through the game five times to hit the five different goals, but it’s OutRun 2 and therefore lovely. I was sighing with happiness as I drifted through the stages. Lovely.
I haven’t tried any online races yet and the friends leaderboards need fixing, like, now, but 800 points for OutRun 2 SP sitting on my hard drive? Bargain!
Valkyria Chronicles (PS3)
Apr 15th
Two battles last night. I had two hour-long sessions, so I didn’t think I had the time to get stuck into chapter seven, so I first did a side mission – The Vegetable Incident. A great change of pace, this was a night-time operation with only three characters sneaking through a village to take out some tanks that were blocking a trade route. As well as the darkness and the limited squad, the other change was that one person being taken down meant mission failure. The first time I tried the mission I died about two-thirds of the way through the village, after coming across an unexpected gun emplacement and trying to take it out by, er, running at it with a character on half health. That was an idiotic move and I paid for it.
The second time I tried I used Largo to take down the gun emplacement from afar, then moved in on the tanks. Unfortunately, I’d wrongly assumed I’d taken out all the enemies bar the tanks and that I was well-hidden in some grass, so I was surprised by an enemy shocktrooper throwing a grenade at my guys and knocking them out of cover. I just managed to survive until my turn and with my three command points I got Welkin to kill the enemy trooper, then got Largo to take out the two tanks with two shots. Job done. Phew.
So, that’s the first mission I’ve had to redo. Entirely my fault – and I was very lucky to finish it off the second time I tried. I must try to be less careless. I have a feeling that any carelessness is going to be heavily punished in missions to come.
For my second session I decided to tackle the third skirmish map, which is basically a replay of the woodland mission I’d done in the story previously. This time things went better, as nobody died permanently, but it was a bit messy. I tried using a sniper only to discover a fence in his way and spent far too long dithering over how best to approach the southern enemy camp. Still, the final assault on the eastern camp was beautiful. I’d already taken out the tank there – thanks Walter! – and stormed in from all directions. I concentrated on approaching from the rear to soften things up, then took out a couple more guys from the west, than ran a shocktrooper down from the northern entrance to mop things up and take the camp. Lovely.
Animal Crossing: Let’s Go To The City (Wii)
Apr 15th
Bella lost her key. I tried to find it, but no luck. I did get a char for the museum, though. That’s nice.
Peggle (Mac)
Apr 14th
So now I’ve gone back and got the high score for all the levels that I’d not previously done. (Bit odd that I could clear any 100% without getting 300,000 points, but there were a surprising number of them.)
Now what do I do?