A Gaming Diary
Archive for June, 2009
VidZone (PS3)
Jun 12th
This isn’t a game, but it’s definitely worth mentioning. It’s a small (23MB), free application that appeared in the Playstation Store yesterday. If you download it, it adds a new icon to your Music menu.
What’s it for? Well, it lets you watch music videos. You can look at popular videos or predefined lists, or just search the catalogue by artist, title or genre. You select videos to watch and then you can watch them. There are a few adverts, but they don’t get in the way. The interface is a little slow and can be confusing at first, but it’s really not bad.
But it works. You choose videos and VidZone plays them. You can play them in a small box on the screen while you search for more, or go full screen. It just works.
And the catalogue is very impressive. It misses out quite a few big names (no Radiohead, for example) and, of course, quite a few smaller acts, but I was very pleased with what I did find. There are, for example, five Miranda Lambert videos. Now, I love Miranda Lambert – my wife bought me a fan club membership for Christmas – but you’ll never see her being played on any of the music channels in the UK. But with VidZone, I can queue up all five videos and watch them. And they have other country artists, too – Gretchen Wilson, Dixie Chicks, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, etc. For a country-starved UK resident it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing and enough to proclaim BEST THING EVER status for VidZone.
Anyway, if you’ve got a PS3, try it out. I’ll be very surprised if you find everything you want, but astonished if there’s nothing there you’d like to watch.
No Nick Cave, though. And no Aqua, either.
Test Drive Unlimited (PSP)
Jun 12th
Hardly played this, but I did start it up and try one of those challenges where you have to go through speed cameras as fast as possible. I failed dismally every time I tried, going off the road, missing cameras, etc. Ouch.
Animal Crossing: Let’s Go To The City (Wii)
Jun 12th
A new resident! Eunice, a sheep. I haven’t formed any opinion about her yet.
Animal Crossing: Let’s Go To The City (Wii)
Jun 11th
Oh, yes, I played this last night. No new resident and Redd sold me another fake painting. I caught a brand new type of butterfly and donated it to the museum, though.
Fuel (360)
Jun 11th
Just as an addition to the last post, while driving to the new base camp I had a hint of why some people – especially reviewers – might not get on with Fuel. For the first time, I had a real goal and a real deadline. The goal was to reach the new camp, the deadline was the time I had to leave for work. When I started the drive, all was fine. I went back and got stacks of barrels that I’d missed. I took a little detour to grab a livery. All that normal stuff.
However, I then noticed I wasn’t making progress as quickly as I needed to. I had to reach the base camp by 8:15am. So, while I still enjoyed myself, there was a slight, creeping annoyance. Instead of laughing when I slammed into a tree, I got annoyed with the couple of second wait before my bike respawned. I saw barrels aplenty, but didn’t want to waste time going to grab them. Other interesting things popped up to my left and right, but I had to keep moving. The GPS was leading me down winding paths that, I’m sure, would have been excellent fun to drive down, but the terrain was fairly flat, so I could just go in a straight line across the countryside, so I did.
Everything was about getting across the country as quickly as possible, without it actually being a race. There was no reward at the other end – at any time I could have selected the base camp from the menu to appear there. And it’s in that context that the free roaming seems to be pointless, even counter-productive. If you have very limited time and a set goal, the game pretty much falls apart. The joy of the thing, of sliding, driving and crashing across America, of getting distracted by jumps and barrels and little green dots on your GPS, all that falls away. It becomes meaningless, even an annoyance.
And that, I reckon, is why the reviews of Fuel haven’t been as good as they probably should be. Fuel should be treated as you’d treat a long soak in the bath with a good book, reviewers only have time for a quick shower.
Fuel (360)
Jun 11th
Got up an hour early this morning. Not specifically to play this – I was well awake and probably wouldn’t have slept – but the thought of being able to have a go did spur me out of bed. Did the last career race in The Big Cauldron’s Edge zone, then decided to drive over to the base camp in The Ashtray zone, where I’d never previously been. I underestimated how long it would take to get there by quite a bit, but just managed to reach it before it was time for work. For the first part of the journey I was using the Spider Wraith buggy, but kept hitting trees, to went back to the Shuriken bike, which is a lot narrower and, therefore, easier to take through forests.
Test Drive Unlimited (PSP)
Jun 11th
I remembered I enjoyed this and it’s the closest thing to Fuel I’ve got for the PSP, so I copied this to my memory stick and started it up. And then didn’t stop playing until bed time. Took me a few minutes to remember how it all worked, but soon enough I was driving around in my Aston Martin, doing challenges and having a grand old time. Didn’t do amazingly well, but I’m sure I’ll improve. I think I’m doing well enough not to bother wiping my save and starting all over again, at least.
Sega Genesis Collection (PSP)
Jun 11th
Didn’t want to play more OutRun, so I went to the games shelf to pick some UMDs I’ve not used in a while. Saw this and realised I’d bought it ages ago, then spent almost no time with it. Went through the list of games several times looking for something I’d want to play, didn’t see anything that grabbed me, so defaulted to Sonic the Hedgehog. I’m sure it used to be easier than this. It took me three goes to even get past the Green Hill Zone – and then Marble Zone, or whatever it’s called, killed me dead.
Decided it would be much better playing from the memory stick, so spent most of the rest of the evening copying UMDs to my hard drive, then back to my PSP, which means I didn’t actually play much.
OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast (PSP)
Jun 11th
Last night I used the “Just Drive” setting a few times, jumping into to random mode with a random car. It’s good for when you’re not quite sure what you want to do, but I ended up driving cars I didn’t much like and not doing very well at all. Ah well.
Fuel (360)
Jun 10th
Played for literally five minutes before work. (Yes, despite the huge world, it’s worth just jumping in for five minutes.)
About ten seconds after setting off on my bike I’d got another Achievement, this one for performing 200 tricks. (There’s no manual trick stuff, thankfully, but if you’re on a motorbike or quad bike and jump far enough your rider will perform a little trick animation.) Then I found a Doppler truck and was about to turn off when I noticed my mileage was on 899.6, so I had to drive another 0.4 miles to get it up to a nice round 900 before I stopped playing.
