A Gaming Diary
Archive for August, 2009
iNetHack (iPhone)
Aug 11th
So, yes, I downloaded iNetHack and started it up.
Took me all of ten seconds to realise that I’ve completely forgotten how to play NetHack. I couldn’t even remember how to rename my pet. Or, indeed, myself. (It didn’t seem to ask me for a name when I started, but I could well have missed something.) I can’t even remember if NetHack is the correct capitalisation of the name. Maybe it’s Nethack.
So I put it down, decided to refresh myself with a desktop version of the game and a wiki and haven’t been back yet. Hardly worth blogging about, really, but I took the screen shot, so I have to. That’s the rule. That I just made up.
Words With Friends (iPhone)
Aug 11th
Played a lot of this over my long weekend.
By the way, if you’re wondering why there were no updates yesterday, it was my wedding anniversary and so my wife and I went down to Hastings and had a great time with claw machines, ice cream, sticks of rock, lovely fried food at the “famous” Mermaid Restaurant, etc. We also saw the world’s creepiest children’s ride.
“Wanna come for a ride, little kid?”
(By the way, that photo was taken with my iPhone. It does things that aren’t games… sometimes.)
Anyway, I’m winning some games and losing others. There really doesn’t seem to be pattern.
I’m resigning a lot more often now, when it’s obviously hopeless and there are no more letters in the bag.
Trash Panic (PS3)
Aug 8th
Either I’m missing something, or this is incredibly difficult. I’m on the second level of the Main Dish, or something, and I can’t see how to complete it. I am given the odd lit match, which helps burns things away, but quite often graavity doesn’t seem to work afterwards and my trash ends up hanging in mid-air, getting in the way of, well, all the other trash I need to dispose of.
It’s frustrating, baffling, strange and oddly wonderful.
WipEout HD (PS3)
Aug 8th
It’s amazing how bad I am at Wipeout after a few months of not playing, consdering that I’ve been playing for over a decade. You’d think I’d remember.
My limited skills aome back quickly enough, though, when I dusted this off today and I’vc managed to get a few more medals. Not very good medals, because my skills have never been great, but I’ve been doing okay.
That’s my current ship up there. I have no idea why I’m using AG Systems, but when I started up today that’s who had the longest loyalty bar, so I must have been using them before.
I also seem to have won a lot of medals on Elite difficulty in the past. That doesn’t sound like me at all.
Batman Arkham Asylum Demo (PS3)
Aug 8th
Played this through a few more times. I unexpectedly discovered the joy of knocking people out by dropping unconscious bodies on their heads. It just gets better and better.
Blue Skies 3GS (iPhone)
Aug 7th
Played another two or three missions this lunchtime.
It did nothing to convince me that I should be playing it more. It’s an okay time waster, but I just can’t get excited about it. I find lining up shots a bit fiddly and avoiding enemy fire is too hard, even now I’ve discovered strafing.
I know other people like it – and it’s not that I especially dislike it, myself – but, you know, the word that springs to mind is a simple, damning “meh”.
Str8ts (iPhone)
Aug 7th
Batman Arkham Asylum Demo (PS3)
Aug 7th
“I’m Batman.”
No, really, I am. This game, you see, lets me be The Batman in a way no other game ever has. And not just any Batman, but a Kevin Conroy-voiced Batman going up against a Mark Hamill-voiced Joker and Arleen Sorkin-voiced Harley Quinn. Which is to say, that if you were ever a fan of Batman: The Animated Series, then you’ll be emitting little of squeals of fanboy/fangirl glee as soon as the characters open their mouths. And if you’ve never seen the cartoon these voices come from, then you’re still in for a treat, because these actors know their characters, have lots of experience in voicing them and just sound right.
The graphics look good. Okay, everyone might be a little too Gears of War-bulky, but we can ignore that. In every other way, this looks great – especially detective mode, which lets you see through walls and highlights things of interest, such as baddies and gargoyles.
How does the game play, though?
Well, it starts off as a tutorial. You punch and kick some bad guys. You throw a Batarang. You sneak up behind people and incapacitate them. It’s all good fun, though would be unexceptional if you weren’t, you know, being the goddamn Batman.
The final bit of the demo, though, just gives you a room and four bad guys with guns. (Well, the room has five goons in it, but one starts with his back to you right by the entrance, so he’s a freebie and doesn’t really count.) Guns are bad for your health, so you really need to take the bad guys one by one, unseen. It’s a mutli-level room, with ladders, gantries, gargoyles and ducts. That sort of thing.
Sometimes it all goes wrong and you desperately swing away from machine gun fire, while feeling less like The Batman and more like Del Boy in that hilarious episode at the funeral.
Sometimes, though, it all goes right. And when it does… oh boy. I’m sitting here smiling just thinking about it. Popping out from a grating under the floor and taking someone out from behind. Swooping down, kicking them, disappearing back into the shadows. Throwing a line down and leaving them hanging upside-down while their heart-rate monitor reads “Terrified”. It’s, well, it’s pretty much the perfect Batman game.
I’m now as excited by the the thought of all the challenge rooms as I am by the main game. This is a real Batman game. It’s Batman from the ground-up. It’s Batman done right.
If the full game can live up to the promise of the final room of the demo – which, yes, remains to be seen – Fuel may well have to surrender its “game of the year” title.
Of course, I’m a massive Batman fanboy. For pity’s sake, before I had a super cool gaming blog I ran a nerdy Batman fan fiction site. (No, really, you can find it on the menu on the right of this page.) So if a game’s good I’m going to love it more than it deserves and, conversely, hate it more that it deserves if it’s bad. So “game of the year” might be a bit strong if you’re not thrilled by the idea of finally, really being Batman. But, really, if you’re not thrilled by that, we have nothing to discuss. Move along.
Spy Bot Chronicles (iPhone)
Aug 7th
People complain that this blog costs them money. Apparently, I’m so persuasive that after reading about games on here they have to rush out and buy them. Well, okay, sorry about that. Let’s try and save you some cash now, shall we?
Spy Bot Chronicles, then. It was released yesterday and jumped on by members of the Touch Arcade forums and lavished with praise. It’s on a 59p introductory offer, but the price is expected to rise a fair bit before long.
Praise plus special offer equaled purchase.
So, what it is? It’s a 2D platformer that, apart from the odd nice bit of physics, is completely unremarkable. It’s, you know, fine, but that’s about it. The controls don’t work for me, either. Now, if you’ve been reading this, you’ll know that it took me about a week of iPhone ownership to go from “Virtual pads will never work! Burn them!” to “Actually, sometimes virtual pads work fine.”
Spy Bot Chronicles should be fine. It’s only got three buttons – left, right, jump – and they’re quite large. So how comes I keep missing them? How comes I run right when I want to go left and manage to hit the jump button, but then miss it half a second later when I want to double jump? I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I die more from missing the controls than anything else.
So you should obviously save your 59p and not buy this then.
Right?
Right?
Well, there’s two things stopping me from coming right out and telling you not to buy this game.
The first is that the buttons are so large, that I can’t help but feel that it must be my fault that I’m missing them. (Though I suspect that having them right up against the edge of the screen isn’t helping.)
The second reason is that, well, all the other iPhone games I’ve blogged about this morning are ones I played yesterday lunchtime. Apart from a few turns of Words With Friends, this is the only iPhone game I played all yesterday evening. I kept getting annoyed with it, planning new ways of cursing it… then going back to check it really was awful and playing another level. I’m well into the second world of four now.
So, yeah, there’s that. I’m very conflicted. I hate it. I loathe it. It frustrates me and makes me want to smash things… but I keep going back.
I’ll leave the final decision up to you, I think.