A Gaming Diary
Archive for August, 2010
Minecraft (Mac/Web)
Aug 10th
Things I have done in Minecraft, a pictorial guide.
Built a statue holding a flaming sword.
Built a house for myself inside a hill.
Carved out a staircase into the depths of the earth.
Fought terrifying creatures hundreds of feet below ground.
And that’s not even the half of it.
Minecraft (Mac/Web)
Aug 9th
The indie game sensation that everybody seems to playing right now.
It’s baffling at first and I had to read forum threads to work out what the heck I was meant to be doing, but I’ve wormed my way in. I’ve made a nice little house inside a hill and below it have a sprawling mine network.
The main room in my house.
I’ve found lots of coal, but only small amounts of iron and gold.
My first night was terrifying, sat behind a door in the dark, hearing terrible sounds all around. Since then, though, I’ve been mining at night and haven’t had any problems with monsters.
Trenches (iPhone)
Aug 9th
Hunker in a bunker.
Blimey. Still haven’t finished the campaign. Seems to have been expanded quite a bit since my first run through it, way back when. (I’m not even sure if engineers were in the game when I first played. If they were, I don’t remember using them – which is odd, as I’m relying on them heavily now.)
Tunnel Shoot (iPhone)
Aug 9th
Pew pew!
Like Boost 3D, only with shooting. Seems pretty good from my brief time with it – especially as it was free at the weekend. Score!
Trenches (iPhone)
Aug 6th
Picked this up when it came out, played through the campaign in about twenty minutes, didn’t touch it again. I must have liked it a fair bit, though, because I’ve kept it on my phone. (I think it was Christmas last year that I played it, which would explain why I don’t seem have blogged about it before.)
An early, siniper-only mission.
Anyway, it’s had lots of updates since then and a spin-off/sequel has been announced, so I thought I’d take another look. I’ve been going through the campaign on Medium difficulty and it’s really very good indeed. You need a quick finger and a quick brain. There are plenty of games where you create troops and have them march left to right across a map, but the care that’s gone into this game make it stand out – I assume there’s been a fair amount of balancing over the months since release.
Carcassonne (iPhone)
Aug 6th
Yes, I am excellent.
Yes, yes, I’m only posting about Carcassonne today because I won a game against a few people. You got a problem with that? It’s my blog, I can do what I want. Y’all don’t me! I can do what I want! I’m grown!
Plunderland (iPhone)
Aug 5th
So, this got an update that addressed the control issues. It’s much better now. I started a level I’d been stuck on and breezed through it. I’m not even sure what’s changed, exactly, all I know is that it’s a lot easier to aim shots.
I'm stuck here.
Unfortunately, though, I’m now stuck on the next level. There’s some scaffolding and I need to destroy it by hitting a barrel of explosives. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get my cannonballs to reach it, however I aim. I’ve no idea what to do now.
Bejeweled 2 (iPhone)
Aug 5th
I'm doing very badly in this game. Which is why I stopped to take a screen shot rather than pressing on.
The iPhone version’s finally been updated with the coins and boosts of the Facebook version. (We’re talking about Blitz here, obviously, rather than any of the other modes. We can ignore them because they’re rubbish.) It doesn’t make a huge difference to the game, but I still lost half an hour without blinking after starting up the game to check the new stuff out.
Cut Him Up! (iPhone)
Aug 5th
It may look modern with stylish comic book graphics and short, sharp cut scenes. It may have global leaderboards.
But don’t be fooled.
This harks back to the brawlers of old.
Remember the days of the Vikings, when boys would be tested on Double Dragon and Final Fight before they could put on their horned hats and sail off with the men to rape and pillage?
This game harks back to those times. It sweeps its way from the snow-covered lands of the north, with pure white backgrounds, sharp black lines and splashes of crimson blood. A game with a snarl on its face, an axe stained with the blood and gore of a thousand men in its hands and a half-eaten leg of roasted pork shoved down its shirt.
Sat by a campfire it beckons you closer, tells you a story of a man waking up in chains, masked men all around. It rises to its feet, invites you to fight. You punch and kick and it seems to fall back under your assault. Then it smiles. A terrible, leering grin lights up its face and its eyes glow with animalistic cunning in the firelight.
“Level two.”
It laughs.
It leaps.
And you’re on the floor. It pulls you back up to your feet, then sends you flying again. You get some blows in, but not enough, never enough.
This game will hurt you, like games used to. It’s not your friend. It’s not interested in whether or not you see all of its story. It’s not a cinematic epic that will adjust the difficulty if you’re struggling. (There are two levels of difficulty, Normal and Hard. Normal is hard. Hard I don’t even want to think about.)
All this game wants to do is be like its heroes, those coin-guzzling arcade machines of long ago. It’s an old-style brawler, nothing less, nothing more.
Expect to be tested.
Surgeons are evil. Explode them with punches.
Oh, yes, overblown, overwritten hyperbole aside, it does have concessions to the modern age. You can choose any unlocked level to start on and you can skip the cut scenes. And, as you can see, it does look very nice indeed.
It’s not perfect. For one thing, it might not be very fair – but if you’re worried about that, this isn’t the game for you. There’s also an odd issue with the joystick graphic sticking sometimes, so it looks like you’re pressing a direction when you’re not. Confusing at first, but a purely cosmetic issue. Just put your thumb back and everything’s fine.
If you’re scared of a bloody nose this isn’t for you, but I’ve been thrilling to the nostalgic feel of the game. It reminds me of days spent hunched over the rubbery Spectrum keyboard and shovelling my last ten pence piece into a cabinet in a seaside arcade.
Maybe it’s not fair. Maybe it’s not elegant. Maybe it really is just the gaming equivalent of a thug dressed in furs. Sometimes that’s enough.
Piyo Blocks (iPhone)
Aug 5th
You can't get the full, horrific effect unless you see this in motion.
Seems like a standard match three, but ruined by graphics so colourful and jiggly that they gave me a headache after three minutes or so of play. No, really, the game actually made my head hurt. So, yeah, maybe there are hidden depths to the gameplay, but I’m not going to be finding out; I deleted the game after two attempts to play it. At least it was free.
