A Gaming Diary
360
Every Extend Extra Extreme (360)
Dec 24th
Just one game of Unlimited mode, but that one game took a while. I was wondering how I could ever actually die, when I pushed things too far, lost a life and then hardly got any more Time Extends and had to watch as my time dwindled away.
Sensible World of Soccer (360)
Dec 24th
It’s finally here!
And it’s great!
There is a problem, though. It’s very, very, very, very, very difficult. I can win a match if I pick a decent Premiership team and play a team in the third division (as it was in ’96), but even that’s a fight. When I’m playing a team on or near my own level I just can’t win. I just can’t seem to get into scoring positions very often and find it hard to score when I do.
Despite that, though, it’s just great. One of those games I turn off in a huff and then come back to five minutes later. One day, I shall be good. (Mind you, that’s what I said back in the mid-nineties when I was playing the PC version.)
Assassin’s Creed (360)
Dec 17th
This is the game I spent most time on this weekend. At least five or six hours of it. It’s repetitive, yes, but that doesn’t matter at all, as the mechanics are so much fun. Run, jump, fight, run, jump, fight, run, jump… Repeat for hour after hour without getting bored. I’ve done six assassinations now and there’s been a big jump in difficulty. Not so much in combat, where I still feel very hard done by if I die, but in the “stealth” – which is less about not being seen and more about not being noticed.
Some people, I’m sure, must get very angry with the game when a lunatic pushes them into a guard during a stealth kills mission, ruining a few minutes of careful stalking and stabbing. I can understand that. To me, though, it always feels like it’s my fault. I need to allow for them, to stay away form guards when they’re around, make sure to stay back, work out where the guards are and how to get past. The stealth missions now tend to have time limits, but they’re not so tight that you need to power through and get lucky. You have time. Failure is caused by overconfidence, impatience and, yes, some luck.
Anyway, I’m loving it. I’m finding it more difficult to lose pursuers – and running away is the better option than fighting now, for the most part, as a heap of dead bodies left lying around near a mission starting point is a very good way to make things more difficult.
It takes a while to work out the rules of the game – and it is a game with simple rules rather than anything approaching reality – but once you do there’s a brilliant game in a brilliant world. Taking things slowly, refusing to “teleport”, doing everything you can, exploring and just running across rooftops for the sheer joy of it, it’s a wonderful world.
(Being pulled out of the game for lengthy cut scenes full of exposition still grates, though. I don’t care about the plot at all and would be quite happy without any.)
Assassin’s Creed (360)
Dec 10th
I spent a long time playing this over the weekend and got two more assassinations done. One was slightly annoying in that it forced me to fight some minions in an arena-style setting before moving on the main target, but the second was much more fun. I didn’t get a stealth kill, but there’s something very satisfying about the way I managed to leap and run after the target as he fled through the streets before jumping on him with my hidden blade. I’ve now explored all of the south-west section of Acre, so when I next play I’ll be straight to the big castle in the south to kill William. I’ve not being much attention to the story, so I’m not entirely sure why I’ve got to kill him, but the reasons aren’t important as the execution.
Assassin’s Creed (360)
Dec 6th
Played this for quite a while last night and – apart from the last ten minutes or so – I didn’t set foot in one of the major cities. I roamed around the kingdom for quite a while, fighting Templars, collecting flags and climbing Eagle Points, found a few more flags in the starting village and then made my way to Jerusalem, where I found the Assassins Guild and saved.
I throughly enjoyed it all, too. The more I play this game the more I like it. I’m still expecting it to get too hard and/or annoying later, but I’ve played for hours now and only done two of the assassinations. I think I’m having a completely different experience to people – especially reviewers – who decided to go through it s quickly as possible. It’s a game that gets better the more you breathe and the more you just mess around, I think.
Psychonauts (360)
Dec 6th
Well, this finally downloaded and installed itself, but that wasn’t the end of the trouble. When I started it up it told me there was an update available which I should download. So I sat and watched the progress bar move across the screen, only to then be told that there was an error and the update couldn’t be installed. Then I got kicked back to the dashboard. Starting up the game after that worked fine, though, and after much stuttering on the intro movies the game’s worked fine, with only the most minor graphical problems since. (Mainly one-pixel-wide black lines appearing on the screen now and again.)
As for the game, it’s exactly what I remember from way back when. The script, voice acting and graphical design are very, very good, but the platforming is merely quite good. I’ve not yet got to any of the controller-smashingly frustrating sections, so we’ll see how far I get through the game this time.
Half-Life 2 (360)
Dec 5th
While waiting for Psychonauts to download I decided to play some Half-Life 2, as it was in the drive. Really was the best and worst of the game in one small sitting. Some excellent fights against the Combine, some fun head crab shooting and then some really annoying bits with stupid physics puzzles and annoying jumping. Also, everything involving ladders is horrible.
I tried to play some Sonic, too, but the kitten wouldn’t let me. She kept trying to claw the rings out of the screen, which wasn’t a good idea at all, so I had to stop.
And Psychonauts didn’t finish downloading until after I went to bed, anyway.
Team Fortress 2 (360)
Dec 4th
Again, a friends match turned into a no-friends match, so I had to leap into a random game. (After going through the final bit of the commentary I’d not heard yet.) This time I knew my limits and wasn’t as awful as I had been the other night. As the Pyro I got a few kills, as a Medic I did some useful healing.
Our team was utterly outclassed, though, and we lost every game heavily.
Team Fortress 2 (360)
Nov 30th
I was meant to be playing this with friends last night, but nobody showed up. So after half an hour wandering round maps listening to the developers’ commentary, I leapt into a public game.
I was rubbish. Just awful. I had fun, though, even though I kept dying. And despite my incompetence my team won a couple of times, including one win that was so decisive that it got me a (richly undeserved) achievement. (Though there is a case to be made that by being such an easy target, I distracted the enemy from the better members of my team, and thus helped in my own way.)
Looking at the stats afterwards, it seems that I did far, far better when I was a pyro and sat back in defence, so I think that’s probably what I’ll stick to from now on.
Assassin’s Creed (360)
Nov 30th
This is brilliant. Yes, it’s a glitchy, buggy and repetitive mess, but it’s a brilliant glitchy, buggy and repetitive mess.
The core world and mechanics are just so good that I find it easy to overlook the problems. Like last night, when a mission I’d finished reset itself because I happened to bump into a Templar on the way back to talk to the guy who’d given me the mission. (As luck it would have it, it was the best side mission yet – a stealth kill of a guard in a crowded street – so doing it again wasn’t something I minded.)
I’ve now taken to killing beggars. You lose sync (i.e. health) whenever you do it, but they’re so annoying that it’s worth it. “Please sir, spare me a coin. Just a single… gurrgggh.” That actually sounds really horrible written down like that and it’s not something I’d recommend in real life, but in the game world it feels great. I’m also killing any lunatics that get in my way, after one alerted an assassination target last night and stopped me from getting a stealth kill.
