A Gaming Diary
360
Hitman Blood Money (360)
Mar 10th
I’m being very sloppy now. I’m not trying to be, it’s just the silent methods really aren’t obvious any more. I had to kill a sheik earlier and simply couldn’t find a disguise to get me into his private area. In the end I set off a bomb nearby to distract the guards, got in without being seen, killed my target, but then couldn’t get out without being spotted and had a really quie uncool run to the parked car waiting to take me to safety. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
Worms (360)
Mar 8th
Sigh.
I honestly, honestly want to like it, want to love it, but the more I play the more disappointed I am.
I don’t know if it’s my memory or the game, but the physics don’t feel right. It feels like everything’s too heavy, or that the game’s playing out underwater, or something. It’s just slightly off, but things just don’t seem to behave as they should. The ninja rope doesn’t feel quite right, either. I don’t know if it’s me or the game, but I can’t seem to hook myself over things, it’s like the length changes a little too slowly. Thinking back, though, I don’t think I’ve ever got on with the ninja rope on any console version before.
And the selection of weapons seems ever more stingy and drab.
Why couldn’t this have been the first 150MB Live Arcade game? Packed with all the customisation and weapons we could ever want? Why couldn’t it be Ultimate Worms instead of Worms Lite?
It’s a missed opportunity and it’s a crying shame.
Worms (360)
Mar 7th
Despite the name, it’s not Worms. Not really. It’s some sort of Worms Lite.
The core gameplay is there, unquestionably. The game just works fine and is good old Worms… what there is of it. It’s what there isn’t that’s the problem. There’s just so much missing. The crates don’t explode properly. There’s no petrol bomb, no baseball bat, no drill. Customisation options are sorely lacking. I’ve not yet seen a mine fizzle out, nor seen any weapons apart from the standard ones come out of crates.
And the first time I played I did a load of challenges and while it saved progress in those – I was the 92nd fastest player in the world on Challenge 2, last I checked – it didn’t save my team stats. I thought the delays were to get rid of bugs?
It’s a real shame, because there’s an engine here with so much potential. There are people who can look at this game and be very proud of what they’ve created. But it’s just the skeleton, there’s no meat. I am genuinely missing things. I’ve wanted to use the baseball bat a couple of times. I’ve wanted Worms to dance around on beds of fire. I’ve wanted to drill down on to a Worm positioned directly below me.
It is a very, very good Worms Lite. It’s just not the real thing.
(And can I delete the foreign language Worm voices, please? I really don’t want to hear them when playing.)
Hitman Blood Money (360)
Mar 6th
So, after not wholly-botching the You Better Watch Out… mission, I was off for some Death On The Mississippi. Haven’t cracked it yet, after a few tries. Managed a cleanish kill (by which I mean the target died and so did any civilian witnesses) or two, but there are seven targets on this level and I’ve not seen most of them.
Had quite a disturbing moment when I threw a body into a furnace to dispose of it, only for the “Target Killed” icon to come up aftwerwards. It was then that I remembered I’d only knocked them out when I’d attacked them. Oops.
Hitman Blood Money (360)
Mar 5th
One thing about going through old games and throwing out those you’ll never play again is that you’re reminded of games you never finished and do want to play again. Like, obviously, the excellent Hitman Blood Money.
I did the tutorial again to remind myself how things worked, then started the first Mission on Normal difficulty. It was so hard that I gave up and loaded my old save, which was set on Expert difficulty. There doesn’t seem to much difference, really. When I last played I’d got stuck on the mission “A Murder of Crows”, but after some experimentation and some less-than-clean kills I managed to complete it. I only got a Gangster rating and left four witnesses alive, but I didn’t do badly enough to make me go back and do it again.
Now on to the next mission, where I have to kill a porn baron. I’ve not got very far yet, just a couple of badly-botched and fatal excursions.
Crackdown (360)
Mar 4th
Now my stats can’t go down I decided to kill lots of civilians and cops today. It was fun for a while, but the cops are never any real challenge so it wasn’t as much fun as it is in other sandbox games.
Crackdown (360)
Mar 3rd
I’m a bit lost now I’ve found all the agility orbs.
There are the hidden orbs, but they’re in such odd places I don’t think I could find them all without some amazing luck or several weeks of daily play. There are car stunts to do, but I find the driving a bit too clumsy when it comes to trying to hit ramps cleanly and such. There are rooftop and road races, but I’m too keen on them, really. I might try out the road races some time, but I’m not sure I want to do rooftop races up The Keep, achievements or not.
Talking of which, I got myself the Master Agent and Global Impact achievements today. I was disappointed there wasn’t any sort of in-game reward for reaching Master Agent status. I’d have enjoyed having immunity from Agency reprisals for killing civilians, or something.
Crackdown (360)
Mar 3rd
500 AGILITY ORBS GET!!!!
I found them all by myself. The final was on top of the big geodesic dome that I’d tried scaling a few times before, but which I thought was impossible to get up. In desperation I tried a final time just before I was going to turn the 360 off and go to bed, caught a beam at the correct angle and – bang! – up I went. Never have five glowing green orbs stacked on top of each other looked so sweet.
Also tonight I found a ton of hidden orbs – I’ve now got 232 of the 300 – and a few car-stunt-based achievements.
Alien Hominid HD (360)
Feb 28th
The first half decent Live Arcade game in ages, so I bought it. But it is only half decent, unfortunately. It could be really good. It looks lovely, it’s fast and frantic, it lets you start from any level you’ve reached and you unlock hats for performing certain actions. Hats! However, it falls down because it seems to hate the player in a number of ways.
1 – It doesn’t show you your score at the end of a game. As you can’t keep an eye on your score during the game it’s really, really, really annoying.
2 – The PDA games are a very good idea and fun in themselves, but they don’t seem to record how far you got. Nor are there any leaderboards for the single player PDA levels. And the background to game rotates and makes me feel like I’m spinning in space, which is a very unpleasant feeling indeed.
3 – It’s far, far too difficult. It’s stupidly, punishingly difficult. At times it’s fun – normally the fifth time you’ve tried something when you know enough about what’s coming up and there’s a bit of a click and a bit of a flow to everything – but sometimes it’s just horribly frustrating and feels very unfair. There is an easy mode, but it’s not that much easier, really… and enemies release flowers and not blood when they die, which is so shaming that I’m unable to play the game on that setting.
If it didn’t kill you so much and if the interface was just tweaked a little this would be fantastic. As it is, it’s just about worth the cash and not a bad way to spend a few minutes. The thing is, everything that’s felt impossibly difficult and unfair the first time I’ve encountered it has, after I got past it, seemed fairly brutal, yes, but not actually unfair. With foreknowledge, positioning and timing everything so far has been perfectly possible to do without dying…
…but I’m only on level 1-3 and I’m not even sure I’ll much beyond that, at least not any time soon.
Crackdown (360)
Feb 27th
499 agility orbs found!
The one I found this evening was on a walkwayy between two buildings on the south Los Muertos island, across the road from the first supply point you’re told to recover. Although an easy orb, it wasn’t in an especially visible place, so I’m not surprised I managed to miss it.
Where the final orb is, Lord knows. I’ve gone through the far north island this evening over and over again, so I can be pretty sure it’s not there. I really think I’ve been through all the Los Muertos areas enough, too. Mind you, I think that about everywhere and there’s still an orb out there somewhere…
