A Gaming Diary
PC
F.E.A.R.
Feb 24th
Haven’t played for a while.
I’m rubbish, the game’s great. Better than I remember, actually.
I’m only playing it on Moderate, but I’m dying an awful lot. I don’t mind, though, because it’s fun, fun, fun. It’s very much the same thirty seconds of fun over and over again, to reapply the famous Halo phrase, but like Halo that’s not a bad thing.
Weird Worlds Demo
Feb 24th
Hmm. I downloaded and tried this ages ago, but didn’t seem to mention it.
It’s basically a quick and simple version of Space Rangers, which isn’t such a bad thing.
Only trouble is, I can’t work out how combat works. I can’t seem to attack ships at all. Might be demo limitation or might be me being incredibly thick. Possibly both.
Seems okay. Really, really, really needs to be on Live Arcade.
Civilization 3
Feb 10th
There is no spoon.
Or rather, there are no naval units. That explains that, then.
And there is no diplomacy. Just war. And there’s only about eight different units ever available. Goes up to cannons and then stops.
Civilization 3
Feb 10th
GOOD – I worked out how to activate fortified units in cities and found that the one square I hadn’t looked at was, indeed, a land bridge.
BAD – There doesn’t seem to be any dimplomacy that I can see, just permanent war.
GOOD – I defeated some enemy units and built a new city.
BAD – The city got killed. It was built between two enemies, it seems. Not a good place. The dark blues came from the west, the light blues from the east. Squish. My settlers got killed. Most of my units got killed.
GOOD – My new chariot seems to be killing stuff.
BAD – There’s a general lack of information that I’ve found so far. I get messages every few turns that the bloody Americans have built yet another wonder, but are they the dark blue or light blue chaps? Dunno. I can’t highlight an enemy unit to get details of it or even see if it’s part of a stack, as far as I can tell. I can see a progress bar telling me how far through production my city is, but not how many turns that equates to. It’s possible this is available somewhere. I need to go online and look for the full instructions. The game gives a web address that I’ll look at later.
GOOD – The enemies fight each other as well as me.
BAD – Given the number of units pouring out of the west and the number of wonders the Americans are producing the AI must be cheating. And this is on Chieftan difficulty, the easiest.
GOOD – It made the bus journey to work absolutely fly by, despite me feeling a bit lost.
BAD – Still can’t seem to build ships.
Civilization 3
Feb 9th
The mobile phone version, you may be surprised to learn. I couldn’t find anything about it online, beyond announcements that it was being developed, so I took a chance. Started it up on the bus about ten minutes before my stop.
No option to start as the English, so I took the Romans. A small map, easiest difficulty, 3 civilizations.
Took a while to get used to the interface, but I’d soon built Rome (no option to rename it) and had some settlers irrigating and building roads. (They seem to do the jobs of workers here.) I seemed to be on a small island, so I was trying to work out how to build boats, but couldn’t remember what technologies I needed. Map-making didn’t help.
As I neared my bus stop a blue unit appeared in the bottom corner of my island and I then realised that there was one square I hadn’t looked at that could be land. Oops. I had a militia unit and a cavalry fortified inside my city and so decided I should get the cavalry out to go meet this new civilization that were trespassing on my turf. Except I couldn’t work out how to activate the cavalry and while I was frowning at the screen it was time to get off the bus.
Hmm.
I’ll have to see if the help, er, helps tomorrow.
Trackmania Nations
Jan 30th
It’s a racing game.
It’s a very good racing game.
It’s a very good racing game that’s great fun online because people can’t shove you off the track or otherwise annoy you.
It’s a very good FREE racing game that’s great fun online because people can’t shove you off the track or otherwise annoy you.
It’s a very good FREE racing game that’s great fun online because people can’t shove you off the track or otherwise annoy you… but it comes with Starforce copy protection.
Whether the Starforce thing is enough to put you off is up to you, but this is a very, very good game online and – as I said – it’s FREE. And I bumped into Ste from ugvm when I went online, which was nice.
HINT: Downloading it from Eurogamer was much, much faster than downloading from the official site, which is getting hit hard today.
SWAT 4 Demo
Jan 22nd
Oooh, now this was a surprise.
First off it looks lovely. I’m sure it doesn’t do as many clever things as FEAR but, to my mind, it may look even better. Secondly, it seems to mix things up a bit whenever you try a mission. At least, I found a hostage in a different place when I played the second time after get killed very quickly first time.
The only problem was that I didn’t really know what I was doing and thought I’d killed/arrested everyone, but the mission was still ongoing. I found a status screen and apparently I have to report on everybody’s status and pick up all the bad guys’ weapons. And I couldn’t be arsed to go back and do all that, so I quit out.
But it’s very tense and the interface makes ordering the squad around so simple that even I found it easy enough to find my way around. Now if I can remember to pick up weapons and things as I go next time then it’ll be ace.
I’m really very impressed indeed.
There’s an expansion out soon, which is what prompted me to download the demo of the game. I wonder if it’s on budget yet?
F.E.A.R.
Jan 22nd
Straight after installing I had to download a 122MB patch. Aren’t PCs great? Only took a few minutes download, though. I remember spending all day trying to download a 13MB patch for Carmegeddon. It took ages and it wasn’t until my third or fourth try that my net connection managed to stay up long enough for me to get it. Gah.
Oh, yes, anyway. FEAR. (Just put the full stops in mentally. I can’t be arsed to type them every time I write the name.) It’s great. It’s depressing to see so many settings on “medium” in the menus, but it runs nicely for the most part. Every now and again it’ll just die for no reason for a second or two, which is odd. But that only happened a couple of times in the hour I just played.
Anyway, so far there have been loads of fights against nasty men with guns and only one crate puzzle. So that’s okay. Thoroughly enjoyable. And, yes, it’s a bit spooky at times.
Star Wars: Empire At War Demo
Jan 22nd
Oh.
I wasn’t paying attention and just got wiped out by an AT-AT.
I wasn’t expecting that.
Star Wars: Empire At War Demo
Jan 21st
Yep, I’m going through the demos and free downloads this weekend.
Anyway, I did the incredibly long tutorial for this new RTS and it seems like it might actually be quite good.
It doesn’t seem to be doing anything too new and it doesn’t look all that great but it seems to play smoothly and, well, you can be the Empire and go round blowing up rebel bases and slaughtering Jawas. The galactic strategy Interface looks a bit fiddly for those of us not sitting with our noses against the monitor, though.
Anyway, I suppose I should actually try playing the game part of the demo at some point, but that tutorial wore me out.
Difficult to judge RTS games quickly, anyway, I suppose. Should probably wait for some reviews.
