InvertY.com
A Gaming Diary
Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero? (PSP)
Mar 5th
Fighting the upgraded versions of the annoying twins Kim and Chi over the last few days, I found myself experiencing the gaming equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome. It’s a rock hard fight, I was dying dozens of times, over and over again… and yet I started to feel like the game was doing everything it could to help me out, as if it was my ally in the fight against the twins. The twins’ recovery times after attacks started to seem absurdly long, the warm up times equally so. The collision detection seemed to be skewed heavily in my favour. Every failure felt like my fault – and there were far more failures based on bad split-second decision making than based on mucking up the controls. Sometimes I didn’t press the buttons correctly, but mostly I was dying because I was just deciding to do to the wrong thing. It felt like the game was giving me all this help, yet I was letting the side down. Maybe we should call it Prinny Syndrome, when a game seems to be trying to help you out even though it’s killing you over and over again.
Anyway, I killed Kim and Chi this lunch time, finally, and then went through the rest of the bosses in the boss rush without any real problems. Basil and Chervil are another two-character boss, but much, much easier than Kim and Chi. Slower, easier to predict, no real trouble. Next was Cyberclops 2.0, who was as insanely easy as the first version. Get in the right spot and you can kill him without being in any danger of being hit. Then on to a fight with Hoshikage, who took ages to work out when I first faced her, but who I only lost one life to today. And, finally, Moab, who should have been the easiest of the lot, but who somehow held me up for quite a while, taking about ten or fifteen lives off me before I got him. (That mainly was down to impatience to finish the rush, I think. Once I forced myself to calm down and take it slow I beat him easily.)
So now it’s on to the final boss again. I’ve got 677 lives in stock. Will it be enough?
Animal Crossing: Let’s Go To The City (Wii)
Mar 5th
Crazy Redd sold me a real painting. Hooray! Also a space shuttle.
Mirror’s Edge (360)
Mar 5th
I think I’m going to send this back to Lovefilm uncompleted. I spent about fifteen minutes last night on one section. I had to do routine stuff (including disarming/killing/avoiding a couple of enemies) to get to a tricky jump which I was finding impossible to get right. I don’t know if I have the patience to continue with it, what with all the other games fighting for me time right now.
Killzone 2 (PS3)
Mar 4th
Completed this last night. I was fearing that the final boss would make me hate the game, but he was fine. Took a good few attempts to kill, yes, but he wasn’t annoying with it. Thank goodness for surround sound, though. I have no idea how you’d keep track of him in stereo.
Anyway, the game took me a little over eight hours to finish and I died 192 times along the way. Which meant that I died, on average, every two and a half minutes. That does sound like a lot, but the game didn’t feel too hard or unfair – except for the one spot I mentioned yesterday, which my wife says took me a lot more than ten minutes to get through. (And if an unfair spot can make half an hour seem like ten minutes, it can’t be so bad.)
Overall thoughts now I’ve finished? Well, it’s brilliant. It’s fun, exciting, tense, cathartic, violent, messy and rewarding. The default difficulty is just right, with no real sticking points or frustrations – but it’s no cakewalk, either. Seems to be perfectly balanced for me.
Now I need to try the multiplayer and then I guess I’ll write up a full review for UpToJump.
Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero? (PSP)
Mar 4th
Kim and Chi are too hard. They’re annoying in their normal end-of-stage form, but the upgraded boss rush versions are horrific. I’ve got about eight hundred lives at the moment, but I may decide to run away and go for another play through where they don’t appear. It’s not that they break the game, because they don’t, it’s just that they’re a bit too hard for me.
Noby Noby Boy (PS3)
Mar 4th
The best thing I did last night was make a horse-faced man. People complain that there’s not an awful lot to do in Noby Noby Boy, which I suppose is true, but what there is keeps me fascinated for ages.
Oh, and I also discovered the secret 2D stage with the Noby Noby Boy song. Joyful.
Animal Crossing: Let’s Go To The City (Wii)
Mar 4th
Played for a quite a while last night. Didn’t do anything particularly exciting, obviously, but had a nice time. Wandered over to my wife’s house to look at her cool new shell, wandered around the bug exhibits in the museum, caught a few butterflies, picked some fruit, shook some trees, chatted to some of my neighbours, all that.
Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero? (PSP)
Mar 3rd
Just spent 45 minutes of lunch break getting the ninth torn letter.
Why, I don’t know, as I’m never going to be able to get the tenth one.
And I seem to have missed the second and eighth ones along the way, somehow.
Killzone 2 (PS3)
Mar 3rd
Mostly, this was just as excellent last night as it had been previously.
However, I found one short bit that raised an eyebrow. You sit in a mounted gun emplacement firing at enemies. Which is all fine and fun. However, I kept dying without warning. I’d be firing and killing the guys, then I’d be dead. I still have no idea what was really going on. I suppose I wasn’t killing enough of the enemies, but there was no feedback. Eventually the sequence ended in success after I used up all my ammo. I’m wondering if maybe there’s an invisible timer on the section which kills you if you don’t use all your rockets in time, or something. That sounds ludicrous, but I’ve really no idea what was going on.
Odd little bit of weirdness in the game. But it only held me up for ten minutes or so, then everything was back to normal. Several astounding fire fights last night, again. I think I’m at the end of the game now, near enough, but didn’t have quite enough time to finish it off.
Noby Noby Boy (PS3)
Mar 3rd
Just had a very quick go last night on a random world of spinning tops and ballerinas. Stretched a bit, tried to make some hybrids, then reported my length to Girl.
It’s going to be a long, long time until we get to Mars.
