InvertY.com
A Gaming Diary
Jeanne D’Arc (PSP)
Oct 6th
Fifteen turns, one target, the only condition is that at least one of my party survive.
I get off to a bad start. I misread the layout of the level and end up stuck and surrounded just out of reach of the target… to all but my archer, Marcel, who sends a poison arrow into him. As my target loses health from the poison I fight on and eventually, with a couple of turns to go, the rest of my merry band can attack. But the poison’s worn off.
It’s the final turn, only Roger, Liane and Marcel are left alive. Liane’s magic is depleted and her sword skills aren’t up to much. There’s only one square I can attack the target from, so she waits on the sidelines. Marcel looses off an arro from afar… but it misses. It’s all up to Roger. The target had started with over three hundred hit points, he’s down to 37 now. Roger attacks him from behind… hits! But only does 29 points of damage.
I lose. If only I’d used Marcel’s Sniper Shot skill. It does very little damage, but it always hits. I should have used that, but I just didn’t think. I assumed the normal attack would hit. I shouldn’t have.
That arrow’s going to haunt me.
Jeanne D’Arc (PSP)
Oct 5th
Well, last time I played I’d just started a level I thought I’d never be able to do. As it turns out, it was really very easy and I did it first time.
This may sound obvious, but the trick was just to go for the objective, which was to kill a specific enemy unit. So instead of clearing out all the units before him, I just got to him as quickly as I could and threw everything I had at him. On the way I just kept healing, rather than attacking the other units, so managed to keep everybody alive and healthy.
Pretty obvious stuff, really, like I said. I missed out on all the lovely EXP and bonus items I’d have got from killing everyone on the field, but that’s a small price to pay for victory.
However, now I’ve got another battle straight after that one, with no way to return to the World Map and level up or buy supplies before the fight. Gulp.
Halloween (Movie)
Oct 4th
I don’t usually talk about movies here, but I’m really baffled by the reception to Rob Zombie’s Halloween and I feel the need to redress the balance somewhat. It’s been sneaked out in the UK with no notice (a week and a half before it was eventually released it still didn’t have a confirmed release date that I could find), minimal publicity and no reviews. It’s got an exceptionally poor rating of 25% on rottentomatoes.com and the IMDB score is a reasonably-okay-but-not-great 6.1.
The reason I’m baffled is that it’s clearly a nine out of ten movie. (And it’s not that I can see any reason to mark it down from a ten, a nine just feels better.) The only way I can see people not liking the movie is if they were never going to like the movie.
Okay, if you don’t like boobies and/or blood, then you won’t like the movie. But then your criticisms are of horror movies, not of this movie.
If you don’t think movies should ever be remade then, well, maybe this will change your mind. The remake of The Wicker Man wasn’t a bad movie because it was a remake of a classic movie, it was because it was a quite incredibly awful remake of a classic movie.
I’m sure I’ll be pulled over by the movie thought police for saying this, but the original Halloween isn’t without its problems. The main one being that it drags. Zombie’s version never does. He’s made the story from the original movie the second half of his version and filled the first half with more back story for lil’ Michael and family. It’s a decision that works well. Michael Myers was never a character whose mystique came from his history. We knew a lot about him in the original movie and now we know more. As well as being interesting in its own right, this allows the second half of the movie to move along at a cracking pace. It’s not all super-fast quick cuts, though. Rob Zombie is a talented director, who’s as adept at using stillness and easy listening as fast motion and loud rock.
It’s interesting, it’s tense, it’s scary and it walks the fine line between horror and comedy that Zombie seems to have chosen as his own particular path. A lot of people seem to have missed that in quite spectacular fashion. You may be able to get through without laughing out loud if you’re particuarly stone-faced, but I don’t see how you’d get through without craking a smile. It does, I’ll admit, settle down on the horror side of the divide for the majority of the second half, but until then it’s one funny film and isn’t without amusing moments even near the end.
In a sense, I feel that Zombie’s movies are for healthy people. They may sound odd to some, filled as they are with guts, screaming and death, but my theory is that you need to have a well-balanced mind to be able to appreciate all the dark shades he uses. The comedy in his movies is often very, very black, but it should be easily discernable if you’re open to it. Halloween is on another level to his earlier movies, though, I think. He seems to have toned down the scattershot approach of House of a Thousand Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects. Enjoyable as they both were, they didn’t hang together nearly as well as this movie.
And to top everything off Halloween’s sprinkled with appearances by Zombie regulars, Brad Dourif and the mighty Malcolm McDowell in a big, crunchy role.
As I said earlier, if you don’t like modern horror then, no, you probably won’t like this, but Halloween is on another level other recent makes, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, and there’s more story and life to it than the likes of Saw and other gorno features.
It’s the masterpiece of the current wave of post-post-modern, seventies-influenced horror movies, it’s actually better than Carpenter’s original and it sure as hell deserves far better than it’s got.
Sin & Punishment (Wii)
Oct 3rd
Bah. I spent ages last night deleting loads of games so I could fit this on to my Wii, only to find that my brain can’t handle the controls at all. Seems I can’t aim with the left sitck, for one thing – half the time my brain wants the controls inverted, the rest of the time it doesn’t, so vertical aiming is lottery for me. And moving using buttons with my right hand feels very odd. And firing with the left trigger is very uncomfortable indeed after a while.
I’ll try it again, but I’m not hopeful that I’ll be able to get anything out of this, which is very unfortunate. More of a Stretch Panic than a Gunstar Heroes for me right now.
If I used smilies I’d use a big old sad face here to show my disappointment.
Race Driver: Create & Race (DS)
Oct 3rd
Just had a very quick go on this sat at my desk. Went straight to the track creator, made a track, tested it, saved it. All very easy to do, though I did keep overwriting bits I’d already laid down and having to redo sections. Only place I could easily find to race it was in Simulation mode, so I did that. Handling felt a lot weightier than in the testing mode. I got a couple of cautions for careless driving, but easily pulled away from the pack.
Graphics are DS-nasty, with pixels and pop-up galore, but they’re pretty clear and are nice and smooth, which is more important than eye candy.
It definitely seems to be the best car-based racing game on the DS by a mile, based on this quick go, but I’m not sure based on this if it can compete with my favourite PSP racers – the PSP version of TOCA is awesome, then there’s OutRun, Sega Rally, Ridge Racers, etc. – but the track designer gives it a different kind of appeal. It’s amazing how much the (pretty random) track I made felt like a proper race track. It’s really very well done indeed and could give this real long-term appeal for me.
Halo 3 (360)
Oct 1st
Started the evening with some Team Slayer action, which was good fun. I did okay, generally, though I was rubbish at Rockets on Narrows.
Then played through level one of the campaign on Heroic difficulty. Well, some of it. I still wasn’t done after an hour and so had to save and quit. Good fun and very satisfying, but it’s really a bit beyond my skill level.
Sega Rally (PSP)
Sep 30th
I’ve made my way through a few championships now and my first impressions seem to be pretty much spot on.
I’m still not entirely sure how to maximise my speed around corners, especially in the Apline stages. I really think I need to play with sound on for a while, because the tyre sounds will probably give a little bit of extra feedback.
The PSP really has some great racing games. Ridge Racer, OutRun, TOCA and now this. (I still dream of a re-release of OutRun with a decentg framerate, though.)
Halo 3 (360)
Sep 29th
Today, I made my peace with level eight. It still wasn’t great, but by taking things more slowly I died less and didn’t get lost so much. It’s not up to the standards of the other levels and it’s much too long, but it’s not as bad as I thought.
Level nine, the final level, was just plain awesome. To both the extreme and the max.
And that was the end. I remembered to wait through the credits to see the final cutscene, and was very glad I did, as it explained something that confused me in the pre-credits cutscene.
Overall opinion of the single-player campaign? Well, I’m sure you can guess. It’s brilliant.
Then, of course, there’s multiplayer. I played three matches in Basic Training and actually won one of them. And not by a little. By a lot. The next match I came dead last in, but I had my moment of victory.
After that I decided to go back to the single player, with scoring turned on this time. I didn’t expect to see anyone, but someone on my friends list joined me. Not sure who they are, really, being a slightly random name, but we played through the first half of the first mission in complete silence and then they quit. Why I didn’t say anything, I don’t know. I’m regretting it now. But I was just confused at first at the fact that there was another player with me, which I hadn’t expected, and as the silence grew it became more difficult to break. I really want to try it with some talking friends sometime.
Clive Barker’s Jericho Demo (360)
Sep 29th
This is a squad-based FPS, which seems to be set in a crumbling castle or citadel of some sort populated by bondage-tinged horrors. It’s difficult to tell, as it’s just about the darkest game ever. Very atmospheric, but it’s really quite annoying. I took to using one character’s fire bomb move just to light the place up, rather than kill anything. Still, it’s good fun, if short.
If this came out in a February or a March I’d be cautiously interested, but post-Halo and pre-Orange Box and Mario Galaxy it’s really going to get lost. It’s on my “possibly pick up for under a tenner in the sales” list.
Sega Rally (PSP)
Sep 28th
I’ve just spent half my lunch hour going testing this out. At first it felt very odd, as the handling isn’t the same as the 360 version, leaning very slightly further towards the real world than that version. If it rates an eleven out of ten on the ridiculous-arcade-handling-meter on the 360 then it gets a nine on the PSP.
It also doesn’t seem to have the same track deformation technology as its big brother, but it’s still a great achievement. The framerate seems solid, the pop-up is limited to objects a very, very long way away and there are even some persistant objects that can get spread out over the track during the race, such as tyres, rocks and fenceposts. (Well, it is a Bugbear game, after all.)
I started off doing a few races in Quick Race mode, getting used things. I found that the d-pad works better than the nub and the wobbling bonnet-cam view is better than the default chase-cam view and was ready to get stuck in, so it was on to the first Championship. I won the first two races with ease, but the third and final race was on ice and snow and I only managed to finish third due to a terrible first lap.
Overall, I’m very happy with the game. I probably should have waited until this evening to play it, because now I’ll be itching to get back all afternoon while I’m working. Somehow web design has lost its allure.
