InvertY.com
A Gaming Diary
Sonic and the Secret Rings (Wii)
Mar 1st
First impressions, then.
Short version: it’s good, really quite good.
Long version: read on.
It takes a while. It jumps into a six-hour (approx. figure) cut scene before letting you play and when you do… oh, it’s not too good. After Excite Truck it feels slow, clunky and just weighted all wrong. Sonic starts off very slowly and only gets up to high speeds after a good long time and only if you don’t hit any obstacles, which you do. There are a lot tutorial levels and, really, I felt like I’d wasted my £27.99 while playing them.
Then the first level proper starts and everything you learned actually becomes useful. You start to level up and get new powers, such as increased acceleration. There are twists on different levels, such as having to avoid breaking jars. (No, really.) There are different collectables and medals to get hold of, giving the promise of replayability. Speed boosts help keep things moving. And it doesn’t hurt that it looks absolutely lovely.
Gradually, like Sonic’s initial acceleration, it grew on me. It hasn’t yet reached the heights of excitement that Excite Truck gives you from the first second. Oddly for a Sonic game it feels slightly more deliberate than that and it relies even more on the memorisation of stages. Sometimes you can get caught up against an obstacle and it grinds to a halt. But that’s your fault and the game is genuinely good fun and addictive – I kept failing a level in Dinosaur Jungle today and never once felt like giving up, I always wanted to beat it.
It’s a genuinely, actually, shockingly good 3D Sonic game.
But, Lord, I miss Chao Garden.
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…
Crackdown (360)
Feb 27th
More searching for agility orbs. More failure. I did find a fair few secret orbs, but the others are proving most elusive.
Kororinpa (Wii)
Feb 27th
It’s like Monkey Ball, only without the monkeys.
And, so far, a fair bit easier, though not quite the cakewalk I was epxecting based on online discussion.
Excite Truck (Wii)
Feb 26th
Well, that was weird.
My truck started refusing to turn right. I thought the controller might be broken, until I started paying attention to what I was doing. Instead of tilting the controller to turn, I was rotating it horizontally. I have no idea why I suddenly started doing that, but I found myself having to retrain my brain to tilt instead of turn and so ended up getting the worst scores I’ve ever got while playing the game.
By the end of the session I was still lacking confidence, but I was starting to play reasonably well again. Hopefully when I next play my brain won’t try anything stupid like that again.
Very bizarre.
Crackdown (360)
Feb 26th
Had the day off work, so put in another good few hours. Got everything up to 4-star ranking and got 498 out of 500 agility orbs. I just can’t find the final two. They must exist, but I have no idea where. I’ve gone all round the map several times. I don’t know how I could have missed them.
Excite Truck (Wii)
Feb 25th
I love being rubbish at games.
I’ve been trying to get S ranks on the SIlver Cup and I’ve been finding it immensely fun but really very tricky. I’m getting great value.
Kid Icarus (Wii)
Feb 25th
Nope, still not to the end of the second stage. I can’t even get as far as I could this morning.
I hate being rubbish at games.
New Adventure Island (Wii)
Feb 25th
I’ve decided not to capitalise “Wii” in my headers any more. I’m sure you care.
Anyway, I beat the boss at the end of stage 1-4 after a few goes and moved on to stage 2-1, after a bizarre fan dance cut scene. If my wife hadn’t seen it too I wouldn’t have believed it.
