InvertY.com
A Gaming Diary
Tomb Raider: Legend
May 13th
Finally got the full game.
Oh dear.
It’s not got worse since the demo, but I’m not going to enjoy this unless I can force myself to not scour every level for treasures. I really need to do a A-Z run through first, before I spend hours looking in corners for stuff.
I spent over half of my time on the first level just trying to get a treasure I couldn’t reach and getting increasingly annoyed. Got it in the end, with the help of GameFAQs. (I was sort of doing the right thing… but not quite.) I never use GameFAQs, except for bosses!
Tetris DS
May 13th
New Standard/Marathon best of 92,287 and got up to level 12.
Lots of people say this is too easy. I’d have to disagree. All the extras just give me something to grab on to, not invicibility.
Pokemon Trozei
May 13th
What better thing to do when waiting for the Cup Final to kick off than beat the final boss in a Pokemon-themed puzzle game?
Well, not so final as I’ve now unlocked a hard mode.
The Guardian reviewed this game today and completely slagged it off. Extreme wrongness there.
Brain Age
May 13th
Thirty-four today. It didn’t recognise some of my “red”s and gave me the bloody word memory game again, so that’s not too bad.
SiN Episodes: Emergence
May 13th
Finished!
Took maybe five hours. Round about that long, anyway. Maybe a touch less.
Yeah, it works for me. Five hours of great entertainment, without any game-extending rubbish tacked on, for a budget price. It’s my kind of game.
The next episode preview at the end looks a bit rubbish, actually, but I’ll definitely give it a go.
SiN Episodes: Emergence
May 12th
Well, I’ve spent an hour and a half or so with this evening after some Crossing action with P’anther. Which reminds me, I haven’t done my brain training yet and today is now yesterday, technically. Or today’s tomorrow. I’m not sure. Anyway, I’ve missed a day’s brain training according to the clock. Oops.
Anyway, sorry, Sin Episodes: Emergence. I’m trying to think of a way to describe how good it is without going overboard and definitely without damning with faint praise. It’s a very traditional, linear first person shooter. Some nice physics and a nicely accurate weapon in the pistol and enemies that don’t take millions of hits to kill. It seems to be very finely tuned and it’s definitely very playable.
It’s not jaw-dropping or amazing or the best thing ever, but it is very good fun. I don’t feel like asking for any more than that.
Hitman: Blood Money Demo
May 12th
Ah ha!
A few days ago I was saying that I couldn’t quite connect with the Hitman games as they didn’t give me the feedback I wanted and didn’t quite understand why some things work and some don’t. Well, Blood Money looks to improve on that by quite a long way, due to a couple of relatively small changes.
Firstly, there’s a proper tutorial, which is the demo. This takes you through a linear hit step by step. Incredibly annoying for people who’ve played all the other games in the series to death, no doubt, but incredibly useful to me. Should even be good if I go back to playing Contracts.
It’s possible to get things wrong in the demo, despite it being a tutorial.
The first time I played I jumped down a hole before I should have done and alerted a load of people I was meant to sneak past, prompting a gun fight. (The demo is perfectly able to carry on when you bugger things up, which is nice.) Later, I had to take someone as a human shield and take down some guards in a room. I got my gun out, grabbed the human shield and walked him into the next room. Everything was going fine until I pulled the trigger and my gun made an empty clicking noise. Oh. Oh dear. That extra gunfight had used up all my ammo. I died and had to restart, but it was a great way to go. Sometimes it’s when things go wrong that you real start to fall for games. And that was one of those times.
So, yes, the tutorial is the first change. The second is the addition of two extra bars. One shows how visible you are, one shows how suspicious people are of you. Okay, so sometimes you might not be sure why someone sees through your disguise, but you’ll get a warning as you walk closer to them. Times when things go wrong won’t come out of nowhere quite as much.
Sometimes it’s still difficult to see why characters react the way they do, mind. I, in disguise, had to walk past a guard. He didn’t bat an eyelid as I walked past, opened a door and walked through. However, as soon as I shut the door behind me he decided I was up to no good and rushed in, guns blazing. Very odd. If the door had been open before I walked through that would make some sense as it would like I was hiding something. Still, in a game like this I suppose you’ve got to expect a few moments of that sort here and there. In fact, testing those sort of reactions is part of the whole game. It’ll make more sense when I can save mid-mission.
Anyway, I’m thoroughly looking forward to Blood Money now and would preorder it right now if, er, I hadn’t already preordered. Having to do the demo again will be a pain, but it’ll give me a nice way to compare the Xbox graphics in this demo to the 360 graphics in the full game.
Sensible Soccer Demo
May 12th
Bought the Official Xbox mag just for this.
I’m not disappointed. Well, if it’s final code, I’ll be slightly disappointed. The sound effects need some work – bigger roar when goal goes in! – and the automatic player switching goes mental at some points when it can’t decide who to pick.
But it’s simple, fast and I can actually play it! The demo must be set on the easiest difficulty, because I was booting goal after goal in. Makes a pleasant change from the FIFAs and Pro Evos of the world, where I seem to have to play for five hours before I even get a shot on target.
Hooray!
