More Colin McRae Dirt

Since my last entry, which I admit was a while ago now, I have played some Batman: Arkham Asylum (I started my second play-through of this and it's still fantastic), quite a bit of Assassin's Creed Brotherhood (which has grown on me and is also excellent, but still not as good as AC II) but, to my own surprise the only game I want to write about is Colin McRae Dirt.

I last wrote about this title in this entry:

http://therubbishgamer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/more-uncharted-drakes-fortune-and-colin.html

I finished playing through the career section on Clubman difficulty (the second easiest of 5) and decided to spend some time with the Championship part of the game, which is all rallying and much more in keeping with the earlier Colin McRae games.  It feels like discovering the game for the first time.

I have switched off the annoying co-driver and am relying on the minimap at the top of the screen.  It means having to look away from the road occasionally but also forces you to concentrate harder and so might improve performance.

I did the long version of the European Championship on Clubman and won it.  This in unlocked the International Championship which I decided to do at a harder difficulty level (Amateur - which is 3rd of 5) and got found out.

The first of these (the European) was one of the best driving experiences I ever had with a game.  I felt constantly on the ragged edge but just in control and it was exhilarating.  The driving is beautifully simulated and I feel as if I have mastered the steering slightly more since complaining that it was too sensitive last time.  I will keep persisting at Amateur level and hopefully unlock the Global Championship this evening.

Dirt 2 is now on my Amazon wish list and Xmas might be too long to wait.

LittleBigPlanet

Since I last reported (a disgracefully long time ago) I have played Hitman 2: Silent Assassin and failed to be either silent or an assassin, failing to complete the first mission after many, many attempts.  It says on Steam that I have played 6 hours of the game and I still no nothing about mission 2.

I have also had a go at Burnout on the PS2 and have found it frustrating.  All but 3 tracks are locked until you make some progress and doing that is tough.  There is an event to take part in which involves 3 races.  I can't see a way of saving after getting a good result in the first and so if you don't finish in the top three in three consecutive races you are back to square one.  The real frustration is that not only do you have to do well in the race overall, you also have to reach timing points within a certain limit; the time you get to reach the next depends partly on how you did in reaching the last.  The most annoying thing about adding this complication is that the same demands do not seem to apply to your AI rivals.  I have been timed out when in second place before now!  It is hard to believe that this game was made by the creators of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.

I have played a lot of LittleBigPlanet and it is my current obsession.  I have now finished the main game in single player and am even tempted to download some additional content.  My lasting impression of the game is of loving it but I spent most of the time swearing in annoyance.  The penultimate level was the worst and I spent hours attempting it repeatedly before I finally got to the end.  I seem to learn only slowly the best way of doing each part.  It took me so long to do this level that a section which had been my nemesis to start with seemed easy by the end because I had then passed it so many times to get to some new nightmare further on.

I have spent most of the last two evenings creating my own level.  It takes plenty of work but is rewarding.  Most of the best bits have come from my happening to notice properties of the game's materials or devices which are not their primary ones.  For example, a moving spike trap is lethal if Sackboy gets caught under it but the top can be used as a platform to bounce off to reach high places.

Another thing I've done for the first time is create an item of my own and I've even put it in a bubble in my level for others to win, assuming I ever publish the level.  It's not a very good item but everyone has to start somewhere and I intend to follow it up with others.

Now that you can get a PS3 for £160 I would recommend LittleBigPlanet to all.  I think that the sale of this cheap machine is probably a good commercial move by Sony, but I am surprised that they have made it.  With this machine having no hard drive to speak of (12GB) is it the console for the download era?  Should I feel encouraged by the implication that Sony are still in favour of boxed games?  I am not too impressed that the new 500GB model comes in the same cheap and cheerful casing as the lower priced version.  The previous PS3 slim models seem to be being withdrawn from sale so these two new ones might soon be the only ones available.  If Sony believe that the PS3 is still the best console in town (and I think it probably is) then why present it in this clunky, plastic fashion?

I have received the copy of Tomb Raider Anniversary for the PS2 which I bought extremely cheaply on ebay (most PS2 games are very cheap and I do like a bargain).  My memory of Tomb Raider Legend is of repeatedly not being able to reach the place I needed to be, so I expect I will have more annoyance to write about next time.

Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion and Grand Theft Auto III

I have been playing Oblivion again recently and have enjoyed it more this time than when first started it a few months ago.

I went back to it after reading Tom Francis's fantastic diaries about his adventures in Skyrim in PC Gamer magazine.  They made me smile from beginning to end and I recommend them to all.  They are in issues 243-245 of that excellent mag.

These pieces made me think that in games of this kind, if they are well made, you can play your own game in your own way.  TF had played as an illusionist in Skyrim and had made rules for himself about only using illusions and no other magic or weapons.  A tough a ask.  I decided to lay down my own rule; less tough but difficult to keep to.  I would not help anyone.

I had made up my mind from an early stage that I would be an nasty piece of work and previously when playing games and trying to be evil I have found myself slipping in to the role of helpful citizen because badness goes against the grain (aren't I boring).  This time it would be different.  I would help no distressed individuals with their stupid everyday problems.  Sadly, almost all side-quests involve doing exactly that.  I am seriously considering amending it to "I will not help anyone except for a named reward", but I feel slightly as if I will just be playing the exact same game as anyone else.  We'll see how it goes.

I have bought GTA III for the PS2 and am enjoying it.  It is slightly harder than I remember (having played some of it on the PC in the dim and distant).  I have had to repeat all quests, except the obviously just story-telling ones, on more than one occasion.  There has been one race so far and the number of times I tried it and lost was miserable.

Usually I came a distant fourth out of four.  This would be either because of wrong turns taken or my car getting so badly damaged that it caught fire and exploded - or a combination of these two.  My competitors were insanely aggressive and seemed to care far more about knocking me out of the race than winning it themselves.  They all drove sports cars which seemed never to crash and burn however stupidly they drove them.  I had to drive whatever I could find.

The large charcoal car of the Mafia guys had a high top speed but being heavy was slow to reach it and awkward in cornering; the Stallions of the Hispanic gangs accelerated well and were fast but lived up to their name and were a nightmare to control.  In the end I usually drove the most common type of taxi which reached an okay speed and handled well.

On many attempts I did not see the finish line and for ages did not know how long the race was or where it ended as only the next two checkpoints appeared on the map.  I just saw a message appear on the screen about 3 minutes in saying " You couldn't win a raffle, loser".  Then an occasion came when I was actually in second place on a long straight, just behind the leader and gaining on him (I was in the charcoal car this time).  I realised that we were approaching the place where the race had started and it struck me that of course this must be the end.  On the map the next checkpoint was straight ahead   Might I actually win this time?  Suddenly, my rival took a sharp right turn and, not knowing this part of the course I followed him.  I knew my mistake immediately.  I had seen the checkpoint ahead.  I knew this was a straight road.  I was in a car park and while the other car was recovering quickly from his error, I was floundering.  I came fourth.

In the end I did win one.  I blew up a taxi and had to switch to another car during that victorious race but I didn't loose first place while I was doing it.  It was almost worth the misery and squeaking impotent rage of all those previous attempts for the glory and joy of that final one.

Simspons Hit & Run

Grand Theft Auto Springfield (as it should be called) is a delight.  I have been playing it on the PS2 for much of the last week and have been having fun the whole time.

The game is supprisingly challanging which is a bit of a relief and suggests that the creators wanted this to be a genuine game, not just a cash in.

There are many other ways in which it is clear that effort and love has gone into the project.  The voices are acted by the real performers from the show and the phrases and speeches they are given to say are absolutley in keeping with their characters.  Most of the off the cuff phrases are straight from episodes of the show.

The parts of the game I've played so far (which are the first two levels and feature Homer and Bart), have involved mostly driving challanges.  In Homer's, the plot was not entirely convincing.  He was trying to uncover a plan by Mr Burns and usually I would have though him far too lazy to do this and would have expected Bart and Lisa to do it.  Still Lisa's section is starting next so perhaps she will take it up where he left off.

The plot of Bart's section was a bit random and, on reflection, I think plot might be the area that lets the game down but for gameplay fun it is unmissable.  You can buy lots of different cars to own yourself and pretty easily swap between them or just climb into any vehicle on the street.  The visuals might look bright and blocky but the cars have their own characteristics and the the game has plenty of subtelties behind it's cartoonish exterior.

When I played Resident Evil Code Veronica X (see previous entry), I wondered if the PS2 had perhaps not been a huge leap forward from the PS1 but in the three years RECVX and Simpsons Hit and Run it seems that leaps forward were made in the way games played.  In this game the camera follows the character as they bound dynamically around the game world, swinging into line behind them when they change direction, and the right stick can be used to look around though 360 degrees.  In other words, the controls are like the controls of a modern 3rd person game.

There are boonus missions and races you can take part in and items to collect and loads to do and everyone should visit the game version of Springfield.

Resident Evil - Code Veronica X

After a few days of playing RECVX its mechanisms are very apparent.  You find one key or item in one area which allows you to access the next and so on.  In any wider section there are always rooms left locked which you know you will have to come back to and unlock once you have found the right item further on.  Along the way you have to kill zombies and other monsters and eat plants and use first aid spray to prevent you from dying.

None of this transparency prevents Code Veronica X from being engaging.  It did take a while for me to get accustomed to the controls: the character rotates left and right with a corresponding push of the left stick, and walks forward or back (from their own perspective) with a likewise movement of the same stick.  Backwards walking looks a lot like Moonwalking.  For a long time I just expected to see Claire (Redfield, the protagonist at the start of the game), walk up the screen when I pushed up, go right for right etc. and was frustrated when it didn't happen.

I have now just about got used to the way things actually are and as have become completely immersed in the game; for days not thinking about other games I might like to play   I even had a dream about being hemmed on all sides by zombies and not being able to get away.

I am now at an awkward stage in the game.  I think I have explored all areas which I can currently access except one.  To get to that one I have to go through a room where there is a puzzle to solve to reveal a secret door.  As soon as the hidden door opens a monster leaps into the room through the window) and attacks Claire.  She is already in the worst possible state of health (except dead), has no health giving items and there are none more to be picked up anywhere.

This monster is pretty tough and if it hits her once she goes down.  I cannot keep her out of the way of it for long enough to kill it so the only escape is to get past it without being hit and get through the secret door.  This is do-able.  There is a blue plant just through the door which Claire does have time to stop and pick up but she's got to be pretty quick as the monster can follow her or even whip his elasticated arm through the opening to kill her.  She can then progress through another door and up some stairs which lead to an area patrolled by two of the same type of monster.  What waits for Claire if she get through this next area I cannot report.  She has not much more ammo than she has health and her situation looks grim.

I have recently read in the manual that my ranking at the end of the game will be based partly on how many retries I have used (you retry after you die).  This section has presumably made my ranking quite a lot worse.

Assassins Creed Brotherhood and Crysis

Well, I've been neglecting my duties again.

I played about half of Assassin's Creed II before the AC Brotherhood that I had ordered arrived in the post, by which time I was a bit Assassined out and wanted a break so I've played some Crysis which I got for £2.49 in a Steam sale and was a total bargain! It has beautiful scenery splendidly rendered and the gameplay is fantastic.  Playing it does not actually give me any pleasure because I die all the time but if you are semi-competent at games you won't have this problem so please, please play this: just remember to save every time you get through a group of enemies!

Despite all the killing (of me), the world of Crysis is a glorious place.

Crysis happens in North Korea where the army make up the early enemies.  My progress has been so slow that I have not fought any alien types yet but there have been distinct signs of creepy things to come.

Having played some Spacechem and not been as immediately hooked by it as I remember being in the past I have now started Brotherhood, and I have numerous complaints.

Ezio will not always defend himself properly when I tell him to.  I am aware that stronger guards can get through his defences but even weaker ones seem to hit him sometimes - it seems to happen more often at an earlier point in any fight.  When it happens I think, well, perhaps he is not engaged in combat so I press L1 to engage and he immediately becomes unengaged and is attacked from all sides.  This process gets me extremely riled and so I lose all control and have been beaten senseless and forced to take 3 bottles of medicine all of which I strongly resent before I get into the fight.

I do approve of the new class of guard which is tough and did not appear in AC II.  The fights did need to be made harder - though only by fair means.

The other way the controls have let me down is that I can often not persuade Ezio to attack when he is not yet engaged in combat.  He might be strolling across a rooftop and be a dead cert' to slash at an archer before the guard even sees him, never mind shoots him, but I am likely to press square four times to no avail and Ezio will have been shot twice before he decides to retort.  I don't mind if he slashes at the air and misses, I just want a sign that he's paying attention to what I want him to do.  I have had no problems with the controller in other games, so it's not that.

I have now bought Hitman 2 for £1.49 in a Steam sale and am pretty curious about that but I am distracted from it by another new purchase which arrived in the post today.  It is a PS2.

I have several 2nd hand PS2 games which I am selling and I can now play / test them.  The first I'm trying out is Resident Evil Code Veronica X.  I have only played the first couple of minutes so far and am already swearing at the old style view and controls but I am determined to give the game a chance.

That's about all the news I've got for now and this time I absolutely promise to write more sooner.

Assassin's Creed 2 Yet Again!?

I thought I'd finished this game.

(Please see my previous entries about this game which came in December 2011 and April 2012.)

Well I did finish it but it's so good that I kept thinking about it and have gone back to it's beautiful depiction of Renaissance Italy.  I wiped my previous saves and started from the beginning.  I was worried that my trophies might also get wiped but no such problems.  I looked through to see which ones I did not get and was amazed at the ease of some of them.  They were just for things which I did not attempt much.  One was for hiding five bodies in piles of leaves.

I am going to try harder to find feathers this time, and to find as many treasure chests as I can without the aid of treasure maps.  I think I got fifty-something feathers last time so I would like to try to get at least 70 this time, though that does not sound too ambitious now as I type it.  Let's say at least 80.

While I has playing I had the thought that I would be sorry if I did not play this game at least five times in total.  Then I realised that by "in total" I actually meant "before I die".  This made my think two things.  The first was, will I really be playing this or any other game when I'm an old man?  Of course, I don't know the answer.  Perhaps I will have terrible arthritis and not be able to play.  I might even have gone blind.  The second thing I thought was: am I measuring out what is left of my life and imagining what I can do in the time.  I am only 40.  It is extremely plausible that a man of my generation might live to be 80.  Isn't it a bit soon to be planning ahead like this?

Since I last wrote an entry I have finished Red Dead Redemption which was great except for the end.  The event to which the plot had been leading happened in a cut scene and then the game just banged on for w while with some really boring tasks to do until another significant event happened (which this time felt crowbared in).  It was possible to continue playing after that but only to finish off any unfinished tasks and I didn't feel too incentivised so I left it.  But I don't want to end on a sour note because I had great fun with this game and would recommend it too all.

I went away to a family wedding and talked about games with my ten year old cousin once removed who was of the confused opinion that the Xbox 360 was better than the PS3.  That naivety aside I was not sure how to feel about the fact that he had played many games which were rated 15 or over.  I suppose it is really his parents decision but there are things in some of the games he mentioned which I would not want to think of a ten year old being exposed to on a regular basis.  Still, he seems to be a normal, emotionally healthy and even quite sensitive kid so I suppose these games have not corrupted him.

I have started playing Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing lately and it's great fun with plenty of content but does my head in because of the high speed and high levels of camara movement so I can only play for a bit at a time.

I have bought both Supreme Commander Forged Alliance and SpaceChem with its DLC when they were on offer on Steam and have played quite a bit of Forged Alliance already and it is great and though I have not played SpaceChem yet I did play a demo of it which came with an copy of PC Gamer a while ago and I know it will take up days of my life.

I bought Rage cheaply in the supermarket and although I do not like to pass judgement too directly on games I was dissapointed by this one.  It is like Borderlands with the fun taken out.  Everyone in the towns tells you what a great guy you are (the most wince-making thing that ever happens in any game and it happens to excess, here), and then you go out and shoot some bandits.  Repeat.  The vehicles drive quite nicely, though.

I'll write again sooner this time.

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts again.

When I play this game I can't believe that I have still not bought or played CoH Tales of Valour.

This is a link to a previous entry I made about this game:

http://therubbishgamer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/company-of-heroes-opposing-fronts.html

Since I bought the new PC, even though I have signed back in to the same Relic account, I cannot continue the campaign from where I left off, which was near the end, and I have to start from the beginning.  It doesn't seem too much like a chore as I can only remember it vaguely, though there are one or two battles which I remember as being a real pain.  I am definitely playing better than I did first time round.

A burning house in St Lo

The game is beautifully made with a lot of thought put into it.  The fact that even when I get hammered I don't feel hard done by makes me think that things are always working how they should and I am being given every chance to win, if only I wasn't such an idiot.

It would make the game more interesting if I did not play so slowly.  Some of the initial battles are almost unloseable, but it might still take me an hour to get around to making a serious assault on an enemy base, only to discover that it is actually quite vulnerable, and the enemy only seemed strong because the AI had taken a lot of territory and attacked my base boldly with almost everything it had.

There will be more of this played in the near future and I will be looking out for Tales of Valour in forthcoming Steam sales.

Resistance: Fall of Man

This is a Playstation only shooter and for £4.21 on ebay was a fantastic buy.

It is set in the UK.  Most of the soldiers our hero fights alongside are Brits but our hero is, of course, American:  the yanks come to our rescue in a game again - what a surprise.  Never mind, story and character rightly take second place to excellent shooting action.

The enemies are the Chimera.  I'm not completely sure as to whether there is an extra-planetary influence at work, but I think that an infection turns humans into the humanoid type of this creature.  However, there are other kinds which are not at all human and which we see hatch from eggs at one stage.  I should probably pay more attention.

Explosions!

Visually, as the pictures show, the game tries to be in keeping with it's era.  It is set in the early 50s and the colour is largely washed out of the game world, leaving a gloomy but effective, sepia tinted look.

The very first part of the game was tough and I kept dying but after a short time two important things happened.  Firstly, I earned a skill point and after that any of the health bars (bottom right of the first picture), which were partially reduced would refill after a short pause without damage.  Secondly, I started to find health restoring serum about the game-world.  Playing on Medium difficulty, serum and ammo are both scattered very liberally and I have only had one low ammo crisis.

I played through the game for quite a while, including a whole section set in Grimsby, without a single death.  There was then a section set in Manchester and the difficulty level increased a bit but the first couple of deaths I experienced were still mainly down to my stupidity.

A not bad representation of Manchester Cathedral.

On reaching Manchester Cathedral the game gets harder still and death goes back to being an occasional feature of it (if you're me).  There are still plentiful supplies of the necessary equipment for survival, though.

So far new weapons and enemies have been introduced throughout and this has kept the game interesting and extremely playable.

Lost its Edge?

I was disappointed to read the article in Edge 243 about the forthcoming Tomb Raider game.  It agonised at length about two brief moments in an E3 trailer where you could see directly down Lara's top.

I watched the trailer today and could just about identify these moments but they were so brief that I doubt they were put there for titillation.

There was also much wailing and gnashing of teeth about Lara being portrayed as weak and a victim at the start of the trailer.  Even since E3 2011 this has been touted as a game in which Lara makes the transition from being an ordinary girl to being a strong woman capable of overcoming adversity.

For Gods sake Lara, put a jumper on.

There is an interview with art director Brian Horton and all he is asked about is the way Lara is portrayed.  I think this is a shame as the games jungle scenery looks great and this might have been a chance to learn more about it.

Just over the page there is an article about Far Cry 3.  In the second paragraph is a reference to Hitman Absolution's "'sexy' nun murdering spree".  This also refers to an E3 trailer and I have also watched this trailer today.  The scene is not the one sided massacre that Edge's description might have us believe.  The "nuns" instigate the fight by firing an RPG into Agent 47s Motel Room.  He does then kill some of them silently from behind but then a fight breaks out and the sisters fight back viciously.  47 is the eventual winner but it is not a one sided affair.

I find all this apologetic squeamishness a bit tedious.  The same Edge issue contains a great piece by regular columnist Steven Poole railing against censorship in games, but I can't help feeling that the magazine as a whole is coming across as being against censorship in theory but a lot more cautious about specific cases.  In a different issue it banged on at length about portrayals of women it didn't approve of in Saints Row the Third and gave a 6/10 rating to a game which was widely applauded elsewhere.

There is one other thing about Edge which is starting to wear me down: the endless analysing to the nth degree of the social, cultural and economic significance of games.  I love games and I can't stand obtuse games journalism (of which there is loads) but sometimes I just want to get excited and blow things up.  I have bought PC gamer this month and I think I might be sticking with that from now on.

More Uncharted Drakes Fortune and Colin McRae Dirt

I was looking forward to a weekend of playing Drakes Fortune and was surprised to finish it on Friday Night.

I think that the linear nature of the game takes the player through more quickly, even though there is plenty of content.  In an open world game I spend so much time messing about and exploring that the total playing time is extended massively.

The more I played, the more prescribed the climbing and jumping sequences felt.  I am going to give them a bit of credit, though.  There is a sequence in the game where Drake has to jump from place to place inside a temple along a particular route to reach two levers which give him access to the next area.  It is a lot like several sequences in Assassin's Creed II.  There are no comparable section in the first AC game, and Drakes Fortune pre-dates ACII by a year.  Though the Uncharted version was not so extravagant, and although there have been a lot of ledge hanging and swinging and jumping sections in plenty of games, not least the Tomb Raider games, I can't help feeling that this specific one might well have served as inspiration for the game which followed it.

Drakes Fortune was paced very well.  None of the sections were too long or short and the peripheral characters never tagged along for so that they got annoying.  The acting performances and script were pretty respectable.  Although I was surprised that the game finished when it did it seems with retrospect as though I had a full experience with lots of different types of challenge in contrasting environments.

I recommend that you play this game.  If you don't have a PS3, buy one and play this game.

This is a link to the previous entry I made about Colin McRae: Dirt:

http://therubbishgamer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/nothing-dirty.html

Playing Dirt this weekend has probably improved my opinion of it, though not of the co-driver calls which are inconsistent and sometimes far too last-minute.

This is what a car soon looks like if I'm allowed to drive it.

I am now trying all the different competitions in Career mode on Clubman; the second easiest difficulty.  I have started to fail to win some races and my average speed for my career has reduced.  I suspect that I am rushing too much and crashing more often as a result.

The steering controls are pretty sensitive.  On a narrow road in a rally section you are ill advised to pull the stick all the way to the left or right for more than a split second at any sort of speed as you will be unlikely to stay on the road.  The occasions when I've gone too much one way then over corrected and got into a prolonged cycle of weaving all over the road are too numerous to count.

You can see what this picture is.  I don't really need to write a caption.

The races are still fun and the OTT vehicles like buggys and trucks are fun to driver on the uneven roads provided.  The rally stages can seem a bit dull when mixed up with these races though, so purists might prefer Championship mode where Rallying is still dominant and each stage seems vital.

I am surprised that I have not bought Dirt 2 yet.  Another Dirt game (Showdown) is now out and it is nearly a year since I bought the PS3 and I am not catching up.  There are just so many games.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

This game arrived yesterday and I played solid, consecutive hours last night.  Progress has been varied.

My early impressions are mostly positive.  It is a pleasant change to play a game with a good cover and shoot system as well as fairly consistent climbing and jumping mechanics.  I do have some reservation about the latter and was sometimes frustrated by Nathan Drake's refusal to climb things which even I could get over when at other times he was mildly superhuman.  More annoying was his inconsistency of action when hanging from ledges.  He is a bit inclined to reach for the ledge he is supposed to be going to in response to a sideways push of the left stick, whether it is behind him or off to his right.

Wow!  The colours, man!

The game looks great.  It is from 2008 and the graphics are not really ahead of their time but the use of colour and scale is very effective and makes the player feel they are truly on an adventure and made me seriously wonder if it was possible to become an treasure hunter and explore the world for profit.  An idiotic thing to think but a good indicator of how the game took me somewhere.

I have to gripe slightly about one section where Drake had to pass along a wooden walkway.  The game was slowed initially so that I could only move him at a walking pace.  When he reached a certain wooden slat it became unstable and the game did the obvious thing; it took control away from me and made Nate stand knock kneed and stupid on the wonky beam.  It then passed control back unannounced and started to swing the camera angle round rapidly.  Drake could now run again but having to compensate for the constantly changing angle of vision was very awkward.

When the Camera settled I was looking at Drake front on, the opposite of the normal angle, and our hero had to run along the walkway as it turned right then left, from the viewers point of view, then at the end there was a jump which was close to the limit of Drakes capabilities.  The fact that this was done at speed and under pressure made hard enough but making the camera angle first changing then settling on an unfamiliar view seemed to be victimising the player.

You might guess from my annoyed tone that I died several times trying this bit.

Killing people in the game works perfectly well.  Dying while climbing and running jumping is very possible but dying in a shoot out is normally embarrassing.

The plot seems acceptable so far.  It slightly gives the impression that a conscious effort has been made to cram in certain elements.  The same type of elements that make Assassins Creed or Indiana Jones a hit.  Legendary treasures, ruthless bad guys who are also after them.  As these are the elements That make for a successful Blockbuster one cannot be too harsh on the developers who put them in.  Sadly, the clean cut Nate cannot be any of the hero's of those series.  However many bad guys he pops off with casual comments he will never be as ruthless as Altiair or Ezio and he could only dream of treating his heroine with Indy's amusing off-handedness.  The guy is just too clean cut.

For all that, I will be putting in just as many hours tonight as last night, and will be just as delighted when I find a silver statue of an animal; and I'll have to admit that sometimes when I fall, it's my fault.

GTI Racing

What I played of this game was not all that great.

The game was made in 2007 (according to Steam) which was the same year as Need For Speed Pro Street and there is no comparison between the graphics of GTI Racing, which are very much of the previous generation, and those of NFS PS, which has much more of the look of the current gen.  I appreciate that this game would not have had the same resources put into it as an NFS game and would have been cheaper at the time of launch.  Graphics are not a serious issue if the game is good otherwise, so I don't see this as a serious problem.

The car was not really going as fast as it appears.

The one thing that makes it fun is the Germanic sounding electro soundtrack which gives it a lively feel.  Sadly the driving itself lacks Germanic precision, with the cars' reactions to bumping into things or going over rough ground being sometimes imperfect, though not terrible.

In one race I was infuriated to cross the line first, have it acknowledged that I had come first on the results screen but on the next screen be awarded a bronze trophy and given the third place prize money.  Aaaaargh, the injustice!

The game's main problem is that most of the races were plain road races and these are a bit much of a muchness.  There is some drifting, which to start with I found impossible because I started with a rubbish car and it was hard to drift through a corner and maintain enough speed to do a good drift through the next one, the corners coming one after another.  There are also some races were you had to drive cross country from one column of light to another, then another etc.  These reminded me sharply of the races in Assassin's Creed II and are enjoyable and more challenging than some of the road races.

Car approaches power station.

My own performance seemed okay, but that might have been because the game was a bit easy.  I am not going to give myself scores out of 10 because it was hard to judge how well I was doing.  I might drop this feature altogether, as I started doing it a bit impulsively and I'm not crazy about it.  We'll see.

I don't know if or when I will go back to this game, but I had some fun playing it.

Need For Speed: Shift...again.

This is a link to the first entry I wrote about NFS Shift, back in January this year.

http://therubbishgamer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/need-for-speed-shift.html

Note that I have lazily used the same pictures for this entry as for the earlier one.

I have not been playing Lost Planet, as I said I would, but have played NFS: Shift incessantly since my last entry.  It is a lot more fun and less serious than I remembered it being; the demolition derby that I have now unlocked and raced being an example of this.

I have made progress in the game and have now tried almost all of the Tier 3 competitions.  They are pretty tough and the speed of the cars makes them hard to control.  Going back and trying the Tier 1 races after doing these I wonder how I ever had any problems.

I have made several new observations about the game.  The first is that the guy whose voice reminds you of a few blindingly obvious facts (like telling you to go at the start of the race) is annoying.  Another is that the loading times for the races are very long.  I've been playing Colin McRae Rally 2005 on the PC today and loading is almost instant.

There is tyre smoke in Shift.  This might seem like a small point but I saw an assessment of a trailer for the new F1 game and the person reviewing it pointed out that this would be the first F1 effort to feature smoke during wheel lock-ups, so Shift beat them by four years, though I'm sure other games did too.

See - just the same as before, only bigger.

The AI controls some cars very aggressively and I have often been the victim of what can only have been deliberate pushes off the road by an AI competitor.  I do not often watch touring car racing but I suspect that this would be illegal in the real thing and for that reason Shift is not as much of a simulator as I originally imagined it to be.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  You can get points towards your career progression by knocking others off the track and it's good fun to do so.  You can get points for all sorts of things; some are for precision racing and some are for aggression.  My experience so far tells me that the dark side is quicker and more seductive.

Although I imagine myself to have improved in this game I have only just won a minor badge for winning 20 races (that's races only, other contests like time-attack don't add to this).  The game has masses of different minor and major badges you can win for achieving simple goals or very difficult ones, as well as Playstation Trophies.

And so to my performance.  I am going to mark myself very low for intelligence because I don't look often enough at the mini-map and then I look at it for too long and crash.  This is not bad observation.  Observation is about noticing things which my or may not be there.  I know the map is there and that I need to use it but still don't because I'm an idiot.  Speed through the game is also poor because it requires good performance to unlock the next level and move on and I'm usually rubbish.

Speed through the game:  3

Intelligence:  2

Reactions and Accuracy: 5

Observation:  5

I seem to score myself lower every time.

I don't yet know what I will write about next time.  I am bidding for an Uncharted: Drake's Fortune on ebay but I probably won't have that till the end of the week.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine

I hate all reviewers!

That is an exaggeration, but I think mediocre reviews have caused this perfectly good game to be overlooked by too many gamers, and I feel really sorry for developers Relic who have an excellent reputation based on many of their other games and did not deserve to have it diminished because of this one.

The game takes the form of an over-the-shoulder shooter.  You are an Ultramarine and a fanatical worshipper of the Emperor, as are all Space Marines in all Warhammer 40,000 games.  The sinister religious fanaticism of these future humans gives an otherwise largely ridiculous game world a dark edge.  The vast engineered environments in which this game's battles take place also lend it real atmosphere.

Ultramarine looking at Warrior Titan.

The game is split into short chapters.  During the first two or three of these I thought it might be too easy (I was playing on the middle of three difficulty levels), but it quickly became much more of a challenge.  This is very much a corridor shooter and I think this might be one of the reasons for its middling reviews as this style is out of fashion with the experts, but it is a totally valid form for a game and the fact that this is continuous Ork-splattering fun excuses it entirely.

I was hoping that there would be some vehicle sections in the game as the Dawn of War games have loads of great vehicles in them.  So far there has been one part where you are effectively the gunner in the side door of a helicopter, but it was extremely short.  I have not reached the end of the game yet so I don't know if there will be any more.

I suspect this game game will still get its sequel, despite the less than ideal reviews, and even though I have not finished this one yet I am very much looking forward to it.

My performance has not been a proud one.  The picture above shows the health bar which is very conspicuous and which I am constantly aware of.  What's more the screen fades to monochrome as you get close to death, which is both helpful and visually effective, but I still frequently fail to take the necessary evasive action.  Fighting boldly to the death is probably the true Space Marine way but it's not what I really mean to do.

Scores:

Speed through the game: 6

Intelligence: 4

Reactions and accuracy: 6

Observation: 5

I have got some PC games out of the attic which would not work on the old machine and have started playing Lost Planet, so that is what I'll write about next time.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat

Dying in games is never nice, but it is worse in some games than others.  For some reason, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are among the worst.

I think it is partly because I have often forgotten to save for ages.  There are more frequent autosaves in Call of Pripyat than there were in Shadow of Chernobyl so it is not quite as bad, but you can still lose a fair bit.

For the uninitiated, I will set the scene. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are set in our own time in a grimly fantasised version of the region around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The meltdown at the plant has caused mutations of both humans and animals into vicious creatures that are the most common enemies in the games. There are also bandits to contend with.

Another bleak day dawns in The Zone

The reason you, and others like you have gone to The Zone is to search for valuable and mysterious artifacts with strange properties which have also been brought into existence by the accident.

That is the case in the first game, anyway.  In the second game, you are a military Colonel masquerading as a Stalker but really trying to find out why several military helicopters crashed in the area.

Returning to the series after very long gap between playing the first game and playing this one I was surprised by how little had changed about the look and feel of the game.  From the pale, two dimensional leaves on the shrubs to the selection of guns and ammo to the icons depicting the items in the backpack a lot is the same.  A few things have been added to the HUD and they are generally an improvement.  The graphics are also a bit of a let down and it fails to match up to Call of Duty 4 which came out two years earlier.

It has taken me a while to get into the game.  This might be because it's murky hopelessness is not new this time around and so did not immediately grab me.  I am not so fond of being the more purposeful military man on a mission as I was of being one of the misfits who through up life in normal society to go and seek his fortune in the worlds most hazardous environment.

Nevertheless, I am starting to get into it.  I am starting to care when I die unnecessarily at the hands of Zombies or Bloodsuckers when I still had four medkits and I just didn't notice how low my health was.  That is my worst failing while playing this game and I'm going to give myself a low score for observation partly because of that and partly because I don't pay attention to what is said in conversations (either in life or in this game) and this is a big hindrance.

So these are my scores:

Speed through the game: 5

Intelligence: 6

Reactions and accuracy: 5

Observation: 4

Initially my speed through the game wasn't bad but now I'm starting to mess about too much.

I started to play Space Marine last night and will now carry on and report back soon.

Portal

I have now finished Portal.  It took less time than I expected.

On my Steam account it is registering 10 hours of gameplay but considering that I'm not the fastest player in the world and that I have spent a little time going back and trying the tests again I recon an adept player could get through it in 6 or 7 hours.

To my shame I had to look one puzzle up on YouTube to find the solution.  It is the one in the picture, though the part I could not understand is just out of shot to the left.  You have to use portals to reach a button which is on a pedestal.  The pedestal is too small to stand on so you've got to press the button as you fall past it and the timing has to be just right to open a door for an energy ball which you have already re-directed using portals.  I had not realised that there was a button on the pedestal, and when I looked it up on YouTube everything happened so fast in the video I watched that I had to watch it again several times to work out what was going on.

I've been back to try this test in as few Portal's as possible and my record is 29.  The target is 30 and you get cake for doing it in 25.  I could save 4 by not knocking down the turrets in this room but I would have to act fast to not get killed.

I am going to start giving myself scores out of 10 for different aspects of my performance.  For Portal I'm getting:

Speed through the game: 6

Intelligence: 7

Reactions and accuracy: 6

Observation: 5

I have now started S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat on the PC and have received the Space Marine for PS3 I bought on Amazon so I am going to be busy.

Excited!!!

Woo-Hoo!

After 5 years with my old PC and windows Vista I have a new one.  It is more than I expected to be able to get for my limited cash and though it is PC World own brand I would rather have its pretty good capabilities than pay the same money for an HP machine which might be built a bit more solidly but could not do as much.

I actually bought it two days ago but it stopped working terminally after about an hour of use and I had to take it back today.  I am not even using it yet.

I have already looked on Steam and Portal is on offer at £1.74, Portal 2 is £3.49 and Mass Effect is £4.99.  These things add up!  I also previously bought Stalker: Call of Pripyat but it would not work on the old PC.

I am going to be busy.

Virtua Tennis 4

I started playing this game late in the day on Saturday and when I put it down and went to bed at about 2:30am I actually felt excited at the prospect of playing more the next day.

I played so much on Sunday that I had a headache by the time I stopped which lasted through most of Monday.

I played Career Mode almost exclusively and I have a thousand complaints about it but find the game so playable that I still couldn't stop today (Tuesday) when I played for an bit to remind myself about the game.

An initial glance at the layout of the Career Mode suggests that there is going to be too much messing about and not enough tennis being played.  This turned out not to be true.  There are several types of training but these are fun and add to the game.  Nothing else on the Career map (above) takes any time to do.

You start in Asia and move through Korea and China and then there are alternative routes to take, as there are at several points in the game.  The picture above shows the first significant place where your possible routes diverge.  At the bottom of the screen you can go to the right and take part in a tournament in Shanghai if your star rating is high enough.  If it is not your only alternative is to go straight down.

Your Star rating can be improved by giving to charity, doing well in practise matches or minor tournaments or taking part in publicity events.  The most stars are won by taking part in major events and winning them.  This last fact means that if you miss a major tournament you have a reduced chance of qualifying for the next one.  You can still take part in the four grand slams by playing in a qualifying tournament but the intermediate major events are off limits.

An additional factor is that you can only move through the map seen above by the number of spaces dictated by the tickets on the right of the screen.  You spend a ticket, move that many spaces and the ticket is replaced by one with a random number on from one to four.  If you do not have an appropriate ticket to get you exactly on to the tournament, you are not going.  In my first play through I missed the Shanghai tournament for ticket related reasons and from then on never caught up with the number of stars I needed to qualify for subsequent ones so I never attended one of these intermediate events, even though I was pretty soon winning every game I played in.  This was annoying.

My Player (this end with stupid hair) Squares-off against Roger Federer.

On the court, despite my boasting about winning all the time, there were plenty of disasters.  My biggest problem was pressing the button to hit the ball before my AI opponent had hit it so it did not register.  Sometimes, I would press it too late instead.  There were times when I was convinced I was getting no response from the controller.  I once lost a whole game through this repeatedly happening but I've got to admit that when I really concentrated it did not seem to happen and winning points was easy.

In spite of these frustrations, Virtua Tennis 4 now has its hooks in me and I will be suffering more headaches in the days to come.

Mafia II (2)

I have just repeated the same (quite simple), mission in Mafia II many times because I kept messing it up.

The Missions are all a bit similar and that makes it doubly frustrating to have to repeat them as it is repeating something just like the last thing you had to keep repeating.

Missions generally involve driving to a location, having a shoot-out with some enemies, usually other gangsters from rival Mafia families or Irish or Chinese gangsters, then escaping the scene, often pursued by the cops who you don't necessarily have to lose before reaching your destination - though sometimes you do.

Vito (with his back to us) on his way to another samey mission.

There is definitely not the same richness of ideas in this game as in GTA IV but it may well better reflect the life of the Mafiosi as a result.

The game definitely has a playable quality when you are playing it.  The shootouts are well choreographed and challenging and there is a good variety of vehicles to drive with their own characteristics, though there is not so much variety of music on the radio.

There was a section during which Vito was in prison, and this was a but slow with a lot of cut-scenes, though there were quite a few punch ups to add in a bit of action.  This was the only time I have ever cleaned a urinal in a game.

The games main problem is that it does not call me back when I am not playing it, and I think this is because I don't expect to discover anything new in Empire Bay.  Despite this, I will eventually finish this game, though I won't necessarily get to the end any time this year.

The copy of Virtua Tennis 4 I ordered on Amazon has now arrived and I will be starting that this evening.  This is only my second sports game since buying the PS3 and I am curious to see how I get on.  As for the first of those sports games, I haven't played any more FIFA 11 since I wrote an entry about it but I will eventually.

Sonic Rush

I was going to write about Mafia 2 today but I have to share the agony that Sonic Rush has been causing me.

The main reason I cannot play this game effectively is that when Sonic is in full flight I don't have time to react to whatever appears on the edge of the screen and Sonic is often knocked back, dropping his rings, and I'm left feeling hard done by.

I was caused particular pain today by the Water Palace section of this game.  Sometimes Sonic is underwater during the two Acts of this Zone and if he does not surface quickly enough he will drown.

Sonic on a moving platform in the hated (by me) Water Palace section.

The were several particular parts of the Zone that were frustrating but the very last part of Act 2 was the worst;  it was only made more annoying by the distinct sense that I was very close to the end, though I didn't know for sure that I was.

There was a series of five consecutive platforms to bounce across, all of which disappeared into deep water, leaving Sonic stranded and certain to die, about half a second after being landed on.  The last two of them were quite narrow so both precision and skill were required, and I am capable of neither.

It was possible to pause extremely briefly on each platform and I think that this was my downfall.  After each jump I would want to make sure that Sonic was where I wanted him to be and collect myself for the next one.  The problem was that after the last Sonic needed to jump both across and up and with no ongoing momentum this was impossible to achieve.  The last three platforms were all at the same height so on numerous occasions I tried using Super Boost to rush forwards from the third last then hitting jump in the hope that Sonic would get enough height.  Whether I timed it correctly would obviously be in the lap of the Gods.  The Gods were apparently in a bad mood with me because on the million occasions I tried this it did not come off once.

One plus was that I had eventually discovered that in this last section there was an extra life box so I could try this bit ad infinitum without having to repeatedly replay all of Acts 1 and 2; though I had done this plenty of times before the discovery.

Eventually I just bounced along the five platforms quickly and was astonished to find myself landing on the other side.  I hadn't planned trying to do this  - it was almost absent minded.  As I had suspected it was a short, featureless run to the end from there.  Thank God I got the Boss Battle first time, though I was on my last life and in possession of one ring (to rule them all) when I did it.

Like an idiot, and despite the pain in my left thumb, I am now going to try Zone 3, Mirage Road.

I started playing this game in the cafe at the supermarket to kill 20 minutes.  It looks like being my whole evening.

Lego Star Wars II The Original Trilogy

I have just switched this game off in annoyance, but there is more to it than just a badly designed game cashing in on the names of a popular film franchise and a popular toy.

When I wrote about the first Lego Indiana Jones game I said I found the games parallel story and freeplay modes annoying, but I take that back.  It is an especially understandable part of the Nintendo DS version as it is an effective way of making a longer game out of limited content; not that this is a short game.

Cross controller on the left makes it hard to move characters precisely.

However, there is plenty to complain about in this game.  Camera Angles are a total nuisance.  Sometimes you cannot see the character you are playing.  If you are running along a narrow walkway (going from one side of the screen to the other), as the camera angle swings round to follow you the direction you have to run in relative to your view gradually changes.  This would be a challenge to adapt to using a thumb-stick, but with the DSi's cross type controller it's a total pain.  For this reason the game is not as ideal for the DS as its blocky graphics and childish appeal might at first make it seem.

I have to spend some time moaning about the Forest Moon or Endor.  This contains a section where you will probably be playing as Han and you have to do so much awkwardly jumping between platforms and generally falling down that you will hate the world and everything in it by the time you finish.  I say probably playing as Han because Chewie is with him to start with but is very quickly trapped in a cycle of repeated falling and gets left behind.  I am not going to go into every detail about why it is the single most frustrating section in any game I have every played but I will say that what made it doubly awful was that twice, through no fault of mine, Han became stuck or the game would not do what it needed to do to move on to the next part and I had to switch off and re-start the chapter.

Chewie is wearing a Storm Trooper's Helmet in "Rescuing The Princess"

Despite all the times that I screamed and swore while playing this game, I played it all the way through in story mode and proceeded to immediately restart in freeplay.  The game's ability to make you want the collectibles on offer is uncanny and I cannot help thinking that this must be a virtue of the game in itself.  If people like a game, then surely that is what defines a good game.  If I want to play this game, doesn't that mean that I like it.  Does that follow?  I don't know and have no wish to resolve that or any other question.

I am glad I played the game and will go back and play other Lego games but I will stuck to the ones available for the PS3 and play them on that from now on as control issues made this too much like hard work on the DSi.

...Got no Strings Attached

Over the last few days I've been playing Lego Star Wars II on the DS and Need For Speed ProStreet on PS3.

In my 30th May entry I promised more on NFS ProStreet and hear it is.  Sorry if I've repeated anything.  I wrote this entry completely forgetting that I'd written about the game before.

ProStreet is a pretty sound racing game from 2007 which, though it wears the guise of a Need For Speed bad boy street racer type game is actually a pretty well put together racing sim.

In the career stage of the game you take part in a series of meetings each of which features about 5 or 6 races of various kinds including Time Attack, Grip (normal races) Drag and Drifting.  Once you have done respectably well in all the races you will have enough points to have won the meeting.  You can elect to carry on until you have dominated the meeting, which will usually involve going back and repeating the races until you have won almost all of them.  You get a reward for winning the meeting and another for dominating.  These can be cash, markers to get your car fixed for free or car upgrades like tyres, engines, nitrous etc.

Once you have done well enough in enough meetings at one stage you unlock a showdown (which is very like a normal meeting) and if you can win that you get through to the next level.

My particular downfall is the race type called Sector Shootout.  The track is divided into about 4 sectors and your time is measured over each sector and compared to that of your rivals.  If you beat the best time yet for that sector (including your own best) then you score points.  You do about 3 laps and everyone's points are totalled at the end.

I am always rushing so much to cover the next few hundred yards that I never take enough account of the corners and bump the side-walls constantly - which is fatal in this race type.  I do especially badly if there is a tight turn just after a timing point as I'll be hurtling towards it, hoping to post a good time, and will be in the gravel trap and mess up my chances for the sector right at the start of it.

The tacked-on theme of this game (which is that some racer-dude thinks he's the baddest and you have to beat all his mates then him) is so underplayed that it does not matter that it's pointless and rubbish; it does not spoil an otherwise excellent game which is full of challenge and will keep me occupied for a good while yet.

I'll write about Lego Star Wars II very soon.

God is Dead

The end of Deus Ex Human Revolution took me by surprise; not because of what happened but because it happened a bit sooner than I expected.

Since I started to play games with the specific intention of finishing them I have almost always been taken aback to discover that they end at all.  It's hard to say whether this game was short or not both because I have so few completed games to compare it to and because I played it over a very extended period with long gaps between sessions.  It does feel slightly as though some aspects of the game were underdeveloped and there were not many city locations to explore: Detroit and Heng Sha both being visited more than once.

The plot seems barely concluded as well.  As I wrote recently, loads of different organisations are mentioned in the game but how they all relate to each other and what becomes of them in the end is far from clear.  It felt slightly like the world of Human Revolution was developed and then the game ended and I can't help feeling that this was an ambitious project which had to be finished in a hurry, like a story I wrote at school but ended very suddenly because I reached the 2000 words I needed to write so the characters had outlived their usefulness to me and could be killed in a crash before their spaceship reached it's destination.

The game's playability and the depth of its world kept me interested to the end.  I will miss the mechanics of the game and nostalgically wish to hack a security terminal and turn a bot against its masters then watch on the camera as it mows them down.  I will long to take down a group of security guards one by one and hide so many unconscious guys in a vent that no more can be squeezed in.

Every time a write about a game I seem to pedantically draw attention to it's negatives but the positives in this game far out weigh them.  I hope I will find time to play through it again some time.

Changing the subject, I have bought Mafia II recently.  It was a bit of an impulse buy and I don't know if it is the right game to be getting so soon after playing a lot of GTA 4.  I have played the very start but I am going to put it to one side and play NFS ProStreet for now.

Not Devine, But Still Good.

I'm back to playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the break I've had from it is making it hard for me to concentrate on the plot.  There are several different Corporations and interests and I can't remember who I'm working for half the time.

The game remains excellent, but I have had slight problems with the shooting.  The first and most serious is that I am bad at it.  The second is that I seem to resort to it all the time.  It somehow seems more comforting to kill enemies rather than sneaking around them and risk being caught.  If I instigate a firefight I know where I stand.  The frustrating thing is that when I do remember to use stealth I find it quite effective as long as I concentrate and don't get lazy.

I am about to attempt a side quest which involves taking down a group of suited goons without killing any of them (this is happening in China), and Jensen is currently crouching behind a concrete pillar and I can see them on the screen engaging in their clockwork patrols.  I will be extremely pleased with myself if I can take them all down without alerting any others to my presence but I think the best I can hope for really is to do the task by hook or by crook.

I have only done two of the reputedly terrible boss fights from this game so far.  I have, of course, died several times in both but not had to repeat either as many times as I might have expected.  With the big burly guy I found a corner where you could take cover from him so that he could not shoot you.  He can still get you when he throws a hand full of grenades, but if you turn and empty a clip into him every time he has to reload and just keep your head down otherwise you will get him after a handful of tries at most.

The second one is the electrical chick.  I slightly fluked this but I think I get some credit.  The second time she hit me with her main attack I used the typhoon on her while she was dazed and then the machine pistol at close range and kept firing with the same gun as she ran away.  She was supposed to be invisible at this stage but I think  her cloak might have been failing because there was a shimmering image of her.  As I was firing she became fully visible and started to fall over and then it went to the cut scene.  More relief than joy!

I will try to play to the end of the game if I don't get bored before then and then I'm going back to NFS ProStreet.

More GTA 4

I have now progressed to into both Algonquin and Alderney.  The missions are getting harder and I have had to repeat some several times.

I came up against a glitch in the game and had to retry one mission many times, not realising that it was not running properly.  Little Jakub and I had to take down a helicopter by flying next to it in another chopper.  I had to line us up properly and Jakub's job was to shoot at it with a rocket launcher.  What happened most often was that Jakub would take a single shot when we were not in a suitable position, the shot would miss and it would cut to the mission failed clip of Jakub getting out of the now landed chopper.

On a couple of occasions I lined up the helicopter pretty well next to the enemy one but Jakub did not take the shot and several times the enemy chopper landed and just sat on the tarmac while I tried to get get ours along side it in the vain hope that we would shoot at it but nothing transpired and this usually finished with our 'copter breaking up due to me flying it into things.

This went on with me trying again and again until about three in the morning and eventually I threw in the towel and went to bed.  The next day when I tried again, Jakub took a shot on the first occasion and it missed and I swore, assuming that the chance had passed.  I could hardly believe it when Jakub fired a second shot, this was unique in the history of all my attempts.  The shot missed but the third hit the target.  Unfortunately, I messed up the landing and we went into the sea and Jakub drowned but the next time it all went smoothly.

Because of this problem I have loads more failed missions in my stats than I should have and I feel a bit hard done by.  Never mind.

My other comment for today is that drunkenness is represented better in this game than any other I've played.

Despite the huge number of hours I've played this game for I am still excited about playing the rest of it, and about the thought that there is plenty more in the Episodes from Liberty City pack.

E3 2012

EA and Ubisoft both did great presentations at this years E3 and kept it interesting, but out of the three hardware manufacturers I think the marginal winner of the event was Sony.

It seemed disappointing that there was no new hardware shown off but none of the main players are really due to reveal anything.  I think we did not learn anything about the Wii U that we did not already know except that very few of the big games being released next spring will be available for it.

Microsoft's smartglass was not at all the hardware which the name implies, but an application to turn your tablet or smartphone into a controller for the Xbox 360.  There are many uses for this but as far as gaming is concerned it will be useable as a game controller and additional game info can be displayed on the extra screen.  In the example we were shown Halo 4 was the game used and I find this telling.  Halo is a Microsoft game.  Third party developers might well be more reluctant to put in the extra time and effort to work in this extra feature and it is likely to put costs up.  The Xbox currently has the slight advantage that some games tend to be a little bit cheaper on that platform.  They could lose that advantage by insisting that developers exploit this feature and I could not see many gamers abandoning the purpose built controller in order to use their phone to play an Xbox game.

Xbox somewhat redeemed themselves by showing to the world Halo 4 which looks like a great game.  The Halo series is the only thing that I feel I miss out on by not having an Xbox.

If I did not have a PS3 I would miss out on far more and that will be even more the case in the future.  Sony announced that the Heavy Rain makers Quantic Dream will be releasing a new game called Beyond: Two Souls.  There was not much in the trailer in the way of gameplay but I trust this developer.  They also showed a new God of War game and PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, which is a multiplayer fighting game and crosses over between the PS3 and Vita, so that players on the two platforms can compete against each other.  It looks like outrageous fun.  The last scoop they had was a new Assassin's Creed game for the Vita which has a female protagonist.  It looks like it takes place in a 3D world like the other AC games and seems to have great potential, though not much was shown.

As far as what went on on stage was concerned it was (as far as I could tell from watching it streamed on the web) a bit of a rubbish E3.  I might have thought that Rockstar and 2K parent company Take-Two could have done an onstage presentation and told us more about Borderlands 2 and GTA V but no such thing emerged.

Maybe next year will be better.

Grand Theft Auto IV

I should not be writing this.  I should be playing Grand Theft Auto IV, and so should you.

I have played some of it in the past on the PC but it now runs so slowly on that ancient machine with it's clogged hard-drive that I could no longer help myself from breaking open the original PS3 copy that I had in the draw and was meant to be saving to sell in the future when it was worth more.

This boxed edition was really quite a beautiful thing in itself.  If was so perfect and had real weight (it includes a map and decent sized booklet).  It had it's original PS3 tear-off ribbon and I was reluctant to open it and spoil it's perfection but it remains lovely.

Even the loading screens are great!

I once read on the cover of a boxed copy of the PC version the review comment "So much better on the PC it's criminal".  I cannot remember clearly what the game was like on the PC but some things do seem different on the PS3.

I remember more chance encounters on the PC version.  I have only met one person by the roadside who I have had dealings with.  I might have missed others.  I have now met the same guy three times and had fairly bland adventures with him.

I do not remember being quite so incessantly harassed to socialise before.  As I remember it I used to cruise around for ages without a care in the world but now if I spend any time not taking part in a quest of some kind I am called and asked to go out by Michelle (girlfriend), Little Jacob or most often Roman (Cousin).  If you say no then they go off you but socialising is the least exciting part of the game.  I think I've been to play darts four times now and it is losing its lustre.

Despite these complaints, this is a game which all gamers should play.  I wrote previously about GTA Chinatown Wars and how it captures the atmosphere of the city.  GTA 4 does the same thing, only with a lot more visual detail to work with it can achieve much more.

A hazy day in Liberty City.

The many radio stations play decent songs from within their genres, not just unwanted album tracks.  There are a massive array of vehicles to choose from.  The plot missions are interesting and don't take you through too many boring bits again if you fail and have to repeat them.

There is masses of content.  I have played a lot in the last two days and I have not got into Algonquin (Manhattan) yet and am only 19.89% of the way through the plot.  (I haven't reached the point I got to only the PC yet, so maybe some of the things I remember from that version will soon start to happen.)

I would encourage anyone to visit  amoral Liberty City and indulge in all it's vices.

We Only Run for the Money...

Referring back to what I said at the end of the last entry, I killed the guy I was supposed to be helping and (after a few attempts) killed the guard who I found waiting for me at the local Inn.

The fight with the guard had moved upstairs by the time I finished him off and when I went back down again the barmaid squealed in fright but when I engaged her in conversation she immediately spoke amiably to me and was quickly won round to quite liking me, despite the dead guard on the landing.  This is pretty typical of the game but does not spoil it.

Another anomaly is that all trades-people can tell at a glance which items in my pack are stolen, even if I stole them in another town.  Guards also have this power.

I've played the game quite a bit now and have been enjoying it.  My character has developed a bit and I can just about take on a single guard first time.  That applies to a normal guard, anyway.  I have entered the realms of madness (I think that's what they're called).  I went through the door marked Mania (forgive me if you don't know what this means) and entered a new land.  After some travelling and coming up against some new and curious types of enemy I reached the main city.  The female guard on the door asked me to relinquish my stolen goods and pay a fine and I decided to resist.  She assured me that I would pay with my blood.  "I don't think so" I thought, wrongly.  I don't think I scratched her before she put me down.  I Immediately realised that I had not saved for ages.

On reflection, I'm surprised that law and order is such a big issue in Mania.

I am now taking a break from Oblivion to play a bit of Need for Speed: Pro Street.

This was released in 2007 but the graphics are pretty good considering its age.  I've not played very much but the career mode has so far involved racedays, where you race in several events of different kinds.  Grip races are basic races against other cars and are probably the most fun.  Drag is a short race changing up through the gears and covering a straight section of track in the fastest time possible.  Time Attack is clocking the fastest lap and Drift...you're not idiots, you know what drifting is.

I've switched off most of the assists.  It's not because I'm brilliant, I'm not, I just don't feel like I'm really doing it myself if I'm being helped with the steering and breaking and if the racing line is marked out on the track.  All I've left on is the mini map and the arrow which appears and shows you the direction of the next turn.

The lack of assistance means I'm pretty often getting the corners wrong and this means repairs have to be paid for between races.  When you do well you win prizes which are a lucky dip and can include markers for getting repairs done.

In any given raceday you can win with a certain number of points, or dominate with a larger number of points.  Races can be repeated if you've not done well, or even if you have, and points seem to be cumulative so if you keep going you will dominate eventually and there are more rewards if you do.

I know this game is going to take up quite a lot of my time for a while.  A strong recommend but I'll write more about it next time.

Incidentally, you will probably want to turn off the voice of the raceday announcer.