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.