The Legend of Battlefield: Bad Hourglass

I've been really enjoying this game today.

I got the hourglass and I did a section of the game where you have to go into the Temple of the Ocean King and get the North-West section of the sea chart before the 10 minutes in the hourglass runs out.  I had to go back outside and top up the hourglass twice because of my slowness (it needs sunlight to be replenished) and this did mean I had to do some parts again which was a bit of a pain but the game is so well made and works so beautifully that it's generally a pleasure to play.

I am now seeking out a cannon (on Cannon Island) before venturing into that North West region.  There are exploding plants which can be carried a certain distance before they explode but I have some blocks that need blowing out of my path and the plants do not have a long enough fuse for me to reach them and I have not yet worked out how to get around this.

One thing I especially like is the use of the microphone.  Sometimes it is necessary to blow out candles and at one point dust had to be removed from the map and these things were done by blowing into the microphone which I thought was an imaginative device though maybe it is common and I'm only impressed because I've played so few DS games.  Still, I liked it.

I have also now finished Battlefield: Bad Company.  I think the game played well and it got more challenging as the game went on which is a positive, but the terrain was not very varied and it was all outdoors, with a bit of moving in and out of small buildings, but no extended indoor or underground sequences.

I liked the fact that there was constant moving from on foot to in vehicle travel rather than an infantry mission then a tank mission and so on.  It gave a feeling of freedom of action.  There was one prescribed helicopter mission but you could set the chopper down and have a scout around when you wanted to or if you needed to do repairs.

The game was not too short but I might be only thinking that because my expectation for game  length have been lowered by my recently playing COD 4.  I did not actually time the game but it is worth noting that while I usually put games down and take them up again after a few weeks or months I finished this in one go so maybe it was short.

I was rubbish at finding the gold scattered around the map.  Each section of the game had 4 or 5 caches of gold in and the were about 6 sections or maybe more so there were probably between 25 and 30 to find and I found either 2 or 3 I'm not sure.  I do not really see why our team was supposed to be finding these when a) we were on foot for long periods and so had no way of carrying it and b) the point of the story was that we were trying to reach a boat which had so much gold on that what we were picking up on the way would be insignificant.

Nevertheless this was a great game with variety, sound mechanics and good shooting action so play it if you haven't already.

Also there was a very satisfying noise when you collected ammo!

Small Gripe

Well, I have made a bit more progress with both Battlefield: Bad Company and Split/Second Velocity.

Bad Company is getting a bit tougher but is still not too hard.  The one thing I am failing to do is find any the gold.  I am in the 3rd area and should have found about 12 cases of it by now but have only got 2.  I don't really mind, it is not what I would regard as the purpose of the game and is in fact a bit of a distraction from the main business, which is killing guys who are trying to kill me.

I have recently been on the golf course area and could not resist a drive in one of the golf carts.  It seemed prudent to trade it in for a tank when the opportunity arose, though.

Now for my complaint.  I have found that the areas which you are allowed to go into during any one mission are not always accurately marked on the mini map.  The way the game lets you know your are straying outside the permitted boundaries is to give a radio call telling you that you are within range of enemy artillery.  If you do not leave the area fast you suddenly find yourself dead.  The regions into which you should not stray are usually marked red on the mini map but sometimes you get the radio warning when you are comfortably outside the red area.  Usually the marking is spot on but sometimes it is badly wrong.

The is not much to report about Split/Second.  I have been moving through the episodes, still unable to do the Air Strike events.  Air revenge has now been introduced where you can redirect rockets back towards the helicopter which is trying to take you out.  There is no limit on the number of lives you get, you just have to take the chopper out faster than your opponents did.  It is very satisfying but I'm still not great at it.

'Til the day I die

Well, I was a lot closer to the end of Batman Arkham Asylum than I realised and I've now finished.  I haven't done all of the challenges or even unlocked them all but the main adventure is done with.

There were rather a lot of boss fights in the run up to the end but they were not totally frustrating ones, and the final one against the Joker was surprisingly doable.

I have now started on Battlefield, Bad Company.  Everything I'm going to write here applies to the single player campaign.

The game is really effective.  There are probably fewer enemies to kill in each section than in COD 4 which I wrote about recently.  The combat areas are generally quite wide and you can choose which direction to attack from.  It usually pays not to go in head-on but to sneak around the sides.

You get an infinite number of health packs, and they restore your health completely with just a short cooldown period, but that has not stopped me from dying through simply forgetting to use them.  The small number of enemies and wide area does mean that there is no real need to die (playing on medium of 3 difficulty levels as I am), you can just take out one or two and then hide while you heal yourself.  I have already received the Hypochondriac trophy which I think was for using health packs when I still had more than half of my health.

The game so far has taken place outdoors and moving in and out of small, highly destructible buildings.  Walls, trees and sandbags can also be blow aside to reveal the enemy and this is an important strategy.

Though there have not been crowded, intense battles yet there is always a lot of tension as you creep towards the enemy's location, only knowing roughly where they are.  The game works brilliantly and has better characters than any military FPS I've played so far and I'm really looking forwarding to continuing it.

At Last

After a brief holiday I can now report that I have actually finished Assassin's Creed II.  I've completed the story (including the two extra sequences) I've found all the glyphs and unlocked all the parts of The Truth, I've been to all the secret locations and opened the vault to Altair's Armour and have found all the treasure (this part was a pain and I was disappointed that there was no trophy for completing it).  I have not collected all the feathers but that would take forever so I'm letting myself off.

I took my DSi when I went away and though I did not play it much I made a little bit of progress with The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.  It is not really my sort of thing but it is clearly a good little game and I will definitely play more.  The characters are great.

I have now returned to  Arkham Asylum (it's the best place for me) and I'm enjoying the game more than I remember doing.  I have been playing AC2 for so long that differences in the controls for Arkham Asylum are confusing me and the angle at which you look over Batman's shoulder is also off-putting initially.

I am currently trying to foil Poison Ivy's attempts to intoxicate the people of Gotham.  If I say so myself, I think my fighting has improved slightly and I am making slightly better use of dodging and concussing enemies.  I'm still pretty bad, though.

I have also recently started playing Split/Second Velocity.  It is great!  It is easy to get into and the early races are quite easy, but it quickly becomes more challenging.  It is one of few racing games where, if you are in the lead half way through you can easily be pegged back and find yourself finishing fourth.  This is because of the power-plays that can be triggered to take you out.  You can, of course, do the same to other racers which is highly satisfying when you get it right.

The game is very well made and the power plays work really well.  They have to be used with caution as it is quite possible to take yourself out with them.

Unfortunately, the speed with which things happen on the screen is so hectic that I have to limit the time for which I play the game as it gives me a headache.

Racing games have been my favourites and I still love them but the more I played ACII the move I felt immersed in it and I am already really enjoying Arkham Asylum again.  I know that these two games are seen as really good examples and that there is plenty of rubbish out there but I think adventure games might be winning me round.

The Creed of Tempered Diction

I have been back to playing Assassin's Creed II on the PS3 in the last few days and I don't really know why I ever do anything else.

I have now made my way to Venice and, in my own bundling way, played through a lot of the plot and have finished Sequence 9.  The races, beat-ups and courier missions have never been the most exciting part of the game but in Venice there seem to be none and I realise that they gave a wider choice of things to do and therefore the appearance of depth.  The reason seems to be that there is a lot of plot to get through in Venice and these distractions are not currently needed to bulk the game up, especially as part of sequence 9 involves Ezio entering a competition with several parts, one being a race and another a fight.



The Serene Republic.

Ezio has a big advantage in Venice which is swimming.  I remember in Assassin's Creed Altair would drown if he fell into water a foot from the bank.  Ezio is a strong swimmer and no guards can swim so they can be safely knocked in or escaped from by swimming along a canal (few of which have a tow path) or across the river.

There has been one training session outside the Animus where Desmond had to leap around a warehouse.  This was followed immediately by a short section where he found himself hallucinating that he was Altair and back in a familiar looking part of Acre.  This was all a bit unnecessary but was soon over and the game otherwise has been a delight.  Wherever this series might have gone since or might go in the future I really hope it will not be forgotten that this was a classic.

Speaking of the future, I have been interested to read about AC III recently.  The thing that I am most curious about is the name.  I am yet to play them but it from what I know I'm surprised that Brotherhood and Revelations are not being considered full games and that this new one is not AC V.  Perhaps this is simply because the intervening games are the same era and protagonist as number two.

So this new protagonist is to be a half British half Mohawk guy called Connor.  From which side does he get that name!?  The game is set in Colonial era America.  Why do I feel like we (the Brits) are not necessarily going to be the good guys in this game?

Otherwise it looks very promising with a radical change in terrain (New York and Boston and spending a lot of time in the wild country in between).  I do not think that Connor's enemies having guns is going to make a huge difference.  Enemies had bows before and the guns of this new game have a long re-loading time and are hardly likely to take Connor down in a single shot (that would be no fun).  It will probably be ages before I play this game since I've got two other AC games to get through first but I'm already looking forward to it.

Fifa 11

When I was deciding what difficulty level to play this game on I was shocked to realise that I have never played a football game before!  I think this has been partly because I am not very interested in football but a good game is still worth playing and this has already proved to be good and has it's hooks in me after just two days.

Because of my inexperience I am playing it on the easiest difficulty.  I have started on career mode and was initially rubbish.  Playing it on easy means that it is as simple for my AI team-mates as it is for me so as long as my guy is picked to play by the coach our team (Nottingham Forest) always wins by a wide margin.  Sometimes I have been dropped due to poor performances and in my absence the team struggles a lot more.

It seems a bit of a farce that I get dropped from the team and several successive matches can go past while I just watch (I don't actually watch the match but the PS3 going through the process of calculating results and match events takes time and I'm excluded).  Early in my first season I was injured for 43 days and missed loads of games and it was not very exciting.  I have at least got the hang of the game now to the point where I don't usaully get dropped for bad performances.

Shooting is something I still cannot do. When running in on goal the camera switches to a low dynamic angle but this makes it harder to see where the player is relative to the goal or goalkeeper and so I often leave my shot too late and the keeper has closed me down.

Forest finished the first season at the top of the championship (art failing to reflect life) and the new premiership season has started.  We have won the first two games but after a bad game against West Ham I have managed to get myself left out again.  You'd think the coach would notice that we always win by a wide margin when I play, even if I play badly.

You'd Better Look Around

I meant to write something new sooner than this but could not stop playing Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars.

It has all the atmosphere of GTA IV and a surprising number of the subtleties.  The Map of Liberty City familiar from large scale game is largely present.  I do wonder if I would be quite so blown away if I did not mentally fill in some of the missing parts of the more detailed map, but the game is great in it's own right.

This picture fails to do the game justice.

The game's sounds give it it's atmosphere.  There are many different styles of music and while it only comes in simple loops each piece evokes the type of music it represents brilliantly and never seems to get monotonous.  The comments shouted as you walk down the street, the sound of gunfire and car engines and the occasional train passing overhead.  It is a rich, urban, aural tapestry.

The gameplay is perfect, too.  The Gunplay and fist fights work well, stealing a car is candy from a baby.  If the cops are after you there are degrees of wantedness and these decrease if no cops see you for a while or, more often, when you force a police car to crash and burn.  If you are driving slowly any policeman on foot near you, including one who has just bailed out of a smashed car, will pull at the door handle.  This is brilliantly done and even though he's only a tiny figure on the screen you can really see him straining at that door.  If you don't get away fast enough he pulls you out and you are busted.  If you just manage to get away you will drive off with the car door swinging open (another great touch) and as you speed around the next corner you can almost feel the car leaning as it turns, again due to great use of minute images.

Great (grown-up) humour.  Imaginative tasks to perform.  Superb use of the touch screen... I could enthuse all day!