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.