Fatal Labyrinth

I started a game of FATAL LABYRINTH on megadrive yesterday. Popped the cartridge in, fought my way through all 30 levels of the dungeon (some levels repeated as I fell into a few pits) and defeated the final boss. Watched the end credits roll. ^_^

I first played this game about a decade ago, and never got very far with it. I kept dying! This week, I decided to buy myself a copy on ebay, started a game and didn't die once! I guess I must be luckier these days than I used to be. Or I have more patience. Or something.

Ah, even though it's easy by the standards of other roguelikes, it feels good to have finished a game that just kept killing me over and over again in the past. That doesn't have any save points or "password" system. That makes you eat to stay alive but the food items (which you can't carry round with you - you have to eat them when you pick them up) may be of any size and if you eat too much you die. Where enemies at the end of the game take anything from about 6 to 99 off your health with each hit and at maximum level you have under 800 health total and have run out of all the potions you had... yeah, I feel like luck was on my side...







Maybe I should attempt Sword Of Fargoal again... I've never been able to finish that either...

Rollercoaster Tycoon pinball and Dragon's Fury

Here's a game that's even less suited to being made into an arcade machine than Silent Hill. It's Rollercoaster Tycoon the pinball table.




Now, I like pinball. There are fewer and fewer pinball tables around in arcades and pubs as each year passes, so every time I see a table I haven't seen before, and the cost to play is about 50p, I'll give it a go.

However... I don't know whether it was due to how the table was set up, maybe the angle it was being played at was wrong... but this table wasn't much fun at all. It was slow - both the ball and the flippers. There was a voice to tell you what to do, which ramps to aim for etc, but it wasn't immediately obvious which features it was referring to each time. I was lucky enough to get a "Match" and a free credit, but it still wasn't enough to make me really like the machine enough to put in more money.

--

This week I played a copy of "Dragon's Fury" for Megadrive. I play a few pinball videogames as it's quite hard to find tables around anymore - mostly on handheld consoles - Pokemon Pinball games, Super Robot pinball and Metroid Prime Pinball. Super Mario Pinball was fun too and is the only videogame pinball I'd really class as 3D pinball - all the others are really 2D pinball with emulated ramps and things. Most video pinball games are terrible, though. The only good PC or console pinball game I've played is Epic Pinball and that was a very long time ago now - I played it on a 486/66.

Well, I guess the one that comes free with Windows isn't that bad, but it feels like the angles are preordained by the timing at which the ball strikes each thing on the table, or something like that, rather than being calculated using maths and physics - it's very old-style Microsoft; you can only play this game the way we say it should be played, travelling the paths which we think the ball should take! There is no way to hit the ball at an angle which we have not accounted for!

So, "Dragon's Fury", which came with the Megadrive when I bought it second hand ages ago but I never started it up. It said on the box "The Best 3D Pinball Game In The World", to which I felt extremely skeptical, but no, it's actually really good - much better than this "real" pinball table, renewing my enthusiasm for pinball. ^_^ I like the style of the graphics, I like the table and the bonus stages, I like the way it has most of the winning elements of modern video pinball games yet it predates most of them. My only wish is that there would be some kind of multiball function in there.



Video pinball is certainly different from "real" pinball, and so gameplay elements tend to be very different. Video pinball games tend to be much easier to give the player a longer game, as we've already taken their money before they start up the game. There's no benefit to the developer in making the player use more "credits". Replay value is not just in getting a higher score (although they always have a high score table) - modern tables and video pinball games both tend to give you short "missions" to complete then you can defeat the final mission and win the game, but for video pinball the final mission is likely to take the form of a "boss" character for you to hit repeatedly with your ball in the right spots or at the right time. With some video pinball games - like Dragon's Fury, Kirby's Pinball, Super Mario Pinball and Metroid Prime Pinball, enemies wander around each stage as targets. I also really like the video pinball games that let you collect things as you play - the Pokemon Pinball games and Super Robot Pinball being my favourites that allow you to do that. That really adds something substantial to do as replay value.

I like some elements of video pinball an awful lot, but as I said, only a handful of video pinball games are really good. I'm always happy to try out a table I've never played before, even though the same is true and lots of real pinball tables aren't very good either... ^_^;;

Silent Hill The Arcade

While I was on holiday last week, I saw a machine I'd never seen before (so that probably means it's at least a year old already, hahaha). Silent Hill The Arcade.

Now, the first Silent Hill game for PS1 is one game I just can't play because I find it too scary. I gave up somewhere that must actually be fairly near the start in real terms - running around in the fog looking for a little girl, armed with barely anything... dying so often... it's partly the poor visibility making me peer closer, partly the alarming visuals when something does come along, partly the fact I feel utterly powerless, partly the feeling of being in an unknown place, partly the very small amount of sound used... but on top of that there must be some craftsmanship that makes the atmosphere just that little bit more terrifying than every other game I've played. The graphics are so dated now, I tried to convince myself "it's just some red pixels on screen! It's really blocky! They're just squares, come on, that can't really be scary!", but that didn't work. My imagination made it scarier than anything I could see.

The later games... I haven't tried. I just don't feel right playing a later game in a series where I couldn't play the first.

But I saw this machine and decided that I should give it a go, since it seemed the newest machine there and was a strange franchise to convert into an arcade machine.




It's a lightgun game. You put your money in, and you're in Silent Hill, it's very foggy and zombies and dogs etc come towards you so you shoot them. It's on rails so you aren't exploring, so there's no fear factor associated with peering closely at the environment to see where to head next. You're probably playing this while standing in a noisy arcade and besides, the game provides noisy voiceovers (with bad acting) from NPCs shouting at you all the time so there's no atmospheric silence to scare you. You have unlimited bullets, shoot offscreen to reload - same as any modern lightgun game, and there's nothing you can't kill by shooting it a few times, so there's no feeling of defenselessness. Graphically, everything seems rather plastic and harmless.

It's not in the slightest bit scary. It's more "House Of The Dead" than Silent Hill. Except that... it's slow. Really slow. I think someone must have thought slow = atmospheric? I don't know. I spent a lot of time waiting around for enemies to turn up.

Overall, it's not very good. The scariest thing about it is that the tacky obviously-cut-to-look-ragged cloth surrounding the cabinet is harbouring some disease you might catch. The second scariest thing is that this is what happened to the Silent Hill franchise. As a lightgun game it's fairly dreary. If it ever heads for a home console... well, I paid £1 for my go on this, and that's enough for me. I'd say that ought to be a price guide for what the game is worth to a player.

(I know, I would not normally judge a game by 10 minutes of gameplay, but that's all I was prepared to put into the machine, so that's all the attention it gets from me)

Shojo Kakumei Utena Complete CD Box (Ltd Ed)

I just noticed there's a limited release CD box set of Utena soundtracks coming out.



Catalog No.: KICA-920
Format: CD
Number of discs (or other units): 10
Release Date: 2008/08/27
Price: 12000yen (12600yen Tax incl.)
Item weight: 840 g

As far as I can see, it contains every soundtrack and has a bonus disk of house remixes, it comes in a nice display box, with a 100 page booklet. Well, I could be wrong about that because that's according to Neowing when roughly auto-translated by Rikaichan. Perhaps if you can read Japanese, the official website will be more accurate and helpful.

The music to Utena is really really great. Most of the music is by Mitsumune Shinkichi - some peaceful, some experimental and jazzy, the big choral battle themes for duels by J.A.Seazer - which are really the high points of the soundtracks for me - there hasn't been much like those songs before or since, and the opening theme sung by Okui Masami. All fitting really well within the series, where it wants to be peaceful, where it wants to be contemplative, where it wants to be weird and experimental, etc. I highly recommend this collection. Most of the original releases of the CDs are out of print now.

I need to look through my collection to find out whether it would be worth me picking this up, or I own most of it anyway (I'm not too bothered about house remixes).

Preorder at CD Japan: Shojo Kakumei Utena Complete CD Box [Limited Release], or if you prefer - preorder from Play Asia who might be a little more expensive for the item but cheaper on shipping... but I would trust CD Japan far more for a preorder, as I've known people disappointed on launch day with Play Asia in the past.

(If you're wondering, yeah I'd collect commission if you click through on either link, and I'll collect less from CD Japan if you opt for that but still recommend them the highest for preorders. Play Asia are great if the product is in stock but sometimes don't meet the demand of their popular preorders.)

Utena is also being rereleased on remastered Japanese region 2 DVDs, at the end of September, but it costs 30000 yen for the first DVD box only (24 episodes of 39) so I think the full set will cost more than a car...

My new Xbox 360 (4)

I've owned my Xbox 360 since the 2nd of this month, including one week when I've been away on holiday and haven't touched it, and already... I've been on the phone to Microsoft support twice today to arrange repairs under warranty. I'm quite disappointed - I didn't even get to see the famous "Red Ring Of Death". What's happened is that the console refuses to read games or DVDs. It gave me an error message last night - a disc read error, asking me to open the tray and remove any dust... so I opened the tray, took a look at the disc which was absolutely immaculate, pristine, brand new and super nice and shiny - not a speck of dust. I shrugged and put the disc back into the tray and got on with my game. It was a compilation disc of games, so I guess it didn't need to read very much, so I didn't have any problems for hours until I stopped playing.

After that, it wouldn't read any discs. I put in a disc, it says "reading" .... and then instead of the name of the game, it says "open tray". It doesn't recognise discs. I tried a whole pile of different games, nothing would work.

So I went to bed, and in the morning tried to ring the support line. They're only open 9am to 5pm so I spent some time jotting down the serial number ready. When I got through, I was through to a woman with an Indian accent. I have a cold so I suppose I must have been hard to understand. I ended up repeating myself an awful lot, and the line kept cutting out and beeping so she was hard to understand, too.

We went through all sorts of things, I explained the problem a few times, told her what I could see... registered the console with the serial number... for some reason she kept asking me if the time and date were right on the console - which are automatically updated when it's connected to the internet, but the internal battery is dead so the clock is wrong otherwise - went through the menu to "console settings" -> "startup" -> "disc" but now it won't let me change whether to start on the dashboard or DVD, it just goes backwards to the previous page on the menu. (?)

At her request I tried a DVD and an audio CD - the DVD failed, but the CD works (it even grabbed the track listing which quite impressed me, since it was an import Utena soundtrack). She asked me if the console was too hot. I said yes, it's hot but how hot is too hot? She asked if it was too hot. I said it's hot, you could use it as a hand-dryer. She asked me if there was ventilation, I said it's sitting there on its own, nowhere near anything else, and that it's a smokeless environment, there shouldn't be a problem with the air. She said maybe I should switch it off and let it cool down for a few hours. I told her it had stopped working since the night before and that I had left it switched off overnight and it still wouldn't work. She suggested I switch the machine off and remove the hard drive like that would make a difference. It didn't.

She eventually got me off the line by saying that she couldn't go any further with this until we had ascertained whether the problem was with the console or the discs, and she claimed that the only way to do this was for me to re-try the pile of games and DVDs out on another console to see whether it was an issue with the games or the console. I told her that my games had all been working, and I'd tried them before, everything had been in perfect working order right up until last night. I told her that my console is under a month old and that my games are brand new and the discs are completely unscratched. She wouldn't accept that. She insisted that I try my games out on another console, gave me a reference number and would not discuss the matter any further.

She did ask me if I had any other questions, so I asked about the other enquiry I had made, a week and a half ago, about removing the credit card details from my xbox, so that if the console is stolen no-one can commit fraud and buy points with my credit card. She went "let me tell you this!" and told me something about the details sticking around until the next billing cycle (whenever that may be), and that the last 4 digits of a card will be shown in the dashboard but they cannot be used.

Grr, Microsoft. Always doing half a job and leaving a huge mess and expecting the user to be happy with it.

At that point I could tell she was really really annoyed with me, she was all snappy and I knew she wanted to get rid of me, so I hung up. I felt really quite angry with her. So I decided to give it a rest for a few hours.

I am sorry to make a post here in which I feel angry. I didn't intend for this blog to be a venting ground, but this is what happened.

I rang back after 4pm, quoted my reference number to the woman on the phone (who also had an Indian accent), and she spent a while reading the details of the case. I told her that it was definitely a problem with the console and not the discs, and she said she would set up a repair ticket for me ("please bear with me, the system is very slow"). She asked if I would like a shipping label by email or by post, saying that by email would be faster and more convenient, and I said that by post would be faster and more convenient because I don't own a printer. She seemed alright with that. Again, I waited. She apologised for making me wait, saying that the system had just crashed. Again, I waited. She was coughing and making uncomfortable throat noises quite often. I felt quite sorry for her, as working in a call centre is the worst place for a person with a sore throat! She told me that the delivery and collection would be done by UPS, it would be taken for repair and should be returned within 2-3 weeks and there would be no charge as the console is under warranty.

That's just as well. If they had dared to charge me money for repairing a console that stopped working in under a month, I would have been so angry!

She told me that before returning the console, I should remove any custom faceplates and the hard drive and any other peripherals and accessories. And asked me to patiently wait.

I could hear a man shouting in the background behind her. Not just plain yelling, but perhaps angrily demanding something? I wondered if I should ask if everything was alright. More people were coughing in the background.

Eventually, she told me that the system had returned with an error, and gave me a reference number to ring back with tomorrow. [sigh] She asked me if there were any other issues I'd like to discuss, and I let her go. This phone call had lasted over 30 minutes and there had probably been under 5 minutes of talking! Such a long wait, so much apologising!

So... I'll be sending my nice new console in for repair very soon. I hope they are good to it, and that my console is all nice and shiny when it comes back. I've heard that sometimes people get replacements when they're sent in for repair, and I'm dreading that I might get my nice shiny new broken console replaced by a tatty old nasty 2nd-hand refurbished only-just-working console. :(

Well, at least in the meantime, the only thing that is broken is the DVD drive so I can play Space Giraffe off the hard drive... ^_^

Global Arcade Classics

I was away on holiday last week, off to Hemsby near Great Yarmouth, a seaside resort on the east coast of England. We've been going there every summer since before I can remember. I used to love going to the seaside in the 1980s and 1990s to see the newest games and have a lot of fun in the amusement arcades. ^_^

In the amusement arcades this year... well, on the whole there wasn't a great selection. They're mostly packed out with jackpot machines and penny-pushers and things that aren't much about having fun, but mostly about gambling and collecting tickets to win prizes. There are some light-gun type games too, and a lot of driving games. I did see two multi-game retro games cabinets, though. One was in the Rio Bar and was called "Arcade Classics". It was playing Frogger when I first looked, then Space Invaders when I looked back. It was in a classic style cabinet that had obviously been sitting around since the early 1980s too. There was no way to find out what games were available to play, so I didn't investigate further.

The one I played on the most with, and the one that I'm going to talk about was in the "Palace Casino", however. That machine is called "Global Arcade Classics".




As you can see, it's an upright cabinet featuring two sets of joystick and 6 buttons, and has a trackball in the middle. They feel good, though my brother was complaining that the left joystick was sticking sometimes (I was generally being player 2). I don't know how much use the machine has had or anything. I didn't actually try any games using the trackball but I was impressed to see it there - it's the only was to be able to replicate some old machines they have listed on there, like 720 degrees or Rampart.

It features dozens of games - mostly Midway and Taito games, a few Atari games too. It has every Bubble Bobble and Puzzle Bobble game and Rainbow Islands (no Parasol Stars as it never came out as an arcade machine). It has Mortal Kombat, Paperboy, Robotron and Tapper. It has laserdisc games - Dragon's Lair 1 and 2, and Space Ace. It has loads of versions of Space Invaders, and Arkanoid, and some golf games, etc... there are 80 games in total - a full list of games here - it's a shop, selling the machine. I'd probably buy one if I had the space to put it.

BTW in case you're wondering - because I know I was - the version of "New Zealand Story" in this machine is the same as the "Japan" version, which just happens to be the one that I played all those years ago (even though I was in the UK). Each version had very different level design, so it's important to know which version.



Pros:
* Good selection of games - some of these games haven't been released on home consoles in this country.
* In some cases, better / more accurate than MAME emulation.
* Has nice controls and a trackball
* Professional looking menu, with nostalgic sound effects as you change from game to game.

Cons:
* If you put your money in while the wrong game is showing, you have to play that game or lose your credit. It won't let you change games and carry over credits.
* The stupid annoying "do you want to exit the game" screen keeps popping up if you haven't touched the controls (e.g. if you're watching the end credits roll after beating a game), and it doesn't pause the game when that comes up.

Beware of faulty DS Lite adapters

I read a newspaper article last week, saying that there have been a spate of incidents surrounding cheap Nintendo DS Lite chargers that you can buy on ebay or wherever. One electrocuted a seven year old boy. I've since found a BBC news report on it.

There weren't any photos with the article in the newspaper and it was only a few lines long, but yeah.. I think I own one of those chargers (since I have an American DS Lite and wanted a convenient replacement charger) so I thought I'd post and help get the word out there.

It cost me £6 on ebay, which I think is a fair amount and the genuine ones are overpriced. No really, that's a lot for a power adapter. You can get a USB one for £2 (at Play Asia) and they're perfectly safe, after all. But, that's one way you can tell it's likely to be a fake. Also, if you take a look at the photos below, two things are noticeable.




One is that the wire is coming loose. I can imagine it becoming a little frayed and then, yeah, electrocution... the other thing that's noticeable is that the top pin is made out of plastic. There is no earth pin on this plug! It's very unsafe.

It also gets unusually warm when being used, and is unshielded - when I switch it on, it causes terrible interference if I'm listening to am-band radio.

It has a CE mark on it, which normally indicates that it passed EU regulations, but they probably just printed it there themselves.

So if you have one of these as well... go get yourself a replacement DS Lite charger!

Portal

Last weekend, my boyfriend let me borrow his copy of The Orange Box for Xbox 360. It contains Half Life 2, and Half Life 2 episodes 1 and 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal.

So I ignored the other games and tried out Portal.

The basic game concepts are explained best in the trailer for the game.

I was quite surprised that unlike most FPS games and recent Katamari Damacy titles, this game did not make me suffer Simulator Sickness, even though the game is set out as a simulator and requires lots of looking around and the environment has these portals. Even with the levels where you do a lot of flying and falling.

It's a fairly short game, I played it all the way to just-before-the-finish within 2 and a half hours of starting it, went to bed, then completed it after under an hour's time when I restarted playing in the morning. It doesn't feel short though, as it feels rewarding to complete each puzzle and it seems like each level has been lovingly crafted and play-tested hundreds of times to see how people would tackle the game. Unlike Beautiful Katamari, for example, which is short and too easy (and full price).

After you've finished, you can play out the same levels as before in "advanced" mode to make them harder, or attempt to finish the levels using a certain amount of time or portals.

Portal is really brilliant. Oh not only is the concept of the game great, and the level design great, but it's really well written. A puzzle game with a story? Yes, it's got a story, it's got an interesting character with some really funny dialogue, and there are little things you see in the environment and mentioned by the character that hint towards a bigger story... and I really liked the ending.

There's a new version of Portal coming out on Xbox Live Arcade later this year called "Portal: Still Alive", I've heard there will be extra levels and challenges, and maybe the ability to play user-designed levels. I'm looking forward to it!

In the meantime, maybe I'll try the fan-made 2D flash game based on Portal... :D

Chrono Cross (US) going cheap

Play-Asia have a sale on at the moment. 25% off everything in stock.

One of the best deals (in my opinion) is Chrono Cross for $24.90 US dollars. That's about £12.50 in UK money, a pretty good price for a game that never came out in this country. It's the sequel to Chrono Trigger which is a really good RPG, and Chrono Trigger is being ported to the Nintendo DS later this year. :D

Oh and hurry since there's only about a day left of the sale.

My new Xbox 360 (3)

Well, I've owned this machine for over a week, so I thought I'd post an update on my thoughts.

I'm surprised at how into the Xbox 360 I am. People go on about these big testosterone-fuelled games for the system, people-killing soldier games and things, which isn't my thing, but I've found games that I like - both the games you can buy in shops on shelves, and the ones that are available to download - full games and trials and demos. There's so much simple fun stuff on live arcade and having the games on the hard drive is very convenient.



That's a photo of my collection of Xbox 360 games so far. I also have a copy of the RPG "Lost Odyssey" coming in the post, and own 4 Xbox Live Arcade games - Space Giraffe, and three games that came free with my MadCatz joystick - Time Pilot, Frogger and Astro Pop.

(Astro Pop is a rip-off of Magical Drop in endless mode, the biggest real difference is that the player can sometimes use a special move. It's made by Popcap games)

I haven't played half those games. Hey, I haven't even played half of the old Xbox games either! (I own some FPS for Xbox just because I feel I ought to give the genre a go again... but it's low on my priority list)

My thoughts on High Definition gaming - I've plugged my Xbox into my super-nice monitor (I had to buy a new cable to do that), and now games look.... well, as good as PC games in 1280 x 1024 resolution. Considering that my normal desktop I use for windows is an effortless 1600 x 1200, I don't consider high definition very high. It means I can see more detail though, everything does look very nice, and for some games it means I can now read the on-screen text, whereas it was impossible to do so on normal TV-sized resolution (e.g. the instructions on how-to-play in the demo of Triggerheart Exelica).

Part of it is down to how wonderful my monitor is, I'm sure. ^_^ Hooray for the Samsung Syncmaster XL20! (I think I need to tweak the colour settings again, though...). It looks nicer than any HDTV I've ever had and there's no lag or weird side effects like you often see on LCD monitors. It's just perfect, doesn't get in the way of a good gaming experience. ^_^

The Xbox 360 is definitely more powerful than any PC I've ever owned or seen, so the extra detail it's possible to show is well utilised.

My thoughts on the interfaces. Well, I think that the Xbox marketplace interface, and the Xbox live website are both horrible to navigate properly. The game genre categorisation system is not useful, and if you know the name of a game but not the genre it's categorised as and want to find it, you pretty much have to browse all games and find it yourself. e.g. I want to find this "Pinball FX" game for a demo? What's that under? ...eventually I find it, and it's under "bar games". I didn't even know what that genre meant! Games categorised under the venue in which they were played - e.g. bar or arcade - aren't very helpful to describe the content of a game, or its gameplay. At least, I think so.



The Xbox website is flaky and hard to navigate. Half of it is in flash, so I can't open new tabs to read game descriptions or easily go back to read other ones.

The network for the console and website is also slow, even when I allow it full use of my internet connection. Browsing lists means loading up text and icons separately, and it takes ages, not letting me go further in the list until the current page has loaded all its icons and stuff I just want to skip past.

It's all just really badly thought out and annoying to use.

I also don't know how to remove my credit card details from my profile. I don't want it there! It's not safe! I'm automatically logged in just by switching on my console - so the card details are under that. If the console were stolen or whatever, that would leave it open for abuse. I'm busy playing games, I don't want my card tied to the account. But I bought some Microsoft points (to buy Space Giraffe and some Katamari levels), and the card details have been stored there ever since. T_T

The games are pretty fun, though.

Space Giraffe

I bought a copy of Space Giraffe last Friday (4th July), after playing through the tutorial and trial version. It's an Xbox Live Arcade game, that costs 400 points (about £3.40), and is the newest game from Jeff "Yak" Minter of Llamasoft. It came out last year, but this is my first chance to actually try a copy. Now, I've been a fan of Jeff Minter's games since I was very very young, playing games on the Commodore 64. My favourites are probably Batalyx, Anticipal, and Revenge of the Mutant Camels. I also remember things like Attack Of The Mutant Camels, Gridrunner, Hellgate, Laser Zone, Sheep In Space, Hovver Bovver, Psychedelia, Return of the Mutant Camels... fond memories. He excelled in shoot-em-ups, really playable games - especially when you consider what else was available at the time. He's also got a common "beastie" theme running through his works, and references to drugs and Pink Floyd...

...but enough of the past.

Space Giraffe is Llamasoft's new game, and I bought it and it's a lot of fun. I got a lot more mileage out of it than the 2 Katamari levels I bought for the same price. The first thing to note is it's not Tempest, though it looks a lot like his versions of that game. It seems to be what he's been famous for the last few years, but I never played a copy, so I have no problem with that concept. The next thing to note is that the best way to clear a level isn't to shoot at the things coming towards you, but to let them come, and then ram into them, when it's safe to. You get more points and a better ranking, that way. It's only safe to ram into things when they've come to the same edge of the grid you're on, your "power zone" is extended, and you're not running into bullets or other invincible things.

It's difficult to explain in a few words, even though the game is fairly simple. There are other elements of gameplay too, and each one is like a new gameplay mechanic as it's introduced, forcing you to re-evaluate your strategies when each new one comes in. There are 100 levels, and I believe that each one has been lovingly crafted, since it seems like there's a best strategy to playing every single level to be discovered - I think each one has been played to death before deciding it's good enough.

Space Giraffe does something that I think Rez was trying to do, but failed to. It blends visuals and audio flawlessly. The music does not change according to the action in the game like in Rez, it's not the same in that way. Space Giraffe is built on a media visualisation engine, and plays like that. It's like playing a game on a winamp plugin with the music still running. This means that the visuals and audio are linked completely. The things you shoot at make noise and there's an effect on what you see. Sometimes you can't see what's going on in the level, and so you are listening to audio clues to guide you as you play the level. "I can't see that part of the grid, but I heard that some bullets were fired, so I had better not stand there just now" is how you play the game. It feels quite rewarding, playing a shoot-em-up by ear. ^_^

At the moment, I have unlocked 4 achievements, and my highest score is 29,454,079 and the furthest I've got is level 19. On the world leaderboards, that makes me the 733rd best player in the world, of all time! And you know what? I think that's terrible! There should be plenty of people better than me at this game by now, I only just started playing! XD

I'm also 15th best in the weekly rankings. More people should be playing this game!

BTW I found a talk given by Jeff Minter for a google thing on youtube. It's quite long - about an hour long, but I found it quite interesting and entertaining and nostalgic. Follow the link below:

Video

I wish he was better at working in teams, to deadlines... so that it would be more likely to see new games from him more than once every few years! But, if it's the only way he can make good quality games... well, I can't complain about getting good quality games, can I?

Beautiful Katamari

I bought a copy of this cheap online, it arrived last Saturday morning, at which point I immediately put it into my machine and had a go. Katamari Damacy is probably my favourite game of all time, you see, so I wanted to play my copy of the latest game for Xbox 360 as soon as possible. Then about 30 minutes later, I stopped because I had to leave and catch a train. I returned Sunday night. Worked all Monday. Somehow by Tuesday, I had finished the game. Even though I was also playing Space Giraffe and trying some Live Arcade demos.

Wow, this game must have lasted me about 5 hours maximum. It's the shortest full-price game I've played in a long time. Though I didn't get great scores on some of the stages, so I could go back... but that won't make it much longer.

There are lots of levels that are only available if you buy them separately and then get them with the download service. They cost 200 XBL points each, which works out as about £1.70 each, which seems cheap but that soon adds up! I really think those stages should have been built into the game, especially as it's so short. I bought two of the levels, though, just to see. I super-cleared one of them on the first try, so that wasn't much good value for money.

It's better than the PSP Katamari game. It's still far worse than the first one, and the second. But then again, the first game is made out of love, diligence, and good level design, and each following game has had a little less of all of those qualities each time. At least, that's my observation.

The online play is quite nice, I briefly tried it, but there's barely anyone playing it online anymore since it's now an "old" game.

My new Xbox 360 (2)

Well, I played on my new console for the remainder of the evening.

My adventures in xboxing so far have won me 40 Gamerscore points from 5 achievements. The MadCatz USB joystick is actually pretty nice.

I played some Dynasty Warriors Gundam, then Dead Or Alive 4, then Blue Dragon, and finally I explored what's taking up nearly 10GB on my hard drive and found a bunch of adverts, videos, and a puzzle game called Hexic HD. So I tried that too.

Dynasty Warriors Gundam is a very friendly kind of DW game, it's nice to be able to rocket power your way round a map in a hurry, and it's clear what to do and where to go. I only played through the first two stages of Amuro's official story route.

Dead or Alive 4 seems faster than any other DOA game I've seen. It's pretty, but all the others from the 2nd one onwards have been, too. ^_^ I only played through the story mode with 2 characters - Hayate and Ayane; I like those two. ^_^ Every time I encounter Bayman, he beats me so easily! I need to learn to counter effectively! The credits weren't in the booklet, and I didn't see them for completing story mode... :/

Blue Dragon - I only started it, though it was already about time for me to go to bed. The direction is good from what I've seen - it feels like a children's adventure film. It feels cinematic. It lets you run around during the opening credits if you're feeling hyperactive, which is cute. Akira Toriyama's character designs have been brought to life in a really nice way - I don't think I've ever seen his work brought to 3D in as nice a way as this, before. The first monsters we encountered were "poo snakes", which are like Dr Slump poo with arms and legs and a snake head, holding a spear. XD The music is top quality Nobuo Uematsu, I just stood around in some scenes to listen for a bit before moving on. So far, it reminds me most of the Final Fantasy IX soundtrack, really nice. As I said, it was already past bedtime, so I only got to the 2nd save point and quit. I might buy myself a copy of the soundtrack...

Hexic HD is a really really boring puzzle game. No sense of urgency, very difficult to get into a game-over situation... after a while I just got bored and waited for an opportunity to get Game Over, and quit. I'd somehow locked 3 achievements on it already, though. :D

I think I will need to call customer support tonight -

* The wireless controller does nothing but flash at me. :/
* The clock goes back to 2005 after I switched it off and slept overnight. :/

I found the power supply to the router this morning! The xbox autodetects an IP address, but can't get to a DNS lookup... I think I need to sort out my network. :(

My new Xbox 360

I decided to buy myself an Xbox 360. :)




The reason is that I found it for a reasonable price in a sale - £180 for the "premium" edition (20GB hard drive), bundled with 3 games I don't really care about but might play anyway. :D It's a special deal on play.com in their current sale. I heard the price has dropped in the US and Australia, and there are rumours that the 20GB model might be replaced by a 60GB model... but I thought now is a good enough time. The few games that I'm interested in have been out for a while and have dropped in price, and Microsoft have become better with their standard warranty because they acknowledge there is a design flaw killing them.

So far... I haven't connected it to a network because I seem to have misplaced the power supply for my network router, and I can't get the wireless joypad it comes with to work. T_T The lights just flash at me. T_T But, I have a USB joystick so I plugged that in instead. :)



It doesn't come with the cables to plug it into my super-nice Samsung XL20 monitor which could show HDTV at native resolutions, so I plugged it into an old Atari ST monitor via SCART. Hey, it still looks good enough for me. The console seems bigger than the screen, though! ^_^;;

All I've done so far is entered a player name in my profile, and started up a game - Dynasty Warriors Gundam. I suppose I ought to watch some of those series so games like this have more meaning, and so I don't accidentally witness any series spoilers. Oh well, I don't really mind.

It asked me to choose somewhere to save games to - I don't have any memory cards so I selected the hard drive. "11.1GB free" it said. WHAT? I thought this was a 20GB hard drive! So why isn't there 20GB free? T_T

I noticed in the options, you can select voices - Japanese or English. So I clicked "Japanese". "Amuro Ikkimaaaaaaaasu!" it said. ^_^ That made me smile; it never seems right to have a Gundam game if you can't hear him say that. "Cool! It says something when you switch over languages!" I thought, and clicked "English" to see what it would do. A woman's voice said: "I... I'm sorry...", and that just made me laugh. Aw, it's not your fault you're not Furuya Tohru! I didn't really mean it! XD

Arcade Gamer Fubuki

I just watched this 4 episode OVA over the last few days. It's based on a manga by Yoshizaki Mine (author of Keroro Gunsou), and there are loads of references to old 1980s and 1990s arcade games - actual recogniseable games, not parody takes on them. "Arashi" from the 1980s anime series "Game Center Arashi" in there as well - the kid in a red baseball hat and huge teeth. Lots of chances to spot little Keroro Gunsou figures in the backgrounds. Oh and one reference to Space Adventure Cobra, even though I don't think he's best known as a video game character!

Furuya Tohru and Fujioka Hiroshi are in the cast too! :D

It's pretty funny, pretty nostalgic, very ridiculous, and overall very entertaining. I thought it was a lot of fun. :D

BTW the DVD I got was a North American copy, it's released by U.S. Manga Corps. The most annoying thing is trying to get it out of the case (weird DVD case), and I really liked the retro arcade-style menu they created. ^_^

Grr, Nintendo Europe

At 1:05pm today I received an email from Nintendo Europe, saying "you have 6310 stars on your account", so I logged in immediately to see what was there. Oh wow, something decent for the first time in years! Kirby and the Amazing Mirror for GBA, 5000 points! I might finally trade them in!

Then I noticed... my balance said there are 800 points.

Eight... hundred??!?!?! but... the email I just got...

So I wrote them an email to ask. I got a generic mailout in return.



Maybe more people have also been robbed of stars. It took me years to build up that many, through the Gamecube era... :(

Grr, Nintendo. Why didn't they send an email saying "Important information about your Stars Balance" right BEFORE deleting them, rather than right after! T_T

In other news, I decided to buy an Xbox 360. No, it's not revenge, there's just a good special offer on at play.com, plus the games are going fairly cheap now, so I picked up a few that I've had my eye on. It'll arrive tomorrow! :D

I'm playing on my Sega Mega-CD tonight. That's more like revenge against Nintendo! >:)