Technical difficulties

Ah, shocking.

My PC is kinda dead at the moment (no power, maybe it's the PSU). My netbook and my router don't seem to like each other much when talking via wifi. I have cables draped across the room and the network cable is broken at the clip so it keeps falling out of the network port.

My Nintendo DSi XL wouldn't play anything one morning when I was away earlier this week, it was really slow and gave me an error message: "An error has occured. Press and hold the POWER button to turn the system off. Please refer to the Nintendo DSi operations manual for details". When I got a chance to look at the manual, it just said to try it again and if that didn't work, call support. Support were shirty and said that there is no warranty unless you have the original receipt (even though the console hasn't been out long enough for the 1 year warranty to be up), so they would repair it for £30.

Then it came back to life! I hope it continues to work...

I'm moving house soon so some of my consoles are in my boyfriend's house for convenience (somehow), including my PS3 and original Xbox.

It's quiet here.

I miss my PC. I can't even watch import DVDs now.

I finished Recettear and it was a great game. Was it too much for my old machine? XD

Deadly Premonition (Xbox 360) coming to the UK!

Rising Star games are bringing Deadly Premonition to the UK!

Official announcement

I want this game because I have seen videos from it on youtube and it seems... uh, pretty eccentric! And... very funny for a horror story. It's received some extremely mixed reviews...

It's on preorder on Amazon UK and play.com for £17.99 - if only I could be sure of my postal address on its release date, I'd preorder it right away!

2011 anime calendars up for preorder

It's that time of year! The time of year when CD Japan put up calendars for preorder... and minutes later, they're sold out!

CD Japan Calendar section

Calendars I'm looking at:

One Piece

Heart Catch Pre Cure!

Digimon Xros Wars

TV anime calendar

TV tokusatsu hero calendar

All that's Ultraman

I kind of wish there were more calendars with old series known for their great artwork. There's Ashita no Joe but I haven't seen much of it and the front cover is a terrible series spoiler. Ultraman calendars always make me smile, though. Every year. :D

Recettear now available for preorder

As I mentioned in my post about companies translating and releasing doujin games in English, Recettear by EGS is coming out soon through a company called Carpe Fulgur.

official English website
EasyGameStation website

I've played the demo, and I really like it.

You play as a little girl who is running an item shop in an RPG world. She can buy and sell things in town and haggle with customers, she can hire people to go into dungeons to get new stuff for her to sell. And I love random dungeoning! :)

I've got it preordered on Steam even though it's the only version with DRM. It's 10% off for the preorder, and Carpe Fulgur made a point of being nice and fair when it comes to international pricing!

Telltale Great Adventure Bundle

Special offer from Telltale Games at the moment:

The Great Adventure Bundle

For $19.99 US dollars, you get The Whispered World, Jack Keane, a collection of the King's Quest games, both of the Penny Arcade games, and if they sell enough copies you also get Puzzle Agent and the Sam & Max Season Two.

They also give some money to charity.

I'm not sure I like this.

I mean, it seems a fairly good offer, probably, but the emphasis of the sale seems to be that it's a way to give to charity and you also get some games. People are talking about it like all the money goes to charity.

But that's not the case. 25% of the money for this goes to charity.

It just seems like they are using charitable causes to advertise their products, rather than wholeheartedly doing this for charity. It doesn't sit well with me.

Telltale Games have made a lot of good games, funny adventure games, I don't have anything against them, I'm not sure about their marketing though. Anyway, if you think it sounds good, this special offer is now on so you can buy those games cheap. :)

My impressions of raptr

I signed up with raptr, the videogaming social network.

Here's my profile: tenshi_a's Profile

My opinions of it:

Good:

* It can automatically track what you're playing on XBLA, PSN and Steam
* You can see what all your friends are playing on the various gaming networks
* You can chat to your friends across the various networks
* You can add your own collection of games manually

Bad:

* I was really reluctant to hand over my login details for the various gaming networks to them.
* It doesn't track what you're playing on XBLA / PSN / Steam if it doesn't have achievements / trophies.
* It says it has 40000 games in their database, but I think most of them are flash games.
* I can't seem to get it to track me playing the flash games it lists.
* It's really bad if you own a lot of old games / obscure games / import games from Japan / you're in Europe and own a lot of Europe-exclusive games. And I have a lot of all of those! I just can't find my games in their database. :(
* They have a page for adding games, and I tried it but the game I added hasn't shown up after about a week or two, so I can't be bothered.

So yeah, it's much more of a social tool than a game collection / playing tracker. It's not ideal for me, but I might as well stick with it for now.

Japanese indie (doujin) game English localisation companies

I decided to start a list because I think the little guys need a shout out. ^_^

I have:

http://rockinandroid.com/

* GUNDEMONIUM Collection
* Flying Red Barrel ~ Diary of a Little Aviator ~
* QLIONE (Qualia)
* SUGURI Perfect Edition

http://www.carpefulgur.com/

* Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

(There's only a demo out so far, but I like it. I don't like some of the language they have used in localisation, but the game seems good fun nevertheless. I'll probably buy it when it's out if they do digital download sales)

http://www.dhm-interactive.com/en/home/

* Chantelise
* Gunners Heart

This is a French company, and I haven't bought from them, but they seem to publish in English as well as French.

EDIT: 6th Sept 2010
I placed an order with them via the website. At first, nothing arrived, so I wrote to the company to complain. A few minutes later, the director of the company had sent me an apology by email and put the order in the post the next day. He had received the payment but had not got the order, somehow! So, I guess I have to call that... good customer service but poor website!

http://www.mangagamer.com/allages/

* Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni
* other stuff. ;)

(though, I think they have massively overpriced Higurashi...)

http://www.nicalis.com

* Cave Story
* La Mulana

I'm kind of reluctant to put the last one in because those games used to be freeware with fan-translation patches, and they are just releasing the games on wiiware which I don't trust. But, I thought I might as well include them.

--

Some Japanese game creators like to release their games in English/Japanese on Xbox indie games, too. They are usually pretty cheap and often have pretty interesting game mechanics.

(Note: Recettear, Chantelise and Gunners Heart were originally made by the same group - EasyGameStation. They seem quite varied!)

Cardcaptor Sakura manga to be rereleased

I just noticed this evening that Dark Horse are going to release the Cardcaptor Sakura manga this Autumn, in omnibus editions.

Dark Horse website

I really enjoyed the anime version of Cardcaptor Sakura but I haven't read the manga (well, not much of it).

Seeing that I went and bought their omnibus edition of Clover mainly because I thought it was printed and bound so nicely, I've decided to put in a preorder! ^_^

Pizza Express - create a pizza competition

http://www.pizzaexpress.com/create-your-pizza/

There's a £5000 prize, so if you're so inclined, might be worth having a go. :)

1Goal

This seems a really good project. It's petitioning world leaders to bring education to children around the world. It was set up by Queen Rania of Jordan, and Sepp Blatter the FIFA president. Over 9 million people have signed up, including lots of footballers and celebrities. Not specifically to do with the World Cup, though it's using that to grab people's attention. :)



You can also get a free 1GOAL t-shirt for your avatar to wear, on Xbox live. :D

Digital: A Love Story

I played through a little freeware game called Digital: A Love Story, which is available here:

http://www.scoutshonour.com/digital/

I really liked it. It's a story that'll stick with me for a while yet, I imagine.

Its execution was really interesting; it's set on the desktop of an Amiga-esque home computer in 1988, and is a story that unfolds through reading various BBS boards... looking for new numbers of boards to dial onto and read...

I'd recommend it to anyone who craves a spot of .hack or cyberpunk or simply anyone who is just very very nosey.

I got an Xbox 360 from Microsoft

I came home on Friday evening to see a large box containing an Xbox 360. It's not the one I sent off to them, it's a replacement one. Seems to be a refurbished old model because it doesn't have an HDMI port on the back.

Pretty quick turnaround! :)

I've tried it out and it seems to work fine (but is maybe even noisier then the last one!), but I have been too busy playing Uplink and Pokemon SS to think about playing anything on Xbox 360 anyway.

Things you should never think about while playing pokemon

1. The people in the pokemon world are sometimes seen playing pokemon, sometimes even trading pokemon with each other. Does the game they are playing contain a pokemon world where people play pokemon? And does that world contain another a pokemon world where people play pokemon? Where does it end?

2. Is it really ok to let children think it's ok to go off on a journey around the world, giving out their phone number to just anyone... especially people who want to fight them?

3. Cubone is a pokemon who is described as wearing the skull of its deceased mother on its head. How come they can come out of an egg like that?

My Pokémon SoulSilver / Pokéwalker adventures

I bought myself a copy of Pokemon SoulSilver when it came out... and a month of waiting and an insurance claim with the postal service later... [sigh...] I got the game (and HeartGold for my brother).

I really like this remake. Well, I confess - I never actually played Pokemon Silver on Gameboy Color, I started playing Pokemon Crystal sometime last year, which was the culmination / enhanced version of Gold and Silver. And still, that game is so clumsy and the interfaces are so bad compared with recent pokemon games. So, compared to Pokemon Crystal, this is a great remake.

The original games on the Gameboy Color were severely restricted due to memory constraints on the cartridge, and it really showed. Names of items were abbreviated, making them somewhat cryptic sometimes. I found myself having to choose what to discard from my backpack far too often. I found myself having to choose which people to delete from my phone book, not knowing whether the next person would be a useful contact. And there wasn't nearly enough space to store pokemon if you were seriously collecting them. Biggest of all - and I might be wrong about it because I didn't play far enough to see and this is what I've heard - the story in the game included a massive disaster in the Pokemon world... because it was a convenient way to exclude half a region from appearing in the game.

It was clear to me that Pokemon Crystal is a really good pokemon game, and it was massive and advanced for a Gameboy Color game, but here in the 21st century, the awkwardnesses of the interface meant that after a while I stopped playing and waited for these remakes to come out in English.

Pokemon SoulSilver was worth the wait. The game is just that much more pleasant to play, and the balance has been struck well - everything from the original is retained and mini-games and things have been added for fun (I am addicted to the Pokeathlon), but they are completely optional if you don't feel like doing them or want to play in the same way as with the old games. The memory restrictions I mentioned are lifted. And, there is the Pokewalker accessory, for exercise and free pokemon / items!

So today, I finished the Johto region Pokemon League for the first time. I even spent the last week carefully training up a "swinub" from hatching from an egg right the way through and looked up how to evolve it through a "piloswine" to becoming a "mamoswine", just to defeat a trainer with dragon pokemon. (My mamoswine is named Calippo, but I think I should have called it SlushPuppy because its type is ground ice).

And... I watched the end credits, but I still have a long way to go in the game! I have earned one more badge since then, in the Kanto region.

Fun times! The Pokemon world is just such a nice place. The pokemon fit in their environment for the most part very thoughtfully (considering real-world wildlife habitats and behaviors), everyone in the pokemon world is so obsessed with pokemon... but that is an important part of the magic of making the pokemon world constantly feel like somewhere really special.

And so, onto the Pokewalker. I love the pokewalker. It's a little pedometer that you can download one of your pokemon to, and go for "a stroll" together. You can catch pokemon or search for items in exchange for "watts", which are kind of like a payment you are rewarded for walking. Very simple interface, three buttons and an old-style black-on-silver screen. All the same, it comes with a 200+ page manual if you're in Europe, telling you how to change the batteries in every language ever. :P

The pokewalker is just a brilliant device, for me. In my mind, as I walk in the real world with my pokemon literally being a "pocket monster", it gives the real world a little bit of the pleasantness and magic of the pokemon world which just makes me feel lighthearted. And, you get rarer / better items from walking further each day. There has never been quite as good a motivator for a bit of exercise than being given free rare pokemon items! Haha, this beats Wii Fit hands down! I've walked nearly 200000 steps already! Ok, maybe I'm a bit pokemon-crazy, but I really think the Pokewalker is a great addition to this game. :)

Too much faith in Microsoft

Over the past weekend and up to today, I've been reading up on the ASP.NET MVC framework and trying it out using Visual Studio 2008 at work, and marvelling at how nice it is, how nice the tools are, and how together Microsoft are about development compared with their attitudes just a few years ago.

It used to be a case of "do things our way or not at all!", but now it's "do things the proper way, here are some tools to help make it easier!"

After a long time battling with certain other technologies to try and do things in a well structured way [sideways glance at php], where you have to jump through firey hoops to get things done in a way that can best be described as a compromised and roundabout way of intending to do things properly, it's just... beautiful.

I feel like... I've been building houses out of toothpicks, and all of a sudden I get to design and build skyscrapers where they just get a crane and pick up entire staircases and slot them in. Y'know?

So I come home, have some dinner, talk on the phone, switch on my Xbox 360 and... hmm. I seem to have one of these. So I start swapping round AV cables... but later notice that because the red flashing lights were so bright, I had not noticed that only three of them were flashing, which means it's one of these.

So I went to the website, tried filling in a form to get it repaired... the website is a bit clunky and the area I live in isn't in the drop-down menu of counties so I am forced to select "England". That goes to an error page, which gives me some phone numbers.

"Oh..." I thought to myself. "I have been showing too much faith in Microsoft! There must be a god sitting somewhere on a cloud going 'see, you have been getting far too enthusiastic about Microsoft things today! I will show you the painful truth of how bad their systems are!'"

The phone number gives me an automatic machine to talk to, encouraging me to use the website. Argh!

Eventually I got to talk to a woman. She was so nice and friendly, and I had no trouble at all! I read out the serial number and some details, and she said the console was going to be repaired under warranty, and that they will pay to have it shipped to them, repaired and sent back, via UPS as a courier service. All for free. With a turnaround of probably 2 - 3 weeks. Plus they'd give me a new 90 day warranty and a month's gold Xbox live subscription as a bonus. I thanked her a lot and told her I was very impressed, and she was just really nice to talk to.

I am actually glad I got the infamous RROD error rather than the 4 light "your AV cable is broken" error, because I get it fixed for free rather than having to buy a new cable!

What can I say? My faith was tested and already it has been restored! XD

Green Man Gaming launches with 1p games

There's a new PC game digital download service available, the site is called Green Man Gaming. Their special gimmick is that you can buy games via their site, download and play them through a special app, then trade them in for store credit.

This means you always have to play the game through their client (called capsule) and I suppose that also means that playing offline must be impossible? I don't know.

I do know that they have some special offers for the launch of the site; certain games are going for only 1 penny. The games are:

Darwinia, High School Dreams, NecroVisioN: Lost Company, Uplink, World of Goo.

Now, I already owned Darwinia and World of Goo, and they are pretty good games. I especially like Darwinia! (note that World Of Goo was also available in the Humble Indie Bundle from Wolfire the other day... DRM free! That offer is still available for the next few hours!)

I just bought Uplink and it's pretty interesting. It's pretty much the way that hacking is depicted in films. You have an account and a server and some software, you get missions to break into remote servers and do stuff, delete all traces of your visit, and get your reward and reputation. Use the money to buy new software and servers, etc. If you get caught, you might get fined or have your server confiscated, or get put in prison.

It's got retro-futuristic interfaces and cute little password breakers that decode one character at a time, and percentage bars to show you how close authority is to catching up with you, giving you that cosy Hollywood-fiction feeling. Sweet!

I would feel far too cautious about handing over my card details to Green Man Gaming since I had never heard of them and the offer sounds too good to be true, but I have seen this promoted on some mainstream news sites so I am inclined to believe that this company is above board.

My PS3...

I haven't switched my PS3 on in a long while. It's going to seem a bit weird, but... I just can't bring myself to let it connect to PSN and upgrade the firmware. It's been ages since the firmware came out that removed the ability to install "Other OS" (i.e. linux), and I have never used that feature, nor am I sure I ever want to, but...

I just feel bad about knowingly disabling a feature on my console.

I mean, I try and look after my possessions, make sure they don't overheat or get scratched up, and I have a nice import console that can even play PS2 games natively... I can't bring myself to let this console... harm itself like this.

I know it's kind of like... removing its appendix, and I know that not using it at all is worse than having one unused feature removed, but, ugh. I can't do it. :(

I keep hoping it'll get over its self-destructive phase and go back to normal. And hopefully before 3D Dot Heroes comes out.

The Humble Indie Bundle

http://www.wolfire.com/humble

This is a really good deal. As in, financially good. Ethically good. Diversity good.

You get award-winning games and you give money to charity. Cross platform. DRM free. As much as you want. The money is divided any way you like.

The games are: World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru and Penumbra Overture.

I already owned World Of Goo and Gish through some deals on Steam but I put in $10 anyway with the full donation to charity just because it's nice idea.

UK general election candidates in 3D Dot Heroes

If you go to the European website for the upcoming PS3 game 3D Dot Heroes:

http://www.3ddotgameheroes.eu/
-> vault
-> characters



You can download David Cameron, Gordon Brown, and Nick Clegg characters for your game. Little 3D blocky versions of them.

The game's not out yet, in fact it's not out until after the election, but eh, I think it's cute anyway. :)

You can make your own characters on the official website too, but I went to make something... and couldn't think what to make!

I spotted this on another site where they have a slideshow of the characters in action. Aww, sweet!

Living In The Future

I thought it's about time I made a "stupid person on the internet" type blog post. :P

Even though it's nearing the end of April, I still can't quite get over the fact that I am living in the year 2010. Every now and again when I write down the date, I think to myself "Oh my god! I'm living in the future!"

I hear news reports, and I have a dramatic announcer voice in my head repeating everything as though it was a cheesy old movie.

"IT WAS THE YEAR 2010 AND HUGE EARTHQUAKES BROUGHT CHAOS AND DESTRUCTION TO COUNTRIES ALL OVER THE GLOBE. VOLCANOES - DORMANT FOR DECADES - ERUPTED, POLLUTING THE SKIES. PLANES WOULD NO LONGER FLY. THIS WAS THE YEAR 2010"

and I'm all giddy, like "omg omg omg what happened next????" :O

Haha! I dunno, I keep expecting dinosaurs to suddenly appear and start eating people, or for the world to turn to desert and all we have left is musclemen riding round on huge oil-guzzling vehicles, somehow. Something like that. -_-;

Beat Hazard - indie game for Xbox 360 and PC

This week, I discovered a really really fun game called Beat Hazard. It's a game that came out on Xbox 360 indie games, but has now also come out on PC.

I read the description and it sounded fun, but there is no PC demo so I decided to trial the Xbox 360 version. It was fun! So I bought myself a copy for PC via Steam. On Xbox 360 it costs 400 MS Points, but I took the more expensive option - a special offer price of £5.24 - so that works out about £2 more. Various reasons: because I can't get my Xbox 360 and PC to talk to each other properly and my MP3s are on my PC. Oh and my internet connection is being flaky and Xbox Live won't let me play indie games offline. It turns out that the PC version is a more enhanced version of the game anyway. :)

Beat Hazard is a twin-stick top-down-view shoot-em-up that generates enemy wave patterns and bullets from files in your MP3 collection. So you choose a song, it starts playing, and you shoot wave after wave of enemies until the song is over. The gameplay is not rhythm based as such, it's just a shoot-em-up which is listening to the music. It's not just the enemy firing patterns which are dictated by the music, it's your ship's firing patterns too. I have noticed that if there's a quiet bit in a song, my ship's mighty flood of bullets will become trickle from a peashooter, so I end up having to evade the bullets until the music ramps up again.

There are two modes: "play" mode where you can play one track, and get rated on that, and "survival" mode where you just play whatever's in the folder you're looking at until you run out of lives.

It is definitely not a good game to play if you are sensitive to flashing lights. It might literally kill you off, it flashes so much. At first I found it difficult to tell where the bullets were being shot at my ship because of all the visual effects, but I think I got used to it.

I can see myself coming back to this over and over just to try new songs, even though in reality there is still a limited amount of variation (otherwise the leaderboards just wouldn't be fair, would they?). I suppose a player's enjoyment in this game is going to really differ if they only like music that does not create interesting stages. It looks like the developer is still busy maintaining the game and adding new updates to this game too, so that is likely to keep interest up!

One thing I personally have discovered while playing this game is that it's really great to play while listening to old mecha anime songs. Some of these songs will make you really super powered (I have found that FIRE WARS by JAM Project is one example that is good for this). Even better than that, in some songs, the shouting of special attacks sometimes actually causes a huge attack with which you can defeat your enemies! *_* That's just so much fun!

So you can put on Macross 7 music and get Fire Bomber / Nekki Basara to rock everything to death! (er, yeah, perhaps that's abusing his music against his intentions...) You can put some Animetal on and have Eizo Sakamoto scream things to death! This game is just so amusing!

(Actually, the Animetal Marathons are really great for Survival Mode. Not because they make it easy, but because it makes it very varied and there are no pronounced gaps between tracks. I think the 4th marathon is most effective).

The album "EROTIC & HERETIC" by ALI Project is also really good for playing through. It makes exciting stages, some are just full of bosses!

Soulcaster, Xbox 360 Indie Game - review

This evening I decided to try, then buy, a game called Soulcaster. I think it was 240 points.

I really enjoyed it.

The gameplay is... imagine if Gauntlet was an amalgam of action, strategy, RPG and tower defense. Without an energy timer or food to shoot.

So you control a wizard who can't fight directly, and he can summon a lady Elf to stand and shoot arrows, a warrior who can take a lot of damage and can't do ranged attacks, and a lobber who can kill various things over walls that others can't, but blows up if he gets killed. The wizard can also use a scroll to attack everything on screen, if he picks one up and you use the right trigger.

I really like this because I am a somewhat frustrated Gauntlet player. I like the game but... it's so repetitive, there are lots of narrow passages where you want the warrior to lead but the weak characters end up tanking... he walks into a Grim Reaper and then becomes a pile of bones and more enemies... and if you're playing online you end up playing with silly people who shoot food and wander off so the map won't scroll, and don't understand switches and teleports, etc etc.

Maybe I did always want it to be single player if I can't communicate what everyone should do. I can finally get my warrior to stand in front and have the others do a lot of damage from further back. I can power up my characters. I can maneuver when chased by things I can't kill without help. There isn't too much repetition in map layouts. And finally, it really does have an ending!

So, I found this a very satisfying game. I really liked it!

I finished the game, it says...

Completion time: 1:21:47

Normal Mode

Died: 3 times.

Summon Count:

"Elf" x 221
"Warrior" x 349
"Lobber" x 262

(well, it has graphics representing the summons, but.. I can't help but think of them with Gauntlet character names!)

The Oneechanbara movie, aka "Chanbara Beauty"

I bought a copy of this film from HMV online on DVD for £2.99 with free shipping, that's cheaper than a bus into town and back.

I was thinking to mayself: "these games are terrible! Terrible! The film is probably also going to be terrible, but I'm sure it will at least be enjoyably brainless and hilariously bad. Surely it cannot be worse than the games which are terrible!"

The jury is still out.

See, I think it's just plain bad.

The woman they have playing Aya (the girl in a cowboy hat and bikini) is all of three things:

* A bad actress who always looks terrified when swinging a sword. She's supposed to be the moody silent type, and a master with a sword, but she always looks like she is thinking "eek! I'm holding a sword! I hope no-one gets hurt!"

* Cannot swordfight. I think she trained for swordfighting via 10 minutes with a wiimote. She does not move in a way that is fulfilling to watch - she just flails hopelessly.

* Isn't that nice to look at (not when compared to the women playing Reiko and Saki, or how Aya looks in the games) and she's supposed to be the "beauty".

So, er, that fails.

And, well, there's just not enough action really, or rather there is but it's not generally very exciting. Zombies move so slowly and clumsily, you see. One of them doesn't - rather than lumbering, she has a weapon and seems competent with it - but that scene became a dramatic plot scene, which made it a bit clunky. I thought that in a lot of scenes that the zombies seemed to be waiting around for people to stop talking.

To me, the CGI looked worse than in the actual Oneechanbara games, by which I mean the first few PS2 budget games that are made with no money at all.

In the end the fighting goes all Dragon Ball Z style which is a bit boring.... and goes on for ages. :/

The games give people a sexy lady to watch as she swordfights and there is nothing but action, so much that it gets repetitive. Very repetitive! This film kind of does the exact opposite. So, they are both bad, but in different ways!

Bayonetta (Xbox 360 version) video game review

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG I LOVE THIS GAME.

Hahahahahaha. I can't start this post off by saying anything else.

This... this is a game written (i.e. the story) and directed by the same man who directed the Devil May Cry games, it has similar gameplay, but is even more spectacular to look at.

The protagonist is a witch by the name of Bayonetta, a strangely proportioned woman (extremely long legs!), in squared glasses and skintight black catsuit, who speaks in a very posh RP/London English accent with an air of seduction and schoolmistress about her. She offers much titilation through her manner, her poses, her curves, the way whe moves, the way her costume sometimes becomes living hair and then moulds itself around her again... and the way she is untouchable and a complete badass at fighting. I cannot deny that this game is erotic. In fact, it may be the most erotic game I have ever played, and I feel a little ashamed because it's so loaded with obvious ploys that I know I have willingly put my brain on a shelf, walked into a trap and then been extremely happy to be there. But... it's just great. I can't help but like Bayonetta. She shoots things with high kicks with guns in her shoes, and pole-dances monstrous "angels" to death.

The story... the story is one of those great stories where people in Japan have read about hundreds of years of religious tension and Christianity and then feel free to act like it's all a nice bit of fiction they can add to. So you have the main character who is a witch, she fights off "angels" and travels to a place in Europe that's closest to "Paradiso" - it begins with a V but is definitely not Vatican. I think this game could really annoy some Catholics.

On top of the plot, you have a lot of hilarious and outrageously over the top and funny cutscenes. I mean, a lot of the time my eyes were out on stalks and I had a stupid grin on my face just down to how cool Bayonetta is, and I just laughed out loud really often.

The gameplay is mainly dodging and jumping and hacking and slashing. The combinations of buttons make up different moves and combos, and equipping different combinations of types of weapons creates new selections of moves and combos, so there is a lot of variety in the gameplay. There are big boss fights, and not only that, sometimes something you thought was a boss early in the game will come back as "just another monster" later on, you get the feeling that Bayonetta is so amazing and always becoming more awesome that eventually what you thought were boss fights mean little; they just become another routine thing to fight.

There are also some game diversions. The game contains various references to SEGA games, as it is published by SEGA. They talk about Eggman, Bayonetta collects halos that happen to look like Sonic rings. This also adds special gameplay styles as there's a motorbike racing segment (like Hang-On) which features remixed Outrun music, and her "fantasy zone" (?) which plays like Space Harrier. I also noticed that Enzo's car in the end scene is yellow so it looks like Crazy Taxi. Haha! I thought these little touches were very cute. :)

I only played the game on "Easy (Automatic)" mode because I don't normally play DMC style games, and it was indeed fairly easy. I finished the game this morning with just over 10 hours on the clock (I think it stops for cutscenes). Then I went back to attempt "normal mode", and with all the extras and items from my completed game, but after 8 more hours I have only done the prologue and 4 chapters! I'm so bad at these games! XD (Actually I found some tough bonus "Alfheim" challenges and they took up a lot of time...)

But for me to come back to a game immediately after completing it is a rarity. I just like this game so much! I think I would genuinely give this game a 10 out of 10. It's just packed with so much fun.

Ace Attorney Apollo Justice (Nintendo DS) video game review

This is the fourth Ace Attorney (Gyakuten Saiban) game, and since the 5th one came out recently (the Miles Edgeworth game), I thought I would hurry up and play this one before tackling that!

This was the first one that doesn't have Phoenix Wright as the titular protagonist, so that is something that I know puts a lot of people off. Perhaps it put me off? I can't say. I just know I only play a new game when I feel like playing that kind of game. I really like these games, they are about the only visual novel style games that have really become mainstream in English, and the stories are usually good mysteries to play through, and the characters funny and memorable. But, I have to be in the right mood to play them.

So, Apollo Justice was a really really good game.

Apollo's special gimmick in court is... a bit ridiculous really, and staring at people to look at their sweaty armpits is not my idea of good fun, but those moments are thankfully rather few.

There was really only one investigation I could consider weak in the whole game, but it was still a lot more fun than most of the stories in the second game. All of the stories seemed logical, maybe even more than in previous games where you know what is going on and you know what you need to say but are not sure what evidence to present in the given situation.

In the end, everything tied together really well. The story is really tight, loose ends are tied up well. The only thing I had a problem with at the end was that one character's back-story didn't really fit together and seemed artificially included at the end to making a happy ending. Still, overall it was really really good.

I don't think I'll start up the Miles Edgeworth game just yet; I may well start up one of the remake Pokemon Gold/Silver games as soon as the end of next week.

The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom (Xbox 360) video game review

It's a long time since I first heard of the Winterbottom game, but "The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom" came out on Xbox Live Arcade at the end of February 2010.

I played a little, then decided to buy a copy of my own and played through to the end.

Take a look at the external links above if you want to see some screenshots.

It's a collaborate-with-yourself puzzle/2D platformer with time manipulation elements, wrapped up in 1920s silent-film style graphics and a story about stealing pies. I like the style and the comedic simplicity of the story makes it charming.

Think Cursor*10, The Company Of Myself, and Braid (minus the annoying self-serving story) combined together... and you'll be almost there.

It's part action game and part puzzle game, but neither is compromised. Unlike the games I mentioned, your copies are not just ghosts - you can change what they do by hitting your copies to propel them, or get them to propel you by having them repeatedly strike thin air, then walking into them. There are also time trial and minimum-copies-made trials in the bonus levels, for those most interested in the action aspect, and those most interested in the puzzle aspect.

Overall, for a commercial game it is a bit short, but the levels have been well crafted. Maybe it could have done with a level editor and some way to share levels via Xbox Live Arcade.

Earth Hour

8:30pm tomorrow, turn off all your electric. :)

Info: http://earthhour.wwf.org.uk/

I'm going to!

Well, it's about time my fridge had a bit of a defrost. :P

(I'm not going to take the batteries out of my fire alarm or clock or watch though, since I have no other way of finding out when the hour is over, so it's not like I will be completely free from the use of electric...)

I am undecided as to whether or not to sit in the dark, or actually try and produce some light. I think I left my dynamo-powered torch in my parents' house (which is kind of electric anyway, it's just me generating it) so I'd have to think about burning something instead, which isn't a good idea either...

Heavy Rain (PS3) video game review

I played and completed Heavy Rain last night. What a turbulent ride that was!

I was looking forward to this game for a very long time, since I heard about it after playing Fahrenheit last year, in fact.

It's a thriller interactive movie, about hunting for a serial killer who drowns children in rainwater. Pretty bleak subject material! Also, I guess it's pretty strange as something to ask for as a birthday present but that's what I requested and received from my boyfriend. Collector's Edition, yay! :)

I started it up, played through bit by bit until I came to two scenes which were really intense... at that point I decided to stop and play something more relaxing, and continued with the "more relaxing" games for about a fortnight before getting back to the game and finishing the rest in one run last night.

Gameplay is similar to Fahrenheit - most are in third person and you can walk and explore scenes and interact with in-game characters, switching between controllable characters as fits the story, with action sequences played out using on-screen instructions.

The main differences in gameplay are that you can press L2 to look into the mind of the person you're controlling and select different thoughts, and that the game uses motion controls (sixaxis) for some actions. In most games I've played on PS3 that use sixaxis, they have felt more of a hinderance than anything else, but they do work quite well in Heavy Rain.

The game promised many branches throughout the story, as it was said that your main protagonists can die depending on the choices you make. I have only played through the game once, but I did happen to see some very different outcomes of scenes depending on what I did (then I reloaded the game), and some people have told me they got really different endings, so that's quite cool.

The graphics in this game are really amazing, and that's not normally something I would praise a game for right from the start, but this is so good that I have to mention it. The faces of characters are especially detailed and expressive, I thought. The face of one shopkeeper in particular stands out in my mind. He had incredibly dark eyes and his performance was genuinely moving. There's also a "Making of" casting video included as an unlockable extra to the game, and it's obvious that many of the characters really do look a lot like the actors that played them (but altered accordingly).

Aside from the characters, the art direction in this game was really good, I thought. It's not often that you think of art direction in a game, but there it was; settings for each scenario that push you into one emotion or another, and another unlockable bonus is concept artwork which is really good artwork in its own right, realistic... perhaps even hyper realistic mundane scenes. Seems strange, but that's the only way I can think of describing them.

The atmosphere was really well set up in each scene, I know it must have been difficult to get this just right because it is a game and the game uses techniques normally employed in film. That is, the player can decide what to do in most scenes that are not cut-scenes, which means they can dawdle, they can move artificially slowly or goofily, so it must have been difficult to capture atmosphere, and yet it succeeded. I was completely drawn in.

Even moments where the game had me (the player) flustered and I couldn't decide what to do, so I made my character pace around the room. Even those moments looked right for the scene. It was just really well made.

The story.... I found compelling, but at the end I had a lot of things I wanted to discuss with other people who had played the game! Are they plot holes or would they be revealed if I played different branches through the game? I cannot say yet. But it's been fun just talking to people about their experiences, their choices, and what they made of various bits and pieces in the game, and characters.

So, overall I was very satisfied with Heavy Rain.

It managed to surpass not only my expectations from playing the studio's previous game, but my general expectations of acting and expression from CGI characters and of the use of film techniques to create emotion and atmosphere in video games.

Although I have access to the DLC chapter of this game, I have not downloaded it yet. I was busy this evening! :)

Very Very Minor Gripe: There was a pre-launch fun little augmented reality game (ARG) to play via the web using Twitter and Facebook and special little websites they'd set up, it was called the "4 Days Challenge". That's all good and well, and it was a nice marketing gesture to give us that ARG game, but the initial "prize" for getting it right was a trailer which managed to spoil me in knowing the start of a scene (one of the scenes which made me put down the game for a fortnight, in fact). That was pretty bad, I thought. Also, I managed to stupidly sign up for the 4 Days Challenge website with my language set as Spanish and couldn't log in again to change it, so they kept sending me emails I had to run through a translator! Lastly, I only got the prize for the event this morning via email, which I thought was quite late. It's an XMB theme for the PS3 dashboard. It's all free so I shouldn't really complain, haha!

Ada Lovelace Day

I've spent all day trying to think of a single woman to nominate in celebration of Ada Lovelace Day, but I couldn't think of one. Celebrating women in science and technology, one that's inspired me into working in technology, hmm.

I went off to an event and spent half the evening talking to a woman who seemed to know everything about everything. We talked about women working with science, tecnology and mathematics, of encryption, passport technology and identity theft, atomic science, relationships and conformity, youth and reliance on technology, of societies and hardship, wicker baskets and autocad, archaeology and history... wow, what a knowledgeable person! *_*

At first I didn't want to go to the event at all, because I thought it sounded a bit too gimmicky, and... there is always the threat of the type of feminism that's about dominance rather than equality. Especially these days where equality is the norm, you get people saying all sorts of foolish old-fashioned things, you know? But, it turned out to be a fascinating and inspirational event after all.

I still have no idea who to nominate.

When it comes to science or technology, it's easier to recognise a method, a product, a service as being something that's a breakthrough... not so easy to recognise individuals. Do I nominate Ada Lovelace herself as the inventor of programming, since that's what I do every working day of my life? How about Marie Curie? Or those women who did vital intelligence work in World War II?

I think overall, the women in science and technology who have helped me the most to get where I am today, and have inspired me further in technology, are probably the teachers I had at the various schools I attended, my maths teacher in college, the female lecturers, faculty and staff in the Comp Sci department at the University of Durham and (as it was) 3F Ltd, and all my colleagues at TechnoPhobia Ltd.

Oh what a cop out! :P

But I have to make this clear: most of the men working at all those places were great too! :D

Katamari Forever (PS3) videogame review

I really could play Katamari Forever.

Since I played the first one, Katamari Damacy has been one of my favourite games.

The first Katamari Damacy game is truly a masterpiece, in my eyes. Roll, roll, roll your clump of stuff round and pick up more and more things. Such a tactile game. Such a happy feeling. Such detail! Each level is crafted so that you start off small and scales up wonderfully, barely noticeably... you play it first of all to discover your landscape, then to figure out the best paths around the course so that you can end up with the biggest katamari possible. There were different goals on different levels.

The music was so good too. It would loop round to infinity - without a pause to restart tracks, and I couldn't get bored of it. It sang happy songs to you. Nonsensical songs about rolling things up and love and joy.

That first game had some magic which I think the later games could not capture. They possessed an almost maniacal attention to detail in creating memorable objects and worlds to roll around, arranging objects amusingly, and yet having level design that meant there was a distinct element of getting to grasp with the environment, learning your surroundings, figuring out what the best path through to success is.

In later games... the second game (We Love Katamari) was very good but didn't have the feeling of scaling up and felt a little too self-congratulory in places. Not only that, the first game feels eccentric but the second felt like it was trying to be weird and that just wasn't cool. The third game (Me & My Katamari) suffered from poor controls, levels that were just junk scattered willy-nilly leaving the game far too easy and levels far too short (I'd roll around with nothing left to roll up for the last few minutes) - plus, it was becoming for too into itself for comfort. The fourth game (Beautiful Katamari) is better than the PSP game, but is far, far, far too short and asks the player for too much downloadable content - plus its Xbox Live achievements system contains achievements for playing for 100 hours or something, which isn't an achievement, it's a waste of electricity. I wrote a little review of Beautiful Katamari in the past.

This new game is called "Katamari Tribute" in Japan. Perhaps that is a more descriptive title than Katamari Forever as this game is like a "Greatest Hits" of the older games. Various hand-picked levels from all of the previous games (including some that were paid-extra DLC) are in this game. There are also a few new levels, but not enough to really class the game as something new. It's on the PS3 so it's all in HD (in fact, it wil not let you play it on a standard definition screen, which was really annoying because it meant I had to buy a new monitor). You play the levels as before but with the ability to jump and with the inclusion of "broken hearts" which help you pick up lots more stuff. There is also a graphical filter on by default, which makes everything look like a chalk cartoon, which actually works really nicely. Later on you can unlock "drive mode" (the katamari moves faster and levels have shorter time limits), "classic mode" where appropriate (looks more like the older games and plays like them too).

It really is a game that I think serves as a good tribute. There's not much new content but I think they have chosen mainly good levels from the previous games and that to me is better than a slew of poor levels. The new gameplay modes do breathe new life into old levels as it sometimes encourages you to think up new strategies. The new graphical filters are mainly quite good looking. The music is mainly made up of remixes of old songs, and while it would have been nice for them to include the original versions of songs, these remixes are for the most part quite pleasant. Certainly there has been worse music in the 2nd to 4th Katamari games.

I do have some gripes with the game though.

The first is that the scoring system on the game seems quite harsh at first so even a seasoned katamari player like me got some not-excellent scores through my first playthrough. This is ok, it means you have to try harder and get better! What is not ok, however, is that the "King Of All Cosmos" and his robotic counterpart in this game use language in a way that seems far too abusive for what is otherwise a nice happy relaxing game. Even if you do reasonably well, they will insult and bully you. I just feel like... this game would be perfect for little children to play apart from that element. I would rather buy the Japanese version of the game and give it to them in a language they couldn't read than have them be abused in such a fashion.

In the past games... I used to really like the King Of All Cosmos, when I played the first and second games in Japanese. He spoke nonsense. Even though what he says is all in a language I am not fluent in, I could tell that a lot of his dialogue was often nonsense. And it sounded like someone messing round on a turntable, wiki wiki wah wah. When localised to English, his dialogue became proud and haughty as well as being random gibberish, and he would talk down to his son. I took a slight dislike to him, really. As time has gone on though, things have become steadily worse and in this game, he's just a jerk.

Maybe some people find that funny. I find it disharmonious to the rest of the game.

Plus, as the scoring system is stricter, you are more likely to have to suffer their abuse as you start, which is just plain unwelcoming.

My second gripe is that it's not entirely made clear how to unlock other modes, so the game ends up feeling a bit more repetitive than it ought to (even though I'm replaying levels I have replayed many times before).

I think I did originally have more gripes, but I can't remember them right now. Hehe!

Overall, I really like this game as a tribute to Katamari. I'm satisfied with it. I did wait and buy it for roughly 1/3rd of the original asking price though!

I'll leave this post with links I found to (yay!) translated stuff about the first game, just for the sake of golden memories.

Interview

How to build a King Of All Cosmos Kite

Tornado Outbreak (Xbox 360) video game review

Well... this is a game in which you build big tornadoes and destroy cities. I bought it in the hope that it could be another take on Katamari style gaming, but overall I have to say this game just isn't that good.

Graphically it's very much like what you see from American TV cartoons these days. That's not so bad. Voice acting wasn't bad but all the same I wasn't fond of the way the main character spoke like a snarky American soldier though he's an alien. Maybe that's just me. I just find it to be a dispassionate and annoying style of speech. Still, it's what it's intended to be.

Gameplay: You start off as a little tornado, you run over stuff and build into a bigger tornado. Not so bad. Then you do these little gate-run sequences (called a Vortex Race), followed by a boss battle (Totem Battle).

The main portion of each mission is the level - where you grow your tornado and collect "fire fliers".

My issues with the main game:

1) Camera angles. It's either almost-overhead when you are a small tornado, and from directly behind when you are big. I don't know, maybe they don't want you to see what you're doing due to limitations with draw distances, but I always felt that I was being hindered by not really being able to see what I was running over. I also felt lost due to not being able to see enough to get a feeling from where I was in the overall landscape. I wished I could tilt the vertical camera axis just a little or somehow get a view from further away. Especially when in a hurry to return to base.

2) Certain objects on levels contain these little orange flames called Fire Fliers which you have to collect to complete the level. There are 100 but you only need to collect 50 and go back to base. Collecting of fire fliers makes the game's speed uneven and clunky. You press right trigger to suck them in and hold it as you run over more things containing fire fliers to keep up the combo. Keeping up the combo adds seconds to the game level timer. Problem is... they give you a minor speed boost (for a split second) then you get gradually slower and slower as you run out of their power. So if you try for big combos, it's really irritating as you constantly feel like you're running out and powerless to do any better, and when you are feeling against the time it seems counterintuitive to combo things to make you ever slower when you're in a hurry. It just made the game feel almost suffocating at times.

3) I didn't feel like the objects on each stage were done evenly. Objects that appeared like they would be quickly uprooted in a tornado stuck strong, beyond other objects that would remain on the ground until you were the next level in size. So you have to play and replay relying on memory rather than intuition.

The other portions of the game:

"Vortex races" seem familiar from somewhere - an old Sonic The Hedgehog game, maybe? I am not sure. They aren't really races, you pass through gates in front of you as you fly forwards, and I don't know, maybe it's just me but I found it almost impossible to get worse than a gold medal for each race. I had to force myself into a silver medal to get an Xbox achievement. These sequences were much less difficult than the rest of the game.

The boss battles themselves weren't so interesting, but the getting to each boss was the interesting part, usually using a new move to help you. The battles themselves are usually a case of [wait for the visual clue] [push a direction] [hammer a button] until done. I felt that they could have done with more variety.

Not a bad game as such, but overall I found it quite annoying and joyless to play. I only finished it because I felt I ought to, having started it.

Maybe if you have an 6 year old son that wants to play Call Of Duty you can give him this instead, since it's all kiddy-style war-glory soldier stories... I don't know who else could really truly appreciate this game.

Way Of The Samurai 3 - out in the UK, free artbook PDF

Way Of The Samurai 3 on PS3 is out here in the UK today.

I have enjoyed the previous Way Of The Samurai games for the ability to free roam and get involved with the game world, finding your way to what you consider to be the best conclusion to the events that unfold. I've had an import copy for a while (I got it as a Christmas present!), but I haven't actually started playing it yet.

If you would like the PDF of the artbook for Way Of The Samurai 3, sign up with Rising Star Games (the UK publisher for the game), and you can download it for free.

That's a 6MB PDF at low quality, or a whopping 240MB PDF at high quality.

There's also exclusive art and a guide. It's nice of them to give this away, I thought.

http://www.risingstargames.com/games/way-of-the-samurai-3-ps3.html

I went to watch the film "Ponyo"

I went out to the cinema to watch a film this evening. It was the newest Studio Ghibli / Hayao Miyazaki film "Ponyo".

I saw it at the Showroom cinema, right next door to where I work, so that was convenient. The ticket cost me £6.90 and I was slightly late but there were so many adverts that I ended up waiting around for the film to start. The picture was out of focus when it started but the seats were comfy.

The film started, and... it's a really good film!

It was dubbed into English, but as you'd expect from the localisation of a Studio Ghibli title, it's top quality and uses great actors - no complaints from me!

The film broke halfway through. The lights came up and some music started playing. I counted the number of people in the audience; 18 people in total. Wow. I had thought it was nice to have two entire rows to myself to lounge around and perch with my head on the seat in front! After a few minutes, someone from the audience went to fetch someone, and after a few minutes I followed to investigate... and the other person came back. A member of staff told us to sit tight and wait for the film to come back.

"Excuse me", I piped up with a question which had been burning within me. Which was going to distract me from the rest of the film if I did not get an answer right away: "You don't happen to know what the music we're listening to at the moment is?" :D
"It's... from a soundtrack, um, another Japanese film..."
"Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence" spoke a voice from behind me in the audience.
"Ah! I knew I'd heard it from somewhere! Thanks!" :D
See, this is the kind of cinema The Showroom is. ^_^

The film started again, and lasted about a minute before the film stuck on one frame and we watched it warp and melt away.

"OMG! Ponyo just burst into flames!!!" T_T came a cry from the audience.

And we waited again, but the film restarted after much less of a delay this time. The sound was still a little messed up, making a somewhat surreal film even moreso.

But, this experience didn't detract from my enjoyment of the film at all; as I said, it's a wonderful film. As always with Miyazaki films, it's got the same old undercurrent of "children are cute", "hey kids - befriend weird things; it's ok!", "destroying the environment is super-bad", and "females are the more-amazing of the two genders". That's not a bad thing, it's just what I expected, I suppose. Some parts are very odd and never end up being explained, which is also to be expected. Hmm, I guess there's not much more I can say really without giving anything away. It's a good film, I liked it more than Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle, I'll leave it at that. ^_^

I might well get it on DVD when a home version comes out, so I can watch it uninterrupted and in focus. ^_^

If you don't care about watching this whole film, watch the trailer, and you'll know the entire plot to the film! That's terrible! T_T Just as well I only looked at that after seeing the film! I'm only linking to it so that anyone who's seen the film can see what I mean!

Sherlock Hound series now available in the UK on DVD

In the 1980s, there was a cartoon series that was a Japanese-Italian co-production, very loosely based on the Sherlock Holmes stories. In Japan, it was known as "Meitantei Holmes".

Like "Dogtanian And The Three Muskehounds" and "Around the World with Willy Fogg", it features animals as the main characters.

The series was dubbed into English and was renamed "Sherlock Hound", and is now being released by Manga Entertainment on DVD after all these years. It's an exclusive to the shop HMV, and although the release date is the 1st of February 2010, my preorder copy arrived today.



It cost £17.99 for this 26 episode 5 DVD box set, and the series is presented as dub-only. The cast aren't so bad, they're voice actors whose names I recognise from US cartoons, not specifically as anime dub actors. There are only 4 names so they're doubling up, but it's very good considering that they are also probably from the 1980s. The British accents don't sound overdone, which was a concern I had. Well, actually Inspector Lestrade might take some getting used to, hehe.

I've only watched 2 episodes so far. The first episode seemed to be quite action oriented, but the second episode had more eagle-eyed detective work. Sherlock Hound's car seems to be as much of an assistant as Watson!

The DVD box says on the side: "Hayao Miyazaki and Kyousuke Mikuriya's Sherlock Hound The Complete Series", though it appears that Miyazaki only had involvement in a few episodes. There are typos on the back of the box. :/

I'm just interested because it looks like another Dogtanian or Willy Fogg. :)

It seems quite fun. :)

Sherlock Holmes VS Jack The Ripper - review

The title of this game almost put me off it. "Sherlock Holmes VS Jack The Ripper" sounds too much like a "I wonder what would happen if you get these two famous names..." type simple fanfic. It was going cheap in the January sales though, and I felt like playing a detective game as a warm-up before Heavy Rain comes out. ^_^

I played the Xbox 360 version of this from start to end, gaining all 1000 achievement points in the process. It was quite a short game, and not that difficult.

It's a pure puzzle adventure game in which Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's famous fictional sleuthing duo of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson investigate the real-life case of Jack The Ripper, which was contemporary to when the stories were set.

The game is played with you playing as Holmes or Watson (whichever is appropriate to the scene), in either 3rd person fixed-camera perspective or 1st person view - switchable at the press of a button. I played in 3rd person all the way through. Most of the gameplay is walking around examining and picking up objects and talking to people, with many minigame puzzles to solve. I liked it, but if you are the type of gamer who feels like a game requires action scenes in order to be enjoyable, you probably ought to give this game a miss.

The authenticity of this game is excellent. It seems like a great deal of research went into this game. Graphically, the streets of late 19th century London have been faithfully recreated (well, from what I imagine from historical pictures and from living around English buildings of around the right age). The street furniture, the smog and filth, the prostitution, the gin-soaked population, the clothing, the prevalance of illness and medical practices of the time, and quietly negative attitudes between different people towards each other, all seem to fit well. There is a lot of detail, and it really gave the game the right atmopshere for investigating this mystery. To me, even though I had seen a documentary on Jack The Ripper in the past, it never conjured up the world and setting and hopelessness of the surroundings that this game got across.

Many of the actors seem to speak in London accents which don't seem to quite fit, or have an accent which sounds too modern, but I suppose that is hard to mask. I expect that barely anyone would notice apart from me anyway. It's really my one gripe.

I don't remember much of any Sherlock Holmes stories to know whether the representation of those characters was accurate, but there are small references to make me think that this Holmes is based on the one in the books rather than based on an actor's portrayal of the character. He speaks very quickly and is quite eccentric, loves searching for facts, hates journalists making up stories - all appears consistent with what I know about the character.

I also appreciated the ease of use of the game; it has nice little touches, like when you are examining all objects in a room, and could select from many things to look at in a small area, the game will automatically select the next thing you haven't already examined. You're not often hearing repeated dialogue as a result, and that's just nice. Holmes and Watson often announced where they needed to go next; on one hand this was useful and saved frustration, on the other hand, maybe it felt like it was holding my hand too much - in a game as linear as this, perhaps I should be working that out?

Most of the investigation, examination and deduction parts of the game are similarly structured (as is Holmes' methodology), but the little logic puzzles are all different, so there's a lot of welcome variety in the game.

The game is rated suitable for ages 16+, and you don't see a lot of graphic horror (thank goodness!), and a lot of what you need to investigate closely is done with cartoony drawings rather than the game's more realistic looking engine, but you do have to stomach reading reports on Jack The Ripper's deeds and other sordid goings on in the area.

There is certainly a blur between fact and fiction in this game. The murders did certainly take place in the ways they describe. If you have watched a documentary on Jack The Ripper you might have a good idea how this is all going to turn out, but... the involvement of Holmes and Watson, the exact dialogue from the suspects, some of the incidental characters, must all be fictional. I did also wonder at the end whether the authors of the story in this game told this tale in this way in order to express what attitudes were like and a small amount of a political view, but do it in such a way that it appears to be fact.

For me, just knowing that the terrible acts I was reading about were really carried out on women, that these things really did take place, made it a lot harder to get through. I'm hearing place names and looking at a map and thinking "I've been near there". It brought it all home. Some parts of this game really made me cringe and feel ill in a way that much 18 rated horror has not.

Without giving too much away, my final verdict is that this was a really good game but... not only is there absolutely no replayability in this (which I expected), and by the end, the exploits of Jack The Ripper had become so gruesome and vile that I was wishing the game to wrap up as soon as possible.

I think that it may have been the intention of the makers of this game to make me feel that way, because the feeling of characters in-game matched mine. So maybe that's actually their success. The effect it had on me was quite powerful. The conclusion of the story seems entirely plausable from the facts presented, though I don't know whether anything was left out to make it seem more definite or anything like that.

After this post, I don't really want to think about this ever again.

Grand Theft Auto - Episodes From Liberty City - review

This is a compilation of two side-stories set in the world of Grand Theft Auto IV, exclusive to Xbox 360 even though the game is out on many platforms.

The first part - The Lost And Damned - had been available as downloadable content for GTA IV for quite a long time, but the second part - The Ballad Of Gay Tony - only became available at the same time as this compilation.

The compilation is out as a standalone game, available on discs in shops. I decided to buy my copy this way as I could find a better price this way, and because there is limited space available for DLC on my Xbox 360 hard drive.

I played it last year, before Christmas, but only decided to do a write-up today. ^_^

My opinion:

The Lost And Damned (TLAD) was horrible to play. It's all about a biker gang and its members. I didn't find the story interesting, I hated the way those big American Choppers (i.e. motorcycles) handle (it's realistic! They handle like armchairs! Armchairs with broken wheels!), I didn't like the scenario, I didn't enjoy the random abusiveness of characters, and after the main GTA IV game it was just depressing to play another protagonist whose life just gets worse and worse as you play the game. The additions to the main game are not too good, and a lot of things seemed like they were made deliberately inconvenient. By the end of the episode, 10 in-game hours had passed and I was thinking "60% done? Oh no! there's so much more to go!" :( That sums up my feeling about the game.

Tips about TLAD: the moment you get a chance, switch off the movie camera effect, and the game is far more playable - you will actually be able to see well enough to aim! Also, use handbrake turns everywhere and the bikes become a little more bearable.

The Ballad Of Gay Tony (TBoGT) however, was a lot of fun. Maybe even more fun than even the main game (GTA IV). It's got an overall more uplifting story, much much funnier side characters, and I got to like the cool music a lot more than the biker's rock station, which was a surprise to me. In TBoGT, you play as a man who works for a nightclub owner, in fact, he's more of a business partner. You're the straight man; the one who keeps Tony from going over-the-top, as his personality leads him to. That's not to say you are boring; you're his man for driving, racing, piloting, skydiving / base jumping, gunfights and other exciting action type things. Plus as pastimes you can be a cage fighter, or get drunk and dance with women and have casual sex with them... which might not be your thing but it's a lot better than what they gave you in TLAD: arm wrestling and playing a card game which I can only think of as "Play Your Cards Right" after the TV game show. ^_^;;

There's also a system in TBoGT where you can go back and replay levels after you've finished the game, in order to get a better score. I thought that was a good idea.

Overall: I really like the way that a lot of the stories in the main game and these episodes are interlinked and woven together. However, I could honestly have done without TLAD. TBoGT is definitely a star game though, and I think it made up for the price of the compilation (NB: I got it half price!)

Fatal Frame 4 / Project Zero 4 fanmade English translation patch out

If you happen to be a person who really liked playing the Fatal Frame / Project Zero games in English, and were disappointed that the 4th game out on Wii was not going to be officially released in English, so decided to buy a copy of the game in Japanese anyway, just in case...

...chances are you already know about this fan-translation project!

But here's a link to it anyway: http://zero4.higashinoeden.com/

It's pretty cool in that even though the wii is region restricted, you don't have to modify your console in order to use it. You just put their patch onto an SD card, put a copy of the Japanese game and the SD card into the wii, and it will play the game and add subtitles on-the-fly direct from the SD card.

Sakura Wars: So Long My Love - language options

A while ago, I blogged that Nippon Ichi America are taking Sakura Taisen V to the US.

Well, it's now due out in March 2010, and will be released in North America on PS2 and Wii (which we already knew), and is also coming out in Europe on Wii only.

Preorders are up in various online retailers, and I've placed my order for the American PS2 version with my favourite and most trusted Canadian videogame shop: VG+. I already own an imported USA PS2 and now I own an American PS3 that plays PS2 games as well, you see. ^_^

Then, a few months after my preorder, the Nippon Ichi America shop - aptly named Rosenqueen - put the game up for preorder, including a special edition. The PS2 special edition mentioned a Japanese language option, but the others didn't. They also changed the release date from January to March 2010.

I didn't want to cancel my existing order because I like VG+ and Rosenqueen's international shipping charges are awful - often more expensive than the items you order.

So I sent an email to Nippon Ichi America to ask about language options - BTW this is partly because even though it's set in America, I prefer to experience something close "the original", and partly because I watched the official trailer and decided there and then I never ever in my life want to play "SOCCERWARS" (as she pronounces it). Hehehe, really - the accent is totally overdone, I suspect it might be the same actress that is the replacement dub Etna in the recent Disgaea games. It would be too irritating to play the game with her, haha!

A few days after I contacted them, they emailed me back to say that ALL retail copies of the PS2 game will come with two discs: one is the English language version, the other is a Japanese sub version. So I stuck with my existing preorder. :)

Official site: www.sakurawars.us

Free Tea!

Do you know what my favourite drink is in the whole wide world? It's a cup of tea on a Sunday morning. Tea always tastes nicest on Sundays, and I don't know why.

I prefer Tetley tea, made with fresh boiling water, with milk. ^__^

However, free tea is also good. :)

Twinings have a promotion on at the moment where they send you 2 teabags and a 20p off voucher, if you just give them your name and address so they can send it to you! I signed up a few weeks ago and got a bag of Ceylon and a bag of Lady Grey, then they sent me an email for this current promotion and I've asked for some varieties of green tea - though they are offering fruit infusions as well.

Website: http://www.twinings.co.uk/free-tea/

Go now! It's free tea! *_*

My SD Sazabi model kit

I just put together my first ever mecha model kit! It's from SD Gundam G Generation-0 (SD Gundam G Zero), and it's Mobile Suit MSN-04 Sazabi. A shrunken version of the mecha Char used in the Gundam film Char's Counterattack.

Of all the model kits in the world, why a SD Gundam series kit, and why Char's Sazabi, you ask? I know, I know, I haven't even seen that.

Well it was cheap, I thought it was cute and I wanted to start small. ;)



It's so dinky! It's only about 7cm tall and 7cm wide (and a lot of that is the crest of the helmet!)



Aw, it's so cute! *_*

There's a little spring in the gun so it can fire whatever is loaded into it, too. It came with a range of weapons. :)