Month: June 2009

Windy CommandoSports

It’s been an odd week.

A week of creeping horror, with the dawning realisation that my aging skills may not be enough to drag me through the Hard difficulty on Bionic Commando: Rearmed, let alone the Achievement-linked Super Hard mode. Hard is proving to be… well, ninja hard: there’s very little room for error, with three hits killing you in levels that seem to be more heavily populated with bullets. I’m still enjoying it, but in short bursts; often I’ll fire up the 360, figure out a quick route through a level to the boss fight, and then get absolutely belted. Try again, same result. Switch off 360 in frustration. Turn it on ten minutes later for another go. Repeat.

A week of lost love, with my very first 360 controller’s thumbstick disintegrating beneath me. This was the controller that helped me get most of my significant gaming victories; Ridge Racer 6. Space Giraffe. Crackdown. And now, after suffering years of my abuse, she’s gone. I only wish I could tell her how much I miss her, but… y’know… gaming time is precious. She’d have wanted me concentrating on the next Achievement, not moping around her grave.

A week of unwanted excessive effort, with my Wii Sports practice yielding a Gold Medal in the Bowling Power Throws, and an unfortunate Platinum in the Boxing Dodging. That Platinum will gnaw away at my mind for years, I can tell… I’d happily revert to a backed-up save of my status to under-achieve a Gold in its place, if it wasn’t risking my Boxing rank (740-ish… but Tennis is up to 1740-ish!) And, of course, excessive vigour in the remaining Bowling training modes leads to a dodgy shoulder and elbow.

A week of returning to old friends. Beset with doubts of my own abilities, bereft with injuries, I just wanted something to crash in front of the telly with on a drowsy Sunday. Wind Waker seemed like a perfect fit, and before I knew it bedtime had arrived, I’d forgotten to eat dinner, and I had to sadly bid the Deluxe Picto Box goodnight. I love that game – the wonderful pacing (compared to Twilight Princess, anyway), the gorgeous presentation… and the OCD pandering of it. I will fill that Nintendo Figurine Gallery, oh yes I will.

CommandoSports and the Missing Mojo

At the start of the week, I was feeling pretty good about myself: I’d knocked Burnout Paradise off The List, and I was snaffling regular Achievements from the purportedly difficult Bionic Commando: Rearmed. My plan was to hammer away at a few of BC‘s Challenge Rooms, a spot of current project N2O, and a little bit of Geometry Wars practice. So, how did I do?

Ermmm…

Hmmm.

I started positively enough, clearing four or five Challenge Rooms a night. The first dozen or so were straightforward enough, although it’s a bit peturbing to check the Friend’s Leaderboard after successfully clearing a “tricky” level and seeing that a mate completed the same Room in one-fifth the attempts. But suddenly the Rooms started getting… well, impossible. I resorted to YouTube, awash with videos of people completing these rooms in stupid-quick times with maximum rank. I see – and replicate – some new tricks, and eventually the Rooms become straightforward again; tricky, sure, but nothing practice can’t overcome. Well, practice and 180-ish attempts. I kid you not.

And suddenly, it’s Friday night and there’s only six of the Challenge Rooms outstanding. A couple of them are quite silly; number 55, in particular, leaves me absolutely bemused; no videos or descriptions make the slightest bit of sense to me. I mean, check this out:

Start by just dropping down to the platform below. Face the left wall to grapple the first block. Once you’ve done that, wait till you’re at the height of your swing going right. Press down to do the arc jump and at the height of this jump, throw your grapple at the white block. If you hit this successfully, you’ll pass through the wall. Once you do, press down to let go and then immediately do a vertical grapple back up to the white block. Pull yourself up, press down to let go and immediately press B to do a regular diagonal grapple so that you start swinging. Then just hold right to fall off and finish the stage.

I watch, I read, and I try… and, after the 150th attempt with not a single second grapple connecting, I think: fuck this.

And, just like that, my Gaming Mojo disappears.

Saturday saw me listless, not willing to commit to any gaming time at all. Most would consider that normal, not undesired, behavior, but to this O/C Gamer it feels something like the Kiss Of Death… how can the psychological weight of The List be reduced if I’m not working to lessen it? But I reluctantly decide to give myself a bit of time, and spend the day catching up on anime (yet another habit stereotyped by the thirty-eight year old male). Sunday starts much the same, but a brisk walk through the parklands at least inspires me to fire up one of my Go-To Games.

I’ve got a couple of Go-To Games, games that I can use as mood shifters, as comfort food for my thumbs: Jet Set Radio Future is the perfect medicine for when I’m feeling sick-and-sorry for myself. Speed-running The Library in Halo raises my confidence when it’s shot. When everything feels like a grind, New Super Mario Brothers reminds me that games are, indeed, fun. But today I opted for a spot of tennis in Wii Sports.

And it was just the ticket.

I love Wii Sports tennis. Now, I’m not good at it (with a Rank hovering around 1400, whereas the EliteScores high is 2400), but I find it a great palate cleanser. A few games, and I’m feeling perky again; suddenly, I wonder where I’m at with my Wii Sports goals.

My targets are pretty simple: all Pro status on the games, all Gold Medals on the training levels (and yes, I am aware that there are Platinum Medals… I just don’t think they’re a reasonable goal). A quick review tells me that the only Pro rank I’m missing is in the boxing, and there are eight Golds missing: all the bowling, all the boxing, and a couple of the golf. A couple of hours sees my boxing Rank leap from 200 to 600-ish, a Silver and a Bronze where there was previously none in the boxing training, and a lucky Gold in the golf Target Practice.

Oh, and a wrenched shoulder.

That is why I don’t play more Wii Sports.

HaloParadise: Rearmed

So – it’s been a fortnight since I last wrote (due in no small part with a little distraction called “four years of tax returns”), and in that time it’s been bedlam in the gaming world… or, as it’s more popularly known, E3. And whilst a large number of the “big” announcements had been leaked beforehand (the PSP Go, Team Ico’s The Last Guardian footage), there were still a couple of surprises: New Super Mario Brothers Wii looks fantastic, and Super Mario Galaxy 2 arrived without any prior fanfare to offer more of the same – which is most definitely a good thing. Just Cause 2 got a lot of positive press, Brütal Legend earned some new fans (and an idiotic lawsuit from Activision), and Halo: Reach was announced.

And then there was this girl:

Excuse me, Miss. Have you seen my ferret?

I don’t want to appear as if I get sucked in by any game featuring curvy vixens, wrapped in a thin veneer of “she’s just a strong female character, honest” justification for ludicrous over-the-top overt sexuality. No, it takes a bit more to have me drooling… and Bayonetta‘s batshit-insane antics have me sold. The gameplay looks to be the type of Japanese insanity that will leave it on The List forever, but I can’t not buy it; visuals are amazing, the character designs wonderfully bizarre, and the whole aesthetic just makes me well up with gamelust.

The arse, tits, and specs sure help, too.

Thankyou SEGA person :)

*Sigh*

Seeing Halo 3: ODST in various presentations encouraged me to round up a group of friends to go Achievement hunting in Halo 3. Ten “players” (four of them, strangely enough, on my 360) in a little social group yielded us the perfect opportunity to grab a wad of the Mythic Achievements… and a two week EXP-ban from Bungie. Oh well.

But the big (bigbigbig) news was the release of Burnout Paradise‘s Big Surf Island. Now, I don’t mind admitting I was like a little schoolgirl just prior to its release: giggling to myself in anticipation, hitting F5 to reload the Marketplace page online every couple of seconds and, whilst it was loading, refreshing the 360 Marketplace tab. It finally appeared, and my release vigilance rewarded me with a speedy download… and then I was there. On The Island.

And it was wonderful.

Big Surf Island reminded me of everything that was glorious about Paradise: the big jumps, the endless distractions, the beautiful handling. Some UK friends eventually came online, joined in, and we must have burned that Island for six or seven hours that night… and the next night, I went back for more, even with all the Achievements, events, smash gates, and billboards wrapped up. I’ve belted through the Island Challenges at least seven times now; I find myself driving to the next location before the current Challenge is finished.

Casting my eyes over the Island Stats, I noticed that I’d pretty much OCDed the add-on… except for one thing. “Vehicles: 8/9”. A bit of research revealed that final car is unlocked when the game is Complete… which, in Criterion’s thankfully symbiotic manner of speech, matched my definition. Everything done, 500/500 Challenges.

And there I was, sitting on 478/500 Challenges like a schmuck.

They were all Bike Challenges, too; four- to seven-players. Figuring there may be four-to-seven other people out there thinking like I do, I ducked into Bike mode and created an Open Freeburn session in Paradise. And waited.

For the first hour or so, not much happened; people would appear, and I’d have enough time to mouth their words for them – “this isn’t the Island! and what’s this motorbike?” – before they disappeared. By the end of the second hour, though, I seemed to have a party of four who were actually desperate for Challenges. Shy as we all were, there were no headsets in use, which made for some pretty cool bits of silent co-operation and camaraderie. Hours three and four saw numbers drift around a core group of six, until suddenly I realised that I had one Challenge left…

One. Challenge. Left.

A six player Challenge. And I had a party of eight.

I figured that this was my time to be an Xbox LIVE prick. I selected the two mouthy newcomers (one of which seemed to have a vocabulary that consisted solely of “fuck”, “bitch”, and “nigger”) and kicked them out of the game, then quickly started that Final Challenge. It was a doddle, and there was a palpable sense of relief when I saw “500/500” pop onto the screen. I opened the party back up, and started taking requests off other players until I could take the mouthy randoms no more. I killed the session, scooted back into Island Car mode, and looked at my new – and final – acquisition: the Diamond P12. I painted it a soothing pink.

And then I realised: Burnout Paradise is off The List.

And I felt very, very pleased with myself :)

Later, I fired up Bionic Commando: Rearmed for the first time. I’d tried the demo after its appearance during last year’s Summer of Arcade, and had put it on the To Buy list; the recent price-drop (to 400 MS Points) made it a steal, regardless of the apparent difficulty of the Achievements. And, two levels in on Easy, I was getting increasingly frustrated; the controls felt alien and obstructive.

But suddenly, something in my head clicked – and the bionic arm became second nature. I breezed through the rest of the game… but I was very aware (by the presence of awkward white blocks) that Easy was… well, deliberately easy. The final level looks nigh-on impossible without the safety of the white blocks; I’m not looking forward to Super Hard difficulty at all.

It’s a lovely game, though: it exudes polish, and it a visual delight. The vector cannon upgrade is positively delicious, and there’s a neat aural and visual surprise in the last level that had me grinning like a Cheshire cat.

Next week? More of Bionic Commando: Rearmed‘s Challenge Rooms. More Geometry Wars practise. And a return to game du jour, N2O.

And some lustful thoughts involving Bayonetta.