Tag: Dash Of Destruction

DashDefenceBurnout: MajoRuga

A return visit by my UK friends led to a rather drunken flurry of gaming on Monday night – the Resident Evil 5 demo, the R-Type Dimensions demo, Ikaruga, Dash of Destruction, and EDF 2017 all got a look in.

My gaming pal, Andy – prior to his backpacking odyssey, he was quite the prolific GS accumulator – was keen to check out Resi 5. I’ve never played any of the series, even the “second best game ever” (according to Edge) Resident Evil 4… “survival horror”, as a genre, doesn’t appeal to me in the least. Mostly because I know I’d have trouble actually watching the screen, such is my scaredy-cat nature (I couldn’t play through the demo of Bioshock, remember?) So it was quite a treat to have a Resi fan accompany me as we co-opped the demo levels.

Our opinions couldn’t have been further apart, either – he loved the graphics, I thought it looked depressingly dry and dusty. He loved the action, I felt hamstrung and helpless. He felt immediately at home, I didn’t have the slightest fucking clue what I was doing – though once I figured out how to knife zombies, I was good. For about ten seconds. Before they ate my brains.

Erm… no. Not buying that one.

R-Type Dimensions will also remain unpurchased; I was never really a fan of it in the arcade (though I recall applying plenty of blood, sweat, and tears to get through the bastard on freeplay during a lock-in at the TimeZone around the corner from my old Uni digs). And whilst the XBLA version certainly looks pretty, and plays faithfully, I can’t deal with the psychological weight of it. Christ, Ikaruga‘s bad enough.

Apart from the abovementioned – and a Valentine’s Day bash through Paradise City with my online chums – nothing else really got played this week… except Majora’s Mask. Which, it must be said, has turned into a mechanical sufferance. The Water Temple (or whatever it’s called) has been conquered, all the fairies therein have been captured, and I step-by-stepped a walkthrough to do it. I’m not proud of that, but the sad truth is that I no longer care; I just want that game off my List soon and forever.

GooDashDuke

Recently I bitched about the fact that I hadn’t knocked any games off The List lately; and now, a mere fortnight later, December is looking plump with Completion. First came Mercenaries 2, then Mutant Storm Empire, and this week saw the Pete-Completion of World of Goo and Dash of Destruction.

World of Goo has been an absolute delight. I was one of those who jumped through homebrew hoops to get their PAL Wii to chat with the US Shop Channel, purely to allow the purchase of this independent masterpiece. Goo picked up the Indy Game of the Year at last week’s VGAs, and was finally released onto the PAL Shop Channel last Friday – the very day I finally knocked off the last of those nasty, nasty OCD challenges. It’d be a tad fibulous to say that I enjoyed every minute – some of the OCDs are incredibly frustrating (leading me to question whether Goo is actually better suited to mouse-control, rather than Wii-mote) – but the sense of satisfaction from having all the OCD flags pop up is immense. Highly, highly recommended – get thee to the Wii store! …or just buy it for your PC or Mac.

A paragraph ago I mentioned that I’d Completed Dash of Destruction – the Doritos-sponsored advergame – this week. In truth, it took less than 30 minutes to see all it had to offer: a cutesy, but shallow, combination of Rampage and Crazy Taxi. With tongue planted firmly in cheek (constant references to its freely available GamerScore abound), it’s absolutely worth the price of admission – that is, free. Go on, kids, click this link and add it to your download queue… it’s cheerful, fun in its small dose, and costs nothing. And it boosted my Completion Percentage by 0.18%, so that’s nice.

The rest of the weekend has been taken up playing Duke Nukem on XBLA. My Completion target for this one is all levels + all secrets + all Duke-isms, and it’s going pretty smoothly (using the excellent 3D Realms walkthrough for reference). I’ve certainly got much further than I did when I had my dodgy copy of the game on the PC, and – with the exception of wishing the weapons had hotkeys – the controls don’t suffer at all from the conversion.

And that’s my task for the week of Christmas – finish Duke Nukem, and bring The List down to 64. Piece of cake.