HaloHaloHalo (and a little bit of Crackdown)

Just a really quick one this week (or fortnight, as the case may be), because I’ve been doing bugger all for the last five weeks while I’ve been off work but I’m heading into the office again tomorrow and I’m completely unprepared and I’m worried that my sleep pattern is all out of whack and stuff.

With my little writing exercise successfully completed, I thought about giving myself a nice little project for my remaining holidays: visit the folks? Did that. Finish populating The Moobaarn? Well, I did a bit of that. Have a nice relaxing read? Did a tiny bit of that. Resurrect one of my coding projects? Avoided that like the plague.

Play a shitload of Halo games? Oh, alright then.

But first, I wrapped up Crackdown 2 with a sizeable amount of multiplayer. Now, more will be written (hopefully) about Crackdown 2 later on, but the multiplayer components are definitely its strong points. There’s lots of fun to be had, even if it is derived from people who quit a game because their team is losing, then immediately search for another game… and get matchmade with, surprise surprise, the under-manned team they just left. Again and again and again.

So – Crackdown 2 off The List. And I looked at the vast amount of time I had off, and at the remaining multiplayer Achievements I had on the 360… and I thought I might clear a few of them up.

First stop: a Halo 3 boosting session, abandoned by its “host”. I’d already committed to the session, and had created a little spreadsheet of all participants’ required Achievements and cross-referenced them with maps and gametypes. Three hours later, everyone who joined in had every Achievement they required; I cajoled the group where necessary, kept everyone focussed, and reveled in their delight. And when the sole Achievement I required popped… well, I was pretty damn pleased.

But that left one Halo 3 Achievement outstanding: the Vidmaster Annual. Final level, Iron Skull, four players, all finishing on ghosts. My usual crew seems to have disbanded (or, more accurately, gained aspects of life that I’m too immature to indulge in myself), and I’d read a guide on Vidmaster Annual that had mentioned the Spartan I Project, who were “available for hire” (worry not – no items of value change hands).

So – one forum post later, and I’ve got a team, well versed in the art of this Achievement. And, with their guidance, it doesn’t take long before the Achievement pops – and it was a lot of fun, too, whetting my appetite for a Solo Legendary run through Halo 3. Instead, I started a Solo Heroic run, and got about three chapters in (on the road to Voi) before becoming irritated by the lack of friendly checkpoints.

And then the DLC for Halo: Reach was released. Cue a somewhat painful boosting session for that, with one participant continually whining that he wanted another specific Achievement… even after being politely told “no; set up another session for that”. Over and over. Still, Achievements were achieved, and another session wrapped up the last of my Reach Achievements… for now.

Finally came ODST. Now, my memories of ODST were not fond, but I found myself in a Firefight with another Aussie and a couple of Americans that went really quite well. We cleaned up a couple of Firefight Achievements, and then I thought (as with Halo 3 previously) that I might start a Solo Heroic run, just to see what it was like. But I slipped, and accidentally selected Legendary… what the hell, I thought, I’m going to play that eventually anyway.

So I started playing through the levels on Legendary. And bloody hell ODST is good. In fact, I couldn’t stop playing it all weekend – cricket and work-prep be damned! – and I’ve only got the final level to go before it’s done. Boy, knocking ODST off The List would make a pretty nice Christmas present…

More CrackHaloBraidWars

Just a very quick one this week, because I’m just about to scoot back to my childhood home to spend some time with my folks. My writing continues unabated and, despite the fact that the novel itself is turning out to be utter trash (what was intended to be a cutting analysis of modern social networking and the Baby Boomer / Gen X divide has morphed into a deathly dull diatribe about some bloke who just wanders around letting stuff happen to him. But he’s managed to get lucky and, as a result, I’m now deeply envious of him), I’ve managed to get a stack of gaming in this week.

(Read that first paragraph again. Check out that mighty fine structure, with the massive bracketed bollocks in the middle messing up any flow the paragraph may have had. Yeah, I’m a writer ;)

Last week, I ended my post with a tiny little snippet that said I was starting to tackle Braid again. And, dear lord, did it sink its teeth in. I basically played that game for three days straight, improvising and analysing and testing and replaying speed runs over and over again in order to snaffle my last outstanding Achievement on the game, and finally managed to snaffle it (the tale itself is long and boring, but I like it; that’ll be another post, I reckon). But that wasn’t enough to knock Braid off The List, oh no! I went back and bested all the Challenge Times for all the speed runs, then went and hammered out all the hidden Stars. Maybe it wasn’t the Herculean effort that it felt like at the time, but I was mighty pleased to have managed it. Off The List.

What was next, then? Geommie Wars 2, and the Smile Achievement. Much practise, little progress. Harrumph.

But then Crackdown 2 got its Deluge DLC and, despite another rocky start with the DLC installation (the DLC was available for purchase from Marketplace for a good nine or ten hours before the title update that enabled it), it’s again managed to up the interest factor in Crackdown 2. Deluge adds yet more new abilities to your character, and adds some arcadey Horde and CTF modes which are pretty bloody good fun. Though I’m pretty sure there’s a large number of people out there who consider me a griefer for my penchant to spam the helicopters in Deluge mode; certainly, several gained the habit of blowing all the helicopters up before I could get near them.

And so to my final big session for the week, a Halo 3 multiplayer boosting session. I had a solitary social Achievement outstanding, and I joined a boosting team in order to try and snaffle it. The team’s instigator didn’t even turn up to his own session, so I – and my trusty spreadsheet of attending players and Achievements and maps – became the default Master of Ceremonies. And it was a delight – hammering through Rumble Pit and, later, Team Mythic maps, we managed to stay focussed on the tasks at hand… with the occasional devolution into the random explosive mayhem that can make Halo multiplayer so much fun. In the end we managed to get everyone all the social multiplayer Achievements, so it felt like a really productive session.

One more thing before I dash off to the bus station: last week I was quite remiss in not mentioning that I’d managed to snaffle one of the pre-order versions of the Japanese No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle sets (the Hopper Edition – try to buy at Play-Asia). Since it was a pre-order, I managed to grab the “erotic comic” that was issued with it, and… yeah. It’s interesting to see some more of Suda51’s ideas in the NMH universe, and more interesting still to see the Japanese trailers and FMVs from the first game, but… hmmm. Dunno whether it was worth expanding The List for, y’know?

For now – toodle-oo. I’m off to, literally, revisit my childhood.

Unfocused

Sure, I’m trying to write a novel and get other things in my house in order, but you’d expect that I’d be able to conjure a focused, concerted effort when gaming, wouldn’t you?

Wrong.

The week started promisingly enough with a direct attack on Halo: Reach. I was determined to reach the rank of Lieutenant Colonel this week, which I easily managed early on, and have occasionally returned to the game in order to whore cRedits to buy pretty armour trinkets. But then I got the wild idea that it might be a good move to distract myself by playing a little Halo 3.

Now, I love Halo 3. It’s a lovely game. And, starting a solo Heroic playthrough, it felt fantastic to be back inside Master Chief’s armour.

Until the first firefight.

That’s when I realised just how comfortable I’d become with Halo: Reach‘s control scheme… because there’s a few key differences between the games. There’s nothing like running up to a grunt to punch it in the head and instead swapping your beloved battle rifle for a plasma pistol. Where’s melee? How do I reload?

So: I was playing Halo 3 (badly). I’ve only got two Achievements outstanding on the game, so I thought I’d join a boosting party (via TA) to try and snaffle one of them. I find some like-minded individuals and am happily (or sadly, depending on your viewpoint of gaming as a hobby / lifestyle choice) sitting in front of the 360 at 1pm on Saturday.

Expect I’ve got the dates wrong; it’s 1pm next Saturday.

Bugger.

I quickly find another boosting session starting later in the afternoon. Hurrah! In the meantime, I poke around TA some more, looking listlessly at my remaining Achievements… and I begin to think weird things. Things like, “I wonder if there’s any Australians who want to work on Perfect Dark Zero Achievements? Or Kameo co-op stuff?”

I poke around and find a likely name, and fire off a message to them. The Halo 3 session is a bust; the “host” doesn’t bother turning up. Then the chap I’d messaged about Kameo pings me back – let’s go, he says.

You’ve got to admire that enthusiasm :)

We played nearly three hours of Saturday for no result (well, all the Achievements we’re shooting for have zero GamerScore associated with them, so technically they’re all for no result), trying to obtain a Time Attack A-ranking on the first level. We failed dismally but, on the first attempt the next day, we romped it in. The next Time Attack fell soon thereafter, as well as a brace of Expert levels on co-op.

I’ve always sung the praises of Kameo – I think it’s a lovely little game, and these extra modes of play really work out well for it. As for Joe, my partner-in-crime… I doff my cap to you, sir, for putting up with a buffoon like myself. A couple of brilliant sessions so far, with more (hopefully!) to come.

Finally this week, I also started playing Braid again. I’ve no idea why. Blimey that Speed Run is going to be hard.

Reach for the Twin Sticks…

This is likely to be the first of a month’s worth of short, perfunctory posts. Mainly because there’s not a whole not new happening (or likely to happen) in the gaming corner of the moobaarn in the next four weeks, but also because I want to preserve my typing digits for NaNoWriMo, in which I’m participating for the first time this year (follow my progress here!)

Luckily, there’s no monster stories about Reach left to tell. I’m on the final cRedit grind on my way to Lieutenant Colonel, and trying to ease my progress by taking advantage of the cRedit bumps given when you receive a Commendation upgrade… which, in turn, has led to plenty of Checkpoint restarting and Gruntpocalypse. But I’ve also taken the opportunity to start playing with a number of Reach‘s other gameplay modes, including online Firefights with randoms. These have been, with one exception, a genuine delight: the firefight scenarios, with their infinite-life / infinite-ammo / fixed-time-limit options, lead to some downright silly, thrilling, seat-of-your-pants, explodey goodness.

Of course, the first time I played one of hese online firefights, I netted an Achievement (for scoring 20K in the game). This caused me to reflect on my GamerScore a bit more and, harking back to my stats on TrueAchievements, I realised I was getting close to a milestone: 94% of my possible gamerscore. And, knowing that Crackdown 2 and Halo: Reach DLC is incoming (with more percentage-mangling Achievements), this was my chance to set a new high-water mark.

The Halo: Reach achievement had left me with a mere 21 additional GS to hit the 94% mark; scouring my gamercard, I noticed that Geometry Wars Evolved^2 had a solitary 25 GS Achievement outstanding. If I could snaffle that, then I’d knock a game off The List, and clear 94%. Two birds with one stone.

Brilliant idea, huh? One little problem, though.

I’m shit at Geometry Wars Evolved^2. Bloody rubbish. I gave Smile a good old bash, and got nowhere near comfortable with it. Buggered if I know how I managed to complete Sequence previously.

It’s all so pretty and neon and… overwhelming. So, to hone my skills, I thought I’d drop back to the rustic Robotron 2084. And wouldn’t-you-know-it, I’m shit at that, too.

So – I’m no closer to nailing my 21 GS. I look further afield… Halo 3: ODST. One of the VidMaster Achievements in ODST has long been regarded as pretty straightforward, so I gave it a bash… and in less than thirty minutes, the Achievement popped. 25 GS, piece of piss. Welcome to 94%-land.

Of course, that led to me looking at the firefight score attack Achievements in ODST, but that’s a task for another month. Given it was November 7th today, I did pop in the Halo 3 multiplayer disc from ODST to chance my arm on the 7-on-7 playlist, hoping that the opportunity to snaffle my final Halo 3 multiplayer Achievement would pop up… that’s when I discovered that there’s 301 people still playing Halo 3 online, and they’re all ninja good. I got one kill, and that’s only because someone else softened up my target with multiple rockets.

So: the whoring in Reach goes on. And I’ve just written 500 words on this blog post that could have gone into my novel. There’s the odd oblique reference to gaming in my novel, you know… ;)

Back From The Dead… Again

Nearly three months it’s been since I last posted here. Three months.

But there’s an excuse for my absence.

A really, really good excuse.

…erm, not really. As you might have gathered, my gaming mojo had been flagging a bit back then; in fact, August was the first month in over three years in which I didn’t knock something off The List. There was a fair bit of emotional hullabaloo going on as well, which sapped away any enthusiasm to get into The Zone. A significant amount of work-related travel didn’t help, either… but it did help me out with the first game I’d like to have a little blather about: Chrono Trigger.

Now, Chrono Trigger always seems to get mentioned as one of the greatest games of the SNES era and, given my new-found love of grinding out RPG success, I figured this would be right up my street. It sat in the shrinkwrap for over a year before finally being chucked in one of my resurrected DSes – and initial impressions were favourable, with lots of running around and chatting with cute characters in their beautifully pixellated world. Levelling up was a delight, the battle mechanic (when switched to the wussy Wait mode) was really nice, and – apart from the mute and anonymous nature of Chrono himself – there was plenty to like about my expanding party of protagonists.

But about halfway through the game, it all became a bit too much. Sure, I had probably played 15 hours in four days, but it suddenly felt too twee, and actions too obtuse; I began to miss things. Exits became obscured from my view, actions that should have been obvious were invisible to me. Suspecting burn-out, I gave the game a break, returning a few weeks later (on another work trip) to finish it off. But the initial delight didn’t return, so my feeling towards Chrono Trigger is a reluctant “meh”.

Of course, there’s no way that Chrono Trigger has been struck off The List yet; after all, I’ve merely finished the game with all characters levelled up to the high 60s & low 70s (mainly thanks to a red-eye flight to Perth offering the opportunity for much bleary-eyed farming in one particularly button-mashy level). But I’ve taken to referencing this FAQ as my Chrono Trigger bible, and I’m aiming for a Level 3 (of 5) Perfect File:

LEVEL 1: (Only one playthrough required, no New Game +)

  • Beat the game and unlock Ending #1 and #13.
  • All sidequests complete.
  • 100% Treasure found.
  • Have a complete Bestiary list, excluding Magus at North Cape.
  • At least 1 of every item in the Inventory.
  • Learned all Single, Double, and Triple Techs.
  • 200 Silver Points at Leene Square.
  • A Doppel Doll and Poyozo Doll for each character.

LEVEL 2:

  • Everything from level 1.
  • All characters at Level 99.
  • Defeat Spekkio’s most powerful form, the Pink Nu.
  • Have a complete Bestiary.
  • Unlock all 13 Endings.
  • 100% Extras. Everything unlocked.

LEVEL 3:

  • Everything from level 2.
  • MAX stats for every character.
  • 11 Cats in Crono’s house.
  • Get a Perfect Score of 2371 while racing Johnny at Site 32.
  • Defeat ALL of Spekkio’s forms; Frog form included.

Despite Chrono Trigger‘s New Game+ option, straight away I see I’m in trouble: my Level 60+ characters preclude me from fighting most of Spekkio’s forms, especially the tricky-to-encounter Frog form. You can guess what that means, can’t you? Yep – let’s start again. Save slot number two, 14 hours in, Level 30-ish, and at least a third of the game to go. Again.

And then there’s the small matter of the other 11 endings. Progress will, obviously, be ongoing; a short game this is not.

After a completion-free August, I felt the need to get something done, to make some inroads into The List. I decided that the early part of September would be devoted to the belated conquering of my final Texas Hold’em Achievement: the Tournament Expert. Now, I’m rubbish at poker, and had been royally (and repeatedly) trounced by the penultimate tournament AI last time I’d attempted this; but a dig around my beloved TA yielded a simple solution that I followed in an extremely disciplined and cautious manner. Except for that rash All-In which could’ve cost me everything. Lady Luck, however, granted me a free pass that time, and a couple of hours on a dreary Saturday saw me clear Texas Hold’em off The List.

Then, harkening back to my Resolutions for 2010, I thought it time to tackle one of the non-current-gen platforms; I opted for the Dreamcast and ChuChu Rocket! I’d already cleared all the challenge mode puzzles and played a bit of multiplayer with a mate last year, so a couple of evenings saw off the solo puzzle levels without much incident. In fact, I probably spent more time trying to get the software to back up my VMU running properly on my laptop.

But the latter half of September, of course, was devoted solely to Halo: Reach. Tragically, work saw fit to send me to Perth on the day of release; as fate would have it, that’s where I was also stranded for the release of Halo 2. And Halo 3. (And Rez HD, but that’s another story). So I picked up my pre-ordered copy on the way to the airport; arriving home at 10:30pm on a Friday night, I fired up the 360 before I’d even dropped my backpack.

I drank in the loading visuals, listened to the familiar-yet-new extended tones, then set about building up my avatar – as usual, mauve was the go-to colour, “M000” my call-sign. I started playing.

Now, I loved the original Halo. It was the first console game I every really played, the game that dragged me into the world of console gaming, and the game that convinced me that twin-stick FPSs could actually work. I loved the characters, I loved the story, I loved the feel of the controls and (in a move that separates me from most other fans of the game) I loved the repetition of it all. I loved The Library (and recall letting out a little squeal of delight when I first entered the Library-esque structure in Halo 2), and I loved retracing one’s steps through previously conquered environments. Somehow, that made the Combat Evolved world feel more real.

The immediate sequel disappointed me somewhat. The controls felt slipperier, the cartoon-ish graphic overhaul was offputting (oh, how I loathe the sights and sounds of the New Flood), and the humanised Covenant jarred. Halo 3 fixed the control issues and delivered a great game to-boot, but Halo: Reach… well, it feels like a big love-letter to the original Halo. From the solidity of the action, through the return visits to battle-torn environments, it really feels like Bungie returned to the original game, leveraging later works only where necessary.

My first playthrough was on Normal (a real departure for me, since I usually start on the Easiest skill levels and work my way up), followed quickly by a repeat playthrough on Heroic… and I felt a massive difficulty spike there, especially when I got to the penultimate battle. And now, since starting my solo Legendary assault, progress has slowed dramatically – I’m currently using the active camo Loadout to avoid fighting as much as possible, because I’m getting pulverised if I engage the enemy.

Of course, there’s the odd ally AI bug – on my first playthrough, I got stuck in a battle with two Hunters which took every ounce of courage (and two dozen shotgun shells) to overcome, because my Noble Team partner had buggered off somewhere to look at the scenery. Second time through he obviously pitied me, because he joined in the biffo and made the fight a whole lot simpler. But, on the whole, I’m absolutely loving Reach.

But there’s so much more to the game than that; the Commendation system is extremely addictive, and I reckon I’ve already played more online multiplayer against randoms than I have in any other game ever. It feels great getting involved in that part of the community early on (rather than being typically late to the party), and levelling up a Commendation (along with all the ranking credits associated with it) is immensely fulfilling. And whoring the shit out of Gruntpocalypse on Corvette will never get old… headshots ahoy!

The big problem with Halo: Reach is the requirement for completion. Sure, the initial set of Achievements seem relatively doable (assuming I can overcome Legendary), but it’s only to be expected that there will be a ruck of additional Achievements associated with the inevitable DLC. But there’s niggling little statistics like “Armoury Completion” and “Commendation Progress” that weigh heavy on my mind; and with the highest rank requiring twenty million credits of accumulated carnage, it’s fair to say that this may be a game that will forever remain on The List…

…which is a brilliant way to segue into Ballistic. Now, I hate Zuma-like games with all my black little heart, and Ballistic is Zuma‘s grandfather. I finally decided to give it a red-hot go yesterday, and dug out my old Samsung N501 Nuon (and the chunky step-down transformer I need to run the bugger) and hooked it up to my old CRT telly. And Ballistic looks bloody awful; chunky graphics which somehow manage to also have a fuzzy feel to them, accompanied by steel-drum “tunes” that grate after a handfull of minutes playtime.

And I still suck at the game itself.

Because the Nuon doesn’t support a save-state, and Ballistic itself doesn’t support any in-game passwords, to beat all 25 levels (twenty-five? that doesn’t sound like much…) I’ll have to do it without powering down the system; a worrying prospect when one considers the ominous buzzing of the step-down transformer. “Still,” I mused, “surely it won’t take more than a concerted weekend to bludgeon my way through the levels?”

Wrong. So very, very wrong.

A good four hours of concentration failed to get me any further than Level 3-1… the eleventh level of the game. There’s a reason I hate these games, and that’s because they hate me.

Which leads me into my final game for discussion: Astropop. But maybe that’s better saved for another post…

A New Era…

Last night I had cause to look something up on this blog – a quip I’d made at some stage – and happened to notice that it was nearly three months since I’d posted an entry here. That caught me a little by surprise, really; and now it’s time to make amends, and time to get back to writing. And I’ll open with a grandiose statement:

It’s a new era at The Moobaarn.

Indeed, it’s a new Moobaarn.

In the three months since my last post on this blog, I’ve moved house, bought my first new TV in over 15 years, and – gasp! – acquired a brand spanking new PS3. Luckily, those last two events were linked, thanks to Sony’s latest promotion; I’ve not assisted SCE’s ledger by actually purchasing one of their now-profitable bits of gaming hardware. And the out-of-box experience is great; it’s a lovely chunk of kit, and was set up with no real drama.

Turning the PS3 on yielded another story. It strikes me that the XMB at the core of the PS3’s interface is every bit as cumbersome as the original blade interface of the 360, and completely at odds with the ten-foot interface paradigms of the Wii and the NXE. I reckon the interface – like the DualShock controller, something I’ve never really got on with – was designed by engineers, for engineers; the organisation and design is very clean and regular (symmetrical, in the case of the DualShock), but it fails to compensate for the volume of information… it just doesn’t feel fit-for-purpose, lumbering under the load of the options forced upon it by the opportunities afforded by the hardware.

Anyway, enough bitching.

Having a big HD telly for the first time led me to crack out some of the more graphically impressive 360 titles; Bayonetta‘s arse looks spectacular, Prince of Persia a cel-shaded work of art, and Space Giraffe even crazier than I remember. I tried getting my eye back into the twin-stick-shooter genre with little success (Mutant Storm Reloaded and Geometry Wars Evolved^2 both rebuffing my advances), and there was even some Halo 3 multiplayer during a zombie-themed Double-XP weekend that netted a few new achievements. Yes, the acquisition of a HD TV certainly performed wonders for my flagging gaming mojo.

Prior to delivery of my new TV, though, I was stuck in my new Moobaarn with most of my possessions trapped away in a barely stable structure of boxes. Sure, my old TV had been setup, but the 360 and Wii were buried underneath scores of books and old videotapes that had (perhaps mistakenly) also made the move. Desperate to make some impact on The List, I dug out my original Xbox and started flicking through the pending titles there; Panzer Dragoon Orta got a bit of a bash, but surprisingly I spent a fair wodge of time playing TimeSplitters 2. Now, I’ve ranted at length at this game on various internet fora, especially targeting those that recommended that game to me; as the second console FPS I ever played, it was a woefully abysmal experience compared to Halo. In fact, the in-game stats indicated that I’d spent a scant six hours playing TS2, completing it on the easiest difficulty setting, before running away to play something that felt right. I really didn’t like it at all.

Those same in-game stats, however, indicated that I’d only “completed” 10% of the game on offer… and that just doesn’t sit well with my OCD. So I started churning through some of the Arcade and Challenge modes, determined to attain Gold Trophies in all events… and, lo and behold, I found myself actually enjoying the game! What a pleasant surprise. Anyway, the percentage had crept up to about 34% by the time the new telly arrived and the old Xbox was consigned to a disused part of the entertainment unit; I will return to play more TimeSplitters 2, though, you mark my words.

My sole PS3 purchase so far has been the original Uncharted, and… well, colour me unimpressed. Woolly controls, glaringly shiny teeth, and paint-by-numbers action has done little to warm me; it really does feel like a prettied-up Tomb Raider clone with an awful lack of precision. In its defence, I’m only about half-way through the game, but my favourite bits thus far have been the oft-maligned jetski sections. Sure, Uncharted 2 may have been the critic’s choice for 2009, but on the strength of its predecessor I’m not sure I’ll bother.

But the good thing about this experience is that I think I’m starting to crystallise what appeals to me as a gamer. Without wanting to sound patronising in any way, Uncharted conjures up the same feeling, the same approach and mood, as Gears of War did for me; not in the gameplay (though there’s certainly some similarities there too), but in the way it’s presented: linear progression with well-defined set-pieces. And, just as GoW irked me massively (co-op hijinks with friends notwithstanding), I think Uncharted is going to pan out the same way.

Ummmmm, what else have I been doing in the last couple of months? Well, I’ve knocked two Wii games – The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Super Paper Mario – off the list, the latter being a paniccy weekend completion of one of my aforementioned In Case Of Emergency games when I realised that I wasn’t getting my skills together to complete Wii Play. Yes, the best part of five grand dropped on a nice new HD telly, and I’ve spent most of my time playing Wii games. And that continues even now, with the local release of Super Mario Galaxy 2 last Thursday… a couple of days solid play has allowed me to gather 118 Power Stars, enough to access one of the finest levels of gaming I’ve ever encountered… but more on that later.

Next week? Crackdown 2… and I cannot fucking wait. Which makes me reflect on the fantastic world we live in; only a fortnight ago, I wandered into my preferred vendor of gaming goodness and slapped down pre-orders on Super Mario Galaxy 2, Crackdown 2, and Halo: Reach, and two of those are released within a week of each other. How awesome is that?

Flu? HTFU!

Not much gaming to be had this week: a fun (but short) Halo 3 multiplayer Achievement Whoring session, the completion of the Xin missions in GTA: Chinatown Wars (during a trip to my parents place celebrating my Dad’s 80th birthday), and a painful first exposure to Scribblenauts via my nephew. Maybe it was his tinnitus-inducing “help”, but I don’t think I’ll be buying Scribblenauts anytime soon ever.

I spent most of the week sleeping, a happy escape from the ravages of the flu. But something caught my eye during my occasional visits to my computer: a video from the makers of Eve Online, CCP.

There’s sooooo much about that video that I love that I don’t know where to start… Glorious Production Values seems as good a place as any. Great instrumentation and lyrics. The perfect mix of people who’re taking their place in the video seriously, people who aren’t serious enough, and people who don’t have the faintest idea what’s going on. A Techno Viking reference. And, best of all, a company that isn’t afraid to tell it’s own customers to harden the fuck up.

Now, I don’t give a rat’s arse about Eve Online; the very premise of the game fills me with an uncomfortable mix of boredom and OCD dread. But this video makes me want to give money to CCP, because this is a company that I want to support; they make me feel like they know where their shit is at, and I love that.

And, if there’s any overseeing Internet deity, the phrase “WOOP WOOP it’s the sound of the Space Police” will replace all those fucking cat memes.

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.

A Mixed Bag

Being Australian, there are times where I don’t want to fuck around with words. Hence the title of this post, because this week’s gaming has been a real mixed bag.

Having wrapped up Master Quest last week, I needed a new project; and, being mindful of my New Year’s Gaming Resolutions, I figure I’d best start work on the Playstation side of things. To that end, I started N2O.

N2O is an interesting one; I bought it, of course, because of its links with my 8-bit past. Written by Tony Crowther (responsible for the first Monty Mole game, and the Loco / Suicide Express / Black Thunder trio of near-identical games, amongst others), it’s very much a love-child of Tempest and one of Crowther’s earlier games, Phobia. Fly along the rim of undulating tunnels, shoot bugs. Easy.

But, as a shooter, it’s got a bit of depth. There’s a great speed-up mechanic (the more you shoot, the faster you travel), and there’s a certain puzzle-solving element to it, too. But it’s blackened somewhat by (seemingly) random weapon drops and a tendency to obscure your view with too many twists in the tunnel. Still, I’m having a fair bit of fun with it at the moment; I’ve clocked it on Easy, and am about a quarter of the way through Normal. Whether or not I require Hard for Completion is yet to be decided.

But the problem with N2O (and a lot of other twitchy shooters) is that I can’t concentrate on them for long stretches; so off into the vaults I went, checking out a few other games for the Next Project. I fired up Bujingai – again – and got nowhere on the boss I’m stuck on – again. I pootled around in the wacky world of Katamari Damacy, looked at all the items I need to collect to satisfy my OCD, and quickly moved on to Frequency – Harmonix’s original rhythm action game. Unfortunately, the use of the word “rhythm” there makes me completely unable to play it.

Hoping for a cheap win, I dug out my Nuon and threw the unknown Ballistic on. Oh shit – it’s Zuma. I fucking hate Zuma. Nine of the twenty-five levels was all I could bear; the Completion Requirement for that one will be All Levels On Easy, I think. And that’s kinda fair enough, given the harder skill levels just increase the speed.

Then there was a little bit of Wind Waker, but I turned that off after an hour or two… I’m wary of burning out on Zelda, as I did when I first encountered the games (when I played through Ocarina and Wind Waker, back-to-back, in a two week holiday of gaming where I rarely left the house). I fired up the 360 for the first time in two months, grabbed all the Burnout Paradise and Halo 3 add-ons that had been released in my absence, and then scored a couple of easy skull-finding Achievements in Halo 3.

Finally, I pulled my finger out and finished GTA: Chinatown Wars. There’s still oodles left to do in-game – I only finished with 81.15% – but it’s still the annoying experience that I remembered. It reminds me somewhat of Heroes or Dexter on TV; fantastic openings that convince you that they’re groundbreakers, before extended exposure reveals a tepid unsatisfying grind. Sigh.