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.
In some respects I was kind of disappointed that Dash of Destruction was so easy to finish and also self referential to the Achievements. Back when the competition was held I was quite impressed that the end result was that someone was going to have their game turned into an XBLA title, so to have it then not take advantage of this opportunity just did not and still does not seem right.
But hey, it was a free and easy 200/200 and the game in itself was quite fun for that small time of playing. It still would be quite fun now even after it is finished. I mean, who doesn’t love destroying things while playing as a dinosaur?
Christmas week means hopefully days and nights spent working on some of those recent games added to my collection. I added even more last week with a PS3 and LittleBigPlanet now in my collection and on my List. Good luck with your gaming endeavors this week and also have a Merry Christmas/holiday period.
I liked the intent behind the Doritos-fueled design-a-game competition; but the results indicated why the vast majority of gamers shouldn’t be allowed to do anything other than play.
When the finalists for the Doritos comp were announced, all the “ideas” took the form of “Space Invaders, but with monkeys”, or “a cross between Ouendan and Ikaruga“. One entry was simply promo screenshots of Space Giraffe with the premise “rhythm-action game”. All of which conjured up a hearty “meh” and an icky taste in my mouth.
So it surprised me that Dash of Destruction was so playable. Then again, look in the credits – winner Mike Borland is the first of six or seven “designers” on the game, with the others being developer Ninja Bee staff. It smacks of Ninja Bee just dusting off some old code they had kicking around and slapping some Doritos on it; I don’t actually think that was the case, but that’s just how it feels. Still, it was fun, free, and a tiny boost to the Completion percentage :)
A PS3, eh? The Dark Side! Congratulations are in order, I guess, though I would’ve gone with the Wii myself ;)
Thanks for the Christmas wishes, and the same back to you :D
The Wii is next and shouldn’t be too far away due to it obviously being much cheaper. I’ll have a post up in the next few days about my experience with the console if you are interested, but regardless of that, I purchased it because there was a local sale on and also because I wanted my PS3 before Heavy Rain came out.
Still have a way to go before that but even so it’s nice to have the console out of the way even if the general price isn’t exactly where I would like it to be. That is two out of three down so I am getting there and finally I don’t have to be called a supposed Xbox fanboy just because I only had the 360. Damn those comments annoyed me (given the fact I own most of the consoles out there) but hey, that’s the Internet for you right?
Heavy Rain, eh? I was mightily impressed with the first demo, but subsequent details about the game haven’t filled me with hope.
“Fanboy” is such an overused term. Isn’t it enough to simply go where the games are? Personally, there is nothing (outside the obligatory Astro Tripper – PomPom are an awesome little team) on the PS3 that I’m even remotely interested in – despite LBP topping many GOTY charts (with MGS4 not far behind). Of course, my utter contempt for corporate Sony probably doesn’t result in a balanced viewpoint here :}
Corporate Sony to me has always been different to Gaming Sony despite the fact that the two will intertwine on a regular basis more than I’d like. Some of the decisions the company has made (especially in recent years) has absolutely baffled me and frustrated me, but for some reason the games that they are behind or support always seem to resonate with me. LBP is no exception but at the same time I’m not treating it in similar ways (massive praise or ignoring it completely) to that of most gamers out there. Before I played it, I wasn’t even really that interested in it but alas that is something I can and probably will discuss on the blog so you better read it, or something. ;)
As for Heavy Rain, I feel that it will either be a massive flop or it will be one of the best, or at least, most important games to come from the PS3’s library. With the very little we know about it, it is quite hard to gauge an interest in the title but for me I have latched onto it because I just have a feeling about it. It seldom occurs but whenever I get a feeling about a game, they end up being really special games to me and Heavy Rain looks set to continue that. Hopefully anyway, time shall decide that one. Ultimately though if it doesn’t end up being what I want it to be or even what the developers Quantic Dream want it to be, then at the very least the purchase of the PS3 for me is still justified by LBP, Team ICO’s upcoming game and no doubt a few other things that I am perhaps unaware of at the moment. It should be interesting…
Hahahahaaa, we’re steering into dangerous anti-fanboy territory now ;) Suffice to say that I believe a large amount of the PS3’s relative failure in the market to date stems from the over-arching parent’s insistence that various sub-companies work together to produce the mega-media device. Of course, I still think that, in their projected 10 year lifecycle, the PS3 will still eclipse other brands in terms of sales, but there’s little doubt that the enforced value-proposition of the PS3 (as assembled by the mega-brand) is still a lofty ask of most consumers right now.
As for Team ICO – a little more of their namesake, and less of the Colossus, please ;)