The week started with my traditional games of Archon on Australia Day – after digging up my Stelladaptor and firing up VICE-64, the first game (playing as Dark) was a little dicey – my usual teleport-the-Basilisk-into-the-backlines technique only yielded a dead Basilisk, a panicked resurrection, and soon thereafter my Shapeshifter went MIA. A war of attrition followed, but exploiting the silly C64 AI yielded a win. Playing as Light was a much more conventional – but no less enjoyable – affair, and Archon once again proved itself a wonderful game.
A fair bit of work has been done on Majora’s Mask in the last fortnight, too – pretty much everything up until the final two dungeons is done, save the Town Shooting Gallery heart-piece (which looks like it will be a Gerudo’s-Archery-level of frustration). All the Mask quests are done and, whilst my attitude to the game has softened somewhat due to the touching nature of the Kafei & Anju side quest, it’s still a bane, still a thorn in my side; I suspect I’ll be finishing Majora’s sometime next month and never touching it again.
Finally, I had some wonderful guests from the UK staying with me over the last couple of days; and, as a “thankyou” for the accommodation amidst their backpacking odyssey, Andy & Jax treated me to a copy of Prince of Persia. Andy and I created a new account on the 360, then started playing with interest – we joked “let’s see how long it’ll take for the first Achievement.” And colour us surprised when the first toast appeared within two minutes, with another handful appearing at regular 2-3 minute intervals. Inside an hour we’d netted over a hundred GS, but at that point we stopped caring – because the spectacle of Prince of Persia is really something to behold.
For starters, it’s gorgeous to look at – the cel-shading-lite is delicious, owing a lot to Crackdown. The audio is lovely, but bemusing – I’m genuinely undecided as to whether the voice acting is brilliant, or shit! Having played a lot more of the optional cutscenes (that provide a lot of backstory to the Prince and Elika) I’m prepared to lean to the former; there’s a lot of humour and sensitivity buried in there, but it’s tempered by the fact that the plot appears to be a rehash of Bullet Witch (and yes, that’d be a spoiler… if anyone had actually played Bullet Witch ;)
So – next week sees more Majora’s and Prince of Persia; realistically, I’m expecting to Complete them in February and March, respectively.
From what I can gather, Prince of Persia seems to be a relatively quick game to finish although since I am yet to play it myself I obviously couldn’t confirm it. That is not factoring in multiple playthroughs on various difficulties though, if the game even has harder modes.
Next week will be more Majora’s Mask and Prince of Persia will it? Forgetting a certain game that is receiving some new DLC on the 5th…?
Hahaha – true, I did forget that. But Burnout‘s new content will be (mostly) local-player only, the two Achievements look relatively tame, and the usual Saturday morning burn with my UK chums is nearly a given ;)