I have decided that this is officially the Hardest Game Ever (except for Game Over on the Spectrum). I’m still getting trounced by the axe armour and medusa head combo en-route to Death. Which is ironic, don’t you think? I did actually make it to Death. Once. But I only had one notch of energy left and one of his sickles materialised exactly on my head, so I lasted less than a second.
This morning at work, we had a Year 9 SAT exam in ICT. This involved two classes logging on to some bespoke RM-powered piece of software, which I have spent the best part of a week setting up. We did it last year too, and it was a mess. The software was horribly flaky and slow, kids got confused that the word processor “emulator” wasn’t an exact replica of Word, and the 50 minute exam took almost two hours. This …
Saw my brother was online playing this, so thought I’d join him. Sadly, although you can play online with the demo, you can’t pick who you’re going to play against. Naturally, I was then randomly paired up against someone who actually knew the controls, and could group units together, and well, was generally capable of playing it without appearing to be a monkey at the helm. He beat me in under two minutes, defeating me with just a commando unit. …
I have no idea why I decided to play this tonight, but I did. Started out on Yellow Belt difficulty, and Level 1, and just played. I’d forgotten just how good Mutant Storm is, you know. It’s great. But I soon died too many times and so stopped. Highest score today? 600,000. Rubbish.
Hmm. I’m not really sure if I’m enjoying this or not. The premise is great – draw shapes to cast spells – but the fights are too difficult as a result. You’re under two much pressure to draw quickly and accurately, and your mana bar (which you use for spells) drains much too fast. Even the faux-RTS element with controllable monsters that you’ve captured is clumsy and hit-and-miss. There’s just too much to keep an eye on at once. Anyway. …
Ta da! All 123 levels complete! Not only that, but I went back and made sure I had beaten the target scores and par times on those I’d missed, and now I’m ranked 34th in the world. Excellent! That netted me two more achievements too, which was nice. Slightly less ace news on the Marsho Madness front though – I’ve dropped quite a few places in the rankings (although am still top of my friends leaderboard) and failed to improve …
Phew! I’m on the final run now, with just 16 of the levels remaining. Currently, my rank in the main game stands at 68th in the world – not bad considering I haven’t even finished the game yet! It’s getting very hard now though.
This was new on the Wii Virtual Console last night, and as I had a look through the VC shop, I thought – why not? So I bought it. I’m not really sure what to think. It is to Bomb Jack what Super Monkey Ball Adventure is to Super Monkey Ball. It had the Bomb Jack “idea”, but then turns it into a scrolly platformer with standard Bomb Jack levels as the end of level “bosses”. Sort of. There’s also …
Hmm. I didn’t like all the in-the-dark stuff of some of the levels today. I know it just adds another element to the puzzles, but it made my brane hurt. Anyway, I’m about a third of the way through the penultimate zone (or world, or planet, or whatever) now, and things are getting really brain-warpy now, with gravity flippers and levitation thingies. I have managed the “10 levels with two items remaining” achievement though, which is ace. And I’m 99th …
That’s Zone Three all done and dusted now too. Go me! Managed par for most levels, and had quite a few “one item left” successes, as well as a couple of “two items left” and one “three items left”. I should be on line for an achievement for those now, I think. Had another go at Marsho Madness too, but only got 120,000-ish. It does put me back into top-400 territory though, as I’d been bumped down to around 600 …
Most of this evening’s pinballing was spent trying to improve my feeble score on the Agents table. I did, of course, but not to any great amount. I’m up to around 34 million now, a 12 million improvement, but I’m still quite low down on my friends leaderboard. I did get an achievement though, but I don’t know what it was for.
I’ve now finished all of the second zone, and a few on the third. It’s getting quite hard now, but I seem to be finding plenty of “wrong” ways of completing levels – mainly using fewer items than necessary. One level was completed with a single item instead of the four provided, and the time it took was under three seconds, compared to the 30 that par time was set at. Ace! I then had another go at the brain-hurty …
And this was the other new XBLA title today. There’s something very wrong with the ball, in that it sounds heavy and metallic, but it moves like it’s a floaty ping pong ball or something. You soon get used to it though. Pinball FX is no Pinball Fantasies or Digital Pinball, but it isn’t bad at all. Even the so-bad-it’s-good Extreme table with the faux-gangsta soundbites is reasonable. The scores on the boards then: 56,000,000, 52,000,000 and 20,000,000-ish on the …
Two new games on XBLA again today, and I bought both of them. First up was this platformy puzzley game which reminded me a bit of Bills Tomato Game on the Amiga. Game ideas are never new, you see, they just hibernate sometimes. I’ve completed all of the first “zone”, having no problems (although I don’t have a faster than par time on one level), and I’m now half way through the second zone. I have four achievements already too!
Had much better luck with on the Explorer course today, managing to finish with 7 under par. I was actually 15 under par way through the first day, but that stupid carnival level with the card suits that flash over a hole messed up on me, as I kept rebounding off the hole, or got stuck in it only to be launched over the course entirely. Rubbish. Having done that, I moved on to Adventurer, which is two days of …