Well, that was an anticlimax. The end of game sequence was a rather rubbish level with a virtually non-existent fight with Voldemort. At least other fights in the game required you to fling things at the baddie, or do a wand duel or something – in this you just wander round as other characters doing normal Lego things, and then it flicks back to Harry and Hairless and you just hammer A or X. You don’t even have to select …
Yes, that’s an overstatement. Gaming is not going to die. It’s going to change, and if it changes how it looks like it’s going to, then it’ll be dead to me. Much of this concern stems from rumours (most of which have been rubbished), but where there is smoke, there is fire. Rumours come from ideas, and even if they’re not implemented now, or fully – someone, somewhere, thought they’d be a a good idea. Online only I don’t want my console …
I have a lot of games on the go at the moment so in an effort to resolve that I made a concerted effort to not play anything else until I’d finished some. It didn’t work as I accidentally started playing Assassin’s Creed III. I did, however, manage to finish The Cave. It’s not a big game, having clocked in at about 7 hours, but it was very funny and quite clever. The three characters I’d chosen were Hillbilly, Time …
The time had come to install SP3 on Exchange 2010. Things hadn’t worked, with nothing useful in the logs, when I tried to apply all the SP2 update rollups, so I thought I’d skip them and go straight to Service Pack 3. I had a few odd issues to begin with: For some reason it thought I had Windows Update running. I didn’t. Then it got through the “readiness checks” but failed because “beremote” (Symantec Backup Exec was running – …
Yep. Another one of those. You love them really. So, here are things I’ve been playing recently: Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7 (360) I’m now, I dunno, half way into the first of the two year 7 films? I have no idea. Things seem to have hit the fan though, as the beardyman has died and the moon has turned into a Lego skull and everything was on fire. Literally no idea. Skylanders (360) My daughter is able to play this really …
Lego games are awesome. All of them. Awesome. AWE. SOME. And Harry Potter is awful. All of it. AW. FUL. Who will win? Lego. Obviously. Just like the previous game. I’ve said this all before. In fact, Years 5-7 is very much the same. Sure, you get one new spell (water jet thing), and new levels, but Hogwarts is the same place and the assets are all copied across. It feels more like DLC than a new game. I suppose …
With about 15 hours on the clock, I’m done. Woo! As previously posted, once I got the controls sorted, I was well away and really enjoyed it. Sure, there are a few puzzles which I appeared to fudge or break in order to complete them (I don’t think I did them any of the accepted “correct” ways), but that didn’t seem to matter. A very pretty game, and well worth a play through. I don’t think I’ll go through again …
However pretty it is, for some reason I didn’t quite gel with Trine 2 at first. The controls were fiddly, having to swap character and weapon and use all the buttons and the touch screen, and as much as I wanted to love it, I didn’t. Then, when I realised it’s the only Wii U game I have that I haven’t completed (aside from Nintendo Land, which I’m not sure counts? That’s a debate for another time, perhaps), I got …
What a stylish platformer-with-shooty-bits! It’s like it’s made from sketches on aged paper, bound up like a flick book. But it plays somewhere between Mega Man and Sunset Riders, sort of. You’re a cowboy with a gun, and there’s platforming afoot! And it’s very hard. At least, I found it very hard. Looking back now, I realised that for the most part, once you’d learned the rooms and where baddies appear from, it’s perhaps not really that difficult. Except for …
I was pretty sure I’d posted on my diary about this already, back in November when I started playing it, but it seems not. Back then, I got to around half-way into the story, and aside from occasionally popping back on to do the latest downloadable puzzles, I hadn’t touched it once my Wii U arrived. After completing (and boy, did I complete it) New Super Mario Bros 2, I went back to Layton. It took me a few minutes to recall …
And that’s it! Well, mostly. The main thing is that I’ve rinsed the levels – all five (shiny) stars got, just like on New Super Mario Bros U. It didn’t take me quite as long as on the Wii U game, mainly because NSMB2 is a lot easier. In fact, bar a couple of the cannon levels, I don’t think any levels were particularly challenging. Sure, I don’t have a million coins yet (in fact, I have barely 70,000), and …
It’s another lazy roundup! Yay! Nintendo Land (Wii U) I’ve completed the Pikmin Adventure game, which took a couple of hours (and unlocked some more, harder levels). It’s really very good, and has me itching for Pikmin 3. I also played Octopus Dance some more, but no matter how well I do, a controller calibration or disconnection problem happens and I lose. Bah. Mighty Switch Force HD (Wii U) Although the level called “Bonus 5” is seemingly the same as …
The thing with New Super Mario Bros U is, that sadly, it doesn’t have an infinite number of levels and doesn’t carry on until the end of all time. That is pretty much its only failing, but nonetheless, it means I ran out of game. Which is why I bought NSMB2. As it’s sort of more of the same. In actuality, it’s not as good as NSMBU. It’s a lot easier. There’s no proper world map. There’s no Acorn power …
Unlike previous years, where I had a rule of not buying games if they cost more than a certain amount of money (£18, in 2011), in 2012 I followed the Pound-a-Mile Challenge – detailed here. This post is a roundup of where that money (and this year, miles) went. In all, I spent £834.48. Last year, it was £888.22, so I’ve spent 6% less on games and game related paraphernalia this year. Woo! 6%! Here’s the hardware/software split: Which is almost exactly …
