Assassin’s Creed III (Wii U): COMPLETED!

Well, I’m glad I didn’t spoil the ending for myself before getting to it at least. Not nearly as bad as people had made out though. There may be spoilers to follow… I didn’t like the final two “boss” fights. Haytham’s was complete rubbish and different to any other fight in the game, and Charles Lee’s was basically a chase followed by a cutscene. You don’t actually get to properly assassinate either of them – it’s done for you by …

Assassin’s Creed III (Wii U)

And so the neck-stabbing continues. Well, I say that, but in fact it doesn’t. One major issue I have with this version of Assassin’s Creed is that you have no way of telling when you’re supposed to press Y to assassinate anyone. You have to guess, whereas previously it would appear as a prompt on-screen. Which means that most of the time you either miss, or worse, miss and everyone notices you. As a result, picking off guards one by …

F-Zero (Wii U): COMPLETED!

Now here’s a thing. I’m not a fan of F-Zero. I never completed it (or ever really played it that much) on the SNES, didn’t like the N64 version, and F-Zero GX was pretty meh.  Yes, I know! Everyone else loves them! Not me. Having said that, I was somewhat drawn in. The controls are rubbish (mainly because I keep trying to press L to drift round corners) and the cars are too floaty. They don’t steer properly (as in, …

DLC Quest: Live Freemium or Die (360): COMPLETED!

About 18 months ago, I played a game called DLC Quest on Xbox Live Indie Games. It was one of very few XBLIG games I’d bought. It was short and funny, and well worth the pence it cost. This week, the sequel came out. Yay! So I played and completed that too. It’s still good, and still funny (and still short), and although it’s filled with DLC (which you again pay for with coins you collect in-game, rather than with …

Assassin’s Creed III (Wii U)

I played this for a couple of hours a few weeks ago, as I snapped it up for a tenner. I didn’t want to play it much more as I was still in the middle of Batman: Arkham City, and they’re reasonably similar game styles (hide-and-seek-and-punch), but the controls are very different, so going from one game to the other was going to be confusing. With Batman out of the way last week, I was back to Assassin’s Creed III. …

Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed (Wii U)

Firstly, shush. It’s not a proper Sonic game even by Sega’s standards. It’s a racing game that has Sonic in it. Big difference. In fact, I’m making a protest by not playing as Sonic or any of his idiot chums, instead working my way through Grand Prix mode as former Sega poster boy Alex Kidd. Alex Kidd who has grown up to be quite an angry, violent young man. I’m sure it’s down to how his parents (Mr and Mrs …

Batman: Arkham City (Wii U)

Completed: More. As in, I competed the Harley’s Revenge story. It was DLC in other versions of the game, and if I’d bought it as a separate purchase I’d count it as a separate completion (like I did with Fallout New Vegas and Bioshock 2 DLC), but as it’s on the disc, I’m not sure I can do that here. Either way, it’s done. It was pretty short, and the actual map you play on was tiny (and reused over …

Batman: Arkham City (Wii U): COMPLETED!

Well, look at that. It turns out the final 15% of the main story takes less than 20 minutes to do. I literally just had to make it to a cinema, then have two fights inside with the end of game boss. Two very, very easy fights. I have to say, the difficulty, and quantity, of the “big” fights in Arkham City both fall way short of those in Arkham Asylum. I think there’s only been one I didn’t beat …

Batman: Arkham City (Wii U)

Dinner dinner dinner dinner fightman! Dinner dinner dinner dinner hideman! Dinner dinner dinner dinner glideman! Climbman! Batman! 85% done now. With the story, at least. It would appear that only equates to about 30% of the overall game, which presumably includes all the side missions, Riddler trophies and after-game fun. Of which there is clearly a lot for the maths to work. Having beaten up Mr Freeze and found his wife for him, lost the cure for Batman’s poisoning, and …

Lego Harry Potter: Years 5-7 (360): COMPLETED!

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 …

The impending death of gaming

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 …

The Cave (Wii U): COMPLETED!

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 …

Can’t upgrade Exchange 2010 – “The service cannot be started”

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 – …

The Irregular Lazy Catch Up Post

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 …