Eternal Sonata (360)

So I completed all of the Xylophone Tower (with two bosses I’d already beaten, again – that didn’t bode well), and opened up Noise Dunes. That led me to another tower, which appears to contain more bosses. Bosses I’ve beaten before. Again. Which means that Eternal Sonata has a SuckySuck(TM) bit. darthvadernooooooooooo.jpg And then, to make things even worse, once I’d killed a boss and was mere millimetres from a save point, the game crashed again. I’d forgotten to clear …

Amazing graffiti

But not in an artistic sense. Pictures of Walls is a site with hundreds of photos of, well, pictures of walls, with graffiti on. Funny graffiti, clever graffiti, and downright bizarre graffiti. Par example: And:

Omega Five (Demo) (360)

OK, so it’s nowhere near as bad as Tron, but it’s still not great. I’m not a big fan of shooters like this anyway, so that might have something to do with my dislike of it. However, there are still issues. For example, your character is far too big on the screen, which makes the game difficult to play – not least because the screen gets cluttered very quickly with the also-too-big baddies. Then there’s the baddies that just leap …

Tron (Demo) (360)

OH MY LORD What the hell is this? Worst controls ever: You have to aim your hand to shoot, but it doesn’t do it like in Geometry Wars (where you point in the direction you want), and it doesn’t do it like Asteriods (where you rotate) – it doesn’t seem to do anything you want. Rubbish. Worst light-cycle game ever. Totally impossible tank game. Far too easy “get into the MCP core!” game. I’ve never played the original, so this …

Eternal Sonata (360)

Allegretto and Co leapt into the giant swirly hole thing, and vanished! They awoke to find themselves, um, somewhere. With lots of dead people. Glowing, ball-like dead people. Yes, really. And there’s a desert that I can’t enter, instead having to climb the Xylophone Tower (to hit a switch to open it), which is full of somewhat difficult baddies. Well, they’re difficult as I’m trying to kill them with some of the characters that are on lower levels at the …

Eternal Sonata (360)

No crashes today, although I’ve doing the cache-cleaning thing every time I start the game up now, just in case. Went into Mt. Rock, and got blown around a lot and found some chests (mostly containing stuff worse than stuff I already had), before finally catching up with Prince Crescendo. Then Count Waltz (is he allowed to be a Count? He’s only about 12, isn’t he?) appeared with a million flying dragons-wot-have-donkey-heads and tried to convince Polka to go with …

Emails from the Dawn of Time #3

In 2001, the Game Boy Advance was released. I was pretty keen on getting one (and I did, as soon as physically possible), but before it came out I chased up a few places to find out how much it was going to cost. I sent this to “Madeira Games” on the 17th March, 2001: How much will the GBA cost? Is it a Japanese import, or is the preorder for a UK machine? How much are the games? When …

Eternal Sonata (360)

Had another couple of crashes to start with today – again at the shopkeeper. Cleared the cache again and it sorted it again, though. The Aria Temple was a bit strange. Besides the large areas with no baddies in them, and the big room with nothing but baddies in (that can be totally avoided), there were several treasure chests that kept moving. I’d go for one, get jumped on by a baddie, kill it, and then the chest would move! …

Eternal Sonata crash horror – and fix!

So I’ve been playing the 360 game Eternal Sonata a lot recently, and now, 17 hours in, I’ve been getting a lot of crashing and freezing. In fact, I can replicate the following every single time: It seems to do it as it’s loading something new in, like a baddie, or a list of items, or some dialogue.Thankfully, I found what appears to be a fix. Like many Xbox 360 games, the problem lies in the data the game caches …

Eternal Sonata (360)

After some hunting around on the internets, I eventually found what appears to be a method of clearing the game cache (documented here), which seemed to work and so I could carry on playing without it crashing every 25 seconds. Played for another hour or so, finding a book in the forest outside Baroque, returning it to a bloke in the castle, then returning through the forest to the Aria Temple. I’ve not entered it yet, though.

Eternal Sonata (360)

Um, yes. So other games don’t exist at the moment, it would seem. And plenty of time has been spent on this again today too – taking me from 13 hours to over 16 hours game time, according to the save files. Killed the pirate captain first of all today, which gained Salsa a new hat (um, great), and then we reached Baroque, where it was snowing. Lots. We decided to leave, after a concert and lots of shopping and …

Answering unasked questions #1

Some questions I’ve not been asked, but I think are on your lips anyway. I’ve been looking at the search terms people have been using to find my blog, and the same things are cropping up most days. Q: Hey deKay – what’s this “destroy my gems” thing all about? A: I have no idea. Well, I have some idea. You’re talking about this, right? Well, there was some discussion about the Amiga puzzle game “Gem-X” (specifically, its crap box-art) …

Fillum Review: Magicians (2007)

Imagine an episode of Peep Show, only three times as long and with the two main characters in a different situation, i.e. that they’re not Mark the dullard and Jez the layabout, but Harry the (dullard) magician and Karl the (layabout) magician. So Harry finds out Karl is sleeping with his wife (who also happens to be their assistant), and lo, Harry accidently kills her with a guillotine. As you do. The pair split, careers spiral, and they don’t speak …

Eternal Sonata (360)

It’s far too easy to spend lots of time on this without realising. I started early this afternoon, and then suddenly it was dark outside. Chapter 2 was soon over. I had to fight Tuba again on the bridge by the fort, and although I won, he took out the bridge and we all fell to our watery deaths. Well, not quite. The beginning of Chapter 3 showed that my party had been split into two groups. Allegretto, Viola, Jazz, …