You know, even though there’s a link over there on the left, many of my readers don’t seem to realise I have a second blog. One which is some two years older than this one, and is updated more frequently. It’s my Gaming Diary. Since I’m what you could call an, uh, avid player of games, I set up a diary to track my progress through what I play, and to try and encourage me to stop buying so many …
I was so close last night! I was doing 10-4 pretty much how you were supposed to, but I just needed to speed up on my Snakey-pushing. 10-5 (the final level) was way, way easier than I expected, and I did it on my second go. Overall, it’s a great game. It looks crap, and yes, is just a crate pushing game at heart, but it’s well executed and the difficulty curve is pitched perfectly, so it’s well worth a …
There’s a thread on rllmuk at the moment about seeing faces in objects. Now I’m looking for faces everywhere – like this volume control box for some speakers I have. Can you see it?
A few more levels, although it took me over an hour. I’m now on 10-4, which I’m pretty certain is the penultimate level. I can see how to do 10-4, it’s just I don’t seem to be quick enough at shunting egged snakeys around. Yes, that does make sense, if you’ve played the game…
OK, so I’m going to try to finish this one off. I’m off to a decent start too, having managed to get from 7-4(ish) to 9-3. Yeah, so that’s not many levels, but it’s really quite hard now and some levels are taking 20+ attempts. I think Floor 10 is the last one. It certainly implies that the “Demon’s room is on the next floor” or something.
By selecting the best weapon prior to mounting the on-foot attack of the Martinez Building after the chopper assault, I found it much easier this time around. The Spaz shotgun is most excellent when many baddies are in close range as it takes them all out at once. After that, I had to shoot down another helicopter, and finally there was a three-way showdown on the roof – the remaining Mendez brother, Martinez, and me. And it was easy, they …
I’m pretty certain I’m on the last mission now. All the other storylines in the game are getting wrapped up – Phil Collins had his gig (during which I had to run round the lighting rigging and stop people cutting through it – shame), Reni went from he/she to just she and flew back to Europe, Gonzales has left Vice City (and I had to protect him on the way to the airport), and one of the Mendez brothers is …
Done loads today, including: protected Phil Collins (no, really) from gangs, built up more of my empire, found out Lance and Louise have been nicking all the drugs, killed a load of people who wanted to blow up Phil Collins (again, but it’s understandable), taken part in more stunt driving (on a jetski) for Reni at the studio, played golf (sort of), collected all the remaining required cars for the impound, chased Lance’s helicopter in a hovercraft, saved Louise from …
Eventually, I managed to take down the antennae. It wasn’t all that difficult once I’d figured out where the stairs to the roof of each police station were, so I could park my car as close as possible. However, I then spent the best part of an hour finishing that mission, as I had a 5 Star rating upon escaping from the last station, and to complete the mission I had to drop that down to zero. Whilst being chased …
I now seem to be working for Gonzales, as well as still doing some missions with Lance to try to recover where all the drugs we had have gone. It would appear that they’ve mostly gone up his nose. Anyway. Also expanded the “empire” a bit, and now I’m stuck trying to blow up antennae on the tops of police stations. With a rocket launcher.
OK, so I’m having a Geek Day today. Sorry about that. But “Siggi”, from the newsgroup comp.sys.sinclair has done something quite amazing. Whilst the rest of us on the group have often giggled about the possibility of creating a webserver that runs on a Sinclair Spectrum, this guy has gone one better – by creating one for the ZX81. Amazing. Assuming the thing is still running (and Siggi says it could go down at any time), you can see it …
This is perhaps the most geeky blog post I’ve done yet. Basically, I ran into a problem this morning. A couple of weeks ago I installed Ubuntu on a virtual server to replace the aging physical server running SuSE 7.3 that powers the intranet pages at work. Everything was fine, until today… I also use the install of PHP on that server to create thumbnail images as part of a photo gallery creation system I have for work’s website. As …
Yes, it’s the same as the first game, only with more “industrial” graphics and a few extra bits. And yes, I was pretty crap at the first one. But, as is often the way with XBLA games, I couldn’t resist and bought the full version anyway. And I’m glad I did, because it’s actually a bit easier than Hexic HD. There are new power-ups and you can now get rid of hexes with a line of five, both of which …
Ecco the Dolphin is, and always has been, crap. There – I said it. The controls need an analogue stick, the jumping out of the water stuff is rubbish, the nose-attack is stupid, and the “find a key!” and “find a whale!” and “find some other thing!” gameplay is dull. The XBLA version is the same as the Megadrive original. So, in that respect, is still crap. Even more so in that for some reason, having talked to a shark …
Two days and two great Xbox 360 demos? With these you are really spoiling us! Six times I played through it. Six. OK, so it’s not very long (three minutes) but it does show how much I’m looking forward to a new Katamari game. It’s more of the same, only in HD and (I’m hoping) no mid-level loading!