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 …
25 years ago this week, a man named Clive Sinclair unleashed the future into an unsuspecting world. That is, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was released. The details of the machine and its history have been reported all over the internet already today, so I won’t bother duplicating any of that here. I should, however, point out how much the Spectrum changed my own life. As MJ Hibbett and The Validators so musically sang, my parents bought me a 48K Spectrum+ …
Played through this on single player this evening for a while, finishing off the Traveller course in 8 under par or so. I then had a go at the Explorer course, and finished at 36 over par – not good. Afterwards, I played a few rounds in two player mode with my wife, which was hardly fair as she’d not played it before. That didn’t stop her getting a hole in one on her first shot, though…
Firstly, the problems. Since it uses the Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2 engine (or at least, it appears to), most of the camera and user interface issues are replicated here. My main two gripes are the camera angles (you’re too horizontal and and not “birds-eye” enough, and you can’t see your troops unless you zoom right in) and the fact you can’t “draw a box” around a group of units like you can in every other …
The aim of this game is to shoot lots of infinitely respawning zombies, run out of ammo, and then die as you have no useful weapons. What a fun game. Or not.