Gah, dammit. The perils of leaving games you don’t want to play yet in your console. I saw it there, on the 360 dashboard, and couldn’t help myself and started playing it. So far: very good. It’s different to both Half-Life 2 and Episode One, mainly because you’re not in or around the city. It’s also improved graphically a little too, especially character models. The HUD has had a few tweaks as well, and the flashlight and oxygen meters are …
So Ravenholm is straight out of Resident Evil. They might not be actual zombies, but they’re no so different. And then there’s The Predator who jumps around the rooftops and climbs drainpipes. Oh, and the harder versions of the headcrabs who poison you as well as jump on your face. I didn’t really like Ravenholm that much. Nothing about it seemed like Half-Life to me at all, and the loon from the church just detracted further. After that, it was …
Well, I say “assorted”, but in fact there were only two: StrangleholdIt’s John Woo, in game form! It’s a stylish third-person shooter, with now-clichéd bullet-time (or rather, “Tequila Time”. Cue “Tequila, it makes me happy” and “Stop! Tequila Time!” jokes, which I’ll refrain from. It looks nice, has some clever bits (like the multi-way showdowns where you must dodge bullets with one stick, and aim your guns with the other), and is full of impressive Woo stunt direction, but I …
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.
What? In? Hell? This has to be the slowest, hardest, most irritating game ever made. Ever. Your character (Simon? It doesn’t tell you) moves as a snails pace. You have no subweapons. You can’t jump very far (and the game is full of pixel-perfect jumps), you only have three lives, often when you die you go back miles, and the whole game jerks and judders all over the place. Ace! So I spent AGES trying to get past the Stepping …
I haven’t played this in a while, but, again, with HDTV it’s come out of the cupboard for some more play. And it looks amazing. But enough of that. Decided to pursue the Mages Guild questline. This meant finding a cave on the east of the map, where some necromancers have been up to naughtiness, and then locating a mage spy inside. I was helped for all of five seconds by a battlemage, who instantly got killed by a trap. …
This took AAAAAGES to download, but it finally did and so I got to have a play. I’m a bit torn on it. On one hand, it’s great fun, with lots of weapons to mow down the zombies, but on the other hand, many of the weapons act exactly the same as each other and it all gets a bit samey quickly. Whether the full game will suffer from this, I don’t know. I hope not!
First thing today was to go up to the cave north-west of Skingrad and find the mage who has been missing for some time. Didn’t take long to find the cave, but once inside there were loads of zombies! And they were pretty difficult to beat too. Luckily, there weren’t too many of them, and so I’d soon found the mage and brought him back to the guild. After a quick sleep (Level 3 now!), and having sold a load …
Finished off N’orlins, witch involved waking the dead again, and breaking some signs and jumping over rubish and mowing down zombies. And stuff. I then had to do a mini-challenge thing, with acid dropping from a helicopter and transferring over it again later. Luckily, it wasn’t too hard. After that, it was on to “Skatopia” (which is “skate-opia”, before you suggest something else). It’s not easy at all. After an hour, I’d managed 50/1000 points, and I can’t even see …
Castlevania seems to have turned into a sort of Metroid clone since Castlevania IV. Not that I’m complaining, since I really enjoyed Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission, and this kind of fills the hole that their completion has left. In may ways it is better too. You get more freedom over where you’re supposed to go, and there is less hand-holding. There is still all the exploration and upgrades, but there are so many upgrades to find, choose, use, and …
Enjoying this so far. I might even complete it. You never know. Went back and completed the level with Harry Tipper, and the train level following it. Homage to Goldeneye, by the same developers? Perhaps… At the end of the level there was a puzzle thing to stop the nuclear missile being launched, and a fight with a guy with a rocket pack. Obviously. The next two levels were obviously inspired by Resident Evil. Firstly, it was set in a …
I never had this game in either of its original incarnations on the PC Engine and the Megadrive, but remember wanting it when I saw a review of it. I think the UK version either never existed or was ub3r-l@@k-r@re. It’s Breakout with two bats and zombies, basically. And it is pretty good too, making use of the second screen to see further up the level as you progress. Graphics are pretty poor though – no improvement on the Megadrive …
Not a particularly successful play today on this. I did managed to complete the Pharoh level on my second attempt – once I’d figured you could smash the huge gold boulders, my coins racked up pretty quickly. Sadly, I had less luck in Frontiersville, although I did come pretty close. As for the Resident Evil Racoon City level – that’s just plain impossible. FACT. You have to get Nemesis to drop all of his coins, but you have to hit …
Finished a few more levels. I think I’m getting the hang of it now. First up today was Booty Bay again, which I found pretty easy. One trick I’ve found is to try and “prank” the same group of people several times in quick sucession. Also, the sharks are an excellent weapon if you have a hoover – let them out, run and hide, and suck up the coins from a safe spot. After that was the Casino level, which …