Writing about Luxor 2 without mentioning Zuma is going to be hard. So I’m not even going to bother trying. Luxor 2 is a direct clone of Zuma. Almost. Yeah, I know Zuma is a clone of ten million other games, but they’re not on the 360 so don’t count. It’s like the Luxor people looked at Zuma and went, “We gots to gets some o’ that”. Of course, they carefully changed some stuff so as to avoid it looking …
I turned my Xbox 360 on today for the first time in over a month (I think – perhaps longer), and set about downloading demos of all the Xbox Live Arcade additions since I last looked. I then played them: Alien Hominid HD:Pretty, Metal Slug-type game with a stupidly hard difficulty setting. It isn’t the mid and end of level bosses that caused me any grief, really – unlike everyone else – since they have simple patterns you can avoid. …
How did this happen? I’ve always liked Castlevania games, and was quite excited about 18 months ago when Dawn of Sorrow came out, even though I hadn’t really played a Castlevania game since the SNES one about 12 years previous. But good as it was, it didn’t propel me into buying any other, older, Castlevania games. Last year, however, when the first details of Portrait of Ruin for the DS were filtering onto the internet, I thought I’d best pick …
It was waaaaaaay harder than I remember it from 12 or so years ago, but today I conquered the game. Excellent. Dracula took 8 attempts (although I’d tried yesterday about 20 or 30 times), but in fact, his final “form” was much easier than his first few. I managed to force myself to only get a hit in when it was safe, concentrating on avoiding projectiles rather that smacking him in the face. This really helped. Getting my health back …
As I’m now in the Thieves Guild, I thought it might be an idea to start nicking stuff. I’ve not really stolen much before, so didn’t know where to start. The guy who entered me into the guild wants me to steal 50 gold worth of stuff, and take it so someone in Bruma, before he’ll start giving me proper missions. Tried to break in to some houses, but was either spotted, or couldn’t get in. I’m a bit of …
Back to this then. And back to Eggman Nega at the end of the game. And back to “gah!”ing at him. Managed to get his health down to just two notches remaining on one of my many attempts, but that was about the best I could manage. His laser attack is too random to successfully avoid every time, and the electricity attack (especially the four-beam variety) is a pain too. The fact that you lose your rings for good if …
Still the irritation factor rises. Athough I’ve now killed Egg Albatross (who was very easy, it turned out), the following two jungle levels were full of irritating unavoidable deaths and stupid can’t-see-where-you’re-jumping sections. The whole alligator chase bit was spectacularly joypad-smash inducing, as not only can you not see where you’re going, but you can’t time your rope-swing jumps properly as you don’t have the seconds required going spare. Oh yes – and more falling though platforms and sliding off …