Archive for the 'gaming' Category

What am I into at the moment?

Published at November 27, 2007 in television and gaming. 0 Comments

I’m currently playing Super Mario Galaxy, which is a gorgeous game to watch and play, Puzzlequest, which is an RPG meets a Bejewelled-style puzzle game, and the expansion version of Phantasy Star Universe.

I’m watching Heroes of course, the new series of Curb Your Enthusiasm (which is compulsory, it’s very good), the Mighty Boosh, and I’ve just watched my first episode of Flight of the Conchords, which I’d heard was a very marmite show, but I got it straight away, stupid in a great way.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Achievements

Published at July 11, 2007 in Xbox Live, Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo and gaming. 0 Comments

So I’ve now got myself a Wii, and very nice it is too. However I feel I’m missing something, namely the sense of pointless achievement I get with playing the Xbox 360. If you haven’t seen the online side of the 360, as a player you get points for achieving certain tasks in every game, and built up an overall score, your gamerscore. It is your personal badge of how seriously you take your gaming, how far you’ve got in all your games.

And it goes deeper than that as well, you can compare yourself to your friends, see down to the individual achievement how far they’ve got in a game you both have. I like this, it spurs me on to try and outplay my friends. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, but I feel it just adds an extra little purpose to gaming.

This I find lacking on the Wii. I don’t know what games my friends have, I can barely play them on any games at the moment (only one, Mario Strikers, and I don’t fancy that), and I don’t know how they’re getting on. In this day and age, you also tend not to be told how far you are through a game, so I don’t get the same sense of progression. As far as I understand it, PS3 has a similar system. I hope Nintendo are going to start to rectify this somehow, but at present there doesn’t seem to be any enthusiasm from them to do so. It’s a shame.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Settlers of Catan

Published at May 31, 2007 in Xbox Live Arcade, Xbox 360 and gaming. 0 Comments

I’ve been playing quite a bit of Settlers of Catan on the Xbox 360 recently. It is a great board game brought onto Xbox Arcade, which as far as I can tell keeps all the board game elements, and then provides you with either decent opponents or the ability to play online. I picked it up pretty much from diving right into it, and I’m rather enjoying it. Let me know if you get it and fancy a game.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Crackdown - Xbox 360 (mini-review)

Published at February 26, 2007 in gaming. 2 Comments

You get to be a super-hero, jump amazing heights up, down, and across buildings. Everything is done at your own pace, charge dead ahead and take down bosses, or build yourself up, and sneak about more. It looks great in its cel-shading glory, basically, what is not to love?

Popularity: 15% [?]

Lumines Live! Packs Hit Soon (And Cheap!) - Kotaku

Published at January 23, 2007 in screwjob, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, Xbox Live, Q Entertainment, Lumines Live, Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade, Lumines and gaming. 0 Comments

Basic news is that the addon packs for Lumines on the 360 will be cheap for a limited period, starting sometime this week. I’ll be checking to see when they go up myself.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Homemade Pong watch! - MAKE Magazine

Published at January 5, 2007 in DIY Projects and gaming. 0 Comments

Dscn1018

From MAKE Magazine, a pong game on your wrist. This is truly the future, sod the hovercar and meals in a pill!

Popularity: 12% [?]

So what am I up to at the moment?

Published at January 4, 2007 in blogging and gaming. 0 Comments

Well, not a lot really, trying to get myself together and organised again for the new year. I haven’t really got any projects going at the moment, other that starting to use the autoblogger I set up that is adding some other posts to the site, as well as my insightful little pieces.

I have been playing a lot of Xbox 360, mainly Burnout Revenge and Tony Hawk’s Project 8 at the moment, as well as some Phantasy Star Universe. Burnout is just as annoying in terms of voice communications as the Xbox version, although overall it seems more stable. Offline it is a great game, and the addition of achievements is a wonderful thing, gets me playing it where normally I’d have got fed up by now. Same with Tony Hawk, my desire to smash through the 2000 barrier is driving me in both games at present.

Outside of that, I have a decent stack of geek books to work through, and a trip to London next week for a course in Java, which I’m really looking forwards to. Whole week in a hotel, hope my money lasts out! Does also mean that I’ll effectively miss a week of Celebrity Big Brother, which may be no bad thing.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Light-gun game from 1936 - from Boing Boing

Published at January 4, 2007 in gaming and Uncategorized. 0 Comments

this has just blown me away, a light-gun game from before World War II.

Cory Doctorow:
1936 saw the introduction of the first-ever light-gun game — a duck-hunting game from a company that specialized in vacuum tube jukeboxes.


Ray-O-Lite Rifle, Seeburg, 1/36, a duck shoot game, this rayolite gun game is the first light activated gun games. Seeburg was a company with an engineering departments focused on the design of vacuum tube amplifiers and gearing systems for jukeboxes. It was no surprise then that when the electric eye light sensing vacuum tube was introduced in the early 1930s that the Seeburg design teams would introduce a light ray game.

Link

(Thanks, Rich!)

Popularity: 15% [?]

Phantasy Star Offline

Published at November 24, 2006 in blogging and gaming. 2 Comments

So I’m now about 4.5 hours into Phantasy Star Universe. Having received my pre-order copy a couple of days early, I’ve been playing the offline mode, as the servers haven’t been turned on yet. The offline Story mode is a fully fledged RPG, in the mode of a Final Fantasy, right down to having far too many cutscenes in the first hour of play.

I have been enjoying it immensely. At first the world is slightly bewildering, but once you take control of your character, it plays and feels like Phantasy Star Online of old, but with much better graphics, and a more organic feel that makes it feel less like you are playing in mainly square rooms. The fighting, whilst still based on the same system, does feel more fluid, and the trademark targeting mechanism of PSO has gone, replaced by, well, pointing at the creature you want to hit, and fighting them. Works fine.

I think my main gripe so far has been the on-screen display. Even though the game isn’t optimised for HD, the menus are tiny. Whereas in PSO you had beautiful clear graphics that told you exactly what you had and were using, these you really have to squint at. I appreciate it may partly be my old age, but they are very small. I reckon they could have done with offering a large-print option for the older gamer. Reminds me, I probably should look into getting my eyes tested soon.

Once the servers have gone live, I’ll be wanting to play there instead, but I will carry on with the offline as well, as it is where all the game achievements are apparently. Will probably report back on the online version soon.

In other news, we’ve got tickets for Bond tomorrow, and hopefully mrsfb will be over her cold for that. Do a few chores and a bit of shopping this weekend, then Sunday afternoon I’m off to London for a couple of days for XP day (now two days).

Popularity: 14% [?]

First moan about 360 - No wireless drivers for the PC

Published at November 8, 2006 in blogging and gaming. 3 Comments

Only a little moan though, generally still happy with it. However, one of the things that appealled to me about the 360 was that you can use the controller with the PC as well. Well it turns out that is only if it is a wired controller. No worries I thought, I’ve bought the play and charge kit, which has an ordinary USB cable on it. If I plug it into the PC like that, it is a wired controller, surely? No dice. So if I want to do that, I have to buy the inferior controller instead. Great.

Popularity: 15% [?]