Rockstar Table Tennis: Jesper

I played Rockstar Table Tennis a while ago, and won a couple of exhibition matches, but it got abandoned at the bottom of the games pile - which is a shame, since it's a well-executed game and works really well.  In my current convalescing state, I dug it out and tried a tournament.

The first two matches were great; after I got back to the controls, I won them with a few points to spare.  Then I came across Jesper.

Jesper hits the ball hard, seems to have a really long reach, and can accurately return almost anything you hit at him.  And he was in the semi-finals.  I lost three matches to Jesper, and luckily you can opt to replay a match if you lose it otherwise I'd have given up.  Time after time I'd just lose to his powerful shots.

In the end, I worked out that if you hit the ball with right-spin to the right side of the table, forcing Jesper to hit a backhand shot, then it'll be weaker, and he'll not have as much control. The only way I could beat him was by hitting right-spin after right-spin until he was far enough to the right, and then hitting a left-spin to the left.  And even that didn't work.

I finally beat Jesper, and got through to the final, which I won on my first attempt.  The problem is that I now know I'd have to face Jesper if I play another tournament, and I'm not sure I can be bothered.  The fact that I had to resort to cheap repetitive tactics to beat him rather turns me off of the game.  That's a bit of a shame.

Burnout Revenge: continuously elite

Back in January 2009, I said that I aimed to get at least a medal on every event for Burnout Revenge.  Since then, I've not played the game.

Destruction Derby 2 left me with a desire for more car wrecking, so I tried some of this.  It's still great, although coming back at such a high level is rather difficult.  I was greeted with a flurry of unlocked cars, which I presume have been unlocked online over time, though I can't see where I can choose those cars.  Having said that, I didn't really deviate from the Elite Racer and EA Racer at the top of my list.

I've now completed the level 8 events, albeit with a couple of bronze medals along the way.  I managed gold on the final grand prix by the skin of my teeth, after coming fourth on the first race.  I've also redone a couple of the lower stages in order to get an achievement for a perfect level 2.  Level 9 races are relatively difficult, but persistence should pay off.

Destruction Derby 2: watching the paintwork

I have no recollection of playing this before; my brother had the original game, and the main thing I remember from that was limping around huge arenas in reverse, hoping to hit the one remaining opponent before they hit me. I'd blocked out the racing part, and the points systems, and everything else.  Wikipedia reliably informs me that the original game had all of those.

So the sequel seems to add very little to the overall formula.  I don't recall being able to roll a car onto its roof before, and the tracks in the second game seem much larger and more three-dimensional.  There's also a pit stop, which means there's a little added strategy to the race events.

It's not aged amazingly well.  There's no real weight behind collisions, and it's difficult to control your car to hit others in the right place.  Collisions see cars emit huge triangles of debris, but these don't seem to do anything to a car that hits them.  The driving model itself is very slippy, reminiscent of Sega Rally at times - or even the original Ridge Racer.  Compare Ridge Racer Revolution on the PlayStation to Ridge Racer 3D, and you can see how controls have tightened up in the fifteen years since this game was released.  All too often I'd be involved in an accident, or slide off the track, and think it wasn't my fault.  This could really do with an update, along the lines of a Burnout game - certainly something to make the graphics clearer.  Despite what Gamespot say, it's nowhere near photorealistic.

Despite that, I had fun.  In the main game series, coming first in the race means nothing if you don't hit other cars along the way.  I've progressed into league 3 (from the bottom of league 4), and have been getting better over time.  I may start using a faster car.

1000 Heroz: breaking the run

Annoyingly, I couldn't come first on the UGVM leaderboard today, meaning that I've managed a run of only six top spots.  Only six.

Starfox 64 3D: all-range mode

Luckily, I'm able to play this on the tube fine, so it must have been a combination of dodgy taxi driver and lack of sleep that caused my prior queasiness.  Since I can play this on the tube (and the DLR), I've made a lot of progress, playing a stage at a time.  I've managed to travel down a central route, not being good enough to start with to follow the top route, but managing to qualify for the sun stage half-way through.

The 3D effect works really well in this game, helping me to make sure my aim is true.  That's not to say that I'm proving to be expert in aiming, mind; it just means that I can tell when my aim's off from the fact I can see when my blasters are going to miss.  I'm hopeless at using the bomb, and can't get the hang of charging my blaster.  And when it switches into all-range mode - that is, when you can fly around an arena and aren't limited to a straight-line flight - I often get hopelessly lost.

And the less said about the tank level the better.

Tiny Tower: diminishing allure

The fun is starting to disappear from the game, as I've run out of new things to discover.  I've got a finely balanced tower at the moment, with fifty-nine floors (sixty including the lobby) meaning I have space for 110 bitizens and jobs for 111.  But nobody moves in with the required skills, and I can't be bothered to wait for people to turn up over and over again.  The game's also given me some very annoying floors of late, including a pub and a video rental shop which get stocked up and then sold out very very quickly indeed.

Oh, and both John and Kieron are miles ahead and I'm never going to catch up, so I've lot that sense of urgency as well.

Starfox 64 3D: blurgh

It seems I can't play this in the back of a taxi; it makes me feel motion sick.  I hope this doesn't apply to all forms of transportation.

May's Mysteries: the Secret of Dragonville: completed!

I was very near the end the last time I played, it seems, since I turned it on, completed two puzzles, and that was that.  The ending was perhaps the least satisfying I've ever seen; I was expecting to meet Uter, and have to solve some particularly difficult puzzles in order to complete the game.  Instead, after solving the last puzzle (a particularly easy sudoko-type add-up-to-100 thing), we went into Uter's room and after a five-minute video and some dialogue, the game just ended.  I was left with May and Tery sitting on a log in the sunshine, and an opportunity to retry any puzzle or complete any I'd missed.  But I'd finished them all by that point.

So that's that.  Well worth the £15 I paid for it, but it's not as good as a Layton game.

Back to the Future the Game: Part 1: completed!

I love Back to the Future.  The fact that this game isn't based directly on the films but is a whole new storyline is amazing.  They've taken liberties with the whole backstory as well, transporting me back to meet Marty's grandfather and Doc when he was a boy.  And, most shocking of all, I went to years which didn't end in a '5'!

What wasn't amazing was how the game stuttered and glitched all over the place, and I'm running it on an iPad 2.  I dread to think what it was like on the original.  It was also awkward having to control Marty with a virtual joystick, and invisible walls just made it frustrating all too often.

I got the first part free, and I'm in two minds whether to buy the rest.  I want to know what happens in the story, but I found playing it rather frustrating.  Maybe I'll buy it on the Mac during a Steam sale instead.

1000 Heroz: running

1000 Heroz is an iPhone game where a level lasts for 20 seconds, on average.  Every day, you get a new level.  For a 24-hour period, any time you register on that level gets entered to the leaderboard, and once that period is up, then your time is enshrined for ever.  You can replay the level, try to get a better star rating, but you'll never be able to share it.  You're too late.

As such, it's pretty compulsive, and the fact that you can register for individual leaderboards means that competition can get quite intense.  I've been doing relatively well on the UGVM leaderboard, with a few top spots to my name; the same can't be said of the RLLMUK leaderboard, but then there are frequently people there who are in the top ten for the world.  My best world ranking was number 50.

Today I'm just outside the top 100, but am still pleased.  There's quite a gulf on the UGVM leaderboard.

Here you can see me registering a time just behind my best, but still a long way ahead of Sessile's.  There's still three hours for someone to beat me though ...

May's Mysteries: the Secret of Dragonville: picross disaster

I'm still trying to finish off the bonus puzzles before progressing.  I've completed them all other than the hidden pictures - the picross puzzles.  There are loads of them, more than every other puzzle type (other than the sliding puzzles) put together.  They're all 10x10 puzzles, and I'm getting increasingly annoyed.

Why?  Because in quite a few, you have to guess in order to complete the puzzle.  Not only for  one or two spaces, but in Hidden Puzzle 37 I had to guess where eight of the pieces were. This is because there were diagonal lines in the pattern, with relatively few black squares.  Hidden Puzzle 35 was even worse - it was actually impossible to start the puzzle without guessing.

This really annoys me.  The project manager probably heard that these picross puzzles are quite popular, and they're easy enough to program.  So he told the development team to add in forty more.  Nobody on the development team understood the need for the puzzles to be solvable though - the importance of a lack of symmetry, the proportion of coloured squares, and the lack of diagonal lines, just wasn't understood.

So we're left with a slog through picross puzzles which can, at times, require you to use up a number of the hints you've been working to earn.  Really disappointing.

Half-Life 2: meeting up with friendly faces

I had played Half-Life 2 a bit before, despite what my gaming diary says.  First on my old PC, then on the original Xbox, then on the Xbox 360.  I even started it on the Mac, but never got that far.

Last night I decided to work through a bit further.  I'd previously, it seems, got through to a section where I was driving a hovercraft around, and I spent a good twenty minutes driving around trying to work out where to go - and being killed by rocket launchers.  After a while I, by accident, found that if you shot one end of one of the containers lying in the water, it fell off, meaning you could drive through that and out into safety.  So I did, and then carried on through the waterways.  This game was designed for a quick save option.

In fact, this game was designed to be played several years ago.  Some of the mechanics feel very clunky now - a lack of recharging health, expansive armoury, empty corridors and long loading pauses.  When a helicopter appeared, I felt as if I was fighting the controls rather than the enemy.  I eventually dispatched it, and have driven over the side of a dam, found some friendly faces and am now in a tunnel on the way to Ravenholm.  Apparently, people don't go there.  I am.

May's Mysteries: the Secret of Dragonville: at the foot of the tower

After setting fire to the zoo and setting all the animals free, with no illustrations of fire or video of fleeing animals, I've crossed the lake and found Uter's tower.  The script hints quite strongly that once I've gone in, there's no return, so I'm going through a lot of the bonus puzzles before I do.

One of the things I don't like about this game is that each puzzle has the same reward - 30 points.  Some really difficult puzzles feel that you should get more; some simple ones (like the matchstick puzzles) should get fewer.  With the Layton games, the size of reward gives you a hint as to how difficult a puzzle should be, so you can go in with the correct expectation.  With this, you go in blind.

Tiny Tower: grinding upwards

I now have 47 floors in my tiny tower, and each is becoming more expensive to build.  Following advice from Kieron, I've been ruthless and evicted anyone from my tower who doesn't have a competency rated 9 - and then I've gone through and got a load of new people in to replace them.  There's still a bit of an imbalance though; I've five jobs open on service floors, and four bitizens with 9s in other areas.

The biggest disaster, though, is that Kieron has overtaken me (with 50 floors) and John isn't far behind (with 46).  My excuse is that I neither have a job where I work at home, nor have been off work awaiting a baby.  Such things help with tiny tower building.

May's Mysteries: the Secret of Dragonville: unsolvable puzzle

I've come across a puzzle which I think is impossible to solve without a huge amount of luck and randomness. It's puzzle 48 in the main story, and I've had to skip it.

In the puzzle, you have to put the words of ice cream flavours into the grid. The flavours you have are BANANA, CHOCOLATE, CARAMEL, COCONUT, LEMON, MOCHA and PISTACHIO. Words are placed like in Boggle, moving only horizontally or vertically. Spaces can be used more than once for the same letter. The first letters of words are placed outside the grid, and then you have to fit the rest inside.

The grid looks like this:

		B
	*	*	*	*	*	*
C	*	*	*	*	*	*	P
C	*	*	*	*	*	*
L	*	*	*	*	*	*
			C		M

For the words starting with letters other than C, you can at least start off with the first letter. For LEMON, you can see that the word has to continue along the bottom, since you can't have a word starting "CM". But after that I get stuck.

		B
	*	A	*	*	*	*
C	*	*	*	*	*	I	P
C	*	*	*	*	*	*
L	E	M	*	*	O	*
			C		M

I've had a load of goes at solving this, and nothing. I've tried terminating the PISTACHIO on the MOCHA's O, but that hems in the whole of the right side of the board. The hints suggest concentrating on the words starting with letters other than C (gee, thanks), and then the second hints says that the positioning of CHOCOLATE is key. That really doesn't help.

So, any ideas, anyone?

Update!  Tom from Croatia (see comments) has solved it!  The solution can be found on my new blog.

May's Mysteries: the Secret of Dragonville: a crime against humanity

Some of the bonus puzzles are picross puzzles. Amazing!

Unfortunately, some of them could have multiple solutions and the only way you can solve them is by guessing. If you put a mark in the wrong box, you lose a 'life' - and you get five lives per puzzle. Guessing in picross games is evil, and it upsets me.

Other than that, the game continues to be charming and unnervingly similar to Layton. I've now found an underground tunnel under a grave, and Mayor Doyle didn't follow me down the rope. Was he kidnapped, or is he the bad guy after all? I suspect the latter.

May's Mysteries: the Secret of Dragonville: go here, here, here, here ...

The similarities to Layton are blatant, to be frank, including the static shots of the character when you pass or fail a puzzle. The music sounds similar, the dialogue is similar, the way that you're told to look for different things and search in certain places is very similar. The only difference is the quality of the puzzles and the fact that there's no annoying little sidekick piping up at inappropriate moments.

May's Mysteries: the Secret of Dragonville: very laytonesque

I read a review that said that May's Mysteries was reminiscent of a Layton game. It's not just reminiscent, it's virtually identical, down to the art style, the idea of the fantasy world, the story and the interaction. Controlling May, you move between locations, tapping on characters to solve puzzles, build the story, and get points. The puzzles aren't quite the same as in Layton - there are a few limited types, including text-entry and rearrangement - but the feel is identical.

One thing that I can see being annoying is that I've got one puzzle wrong so far, and after failing it I wasn't given an option to retry it. This goes against my OCD tendancies somewhat.

But it's charming from what I've seen so far, and it's very likely that I'll see this through to completion.

Goldeneye 007: all over the place

I've not played a FPS on the Wii before, save for a few games of Red Steel on launch, so I found it pretty hard to adapt to the controls of this. To start with I was weaving all over the place, unable to aim or even get through a door. By the time I got to the end of the level, jumping off the dam, I was still finding aiming a bit tricky, but could at least walk down stairs without falling off the side to my death.

I was expecting a remake, but it's very different, with the levels being designed to be more complex. This is both a good and bad thing. Bad, because I was hoping to recognise everything. Good, because they're actually very well done indeed.

Tiny Tower: not restarting

I may have been a little overkeen on my last post about Tiny Tower. There is no synchronisation between different devices as such, only the first time that you play. When I started it on my iPhone, it asked me if I wanted to resume my game; however, after that point my iPad and iPhone have led completely different tower lives. I'm not playing it on both, so I've deleted it from my iPad.

I'm now up to 21 floors, and have some really rubbish people in residence. I'm slowly evicting them and trying to get people with better skills in.

3D Classics Xevious: not an arcade machine

The 3D effects on Xevious are possibly the best I've seen on the 3DS, and they are game-changing in a way I've not experienced before. The two layers of game are separated to such an extent that you can focus only on one plane of action at a time, and you have to constantly move between the two to avoid bullets and enemy ships. It makes it a lot harder, having to watch for bullets int eh top plane while lining up bombs in the bottom - to the extent that I've not managed to complete the first level yet.

Its arcade origins cause some issues though. When you use a life, you're put back at the start of the stage you're at, but the enemies are as tough as the part you'd got to. So you can be put back at the start of the first stage, but suddenly the enemies are shooting at you rather than passively moving out of the way. As a result, if you lose a life it's actually better to quit and restart. Obviously, in the arcase this is designed to make sure that you only stay on for a limited time, but here it just feels annoying.

Tiny Tower: you can't please all the people ...

... any of the time, it seems. Tiny Tower is a sim game, where you build extra floors, juggling between residential and commercial types, so as to maximise returns from all the shops who employ the bitizens who live in the tower.

Each bitizen has an ideal job. None of my bitizens have an ideal job which matches to the business types I have in my tower. They are all moderately happy - I'm doing my best to make sure they're doing something they're good at, after all - but I do wonder why they're moving in to a tower where they can never be completely happy.

I like the way it sychronises my game between my iPad and iPhone. It means it gets played a lot more.

Burnout Paradise: online shenannigans

Having been turned off only by the size of the single player game, I was more than happy to join the UGVM gang online. It's a completely different game when you're playing with people you know, driving around the same city and randomly crashing into them. The races from point-to-point were great fun (even if the game did glitch and give me an old banger, when everyone else was in an F1 car), and marked man events - where everyone tries to takedown one nominated player - led to hilarious carnage.

A few days later, I went online by myself, and it was still fun - just not as much. But it helped me to get a few more achievements, and I'm now over 10,000G. I may need to play more Wii games to compensate.

World of Goo HD: factories and virtual worlds

I played World of Goo on my Mac some time last year, but found it a little too tricky to control, with my mouse skills not up to the fast speeds needed. On the iPad, it's a different story. I've been making my way through the story, and have completed the first three chapters now, moving onto a strange virtual world where it's seemingly less about creating structures as it is about flicking goo balls between parts of the level. I'm not sure I approve.

However, the other game within the game, of building a tower of goo, is very addictive indeed. It's made all the more so since you can constantly see a cloud just overhead representing someone else's tower - and you want to build just a little further to beat it. I've got 200 goo balls in my playground now, so am starting to reach a fair height.

The Game of Life

I've not posted for a while. And I won't be posting for a while either.

I'm getting married tomorrow, and then I'm going on honeymoon. I have a feeling there may not be many videogames played.

Pilotwings Resort: completed!

I've completed the free flight mode, in any case. The last info point was in the middle of the ocean; the last stunt ring was hidden around the back of the golf island.

I've not perfected all the missions, but I will one day. It's such a relaxing game to play - and the 3D adds to it hugely.

Halo 3 ODST: completed!

My home console game of choice for the past couple of weeks has been ODST, the fourth in the Halo series despite the fact it has a 3 in the name. I believe it's considered part of Halo 3, but I can't quite see why since the story as far as I remember doesn't really fit alongside Halo 3's. I could be wrong.

I remember this having a relatively muted reception when it was first released, with people not liking a lack of variety in levels, thinking it was too short, and having a story where you don't play as Master Chief. It does seem shorter than most Halo games, but that's no bad thing since it's actually of a length where I'd consider replaying it. This is helped by the fact that the story is really well told, with an initial scene explaining the game - splitting up the troop - and the rest of the narrative told by an interpolation between Rookie finding clues as to what happened, and flashbacks during which you take control of other members of the team. With you all meeting up in the end, and fleeing a burning Earth.

While the setting was all similar - all around New Mombasa - there was plenty of variety in the types of game, with various levels demanding sniping, explosives, getting past hunters or just a load of grunts and elites. The original Halo required a bit of puzzle solving to work out how to get past different levels, and this is no different - though with the Rookie parts, there's further need for exploration and it's all a bit more eerie. There's a good range of weapons on each level as well - meaning you can often find a beam rifle when you need one.

And as for not playing as Master Chief - so? The only part that grated was when controlling Buck, who kept on shouting idiotic gung-ho phrases which were far too American, which I'd never do. Other than that, the only difference was the need to pick up health kits occasionally, and the fact you can't jump as high. Not a huge problem for a game not designed around jumping.

I've got Reach to play now - but I'll not start that for a while, I think. Halo is good in smaller doses.

Space Channel 5: chu chu chu!

I'm still not sure if they say "chu" or "shoot".

Back in 2006, Owen posted about Space Channel 5. He wanted to try again five years later, to see if he could get past the first level. Unfortunately, he never got the chance to.

In his memory, today a number of people from ugvm and RLLMUK have played Space Channel 5 - the idea being to at least finish the first level. Owen said he got kicked out because his view rating wasn't high enough, so I presume that's after the robot battle. I ended the level on 21%, well above the 15% cut-off.

The graphics have aged quite badly in places - walking on the spaceport roof, for example, the pre-rendered background looks like it's at a different angle to the characters. And background characters seem to have rectangular heads. The rhythm of the music is difficult sometimes, but after calibrating the TV to 'game mode' it worked OK.

I played the first section a few times, though, since my Dreamcast kept coming up with disc read errors to start with. I hope it's not on the way out. I would normally just get a new one but I recall PSO characters are tied to the console.

Anyway. Space Channel 5. Sorry Owen, it's not that hard to get past the first level. But I did it for you, so you can say you've done it now.

Pilotwings Resort: a strange sense of déjà vu

I wasn't overly impressed with Pilotwings on the SNES, so was pleased to see that the 3DS game bears very little resemblance, with even a different structure to the missions.

It's also a lot easier; I've completed (but not perfected) most of the main levels now, and have found the majority of information points and stunt rings, balloons and rings in the free flight mode. I can understand the complaints about it being light on content, but it's such fun to play that I'm happily going back through missions trying to improve my score.

My main disappointment is that the location is the same as that used in Wii Sprots Resort. I've flown over that island so much now that there's not much left to explore. We'll need somewhere new for the next game.

Ridge Racer 3D: someone's in my slipstream

I can see the commentary getting tiring very quickly.

But not the game. I've never really been into Ridge Racer before - Ridge Racers for the PSP was pretty good, and Ridge Racer Type 4 was fun for a month or so - but this gives a much better, more controllable race. And it's in 3D as well. Proper 3D. Unfortunately, because of the way the polygons break up at a distance, it makes the horizon go a bit funny, but there's no doubting that this is really quite amazing stuff.

I've been playing around with the various games and utilities for a few hours now. The 3D effect works really well, though some applications have quite a narrow effective viewing range. You just have to hold it still.

Game memories: E

Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future (Dreamcast)
The original Mega Drive games were pretty, and at the time were examples of great pacing and exploration. They’ve aged badly, though, and are far too difficult and imprecise to be fun. The same with this, in fact, with the momentum behind Ecco making any fight a random punching at buttons and hoping to flee. And while the Mega Drive games still look great, in a sprite-based way, this is starting to look a little ropey. Especially when you compare it to ...

Endless Ocean (Wii)
A lovely, relaxing, dive game with little to panic or scare you. Exploring the intricate environments is great.

Evil Twin (Dreamcast)
Mediocre action adventure type game which was far better on the Dreamcast than the PS2, but sold only 12 copies.

Exit (PSP)
I really enjoyed this for a while – working out how to save everyone and get to the exit in time was a good logistical puzzle. But it all moved so slowly, and the animation playing out over and over again made it an exercise in frustration in the end.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem (Gamecube)
I’ve only even played half an hour of this, because I’m a wuss.

Essential Sudoku DS (DS)
Not for the Sudoku, but for the 1000 colour picross puzzles included. The interface used to complete the puzzles was superb, and while the front-end looks like it was put together by a five-year old with a set of crayons, you can look past that to the excellent implementation. I completed this. All one thousand puzzles.

Elite Beat Agents (DS)
It’s fun, but not amazing. Maybe just because I’m not very good at it.

Excite Truck (Wii)
It’s a racing game, but completely different to every other racing game I own. I love it, but it’s quite a light experience with me feeling very often that progress is down to luck more than anything else.

Earth Defence Force 2017 (Xbox 360)
EDF! EDF!

Game memories: D

Doom (32X)
I played the PC game a fair bit, yes, but the 32X game is where I really learnt to love Doom (and the GBA conversion kept the affair running). It played brilliantly on the console, particularly with the MD's sublime six-button controllers.

Doom RPG (N95)
A really clever adaptation of the game, set to a turn-based first-person RPG with all the enemies and weapons of the original. I'm not sure if there's any way to play it now, short of buying an old phone.

Dr Kawashima's Brain Training (DS)
I played this religiously every day for ages. I'm not sure it improved my mental capacity at all, but I had fun. I have the brain of a 20-year old, apparently. Maybe that explains why I still like S Club.

Drawn to Life (DS)
A surprisingly good platformer, in which you draw the characters (to an extent, within animation boundaries). Each time you find a new thing, you colour it in and it stays like that for the rest of the game. The only issue is that the game is a little too hard for its intended audience.

Disaster: Day of Crisis (Wii)
A great experience, but I don't think it's got a huge amount of replayable value to it. Having said that, I never did finish it, and I last played it ages ago, so I may well start from the beginning again.

Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball (Xbox)
Or "look at our boobs". The volleyball game wasn't as good as Beach Spikers (which I forgot, oops), and the 'gifts' section was awful. I paid £5 for it, and that was £10 too much.

Donkey Konga (Gamecube)
I was so excited about this. I bought the game and bongos in an HMV in Kingston because they were selling it the day before release day, and carried everything home across London during rush hour. The game didn't disappoint; the highlight to me being Don't Stop Me Now, which, whenever it comes on in a club or disco nowadays, causes Kieron, Matt and myself to exchange knowing glances.

Dancing Stage (PS)
I had a load of these. I wish I could play them on the PS3, but there's nowhere to plug the dance mat into.

Wii Sports Resort: bettering Pilotwings

I spent some lovely relaxing time flying around Wuhu Island, collecting the information points (of which I now have 50 of the 80) and sightseeing. I can now fly at night or in the evening, and shoot balloons which everyone seems to hold. But there's no pressure to do so, and it's lovely to just fly around and investigate. I just wish you could do so for more than five minutes at a time.

After this, I wanted something more energetic, so I played a bit of swordfighting, and then the 100-pin bowling game. My high score sits around 2000, I think, which is pretty good given the need to knock down all pins twice in a row.

One thing Wii Sports Resort doesn't do too well is the stamps. These are similar to achievements on the Xbox 360, but are less imaginative and seem to be bolted on at the last minute. It's almost worth ignoring them completely.

And Yet It Moves: twisty

As one of the few WiiWare games with a demo, I thought I'd give this a try. I'm glad I did, since it's a really clever idea, if a little rough around the edges in places. At any time, you can pause the game and rotate the wiimote to rotate the entire level. With this, part of the level move, or you can fall through small gaps, or you can walk up walls, and so on. It gets quite tricky after a while, particularly because as you fall you build momentum and so you can't just rotate the stage to fall to the exit otherwise you get squashed.

I'm tempted to buy the full game, but I don't have enough points on my account at the moment. If I could pay with cash, I would.

Blur: not winning any fans

I've heard from many that the single-player mode of Blur is easy. I beg to differ.

I'm now stuck on the fan races. I've completed all the races with a bronze or above, but I need to get some sort of "X5 multiplier" on one of the races in particular, and I don't recall being told how to do that. I may need to look at an FAQ, for shame.

Pilotwings: jumpy handling

In preparation for the 3DS version, I realised that I've never played the original Pilotwings - I've played a bit of Pilotwings 64, but not that much of that either. The original is available on the Virtual Console, so I downloaded it to try it out.

It's OK. The controls are a bit crap, really jerky and unresponsive. It's difficult to judge distances, particularly trying to work out how to land the hang-glider. No doubt it would improve with practice, but since I'm now stuck on the third level, the difficulty curve is almost too steep for me to bother with again.

Maybe I'll go back to it in a couple of years, like with most Virtual Console games.

Slitherlink: awful music

Slitherlink is another DS puzzle game, based on real-world counterparts but made much easier by the fact you can easily erase mistakes and you don't have to carry around a huge book of puzzles. The idea is to make a single loop of string fit around a grid, such that numbers on the grid have the correct number of sides filled. So, for example, a '3' on the grid must have string on three sides. Eurogamer has a very good review which describes the concept without giving away too much in terms of hints. It also mentions the awful music, which was muted after around 15 seconds.

As a Japanese import, this is difficult to get on with, and I still don't know what half of the menu options do. As far as I can work out, you can have two named profiles (and the naming of the profiles was my first stumbling block, given that I was just presented with a page of kanji with no indication what it was), and the first item on the menu starts the game. That's all that's needed, really. It's rewarding to work out logic that lets you fit lines onto the grid, and even though there's a fairly comprehensive cheat sheet built in - which I found when randomly pressing some menu buttons - this doesn't cover every eventuality. Occasionally you have to be able to see how a line must fit around four squares in a line, which means a certain amount of planning.

There are four difficulty levels, although the first only has twenty puzzles and lasted a day. I'm working on the second set now, but am worried this could take quite a while ...

Game memories: C

Crackdown (Xbox 360)
A sublime game, where the only fault is a limit on 2-player cooperative play. After years, I recently managed to find my last agility orb, and I'm pretending that the hidden ones don't exist any more. The achievements in the game were great as well, with an appropriate balance of progress, difficulty, and silliness. Harpooning 5 people onto a car was good fun.

Crackdown 2 (Xbox 360)
Not as good as the first, but still great, with the bonus that both John and Kieron can join me to shoot people from rooftops. The radar ability means that orbs are a more realistic prospect as well.

Castle of Illusion (Mega Drive)
Possibly the first 16-bit game that made me go 'wow'. I'd been playing on the CPC for a few years beforehand, and everything about Castle of Illusion was a step up from what I was used to. Not only the graphics, but the tightness of control, scale of the world, and variety of gaming. It's the game that sold me the Mega Drive.

Castle of Illusion (Master System)
A few weeks after I saw Colin's Mega Drive for the first time, I went to visit a friend of the family, who I was told had Castle of Illusion. I was looking forward to playing it. Unfortunately it was the Master System game, which was slow and far too difficult to control accurately.

Card Fighter's Clash (NGPC)
I have played this only once, many years ago. I can't remember anything about it.

Colour Cross (DS)
Bargainous colour picross game, which, despite its awful presentation and the need to guess on two of the puzzles, kept me going for four months of playtime.

Cooking Mama (DS)
I don't see the appeal. It's like a minigame collection with a theme, but minigames are done so much better elsewhere.

Chu Chu Rocket (Dreamcast)
Giving away a free game was typical of the Sega of the early noughties. Not just any free game, but an excellent puzzler which caused many fights amongst my friends. The online mode was amazing, although the second-long lag they introduced to compensate for the Dreamcast's 33.6k modem was tricky to deal with.

Civilization Revolution (DS, iPhone)
Civilization is possibly a bit too complex for me. I like my strategy simple - Populous: the Beginning, say - and this does it really well. For a few games. After that you start to try the higher difficulty levels, and there's just a huge wall to overcome.

Contact (DS)
I found this dull and insipid. I was enticed by the prospect of videogame humour and self-referencing, but gave up after I realised that the script was barely English.

Carnival: Funfair Games (Wii)
Actually pretty good. It's well structured, with a decent system of unlocking new games and items. Possibly the best thing is the coin-pushing machine, which I can play for hours (but not as long as my mum, who has racked up 60 hours on the game, of which 40 is on the coin-pushing machine, and 15 is on the horse racing game earning money for the coin-pushing machine).

Cel Damage (Gamecube)
It's only been played twice, both at multiplayer meets, but it's fun.

Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap: completed!

The end was in sight indeed. I collected the four keys after defeating the knights, and got the big key. After recharging health, again, and filling two bottles with fairies, I went through the big door, to hear Vaati taunting me that I had three chimes of the bell before his plan would be complete. Well, Vaati, sucks to be you, since I had the sound turned off and so bell chimes wouldn't happen.

Sadly, the console didn't accept this as an argument, and hurried me through a few rooms of enemies. The hardest part was after I got to a room with three knights, and my usual tactic of decamping to a corner and waiting for them to swing their swords didn't work since the whole fight was timed. Apparently the third chime sounded.

So, next time through I just tried the whirly blade of doom approach, and though I lost a few hearts of health, it was fine and let me through relatively easily. Which was luck as I had to do it a few more times following deaths on the final bosses.

The first two forms of the final boss were pretty tough, and it took me one death to work out that in the first form you had to use the gust jar to suck up the dark clouds around Vaati's circling eyes. The second form was much harder, having to hit him with arrows from all sides while avoiding spiky balls of death, electric balls of death, and just general death. Once I had turned four of his eight eyes red, I had to split Link into the four on the correct side (not easy when Vaati kept running over the splitting panels) and thwack him. A lot.

But after a couple of attempts, he died, and I went to rescue Zelda. And there was no cutscene; instead the castle started to collapse. So I ran out, Zelda in tow, picking up some more health on the way. The game obviously hadn't ended, so I wanted to stock up on fairies and hearts, just in case.

And it's a good job I did. Vaati claimed to be a god, and appeared once again as a big round enemy with claws for arms. It took me ages to work out that you had to use the cane to flip his arms upside down, and that when you'd done so you could shrink down and run inside them. And then once inside you had to thwack the correct eye monster. And then once both arms had been dispatched, I had to split Link into four again and hit Vaati's electric balls back at him. Lots to do, very little health left at the end.

But there was an end. Ezlo got his human form back, then ran off through the picori portal after saying goodbye. He gave Link a proper cap before he went. Zelda magically made everything better. The stained glass endings reminded me of the opening to The Wind Waker. And that was that.

Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap: collecting keys

I found the other swordmasters, so now my collection of tiger scrolls is complete. By button mashing I can send Link spining all over the screen; a whirly blade of doom.

This doesn't help when your opponents are big knights with seemingly magic shields that stop anything getting through.

After getting stuck on the ground floor of the castle for ages (1F, but the one you enter on, stupid American numbering), I finally worked out that I had to bomb the bottom half of a wall on the other side from a weak point I could see from a different room. Which goes against every bit of logic so far, where walls only disintegrate if they look broken on the side you bomb to start with.

Up on the higher floors, and there are loads of knights who've just appeared, each one guarding a key. Lots of fighting ahead, and each fight lasts far too long since you have to wait for them to swing at you before their guard is down. After each fight, I'm warping outside the castle, sneaking past guards, and going to the fairy fountain for a recharge of health. It's a little tedious, but there's an end in sight, at least.

Game memories: B

Blur (Xbox 360)
Possibly my favourite racing game avec weapons, but opinion on that will flip-flop depending on whether I've played this, Mario Kart Wii, or Wipeout HD most recently. Blur is magnificent though, really well balanced in both single-player and online multi-player. The weapons and their strength have been honed to perfection, and every race is thrilling from start to finish no matter where you end up.

Burnout (Playstation 2)
One of the first racers that showed that it doesn't need to just be a race to the finish line. It seems quite tame now, compared to its sequels, but the seeds were sown.

Burnout 2 (Gamecube)
Not just an evolution but a revolution. Adding so much more content, including the crash junctions and other event types, and the handling was refined so your car felt lighter and more manoeuvrable. Some say it was the highlight of the series. I'd argue they can't have played ...

Burnout Revenge (Xbox 360)
Everything that made Burnout 2 great is here, but with a more defined structure, more cars, content, and with takedowns fully implemented. It's a constant source of fun and mirth.

Burnout Paradise (Xbox 360)
A departure for the series, with multiple routes and hidden events. I've not really explored it much so far, but it's a good game - just not as great as what preceded it.

Bombjack (CPC)
I have fond memories of playing this with my sister. I perfected the lit-bomb runs on the first five screens, and we used to be amazed how colourful and fast it was. We never played the arcade game; I have a feeling that may have spoilt the magic.

Bomberman (DS)
In my eyes, the ultimate version. You will never have ten people and ten Saturn controllers in order to play the full version of Saturn Bomberman, but eight DSs in one room? Easy!

Bonanza Bros (Mega Drive)
Slow, dull, awkward jumps, boring. I always hoped this would be similar to Spy vs Spy, but after finally getting to play it, it wasn't.

Battletoads (Game Boy)
Difficult, smeary, frustrating, dull.

Brick Breaker (Blackberry)
Awful. Really quite awful, in that that ball bounces off your bat at random angles, the icons you collect are difficult to distinguish, it often stutters or slows down when your email downloads, and the levels are badly laid out. But have a colleague challenge your high score, and this can take weeks of your time.

Bust-a-Groove (PS)
One of the first dancing games I ever saw. It's not great nowadays, but back then it was futuristic.

Bust-a-Move (PS)
I never got on with Puzzle Bobble. It always seemed a little random as to when the balls would stick to the side of other balls, or just pass them by.

Bayonetta (Xbox 360)
I want to love this more than I do, because it's good fun, well designed, and is full of amusing touches like the car stereo playing Splash Wave. But I've never got very far into it and then it gets left for months until I can no longer remember the controls and have to start again.

Black (Xbox)
I really enjoyed Black - it had a good story, good range of gameplay, good balance to weapons and enemies. All the way up to the final boss bit, when it got stupidly hard with infinitely respawning enemies. I never completed it.

Beyond Good & Evil (Gamecube)
When this first came out, people were desperately searching for a comparison. It's sort of like Zelda, because you upgrade your craft to give you access to other areas. It's sort of like Pokémon Snap, because you take photos. It's actually a unique game which is perfectly short and sweet, with the best ever text-input system and a cast of amazing characters.

Braid (Xbox 360)
I completed it, thought the puzzles were clever, but the story was trying to be intelligent just a bit too hard. It was fantastic for students desperately trying to prove the worth of games, though.

Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap: a point of no return?

Running headlong into the sparkly tree seemed to make all the leaves drop, and I could shrink down. So I got the book, went to the Temple of Droplets, and have got the last two elements via a place in the clouds. I fused the sword with the two elements, and headed through the new exit - to be confronted with information on the light force and Vaati, who knocked me out. He didn't steal the sword, though, which was a bit stupid of him.

Oh, it's now the Four Sword. I like the way that different elements crop up over and over in Zelda games.

Hyrule Castle is now all dark and foreboding, and even after rescuing the king it remains so. I can exit the castle, but in the town all the people and animals have disappeared into their houses. So it looks like I can no longer move the cats to make way for a new house, or finish off the kinstone collecting (not that I would do so anyway). I'm going to try to remember where all the other swords masters were, so I can learn different fighting techniques, and I hope they're still around.

But it looks like the endgame now. Vaati, I'm coming for you.

Game memories: A

Afterburner Complete (32X)
For years I'd wanted an arcade-perfect version of Afterburner. The CPC version wasn't too bad, but rather slow. The monochrome Spectrum version was awful. The Master System and Mega Drive games were getting there, but they just didn't feel frantic enough. This did. I got a 32X a couple of years after the Saturn came out in Pink Planet in Bristol for, I think, £20, and with it came Afterburner, Virtua Racing Deluxe and Star Wars Arcade. Afterburner was an amazing port, just what I'd wanted since first playing the arcade game years before, but given the competition it was quickly at the bottom of the pile.

Ace Combat 6 (Xbox 360)
Previous Ace Combats (plus Air Combat on the PS) have been OK, but this is great. HD really does add to this game, searching the skies for opponents and with loads of screen set aside to just see how pretty it is.

Animal Crossing Wild World (DS)
I remember once hearing that someone had an 800+ price on turnips on a Thursday, when I had thousands of bells invested. I went and stood outside the pub opposite work, in the rain, so I could use their Cloud wifi and trade my turnips in.

Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap: a book on a bookcase

I got the mole gloves so I can now dig through dirt - and finally worked out what those filled-in cave entrances were about. I've also found power bracelets which let me move objects like bookcases when small but don't appear to let me move little boulders when big. I'm now on a mission to return overdue library books. Don't ask.

I've returned two, and have found the third, but it's on top of a bookcase. There's a note on the table nearby which hints that if there's a problem I should just run headlong into it - but using the pegasus boots and running into the bookcase doesn't do anything. There's another one of the sparkly trees out the back of the house, but other than that nothing. I can't work out what to do.

Burnout Paradise: building up my car collection

But very slowly. I've just got my B licence, which indicates I'm halfway up the progression (since I'm sure it won't stop at A), and I've only found and unlocked 12 cars out of the 57 it claims. The game just feels almost too big - I've not touched on bikes yet, or the Surf Island extra bits. I found the same with Burnout Revenge in the end, that it just seemed a bit never-ending, and at least that had a more rigid progression structure.

Still, this works well as a game, and I'm enjoying the racing aspect. I feel I'm missing out a little from not learning the map in full, but that's just a bit too much of an ask. I do miss the aftertouch takedowns though, and I've heard that every road has a crash junction event but haven't seen how to trigger these as yet ...

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: big plant down

Finally finished the forest temple, killed the big plant. Now I've been told I've got to go west. It was in red, so it must be important.

I'm getting very confused though, between what's happening in Twilight Princess and what's happening in The Minish Cap. I may need to put one on hold for now!

Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap: not being able to dig

I'm in the Fortress of Winds, and am stuck. I know what I need - something to suck up or dig through or otherwise destroy the big foamy blocks that are strewn across the level - but I've been everywhere I can get to in the dungeon, many times, and there remain a couple of rooms that I just can't access. This is most frustrating.

Phantasy Star Portable: excitement

There's a lot of story I'm wading through. A lot of buttons to learn. A lot of menus and options and items.

But there's a lot in common with Phantasy Star Online. Monomates, sabres, and swords mean that the game has, for me, a shallow learning curve, and the first few missions have reminded me of my exploits back in 2001 on the Dreamcast. Unlike Phantasy Star Zero, the controls work well, and the addition of other members of your party mean that it's an easier game at this early stage. Which is a good thing.

Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap: collecting elements

While Twilight Princess has slightly stalled, I've been playing The Minish Cap on my commute to and from work, and it's been captivating. The storyline is semi-standard, with Zelda being frozen in stone, but it's Vaati who's the enemy rather than Ganandorf, and the world is inhabited by the Picori. Link has a magic hat who used to be a sorcerer, and he can shrink and grow at select portals. Half the trick is working your way around the world as a dot, where you can't mount steps or traverse puddles.

I've made quite a lot of progress; I've mended the Picori sword, and fused it with two elements. Some of the objects collected are pretty innovative - the gust jar which hoovers up dust and grass, the cane which flips objects over - though there are as ever the stables of the boomerang and bow and arrow. The Game Boy Advance suffers from only having two buttons to which you can map objects, so there's frequent breaks to reassign actions.

It's very different from The Wind Waker, Ocarina of Time, and Twilight Princess, and indeed very different from Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. It reminds me most of Oracle of Ages, which of course is because it's by the same team - but I never finished that so I'm hoping this has a little more staying power ...

Lego Rock Band: hidden orb ... oh, hang on

Lego David Bowie is amazing. What is not amazing is the cramp I'm now suffering in my left-hand little finger.

I was playing a set on the roof of Leg City Skyscraper, and half way through I noticed, at the side of the screen, a pigeon. Except since I was concentrating on the centre of the screen, I didn't. I saw a bright blue, glowing, round thing, and my immediate thought was to go and collect the hidden orb. Which led me to mess up huge sections of the song, and only get three stars.

Damn you Crackdown.

Afterburner Climax: pew pew pew

Or more like BANG BOOM KASPLOOM. Much as Outrun 2 updated a classic arcade game to a modern audience, Afterburner Climax takes the basic gameplay of Afterburner and ramps up the graphics, enemies, movement, and pace. And it's generally a success, although at times it's just a bit too frantic, with smoke from missiles and explosions obstructing the view.

On my first go, I got to the fifth stage. The game then gave me extra continues. On my second go, I got to the thirteenth stage, and the game gave me some extra perks. The more you play, the more options it gives you to fiddle with, ranging from more powerful guns, non-respawning missiles, larger targets and better armour. As you play more, the easier you can make the game. I played through the whole thing five times in the end, but didn't manage to complete all of the emergency instructions in one go, meaning that so far I've only been able to get the 'bad' ending. But that doesn't matter - I'll be playing this again many times over.

Mirror's Edge: completed!

Not the Xbox 360 game, which is still residing on the last level (maybe I'll get around to completing that after Twilight Princess), but the side-scrolling iPhone game. As I said back in October, UGVM bought this en masse in tribute to Owen, and I played a fair few levels at the time. I've now completed it - in that I've completed every level, but will no doubt return to collect more bags and to try speed runs. I'm more likely to do that in this game than in the console version, in fact, due to portability and the fact it's a bit easier.

Mirror's Edge on the iPhone owes a lot to run-and-jump games such as Canabalt, but it's a lot more involved than that, with intricate level designs, enemies to be avoided or attacked, and several instances where you have to reverse direction. One of the later levels sees you running backwards through a former level, which only goes to emphasise how well the jumps and platforms are designed. It's a shame there are only twelve levels (excluding the tutorial) - though the end-of-game message implies more may well be incoming in the future.

What I admire most is the way that the game is designed directly for the interface, and they've made a game that fits in with the main console story, retaining the graphical style and feel, but is almost a different genre. It's fabulous.

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: freeing monkeys

Still no ability to swap between realms at will - and the story seems to indicate this won't happen, which is a bit of a relief given the thought needed to do so - but last night's game progressed quite a bit. As a wolf, I restored light to the local spring, and met someone who told me I was the chosen one. That's lucky, really, given that it'd be quite a dull game if I wasn't. I've been restored to human form, and have made my way to the Forest Temple, where I've been helped and hindered by a monkey, giving me a pointer to rescue all of her friends. Each time you rescue a new monkey, you're able to cross ever-longer rope bridges, swinging from simian to simian. I've an entourage of four now.

The movement's improved slightly, but it's still not perfect. It's frustrating, because other games show how precise the remote and nunchuk combination can be, but this was obviously designed for a Gamecube pad, with pointer controls added on afterwards. If I wasn't now five hours in, I may have restarted it on the Gamecube.

The old Zelda problem of not being able to save a particular position in a dungeon rears its head again, by the way. I'm half-way through the Forest Temple, but will need to start from the beginning when I resume (although this is partially mitigated by the design of the temple, with a hub room being close to the entrance).

Pac-Man Vs: running in the wrong direction

As it's Christmas, I thought long and hard as to which game I could inflict on my family, as is tradition. And this year I chose Pac-Man Vs, which has had a bit of a renaissance of late since I realised I could run it on the Wii and found my GBA cables. And found in addition that Justine loves it.

So I had myself, Justine, my brother and my mum around the TV yesterday evening shouting at each other and laughing as my mum ran away from Pac-Man when she should have been trying to eat him. Justine was relatively silent since she said she couldn't concentrate on moving and talking at the same time. And I managed to clear two stages.

It's still great.

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: they've been taken!

It's quite depressing when, after three hours of playing, you stop and look at the instruction manual and realise that you've only just got to the end of the introductory explanation of the game's storyline. Twilight's story is a little more personal than that of many Zeldas, with the emphasis placed not only on the rescue of the kingdom from the forces of darkness (quite literally in this case), but also on the rescue of two children from Link's childhood home.

Getting through the story has been slow to start with because of the controls. Not the 'waggle' - that in itself is intuitive and accurate - but rather the use of the analogue stick on the nunchuk. There's a large turning circle, and there have been quite a few occasions where I've been unable to see the enemies attacking me. Using the Z-lock solves the problem, of course, but it's something I need to get used to.

I've been to the twilight realm and back, and have saved just before I return there. I'm hoping soon to be able to control my shape as well as being able to travel back and forth a little more freely. But before that, I've got to go to the Forest Temple.

Burnout Legends: crash bang wallop

I've been playing the crash mode almost exclusively since my last update - I've now got medals on thirty of the courses. It's pretty hard though, since you have very little aftertouch control and the crashbreakers don't do that much. I've not managed to blow up a single petrol tanker yet.

Splosion Man: zzzzzz

I got bored after about four levels, and stopped playing after ten. There's not much variety, and while occasionally you have to think how the level wants you to get through it, it gets pretty frustrating when your jumps don't go where you're telling them to. Hmm.

Trials HD: breaking bones

Simple controls do not mean it's a simple game. It's anything but. Very good fun indeed.

Blur: destroying Shannon and beating Khan

I really like Blur. You can see the PGR influences, and the more arcade-like feel to the cars, but it's been well put together with the different weapons and event types so it feels very fresh. The visual style is clean and consistent, and actually works a lot better than I was imagining. At times it can be a little difficult to see what's going on, and the controls aren't the most intuitive (why not have three fire buttons, one for each slot?), but overall it's a great game.

The difficulty level could have done with a bit more work though - there are quite a few sudden spikes which almost make me give up on it. In particular, Khan speeds off at the start of his one-on-one race, and one mistake can make him unbeatable. It took me ten tries before I managed to sneak across the line a second before him.

Onto the fan-based challenges now.

Bioshock: mad cosmetic surgeon

Looking at the True Achievements site, I was reminded of the games which I've not played very far through at all. In particular, I've barely touched Bioshock, Bayonetta, Rock Band 2, Dead Rising, or Tomb Raider: Underworld. The whole point of this blog was to keep track of where I was in different games, and to encourage me to play more to completion. It seems to have failed.

But I've tried to rectify this over the last couple of days. I loaded Bioshock, and found that my last save was just over two years ago, about an hour into the game. Of course, this meant that I've now passed all the bits where you learn about controls, and have completely forgotten what to do. It was a good twenty minutes after starting that I realised that you could also use the left trigger to shoot electric things with your hand - needed to get past the robot sentries. After hacking some of those, and rescuing the first little sister, I was plunged into a darkened room with a shotgun and many enemies. The game does 'scary' very well.

I've now got two different left-hand tricks; I would have had three but can't work out how to have a new slot open up. I've found and killed a mad doctor who seemed to like cutting people up for no reason, and called me ugly. And I've now found a Big Daddy who promptly killed me.

It's a very cleverly done game, with a good narrative and setting. The limited use of ghosts and flashbacks adds a lot to the atmosphere. But while I can admire these qualities, it's not huge amounts of fun. I'll play again next time I want something very involving, I'm sure. Maybe in another two years.

Burnout Legends: coupe with no accent

I dusted off my PSP for my recent trip to South Africa, but it wasn't until the way home that I got around to playing anything on it. That thing was Burnout Legends, which is much better and much worse than I remember. It's still a long way from the console games in terms of content, but the way they've taken the tracks from the first couple of games and added takedowns and the later games' mechanics works really well. There's a nice sense of weight to the cars, and it runs at a fair pace.

But the controls on the PSP are awful, and it becomes a matter of luck as to whether you complete a course. Not so much of a problem for the road rage or race events, but the burning laps become really hard.

When I started I was half way through the second car class, and now I'm half way through the third - though I've given up on trying to get golds for everything.

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future: completed!

So, despite the odd plot and the tenuous lock puzzles, I completed the story of the game, then went back in to clear up the ten-or-so puzzles that I'd missed as I went through. This was a particularly long process, since it meant having to talk to everyone again (in some cases more than once), and in the end searching a tree outside the hospital. And then I completed the parrot and toy car games, and the sticker books, and the bonus puzzles, and everything.

At some point I'll download the weekly puzzles and work through those as well.

One thing that I noted as I played through the game was how little I remember of the first two Laytons. It's great as you play through, but it's generally quite forgettable, and there's very little reason to replay. It's a one-off experience, and I look forward to the fourth game already.

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future: plot deviations

A giant moving fortress, built under London. More to the point, built under a city under London.

How odd.

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future: more funny voices

I'm sure that some of the lines spoken by Luke and the Professor are from different actors. They don't sound to be in the same voice at all.

I'm making steady progress through the game, and have been playing for around ten hours now. The story is a little convoluted, but that may be because I'm spending quite a long time chasing down extra puzzles and solving the parrot and toy car minigames. The parrot is odd - when he first appeared, it was hinted that he'd help to sniff out hint coins which remained unfound, but he's done that a whole one time so far. Maybe it's serving me right for naming him Sparrow. It was funny at the time.

The characterisation still feels consistent after two and a half games. Luke is an excellent sidekick to the slightly-stuffy Layton, and it's those two who make the game. Other characters are perhaps a little too odd at times, which throws Luke and Layton into a much more congenial role, along with the few other characters (such as Becky, the hotel girl).

The puzzles are more closely woven into the game, but I can't help but feel they are less well designed than in the first game. There's only been one which I thought was a bit oddly worded though - and that was ambiguous rather than just being wrong.

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future: funny voices

Again, it's the US title - I'm not ruining the look of my Layton collection!

With Colour Cross finally out of the way, I've been able to move onto the third Layton adventure, which is set in London ... while I'm out of the country. Still, it's not as if it's a particularly realistic interpretation, feeling more like Paris or Brussels at times, so the homesickness hasn't kicked in just yet.

I've rarely played DS games with the sound turned up (it's not the done thing on public transport) so I'm not sure if this is the case with previous games in the series - only some of the phrases are spoken, and which are and which are not seems to be relatively random. I must have played at least some of previous games with the sound, since Luke and Layton's voices are familiar, but I don't recall being confused over usage before.

In any case, I've now completed the epilogue and the first chapter, which is about twenty puzzles in. I was disappointed to read that there were only 120 puzzles included, but I've found a hidden puzzle - number 144 - so there must be a few more than in the main story.

And it's an odd story indeed. No spoilers, obviously.

Colour Cross: completed!

Colour Cross is a picross-type game, with a few differences - there are always multiple colours, never any blank spaces, and it's got a fair few annoying aspects to it:

• A few colours on each puzzle are very close to one another (with four shades of red on one puzzle) - this makes it difficult to see what is outstanding to be filled in.
• The backgrounds can be either blue or yellow (with little pictures scrolling diagonally). Some puzzles have both blue and yellow tiles to place. It's really hard to see where bits are missing.
• Each puzzle is timed, with penalties for placing the wrong tile down. This stops you going wrong, but when playing on a bus, I often amassed a hour's worth of penalties just because the squares were too small.
• On larger puzzles, you have to scroll around the play area just to see the clues at the top. You can't do this using the d-pad though.
• The general presentation is pretty awful. You frequently get dumped out to the main menu and have to go back into a submenu, when it would be far easier to have a "next puzzle" button.

It's biggest fault, though, is that there were a few instances where it wasn't possible to complete a level without guessing. And I always guessed wrong.

Despite this, it's all I've been playing on the DS for ages, and I've finally completed it. I feel like I can put it to bed at last - even though, due to an annoying bug, although I've completed every puzzle three of the avatar unlockables remain locked. It's all a bit shoddy really.

Crackdown: end of an era

Ooh, what's that?

I've not seen one of them for a long time. Well, not in the original Pacific City, anyway. It seems to be glowing.

It's not even that high up. It's on the top of a building, yes, but it's only about ten stories up. If that. And I could jump over there easily. Surely the final agility orb isn't just a jump away?

Oh, yes, it is.

500 agility orbs; I thought it would never happen. Now I can play Crackdown 2 with more gusto, without feeling that something's missing. As long as nobody mentions that I've got 272 of 300 hidden orbs.

Angry Birds: completed!

Three stars on all levels, all golden eggs found and starred. I must admit that I had to resort to a search to find out what order to play the sound test in in order to get the star. It was hardly intuitive.

The latest update to the game brought with it Game Center support, and achievements. I've got a fair few, but there are others that require you to get over a certain total score on groups of levels. That just seems too much hard work now - but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's a brilliant game, ideal for wasting time on the commute ... or just about anywhere.

Owen

Last Tuesday evening, I looked at Twitter and Facebook and UGVM after getting my phone to connect to the hotel's WiFi network. The idea was to have an early night, but it was anything but. Dreadful news crept around the Internet, that Owen Allaway had collapsed at home and had been rushed to hospital. Not long after, the news was that he had died.

I've known Owen for over ten years. I never met him, but I know him far better than I know many other people. We were in almost daily contact over that time, via UGVM, via RLLMUK, online gaming on Xbox Live, and even by email. Owen often played games in much the same way I do - in short bursts, looking for a minute's worth of fun at a time. He played about fifty times as many games as I do, admittedly, but we shared many favourites - Peggle, Crazy Taxi, Angry Birds, Bangai-O, Outrun 2, Crackdown, EDF, and most obviously, Mr Driller. We had a number of discussions over the fine points of drilling strategy, and which was the best version. We were pretty evenly matched in terms of high scores, and we even played Mr Driller Online against each other a couple of times, despite the hurdles the game made us overcome to get it working.

Owen was positive about so many things. He would look for the best in games - innovations, clever work-arounds, style - and was forgiving of bugs or glitches (other than developers not implementing an invert look function on the Y-axis). One of the last games he played and was enthusiastic about was Sonic the Hedgehog 4, when he rallied against the RLLMUK hoardes to say that he was having a good time. His enjoyment was infectious - many people relied on his postings in the iPhone games thread to guide their purchases. A number of us bought Mirror's Edge on the iPhone at the weekend, and it's every bit as good as he said.

He will be missed. He touched hundreds of people online in various fora, and made the world better for them, and more specifically for me. A week later, and his legacy is everywhere. Words With Friends has his name listed at the top of my recently completed games. Google Reader is full of his blog postings - it's amazing he managed to play any games at all, given the amount he wrote about them. He'll remain on my Xbox Live friends list, and many of his high scores will never be beaten. Every time I play Peggle Nights I remember how excited he was to see that the Peggle iPhone app had been updated. I completed the adventure mode for him.

Bye Owen. I hope that wherever you are, Mr Driller: Drill Land is available in English.

Colour Cross: fundamentally flawed

Colour Cross is a picross-type game, with numerous colours per puzzle and no blank spaces on the board. You solve one colour at a time, with each building up to help you solve the overall puzzle. It's difficult to explain; given that it cost a whole £4 in HMV, I recommend you try it yourself.

Or don't. One fundamental rule of picross games is that there is no point at which you should have to guess - unless you are able to quickly see if you've gone down the wrong path.  Colour Cross does this all too often, and while at the moment the puzzles are small enough that I am able to return down a path, I fear this may not be the case forever.

Miles Edgeworth Ace Attorney Investigations: completed!

I'm not sure I'll be buying the next Ace Attorney game. This just dragged on far too long, and the story just wasn't long enough to support it.

Still, I suppose I did complete it.

Miles Edgeworth Ace Attorney Investigations: take your pick

I must be coming to the end of this soon, but the last case has just gone on and on and on. I know who the murderers were. I know who the mastermind of the smuggling operation is. But the game is very specific as to what evidence it'll allow me to show and when. It's just a bit too drawn out.

I now have a picture of the ambassadors with flowers, and I can see quite clearly that there's a fake flower missing a petal which is the same as the guitar pick I found outside. But can I present that? Oh no.

Sigh.

Flower: yellow and red

Flower is a lovely ... distraction. it's not realy a game as such, though it does include game elements. But there's no urgency, no failure, no benefits for completion. There is progress, to new fields and new music, but nothing really driving you there.

It's just very relaxing.

Miles Edgeworth Ace Attorney Investigations: plodding around

It's just not the same.

I'm on the third case, and the investigative nature of the game just doesn't fit as well as the courtroom drama of the main Ace Attorney series. All too often you have to fiddle around with the characters to stand dead in front of something to examine it. There are too many ways to examine evidence - connecting logic threads, deducing using evidence on scenes, presenting evidence to others, talking to your partner - and it becomes a bit of an exercise in trial and error to see what the game wants you to do.

The story's not as engaging either. Each of the cases has been stand-alone, but the timeline jumps all over the place and it hints that everything's interconnected. The writing isn't as concise as in the first games, and I'm finding that I'm holding my stylus on the screen in the hope that it'll just hurry up half the time. Edgeworth has a horribly convoluted way of saying some things.

But having said all that, it is an Ace Attorney game, and as such is worth playing through.

Home: what a pointless waste of time

It really, really is.

Wipeout HD Fury: quake!

Yes, I have a PlayStation 3 - it's finally broken the "enough games to own" barrier with Heavy Rain, and I was offered a backwards-compatible model in good condition.

My first game purchase was actually Wipeout. I've been playing through the HD side and while it starts off nice and easy, it quickly becomes trickier. There's little give in the AI, and one mistake can see you at the back of the pack for good.

I also played some online games, and won two of the three. Very pleasing.

World of Goo: nonsense story

There's a story, yes.  No idea what it's meant to be about.  There are balls of goo which stick together and you can make structures with them.  Then other balls of goo will travel along the structures and you can then use them to make more structures.  And then the structure will fall over and the mouse doesn't move quite quickly enough for you to rescue it.

I've finished the first world, but that last point is just a little too irritating to continue.  I can't find an easy way of fixing it, either.

Mirror's Edge: run, fall, run, fall, run ...

I've reached the eighth level now, and things are getting harder. It's trickier to avoid enemies, the time you get to complete certain sections is reduced, and the areas you have to land on are smaller.

It's still a great game though, with a of freedom unlike anything else I've played since Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. And like that game, it's actually really linear.

Bayonetta: what's going on?

It's just a little too much action for me, and it turns into a button-masher.  I shall have to try again one day when I'm more awake.

Portal: completed, again

Steam was released for the Mac in the last week, and as part of the initial offer you can get Portal for free. In fact, I'd get Portal for free anyway, because they're saying that if you bought it for PC, they consider you bought it for Mac as well. Very generous of them.

So I've completed Portal's main story for the fourth time (PC, PC with commentary, Xbox 360, Mac). I didn't buy my Mac as a games machine (I have enough consoles for that), but other than when Time Machine started whirring away the performance was great. As is that game, still.

Street Fighter IV: I hate Seth

I can't beat him.  I've managed to reach him many times, even without losing a bout to any character before him, but I'm lucky to get his health down by half a bar.

He just feels cheap.

Words With Friends: sorry, William

I just laid down ZEBRA, with Z on triple-letter and A on double-word. 74 points. Oops.

Words With Friends: dye

I won!

Words With Friends: qis?

Stupid non-word. Niaz came back with "qis", on a double-word tile. I've put down my "aloft" for 22 points, and I'm 19 points in the lead. Can I hold on?

Words With Friends: come on, Niaz

Words With Friends is a Scrabble-like game, which you play against other people over the Internet. Niaz and I have been playing a game for a couple of weeks now, and it's been quite tense. He built a 50-point lead near the start by making "rezones" on a triple-word score. I've been chipping away at his lead for a while, and finally overtook him a couple of days ago with "thugs" on two triple-letter tiles. Since then he's not played, which is annoying since I have an excellent next word to play which should score 22 points. We're now into the endgame, with scrappy words using up letters, so that could well win me it.

But I need him to have his turn first. Come on ...

Fish Listening to Radio: they've got the radio!

An Xbox Indie game, this has a certain charm to it. It looks hand-drawn, and is just line drawing, but as you progress through eating woms then it slowly colours bits of the game world in. I've had ideas about games being slowly coloured in through progress for ages, so it's good to see something taking the idea and running with it. It's a fairly simplistic game, where hooks descend and ascend and you must eat the worms on descending hooks but avoid the ascending ones. The more worms you eat, the more points you get. The hooks can also attach to the fishes' radio, and if so you must rescue it before it's taken out of the water. You get no points for that.

The single player is OK, but it shines in multiplayer, where you are trying to get the same worms to get more points than the other, but trying to save the same radio. A strange mix of competitive and cooperative play.

Phantasy Star Zero: longing for analogue

Phantasy Star Online is probably my favourite game, ever. I know I've said that about Populous: the Beginning before, and to be honest if I was forced to choose between them I'd have to toss a coin, but bear with me for now.

I've been looking forward to Phantasy Star Zero for ages. It was billed as a return to PSO, with new levels and quests but the same play mechanics, usable items, online gameplay and an upgraded picture chat system. The graphics looked really impressive for the DS - a bit of a drop from the Dreamcast, of course. I've tried Phantasy Star Universe and found the quests to be limiting; I've tried Phantasy Star Portable and the lack of multiplayer and linearity of the game kills it. I had big hopes pinned on PS0.

Oh dear.

The game in general is great. It's not quite like PSO - the levels are separated into discrete blocks rather than being all free-flowing. My dreams of resurrecting Xevious (my PSO character) died when I saw the limited character customisation options; there was no purple, and the main male human looked like a spoiled kid. Swords look like solid swords, rather than the lit-up sabres that I loved. Magic users are a bit too pathetically weak.

But that pales into insignificance when it comes to the controls. I've been spoilt by Zelda, maybe, but this is painful to play for any length. You have to press the buttons down for extended periods, and it's often on a diagonal. Trying to face the enemies is tricky when you can turn only in increments of 45° - and the auto-lock-on doesn't pick up large angles. So you end up battling against the camera, unable to focus on and hit enemies until they move into one of the angles you can turn to. All the time they hover over your character taking energy off of you.

It's a crushing disappointment, but it's still a great game.

Pac-Man Vs: fruit appeared!

We also played this last night. It hasn't aged at all, and had six of us shouting instructions at each other to try to catch Pac-Man. The scoring system's a bit off (subtracting Pac-Man's score seems a little pointless), but the core of the game is still amazing.

Lego Rock Band: or pop band?

One of my birthday presents was Lego Rock Band, which is like all the other Rock Band games except the music selection is a bit more poppy and with fewer swears. And your characters are Lego people, obviously.

We played it quite a lot last night, since I had people round for a party. There's some overlap with Singstar, really, though this also gets people involved who refuse to sing. I have a feeling it may be quite expensive in the long run, given the number of songs on the Rock Band Store ...

Xbox Live: party like it's 2005

Last night I met up online with Kieron and John. We had a plan.

On April 14, Microsoft is turning off the original Xbox Live servers. After that date, it'll no longer be possible to play original Xbox games online - unless you go through some sort of unofficial LAN link. It's the end of countless classic experiences.

Xbox Live was amazing. Online gaming beforehand (at least on consoles) was normally an afterthought, bolted onto a game designed for party play. It was hampered by needing to accommodate for dial-up users, and with a lack of expectation that the console would be permanently connected. That's not to say that great games didn't exist - Phantasy Star Online would argue that - but because of the inconvenience, I didn’t play them that often. Chu Chu Rocket and PSO were about as far as I went. With Live, though, game designers started to exploit the medium properly. Project Gotham Racing 2 was the first Xbox game I played online, and I was amazed by how smoothly it worked. Not only could I join a random game and race against people worldwide, I could also talk to them as I did it. Plus the game downloaded leaderboards and my friends' best times, even when I was playing the single-player game.

Online functionality was increasingly included in games throughout the Xbox's life. It evolved from additional single-event versus modes, through dedicated party modes, to cooperative modes through the single-player game. Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow was a highpoint of the last of these.

To capture the past for one last time, we met up armed with our copies of Halo 2, PGR2, and Outrun 2. It was odd not being able to carry on chatting as we moved from game to game. It was annoying to have to sit and wait for updates to be installed for each game as we tried to play it - though bearing in mind that my broadband line now is 40 times faster than the one I had when I first got Live, I'm not going to complain too much. Online gaming's come on a long way since, with better options and play modes. But none of this mattered for what we played.

Halo 2 is still great. We played custom games amongst ourselves, since we didn’t all have the expansion maps installed and without these we couldn't join matchmaking. Rockets are great, and much better than their Halo 3 variants. Going back to Halo 2 only served to show how Halo 3 didn't really evolve the game that much, if anything adding too many options. Having said that, Halo 3 is obviously a direct replacement, and the loss of Halo 2's online mode won’t mean that there's nothing similar to play.

That’s the case for all the games we played, really. Project Gotham Racing 4 does effectively make PGR2 online obsolete, though I reckon the range of cars in PGR2 is slightly better. I don’t like the bikes in the later game either. Outrun 2 is obviously replaced by Outrun Online Arcade, though with different courses meaning the game's not identical. OOA has got one thing in common with the earlier game - there's never anyone online.

Farewell, original Xbox Live. You'll be missed. A little.

Angry Birds: going backwards

I now have three stars on only 50% of the levels.

They've just updated the game, and it's gone from three worlds to five. They've given us an extra 42 levels for free. That's very generous indeed.

Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: completed!

I was right about where I missed stamps - the Goron Village stamp was partially hidden and required the whip to get to it, which is why I missed it before since (I think) I got the whip after exploring the village. The Dune Sanctuary stamp was on an island to the Southeast, which I spent ages trying to get to before realising that all I needed was a chicken. Sigh.

Anyway, stamp book completed, all rabbits collected, all tracks revealed ... I'm never going to get enough treasure to collect all the different train parts, so off to the dark realm I went.

Despite its small size, this game does "epic" very well. The journey up to the final temple looked impressive and daunting, with the green portal pulsing. Half-way up the hill, Zelda hints that once we go through, we can't go back. It's a turning point for the game, but also for Link. He's leaving behind the friends he's made throughout the world - the gorons, the anouki, the flirts in Paparrazi Village; and he's travelling to somewhere evil. The innocence of youth is about to be broken.

Yes, I got all that from a straight bit of rail.

There were a number of final fights, with different play styles. The first of these I found to be quite tricky - planning a route around the rail map to hit light pearls and then the enemy trains shortly after. It was like a verson of Pac-Man where you were able to pretermine your path. The main difficulty came from the placement of the pearls, with two trains in the Northeast corner being too far away from any pearl - until I realised how the warp gates worked.

Then there was a rolling stock fight, versus the Demon Train. Easy enough, particularly given that my train had six units of health rather than the standard four. Zelda (in a guard's body) and I climbed on top of the defeated train and had to make our way to Malladus (in Zelda's body) at the front, with her blocking the laser and me killing off the electric mice. Zelda hit Malladus, and he left her body floating in mid air. She regained it, and that was the end.

Or should have been. The trademark death-blow of a Zelda game can't be omitted, and as such another boss battle was bolted onto the end, which just seemed a little superfluous. It was another battle using Link and Zelda together, but with the two screens showing different viewpoints of the same scene - a view of Zelda readying the bow of light, and a view of Link running around trying to distract and avoid Malladus. When he turned his back on Zelda, you could shoot, knock him down, and Link could attack the top of his head. Repeat three times, and Zelda joined Link to deliver the final blow; that was that.

It was good, but not as good as Phantom Hourglass. It's spurred me on to playing Twilight Princess, though.

Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: missing stamps

I've got the Compass of Light now - it took two attempts since I couldn't work out how to defeat the three flamethrowing warrior-type enemies, until I fluked on the fact that I could use my whip to grab their shields and then hit them. I was trying to get Zelda to go around the back to attack, but that was easier said than done.

I'm now on my way to the dark realm, but there are two stamps missing in my passport. I reckon I've missed stamps in the Dune Sanctuary and possibly in Goron Village, but for the latter I've no idea how I missed it - plus the Valley Sanctuary stamp might cover that. We shall see.

Angry Birds: three-starring progressing

I have at least two stars on every level of the game. I have three stars on around 85% of the levels. I'm not sure I can go much further.

Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: slipping away

The desert temple was pretty easy in the end, even the boss (as scary as he looked). I love the new item, which raises the ground up by one level - though it's a shame you can't use it twice to go up twice and so on.

I've caught more rabbits - all of the grass and snow ones now - and have found a couple more force gem ones now. One of the latter opened up a new area in which I could race around an ice rink to get to doors before they closed. It took me lots of attempts at the second course before I realised that you can roll on the non-ice parts to give yourself a speed boost.

I'm not sure what to do next. One annoying thing I've realised is that the DS only thinks it's a new day if you save and quit the game, and turn the machine off and on. I've not been receiving post because I've just been shutting the DS up and putting it to sleep that way. I turned it off properly last night; I'll see if I receive anything later today.

Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks: deserted paths

The goron gave me a force gem after much persuasion, but it didn't open the number of tracks I was hoping for. Bored of searching for rabbits, I went back to the tower and saw the demon king getting into Zelda's body (f'nar) and flying off. Git.

It turns out that the sand by the ocean isn't, as you'd expect, a beach, but is instead a desert. So off to the sand sanctuary I went, collecting four sand rabbits on the way. Great, another type of rabbit for me to not collect all of. I met the fifth wheelchair bloke and he told me riddly things about an eye in a cave, twisty passages, and something else which I've forgotten. Hope it's not important.

Oh, and Mr Wheelchair Man is neither dead nor a man, apparently.

Mirror's Edge: all white

The visual style of this game is marvellous. The use of colours and themes throughout the game - red for highlighting routes, other colours used one at a time for scenery, white used as the main world colour - works really well.

Level six down. The background story continues to be a bit pants, but it drives the game on and gives a sense of urgency.