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.