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.