Thursday, April 16, 2009

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars: missing a sword

I'm astounded by this game. The amount they've managed to pack onto the DS cart is amazing; the game runs smoothly through huge cities, and there's so much to do. The city can at times feel slightly sparse, but not to the extent that GTA Advance or even the original GTA did. There's so much detail in the streets though, with buildings looking distinctive - there are even some with scaffolding on, and builder's bucket pipes down the side.

The game does just about everything right. You can lose the cops who are chasing you by getting them to crash (complete with comedy dying siren sound). The rampages are well thought out and fun; and the way you throw molotov cocktails is an excellent use of the touch screen. The PDA on the lower screen works well too, especially with the use of email to drive the story forwards.

I've worked out you can put the GPS directions on the main game screen, which makes navigating much easier. Having said that, I've found that actually I'm having difficulty navigating normally - I'm not learning the cities like I did with previous GTA games.

The missions are based around a really stong story, and almost every one has a twist to it, making it run not how you'd have expected from the introduction. The people that you're acting for are a varied bunch too - I've acted for three potential leaders of the Triads so far, but I've now heard from an undercover cop. If anything I'm finding the missions too easy, because of the aiming system meaning it's easy to dispatch enemies given a decent gun. That may well change soon.

Monday, April 06, 2009

Mario Kart Wii: on to 150cc

I hadn't played this since the last time I blogged about it - November last year. I've no idea why - limited time in the country can't have helped, and there have been various other things tempting me away. After watching my brother playing it on Saturday, I decided to go back and try to get a gold on all the remaining 100cc grands prix - and did so. Once again, Rainbow Road almost proved to be my undoing, but luckily in the previous race I'd taken out my main opponent on the second-to-last corner with a blue shell, so they had to get seven points more than me in order to win. My slow-but-steady sixth place on Rainbow Road was enough to clinch it.

The 150cc races are hard.

I also played around a bit on the online time trials. There are some rather good players out there.

Friday, April 03, 2009

My Xbox 360 is broken

After around 5 minutes, the screen locks up and I get artefacts all over it. I wanted to play Half-Life 2 as well.