Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed: not fun any more

I didn't lower the difficulty to easy, and have managed to progress through all five sets of levels on medium.  And now I've reached a gateway that requires more stars than I have, meaning that I need to go back and play levels on hard.  I managed a couple, but the game just feels too random and the framerate doesn't help. It's just not fun having to repeat the same race over and over hoping that the leader - who always has a speed greater than you - makes a mistake somewhere.

Nintendo Land: no more

It may take me more than a few weeks to complete the Pikmin game, since my Wii U appears to have died.  it won't turn on; instead it just flashes a red light at me.  I am not a happy bunny.

Nintendo Land: catch me!

Indeed, a Wii U game!  I was given a Wii U for my birthday, which was an unexpected treat, and coincided with my brother and his wife coming for the evening last night.  We played Nintendo Land all night.  It was great.

Of the three competitive games, the best is probably Mario Chase, which we played loads - learning the nuances of the maps together, and by the end of the evening everyone had managed at least one catch.  I'm surprised that Nicholas didn't wake up given the shouting between the chasers of Mario's location.  The ghost mansion game was similarly frantic, though that seemed a little too unbalanced in the ghost's favour; only one game finished with the ghost losing.

Possibly the most fun of the evening came from playing through a few of the Pikmin levels, which felt like a fully-fledged game given its scope and size.  I suspect I'll be playing the rest of the levels by myself over the next few weeks ...

Little Things Forever: an owl within an owl

Little Things Forever is a hidden object game, where the objects aren't hidden - there are just a lot of them.  A large picture (of, say, an owl) is made up of loads of little objects (such as spades, cameras, arrows, trumpets, pelicans, funnels, paper planes, and owls), and you are given a short list to find.  On some levels you are given this list one at a time, and you have an overall time limit of two minutes; on some levels you are told to find a larger number of a single type of object (for example, four keys); on other levels the number of objects you need to find increases with the number of levels you've passed.

As you complete levels, you collect puzzle pieces, and after you've collected a certain number you then get to do a square jigsaw that lets you play on another large picture made up of small pictures. I have unlocked a fair few of these now, the most recent being the octopus.  It's a lovely, polished game, which i can see lasting for just long enough.

Civilization Revolution: scenario testing

The Xbox 360 version of Civ Rev was cheap in the sales last week, and given how much I enjoyed the iPhone and DS games it was a bit of a no-brainer.

It's even better on the 360; graphically it's superior of course, but the controls seem to be a little more intuitive as well, which is surprising given the touch-screen nature of the other versions.  I've been concentrating on playing a couple of the scenarios first, which is something that I never really got into on the iPhone, and they seem to be taking a while to play through.  The English are a pain with their fleets of battleships.

GRID: hitting many cars

In general I don't like racing games where you can damage your car and it impacts on performance.  I'm not great at driving a clean race, and like to be able to graze the walls in order to get around corners when needed.

You can't really do that in GRID.  You have quite a lot of leeway before the damage gets too much, but a lot of that is often lost in the first corner when one of the opponents drives straight into you.  After this, it's a case of driving very carefully around the course, ending up on the podium at best.

Still, the car handling works well and there's a good sense of accomplishment each time you finish a race.  You can't complain for £2.69.