Geometry Wars Galaxies: completed!

At least, I've now got a silver medal (at least) on all stages on all galaxies, with the exception of the last galaxy for which I need to link up the DS game to the Wii game. That'll have to wait.

Some of the later levels in the game were really inventive, although there seemed to be a tendency to make the game harder by simply throwing more enemies around, and upping the score requirements to allow for the fact that multipliers shot up much quicker. This made some of the levels a little bit too dependent on luck, with some attempts finishing after scores in the low thousands.

I've gone straight back to the start trying for golds, and it's pleasing to see how I'm able to obtain these whereas I wasn't before. I got a stonking score for the last of the α levels (over 50 million, whereas the requirement for gold was just 5 million). What is clever though is the way the game becomes progressively harder as your score increases, meaning that the earlier levels still retain a challenge, especially to make a dent on the online leaderboards. For example, my 50 million pales in comparison to the current world best of 17,000 million ...

The last time I completed a game with silvers and started to try for golds was PGR2. Evidently Bizzare knows something about putting goals just within reach ...

Scene It! Lights Camera Action: I am the champion

While at John's, we played Scene It! In teams of two. I was teamed with John, and we played using my gamertag. I'm very pleased we did; I got loads of gamerpoints for winning the game, for getting 100% right in a number of rounds, and generally for being brill.

Of course, it was all down to me, nothing to do with John's vast film knowledge ...

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations: completed!

I was very near the end indeed. Three more questions (the last of which gave me quite a lot of trouble working to what to present) and it's over. Mostly a happy ending too!

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations: Maya, Mia, Misty, Morgan ... and Pearl

Morgan called her kids Dahlia, Iris, and Pearl. How daft. It's obvious that the Master has to have a name that starts with an M.

I must be near the end of this now, surely. I played through the fourth case, which was a retrospective of Mia's first ever case - and I saw that Godot used to be Diego. The hair and waistcoat gave it away. Now I've played through the first day of the last trial as Edgeworth, then carried on as Phoenix, and it's all a little far-fetched at times. Some of the needing to present at exactly the right time is annoying too. I wanted to present the weather report when they said it was snowing, but instead I had to present it when they talked about the time instead. Huh.

Almost everything is solved now. I know who killed Misty, I know who else was there, and I know what that other person saw. Just to prove it. Hopefully I can finish this tonight ...

Mr Driller Online: not online

The Xbox 360's d-pad is rubbish, but even that can't take away from the magnificence of Mr Driller.

I only played this quickly last night after it had downloaded, just enough to complete the 100m and 500m levels.  There are items!  And odd flags!  One of the items looks stupidly useful - a full air tank.  I can forsee myself using that very often indeed.

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations: cultural references

I'm halfway through the third case now, and it's very clever.  Confusingly, it appears to be a retrial when it should be an appeal, and there's a fake Phoenix around.

A computer programmer's been murdered, and it's difficult to get information out of his boss ...

Maya: "SuPer-Admin Restricted Desktop Access password-protected!?  What!?  This is madness!"
Phoenix: "No, Maya, that is SPARDA."

Mario Kart Wii: the French are pretty good

This was delivered on Thursday, and, what with me running the London Marathon tomorrow, I have the prefect excuse to stay in most of today and do little else but play it. I've completed the 50cc game, getting gold cups on all tournaments, though only one star rank and a few Bs and Cs. Apparently the ranking you get depends on the total time taken to complete the grand prix, which itself is highly dependent on the items that the computer uses against you, so that seems a little unfair. I'm now onto 100cc, for which you have to use bikes. PGR4, now this - the world is ending.

I've also been online for a fair few races, and have ended up with a score of 5100 (up from the starting score of 5000). You win points for coming in the top half of a race, and lose points for coming in the last half. For quite some time I was languishing in the 4000s, but a few victories over Dutchmen and Germans saw me elevated again. For some reason the French seem to be very good at this game. The best bit though is that it's not out in the US until the end of this month, so for a while we'll have blissfully few disconnects, cheaters, and idiots driving the wrong way around the track. Excellent.

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations: blackmailing a blackmailer

So, I've finally finished the second case - all very complicated by the end, with plot twists and turns all over the place.  Who'd have thought that pink paint would be so important?  I'm glad to see the back of Luke Atmey though, he's one of the most annoying characters I've come across so far.

Project Gotham Racing 4: speeding across the Brooklyn Bridge

One of the most difficult events I've faced today was a speed camera event, where I had to go through four speed cameras and get a total sped of 440mph. All but one of the cameras was just after a sharpish turn. The one exception was placed at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge, and I managed to get 185mph through it, in a TVR. Rather amazing.

I've managed to work out how to upload photos from PGR4 now as well. Rather idiotically, you can't upload ones that you've already saved; you can only upload them as and when you take them. After my stint in a TVR in career mode, this afternoon I was racing in a Jaguar.

In Tokyo, where an overtaking event was made all the more difficult by an opponent who refused to go slowly (you can see him in the background):


In Tokyo, where it was snowing and the wheels were spinning all over the place:


And in Las Vegas, where my car got infeasibly dirty:


You've got to love the purple and orange colour scheme.

Geometry Wars Galaxies: η clear

There was another of the difficult levels with the light and dark blue shapes; not a star this time but a cross. This one didn't take me quite so long, though, since I followed the same tactic as before, and found a place where I could hide and just watch out for things spawning behind me.

This morning I played through some of the planets in the theta galaxy, and have even managed a couple of golds. One on Rocduo, where I got 10million (the gold required 5million), and one on Flipente, where a score of 53million was not only four times that needed for gold, but is also the fifth best score in the world, according to the leaderboards.

That doesn't say much though. The leaderboards are idiotic, since you need to connect to Nintendo Wi-Fi individually for each planet. It really ought to be a one-off connection, where it takes a few minutes but downloads the current high scores for each and every planet at once. Especially given the nature of the DS, where the opportunities to connect to the Internet are rarer than with home consoles.

Still. Fifth in the world. Huzzah.

Geometry Wars Galaxies: ζ clear

That took quite some time.  There was one big sticking point - a level, shaped like an eight-pointed star, where the only enemies were the light blue rhombi and the dark blue nuclei, both of which dash towards the ship at differing speeds.  You get one life and no smart bombs.  The enemies appear equally spaced around the ship, so it's not easy to get them all before they arrive.  I got to bronze quite a few times, but silver was out of reach.

To start with, I tried using the bait drone, to attract the enemies away from me.  I'm only half way through levelling that drone up though, and it was rubbish - attracting enemies around one time in four, and being useless the rest of the time.  I tried moving, or finding somewhere to hide, but it was useless.

In the end I found a way to use the turret drone.  I sheltered against the side wall of one of the side star sections, and aimed to the point of the star every time I cleared a wave - so as to destroy the enemy there at its first appearance.  Often the turret would take out the rest of the wave, but if not I just had to quickly aim the other way to do so.  After a while enemies stopped appearing actually in the star point, so I moved right to the end and cleaned up from there.  Just after I got silver, however, enemies reappeared at the end of the point - but I've got silver now, and that's all that matters.

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations: somebody's died

Ah, now it's a murder.

Halo 3: pretty pictures

While having breakfast this morning I was playing around with the theatre mode in Halo 3. I've used it before, as you'll have seen from my "behind you" screenshot. What I didn't appreciate was that it actually saves films of all your single-player games as well.

So, a couple of highlights from the last week or so ...


There was a room full of Covenant grunts, jackals and a gold brute. The first couple of times I went in, I managed to kill most of the jackals and grunts, but the brute killed me in the meantime. I managed to find an invisibility pickup, turned it on, ran into the middle of the room and stuck a plasma grenade to the brute; then ran back and watched the explosion before finishing the survivors.


This is what happens when the Flood panics you. I was carrying a brute shot, and suddenly was jumped on by a couple of Flood. Even watching through the replay it made me jump! I fired at the first one, standing next to me, using whatever weapon I had equipped. Oops. Luckily it didn't quite kill me. The remaining Flood did though.


This is from a multiplayer game a week or so ago. That's me in the red. I've just killed the blue person, who was jumping towards me. Unfortunately, that firey blob to his right is a fire grenade which he threw just before dying. Two seconds later I was dead too; killed from beyond the grave.

Halo 3: completed!

Hmm, that wasn't that long really ...

Maybe I played more before than I thought, or maybe it was just the solid three-hour session on Saturday, but that seemed a lot shorter than Halo 2. From where I was, I went and found Cortana in the infected ship, and escaped; fought my way into the control room on the half-complete Halo, killed the Spark with four shots from the big laser thing, activated the Halo and ran away. Then I found a warthog and thought I'd have a repeat of the timed sequence from the first game - but it wasn't timed, which made it more fun. The big explosions around me kept me going, though, and the track falling away in front made some parts tricky. But I hit the ramp at the end, jumped into the ship, and ... credits roll.

I'll enjoy playing this through in co-operative.

Halo 3: such a convoluted story

The original plan was to play through Halo 3 for the first time in co-op, alongside Kieron and John, fighting our way through the Covenant and the Flood together. And then I read that you actually can only play missions you've unlocked ... and if none of us have unlocked them, that could be a problem.

Last night I was on the exercise bike for three hours as part of my marathon training, so I progressed with the story. I'd played a bit before, working towards stopping the prophet Truth from activating the weapon stored on Earth (though for some reason I've not written about that, it seems), and I carried on fighting on Earth. We stopped the weapon being activated, but a massive portal opened up, and Cortana sent a message on a Flood-infected ship crashing to the ground. I went through the portal to find the Ark, from where the Halos could be controlled, and tracked down the remaining prophet - and the Arbiter killed him. Not before Truth's lackeys had killed Keyes, though. Sob.

While the game's made up of excellently-designed levels, and the way the set-pieces are built around the AI is really clever, it's not really that memorable. I suppose the individual fights are unmemorable in a good way, in that the whole game is actually excellent.

There were some highlights. Taking a Scorpion tank through installations, destroying Wraiths and Ghosts. Flying the Falcons to take out two Scarabs at the same time. Allying with the Flood to get to the prophet, running along and seeing fallen enemies being consumed to join my army. Great fun.

We found a new ring, being built to replace the one destroyed in the first game, and it was explained in a rather long-winded way that we could use this to destroy the Flood and not kill everything and everything. All I need to do is find Cortana, who's somewhere on the Flood-infected High Charity ...

Hexic HD: two black pearls

I really love Hexic. It's perfect for when you want to just relax and take your time over a game. And I'm quite good at it. I managed to get two black pearls, which is amazing given the hoops you have to go through to get even one. I had four starflowers towards my last black pearl too. I was getting quite excited.

And then the stupid game-breaking feature came in: a bomb which was impossible to diffuse before it went off. I can understand the bombs; you do need some way to lose, and they do make the game more anxious. But it isn't asking much, surely, to request that it be always possible to diffuse them? Otherwise you get to a stage where the game is deciding when it's game over, with nothing to do with your skill. Rubbish.

I will no doubt be told that it wasn't impossible to diffuse this bomb, but it was. The yellow bomb sat alone, no other yellows near to it. There were only three hexagons underneath the bomb which could be cleared, and when they went no yellows appeared above it. All other moves were on the other side of the play area, so any yellows that appeared there were useless anyway.

How you're meant to collect six black pearls when the game is this unfair, I have no idea.

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations: nobody's died?

A case of burglary, not murder? I am shocked and stunned.

Project Gotham Racing 4: two wheels bad, four wheels good

I don't like the bikes. They handle oddly, you have to be really careful around the cars, and the rider is a bit oddly animated at times. I'm quite happy to have the computers ride the bikes, and it's fine if other people want to ride them, but ...

I was quite happily going through the arcade mode, and then I got to a stage where you must use bikes. I'd resigned myself to only completing half the game as it is (for each arcade mode, you get two sets of medals, one for the car and one for the bike), but even that's not good enough. I'm being forced to ride rickety bikes which fall over if you breathe on them. And the computer cars have a propensity to drive straight into me. Huff.

Sensible World of Soccer: a wonderful achievement

Last night I gained 5 gamerpoints. They were for the hardest achievement I've managed to unlock so far.

I won a game of SWOS against the computer.

Now, yes, I was playing as England against the Faroe Isles. I did play eight games before this winning one. I did only score once in those eight games (and then lost 4-1 overall). But let that not take my glee away from me. I won a game!

It's not as good as the old Mega Drive game. It's annoying, the controls are awful, and the computer's just too good. At least I can rest easy knowing that I won a game, and never have to try to again.

Project Gotham Racing 4: I've got me a career

The career mode in PGR 4 isn't quite as good as the old single player modes, which is a shame as it's obviously intended as the main part of the game. The old single player is most similar to the new arcade mode, but that's a bit odd with you being restricted to a single car for all the
challenges.

As with PGR2 (and the small part of PGR3 I played before getting bored), I'm aiming for the silvers in the arcade mode, and so far have got them all without a hitch. The different types of gameplay are great - I particularly like the 'Time v Kudos' mode, which pauses the clock all the time you're earning Kudos points - large powerslides never felt more satisfying.

The career is much harder though. For each event you compete against three computer-controlled characters, and I've only won two of the five events I've completed so far - I came second in the other three. Interesting I seem to win by far for those races which aren't actually races - Hot Laps, Cone Challenges and so on - but often have difficulty in the street races. It all feels a bit unbalanced.

And there are some really daft things in the game too. Who put the names and nationalities in such large text, so that they can completely obscure the track ahead? Who decided that it was a good idea to only allow the Tourist mode to be playable in multiplayer online? I want to drive around London by myself!

Having said all that, I really do like PGR, and this does seem to be the best yet - yes, even better than PGR2. That's saying something.