Edge: clunky rolling

Edge is a game that really benefits from physical controls.  I tried it on a friend's iPhone and found that it was tricky to control, and I felt I was always fighting against the game to get the block where I wanted it to go.  On top of the control issues, it felt clunky and unresponsive.  It wasn't fun.

With a proper control stick, though, it's a joy.  It still feels clunky, but with the veil of control issues stripped away it's clear that this is a design decision, with the cube having its own momentum issues as it rolls from one side to another.  It takes time to move the cube, and you have to consider this when playing.

I bought this initially for the Wii U, but because it was cheap at the time I have bought it again for the 3DS, since it's not the most taxing of games (although I have noticed a few framerate problems on the handheld).  I'm far more likely to make progress on the 3DS; each of the levels may only take a few minutes to complete, but it looks as if there are over a hundred of them, and I think later levels may get much larger.

The game relies more on spatial puzzle solving than reflexes and speed, which suits me well.  However, there are occasions where you need to be quick and accurate - one section in particular in an early level sees you traversing a section full of collapsing tiles, and you need to follow the exact path in order to not paint yourself into a corner.  That relies on precise movements and timing - and took me several attempts even using proper controls.  The below level had a conveyor belt section in it, with tiles disappearing from the back and moving to the front - again requiring precision.

I suspect some of the later levels might get tricky - some of the last levels I played (around level 25) were getting difficult, with a need to balance the cube on the edge of a moving block - but it's a solid game which was a bargain at under £2 for each format.

If the game had been £5 for both in the first place, I'd have paid that immediately.  It makes no sense to have to buy things twice, once on the Wii U and once on the 3DS.  A conversion fee, maybe - charge an extra £1 to have it on one format if you have it on the other.  It's one of my main complaints about the Virtual Console service; I'd have spent a huge amount in there if I could have the games both on the Wii U and the 3DS.

Wipeout 2048: hitting the sides

This is a stunning game, with possibly too much going on at a time for me to cope with.  I've only completed a few events so far, with slow ships and easy opponents, but I'm finding it tricky to keep on the track without hitting the sides.  It doesn't help that I can't remember which button the airbrake is on; I keep expecting there to be two different triggers, and then my finger waves in mid-air while my ship hits the wall.

I still feel that it's not as good as Wipeout 3 Special Edition, but that's likely nostalgia talking.

Saints Row the Third: losing Matt

Last night I arranged to meet Matt on PSN, a meeting that was interrupted by Nicholas being restless, Justine needing chocolate deliveries, and Gaby returning home.  But eventually we were able to get the same game running, following interminable updates, and that game was Saints Row the Third.  Having never played the previous games in the series, Matt filled me in on the detail a bit as we drove around town creating havoc.

It's not a bad game, by any stretch.  It's massively over-the-top, with items such as a car with a people cannon attached, and missions involving flying a helicopter through the streets, exploding cars with rockets, and skydiving through a debris field.  In some missions you're effectively alone, and the cutscenes always show your character, which was confusing at first; especially once I'd changed my character's costume to be just a pair of pants and Matt couldn't tell what I was laughing about.

Talking of being alone, Kieron may have some competition in the 'wandering off' competition.  Frequently I had to stop whatever I was doing in order to find Matt and either get him out of a fight or guide him to the next objective.  Still, he was having fun.

FIFA 13: loss after loss

I'm rubbish at this.  I'm rubbish at most football games (with the possible exception of International Sensible Soccer on the Mega Drive), but this is harder than most.  As well as the standard controls to battle with - in particular, I can never remember which is shoot and which is a high pass - EA have included a number of touch-screen controls on this.  You can tap a player to pass to him, except by the time you've tapped there he's probably moved and you'd be better off passing with the B button.  You can tap on an area of the screen to shoot in the goal (tap top-left to shoot top-left), but by the time you've looked down at the pad to accurately aim, you've missed your chance.

I do like playing football games, but that enjoyment mostly comes in the five seconds of the match when I manage to score a goal.  That happened only once.

The thing is, as hopeless as I am at this, and as much as I find real-life football boring, there's an attraction about videogame football that I can't ignore.  This is one of the better versions I've played, and I'm sure I'll get used to the touch controls at some point.

Tearaway: lots of bugs

On the way home last night, the majority of people got off the train two stops before me.  I saw my chance to progress in Tearaway, so got the Vita out and turned it on; it's great that I can be back in the game within a couple of seconds, something we've taken for granted since the DS and PSP.

I pressed Y to record a sound, called "hello" into the microphone, and nothing happened.  Surely it can't actually recognise a roar?  I pressed Y again and growled into the mic.  Again, nothing.  No matter what i did, the game didn't recognise that I'd made a sound.

I wondered if there was too much background noise.  I waited until I got into the car, and tried again.  No luck.  Nothing I did let me either cancel the request for a sound or record anything.  Searching the Internet today, it seems that there's a bug in the game, which should theoretically be solved by completely turning off the system and then restarting.  I'll try that tonight.

Tomb Raider: sighteeing

I've been through quite a few spectacular sections in this now - running through burning buildings with things collapsing as I go, jumping across a bridge as it was being demolished, ziplining from the top of a mountain down to the beach.

In some ways it's similar to a Metroid structure of game, where as you progress you're given new upgrades which allow you to access parts of the world which were previously hidden away.  The main difference here is that there is very little back-tracking, and I can only think of a couple of places where I went past a room or entrance without getting the ability to enter it very soon afterwards.

Having said that, there may well have been a number of hidden areas that I didn't notice.  A few hours into the game you're given the ability to upgrade your pick, which allows you to climb walls like the above.  The indicators of where you can use upgrades are generally well hidden until you know what to look for - bundles of white cloth, ropes wound around timbers, chalky walls.
 

 After escaping the burning monastery, Lara has to avoid several machine gun emplacements and make her way down the mountain.  After the first descent, you find a stunning area with a ship suspended by ropes.  This ship is huge - and you have to zipline down onto its surface.  By the end of the sequence, the ship's hanging by a single rope and Lara's no longer on board ...

Then down to the sea, and meeting up with the survivors.  They want to repair a boat to escape the island, but we know that's not going to happen - Lara wants to take the boat inland.  Before that can happen, Lara's off to explore shipwrecks to pick up a pulley system and play around on the masts.

Stunning game, and fun with it.  I hope it throws in some new ideas soon, though, or even finishes - it's starting to get a little samey in terms of gameplay, even if the location changes.

Tearaway: lots of idiocy

The PS Vita is a portable system - just about, admittedly, since it's bigger than a PSP and won't fit into a normal pocket.  Still, it's got an integrated screen and headphone socket, so it's ideal to play on the train during my commute.  With Tearaway you do look a bit daft from time to time when you start to prod the back of the console and use the touchscreen, but nobody looks at you on the train so that's fine.

People can, however, hear you.  I'm sure I'm not the only person to play Tearaway on the train - in fact, I'm sure some of the developers of the game must get a train from time to time and play their 3DS or Vita on board.  Did nobody at any point in the development process think that it might not be such a great idea to include a bit in the game where you have to shout into your console?

There's no way to skip this and use a default noise, you have to record yourself (and it won't accept just background noise, either).  Needless to say, I'm not going to do that on the train, and as I can hardly do it in the office either I'm not going to be able to play the game on my way home either.

Idiots.

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies: Turnabout Reclaimed: completed!

Let's just deconstruct that headline.  I've completed the game!  The game in question is the additional case for the 3DS Phoenix Wright game; this additional downloadable case was called 'Turnabout Reclaimed'.  It involved two court cases, in fact, first defending an orca from a murder charge, and then defending her trainer.  In that second court case, I called the orca as a witness.

Yes, an orca.

Tomb Raider: massacres

This is the 2013 game called Tomb Raider, as opposed to the 1996 game called Tomb Raider.  I completed the 1996 game called Tomb Raider back in 1998, after I completed the 1997 game called Tomb Raider II.  I also played a significant amount of the 2007 game called Tomb Raider Anniversary (on the PS2) which was a remake of the 1996 game called Tomb Raider but not the 2013 game called Tomb Raider.  I'm not sure if I completed that.

I hate it when games have the same name.

Anyway, the 2013 game called Tomb Raider is actually really good.  It's easily recognisable as a game in the Tomb Raider series, not only because of the name - there's a lot of exploration, working out how to get to different places, and an athletic female hero.  However, there are also a lot of deaths, which goes against some of the plot of the original games.  In the first Tomb Raider, the bloke who employs Lara and then subsequently double crosses her is meant to be the first human she ever kills.  In this game, which I think is set before that first game, she's gunning down hundreds.

I don't remember a Tomb Raider which is quite so bloodthirsty, in fact.  There's a flimsy story excuse as to why Lara is happy to shoot men, along the lines of them being brainwashed and it being a kill-or-be-killed situation, but when Tomb Raider II came out one of the chief complaints was that Lara was too gun-happy and this is magnitudes worse.  At times it's less of an exploration game and more of a strategic cover shooter.  Hiding behind crates and popping out to kill enemies is eerily reminiscent of Read Dead Redemption and LA Noire.

Despite this (and the heterogeneity of modern game design), I'm enjoying the game.  There's no global travels for Lara here, no separation of the game into areas and levels - instead, as I explore the island more I'm appreciating the value in getting to know one area so well.  It helps, of course, that this one island seems to include tropical beaches and snow-capped mountains.  There's a good sense of geography in the game, though, and some of the scenery is spectacular.

I'll continue to play this, no doubt, although I am starting to tire of the excessive grittiness and attempts to shock.  I've lost count of the number of cutscenes with Lara covered in blood.

Little Deviants: dull

Gosh, it looks zany exciting fun, doesn't it?  The main character's goofy face just screams originality, and the over-complicated colours and textures just go to reinforce this as a game full of vibrancy and enjoyment.  You get to roll your little ball around the courses, avoiding the robots and darting between posts when the electricity stops.  But, in case that doesn't sound amazing enough, you have to do it by manipulating the ground around the ball, pushing it up using the touch panel.  Don't use any method of control which actually puts you in control, instead let's make sure the game is as frustrating to play as possible.

I understand that the "new game" I unlocked is actually something completely different to play, and this is in fact a collection of minigames to show off the capabilities of the Vita.  All it's done is convince me that the back trackpad doesn't work as a control method, and also that I don't really want to play Little Deviants any more.

Tearaway: lots of style

Tearaway is the game that most made me want a PS Vita, and it's not disappointed.  I loved the idea of LittleBigPlanet but found the execution a bit iffy - and the controls were awfully floaty. I was never going to get into level designing or clever mechanics, either, due to a lack of time.

Tearaway is from the people who made LBP but without the faff, an added dimension, and an even more stylish identity.  Everything's made out of paper - indeed, you can download papercraft templates to make everything in real life - and the many odd control methods on the Vita are used in an intelligent way, only occasionally feeling like they're stuck in for effect.  Poking the back panel pushes up diaphragms or even allows your finger to poke into the world.  The front camera projects your face onto the sun.  The touch screen allows you to directly manipulate parts of the world.  I'm just waiting for the game to require me to shout something.

It's a but of a collectathon in the bad tradition of Rare games, but as soon as you decide that you're not required to find all the presents and photo opportunities and confetti, the journey through the levels is much more fun.  Depending on the length of the game, I may even be back to find more bits.

The levels are nicely varied and there are some clever bits of platforming required.  I've now regained the powers to jump and roll into a ball, and the way in which the levels were constructed before these powers were available was ingenious at times.

I am the "you", and my ugly mug shines down upon the people. Guilt of that alone means I want to carry on and complete this as soon as possible!

Hungry Giraffe: ouch, my head

A fun little diversion, definitely, but maybe not worth being billed as a full 'game' in the PS Vita 10-game package.  Well worth £2.50 though.

Hungry Giraffe is a tilt-controlled steering game.  You have to get the giraffe to eat food that's hovering in the air, which will then give him energy to reach higher.  If you don't eat enough food, the giraffe's neck will wilt and it's game over.  If you hit the giraffe's head on an anvil, you have to act quickly to recover from a death spiral.

I'm a little sceptical that the difficulty's been fiddled with to encourage further spending.  There are some golden feathers that allow you to rescue a wilting giraffe, but I used all these in my first game expecting them to be replenished in the second game.  They weren't.  I've not investigated to see if you can buy these for real money, but if you can then I suspect this'll be deleted off my memory card to free up space for something else.

LA Noire: completed!

I had only a few missions to complete in that game, it turns out, all of which involved hunting down various corrupt officials and getting them to talk.

I think that shooting him in the leg was probably a bit excessive, but as I said previously the game has taken control of my character's actions in order to progress the story.  This has just got worse as the game's progressed - it's not longer merely Phelps being over-zealous in questioning; it's now Kelso shooting people during cutscenes.

Still, at least I get to drive between these and watch people being shifty.

The endgame saw me exploring a creepy dilapidated house, in which a madman had been holed up.  The game carefully told you that he was mad several times, before showing him folding origami cranes over and over again.  Finding these in the house was quite a shock.

The final missions turned into a run-and-gun cover shooter, with the madman seemingly able to convince dozens of men to lay down their lives just to keep me away from him.  Naturally, that didn't work, but it was pretty tense, running around the sewer systems and popping out to shoot people.  It felt pretty familiar in some ways, reminding me of gameplay in Red Dead Redemption.

I finally found the flamethrower man, who turned out to be someone that Phelps and Kelso had served with.  Funny that all the main characters turned out to be linked in some way, given the size of the city the game's set in.

And then the end of the game sees Rockstar killing off the main character again, but this time I have little sympathy left for him - even after he helped to save everyone else.

After the credits, you can go back and play in free roam mode, which means that you no longer need to worry about how much damage you cause when driving.  I enjoyed that, and ended up with some amusing accidents.

Overall, a great game, but the story was crowbarred in a little, which spoilt the interactivity somewhat.  I hope a sequel could improve on that.

LA Noire: am I overly moralistic?

Games, as interactive experiences, put the player into the character they control. The player determines how the character progresses, whether they succeed, and how they act. This, of course, is a challenge to game scriptwriters, who have to determine how players can all get to the same ending no matter how they behave. Some games get this more right than others.

I've mentioned before about how I feel uncomfortable playing certain games - Bulletstorm, for example, didn't keep my interest as I felt that the characters were unlikable. I've played around half an hour of Gears of War before tiring of the macho idiocy. LA Noire has hit it from a different aspect, however. For the first couple of sets of levels, there's not too much of a running story, other than an up-and-coming policeman getting promoted. By the time you start on the Vice Desk, however, there's a much grander story happening, and Cole Phelps - your character - gets a little too involved. The end of the vice desk cases sees Phelps exposed as an adulterer.

So no matter how I play the game, whether I stop at red lights, I am forced to play the part of an adulterer. My character gets thrown out of his home and demoted, whether that's how I was acting or not.  It's a sudden break in the immersion which is entirely unwelcome.

Anyway, I've done a few cases on the Arson Desk now and I feel the game's coming to a head. I'm no longer playing as Phelps - probably just as well since I have no empathy with him - but he's cropping up from time to time.  Maybe I can complete this soon ...

1000 Heroz: nearly there

Up to day 926 now, and I'm all-but-out of the RLLMUK leaderboard, as Donny Rosco is 40,000 points ahead and while I beat him on most days, that's only gaining me 100 points a day on average.  My period of not playing has come back to haunt me.

Most days see me getting a global rank of around 200, which is pleasing.  I think at the moment I'm 50th in the world, but there's a fair bit of time still to go.

LA Noire: am I a robot?

I knew this was lauded for its facial animation, but I wasn't expecting it to be quite so accomplished.  The characters don't suffer from the plastic faces of most games, and the lip-syncing is almost eerie in its accuracy.  Of course, Rockstar claimed this was needed so that players could assess whether the characters in the game were lying or telling the truth, but in reality it's made much more obvious through shifting eyes, stuttering responses, and finding evidence beforehand.

Having said that, I'm doing particularly badly at this, finding it difficult to work out which evidence to present and even if the people are telling lies, much more than when I play Phoenix Wright.  There are quite a few differences between the games, of course, but the idea of solving crimes with an evidence-based approach means that they feel very similar at times - particularly where I'm playing the two at the same time and starting to confuse which bits of evidence I've got in which game.

The other thing I'm bad at is driving in a sensible and law-abiding manner.  I am forever crashing into civilians, almost running them over on the pavements, and bringing down lampposts.  As a result I'm not scoring particularly highly overall, and have had a couple of tellings off from my superiors.  I don't know if the end-of-missions cut scenes do change depending on how well you do, but if not it's a bit of a coincidence that the chief is generally unhappy with me when I've failed to ask the right questions.

Asking the right questions is tricky in itself.  You are given three options - accept a statement as the truth, indicate that you doubt it, or present evidence that it's a lie.  Often if you choose the 'doubt' option, because (say) you don't think that someone can be sure of what they're claiming, your character blunders in and shouts louder than if you were accusing them of the murder itself.  The interviewees get offended and you've failed the questioning session.

So, I'm not doing too well, making me doubt if I have any human empathy at all.  But I am enjoying it a lot, and the world in which it's set is really solid and well designed.  I've been promoted from a rank-and-file policeman to the traffic desk, and then on to the homicide desk.  Most of the murders have been very similar, but with apparently different perpetrators.  I'm hoping that the story doesn't twist to show that I've send a number of innocents to their executions.

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies: completed!

There's not too much I can say about case 5 without spoiling it completely, but there were some pretty large twists which helped segue case 4 into case 5 and then turn case 5 on its head halfway through.  Really well scripted and thought out, though the quality of the translation dropped a few times.  That being said, there were some excellent lines and situations.

And I didn't get a screenshot, but Athena's line of "The court will note that this is different from the selective hearing men are so good at!" made me laugh a lot.  I particularly enjoyed the references to older games in the series, such as the ladder and stepladder specification.

But now it's over, and there'll be a wait for the next game.

Or not, because there's a brand new case available on the eShop! Huzzah!

Everybody Votes Channel: screenshots

Back in June of this year, Nintendo closed down a few of the channels on the Wii which relied on someone sitting in head office maintaining some sort of online service.  These included the news and weather channels; while there are far more effective ways of looking up the news and the weather, Nintendo's approach of giving you a globe to grab and spin was more fun than most.

One of the services closed down was the Everybody Votes Channel.  When this first launched I visited it a lot - checking the results every couple of days, suggesting my own questions.  I was pretty good at predicting which option would be more popular.  I'd not used the channel for a couple of years, but when I heard it was closing I went back to look at it.  It seemed to still be quite well populated - there were at least enough people to form meaningful results, at least.

There are few good quality screenshots of the channel on the Internet.  I captured quite a few in June, which are included here.  If you want to use any of these on your websites, feel free - please just include a link to this post.

Fez: the world's too big

I've heard great things about Fez.  I've been recommended to buy it over and over again - so eventually I did.  And I've played it a few times now, but it feels like a constant effort to do so, because it's just too big.  Remembering where everything is is overly daunting, and I feel that I need to devote too much time to a game which I'm not really enjoying much.

I can appreciate the effort that's gone into the game, the platforming and world rotation is clever, and the whole package feels polished and complete.  I've tried to give it a fair chance because I know many others find it to be an astounding game.

Unfortunately, I don't.  I think I'd be more likely to play if it were portable, since there I have the free time, if not the notepad I fear is needed.  Maybe if it ever gets a Vita port.