Uber Update

Game Diary / August 26, 2007 / John / 2

In which many game sessions are combined into one and some surprising facts emerge about the clientel of GameStation.

Well, I’m finally making some progress in Zelda! I think my problem has been that I haven’t been playing it regularly so the first half of any play time I have is spent trying to work out what on earth I was doing the last time. So, I’m at the third and final (yeah, right) twilight area, to the north of Kakariko village, and I think I need to sort out a dried up lake to the east before I can progress any further. The control scheme has really become second nature now and feels very natural – Link is a bit of a ninja in this iteration.

I’ve suddenley become really rubbish at this and have made very little progress in the Silver grade levels. Again, it’s probably down to only playing for five minutes here and there. I should probably remove some of the DragonForce tracks from the soundtrack as well because it all gets a bit hyper after a while. Still, there’s a lot to be said for hurtling off jumps at two bazillion miles and hour with mental guitar shredding going on in the background. It’s a larf, innit?

This is woeful – I’ve been sat at the closing section (the invincible guy’s house) for ages now. It’s one of those “there’s no time” things. I’ll get back to it eventually, once I actually get five minutes to myself.

One of the nice things about it, though, is that it always seems to be very clear where you have to go next. Sure, it makes the adventure a bit linear, but it’s still aces.

Resident Evil 4 (or Resident Wiivil, as I call it) is indeed a thing of wonder. I’ve not too far into it yet – not even at the lake, but the control system is so immediate and awesome that taking my time and exploring every last bit of the environments is hugely more intertaining that the (excellent) orginal cube version. The bad guys seem to have been tweaked a little because they’re still tough even with the pin-point accuracy of the aiming system – this could all be in my mind, of course.

It’s probably not “Cool” to be playing this as (a) It’s a Harry Potter game, (b) it’s a movie tie-in and (c) it’s published by EA, but the fact remains – the wii remote controls work really really well. Without the controls, OotP would be of interest only to die hard potterheads (the exploration is great, I have to say) but the extra level of interactivity provided by the wii remote doubling as a wand really makes the difference. It’s never going to be the game of the year, but it’s still a lot of fun.

This is great, vacant and silly. I’ve only played it for around ten minutes (my daughter has played it for much longer) but it seems to be a lot of fun. Basically, you cook stuff – breaking eggs, chopping stuff up, stirring, etc, and all with one hand – it’s a wiimote only title. I’ll no doubt have more to say about it once I’ve actually played the thing.

One point of interest – my six year old picked it up within about 8 seconds. It took me considerably longer.

This is one I was looking forward to for ages but had actually forgotten about until just before release. One top tip though – if anyone out there is struggling with the frame rate, using the “force global lighting” option makes a massive difference. The game loses a lot of its appeal if there’s any slowdown at all. It depends whether you can happily accept a prettiness:playability compromise. It’s very clever, very pretty, but ultimately involves sitting in front of a PeeCee to play. If I’m going to be sat there anyway, I may as well play……

this! Despite owning it since launch day, I’ve barely played Half Life 2. I figured that as the home pc has enough clout to almost run Bioshock with a reasonable amount of detail, it should really fly with HL2. And it does everything turned up to 11, everything smooth and fast – it plays just lovely.

Lastly – here’s a turn up for the books – I was in GameStation yesterday and noticed on my way in the door that one half of the shop was completely empty and the other half was heaving. The half where the Wii and DS games are. The crowd was literally four people deep and everyone was taking games to the counter. All ages were represented – kids right through to people in their fifties. I overheard one woman – mid-forties, I’d say – telling another that she was going to buy Twilight Princess because she’d been playing Ocarina of Time on the virtual console and loved it. You can image the depth my jaw dropped to. It would appear that Nintendo’s “flash in the pan” is moving off in some surprising new ways – introducing new gamers to not only the shiny new one-trick-pony titles like Wii Sports, but to more traditional games as well. Who knew?

And that’s all for today, I guess. I think I’ve spent longer writing about these than I have playing them, which means it’s probably time to shut up.

John