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NaJoPoMo Day twelve Mags - Preview is my friend
Posted Nov 13, 2013
I've been playing a couple of game Demos today one was a PC game Long Live the Queen which is and RPG/sim and the other was The Bridge on Xbox a puzzle game. Demos are great, they allow you play a level (sometimes a few) of a game inorder to decided whether you want to play it. All of the XBLA games have a demo and we try out quite a few of them and in some cases buying the game after plying it. Many years ago they came on an actual disc with games magazines, if you didn't get your magazine early the game disc would be gone. Now it's just the CDs out of Classic Rock.
So, what of today's games? Well, Long Live...is about a Princess who has just lost her mum (the Queen) and training to be queen. It's and and RPG/sim in that you are trying to the Princess all sorts of thing about being a queen while at the same time keeping her happy - she only 15. The demo's quite short, but can play it over and over learn different skills and get different results. The Bridge is a whole 'nother thing. It's a series of puzzles, drawn in pencil, that are sometimes really easy and other times not so much. Of course once you've worked out the solution, you realise how thick you were not to see it in the first place.
I bought one.
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Latest reply: Nov 13, 2013
NaJoPoMo Day twelve Mags - A little help from my 'friends'
Posted Nov 12, 2013
Thank the gods for walkthroughs and the interwebs.
Last night (and for a couple of nights previously) we'd been stuck on Army of Two. We were on the high ground, but had 2 ladders, a staircase and a wounded soldier to defend. There were about 30 of them and they kept on coming up the ladders and the stairs. We thought we had to split up (as is quite usual in this game) and defend a couple of bits each. We didn't. What we *needed* to do was basically stay together near the soldier and just pick 'em off, it was hard work, but we managed it in the end. Thank you IGN.
That reminded me of the first ever time I had to use a walkthrough. The game was Ephemeral Fantasia on PS2. It was a role play game of sorts, the same 5 days kept repeating themselves until you'd 'discovered' all the characters and (consequently) most or even all of the map (you started just in one little town and had to do all sorts of things to get out of there) that could and would help you at the end of day 5. Simple huh?
Nope. The characters were only available to 'recruit' at certain times, on certain days, *and* you usually need to do something for them in a certain time period before they'd be willing to join you. I was lost, I kept repeating the same five days over and over and over. It was driving me mad. I didn't have a PC at the time as it was nearly 13 years ago, but I *did* have access to the internet through my cable TV package it *was* dial up, and did cost me a small fortune, but what the hey. However I could only find one place that had a walkthrough at the time and that was a site called intoliquidsky.net - the site is still there and the last time I looked the walkthrough was too (although it was very difficult to find)
Nowadays there are all sorts of places on the 'net that have walkthroughs, both written and on YouTube and you can buy dead tree ones as well, these are brilliant when playing RPG's and are a lot cheper than printer ink and paper when you're trying find and make recipes as in Tales of Vesperia.
Cheating?
I'm not sure, I don't think so.
After we'd saved our man on AoT we continued to play for well over 2 hours without a single problem. Sometimes you just need a liitle help.
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Latest reply: Nov 12, 2013
NaJoPoMo Day Eleven Mags - Back to the Primitive...
Posted Nov 11, 2013
I mentioned a couple of days back that we'd been sent Midway Arcade Origins by our rental company, so yesterday afternoon (after the very disappointing footy result and if Garcia is the answer it was a really stupid question 
) we set about trying to get as much out of the game as we possibly could. Man, some of those games are pure rubbish, Root Beer Tapper, anyone? There's an American Football one that means absolutely nothing to me. I can explain the off side rule in 'proper football' 
but haven't a clue about Offense and Defense in this one, I'll get there in the end (or more likely give up).
The racing games are, quite frankly very poor one of them is even sitting a rubber ring and using your hands to ride down a river. I can't imagine sticking anything more than a few 10 pence pieces in that.
The main difference between playing these sorts of games on a console rather than on an arcade machine are the controllers. The arcade machines were game specific.
This is the one for Championship Sprint: http://media.liveauctiongroup.net/i/5168/8212319_1.jpg?v=8CAA0DAF3C16AF0 it has a 'start button', steering wheels and gas pedals, on the Xbox controller all you can do is hold down the right trigger and manoeuvre with the left stick, and it's sort of inverted so your little car won't go left when you move the stick left, it'll go right. Okay, that'll just take practice, but still, very annoying.
We've come a long way since Pong. We no longer need fridge-sized machines to play games and the computer voices no longer sound quite so computery. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
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Latest reply: Nov 11, 2013
NaJoPoMo Day 10 Mags - I aint afraid of no ghost
Posted Nov 10, 2013
Many years ago I played what is arguably one of the scariest games ever. It's called Project Zero and it's survival Horror. Unlike Resident Evil or Silent Hill you don't carry a gun or bat, your weapon is a camera. That's right you take photos of the enemies and the power in the camera kills them. The enemies are ghosts, and proper tormented souls they are too. You can hear their voices screaming things like 'My eyes, my eyes' and one of the ghosts is called 'Broken neck' and she approaches you backwards, there is no 'incidental music' just the sound of the ghosts and your footfalls. Opening doors can be very dangerous because you'll be confronted by more ghosts. Sometimes you just needed to take one photo and the ghost would disappear but at other times you actually had to battle them, taking shot after shot until they were exorcised. I used to play it in the dark, because that's how I roll. I recently played the seecond one again on the Wii, which is even eerier, because the voices can be heard in the Wiimote in your hand. Spooky stuff.
A few months ago my local Blockbuster closed, but before it did, I bought the 3DS spin off Spirit Camera, which utilises the actual camera in the 3DS itself. Now, while this is rather 
when exorcising the ghosts, it does present one rather major (IMO) flaw. Throughout the game you to take photographs of certain pictures which appear in the game booklet which, in turn, reveal clues as to where you should be heading next. The flaw is that you need very good light in order to be able to take the photos which sort of defeats the object. Good fun nevertheless and perfect for playing in the summer, the only real problem was that I lost the game, all of it box, cartridge, little book, sometime earlier this year. I've searched and searched for it, but my searches were fruitless, until yesterday when I found it looking for something else. Always the way.
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Latest reply: Nov 10, 2013
NaJoPoMo Day Nine Mags - Throwing down the Gauntlet
Posted Nov 9, 2013
Finally got the last collectible on Gears 2 last night so we're going to delete the save and (hopefully) try again with our secondary profile to play the add-on. Wish me luck with that.
The Midway Arcade Origins collection is rather fun, apparently it should only take about 6 gameplay hours to get all 1000 achievement points, but we'll see. My game-fu deserted me when I was playing Smash TV last night so it may take us a bit longer We also played Gauntlet for a couple of hours, naturally if we'd been churning money into something the size of a fridge freezer we'd have spent about £400 last night, but as it is you just need to press the 'back' button to add credit which means more health so we couldn't really die. There is some debate as to how many levels there are in the game, any where between 100 and 255 depending on the machine/console- we only managed 56 yesterday and I doubt very much we'll top that, although the collection does include Gauntlet 2, so we'll probably have a go at that after the footy tomorrow.
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Latest reply: Nov 9, 2013
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