Namco Museum Essentials

I downloaded Namco Museum Essentials from PSN yesterday. I was initially dubious about it, because there's only six games in the collection, but I played the demo first and I got totally addicted.

The six games are: Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Galaga, Dragon Spirit, Xevious, and Xevious Resurrection ( a hi-def remake of Xevious ).

I spent an hour or so yesterday playing Pac-Man and Galaga, and managed to get the bronze trophies for both. The Collection does a good job of dishing out rewards gradually. You get "Stamps" for each game for achieving certain criteria, like collecting fruit in Pac-Man, or getting a double ship in Galaga. These stamps give you points, and get enough points and you go up a gamer level which gives you rewards like new wallpaper to have as a background for the games, and also Playstation Home rewards like clothing for your avatar and arcade cabs to put in your apartment. Your high score for each game also gets saved, and you can see how you compare against everyone else who has played the game.

Although the games are obviously pretty ancient by this point ( excluding Xevious: Resurrection ), they are all classics for a reason. Even without the rewards the games offer, they'd still be fun to play on their own. They can be very addictive, and high score chasing always gives you an incentive to keep playing.

This morning, my fiance and I played Dig Dug for a couple of hours straight chasing high scores. We just couldn't stop, we always had to have one more go. I'm currently in the lead with about 36,000 points.

I highly recommed this collection if you feel like taking a trip down memory lane, or if you just want some games that you can dip in to for a quick bash now and then. That's the great thing about these old games, you can play them for five minutes or so and have a great time, or you can sit down for hours and get even more out of them.

Catch up

It's been a while since my last post. What have I been up to? Well, a few weeks ago my fiance and I went through very stressful week of trying to buy a house. In the end the sale didn't go through, but we learned some good lessons about the house buying process so the next time we put an offer in it should be easier. I just wish that going through this learning process didn't cost us more than a grand, after the builder's inspection report and lawyers costs etc was added up. Ouch.

Since then, we've decided to take a brief hiatus from the house hunting to clear our heads a bit. During that super stressful week I hardly played any games, all I could think about was THE HOUSE. Since then, I've been getting into the bunch of second hand PS3 games I mentioned a few posts ago.

I've dabbled in Assassin's Creed II for five or six hours so far, and even though it's early days yet I already find it much more enjoyable than the first game. By this point in the first game I was already growing increasingly bored with the routine that the game presents you with ( gather evidence, locate target, assassinate target, run from guards, repeat ad infinitum ). But AC II is far more varied in the tasks that it gives you. The free running aspect is just as enjoyable as before, but now it is mixed in with genuinely interesting goals. The combat is still a bit jinky, but it's definitely an improvement on the orignal. AC II is not the type of game that I can imagine myself sitting down with and having super long gaming sessions, but I'll definitely keep chipping away at it.

F.E.A.R 2, the sequel to one of my favourite first person shooters, has been pretty good for the few hours I've played so far. I played the orignal on my PC years ago, so it's been a bit strange playing the sequel using a PS3 controller. The basic experience so far is similar to the first game, the gameplay mechanics are essentially identical as you would expect. There haven't been any really big scares yet ( something which the first game definitely had in spades ), but there is a constant sense of unease which keeps you on edge while you're playing. The bad points? Well, I must say, the graphics are a bit shoddy. Definitely a case of a multiplatform game not really being tailored towards a particular platform. The PS3 is capable of much better graphics than this game has, that's for sure. Otherwise, it's a sold game so far, and I'm looking forward to playing through the rest of it.

The game that I've spent most of my time on is Brutal Legend. I'm about half way through the game, and a lot of that time has been spent driving around finding all the hidden secrets. This is a game that definitely triggers the "gotta catch 'em all" part of my brain. Overall, the game is a mixed bag. The dialogue, voice acting, graphics and music are totally brilliant. The combat leaves a bit to be desired, I find that you're generally just rushed by a bunch of enemies so there's very little chance to try out combos. More often than not combat just dissolves into button mashing. Driving The Deuce around is a lot of fun, and honestly just exploring the world has been my favourite part of the game so far. But, yes, definitely a mixed bag. It feels like the game just tries too many things instead of focussing on a handful of core game ideas. It definitely has a few rough edges, such as not being able to jump and getting stuck in holes in the scenery. Still, it's a hell of a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to getting back into it over the coming weekend.

So, these are the games that have been entertaining me in my spare time. I'm looking forward to grabbing God Of War 3 at some stage, along with Heavy Rain and Bayonetta, but I'll probably wait again until I can get them second hand.

Bits and pieces

I've really been digging the demo of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on the PS3. After years of playing first person shooters on PC, I honestly thought that I'd never really get the hang of playing them using dual analogue on a console, but I'm actually pretty good! I'm consistently in the top three or four people on my team in the demo, although my kill to death ration isn't that flash.

Overall, the demo just "feels" good. The controls are intuitive, the visual and aural feedback is great, and it's so satisfying when you're part of a decent team and you can pull out a win. Although, even on the occasions that my team has lost I've still had a lot of fun. The medals and rewards are fun also, and it's tantalising seeing all of the unlocks that will be available in the full game.

I'm definitely planning on getting the full version of this game, but that just means I've added it to a long list of games that I want to buy. They are as follows:

- Brutal Legend
- Heavy Rain
- Mass Effect 2
- Bioshock 2
- Assassin's Creed 2
- Bayonetta
- Stalker: Call Of Pripyat
- Metro 2033

I'm sure there's more, but I can't think of them now. The problem is that I just don't have the money! My fiance and I are in the middle of applying for mortgage so that we can start looking for a house. We're hoping to find somewhere within the next few months, so that we can be settled in before we get married in January next year. Most of our spare cash has been going into the house deposit, and I really don't think I'd be very popular if I spent cash on new games.

Oh well, it's times like these that give me a good excuse to finish games that I'm already playing. I've been getting back into Grand Theft Auto IV, and I think I'm only about a dozen missions away from finishing the main storyline. As long as I make it, this would be the only GTA game that I have successfully completed! I've always tended to just get tied up in the side missions in the previous games and end up losing interest after a while.

I'm also still working on Resistance: Fall Of Man, and I've got Resistance 2 waiting in the wings also because I bought both of them as a bundle online for cheap.

So, I can't really complain. It's not like I don't have any games to play. I just don't have any new games to play.

My greatest moment in gaming

I've been really busy lately, so I haven't had time to play many games. I'm still training for my half marathon, and I've found that on the long runs my mind quite often wanders to gaming. I got to pondering about games that have actually made me verbalise at the screen while I'm playing, either in anger or joy, and this took me down memory lane to what I would say is my greatest moment in gaming. I'm sure everyone has that one moment that just stands out in their gaming life. I experienced mine while playing EverQuest...

It was around nine or so years ago, and EverQuest was pretty much the only game that I played at the time. It occupied my life for about two years. I think I mentioned in an earlier article just how addicted I was to this game. By the time I experienced my greatest moment, I had been playing the game for about a good seven or eight months. My main character at the time was a High Elf Wizard by the name of Zoidberg Zaius.


That's a screenshot of him above, showing off and casting a spell, and he's also wielding the staff that played a part in my greatest moment. It's called "The Staff Of The Wheel", and the only way to get it is as a result of a quest called Tarton's Wheel. You have to collect ten "rods" from around the world of Norrath. A few of them are relatively easy, some are quite tricky and you need a group to help you get them, and some are really quite hard. I worked on the quest off and on for a few months, getting help where I could from helpful groups and my guildmates ( "The Ancients Of The Realm" ), and when I couldn't get any help I would just try it myself. This led me to venture by myself, naked, into the heart of Lower Guk...

Now, before I go any further I feel I should explain something about old school EverQuest. At the time that I was doing this quest, if you died you would be resurrected without any of your equipment at the nearest town that you bound yourself to, along with losing a hefty chunk of the experience that you had gained ( which would sometimes take many hours to gain back ) and you would then have to go on the dreaded "corpse run" to find your corpse and get all of your gear back All you folks out there who got their introduction to MMORPGs with WOW don't know how easy you have it. EverQuest was hard. It could sometimes be an incredibly punishing and soul destroying game. It pretty much invented "grinding", and yet that addictive grind kept me coming back for more. Okay, back to the story...

So, the reason I had to venture down to Lower Guk - the lair of undead Frogloks and various other nasty creatures - was so I could get the very last rod for this quest. It was located on the floor of a room occupied by this guy:


Yes, "A Reanimated Hand". Note the fancy ring he's wearing, though. At least he's a stylish reanimated hand. As I mentioned earlier, I ventured into Lower Guk without any of my gear just in case things went horribly wrong and I died down there. Doing a corpse run down there by myself would have been impossible, basically. The only other option would have been trying to get someone to drag my corpse to the entrance, but that was always a long shot as to whether or not you could find someone to do it. So, I zoned into Lower Guk, all shivering and frightened, and began sending out zone wide calls for someone to cast Invisibility Versus Undead on me. As a Wizard, I had the standard Invisibility spell, but undead mobs see right through this. As nearly all of the mobs down in Lower Guk were undead, the only thing that could help was IvU. Luckily, a friendly Paladin near the zone entrance kindly cast the spell on me, after which I began to timidly make my way to the Reanimated Hand's lair...

Another thing about old school EverQuest ( I keep saying old school because they eventually did bring in some additional features which made the game ever so slightly more easy, such as your corpse appearing in a celestial graveyard up on the moon of Luclin after it had been left rotting for a week or so which meant you could then recover it from there instead of having to attempt an impossible corpse run ) was that that it didn't have a map. That's right, no handy little map in the upper right corner of the screen that points you in the direction of your next quest item. No, you had to do it the hard way, which for me meant printing out dozens and dozens of maps of all of the zones in Norrath. I had printed out a Lower Guk map before attempting this kamikaze mission to get the rod, so I had a pretty good idea of where I was going. Although it was such a long time ago that I did this, I can still clearly remember every little moment. My heart was pounding the entire time. Every time I came across a mob, I would hold my breath just in case it was one of rare ones who weren't undead down there and would see through my IvU spell. There was also the fear of the Invisibility vs Undead spell just dropping for no reason. This actually happened with some spells, they had a maximum time they could last but sometimes they would just drop off early. Luckily, I made to the base of the Hand's lair without being noticed.

To get up to the Hand, you had to jump into the base of a waterfall and then swim up it to get to the top where the Hand is waiting. Weird, I know, but that's how it was. I dove in and successfully swam to the top. I emerged into his domain, and my Invisibility vs Undead spell promptly disappeared. Honestly, I totally began shitting myself. The hand started hammering away at me, along with a Dar Knight who hangs around in the room also. I had buffed myself up as much as possible before starting the adventure, and the friendly Paladin had also cast some buffs on me along with the Invis spell, but my hit points were rapidly disappearing. I was frantically searching the floor for the rod, but it was almost the same colour as the floor so it was really hard to see. Finally I located it, quickly clicked on it to pick it up, and then cast my Gate spell to take me back to my bind point in the town of Freeport. I didn't have much hope that it would work, because with both of the mobs hitting me there was a high chance that they would interrupt my casting and then I'd be screwed. The few seconds it took to cast the spell seemed to take forever, but amazingly my casting wasn't interrupted and next thing I knew I was back in Freeport! My hit points were almost down to zero, but I had made it! Going back to what I said about games that make you verbalise at the screen, this was definitely a moment where I stood up and was whooping and yelling with joy. It was such an adrenaline buzz.

After this, I made my way up to Everfrost Peaks and handed in my rods to the quest giver. This in itself was quite terrifying, because the quest givers in EverQuest were notorious for just swallowing your quest items for no apparent reason and you got nothing in return. Once again I held my breath when I clicked "Combine" on the quest bag I had been given, but everything worked as it should and I was left with this:

This, undoubtedly, is my greatest moment in gaming. The sense of satisfaction from completing this quest was just incredible, especially soloing The Reanimated Hand rod.

So, how about all of you out there? What would you say your greatest moment has been

New Year, new games

Here's some games that I've been playing in my spare time since my last update ( all the way back in last yearville! Wow! ):

- Resistance: Fall Of Man
I'm about two thirds of the way through the game so far. It's generally pretty good, but there's nothing that really stands out about it. It's just a solid, fun shooter.

- Modern Warfare 2
Only the multiplayer, and I haven't played it for a few weeks now. I go through periods of being very addicted to it, and then not playing it for weeks. I think I'm up to about rank 35 or something so far.

- Flower
Well worth the asking price. A totally fantastic use of the Sixaxis controls, and beautiful visuals and sound make for one of the most unique games that I've ever played.

- Lemmings PS3
A bit average, really. I've only played about a dozen or so levels. I just bought it off the PSN Store because it was on special over the holiday period.

- Dragon Age: Origins
Hmmm. I'm still not sure about this one. I've sunk a good ten hours or so into the game already, but it honestly hasn't really caught my imagination yet. The story so far seems very, very derivative ( it particularly "borrows" a hell of a lot from the Wheel Of Time series of books ), and there's just so much talking. It's a Bioware game, yes, so of course there's a lot of dialogue, but none of it so far has been very interesting and the way in which you choose your dialogue options seems like a step backwards after the brilliance of Mass Effect and it's handy dialogue wheel.
I'm sure I'll come back to the game and carry on with my quest at some stage, but for the time being I can't really be bothered.

- Torchlight
Now, this is more like it. Instant fun RPG action. I've been really loving this game. It's so user friendly, and you can just jump in for ten minutes and have a quick bash around a dungeon and collect some awesome loot. I haven't really played many Diablo style RPGs before this, but this has actually got me looking forward to Diablo III.

- Street Fighter 4
I just bought this off Steam on a whim, because it was so cheap during their holiday sale. I've only played it once so far for about an hour, and it reminded me that I'm not really particularly good at Street Fighter. Still, it sure is pretty to look at.

- Critter Crunch
Another PSN game that I bought. Very, very addictive. Easy to learn, but hard to master, as all good puzzle games should be. The online play is a blast, also, even though I get my ass handed to me most of the time.

Most of my time has been divided between Torchlight and Critter Crunch. I'm training for a half-marathon at the moment, so along with work, training after work and on weekends, and spending quality time with the fiance, I find that the little spare time I have I really just want to play a game that I can enjoy in small bursts.

What games have I got my eyes on next? I played the Bayonetta demo on PS3, and it was bloody awesome. I'll probably wait until I see it on special or can buy it second hand, but I'll definitely get it at some stage. Other than that, I'm very curious about Heavy Rain. I played through most of Fahrenheit ( The Indigo Prophecy to anybody reading this in North America ) and found it a rather fascinating experience. I'm hoping David Cage can actually wrangle a game out of Heavy Rain, but even if it just turns out to be an interactive movie then it's going to be a gorgeous one.
Oh, and I still want to get Brutal Legend at some stage. The demo really impressed me, and I'm sure the full game will be a blast.