Saturday 19 November 2011

Anypet (Dream)

So for some reason I move out into the country (I think it's someplace in China or Tibet) where a distant relative of mine lives in a very old farm. I often notice the farm has lots of animals around (not too unusual) but the variation is crazy, with lots of birds I've never seen before and also llamas and giant horned turtles etc. One night I'm helping out in the big barn on the property and it suddenly gets dark so I decide to sleep there. When I wake up the next morning there's a huuuuuuge bright pink cat cuddled up to me so I decide to keep it as a pet. Stuff like this happens again and again, with yet odder animals being found, and I come to the conclusion that this barn is some kind of... portal to THE ANIMAL PLANE or something.

I decide to set up an exotic pet shop and have it built on the farm. People come from pretty much everywhere to see my crazy stock so I make a website for it and I get ridiculous amounts of hits and orders. To fill quotas I start training some of the animals to do the catching for me. I dinstictly remember watching a large parrot nudge a smaller bird into a cage and closing it for me. Clever parrot! Also a grizzly bear very daintily picking up a jerboa or something and brushing its fur for some reason.

My well-trained animals hit the headlines and a circus director comes to ask me if he could use them in his acts but I say no because I don't want them mistreated or anything. For some reason this provokes him to have my distant-family-member-who-I-don't-remember-at-all assassinated so I buy the land with my newfound wealth and live there forever cataloguing the stranger and stranger animals that appear from my barn.

Sunday 13 November 2011

Tekken 6 (360)

I recently grabbed Tekken 6 because I wanted a new PSP memory card to replace that infeasibly small one, and decided to buy a game at the same time. I've wanted to see how the series has come out for a long time; the last game I played was Tekken 4 which I kinda enjoyed, but the massive focus on wallhits was annoying. So, how's 6?

Pretty similar. Wallhits are still important but juggling is far more so; even the standard AI will take time out to juggle the crap out of you if it hits a launcher, so one hit turns into a lot of damage quickly. It's still a fun game to just pull out and play, though. Everyone has a zillion moves as ever.

The main difference in 6 is the addition of the 'Scenario Mode', which has a horrible and nonsensical plot tied together with voice actors all speaking different languages for no apparent reason but all able to understand each other perfectly. Alisa has to have some of the most horrible visual design I've ever seen (and I've played Final Fantasy 10/12/13) but the campaign is actually pretty fun once you get used to the strange hybrid controls. I mostly played through with Lei instead of Lars because Lars is an idiot. The optional stages are a large leap in difficulty, especially the well-named Nightmare Train which took me over 2 hours to beat.

You also unlock a crapload of different clothes for your character to wear by playing Scenario, although most of them are just palette swaps. The potential is there to make people look rather dashing or completely stupid, which is always welcome.

Haven't tried online play yet.

Monday 7 November 2011

PlayStation Blues

My PS2 which I've had since 2002 gave up the ghost yesterday, so I went on a mission to find a new one. Fortunately I didn't have to go far, because GAME actually had a preowned PS2 slim for only £30. Holy cow, what a find!

So yeah, finished Disc 2 of Final Fantasy VIII for Emily today. Funny how you get given a massive plot dump then you immediately fly over and kick the crap out of the one person who everybody loved in the space of about 15 minutes. The garden fight FMVs are still as spectacular as I remember. Disc 3 finally explains all the Laguna crap that's been happening so Emily might appreciate that one a bit more.

Saturday 5 November 2011

Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines

I recently remembered that Emily actually owned a PSP, so I decided to grab Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines to try it out. Unfortunately she has some kinda what-the-fuck 30mb memory stick in it, so I can't download any system updates, so that bit will have to wait, but here's stuff about the game.

Have you played the original Assassin's Creed? It's that, but everything is scaled down. Instead of a whole city being one map, it's split into areas (for obvious memory-constraint reasons), all the animations are just from AC1 with some frames taken out, the sounds are very similar except for some reason Altaïr's voice actor is different. The controls are also slightly different; due to there being no right analogue stick, you have to hold the L button and then press the face buttons to control the camera. Not useful in a chase situation, but it's a fair solution. Also there's some kind of buying upgrades system based on coins you pick up which are in hard-to-reach locations, like flags. Makes Altaïr into an unstoppable badass by the end I'd wager. Auto-block?! Enough of the technical side.

The plot seems kinda random, what with Maria somehow being useful to the Assassins despite hating them fervently and whatnot. There is the whole "now the templars hate me too" thing, but I don't think it sticks very well. The world is still excellently fleshed out as I would expect from this franchise. I'm enjoying it so far, bare though the experience is. Climbing up shit is still fun, even though EVERY wall in this game is climbable. There's also a simple achievement system full of stuff like "stab 50 guards" so that'll be done in no time. I've heard the game is pretty short and I've spent perhaps 3 hours on it so far, so who knows, another 7 before it's done I guess.

It did only cost me £10!

Tuesday 1 November 2011

Dungeon Defenders (PC)

So I bought Dungeon Defenders very recently because a few other SDA members wanted to get the group pack thing. I had it on my wishlist ever since it got announced more than a year ago and now that it's out, here's my thoughts.

It's pretty good. I tried playing the little mage dude in single player for a while and I'm not sure he's very good on his own. Either that or I just don't know how to use him. His secondary attack is an AoE pushback which makes no sense if you want to use it for damage, I guess the push is more important. Then I went online and made a Huntress and ever since this niiiiice weapon dropped I've just been standing behind other people's traps and shooting stuff until it dies. I'm not sure focusing solely on character stats rather than trap stats is a good idea, but well... guess I'll find out. I suppose it just means that all the defense points go to my allies who will presumably have put some points in stats so they can better use them. I'll just stand around going pew pew pew.

Not a massive surprise, but it would be more fun if I had 3 other people to yell at frantically. Playing with randoms on the internet has actually been a pretty good experience, strangely. I guess I'll play some League of Legends now to remember how that usually goes.