The Clan of the Cave Bague

Wahey! Well, I only had twenty minutes or so to spend on games this weekend (criminal, I know), but it was well spent with a twenty minute blast of Serious Sam on t’cube. It may not sound like a long time but when you have enemies appearing at a rate of fifty-million per second and unlimited ammo in your minigun, you can deal a fair amount of pain

Best thing about it, though, is the ability to switch off the gore so that things explode into massive funnels of flowers and mushrooms. Makes it more satisfying, for some reason. Or maybe that’s just me. Anyway, there’s no plot, not much in the way of puzzles. It’s like an over the top 2D shooter on speed. It’s kinda where Doom was going before ID disappeared up their own nether-regions. One good thing is that it’s available on just about every platform known to mankind and they’re all virtual identical. It clips along quickly and smoothly with nary a slowdown. Fab.

I guess it’s kinda like the videogame equivalent of power metal. Without the dragons. Actually, no, with the dragons but possibly without the perms. At least I haven’t seen any perms yet.

Picked this up for 7 quid in Woolies. It’s surprisingly good – it uses a novel joint third person and over the shoulder aiming view – exactly the same as the new Resident Evil game. Except, of course, Ghosthunter was released a year or two ago.

The graphics are blindingly good – indicating that the PS2 would be capable of rivalling the quality of ‘cube and xbox games, if only they were developed by someone other than EA.

Anyhoo, the basic premise is you play a bloke who can see ghosts. So, being able to see them, the first reaction is to blow them to bits using an assortment of conventional and spiritual weapons, before catching them in a spirit grenade.

There’s a degree of exploration, but it’s really a shooter at heart, with some really nice thermal sniping. EAsily worth 7 quid of anyone’s money.

Well there we have it. That lovely Mr Blair would like to follow in the footsteps of Apartheid by giving law enforcement officials the power to effectively imprison and silence anyone the state considers to be a supporter of “terrorism”. Without trial, without being required to provide any evidence whatsoever. Does posting this blog entry add a black mark to my file somewhere in London? How long, then, before we have our very own home-grown Steve Bikos and Nelson Mandelas, subject to detention in their own homes and flagged as “banned persons” guilty of the crime of disagreeing with the government?

So where can we turn? The Tories are just as much in favour of this as Labour are – keep ‘em frightened, keep ‘em in front of the their TVs so we can coerce them to “consume”. Are the Liberals an alternative? Can they actually make a decision off their own backs? Who knows. The future is looking bleak.

The civilised world imposed sanctions on South Africa because of policies like this. Who will sanction Britain?

BBC NEWS | Politics | Blair defends house arrest plan:

On hard mode, I’m sure the AI cheats in Helm’s Deep. Three times now, with the same line up of characters, the Uruk-Hai just get as many goes as they like until two of my chars are KO’d and the last one is below 500 Hit Points. At that stage, it’s the uck of the draw whether you survive or get game over.

I. Don’t. Like. Games. Which. Cheat.

I’m waiting for a review copy of Resident Evil 4 (US) to arrive. The rants and raves about its undisputed greatness has me all excited and I can’t focus on anything else

I’m still taking a little break from the aggravating exercise in pointlessness which is Helm’s Deep. Last night I had a little (20 mins or so) go of SMB2. Everyone loves this game. Everyone thinks it’s great.

It really really REALLY annoys me. It gets me tense, irritable and aggravated.

So it went back on the shelf. I think I’m going through one of my game-hate stages.

On a cheerier note, I played through the first few levels of Star Fox Adventures today. It gets dissed a lot due to it’s easiness and repetitive structure (and I guess it’s guilty on both counts) but it has a nice game mechanic – it’s fun just mucking around in the world. One thing that did strike me – bearing in mind it’s over a year since I completed it – is how absolutely gorgeous the graphics are. I don’t seem to remember much of a fuss being made about the visuals at the time, but it really is lovely.

I’ve just noticed that Gamespot gave it 8.3/10 at the time – they’re just gone up a notch in my estimation It can be picked up for next to nothing these days and, although it’s only about 10 hours long, it’s easily worth a few quid. I seem to remember I paid full price on release day and don’t regret it for a second.

It’s not often I get in a temper tantrum through frustration, but Third Age has done it. I’m playing it on hard mode because anything less than that is just stupidly non challenging. Up till now, it’s all been going swimmingly except the developers have obviously decided it’s not hard enough. Solution? Improving the enemy AI? Nope. They just decided to introduce three hour long battles against endless opponents with no breaks and no saves in between.

Click. <— That’s the sound of the Gamecube being switched off.

It’s not often I get in a temper tantrum through frustration, but Third Age has done it. I’m playing it on hard mode because anything less than that is just stupidly non challenging. Up till now, it’s all been going swimmingly except the developers have obviously decided it’s not hard enough. Solution? Improving the enemy AI? Nope. They just decided to introduce three hour long battles against endless opponents with no breaks and no saves in between.

Click. <— That’s the sound of the Gamecube being switched off.

The wormtongue us a wormfeast. Ignoring him completely and focussing on the Uruk-Hai is the way to go