The Clan of the Cave Bague

There haven’t been many rambles on here of late – it’s really just been the game diary that’s been getting postings. Anyhoo, I’m here now.

First off, homeAudit has been doing very well of late – it seems to have attracted a fairly large audience. Just as well, really, because I’ve been spending a lot of time working on the next version. I’ve had a lot of feedback from registered users asking for some quite cool features, as well as pointing out a few shortcomings. As a result, I’m taking the opportunity to make homeAudit 3 a complete new build. As homeAudit has somewhat outgrown RealBASIC, version 3 will be fully Cocoa/Obj-C. I’m looking forward to Tiger appearing – it’d be nice to do some funky CoreGraphics things with it too.

On other fronts, all has been quiet. The weather has settled down sufficiently that we’re no longer tormented with power cuts – always a good thing. We do have a little bit of wind though – thought the house was going to come round down my ears last night. Fortunately, it didn’t.

It’s not as though he’s tough, or anything, just that he has two dirty great seemingly-indestructible Uruk Hai henchmen. Not to worry, though – I’ll get him tonight.

Resident Evil 4 is on the way – I can see poor old Third Age taking a break for a day or two

Top tip – ignore everything else and take out the Uruks.

Ents can be helpful.

Aaaargh! Ok, big hard fight with swarms of Orcs lurching across a bridge. Not too bad – thankfully I have an Elf who can revive KO’d characters. The battle out of the way, something very similar happens a few steps later. So, I’ve battled my way along to the end of the bridge only to find two Uruk-hai on the bridge, two Orc archers on the gatehouse walls, and all the Orcs in the flipping universe scrambling over the side of the bridge. Run away! Run away! But no, too late – I’m a wormfeast. Then the cold grip of reality clutches my chest as I realise the last save point was before the bridge :-/

Gaaaaaaah

Worth a quick mentioned. Although it’s essentially as linear as the tunnels of Moria, the area gives a really vivid impression of wide rolling countryside and a true sense of traveling from village to village. Very pretty.

Another couple of hours in and I’m in Rohan – 30% complete. Couple of things I should have mentioned – I’m playing the gamecube version. It’s stunning, graphically, but with a touch of slowdown here and there. I’ve heard that the PS2 version crawls at a few points – hardly surprising given the complexity of the graphics. The Balrog section, in particular, was noticeably sluggish.

The other thing I should have mentioned relates to the difficulty level. FatHippy from UGVM suggested playing on the highest difficulty setting due to the somewhat unchallenging nature of the combat. He’s right. On highest difficulty, it’s hard without ever being frustrating. There are a lot of enemies which do substantial amounts of damage – i.e. whipping away 75% of health of multiple characters with a single strike. The available powerups, buffs, and generally überness of the characters balances this out a lot. On normal difficulty, you’d be as well just watching the movie as there’d be no challenge whatsoever.

As can be seen, it’s a pretty game. The spell effects are pretty spectacular in a not-at-all-lord-of-the-rings kinda way, but hey – it’s a video game

Fired up for 45 minutes or so to have a quick blast around a couple of tracks. The nice thing about this game is that we can all play it, including Debbie and Harmony (who is only 4). I still find the whole game utterly incomprehensible though. Pretty though.

Well, I kinda lost interest a bit while lurching through Moria. Loads of brown, loads of repetitive battles with Orcs. Anyway, I was having withdrawal symptoms and picked it up again for another go and managed to complete the Moria section. The Balrog was fun – 178,000 hit points is no joke, but Gandalf is well hard.

Once out of Moria, the whole thing brightens up a little and becomes more open. Sadly, it’s more Orcs with only a few Uruk-hai added to give a bit of variety. It’s not really a shortcoming of the game because Lord of the Rings does have a fairly limited number of species. A few Nazgul have appeared as well, but sadly I ran like a frightened girl, even though I have it on good assurance that I’m leveled up enough to beat them.

There was a particularly large and fierce looking starving Warg as well – that one was pretty good fun, really cos it didn’t attack often but when it did you knew about it. Loads of buffing needed for that one.

Surprisingly, for a game which I play for a while and then put down when it gets a bit tedious, I’ve managed to clock 12 hours with exactly 25% completed. We’ll see if I get to 100%.

Hallo – just a quickie. My Macintosh ports of Andy Noble’s fab remakes are now available here. They should be up on the retrospec site as soon as I get a minute.

Dear oh fecking dear.

I bought a plastic bottle of “Channel Islands Milk” from Tesco. That’s the creamy, slightly golden, milk from Jersey Cows. I was pouring a glass of it when a small flash of colour caught my eye.

There, on the side of the bottle, was an allergy warning.

ALLERGY WARNING!

it proclaimed.

CONTAINS MILK!

Contains. Fecking. Milk.

I’m too fecking sickened by the stupidity of society and the lawyer-cowed wankers of big business to comment any further. I hate you all.