The Clan of the Cave Bague

I hate it when this happens.

The exit to the next level is in the third room, but I just know I’ll be compelled to crawl around the whole level looking or goodies and end up being eaten by a grue

Completed mission 7 – the first ‘fog of war’ mission. Not a particularly elegant victory, though – it ended up with a boxing match between my last unit and the enemy’s last unit. Entire map in darkness except for the two squares beside each other. In fact, in the Standard Scale Of Great Military Victories, I’d give it a negative 5. I rated a C overall.

Anyhoo, it was my first game in a pretty long time so maybe I shouldn’t be quite so grumpy about it. The ennui still hasn’t broken, unfortunately. I think I’ve started too many new titles at once and kinda overloaded myself. As well as that, we have a load of other stuff going on which is kinda taking a lot of my time and attention. No matter, though. The DS will always be there for me when I get a minute

Other than a bit of dabbling with The Temple of Elemental Evil on t’PC, I’ve played virtually no games for ages. The ennui has struck again. A friend of ours has loaned us season 2 of 24 (we only saw season one) so that’s kinda eating the hours in the evening. Add to the mix all the various faff of moving house and changing jobs, and there’s just no time. I still get the odd five minutes with my gameboy, and it’s always Mr Driller 2 that gets the attention, but I really haven’t been doing much at all.

Temple of Elemental Evil is quite interesting, but very very hard. I’ve gone off on a couple of quests and had my bottom smacked by various gruesome creatures. I think I need to do some in-village experience quests and buy some decent armour :-/

Well, we both have a gut feeling that we’ll be asked for medicals and police certificates in the next month. This may be wishful thinking on our part. The police certificates can take 40 days to arrive and are valid for one year after arrival. The date on the police / medical documents determines how long we have to ‘validate’ the visa – i.e. enter the country for the first time. As we’re planning on moving permanently long before February next year, we reckoned there’s no harm in getting the ball rolling with the police statements.

The medicals aren’t so bad as I don’t think there’s a huge wait between applying and being seen. At least this way, when the request for documents comes in from the DIMIA, we’ll at least have a head start on getting them organised.

Mrs Me is popping in to our solicitors today to discuss missives on the house sale. All appears to be going very smoothly, so we’re hoping it stays that way. There’s nothing but silence on the visa front, but that’s to be expected.

Next week is my last week at my current employer, so I’ve been spending this week bringing my replacement up to speed – that’s been interesting to say the least. I get the impression there’s a degree of envy doing the rounds.

We haven’t made a great deal of progress with the List Of Doom, because it’s been a busy week. We’ll really need to get torn in about it over the weekend. It’s probably higher priority than we’re giving it at the moment.

People keep saying ‘what if it all goes wrong and you don’t get a visa?’. The answer to that is we’re going anyway. We’re pretty confident we’ll get the visa as we meet all the requirements, but in the event we don’t we can go on a different visa subclass and try again later. Or we can go to Ireland. Or somewhere else. It’s not something we’re concerned about at the moment.

Well, I can do 500 metres pretty reliably now. Trouble is, it generally takes me all three lives to do it and I never lose a life before level 4. That’s largely, I suspect, because I haven’t got the hang of getting rid of the brown blocks that almost always protect air tanks in levels 4 and 5. Grrr. I don’t think there’s much point in moving to 1000 metres until I can do 500 without losing a life.

So – next plan of action is to get 300-500 meters sorted out – I need to think about ways to get rid of those blocks. The trouble is, I panic and worry about oxygen depletion if I sit about for too long.

This is a weird game. It really is. It needs a combination of speed and fast reactions, puzzle solving and strategic thinking. Now that I’ve had a bit of success with 500 metre mode, I’ve gone in to tackle some of the speed missions. Basically you have to dig a certain distance within a target time, picking up time bonuses along the way. This is an ACE way to get the hang of the speed / reaction time elements of the game as you don’t have time to wait for cascades to clear things up for you. You also don’t have to worry about air.

The whole package is well delivered – every time trial mission has its own persistent high score, as do the main game modes. An added bonus is that the time trials generally have sub-30 second target times (at least they do on the early levels) making a perfect ‘pick up and have a quick go’ game.

Surprisingly, both Mr Driller 2 and Mr Driller Drill Spirits (for the DS) can be had for less than 15 quid – easily worth the money.

500 METRE TRIUMPH!

Muuuuhahahahahaha! I don’t care that I’ve finished Resident Evil 4 on hard mode. Couldn’t care less about Halo on the hardest level. I poo-poo in the smelly face of Tempest 2000 – I HAVE COMPLETED EASY MODE OF MR DRILLER 2.

Phew! What a sense of satisfaction! This is why I play games I’ve achieved something important – I’ve dug down through some coloured blocks. Oh yes.

Well, the survey has been carried out by our prospective purchasers and the surveyor indicated no problems, so I expect the ’subject to survey’ offer will be replaced by a firm one next week. Our purchaser was also telling us that he has a buyer pretty much lined up for his place, so things appear to be going very smoothly.

That leaves us with a bit of a panic because, while we’re going to be staying in rented accomodation for a couple of months, we need to get rid of everything we’re not taking in the next two months. We’ve decided to travel light, only shipping personal items and difficult to replace items (video games,  of course). With the costs of a 20 foot container at the moment, it would cost more to ship furniture than it would to replace it in Oz.

We’re making a list (and checking it twice) of everything we have to work out what to take. This isn’t much of a problem, really, as we’ve done it before after we had a house fire. We also only really have two years of accumulated cruft to sort through this time – it was 34 years worth the last time

So, all according to plan. We’re hoping we don’t get medical requests through too soon – we have enough on our plate with moving.

I start a new job in a fortnight. My current employer had me on a three month notice period (which was awkward) and I wanted to give them as much time as possible to get a replacement. Well, they took that as ‘handing in my notice’ so that’s that. I’m doing a spot of consultancy for the next few months, so it’ll be an interesting change.

Guhh. I can get to 450 metres pretty reliably these days, but that last 50 metres seems problematic. I tend to run out of oxygen. The oxygen tanks are all tucked behind similar looking arrangements of blocks so I just need to get my head around how the puzzle works. Played this for about an hour then went fishing in Harvest Moon to calm my shattered nerves.