Comments (0) I played a bit more of Trials HD tonight, getting through all of the medium levels. I’m only getting bronzes and the occasional silver on these, though. It’ll take a lot more practice to be able to do these without a lot of mid-level restarts, and I’m just trying to get through all the levels for now.
I did at least get the achievement for destroying my bike and breaking every bone in my body, though.
I haven’t done much with the 360 lately, but today I took a bit of time to catch up with some of the newer XBLA games, at least.
Splosion Man: You play a character who, well, explodes. That’s all he does, run around and explode. But the explosions propel you around, let you trigger various things, etc., and you use that to make your way to the exit. There are of course various obstacles, timed puzzles, enemies, tricky jumps and triggered sequences, etc., along the way. For example, you might have to wall-jump, er, wall-explode up a shaft into an area where spiked walls move inwards and you have to explode up to trigger a barrel drop that you blow up to lift you up enough to trigger a door switch and…etc. I’ve done the first 11 levels so far, and things are getting pretty tricky.
Trials HD: I have the PC version of Trials 2, but word-of-mouth was that the 360 version was an improvement, so I picked it up as well. One of the biggest improvements is that you can see how well you’re doing relative to your friends, which can be motivating or depressing… I’ve done the Beginner and Easy levels so far, usually placing near the bottom but there are a couple of levels where I managed to get to the top of my list of friends.
Shadow Complex: It’s a semi-modern-day version of Metroid, basically, with the same kind of side-scrolling exploration and upgrade-finding, but with an analog aiming stick. I’ve barely started this one, though.
The PC was busy, so I couldn’t get back to Trine right away, and instead I caught up on the latest Fable II DLC, See The Future.
It started out with entering a cursed snowglobe, where coloured shadows had sucked all of the colour out of the world. I had to fight my way through a few villages and caves, with each shadow being immune to all but one type of damage, depending on its colour. It wasn’t too hard, though it was annoying in parts where I couldn’t use melee to regain health. Next up was a cursed skull, where I had to disguise myself as various monsters to get some wisps to free a cursed knight. Or so he claimed…
The end result was a statue of the spire, which gave me a vision of the future. I also got the ability to compete in a colosseum, though I managed to win the ultimate prize on my first time there anyway.
Instead of continuing on in Trine, I wound up doing a grab-bag of different things today.
First I fired up Crackdown for a little bit. I know I swore I wouldn’t bother trying for that last agility orb anymore, but I figured I should at least check the tops of the tallest Shai-Gen buildings, since I’d passed over them before. But it wasn’t there.
I checked out the recent XBLA games and gave Rocket Riot a try, and the trial was fun enough that I wound up buying the full game. It’s fairly simple, you pilot your legless guy around a destructible 2D map trying to accomplish the given goal by firing arcing rockets around, but there’s a decent amount of variety to the goals.
And finally, inspired by a resurrected forum post, I dusted off Test Drive Unlimited and redid the Millionaire’s Challenge once again, since it gives you a good tour of the perimeter of the island. I’m a little rusty, coming in a minute slower than my previous record, but I triggered the police way too much this time.
- test drive unlimited
I bought Prototype today, but it was taking forever to download from Steam, so in the meantime I started up Crackdown to get me in the right frame of mind.
I also had another motive for returning to Crackdown: that one last damn agility orb that I’m still missing. I’m up to 498 of 500, I know where one is (and want to make it the very last one I pick up), and now there’s just one left. Damned if I know where it is, though. I’ve considered following guides to all of the orbs, but that gets tedious quickly, so I just ran around listening for the orb-nearby sound.
Alas, by the end of the evening, the agility orb still eluded me. I did pick up a good 15-20 more hidden orbs though, putting me at 283 of 300 of them. I don’t think I’m going to waste any more time on that agility orb, though — congrats orb, you’ve beaten me.
I’m trying to catch up in Rock Band, since for some reason I kept buying a few song downloads here and there but didn’t play them right away, and now I’ve accumulated a bunch of them.
I can’t even remember which ones they were though, so I’m going through the whole list of downloaded songs and playing any that don’t have scores against them. It’s odd though, since I know I’ve played some songs that don’t have scores already, and I’m not sure why it didn’t get recorded, and it just makes it harder to tell which ones are really new.
Oh well, I’ll get through them all eventually, and I’m up to Foo Fighters so far.
Tonight was a variety of things, starting off with Crystal Defenders, a Final Fantasy-themed tower defense game just released on XBLA. It looks fairly simple, but it’s harder than it looks, and I haven’t successfully completed a wave yet. That looks like it’s intentional though, as there’s only 6 maps in total, plus a hard variant of each. I’m not sure if it was really worth the money, but it’s still kinda fun.
Next up I was inspired by a forum post to play another Hinterland session. There have been a couple patches since I last played, but nothing revolutionary. I took an Outlaw on long/hardcore, which starts you off in a fame debt that you have to pay off within four days or lose, but that attempt was cut short by some rather hard-hitting monsters instead. I tried again and managed to win that time, though it took about four hours. I really had to be careful since my equipment and town growth was awful for a long time, but in the end things evened out.
And finally I gave Unreal Tournament 3 a whirl. It was cheap and I was curious about modern shooters, but I only had time to play through the tutorial match. There’s a ‘campaign’ mode to it, but I imagine it’ll just be a series of bot matches, much like previous versions and Quake 3… There’s a fast pace to it that I’m not sure I’m comfortable with yet.
Getting away from WoW for a bit, I hopped back into Fable II tonight in order to go through the Knothole Island DLC released a little while ago. And as if I wasn’t rich enough already, I was treated to an instant gain of over a million gold as soon as I loaded my save.
The island turned out to consist of a series of three quests, each of which led to a temple that changed the weather after completion and that changed the terrain of the island around a bit. The temples were fairly easy, with a bit of an overreliance on timed orb switches, and you had to leave the island and come back between each one in order to start the next one.
There were various island-specific items to gather along the way, but the only ones of any real consequence were some new augments and weapons with a larger number of sockets. With those, I’m even more overpowered than I was before…
There was a crypt that gave me a chance to resurrect my dog, having lost it in the main quest, but I opted not to. The consequences of my choice should remain, and I would have had to sacrifice an innocent villager to do so. That halo over my head isn’t just for show!
And that was about it for the island, and I ended the night in the way all gaming sessions should end, by having sex with my wife. Overall, I’m not sure the DLC was really worth it, though. There wasn’t really any challenge or enough new or interesting to it.
Today I finished off the last two chapters in the single-player campaign of Frontlines: Fuel of War, most of which took place within Moscow. Nothing really new was introduced in these chapters, but the sheer density of enemies and prevalence of things like rocket launchers made it more difficult and slow-going than the previous areas. I took a tank through most of it, but it required a lot of backing off and hiding to allow time for repairs.
Overall, the campaign was pretty good, if short. I haven’t tried the multiplayer part yet though, which will depend on how much time I have, how many other people are around, etc. There are also achievements for completing chapters without dying or within time limits, but I’m not sure if I’ll bother trying for those.
I worked through a few more of the Frontlines missions over the last few days. Mission 3 started out like a stealth mission, but it wasn’t too long before the enemies had discovered where I was and most of the rest of the mission was spent trying to coax them out of hiding or sniping them. The second half involved defending a town against a couple waves of enemies, which I barely scraped by on — I’m never very good at timed bits like that.
Mission 4 was mainly a whole lotta tank battling, and then mission 5 took the battle to inside a mountain, where there were all sorts of corridors and boxes and platforms for them to hide on.
I also toyed a bit more with Defense Grid, managing to complete the ‘Grinder’ mode of Waste Disposal. In this one only ‘walker’ enemies appear, but you have to survive through 99 waves of them and the groups of them get bigger and bigger and bigger… It took a whole lot of meteor towers and a couple others I don’t often use, like inferno and concussion, but I made it with only two cores lost.
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