Be Excellent To Each Other

You may not have finished it fully. Theres two endings if I remember rightly.

Three, according to loserfaqs. I got the worst one. Go me!
I reckon it should have let me know.

I've started playing that wolverine game, and its pretty good. Seems a bit like conan, as in brawler with a few climby bits, orbs, unlockable abilities, and bosses.

I think theres a demo for it.

Completed Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow on my DS last night on the way home from work. It's pretty damned good.

Have you played Portrait of Ruin yet? It's not as good as Dawn of Sorrow but still offers a nice Castlevania fix.

where did you have to go, was it them walls were you have to use a monsters specific attack to get through them?

No, I just didn't think about going into the mirror before nailing [Fire guy]. So I completed it, just not properly.

Anyway I finished Wolverine last night, and its well worth a cheap price or a rent. Very similar in style to Conan with it more polish (not the nationality) Wherelike where you brawl a bit, get orbs, learn new attacks, and have enemies that you need to use certain techniques on.

The games not too long although a few of the levels seem near an hour long which seems quite long for a game like this to me. Anyway its almost free from annoying game ruining difficulty spikes and cheating, except for the last boss, although even then it isnt that bad.

B

Should be easy for a whole 1000 if you can be arsed to complete it another time on hard.

Finished Batman:Arkham Asylum last night.
Great atmosphere, solid gameplay, sometimes inspiring. Nice graphics. It would appear, to a non Batgeek like me, to be stuffed to the rafters with references to the Batman universe. The final quarter of the game could be better, but were talking about a very minor degree and I think some of the disappointment comes from the knowledge that the game which I enjoyed enormously, was drawing to a close. Haven't done any of the challenges yet and I have about 35 riddler trophies to mop up.

I'll give it an A

Finished LocoRoco 2.

Lovely knockabout fun.
Mui-mui's/bui-bui's/ho-ho/roco's etc are cute as cute can be
Mui-mui house music makes me happy and I can't help stop and clap when they do
The crane returns (yay!)
Music is generally brilliant, again, in fact there is a nice shift in focus for the music where it starts with few instruments and when you collect more roco's during the level more instruments come in and the roco's sing.
Weird hit and miss shorts when you collect 20 rocos on a level.
A strangely compulsive stamp game.
Mini-games for the sake of mini-games.
Splendid presentation throughout.
This uber-weird short film that can be unlocked inthe mui-mui house where the roco's are made of clay.
General weirdness throughout. This is a good thing.
Collecting maps and unlocking more levels after the games finished. Replayable levels with new objectives too.
Stupid tough as nails levels where one mistake means that you're fucked and can't get 20 roco's. But it doesn't really matter if you collect 20 anyway, so it's left for the compulsive to replay. The difficulty in collecting 20 kinda reminded me of old skool 8 bit games.
Bags of content. I've clocked up over 30 hours for a PSP game that's seems to be aimed at kids but underneath is as hardcore as hardcore could be.

A*. It's brilliant. The only people who won't like it are dead inside.

Completed Professor Layton and the Case of the Curious Village. Fun puzzles, and a lead-by-nose investigation with quite a good story. Nice looking, too.
B.

Oh yeah, finished Forza 2 in every sense of the word - A.

Just completed Batman with all the Riddler challenges solved and the final Arkham spirit found, excellent game A- (the minus for the Poison Ivy boss fight).

Dark Sector

It's a combination of Gears of War*, Resident Evil** and Dead Space*** and yet manages to be less than the sum of it's parts. But still pretty good! I was compelled to finish this game over many half finished titles I have already started, I'm not sure what grip this particular game had over me, but it did.

Pretty varied action meant things never got stale, your powers are upgraded every chapter or two and there are a couple of stages where you take control of big stompy 4 legged mech suits. Some sections it's a little hard to tell wtf is going on as you're in almost complete darkness, but you do have a torch!

Some great atmospheric touches, fantastic nasty combat, twatty bosses, wtf/wgaf storyline. If you see it cheap, and you like the games mentioned above you should grab it. I got my copy from Morrissons btw.

Best new game for £5.99 I have ever played.



*Wall/scenery cover system
**Vibe/Settings/experiments/Weapon shops for upgrades/Bosses
***Aliens/disease/jumpy/creepy

I, too, have finished Batman, nabbed all the Riddler trophies and got the World's Greatest Detective cheevo. I suspect that if you don't have that great an attachment to Batman as a character that it's not actually that great a game - too repetitive, too many stupid boss-fights, too Generic XBox Action Game Grey Space Marine-o-Vision. On the other hand, if you don't have that great an attachment to Batman as a character that's your fault, Mister Stupid-Head. Rank: A

I've just finished FEAR 2. Hmmm, a none apologetic old school shooter on rails with less scares than the first game. C+

So continuing on my quest to clear the games pile I have finished:

Call of Duty 3: Competent shooter which suffers from the usual CoD problem of invisible wall syndrome. 'Flank them to the right'...well I would but I go five paces to the right and this hedge impedes my progress. How did we win the war in Normandy if all infantry and vehicles couldn't got through hedges? Had a quick blast on multiplayer and found that I'm better at it than I am in CoD 4, which means that CoD 3's MP is better than 4's fact fans. Probably enjoyed this more than the core CoD 5 SP campaign. C.

HL2 Episode 2: I don't care what the nay sayers say (with all their naying), I like the HL2 games so nah. The final battle however is somewhat hateful. B+ (oh and it's too bloody short when they took an age to release it).

True that.

Last game I completed was Batman, also. And unusually, i went back to it to get all the collectibibbles and things, too. I don't normally do that. I've not completed many other games lately, though, unless you count Telltale adventure games. I'm currently probably not going to finish Halo 3: ODST, because it entirely fills me with Meh.

This reminds me that I still have to finish Halo 3, I think I got a quarter through it before a wave of ennui flooded over me and I really couldn't be arsed to continue.

Honest Question: Are the batman riddles actually riddles you have to solve? Or are they just question marks you have to collect or something?

Will I ever nail the final stage of the Boss on Rez HD?

if that's the case, really don't buy ODST. I played, liked and finished the original Halo 3. But ODST really didn't grab in the same way. For a start, it suffers from "in the future, lightbulbs don't exist" syndrome, which just makes me want to break things.

It's not that hard if I can do it.

I still don't understand how to get High Score in Rez. I shoot shit down, but get 1/20th of the scores of others on my list.

Drag the boss fights out. If you kill them too quickly you won't get enough points.

You're doing it again, Dimmers!

Ditto. I quite enjoyed the original Halo (despite the cheekery of making you fight through three identically-laid-out floors of the same complex), didn't play the second and found the third left me entirely cold.

Well, finished Burnout Paradise at last. 101% with my Elite licence, motherfuckers! I didn't appreciate it enough last year, but this is simply the best arcade racer this generation. I'd put it in my top five of all time, and all.

Now for Big Surf Island.

Rank S

Well done Matthew, and shut up Dimrill with your 102%.

I've got 102%. And all the challenges done. If the cops and robbers pack was in the deal thing I'd get it.

Having all the challenges done is WHY you've got 102%, or was figuring that out beyond your grey matter?

Nothing to do with getting Big Surf to 100% then?

No, that gets scored separately I think. So does the bikes.

I had 102% before I got all the challenges *stretches and pats back*

It's the prettiest game ever, too.

I have 'finished' ODST. I am in the process of finishing it again but with more finishingness (and without people skipping the stoaty part).

We need to Legendary it too. And that evil last mission achievement.

I finished Halo 3 over the weekend...I've no idea how I maintained my will to live, it really is the boggiest of bog standard shooters.

You're a bog.

I finished King's Bounty. It was one of the best games i've ever played, but it was also a huge timesink. I won't play it again for that.

I think this is unfair. It's good, not great, but above average. IMO, OBV, LOL, THX

I didn't say it was bad...just standard, bog standard. There is no doubting the production values but it seems the gameplay has not significantly moved on from Marathon.

What difficulty did you play it on? Anything below Heroic and it's bunfight. The Halo series has always been about the clever enemy AI kicking in on all difficulties above Normal and transforming the game into a decent challenge - not that I'm eulogising it as it's a 7/10 game without the multiplayer.

Didn't the four letters on the cover give you a clue?

Morte, to get the best out of Halo 3 you must bezzie it up on Legendary.

It brings nothing new to the table but it's highly polished shooty fun.

Rightio, add BF: Bad Company to the completed list.

Excellent game, nice modern shooter with pretentions of being a sandbox game (which it isn't), it does force you to make some interesting tactical descions and can be quite a tense affair. It also scores extra marks for the latter stages being set in a very thinly veiled Turkmenistan (more games should be set in Turkmenistan), although the President was no where near as mad as Turkmenbashi.
I've now dabbled with the multiplayer for a couple of hours and declare it splendid...it seems to play more like 1942 than 1943 does. Excellence all round but points will be deducted for silly 'run round like a blue arsed fly' levels. This has me really look forward to Operation Flashpoint.
B+

/EDIT: Oh and assaulting SAM sites in golf buggies. How could I forget that.

I finished X Men origins : Wolverine last night and mopped up some achievements this morning. I picked it up in Cex last week because I remember a hive tertiary adjunct saying that it was decent enough.

The Eurogamer review is extremely harsh I thought. It's not a pretty game and the plot makes no sense at all, even having seen the film, but as a flimsy premise on which to hang an effective rendition of Wolverine's powers it's more than adequate. There's a wealth of combat moves but it's easy enough to settle on a couple that work for you.

There's a lot of similarities with Arkham Asylum that surprised me;

Feral Vision = Detective Mode
Large lumbering bosses that you have to avoid a charging attack then jump on their backs.
Powering up with skill points to assign to various powers with XP handed out for finding things and smacking people about.
Slow mo money shots of the final kill after each battle.

Probably a few others as well but the comparisons are favourable it has to be said. The levels are all a bit samey and predictable but the combat rarely gets dull and as Arkham Asylum let you feel like Batman you this game really does make you feel like an unstoppable berserking stabby thing from beginning to end.

What's particulary laudable and all games should be forced to include is the option to go back and replay any part of any level with your powered up Wolverine to go hoover up achievements or just try out your overpowered beastie on the earlier enemies to shred them into scarlet vapour.

There's one really fucking annoying boss fight with a flying sentinel and it glitched a couple of times on me so it lacks a fair bit of polish but overall I enjoyed it much more than I anticipated and whored myself a good 750 gamerpoints from it at the same time so score 1 for the hive and -1 for Eurogamer.

Overall B-

There are hidden trophies to find just stashed in odd places, there are 'spray-painted' question marks where you have to line up the dot with the rest and then take a 'photo', and there are proper riddles where you have to take a photo of a specific item.

ODST polished off, just in time to watch the footie.

HALO games are never my favourites in the genre but I will always, upon getting hold of one, play it to completion at the expense of all else then only ever pick it up again for multiplayer if asked by mates. The odd thig is I paid £25 for the privilege this time around. What I got was an improvement, imho - I played this one as you are supposed to, enjoyed it very much and it didn;t go on quite long enough to bore me.