Braid

I got braid week of release, amid the cry by many as the greatest thing happening to live this year. Did i like it? Well yes, although it did induce the first pad throwing of the month…. Having said that though, i really do feel that it was overpriced & overhyped. For a set of 60 puzzles, i think 1200ms is a bit steep, considering how much more (and longer) i’ll be playing both TTR & Lumines. At no point did i feel that this game was life changing, it made me smile, and it made me think WoW on occasion, but it never convinced me it should be played again.

Now thats out of the way, the one thing i really liked about this game was that finger snapping moment when you worked out what you had to do. If you’re playing and you get stuck, nothing more than a break and a re-assesment at a later date should be nessecary (Although i went through several of the puzzles about 6 times over various sessions before i got them). The one thing that got me, which only triggered when talking to a friend, is the way you can double jump on enemies in certain situations and get higher. The pacing in that respect was great. The other thing i liked was the music, it was a real nice change of pace to the standard dross we seem to get in alot of 360 games. It was calming, unobtrusive, and subtle. The art was pretty, although i didn’t like how short my man was…

On a seperate note, i’m steaming towards my last achievement in TTR outside of the two DLC maps (Which i’m still not buying), i’m over the 50% winn loss ratio also, which is pleasing!

A whole night to myself

Well I wanted to play a lot of games today. I’ve got bio-shock to be getting on with, skate to finally finish, and the rest of the list of shame to contend with. Unfortunately, all I seemed to want to do is play endlessly on TTR. Now don’t get me wrong, I love me some TTR, it just seems that on a night where I had the house to myself, I should have used the time to play some of those more involving games that I don’t often get to enjoy.

Gaming: Post rockband (G:PR) has seen much of my evenings in with anniedele playing said game, as we slowly work through improving our instruments and learning the ropes. This has almost entirely used up all free time I had to play any other game, which has caused me some issues. I know there are games coming out that I’m gonna want straight away, but I don’t want to get them when I still have so much at my finger tips. I guess that it comes with the territory of the gamer, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it. And my keen sense of a bargain means that things like the orange box for fifteen pound coins are very hard to pass up, which only adds to my list of games I really should play before I buy any more. Next month, I won’t buy any more….

A Quiet Night in

As the wind and rain whistled around our flat, I took in a couple of hours of bioshock (Halfway through first mission, on the way through the medical pavilion) and a fair few games of ticket to ride.

The atmosphere of Bioshock is really something, the times when all you can hear are some inane gibberings of a splicer are quite disturbing, and the times where they’ve attacked each other before they’ve seen me is a really nice touch. The way the back-story is handled with the tapes is particularly appealing due to the hoarding mentality it rewards. Hacking seems a bit hit and miss. On a few occasions it seems that you are destined to fail, blocking off so many squares it became impossible to make a chain. Although the penalty is so small it really doesn’t make too much difference i suppose.

As for ticket to ride, i screwed myself over in a big game because all of a sudden you can use some routes twice. Not knowing this, i made a mad dash out of my way to get a track i desperately needed, which resulted in two people blocking off my only ways to get there. Would have been handy to explain that in the stupid tutorial I suppose. I am glad to see that TTR is still being played on the America map, I was quite concerned that everyone would migrate to the Europe map.