Thursday 22 Apr 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

So last night I was able to fire up the game again.

As you might recall, I was trapped on a boat. But on reloading the game, I have now magically reached the Assassin’s Bureau. (Which is interesting, because so far I’ve been unable to find it…) So I walk in, and the guy tells me that I need to track somebody down. OK, well I guess I’d better go walk around randomly then?

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Tuesday 20 Apr 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

I played AS some more last night. After going through the fifteen levels of menues to get into the game, I find myself standing in an empty room. So… oh yeah, that’s right. The guy said there are 9 people I need to kill or something. So I guess I need to go somewhere? Hmm.

I walk outside the building and some guy says something about a sword demonstration. Oh yeah, that’s right, now I’ve got my weapons back, it said I could go practice fight technique out in the yard. Well anyway, as far as I can tell, fighting people is pretty easy. Draw your sword, keep clicking the mouse button. The enemy gets a pretty brutal seeing to. If you hold shift, sometimes you can throw people to the ground. (Seems to work roughly 20% of the time, at random.) I still haven’t figured out what the hell “Button 1” and “Button 0” refer to.

For reasons unknown, only one enemy ever attacks you at a time. It’s strange, but it’s true. (And it’s quite helpful.)

Most of the rest of my play session was spent walking to Damascus. Let me tell you, it took a loooooooong time to walk that far. I’m not even kidding.

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Monday 19 Apr 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

I played Portal again the other day. Now why would I do that?

I’ll tell you why. All over the game, more of those little radios have appeared. Each one has a little red light on the front, but if you take it to a specific point on the map, the music stops playing, a bunch of morse code can be heard, the light turns green, and an acheivement progress notification flashes up in the corner of the screen.

The achievement is called “transmission received”. Apparently it’s somehow related to Portal 2, which is meant to be officially in production now. And it’s supposedly a much, much bigger stand-alone game.

They’ve also changed the game’s final ending slightly, as can be seen online. Apparently after you destroy GLaDOS and lay in the wreckage, the unseen Party Associate robot thanks you for assuming the Party Position and slowly drags your limp body back into the facility.

Personally, replaying the game I found the radios to be quite annoying. I just found the loud distored music blaring constantly in the background to be very distracting. And while some of them are easy enough to crack, many of them are positioned in absurdly unreachable locations, even for somebody equiped with a portal gun.

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Monday 19 Apr 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

My dad obviously had no idea what the hell to get for my birthday, so he got me some games. Apparently most shops only sell games for PS3 or Xbox or something, and finding PC games isn’t easy. (Unless you want the £2 games like Quake or HalfLife.) What he eventually gave me was Assassin’s Creed and Cryostasis.

Now from what I’ve heard, Assassin’s Creed was OK, but Assassin’s Creed 2 was infinitely better. We shall see. But I started off with Cryostasis (which I’ve never heard of).

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Monday 22 Feb 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

So I’ve completed Psychonauts for the second time now. There aren’t too many games where I’d bother, but this one’s worth it.

The first time around, I didn’t do much exploring. This time I had more of a look around. (I also knew before hand about the various points of no return.) I managed to find almost everything on the treasure-hunt. (I think I missed the foscil, the glass eye and the golden acorn. And I’m pretty sure I found some of those the first time around.) I also got a few extra lines of dialog, some of which was pretty humourous.

“Hey, do you happen to know the way to Sasha’s secret lab?”
“Secret? It’s printed on your map, dummy!”
“Oh, uh, yeah, I knew that. I just wanted to if you knew that.”
“Yes.”

It’s interesting that you have a map with objectives printed on it, but it only works for, like, the first quarter of the game or so, because the rest of it is spent in mental worlds or in just one single physical location. Actually, when you think about it, the whole game is fairly short. Which is a pitty, because it’s such a nice game. And the ending so heavily foreshadows a sequal…

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Monday 22 Feb 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

I stumbled across an article entitled Assasin’s Creed II PC’s DRM sounds as pleasent as a stab in the neck.

This apparently applies only to the PC version, not the various console versions. (Because it’s impossible to pirate those, right?) The gist of it is that if you lose your Internet connection, you get booted out of the game. This is supposedly meant to make using an illegal copy of the game impossible. Because, let’s face it, nobody can crack DRM, right?

Right??

WRONG, morons! I have yet to see a “copy-protected” game, film, song, whatever, which hasn’t been copied anyway.

Now let’s be clear on this. Piracy is a crime. I do not own any pirated works. All my stuff is legal. Because if I like something enough to want to own it, it seems fair to me that I should pay the people who worked so hard creating it. (There’s also the small matter of getting the geniune article and not some mutilated, low-quality copy — or just a computer virus…)

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Tuesday 02 Feb 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

So last night I loaded up the game to see if I would be able to go back and collect more of the stuff I missed the first time around. I was expecting to have to restart from the beginning, but actually hitting continue just planted me back in the Collective Unconcious, standing next to the door to the Meat Circus.

I wandered over to the next door and entered Black Velvetopia. Oh, how neat! I actually get some new content. I see Edgar playing cards with the dogs. And that damned bull isn’t running around the place. Clearly the designers expected you to come back again later, and put some work in to that scenario. How nice.

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Sunday 31 Jan 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

Heh, well, I got there in the end!

I feel like I only explored a tiny fraction of Black Velvetopia before leaving. That was probably a mistake. Along the way, you’re supposed to collect 4 cards, which involves fighting 4 identical copies of the same boss, although with a different colour scheme each time. If I’m remembering this right, the first boss is Tiger. Just so long as you use levitation correctly to enable you to run away fast and jump out of harm’s way, he’s reasonably easy to beat (although it still took a few tries). IIRC, next up is Dragon, who has a habit of sitting you on fire. Try to avoid that!

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