Wednesday 28 Apr 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

Yes, it’s that time of year again. Walked into the dance hall to find that the fire escape door is propped open, and it’s still pretty damned warm in there. This is before we start dancing. Oh dear.

With my class merging with Debbie’s Wednesday class next week, Linda decided we should probably learn the routine that those guys do. Hehe, uh… wow. OK, we’re all in deep trouble! Suffice it to say that there’s lots of hopping and jumping involved, and a small bevvy of moves that none of us have ever seen before. We were all very warm by the end of that lot. (I find it especially unerving the way the floor shakes when you jump on it…)

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Monday 26 Apr 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

Yes, there’s more.

I spent almost the entire weekend playing Assassin’s Creed, so consequently rather a lot happened in-game. Far more than I can actually remember now, so I’ll just include the more amusing hilights.

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Monday 26 Apr 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

Friday night was my first evening without Lesley. But hey, I had Lois to dance with, which was fine. She’s quite tall when she wears heels. Anyway, the lesson began predictably with a Waltz. This was followed by a Quickstep, a Rumba and a Cha-Cha-Cha (no, I don’t remember in which order). All of which came off fairly easily, with the exception of the Whisk & Chasse in the Waltz. That was slightly questionable. But hey.

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Friday 23 Apr 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

I didn’t get to play for very long last night. I tried several routes south; all of them ended up with me in the restricted area. The gap apparently can’t be jumped even on horseback, and when I tried to go back some nutter sliced up my horse. I tried to fight him, but to no avail. Now most guards, if you just repeatedly click the mouse, eventually they die. But this guy is apparently unkillable. Hmm, whatever.

So I tried travelling east instead. In spite of what the status indicator said, I didn’t have much trouble. In one small village I suddenly got chased, but I just galloped to the viewpoint I was trying to reach, and started climbing. I got a few arrows fired at me while I’m scaling the wall, but once I was up high all I got was the flashing yellow alarm. Dive off the top and sit in the hay for, like, 6 seconds or so, and the blue light turns to green, and everybody forgets all about me. Jump out, get on my horse (which has randomly followed me, even though I’m hidden), and off I go.

At another point I got chased. I gallopped off. The alarm turns from red to yellow. I get to the next village and casually walk through, all the time with this alarm going off. Nobody cared. And when the next chunk of the map loaded, the alarm magically went away.

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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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Wednesday 21 Apr 2010 by Orphi the AweKid.

Due to assorted melodrama, I got to me class a few minutes late. There’s a reasonable number of people this time, and I get to dance with Cleo, yay!

We started off with a little Stroll. Linda decided to try out a few variations; almost flattened Ellie at one point! Hmm, walking backwards in the middle of a crowd of dancers? Hazardous! Anyway, then we continued practising the little routine from last week (with the moves that I don’t know how to do yet). I managed to remember the Pit-Pat, except as soon as I remarked that I’d remembered it. That instantly caused me to get it wrong. Oh well!

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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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