Currently… Playing:
Dungeon Defenders
Listening to:
Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds
Watching:
Smallville: Season 10
Reading:
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline Hey look, a Paypal button.
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Sensible World Of Soccer on the Amiga provided me with hours of entertainment.
Most of them not actually playing the game, but updating the rosters of the various football clubs, and editing the fictional teams with themes of my own choosing.
A lot of time was also spent brainlessly clicking the fire button through the Career mode, “managing” an amazing team I’d assembled (but were so good no longer needed any kind of managing) on auto-pilot.
A huge chunk of time was also spent waiting for the game to calculate the standings and cup results in other countries around the rest of the World at the end of the season.
Compare that to the time I actually spent controlling little men and kicking a little ball around… Well, I made a graph. Look at it.
Strangely, I never got on with the version on Xbox Live Arcade. Maybe it’s because I have better things to spend my time doing now.
It’s true! I didn’t! Well, I did for a little while, but my brother started just after me and played it more than I had the inclination to, so I watched him play through it. In many ways it was more enjoyable to be honest, as I wasn’t getting on with the controls. It was the first kind of game where it didn’t really matter if you were playing it or not, as so much of it was exploration, or talking to people – for me it was more fun watching the experience than playing the game.
 I see. While I was researching this piece, I found several Youtube videos of Shenmue… Man, it brought back some memories. While I don’t think there’s any point in me going over the endless “Do you know where I can find some sailors?” or “I’m looking for Warehouse number 8″ jokes*, there were many things in Shenmue that do deserve a mention simply because it was such a magical game. From the beautiful, swirling title screen, to the memorable little ditties that played when you went into shops (the Tomato Convenience Store being my personal favourite), having to wait for a bus to take you to the harbour, and the way day slowly turns to night (which changes the options available to you), to the Forklift racing, it was packed full of lovely little touches.
While I’m honestly not bothered if there is or isn’t another Shenmue game, I can understand that many people do want one, if just to learn the conclusion to the story, to find out if Ryo does eventually avenge his Father’s killing, or if he gets sidetracked by playing arcade machines all day and amassing a huge collection of capsule toys.
*Ok, so I couldn’t resist poking fun – see image and caption to the right.
 Back in the glorious days of the original black and white (or black and horrible shade of yellow/green, to be more accurate) Gameboy, I owned a game called Pokémon Blue. You may have heard of it. My brother had Pokémon Red and a Gameboy of his own, and while we very rarely battled, we quite often traded Pokémon in an attempt to fulfil the marketing criteria of “Catching ‘Em All”.
Around the time of the first Pokemon movie being released, it was announced there was to be a Pokémon event at a shopping centre in Southampton where Nintendo themselves would put a Mew into your game! Ah, a chance to get the 151st Pokémon and fully complete our Pokédexes! Thing was, they said they’d only put Mew on one cartridge per-person, and my brother was going to be on holiday for the duration of the weekend event… As the day drew closer I concocted numerous plans. One involved going in early one day, then later on the next day in the hope they wouldn’t recognise me, wearing totally different clothes. Another consisted of me begging them to understand that my brother was on holiday, knowing that that probably was a common excuse as to why someone wanted a Mew on two carts.
In the end, I went in there, held up a blue cartridge and a red cartridge, and they loaded them both, one after the other, into the Super Game Boy (which was plugged into a US SNES, I recall), and transferred a Mew into both without me even needing to explain that my brother was on holiday. By that time, he had lost interest in Pokémon anyway, so I kept my Mew at level 5 and levelled his to 100 in my game. Glorious days.
We all have them, surely. Moments in gaming that transcend simply playing a game, completing it and moving on. Some memories stick with you for a long time. Indeed, some of my personal memories are from as long as 20 years ago. Also, for one of the first times, it won’t just be me writing these things, as I’ve asked members of Random Fury! to contribute their own Memorable Gaming Moments to this series.
Some of my most memorable moments have already been captured on the blog, such as my time with Phantasy Star Universe and Phantasy Star Online, some of the amazing experiences I’ve had with Random Fury! on Halo 2, finding a cheat in Hero Quest, finding out that Radar Rat Race and New Rally X are identical, finally nailing that preview lap in the sixth tier of events on Burnout Revenge, and my most recent triumph, the Tenpeat on Super Street Fighter IV.
The ones that will follow over the next week or so are a bit older. I hope you enjoy reading them, maybe you could leave a comment or two, or maybe even pop over to the forum and post your own in our Memorable Gaming Moments thread.
For more details such as “Who’s who?” and “WTF is that picture all about?” go to the Weddingfest topic, as this is an image archive just in case Imageshack ever loses any of them. The photographs were taken by myself or Jane if there is no other name in the title of the file.
CAUTION! There are 91 thumbnails!
Continue reading Weddingfest gallery
This is all about Firefight, the super cool mode on Halo 3: ODST where you are in an arena and wave after wave of Covenant rush at you, shooting their futuristic neon laser guns in your direction. It was going to be about Pokémon, I figured I’d not written about it in a while. I am still playing Pokémon Emerald on my PSP, but it’s slow going as I’m trying to level up every catchable Pokémon in an area before moving on to the next. How long have I been playing? Two weeks? Three? Anyway, I’m only up to Lavaridge Town, still with only a vague idea of what my final team will be, fighting-fire-chicken and HM-whore-Linoone aside. So yeah, FIREFIGHT!
 Rally Point, Crater, Windward, Last Exit Jane and I have been playing it quite a lot over the past few nights, and although we’ve only been playing on easy, we’ve racked up the 200k Achievements on Rally Point, Crater, Windward and Last Exit. They only took about 80 minutes each, and luckily we managed to hit the 200k before all six skulls were active – we usually got it with Tough Luck, Catch, Tilt, Famine and Mythic. Adding Black Eye to that combination would’ve killed us, for sure.
The first few waves of the first round of any set is always easy if you have access to a turret – as Catch isn’t turned on, the enemies don’t throw many grenades. When Catch is on, however, move around a lot or you’ll be peppered with exploding blue things, or worse, patches of fire. Flame grenades are one of the things that will kill you most. At first I kinda freaked out when skulls like Tilt and Famine went on, but on easy they don’t tend to make that much of a difference, you can still power through most things with a few melee attacks, even Brutes. Just keeping your head down and getting on with the job in hand is a better approach. Melee attacks are even better if you have a Gravity Hammer (even if it’s run out of juice), as killing five enemies in a row with it nets you a nice points bonus. I’ll say this again, just to clarify: Yes, even if it’s run out of battery and you can only do standard melee attacks with it, it still counts towards the Hammer Spree/Dream Crusher.
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Blow dat Wraith yeah
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Teamwork is key
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Let’s roll
Last Exit was the first one we cracked – having a supply of Ghosts at hand really helped. That, and the map design gives you a massive amount of control over where your next enemies are coming from (unless it’s Drones or Jet-pack Brutes, of course). We started well on Windward, clearing the landing pads before the Covenant even got inside, but it got quite tough towards the end where we were pretty much pinned down in the middle room. Still, we powered through, the extra points from killing the Banshee helping loads (Keeping the Missile Pods intact is a key point on this map). Crater was simple enough – I had actually scored the 200k on this one on easy by myself before, and by this point I’d figured out that using an empty Hammer was brilliant for points. Rally Point, again, was simple enough, no real problems there. Well, apart from the Wraiths, but the points they gave offset the lives they cost.
It may have only been like 40-50 Gamerscore, but all in all, we’ve had a great time killing Covenant together.
There I was, playing Halo 3, waiting for Matchmaking to do it’s stuff, as you do. The teams popped up, and whose was the first name I noticed, directly above mine on the blue team? Blimey, it’s only GRcade moderator The Alchemist “Tiarny” Penguin. I fired off a quick “hi lol” message to him just as the game was starting up, and he sent me a “lol, what are the chances of that?” message afterwards.
Here’s the game: http://www.bungie.net/Stats/GameStatsHalo3.aspx?gameid=1764808477&player=toxic%20rf
We won, despite two of our team leaving, and I notched up a +12, which is always nice. I even took a screenshot of us in action (which was more difficult than it sounds – getting a nice photogenic shot of two players facing the same way without the other team or the background in the way, or everyone’s shields going off in a game of Halo is quite rare).
 We both have bubble-heads. That explains the bubble-head reference. I took more than that, but I think that was the best one. If you’re interested, the rest are on my Bungie.net profile, or you can see them if you select “Files” in the game viewer.
So, I went to the Jobcentre on Wednesday, not in the hope that they’d give me free money (I was 99% sure they wouldn’t), but in the hope that they’d give me a letter that I could show to the bank so I could open a new bank account with Natwest. Jane banks with them, so it’d make sense in the long run to switch to them instead of staying with Barclays. My Gran (who is lovely, I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before) had sent me a cheque and as my bank account was closed due to inactivity, I had nowhere to pay it into! So anyway, I went there to start a new claim, and to my astonishment, they basically told me I’d wasted £5 on bus fare to get down there (Waterlooville isn’t exactly a cutting edge frontier, the nearest Jobcentre is half an hour’s bus journey away), as they only do new claims by phone nowadays.
So, I got home, phoned them up – the call took about half an hour – and was told to come back in on Thursday for an appointment. Thing is, I went in there and the woman on the phone had set me up for the wrong type of Jobseeker’s allowance, so I had to fill in a 32 page form. I was basically repeating the process I had done over the phone on Wednesday, but by myself, and with a slightly different form. Modernisation is amazing. So, the bottom line of that is that I will have a letter saying that I am not entitled to any free money (like I was expecting any anyway), but it will be a letter which will hopefully be enough to satisfy Natwest’s proof of identity criteria.
see more Lolcats and funny pictures
Looks a bit like a Tigger nose.
I really should get around to trying to make some LOLs with our cat pictures.
Last week was… quiet, not a lot happened. I found out Barclays closed my bank account because it was inactive, and wanted me to spend £80 on a passport to re-open it. Rubbish. Jane was off for a few days last week, her appendix was grumbling, giving her jip. Poor girl.
Next week will be quiet in a different kind of way! Claire, Matt and the kids have gone on holiday to the Isle of Wight. I’m so looking forward to the peace and quiet.
If you read the forum at all, you may notice I’m trying to drum up some support for this idea I had for a nice little feature on here. Called Memorable Gaming Moments (the post tag will be “MGM” so you can easily find all the articles in the feature), it is basically what it sounds like: People write about their most memorable gaming moments. I’ve written six so far, with another six planned, and then however many the guys on the forum decide to write (which is so far looking like none at all, lol).
Here’s the graphic:
Keep an eye out for the feature, coming soon.
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