Waves

It’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to sit down and write about what’s been going on in my life, but don’t panic, this won’t be a massive, over-long post as I’ve not been up to much. My new job at Asda is going well, although I don’t feel I’m being used to the maximum of my potential. I’ve mostly been tidying up and restocking the seasonal aisle, which, as you can imagine, at this time of year takes a bit of a beating. Just give me a week on the Music and Video desk, it’d go from being chaotic to organised, streamlined and more productive. Honestly, there are CD’s and DVD’s in the “NEW RELEASES” drawer that would be considered new if you lived in 2008. Also, I occasionally get the feeling I’ve only been brought in as an extra pair of hands to help keep stock on the shelves over Christmas rather than feeling like they analysed my strengths and brought me in for the long term. My Colleagues are nice enough, and it’s quite a relaxed working environment. I’m still surprised and a little amused when they say it’s “busy” though – I’m used to working in proper, city centre retail outlets, where it can get incredibly busy – something I’ve yet to encounter in my new job.

Still playing Halo: Reach, very much enjoying the new maps they released recently. I should get some screenshots on them for upcoming Screenshots of the week. All three maps are really very good, I think they benefit from being made from the ground up as opposed to being ripped out of the Campaign mode. Anchor 9 is a nice little 4v4 arena, a little reminiscent of The Pit from Halo 3, but with an amazing outdoors low gravity gimmick. Tempest is a great medium sized map, lots of hills and scenery to hide behind – maps that are mostly flat are pretty boring (cough, Haemorrhage). Breakpoint is my favourite though, a lovely big map that doesn’t feel too big. Although it’s been designed for the Invasion gametype, all the other objective based games I’ve played on it have fit very well. Unlike Boneyard and Spire, you don’t feel as if 75% of the map is rendered pointless by it not being used with an Invasion gametype. I’m a bit disappointed there were no new Firefight maps or Campaign side-missions, and a little miffed that Tempest (although being fully Forge-able) is really too small to make truly unique new maps, but all in all, they’re great additions.

I’ve also been playing Pac-Man Championship Edition Deluxe (Pac-Man CE DX), which came out recently. It’s nice enough, but ruined by Matrix-style slowdown when you’re about to run into a ghost. Honestly, the beauty of Pac-Man is that you plan ahead and try to second guess the ghosts mistakes, not plough headlong into them and let the slow-mo take all the danger out of it. If that on it’s own didn’t make it far too easy to avoid losing a life, there’s also a bomb feature. Tap a bumper when you’re in trouble and “poof!”, all the ghosts return to the middle. The sleeping ghosts are a nice little touch, but they do make the routes around the mazes a little bit too contrived and obvious, although I do like the ghost-train feature. Wake up a bunch of ghosts and they are added to the snake-like ghost-train which traces your Pac-steps exactly, making it a bit different from the other ghost personalities. It can get quite long too (up to 30 ghosts), so if you’re not careful you can run into it’s tail. I’ve not unlocked all the modes yet, so hopefully there is a mode more like the original Pac-Man CE. If not, I think I’m going to remove it from my hard-drive and rely on Pac-Man CE for my Pac-Man fix.

Well, look at that. I said it wouldn’t be a long one, but it turned out to be a reasonable length!