Skip to main content

What I am playing September 2012

The creative juices have not being flowing recently so this poor blog has been quite neglected nevertheless I do like to keep a record of the games I am playing so boring diary post coming up.

Driver San Francisco: The "campaign" in this game is utterly forgettable but the  driving is great fun. I dip in and out of the game every so often for a spot of high adrenaline thrills.

From: Dust: A clever God game with interesting terra-forming capabilities.  It looks and sounds very like Spore but the game play is much more limited sadly and doesn't really do the superb terra forming engine justice.

Rainbow Six Vegas2: I really enjoyed the first Rainbow Six Vegas and this squad shooter sequel is more of the same.  A minor annoyance is that the difficulty is uneven with many trivial levels and  some that are very difficult to complete without multiple deaths and progress by trial and error. Nevertheless there is good replay value in the various challenge modes once you compete the campaign.

Fear 3: Despite the title Fear 3 isn't scary at all but it is a surprisingly good shooter. Any attempt at scares is pretty much destroyed by an achievements system that constantly splashes congratulatory messages on the screen but the campaign has everything you expect in a modern shooting game: well designed levels, intelligent enemy ai, a useful selection of weapons, a good cover system and a powerful bullet time facility. It gets even better the second time around because once you complete any level you can play as the protagonists evil ghost brother. This guy doesn't use guns himself but can possess his enemies which completely changes the way you play the game. Minor complaint is that some of the levels are a bit repetitive but overall this game is highly recommended to shooter fans.

Ground Control: This 12 year old classic could have been been my all time favourite rts. It has no resource building  (which I don't like) and lots of tactical combat (which I love). It still looks fine and runs flawlessly on Win 7-64. It has one major flaw unfortunately and it is a humdinger. There are no mid levels saves at all, not even checkpoints. With challenging levels that last several hours this is a deal breaker. Over the course of last week I got about six levels into the game. Then I lost two hours of progress to a stupid ambush and I remembered why I gave up at about the same point a dozen years ago. The game was released as a free download to celebrate the launch of its sequel so if you want to try it it wont cost you a thing.









Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein...

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p...

Lotro: The Forgotten Treasury

Throg joined a Kinship group for the Forgotten Treasury instance last night. It was an enjoyable change from the solo questing that the now level 55 dwarf champion has been mostly doing so far in Moria. Some members of the group had tried and failed to clear the Treasury before so we knew it would be challenging but we were lucky enough to have a well balanced group with Guardian, Minstrel, Lore Master, Hunter, Burglar and Champion (Throg). Throg (level 55) and the minstrel (53) were both below the 56ish level of the instance but the others were all higher so it more or less balanced out. [SPOILERs ahead] It is a well designed enjoyable instance set in a circular chamber with balcony around. As you enter, a boss absconds to a locked side chamber with his treasure leaving the fellowship to clear trash ringed around the balcony. Once the trash are cleared you have access to a puzzle which must be solved in order to open the locked door. Clearing the (including six mini bosses) also get...