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Gauntlet: generally boring

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Some games don't age well, unfortunately. Moreover, some games just don't suit certain settings in the first place, and age makes it ever more evident.  Playing Gauntlet last night, I felt that it should have stayed in the arcade, as the constant draining of health and difficulty in dispatching enemies feels odd when there's nobody waiting to have the next go on the machine.

In the end I just decided to clear an achievement for getting the highest score on the leaderboard.  This meant getting above 8000 on a single life.  By warping to level four, I found I could stand in a corridor and kill all the enemies spawning around a corner; after a while the walls changed to exits and I could kill even more in the level.  Not the most fun thing ever, though.


The Typing of the Dead Overkill: trying to touch type

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I played the original Tying of the Dead quite a lot, both on the Dreamcast and the PC.  The Dreamcast version was a bit of a faff, since it was a US import which therefore required a boot disc and crossed fingers, and you could never be sure it wasn't going to corrupt your VMU.  The PC game was more accessible, except I never really had a gaming PC that could do it justice.  I still have the disc, somewhere.

When I heard that The House of the Dead Overkill was to get the same treatment, I was a little excited.  When I learnt that it had just been released on Steam around five minutes later, I was more excited and went to download it.  It's not like me to buy something without seeing any reviews or impressions from trusted sources, but, well, it's The Typing of the Dead.  I was glad that I bought it even before I started to play, after I learnt of the game's troubled development and eventual rescue.

Firstly, the bad news.  Unlike the first TotD game, which was based on The House of the Dead 2, the characters aren't wearing Dreamcasts on their backs with a bizarre keyboard lap tray.  Instead, the graphics are completely unchanged, which means that they must be using incredibly bizarre guns.

The core gameplay remains the same, though.  Zombies appear and shamble towards you; you must type the word that appears next to them.  As soon as you do so, they are killed.  Kill them before they kill you, and all is rosy.



This would all be fine if I was a decent touch typist.  I'm not - despite me being able to type entire sentences of reports without looking at the keyboard, it appears that as soon as it's no longer about economics, I need to see which letters I'm hitting.  And this then causes issues, because I can't see when new zombies appear, I can't see which ones are running towards me rather than ambling, I can't see when something is thrown and I need to press a single key quickly.

There is a mechanic in the game where if an enemy starts to approach you faster, you can cancel your current word by pressing backspace, and start the new word.  Guess what I need to do in order to hit backspace?  Look at the keyboard.

I made a conscious effort to look at the screen.  My accuracy dropped right down, but all the time I was typing normal words my keyboard mashing was working OK.  But then this happened:


And it wasn't just phalanges.  As soon as I was having to type single letters in order to spell the word, my typing rhythm disappeared and I started to panic.

Having said that, I got through the first chapter fine, before leaving it for now.  I will be back, though - just maybe after getting a better keyboard.  Or a Mac version.

Tomb Raider: completed!

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I cleared the last enemies from outside the temple on my first attempt, although it was a pretty close thing, relying on me running away and picking them off one by one.  I approached the bridge, and was confronted by a huge monster.  I readied myself for battle ... and then he was blown off the bridge.  Genuinely funny.

Climbing around the temple was quite stunning, with a real solid feeling of ruin and adversity.  Climbing the cliffside as the building falls was really exhilarating, even if it's a false excitement since none of the debris would ever actually hit Lara.




It's a good job that it takes a long time to transfer a Sun Queen spirit from one body to another, because Lara took quite a while to work around the outside of the temple, killing soldiers and guardsmen alike.  Lots of killing.  There was then a boss fight, facing the large monster from the bridge, which was a classic videogame encounter: wait for him to attack, dodge around the back, shoot lots; wait until weakspot is exposed (the head) and attack; repeat two more times with additional enemies appearing throughout.



  More cutscenes, followed by an anti-climatic quick-time event sequence to kill the final enemy.  At the time, this felt like a suitable exciting and clever ending to the game, with Lara finally getting her hands on her signature twin pistols and using them to finish the enemy off.  Looking back, however, it's a shame that it wasn't more of a fight, since simply aiming and hammering the trigger buttons in turn meant that it was over all too quickly.



And killing him meant everything was OK again - so why didn't Lara do it before, at any of the many times she was hiding and he walked past?  Why wait until Sam was actually undergoing soul transplant surgery?

Anyway, the final cutscene finishes with Lara saying that she's not going home, in an obvious way of allowing the player to run around the island collecting all the bits they may have missed.  How, exactly, she plans to not go home given she's on a boat sailing to England isn't clear.  I'm guessing she got to a port and went straight to an airport to get back on the island, given that she's not showered or changed clothes when restarting.  The other odd thing is that in some areas there are still soldiers running around trying to kill Lara and talking about Mathius as if he's still alive.  News travels slowly.


There were relatively few things I'd missed on my playthrough - one additional tomb (no idea how I missed it), a few relics and documents which were now on the treasure maps, and a few challenges.  For the last of these I must admit I looked at a guide on the Internet when I couldn't find things immediately.  One of the old flags, for example, was up near the top of a radio tower which you couldn't climb.  One of the GPS beacons was on a platform which I had to line up two bouys to get to.



So, not just complete but all areas are 100% complete, Lara's at the maximum skill level and all weapons are fully upgraded.  Looking at the achievement list, the only things I'm missing are to do with multiplayer or killing soldiers in a certain way, which I can't be bothered with.  In order to get enough salvage to fully upgrade my weapons I killed quite a few deer in the first level - doing the same but with people who fire back doesn't sound appealing.


Sonic the Hedgehog: collecting emeralds

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The original Mega Drive game was available on the PS3 for around a pound, so I bought it.  Of course.  I now own that game on the Mega Drive, Saturn (in Sonic Jam), Gamecube and Xbox (in Sonic Mega Collection), DS (in Sonic Classic Collection), Xbox 360 and PS3.  And I've completed it on every platform other than the PS3.

This pales into insignificance when you compare it to Andy's collection, but I've no doubt I'll buy the 3DS version at some point ...

After getting annoyed with the battle in Tomb Raider, I decided to play through this.  Rather than a straight run-through, I decided to try to get as many trophies as possible.  This means not dying, completing the first act of Green Hill and Marble in relatively quick times, collecting all the chaos emeralds, and completing the game in less than 40 minutes.  I was saving after every stage and had to restart the special stages a couple of times, but I've now got a save game with five chaos emeralds, at the start of Spring Yard 3.  I think that the overall time might be more than 40 minutes by the time I get to the end though, so I might need to play through another time without trying for the special stages.

Tomb Raider: fights

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I must be getting to the end now, since the enemies I face are no longer normal soldiers, but undead Japanese soldiers with lots of armour on.  Blasting them with a fully-upgraded shotgun from close range doesn't kill them.

I entered the monastery being very careful not to make a scene.  I crept past two guards and through a huge hall of soldiers.  Then as I climbed out the window, I was spotted, and had to run away from an inferno.  Since then I've been making my way through a pretty linear level with hundreds of enemies, who keep killing me.  I've gone past five checkpoints so far, but last night I got stuck just outside the main temple and turned the console off.  I really hope those checkpoints saved.