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Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies: non-existent monsters

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Just reaching the end of episode two; this is so far a great game with little emphasis on special powers, which spoilt the Apollo Justice game somewhat and were a bit tenuous in Justice For All and Trials & Tribulations. Athena's power is used very sparingly, just enough to break up the trial process, but it's not been used as yet as a way out of a dead end - at all times I've been able to see where the evidence would eventually point.

I wasn't a huge fan of the setting for the second episode, though.  It suffered from the fact that the game has been transferred from Japan to the US, but all the settings were unmistakeably Japanese and so the story had to crowbar in references to how the villages were modelled on Japanese styles, superstitions were Japanese, festivals were to celebrate Japan ... the overt use of superstitions and monsters also seemed pretty ludicrous at first, though of course that just meant that part of the game was spent with me trying to work out a way to show that there was no such thing as a monster called Tenma Taro.

Case three now, and I'm off to university as an eighteen-year-old girl.  I'm sure it's not possible to be a lawyer at that age ...

Blur: being hopeless

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I still haven't worked out what an X5 multiplier is, so I skipped onto the next set of challenges and got bronzes and silvers on them all, but still didn't unlock the one-on-one challenge.  I have a feeling that the career of this game is going to be easier to complete by unlocking as much as possible, replaying events to gain more fans, unlocking faster and better cars, and going back to previous events to unlock the bosses.  That's fine other than the fact that some of the events are pretty difficult in themselves.

I'm seriously thinking about knocking the difficulty down to 'easy'.


The main reason I was playing this tonight was for multiplayer, though.  RLLMUK was organising a Blur revival night, but it never happened.  Instead I played a few races against randoms, which I comprehensively lost.  It wasn't until later on in the evening that I worked out how to use the handbrake to stop myself piling straight into barriers.

Red Dead Redemption: to Mexico!

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Use of the in-game satnav has helped with the cliff issue, but I've now reached a point in the story where this is no longer an issue.  After a fraught crossing of the river by raft (during which I probably shot half the population of Mexico, I'm now running around areas of Spanish speakers and being attacked by bobcats.  I don't think there's a way at the moment for me to get back to the US side of the river, so I hope there's noting that I've missed out on over there.

The game is just a bit too expansive, really, and I'm slightly put off by the amount of side missions and other bits and pieces that I know I'm not going to find and complete. I've decided to not worry about this, though, and my primary aim is to complete the story, ignoring the trophy list and multitudes of icons on the map.  I do keep getting distracted by the strangers and herbs, though.

According to the Rockstar Social Club, I've now completed 36.8% of the game.  I'm not sure if that's just the main missions or everything.  Still some way to go, whatever.

Tomb Raider 3: awkward

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I bought the entire Tomb Raider series on Steam a while ago, and I was inspired to play something after a short conversation with Sue on Twitter.
I never completed Tomb Raider 3, despite loving the first two, so this was an obvious thing to try. It took quite a while to get it working on my work laptop, and then configuring it to use the Xbox 360 pad took even longer.  I eventually settled an a scheme which meant I only needed to use the keyboard for crouching and walking slowly, and set off the the jungle.


The game looks a little rough nowadays, but that's not necessarily a bad thing given the paltry processing power of my laptop.  Rendering at 1280 x 800 meant that the game ran really smoothly; the cumbersome controls were a much bigger hindrance.  This was only part due to my inability to configure the 360 pad properly; the absence of a second stick to look around really hurts a game based around exploration.


It took a while to come across the first enemies.  I shot a monkey because I was convinced that he was looking at me funny; later on i realised that the monkeys only attack if attacked first.


That's not true of the tigers.  These took quite a few bullets to finish off, and bounded towards me very quickly.  Lara's not really a conservationist.


I got stuck on this bit for ages, mainly because the controls just weren't responsive enough for me to be able to pull the switch, turn around, and jump into the wall cavity before the big spiky wall killed me.

Despite the issues, it was fun to revisit the game.  As there doesn't seem to be a plan to remake TR2 and TR3 in the same way as Tomb Raider Anniversary, I may need to dig out my original PlayStation TR3 disc and play it on the PS3, which will overcome at least some of the control issues - plus, of course, in a month's time I'll be handing back this work laptop and have no idea if Steam will run on the next one.

DLC Quest – Live Freemium or Die: Completed!

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I started this a while ago, but unwisely didn't complete it at the time.  While waiting for The Typing of the Dead Overkill to download, I had to rediscover the whole map, talk to everyone again, and spend ages wandering around trying to find out my current objective.


Live Freemium isn't as biting a satire as the first game (not that that was particularly vicious anyway), but instead looks to send up many aspects of gaming culture.  The comedian simply parrots out lines from games; towards the end of the came there's a collectathon fetch quest just to get hold of a certain item; the most difficult enemies are zombies.  As with the first game, the primary objective is to collect coins in order to buy new abilities or optional random stuff.  I was amused by the high-def pack, which turned everything brown, and the DLC NPC, which just generated a new character called "DLC MAN" who complained that he couldn't have a central role to the plot since he was an optional extra.

Again, the writing was clever and funny.




I'm guessing this wasn't the same shepherd that I killed at the end of the first game.  Or maybe it was, and I'm the baddie ...



The village elder was senile.


This was another of my favourite DLC packs.  Many games are being patched in this way now, which is incredibly annoying for those of us with monthly bandwidth caps ...




I was surprised there wasn't a DLC pack to restore the colour here.


This one annoyed me a bit.  It made the text more annoying to read and I couldn't find a way of turning it off.



There's a whole area which is missing until you unlock it via DLC.


My heart fell at this point.  Yes, collecting flags is funny since it shows the pointlessness of the original Assassin's Creed achievements, but do I really have to fetch so many?


Yes, it turns out, but they're all in one box.


Battling against the wind and snow reminded me of the last part of Journey.


Again, annoyingly this couldn't be turned off once applied.


And it turns out the shopkeeper is the overall baddie ...


... who sells you the swords to kill him with.



To buy the swords, you have to collect coins that he throws out, while avoiding other rubbish.  I found that by standing on the far right, nothing could hurt me and I could just pop out to pick up coins when he stopped throwing.