ugvm

the site of uk.games.video.misc

Hungry Giraffe: ouch, my head

Posted on Written by

A fun little diversion, definitely, but maybe not worth being billed as a full 'game' in the PS Vita 10-game package.  Well worth £2.50 though.

Hungry Giraffe is a tilt-controlled steering game.  You have to get the giraffe to eat food that's hovering in the air, which will then give him energy to reach higher.  If you don't eat enough food, the giraffe's neck will wilt and it's game over.  If you hit the giraffe's head on an anvil, you have to act quickly to recover from a death spiral.


I'm a little sceptical that the difficulty's been fiddled with to encourage further spending.  There are some golden feathers that allow you to rescue a wilting giraffe, but I used all these in my first game expecting them to be replenished in the second game.  They weren't.  I've not investigated to see if you can buy these for real money, but if you can then I suspect this'll be deleted off my memory card to free up space for something else.

Hungry Giraffe: ouch, my head

Posted on Written by

A fun little diversion, definitely, but maybe not worth being billed as a full 'game' in the PS Vita 10-game package.  Well worth £2.50 though.

Hungry Giraffe is a tilt-controlled steering game.  You have to get the giraffe to eat food that's hovering in the air, which will then give him energy to reach higher.  If you don't eat enough food, the giraffe's neck will wilt and it's game over.  If you hit the giraffe's head on an anvil, you have to act quickly to recover from a death spiral.


I'm a little sceptical that the difficulty's been fiddled with to encourage further spending.  There are some golden feathers that allow you to rescue a wilting giraffe, but I used all these in my first game expecting them to be replenished in the second game.  They weren't.  I've not investigated to see if you can buy these for real money, but if you can then I suspect this'll be deleted off my memory card to free up space for something else.

LA Noire: completed!

Posted on Written by

I had only a few missions to complete in that game, it turns out, all of which involved hunting down various corrupt officials and getting them to talk.



I think that shooting him in the leg was probably a bit excessive, but as I said previously the game has taken control of my character's actions in order to progress the story.  This has just got worse as the game's progressed - it's not longer merely Phelps being over-zealous in questioning; it's now Kelso shooting people during cutscenes.

Still, at least I get to drive between these and watch people being shifty.



The endgame saw me exploring a creepy dilapidated house, in which a madman had been holed up.  The game carefully told you that he was mad several times, before showing him folding origami cranes over and over again.  Finding these in the house was quite a shock.





The final missions turned into a run-and-gun cover shooter, with the madman seemingly able to convince dozens of men to lay down their lives just to keep me away from him.  Naturally, that didn't work, but it was pretty tense, running around the sewer systems and popping out to shoot people.  It felt pretty familiar in some ways, reminding me of gameplay in Red Dead Redemption.

I finally found the flamethrower man, who turned out to be someone that Phelps and Kelso had served with.  Funny that all the main characters turned out to be linked in some way, given the size of the city the game's set in.


And then the end of the game sees Rockstar killing off the main character again, but this time I have little sympathy left for him - even after he helped to save everyone else.


After the credits, you can go back and play in free roam mode, which means that you no longer need to worry about how much damage you cause when driving.  I enjoyed that, and ended up with some amusing accidents.


Overall, a great game, but the story was crowbarred in a little, which spoilt the interactivity somewhat.  I hope a sequel could improve on that.

LA Noire: am I overly moralistic?

Posted on Written by

Games, as interactive experiences, put the player into the character they control. The player determines how the character progresses, whether they succeed, and how they act. This, of course, is a challenge to game scriptwriters, who have to determine how players can all get to the same ending no matter how they behave. Some games get this more right than others.

I've mentioned before about how I feel uncomfortable playing certain games - Bulletstorm, for example, didn't keep my interest as I felt that the characters were unlikable. I've played around half an hour of Gears of War before tiring of the macho idiocy. LA Noire has hit it from a different aspect, however. For the first couple of sets of levels, there's not too much of a running story, other than an up-and-coming policeman getting promoted. By the time you start on the Vice Desk, however, there's a much grander story happening, and Cole Phelps - your character - gets a little too involved. The end of the vice desk cases sees Phelps exposed as an adulterer.

So no matter how I play the game, whether I stop at red lights, I am forced to play the part of an adulterer. My character gets thrown out of his home and demoted, whether that's how I was acting or not.  It's a sudden break in the immersion which is entirely unwelcome.

Anyway, I've done a few cases on the Arson Desk now and I feel the game's coming to a head. I'm no longer playing as Phelps - probably just as well since I have no empathy with him - but he's cropping up from time to time.  Maybe I can complete this soon ...

1000 Heroz: nearly there

Posted on Written by

Up to day 926 now, and I'm all-but-out of the RLLMUK leaderboard, as Donny Rosco is 40,000 points ahead and while I beat him on most days, that's only gaining me 100 points a day on average.  My period of not playing has come back to haunt me.

Most days see me getting a global rank of around 200, which is pleasing.  I think at the moment I'm 50th in the world, but there's a fair bit of time still to go.