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Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies: spacemen and robots

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I must admit I've been a little confused as to the timing of the cases.  Case 1 was after the courtroom explosion.  Case 2 was when Athena first arrived.  Case 3 was Athena's first case lead.  Case 4 is back to around the explosion - the first part was before and leading up to the explosion, the second part is after (and given some of the internal monologue, it's after case 1 as well).  I think that's right.

Anyway, well into case 4 now, and I've managed to avoid any penalties for showing the wrong evidence.  I'm impressed with the way that game's taken the previous games' gimmicks - Apollo's bracelet, Phoenix's magatama - and added these to Athena's widget.  It makes it feel like a Mario game in some ways - new gameplay elements being used for very short periods then thrown away.  It does, however, mean that the game is much more linear - meaning that I'm likely to finish this much quicker than previous games in the series.  That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Red Dead Redemption: helping an old-timer

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Concentrating on the story missions actually really helps to give the game focus, although I've not entirely stopped looking out for strangers and helping them out.  Indeed, I spent most of my last play session ferrying opium across Mexico, though I didn't know it at the time.  I was given $1000 to give to the seller; against my better judgement I did so, not wanting to get involved in the drugs trade in the first place.  I also cleared out another gang hideout that I chanced upon, although I died once doing so.

Dying seems to be a hindrance but nothing more - I'm not sure that I've lost any money from doing so.  I much prefer it this way, it mean that I'm much more willing to experiment in the world, and will stop to help people at the side of the road rather than just spurring my horse on past them.  It means that the game progresses more slowly, but that's not a problem here given the storyline that's being followed.  Yes, John Marsden wants to kill or capture Bill Williamson, but he wants to do it properly and there's no point rushing into a gunfight unprepared.

The story missions are really nicely varied in this, with decent checkpoints throughout and generally good reasons for existing within the story.  I've just helped to rescue Luisa with the help of Landon Ricketts, and then helped Luisa's sister to escape by taking her in a stagecoach to a waiting boat.   I also completed a long missions where i had to fight with the Mexican army up to a fort which had been overrun by bandits. I have now completed 46.4% of the game; hopefully I can continue to get through it at the same sort of pace.

Wii Sports Club: 2006 as it should have been

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Wii Sports was a fantastic game - back at the launch of the Wii, we played it more than anything else, and it continued to occupy me for some time afterwards.  Its inclusive nature means that it still gets brought out very often for social occasions (but less often since Nintendo Land came onto the scene), the most memorable time being when I beat Ken.

It's now been updated - or at least part of it has - with better visuals, online modes, and an extortionate price tag.  Luckily, of the five games included in the original Wii Sports, the two best are out already and there's no need to buy the other three.

I've spent a bit of time on both Tennis and Bowling - to the extent that my shoulders are aching.  Tennis sees the most obvious improvements, with motionplus giving much better control over the player, and online meaning that you can find a decent set of opponents to play against.


I've been starting with the offline mode to get into the swing of things, and amusingly the third game had me paired up against a couple of OAPs.  I beat them, just.

I've spent more time bowling, where the online leaderboards add a lot to the game.  Oddly, deKay posted a score of 214 to Miiverse, but the leaderboard showed him with a lower score.  I was incredibly annoyed when I scored three points less than his claimed score.


A couple of games later, though, I got the hang of the controls, and managed to get five strikes in a row, at the end of the game.


This meant that I ended up with a pretty good score.


The online modes for bowling are a little odd; you watch everyone else taking their turn and can send pre-programmed phrases offering encouragement, congratulations or commiserations.  As with tennis, any games you play are racked up in your 'club' score, and you define which club you wish to be a member of, theoretically by stating where you live.


I'm helping England South East here.

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.