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So why is it crashing as if is one?
Unfortunately the debug menu option doesn’t work, and instead it just quits the game. I’ve tried deleting and redownloading, and I get the same error, which means it might be an issue with a locally stored save file or update file or something. Pretty frustrating.
Maybe it’s the conversion to the Xbox pad, but APB is incredibly difficult to control. In order to arrest someone you have to have your cursor over them and press the siren, because obviously criminals are only going to pay attention to a police car which is an exact distance away from them. The thing is that the cursor is not at a set distance from your car, but instead varies with the speed you’re going. In order to have enough of a gap between your car and the cursor to be able to arrest someone, you have to be going quite fast, certainly faster than the criminals you are chasing. For littering this isn’t so much of an issue, since you need to signal to them once. By the time you get to chasing down dopers, it’s much more difficult because you have to signal on them three times, meaning you are almost guaranteed to crash; too many crashes and you’re out.
I’ll have to see if there’s an original cabinet next time I go to somewhere like Arcade Club, because the concept of the game – a semi-open world, different criminals to find, extending time through fuel and doughnuts – is quite attractive. It’s just the controls which frustrate.
I’m not sure I’m going to be able to get a lot from the shops in my Supervan any more.
I am stuck on an event in Wreckfest where I have to drive a Robin Reliant, and everyone else has four wheel cars which can actually take a corner. It’s a four-race series and I’ve managed to come third on the first race, and then get completely wrecked on the second. I’m sure I’m missing something; this isn’t even that far through the game.
I haven’t written about it for a while, but I had been playing Flock in small chunks since I started it back in December, until I reached a bit where I couldn’t quite parse the instructions. Having identified and charmed the Emperor Cosmot and the Cloaked Rustic, the forests were unveiled and I explored, including the giant mushrooms of the Skyfish Caverns. There weren’t many skyfish there, save the occasional Barbeled, but there was a large cave with ominous noises coming from within.
My aunt hinted, after a while, that the occupant of the cave needed an audience, and so I should find five crystal sprugs – but searching the nearby pools with crystals surrounding them gave me only two. Frustrated, I decided to explore the world more and try to find other species that I hadn’t yet found – leading to a male painted skyfish, a dappled baffin, and a slumbering rustic – and eventually I noticed more crystal pools in the swamp area in the middle of the map. Three more crystal pools, in fact, each holding another crystal sprug.
Sprugs collected, I went back to the cave and a giant skyfish emerged, which I named as the Encrusted Skyfish as it was covered with (what look like) barnacles. This then meant the final areas of the map opened, and I went exploring again. I found a fifth sheep, the final family of animals (the burbots hiding on the ground), and realised that I didn’t yet have the drupe whistle so started to search the meadows for it. I found it, charmed a few drupes, and then on grazing another meadow I found a burgling bewl who had stolen my aunt’s feeding bag. I had to chase it down and charm it, then on returning the feeding bag to the starting area the credits rolled. Game completed.
Not quite, though. Up to this point I had played for about 10 hours, and I hadn’t grown tired of the game mechanics, so I decided to fill out the creature guide and become a master of as many different families as I could. I’d already charmed quite a few cosmets, and that bar filled up quite quickly. I loved exploring, listening to hints from the researchers on where to find the last few creatures, and then tracking another male painted skyfish through the landscape until he met a female. The ability to fill feeding stations to attract some of the last few entries was very useful – and I’m glad I didn’t try to fill this out before rolling the credits.
At the very very end, when I was going back and forth finding the last few skyfish to charm, it started to wear a little thin. But the flowing movement still charmed me, and I was spurred on by the fact that the game is leaving Game Pass in a few days so I didn’t want to leave it incomplete. By all measures, that’s not the case now. Credits rolled, creature guide complete, mastery of everything, all achievements unlocked.
On Friday I met John and Kieron online for an evening of gaming.
We have a great many games that we have played through, and even a few we have completed, most notably Human Fall Flat multiple times (since they keep adding new levels, so we have to complete it again). We haven’t completed Borderlands 2, since sometimes the intensity of the shooting just means it feels too much effort. We have completed Overcooked 2 other than one level where we’ve only got two stars (and the score for three stars seems unreachable). We have completed Halos 3, ODST, Reach and 4, but haven’t really started 5 yet. We’ve started Moving Out 2, Star Wars Squadrons, Astroneer, Plate Up!, and Powerwash Simulator, among others. We regularly play Peggle 2, and Golf With Your Friends.
With so many games left hanging, obviously Friday was all about new ones.
We played All You Need is Help for a bit. It is horrendously confusing on how to start a game, particularly since you can’t start with only three players and one of us needed to control two characters. I accidentally discovered this while we were all pressing random things to try to start a game, which meant I spent most of my time getting very confused over which stick was controlling which character.
We got a notification that we had completed the first set of levels, but couldn’t work out how to unlock any others. So we didn’t, and we moved on.
The surprise hit of the evening was Lonely Mountains Snow Riders, a follow-up to Lonely Mountains Downhill. The Downhill game saw you getting a bike down dangerously thin and steep paths, avoiding trees and bushes and cliffs and sudden jumps. Snow Riders loses the bike, gives you skis, and adds in online multiplayer which immediately makes the mountains a bit less lonely. It seems to control much better than Downhill, from what I remember, and paths are wider and more forgiving. That’s not to say it’s easy; working out how to hit a jump at the right angle and speed so you can clear a river or gully took multiple deaths in almost all cases. On one of the courses we had all died a minimum of 23 times.
The mode we played was a race, but it wasn’t as easy as just holding the crouch button and steering. Getting down the mountain had multiple paths between each checkpoint, some of which may have been faster but which required skill that I certainly didn’t have. When you die you reset to the last checkpoint passed, meaning that each waypoint down the mountain gave a feeling of relief; there were occasions when one of us crashed just before crossing the checkpoint, at which point the silence on the microphone was noticeable.
I may well go back to Snow Riders by myself at some point, but there’s a lot of content there and I can foresee us trying that game again on a future gaming evening.