Lately

Played more pinball, as usual.

Got a few more stars with Luigi on Super Mario Galaxy–I’m up to 41, I think. I hope to finish the game with Luigi before Super Mario Galaxy 2 comes out, which gives me about a week. I’ve got to say, Super Mario Galaxy is a really high quality game. The levels are very well designed, and there’s enough new and different stuff throughout the game to keep it interesting. It’s great.

I got Portal, since it’s free on Steam. It’s really great. I’ve played partway through it before this (and I played Narbacular Drop before Portal was released), though I haven’t yet finished it. I think that Portal mostly does a good job of being challenging in places without also being frustrating. It’s not too difficult, and the earliest parts are especially too easy to require much thinking, but it’s fun just playing with the portal gun.

I played some Codename Gordon, which was also a free game on Steam, but it’s much less fun. It’s a sort of run ‘n’ gun platform thing which seems like it might be implemented in Flash. Not terrible, but I doubt I’ll finish it or even play it again.

I beat the demo-thing Peggle Extreme which is available on Steam. It’s a fairly fun little casual game.

New games, and old

Still playing the pinball games. They’re still nice. However, I’ve been noticing more lately that the Williams pinball game has quite a few bugs. Sometimes, the ball will just shoot through solid obstacles, and more than once I’ve gotten a message that the ball fell off the table (what? how?). Twice (or thrice? I forget) now the game has randomly decided that the last player will go first. Everyone still gets to play all of their balls, but it gives the ‘match a number’ screen after the last (which is actually first) player loses the last ball, so when the other players lose and it should either show the match screen or proceed to the next table, it crashes instead. I’ve also had three-player tournaments going, and after each table, the game would show scores for players one, two, and four. Of course, there was no player four, so it was always zero, and there was no way to see play three’s score. Oh well. Can’t have everything. I haven’t noticed such bugs in the Gottlieb game, but I also haven’t played it as much.

I’ve been playing Beat Hazard a bit. It’s an arena shooter, like Asteroids or Warning Forever, but it generates each stage (which enemies appear, how they move, how they fire, and also how much the player fires) based on the song the user selects. In this way, it’s like Audiosurf. It didn’t take too long to reach Elite rank, though I guess it’s probably not supposed to. Most songs are fairly challenging to me on hardcore, and insane difficulty (I think? whatever the final, unlockable difficulty is) is too hard for me in general. I’m sure I’ll be able to play it with more practice. The game is pretty good, though the mouse and keyboard controls are a little problematic: I don’t know if it’s because of my dual-head setup, but the mouse doesn’t get locked to the visible game window, so it can be a pain when I need to change direction if the mouse has gone offscreen–it takes too long to get it back. It’s better with a gamepad, though it only supports 360 controllers (and clones, as I’ve discovered).

Controls aside, it works well for most songs. There is one big issue, though: songs with quiet segments can be absurdly difficult. Since the volume of fire depends on the volume of the song, it’s quite possible to have a 30 second period where very nearly no shots are fired by the player, but a boss or a bunch of ships or something like might be onscreen trying to kill the player. It wouldn’t be so bad, but the bosses fire homing missiles which have to be shot to be destroyed, so and length of time without the ability to reasonably destroy them can be very difficult indeed. So, counter-intuitively, the gentler, quieter songs can actually be much more difficult. Still, I’m enjoying it quite a lot, just as I enjoyed Audiosurf.

I recently played through the campaign of Creeper World, a tower defense game. Creeper World is unique in that rather than distinct enemies, the enemy behaves like a liquid, so the player takes the high ground and attempts to keep the level of the liquid low, and eventually beat it back enough to beat the level. Of course, not all levels are kind enough to give the player the high ground, so it is sometimes necessary to quickly defend the low ground so you can work your way up to the goal. I’d say that it’s one of the better tower defense games I’ve played, though the plot leaves something to be desired.

Got Another Code: R – A Journey into Lost Memories for the Wii and started it. It looks like it might be fun, but I’ll need to play it more before I can really form an opinion.

Played a little Monster Hunter Tri some days ago. It doesn’t seem too bad, but I don’t really like it–it seems to combine the worst elements of RPGs and 3D action games. It has annoying inventory management and weapon durability and food and stuff on the one hand, and irritating ‘aim yourself at the enemy and mash on the A button’ fighting on the other hand. I don’t think it’s really an awful game, but I don’t care for it. Maybe it’d be more fun in multiplayer, but I don’t really care much for multiplayer games either. Maybe I should just stick to platformers from two decades ago.