More backloggery, and my number has grown again.
Total: 399 games
Unbeaten: 353 games
Beaten: 42 games
Completed: 4 games
I should just get rid of the lot, eh?
Nah, just kidding, I could never do that. (Except the ones that are crap which is surprisingly few.)
Have played yet more Phantasy Star Portable and Pokemon Diamond, too. Done lots of trading 
I’ve been going through and updating all the game notes as to where I am in each, I’m not done yet, and also I’ve updated some games to beaten which should have been there originally. Also, some more games have been added, and no doubt more will be later as I remember even more.
Total: 380 games
Unbeaten: 334 games
Beaten: 42 games
Completed: 4 games
Right now I’m at 12.2% beaten and completed, which is far higher than I first envisioned it would be. Here’s hoping it keeps increasing.
Since last time I’ve been playing more Phantasy Star Portable, and Pokemon Platinum, mostly. In Platinum I’ve only just traded my eggs across and hatched them, and training them up to level 5 each is taking it’s time (especially since Cubone ended up with only Growl). My team (randomised from a group of 30 eggs) is Rhyhorn, Cubone, Spinarak, Treecko, Mudkip and Magby, which is surprisingly well balanced. I was quite sad not to get my Sneasel though.
In Phantasy Star Portable I’m levelling up my basic classes. Hunter was at 10 before I started as that was my original class, and I have just raised Ranger to level 10. I have just begun on Force, and when that is done I will be very happy because I’m not too keen on Forces. My guy (George, Human) is at level 28, still in Chapter 3 and I have been playing for 7:25. I am taking it very slowly. 17 titles are acquired, and the last one was Top Condender, for clearing free missions 50 times. The prize was a very lovely S-Rank Rod. Which I can’t even use, but never mind, it’s a nice weapon and probably means I won’t have to bother getting other ones.
http://backloggery.com/main.php?user=daysocks
‘Till next time, folks.
Total: 373
Unbeaten:331
Beaten: 36
Completed: 4
I totally added all my emulated ones since last time and it shows. Since last posting, I beat Link’s Crossbow Training (which is surprisingly good if not worth it without the Zapper) and played a lot of Resident Evil 4, and some Phantasy Star Portable. And also started Persona 2: Innocent Sin (which I’m not sure is on my backlog right now, actually).
In Resident Evil 4, I just rescued Ashley.
And I hate Ashley. She managed to die straight away.
Stupid Ashley. I’m never going to unlock Mercenaries at this rate.
Recently I found a website where you catalog your games collection, and whether you’ve beaten them or not. I’ve spent the past few days putting most of mine in (I’ve yet to put my emulated ones on), and the numbers are damning.
Total: 332 games
Completed: 4 games
Beaten: 33 games
Unbeaten: 293 games
That is a worrying amount of unbeaten to beaten. So, I’m going to try and beat more. I’ll be putting all here, so stay tuned.
If you have an account, please add me. This is my profile: http://backloggery.com/daysocks.
I also need to change the status of House of the Dead Overkill. I beat the main story, so I can now count it as beaten. (Only Director’s Cut left.) Overkill is such an awesome game. Really weird though.
Yeah, I’m so getting it now.
EA has learned from it’s mistakes (at least a little bit) and has put Spore on Steam without SecuROM. This is awesome.
Maybe one day I can start buying new EA games again. (Spore doesn’t count.)
So, by now everyone who cares knows that there’s a new Sonic game out. It’s split into two sections, day and night, and by day it’s the speed you all love and need, and by night it’s a psuedo-beat-em-up.
But reviewing it is not why I’m here today. That can wait until I’ve played the game to completion. Why I’m here, is to have a look at just why review websites such as IGN and Gamespot have given the game such low scores (4.5 and 3.5 out of 10 respectively).
The game is not that bad. Sure, there are niggles, such as a sometimes unreasonable camera, and punishing difficulty sometimes, and the Werehog, whilst not the awful thing they’re making it out to be, does tend to detract from Sonic, and the levels are a good 10-30 minutes longer than the blue blur’s stages. But you play it, and you can tell Sega have put their heart and soul into the game. The graphics are more than a bit shiny, the sound has been improved from the last incarnation, and it’s fun, really quite fun.
It definitely does not deserve a score less than passable.
So why 4.5? Why 3.5? Are the reviewers punishing Sega for not giving them a 3 hour game purely speed based? Probably not, because then they’d punish them for giving them a 3 hour game. Did the reviewers have a bad day? Was it a competition to see who could give it a low score? Perhaps it’s just their attempt to get Sega to give them the game they want. I say ‘game they want’ instead of ‘a good game’ because at it’s heart? Unleashed is a good game.
Fun? Check. Replay value? Check. Likeable characters? Check. Graphics that don’t impede gameplay? Check. Sound that doesn’t make you wish you were deaf? Check.
What do they want it to have?
Personally, I think they were sulking at it lacking chao. 
On the surface, Mordor doesn’t seem like much, with little in the way of things to do and without many graphical effects, but the wealth of options in the game is undoubtedly the draw of the game.
You begin by creating your character (or four) from many different races, choosing its gender and alignment, and it’s stats. Everything but the gender governs what guilds it can join from the off. Every character can join the Nomad’s guild, which gives the least bonuses but gives them a decent fighting ability if levelled up. Other than that, there are many guilds to choose from – you can create a pure fighter, sorceror, thief, or cleric or mage (which excels in getting monsters to join you). Or, if those aren’t up your street, how about a Ninja/Scavenger hybrid, or a Barbarian/Mage/Villain?
If your stats aren’t up to the levels the guild wants, you can find potions and tomes in the dungeon to up your stats. And once you’re in, you can level up to 999. You can do this for every guild you’re in. There is a penalty for every guild past the second one, in that you need to pay a lot of money to get in, and the experience you need for a level is increased. However, once you’ve sold a few identified tomes, it’s not much of an issue.
Which brings me to the meat of the game. The dungeon. The aim of the game is to get to the bottom of the dungeon to kill the boss. This sounds easy, but is rather more difficult than you might expect. There are many floors, and whilst they aren’t randomly generated, they are filled with traps and monsters that get increasingly difficult as the game progresses. If that wasn’t all, you don’t level up automatically. Once you have the required experience, you have to return to the guild to level up, and if you gain enough after that, you become Pinned, which means you can’t gain any more until you level up. (Although once levelled up after being Pinned, you only have to gain 1 exp to gain another level.)
There is also age to consider. If you spend the entire time levelling your character, you may get to the point where you can’t get to the bottom of the dungeon without dying of old age. Every race has a different lifespan, which governs how difficult they are to level up. After all, it doesn’t make sense that a human that lives for 100 years would take the same amount as an elf that lives 350 years. This needs to be taken into account when creating your character and traversing through the dungeons. There are potions that reduce your age, however they are very rare, so you can’t bet on getting any.
Characters can team up in parties of four to make fighting easier, although you can’t team Good characters with Evil ones, so you can’t have your Paladin teaming up with your Villain. It makes life a lot easier, however it does mean that you have 4 characters to keep track of instead of one. Unfortunately, there is no way to play over an internet connection or even over LAN so it’s a bit of a lonely experience sometimes.
In the town there are many shops, including your basic equipment/items one, a creature one where you can buy creatures to help you fight, the undertaker which revives you, your party and any creatures for gold, and a Seer, which points you in the general direction of the monster or item you’re looking for to finish a guild quest for a fee. The equipment shop and the creatures shop keep track of what you sell to them, so if you sell them a Sword of the Winds or a Pseudo-Dragon, it’ll still be there when you come back with another character 30 levels on to buy it.
The graphics and sound are definitely nothing to write home about. The graphics do their job and nothing more, and take a back seat to the gameplay. The sound, however, starts to grate on your nerves quickly, so it might be best to turn it off in favour of your own music.
For the people who are stuck, or who want to know more about the intricacies of the game, or who want to know the story behind Mordor, there is an extremely comprehensive help system. From the backstory (which is pretty good if not overly inspired), to the lifespans and natural stats of races, to the statgains and requirements of every guild, to what every single spell in the game does, to an early game guide, there is enough material in it to satisfy the vast majority of questions you might have.
There is a shareware version you can download to try it for yourself which includes everything up to the third floor of the dungeon, and if you’re even remotely interested in Mordor it is worth downloading, so you can see for yourself. If you then buy the full version it keeps all your data, too.
Mordor is not a game for the casual gamer, or indeed even the regular gamer. It can take months to finish and years to find everything, so expect to be in it for the long haul. However, the rewards you get from it more than make up for the time investment. Personally, this is the only game this gamer still plays regularly after 10 years of owning it.
Recently, I acquired an R4 for my DS at a computer fair. You would think that with the sheer amount of games that are now at my fingertips I would be gaming far more than I used to, but actually, I’m not.
Instead of 8 games to choose from, I have 30. And the amount of choice is daunting. Instead of playing one games for a few hours then going onto another, I’ve devoted almost no time at all to each individual one. The one I’ve played most over the past week is Animal Crossing, and have only played that one for just long enough to play off the first mortgage. Which is perhaps two or three hours play.
I propose that with the amount of consoles there are, and the sheer volume of games released for each, that gaming is being damaged. And not just quality of games-wise. Because the gamer has so much to choose from, instead they go for something different entirely.
I see this all the time at work. Mr 360 gamer is looking at the new releases section and asks me what I recommend. I say something along the lines ‘most of these games are sweet and you can’t go wrong with them’ and Mr 360 gamer can’t decide which one to pick so he goes to the pre-owned section and gets two decent-looking games for the same price as one of the new ones.
Obviously, gaming is not doing too badly and new games are almost universally selling well. But if there were less consoles, then developers wouldn’t have to stretch themselves to put games on them all and the quality might improve. There’d be fewer people who forgo the new games entirely.
And also there might be room to move on a busy day in the shop.
And I wouldn’t have to go out and buy an expensive PS3 just so I could have the lot.
My DS games want to be completed but because there are so many I just can’t bring myself to do so. Daunting task is daunting.
Well, we got Fallout 3. He bought it regardless of my qualms, so there’s no harm done, I suppose. However…
I can’t play it.
This is the first time my motion sickness has gotten in the way of a game that I actually want to play. It would be fine, if, say, it was the kind which appeared after a while, and I could ignore for a while and went away not long after coming off the game. But it’s not. It’s the kind that rears it’s ugly head after I’ve been playing for 5 minutes, and kicks me to the floor with severe nausea and headaches and dizzy spells. Which doesn’t go away until I’ve slept it off.
I still don’t know what causes it. As of today, there are three games that cause my motion sickness to go severe: Fallout 3, Duke Nukem 3D, and any 3D Spyro game. Oh, and two-player on Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise. The only thing these games have in common are that they’re 3D. That’s it. It’s highly frustrating.
As far as I can tell, there is no real solution to motion sickness; that it can only be ‘managed’, and to be honest, that upsets me greatly. It means I will never be able to play a game I’ve been anticipating for a long time.
I can only see it getting worse, to be honest. As games get more advanced, the less I will be able to play of them. I could miss out on what could be the greatest game of all time because it makes me sick. I’m already missing out on Fallout. I already refuse to play Mario Galaxy because I know from experience with Sonic Adventure 2 it will make me sick. What else will I not be able to play?
I absolutely adore Fallout. This may or may not come as a surprise to you depending on how well you know me. Today, Fallout 3 is released, and I was going to go right out and buy it (or rather, get the boyfriend to). Last night, however, I had an unpleasant shock.
The PC version of Fallout 3 comes with SecuROM.
I absolutely refuse to buy anything that has SecuROM included in any of it’s versions.
Now, I’m going to hazard a guess that few of you know what SecuROM does. Let me explain.
SecuROM is DRM, obviously designed to make sure pirates can’t do what pirates do (it doesn’t work, but that’s beside the point). There are several versions of it, and the one that has me riled it the one that installs itself on your PC without telling you it’s doing so. That’s bad enough as it is. However, that’s not all it does.
If you have any number of CD burning software or “piracy” software like Nero or Daemon Tools installed on your PC, SecuROM won’t let your £40 (~$80) game run. Nero is often installed on your PC by the manufacturer so you don’t have to depend on Windows native software to burn files onto a CD. But SecuROM assumes that instead of backing up the data from your hard-drive that you need to keep but don’t have room for, you’re making copies of games and distributing them to your friends.
It’s also next-to-impossible to uninstall without expert knowledge of PCs. For the average user, the only way to get rid of it is to reformat your PC. This is because it digs itself into folders that you’re probably not even aware exist. It gives itself permissions that only your operating system should have. And more insiduously? It pretends it hasn’t. If you realise it’s been installed, it only appears to have been installed to the same level as the rest of your software. This website explains it far better than I ever could.
I am going to say at this point that at the moment, Bethesda aren’t so stupid as to use the full version of SecuROM. At the moment, they are using the CD-check version. -But.
“First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.” -Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945
I’m not even going to pretend that it’s anywhere near as serious as that, but the idea is the same. If I do not speak out against a lesser version of SecuROM, how long is it before they start using the worse version?
I do not want them to think it’s ok to treat me like a criminal. But if I refuse to buy Fallout 3 on principle, then I will be losing out on a game I’ve wanted for years, maybe the game of the decade, and my protest will fall on deaf ears because most people will buy it anyway because it doesn’t have the version of SecuROM that invades your PC.
I have two hours to decide whether or not to stand for what I believe in regardless of what others are doing.
