Headflid

October 3, 2008 · Filed Under Personal · Comment 

Gah, I’m all over the shop with stuff.

It’s more than a little frustrating as at the moment, thanks to C4 starting school I’m actually starting to get some time back - which has been curiously absent in the 6-8 months prior. He’s off out most of the day and in bed at 7:30 at the outside these days, so in theory I’ve got all that time to do stuff. And in many ways I am doing stuff, it’s just my concentration for single projects right now isn’t really lasting out.

Normally, I have 2 projects on the go. One to fiddle with and one to plug away at in a relatively serious manner but the past month I’ve started and stopped more stuff than I have in about 5 years.  It’s not even a flailing around trying to find something that interests me sort of thing, it’s just a very odd funk whereby I’ve got the urge to do something and write something but haven’t got the attention span to see it out.

I’ve got 4 games a gnats breath away from being completed, but it’s just not happening right now. I knew something was especially odd when I was doing some under the hood stuff on RR last week and I’d found I’d pixelled half a sprite set for one level and a title screen for a game I’ve been meaning to do for years, saved it and found it again yesterday tucked in a folder labelled something absolutely nothing to do with the game. Much to my own befuddlement.

I guess it’s that autumnal shift I tend to get where everything goes a little bit wonky. Traditionally whenever things have gone majorly tits up in life it’s always been around this time. I’ve had now the best part of 8 years of comfort with no major crises (last years house rubbish really doesn’t count) that I’m becoming increasingly convinced that my brain goes onto some sort of strike come the autumn and doesn’t really come out of hibernation until we’re into winter proper just in case.

Naturally, there’s only one cure for such a funk. Fuck it all off and play some games.

Gravitron 2 has just landed on Steam at a bargain bucket price, so I bought that again (and got a verbal from X-Out for buying it twice) and ploughed through 6/10 of the achievements. I’ve been running around in Burnout Paradise for a week and a half and quite enjoying that, well, until I realised how much of the game wasn’t so much about having and making your own fun but pandering to bizarre OCD habits. I tried Pure after someone described it as “the next best thing to Excite Truck” only to find out they fucking lied big time and it’s not really even in the same league, never mind ballpark and umm, yeah. That’s about it.

With Gary being too busy to try and lay waste to my Galaga Legions score, I’ve not gone back to that in a few weeks despite loving it to bits and I’ve finally come to the realisation that I’m not enjoying Geometry Wars 2 half as much as I should as some of it is just too fucking random and I get a bit pissy with things spawning too close for me to avoid. So I can’t really play it of an evening when C4 is around as he’s picking up words a plenty at the moment and I don’t really want him going into school shouting “fucking shitbollock cunting blackhole twat blue thing arse fuck”. It was bad enough earlier when I was doing a Frank Finlay Witchsmeller Pursuiveant impression and he proceeded to spend the next ten minutes shouting “MILK! BLOODY MILK!” at the cat.

On a lighter note, Ian Blair is out of the job and someone is making Sigue Sigue Sputnik: The Game for the RR competition. Both of these things make me very happy indeed.

Oh yeah, I also transcribed the lyrics to The Imperfect List and dumped them up here for some ill apparant reason.

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Gravitron 2

August 31, 2008 · Filed Under Featured, Reviews · 7 Comments 

Alright, alright, I confess that I’m an absolute sucker for gorgeous vector style graphics. It’s likely that any regular readers of this little hovel are already fully aware of this quirk though. What I’ve never been the greatest fan of is Thrust-a-like games. It’s not that I find them bad games, it’s just that my rotating and flying skills are more akin to doing in game Challenger impressions than anything especially useful.

Over the past couple of years though, I’ve been forced to reassess my opinions on a couple of occasions. Weibo turned in the rather superb Thrust Extreme, which blew just about everything out of the water by a country mile, then to top it off along came X-Out with Gravitron and well, it managed to fuckmeld bits of Oids and Thrust together in a gorgeous glowy dreamorama. Very nice it was too and received some well deserved critical praise.

So, here I am today then, sitting with a copy of Gravitron 2 in front of me and not a lot of time to play due to having to work my knuckles raw to ensure the competition launch goes smoothly. Or at least, the latter part was the plan until I started playing.

As usual, my first few moments in the game were spent crashing into anything and everything like a complete tool. You’re probably thinking that there’s a lot to crash into on the first level and you can take my word for it that no, there isn’t. I really am that spack handed with this type of game. Rather than throw my hands in the air and walk away, things started getting better rapidly for me. Soon I was doing rather nifty spins around the level, landing perfectly to collect the scientists and taking out the gun turret with ease. Aha! Fantastic. There’s hope for me yet. And then I destroyed the reactor.

I’ve had “oh fucking shit” moments in games before, but there’s not many that instil such a sense of absolute urgency into the player as when the music ratchets up a notch and that countdown appears on screen. It’s a total “get the fuck out of here, fast” moment.

And that’s just the very easy first level. Half an hour later, despite having many other things I should be doing I was still sitting there playing through Gravitron 2. And I swore. Really loudly. There’s not many games I play that manage to put me quite on edge so well. I think it was around level 4 or 5 with a large rotating rock, filled with turrets, a reactor and a laser flitting on and off where attempting to navigate the level left me twitchy as fuck afterwards. If I weren’t already sitting down, I’d have had to go for one quick. Luckily, I had a lovely pair of warm cups of tea on hand to help soothe my nerves.

I can safely say that Gravitron 2 is a fucking lovely game and at under a fiver, it’d be crazy not to take a punt on it. If you’re unsure, check out the original first (as there’s currently no demo for the game at the time of writing) and imagine the game looking even nicer than that and with some fantastic level design to boot. There’s bits of Oids, bits of Defender and obviously bits of Thrust tucked away in it’s glowing package and I’d be hard pushed to recommend it more.

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