Monday, May 07, 2007

Bank Holiday Gaming

It's a traditional rainy bank holiday, so in this household that means games, so what have I been playing?

Phoenix Wright goes without saying. It really is a superbly constructed game, with each case being turned around numerous times both in the evidence gathering sequences and the court room showdowns with their anime inspired stylings and beat em up sound effects as you present a devastating bit of evidence by shouting 'Objection!' into the DS microphone.

To prove that you can go home, I fired up the mighty Animal Crossing after a hiatus of four months. I spent twenty minutes pulling weeds, digging for fossils and planting flowers, before going to visit all of my animals who all seem to be present and correct. I sent letters and gifts to the ones I liked, and a bit of hate mail to Ribbot in which I called him a metal robot frog freak and hoped that he would go rusty in the pond. It's like I've never been away.

I don't know if playing with a personal video recorder counts as a game, but the Mystuff extensions for the Topfield are excellent - a completely configurable new EPG, automatic searches and recordings, buttons to auto skip past advert breaks, automatic organising of archived recordings and more. Worth a look so you can see exactly what this box is capable of.

Jamie's bank holiday treat was Test Drive Unlimited for the PS2. The developers have done a pretty good job of shoe horning the game from it's next gen roots on the xbox 360 onto the venerable PS2 platform. The game features an accurately mapped version of the Hawaiian island of Oahu (I looked on Google Earth to confirm it). Some of the buildings are a bit generic, and there's not a huge variety of traffic on the roads, but the super cars all seem to be well modelled and appropriately shiny. The dashboard view is even better, and you can look around to see different interiors for each car. Even though the drivable area runs to a 1000 miles of road way, a nifty sat nav voice feature directs you to your chosen destination or the next available race challenge. There are police to catch you speeding, but they are fairly stupid and you can usually shake them off by cutting off road for a while.

I can exclusively report that barrelling along the coast road in an Aston Martin DB9 listening to 'Ride of the Valkyries' whilst the sun sets over the Pacific is ACEBEST fun.

3 comments:

Alan said...

Damn, now why didn't we think of that instead of doing the British thing of going to the beach regardless of the weather!

Anonymous Me said...

What IS a bank holiday?

thermalsatsuma said...

A bank holiday is a public holiday when all of the banks are closed and (in theory) most of the shops. By some strange quirk of meteorology it always seems to rain on a bank holiday ... :-)