Diary of a Lethargic Video Gamer

I was so looking forward to the new Wii version of Samba de Amigo, but it’s turned out to be a crushing disappointment.  Being such a massive fan of Samba on the Dreamcast, I was hoping to
overlook the reported control issues, but they are all too apparent for me I’m afraid.  I can handle flawed controls preventing me from getting perfect scores, but playing on medium is really highlighting how hit and miss they really are, and the amount of times they fail to register my movements correctly is detracting from the overall fun now. I dread to think what playing on hard is like, and as things stand, I doubt I’ll have the patience to even try.

Bah!  Eurogamer started to give away keys to the beta of one of my most anticipated games of the year, LittleBigPlanet, earlier this evening.  I was out at a school open evening and so appeared to have missed out though.   I tried as soon as I got in, and the Eurogamer site appeared to be under heavy strain as the page kept timing out, but I eventually got the giveaway page to load and saw this:

Yes, one bloody key left.  I clicked the claim button but the next page then timed out and there is nothing in my EG account inbox, so it looks like I was too late.  So near, and yet so far, eh?

Bum.

Official 360-style PS3 gamercards are now available.  Here’s mine:

So, after my 360 breaking down yesterday, my PS3 decided to follow suit this afternoon.  First the menu wouldn’t appear if the machine was connected to the internet.  Offline it appeared to be working, but throws up a blue screen whenever I try and run a game either from blu-ray or the hard drive, and now it goes back to the initial set-up everytime I reboot.  I’ve spoken to Sony, and they’ve put it down to a problem with the update, even though I installed both the 2.40 and 2.41 firmwares with no apparent problems until today. They are bringing me a new machine on Wednesday, the same day I’m expecting UPS to come back to collect my faulty 360. I’m just waiting for my already temperamental Wii disk drive to completely fail on me now for a complete current generation failure hat-trick.

The replacement I received for my original 360 last year has decided to gift me with three nice shining red lights this morning  After a quick call to Microsoft I’m now expecting a pick-up from UPS sometime in the week.  Having recently starting to use my 360 again, after seeing it gather dust for several months, I’m glad I now have a spare machine upstairs to continue my gaming on.

A late night on Friday saw me earn the Extreme Hunter achievement for completing all the Terrorist Hunt levels on realistic difficulty (the convention centre and oil refinery levels took bloody ages), and I followed this off by completing the main game yesterday.  I had a tricky showdown with a helicopter gunship and a small army of terrorists, then, after a short cutscene I merely had to fire a single shot to kill Gabe and bring up the end of game credits.