Diary of a Lethargic Video Gamer

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.

Another idiot purchase, possibly.  Whilst almost universally praised, I didn’t like it’s Gamecube predecessor much.  With this in mind, and after my recent experience with buying GTA IV against better judgement, plus the fact that I’ve recently bought Civilization Revolution, Lego Indiana Jones, Rainbow Six Vegas 2, and Ticket to Ride on the 360, My Life as a King and LostWinds on the Wii, and Everybody’s Golf World Tour on PS3, and Buzz Quiz TV is arriving next week, leaving me with more than enough to get on with, you’d have thought I’d have stayed well clear of Smash Bros, wouldn’t you?  Despite all this I somehow found myself browsing shopto.net earlier, and having a promotional £4.00 credit in my account about to expire I clicked on the add to cart and confirm order buttons before I’d thought it all through.  Ah well, it should be here tomorrow morning, and hopefully I’ll fare a little better with this one.

Bloody hell, where did this come from?  I love the board game Ticket To Ride: Europe, and I mentioned how I would love to see an XBLA version in a Usenet post way back in May of last year  Little did I know that someone out there was listening and decided to bring the original Ticket to Ride board game to XBLA today.  I completely missed yesterday’s announcement that is was due for release, and just happened to see it listed on the Arcade blade earlier.  Not knowing it was in development, and just seeing it appear made it a real treat and I instantly bought it without even looking at the demo first.  It was a good decision because, yes, it’s simplistic, but like Uno, it’s an excellent wind-down game after a hectic session on COD4 or whatever.  I’ve already played a few games against the CPU and also won my first attempt at a ranked game.  The only possible downside is that I fail to see how it is supposed to work in offline multiplayer as your cards, destination tickets especially, need to be kept secret.  Having to look away or close you eyes in between turns is far from ideal after all.

I notice there is a download content option, so hopefully they’ll release TRT: Europe soon which has a little more variation that the original game.

Great game until the end when it started to get a little tedious as I’d cleared all the dungeons and discovered the Shrine where the end of game boss, the Dark Lord was lurking, but my adventurers were not strong enough to defeat him.  As a result I had to get them to battle through already fully explored dungeons again to level up for a while, with nothing new to unlock for my town either, before they were finally ready to take him on.  I’ve now unlocked the hard and extra hard modes that I’ll probably work through in short bursts over a longer period of time.

With Civ Rev reigniting my interest in all things Civilization related, I thought I’d fire this up on the PC again.  Before I started the game I foolishly hit the check for updates button.  There was an update for the main Civ IV game which took about ten minutes to download and install.  It also found an update for the Warlords expansion, which also took a further ten minutes to download and install.  Once I was done with updating I found that the game would no longer start, throwing up an error box saying that D3DX932.DLL could not be found and that I should reinstall the game.  I was about to do just that when I decided to do a quick Google first, and I discovered that it’s a problem caused by the Warlords patch and that I just needed to reinstall DirectX instead.  Another ten minutes of downloading and installing later the game was running fine, except by that point I simply couldn’t be bothered to play so I went out instead.  Pfft.

I ended up staying with the Xbox 360 version for this, my copy of which arrived on Thursday.  It’s vying for my attention at the moment with the equally addictive My Wife as a King which I stupidly bought only the day before.  Gaming addiction overload!  Anyway, it’s great stuff, naturally.  It’s Civilization on speed, with a full game taking me a mere two to two and a half hours to play.  It resulted in me going to work on only four hours sleep on Friday, and I’ve played it through with six different civilizations already and met all the conditions for the three different types of victory in the process.  Pure gaming crack.