Been playing some good games recently

I finally bought Forza Horizon at the weekend. I spent £3 on it, plus some money I had left over from trade-ins a while back and I got £9 for GTA 4, which I was chuffed about; especially when you consider it's over 4 years old!

It doesn't seem as hardcore as I thought it'd be, but that's sort of a good thing. It definitely feels like an up to date version of NFS Underground 2. I love the cars, the upgrading and sheer amount of personalisation. I was expecting there to be tuning and car damage, but both of these don't seem to be present.

First car I bought was a Toyota Supra, which was my pet love when I first got into NFS Underground. Not sure why, I just loved it! Still has a great feel and there's something about it that I still like. But since I found a 1971 Plymouth Cuda in a "barn find" mission, within the game, I've fallen in love with the old american muscle cars. I've been a big kid, spending my in-game money on old muscle cars and then sticking a massive super-charger onto the engine, without doing anything about actually important things like brakes and suspension, and then watching it roar in a straight line straight into a tree! Haven't got bored of that yet, but when I do there's only about a million other cars and aspects to the game to get my mitts into.

Another good game, which I've been looking forward to for a while, is The Cave. A Double Fine production available on XBLA for 1200 points. It's a platform puzzle adventure game, where you take 3 characters through a talking cave, each character searching for their deepest desire. There are 7 characters to choose from so to completely complete the game you've got 3 play throughs, each will be slightly different as the different combinations of characters bring up different challenges.

Overall I'm a little disappointed with The Cave, but I did have very high hopes! It only takes about 4 hours to complete and you could probably do it quicker if you don't enjoy exploring all the different areas and try to find secret rooms and things. But the story is good, the dialogue is humourous and the puzzles make for a great sofa game to play with mates. Would be best played with 3 people, each having their own character. I have played through the game twice with my girlfriend and we always have to swap to the third character, which can be a little frustrating sometimes.

There are a lot of good games coming this year, which I'm looking forward to. First of which is Gears of War Judgement! Before that comes out I'm hoping to finally crack horde mode on Gears of War 3! Will need to gather the forces soon!

Thoughts of Wastelands

Over the past month I've put a lot of thought into moving Wastelands forward, which has stalled for various reasons. I've discussed ideas with friends and thought radically about new mechanics and future elements to go into the game, but it's occurred to me that this is sort of moving away from my original brief for the game, which is that it should be a simple, exploration, survival racing game, which is easy to learn and perfectly playable while slightly drunk. To this end I've thought that I should really get back to the basics and refine that before getting too excited.

My plans for moving forward are to refine the decks and keep the mechanics simple. I'll move all the engines and vehicle upgrades into the scrap deck and re-write the encounter cards to keep each of them interesting, even as individual encounters.

My pad is wonderful!

A while back I supported Double Fine Adventure and ever since I have enjoyed watching the update vides, reading the articles about how they've been developing the game, designing and doing art work and such. One of the key points Tim Schafer pointed out in one of the first videos was that if you want to write or design you need to get it down on paper. He urged all those aspiring to this to go out and buy a "project book" and a pen and just start writing nonsense. The more you do this the more you will find rare gems appearing on your pages. Tim described it as emptying your thoughts onto the page to make space for new ideas in your brain.

So, I did this. Well, not quite to the extent of scribbing nonsense, but on busses and trains and during the day, if I feel an urge, I scrawl ideas down inside it. I'm now finding that I look back at some of these ideas and it gets me excited about developing them and thinking of MORE ideas!

I realise I'm sort of repeating myself from a post a few weeks back, but this is a development from then! I didn't have the big pad then! The big pad important to me.

A rare pleasure

Last week I had a chance to spend a whole week down south with friends and family. On the saturday some old friends, my brothers and I spent the whole day gaming!

We played 2 games of Battlestar Galactica the boardgame, 3 games of 7 Wonders, learned the rules to Dreadball, a few games of Magic with my mate who got me into it and capped it all off with some tasty indian take-away.

The highlight for me, and I think most of us(?), was the first game of Battlestar Galactica. This is one of the best heavy weight boardgames out there! In our first game it went to-and-frow, the cylon players played very well and stayed relatively unknown for most of the game and it came down to the wire at the end! I felt playing a 2nd game, even after a fair gap, was a bit of a mistake, but it's such a good game that we couldn't help ourselves.

I've played 7 Wonders once before, but playing a few more times just made me fall in love with it. Every game seemed to get better and better as all 7 of us got to grips with the game and started to be more aware of each other's actions and tried to sabotage each other's development. By the third game we were finished inside 30 minutes, grinning like fools and eagerly totting up the scores to see who'd come out on top. I felt very satisfied to win the first game, which I thought I'd done quite cleverly, but it really didn't matter that much. The well designed mechanics meant it was fun to play and try different things inside the game.

Really hope it's not another 2 years before we meet like this again! And next time I'll try to fit Game of Thrones in my bag.