999

999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is a visual novel type puzzle game for the DS that I started playing sometime last year and after doing a couple of play throughs and getting 2 of the bad ending I got distracted by different games and didn't come back to it to get the other 4 endings.

A few days ago I decided to play it again and try to get the other endings. I originally got an ending that I already had but the second time a got a new one, then that one again, then another new one which seemed like it could be the proper ending until I saved and realised it wasn't then raged a little bit. I then decided to look up how the hell to get the true ending, and found that I had to get a particular ending before I could get the true one which really annoyed me at the time.

Now that I've played though that ending and the true ending I realise why it was like that. They could have made is so I didn't have to do that ending first but it is a great way to starting showing the telepathic field thing in use.

I absolutely love the proper ending. Some of it was a tad crazy but having the telepathic field play into the end really well was awesome.

Minecraft

I have recently acquired Minecraft and have become slightly addicted. I have always liked foraging, collecting, and crafting in games and having a game made for that is good. Having the multiple modes is good so it can become slightly more customised for what you want it to do.

I've been playing on peaceful mode so that I could figure out how to do stuff without also having to fight monsters in the night. Figuring out how to get items and make things is fun except when the formula for making said things is unintuitive (which is were Wikipedia comes in) but it's good when something works. There is the problem of the game not helping you make after you've made it once, having to remember how to place everything to make all the different items is rather annoying. Having a better quality map would be good as well but I do like that you view the map by holding it and looking down at it.

So far I've only built a little cobblestone house, attacked a few animals, and mined for various materials (still haven't found diamonds sadly) and died once by falling down a mine shaft into lava. Having finally obtained some string from some spider webs in a old mine I found, I now have a fishing rod so I can try fishing and (farming at the same time) now once I finish building a dock. I haven't had much luck with boats though, first one shot out to sea when I placed it and the second and third ones both broke out in the ocean, fortunately I managed to swim back out too much trouble.

Minecraft is fun but is not a great game to me. There's too many annoying little things, trees floating when I cut the base, leaves stopping me to jumping up hills easily, not particularly useful map and pointless NPCs. The worst thing about it though it that this is the final product. While it was in Beta and earlier it could be forgiven for things like this because they would likely get fixed later but in a final product it should not be acceptable. I'm fairly sure it stayed as it is mostly because of Notch's (the creator) laziness after become rich from an unfinished product.

TF2

Team Fortress 2 has been my favourite FPS since I started playing it a lot a couple of years ago when I got the Orange Box collection. The only FPS I'd played much before that was Halo on the xbox since my brother and cousins would play it, but since finding TF2 I've moved away from regular FPS games since I've realised how little strategy and variation there usually is.

Team Fortress 2 has such balanced classes and and maps that there really is a need for strategy and teamwork. When I'm on a team that works well and wins as a team I get a much better feeling of success than if I was just running around shooting as many people as possible. Since I usually play an engineer or medic I don't often don't get many kills or points but having worked setting up my sentry to defend the intell, or healing someone and ubercharging them as they storm the base gives a great feeling of teamwork and worth.

I was really happy when it went free to play because I could get more friends to play it and have more people realising how good it is. Sadly some of the new players came in with a Call of Duty mentality and just went around shooting and ignoring the goal of the map they were on. Eventually most of those players realised that  finding a class that suits your play style and working as a team is needed to win matches.

There is still a few lingering players that don't seem to understand there is different types of matches. Recently Michael and I have encountered quite a few people on Capture the Flag (intell) matches that get upset when we capture the intell, which is the whole point of that type of match. They seem to have wanted the game to keep going so that they could get more kills. There are Arena servers for people who just want kills, I don't know if they don't know how to search for servers or are just ignoring those servers. All I know is that it becomes annoying when players get angry at you for playing a game as it is meant to be played.

The Beginning

I have finally decided to make a blog. I'm a tad late jumping on this bandwagon but meh.

I'll probably just be using this to ramble about what's happening, games, movies, and various random stuff. If nothing else it will be something (hopefully) interesting to look back on in a few years time.

So what have a done so far this year:
Finished Fable 3. I've always loved the fable games so I finally played this one and loved it too. I loved the gnomes, hated how well some of them were hiding though but I shot them all (with the help of a couple of guides for the ones I couldn't find). I hated that there wasn't a easy way to keep track of all the houses I owned though, buying houses to get money was a pretty important part of the game (if you want to save all the civilians) and not having easy way to repair them without going to each one individually on the world map was annoying to me. I liked most of the sanctuary but not having an inventory was annoying since I couldn't easily keep track of how many of each random item I have.

Finished Portal 2. I (like many, many others) love Portal. The first one was amazing so having a second one that is longer and has multiplayer is awesome. Loved the story mode, (I wish I could have had glados as a potato forever) and that fact is was longer but had parts outside of test chambers that broke it up at perfect points so that it didn't get tedious was great. I love playing the 2 player parts with Michael, having 2 sets of portals sometimes breaks my brain but makes the puzzles really interesting to do. Atlus and P-Body are so adorable that when they fall to their deaths when I misplace a portal makes me sad.

Played more FF13. Getting close to the end now, almost got stuck a couple of times recently but got past them with a little luck (and some grinding).

Watched Hugo. It was good, I didn't like it as much as some people seemed to though. I love the automaton and all the old filming style parts but at some times it seemed a bit like 2 movies mashed together.

Finally cleaned and sorted some of my table full of videos that I got from a garage sales ages ago, and got a shelf to store them on. I've cleaned about half of them so far, Once I've cleaned and sorted them all I'll have to count how many I got, then donate the one I don't want or have doubles of.


I think that's enough for a first post, time to go watch tv with Michael who has been waiting patiently for me to finish this.