12 MORE MONTHS!

Now that is how to start off your day.  Much better than the insanity I encountered a little bit earlier this morning.  I’m currently on “Christmas Lockdown”, which means I went out and about yesterday, put the world to rights delivering gifts to the elderly (ahem) and when I got home that was it.  The car was in the garage, and wouldn’t be moving again until Christmas morning.

I got up early this morning, Sally went off to work (ho ho ho) and I thought as it was so early I would head down to Tesco before it got busy and just grab a couple of things.  Nothing we actually needed, just the rather bizarre combination of bacon and chocolate (hmm, bacon flavoured chocolate…that could catch on).  But when I pulled into the car park at eight o’clock I found it was nearly three quarters full.  At eight o’clock in the morning!  Too much bacon and chocolate is bad for you said my brain, and I turned round and came straight back home.  Back on lockdown once again.  It’s not too bad though, the food’s good and there’s plenty of entertainment.

In web site news, I have now renewed the site for another twelve months and have also upgraded my package.  Since all of the Freesat posts went live my blog hits have gone a little crazy, and also because people decide it’s great to hotlink to my images which is great for sucking down my bandwith.

Every month towards the final week I get a “bandwith soon to be exceeded” warning from my hosters (the superb Netmotivated) but this month it came far earlier than usual.  Those will be a thing of the past now as the new package allows for quadruple the bandwith so it should be smooth sailing throughout 2009 on the good ship petecullen.net (please remember to keep all limbs inside the vehicle for the duration).

On the gaming front, Prince of Persia sucked me in and would not let go.  I never played any of the Sands of Time trilogy on the last generation of consoles, despite many people saying they are some of the finest games evahz!!!111, etc.  I may have to try Sands of Time, I’m sure I have it for the original Xbox somewhere.

But this new reboot of the franchise I found to be great to be able to game and relax at the same time (for the most part).  It also awoke the item collection whore within me, just like the Agility Orbs in Crackdown, the light seeds that are collected from each area in PoP kept me messing around in the beautiful environments for hours.

Yes, the game looks absolutely stunning.  Each area in the world starts off as being corrupted, you traverse the environment with your AI buddy Elika (possibly the most likeable companion in a videogame I have ever played), defeat a boss and then heal the land.  Healed lands leave 45 of the light seeds to collect.  Some of which you can’t get to on your first attempt.  Unlock enough seeds you gain more powers, more powers mean access to new areas and more light seeds.

It’s a real collect-a-thon, but it never felt like a chore.  It is best to play the game in small chunks, which is what I did for the most part until I played a monster six hours of it on Sunday and a good three to four yesterday.  By that stage I just wanted to complete the game and see the ending, and it does start to get very repetitive.  The combat is essentially a mess of QTE combos chained together that do feel fun and fluid to begin with, that tend to get a little monotonous towards the end.

That said, you get plenty of game for your money, especially as here in the UK Play.com are selling it for £17.99 and in the US it is $40.  There is an achievement if you complete the game in under 12 hours.  I didn’t get it, I took my time and reckon in total I probably played around 15 hours.

My only criticism is that when the game is complete (and it does a great job of carrying on after the credits roll) that is it, you can’t go back to the healed lands and try to ace your light seed count.  If I had known that I would have created a save game before the final confrontation.  But that is only a minor quibble.  I bought the game by chance and am extremely glad I did, I highly recommend it.

Another game I chance purchased was Fable II which I started last night.  My initial impressions weren’t good, the whole cockney villagers voiceover at the beginning really started to grate after a while.  But once what is essentially the tutorial quest when you are a child is over I found myself really getting into it.  It’s definitely an RPG for people who don’t usually like RPGs.

I’ve done a few quests, picked up some powers and played fetch with my dog.  With the added bonus that unlike having a real dog, this one doesn’t relieve itself in the street.

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Category: Personal, Reviews, Site News, Videogames