Bourne

I watched the first Bourne movie today; I have seen it before but today was the first time that I actually enjoyed it.

Before today my thoughts of the Bourne movies was that they were grey, boring and with a really depressing atmosphere but from today I am going to think that the first movie is a cool and intense movie. I bought the trilogy in a pack from CDON a couple of days ago and Lisa and I decided to watch the first movie today.

When the movie ended I really wanted to put in the next movie and watch it, now that didn’t happen but I will see it this week probably. Go Bourne, go.

This week my thesis in Game design starts and I am going to be working for Ted Kjellson and writing some stuff for him, the hard part is to make it as a research. It shouldn’t be only writing instead it shall have a research question that I shall take in consideration while working and writing a report a out if it but I’ll talk to Ted about it and I am sure we’ll figure something out.

I bought the two newest James Bond movies today on Bluray, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace; a nice addition to both the James Bond collection and the bluray collection-

That’s it for today, sleep tight!

Matt Damon as Jason Bourne

Infinite Undiscovery #2

I am now six hours into Infinite Undiscovery and I like it. Again, there might be small spoilers in the text for those who don’t want to know anything around the game, characters or story.

The story has started for real now and I have destroyed two chains so far. A lot of characters have been introduced and I use some more than others but that is normal. The fighting in the game is really nice, going away from the turn based combat that is standard in the genre and instead lets you fight in real time with up to three AI partners who can be given orders. It works well and they switch combat style when I tell them to.

I have explored the game world a bit further now and I must say it is huge; the down point is that the game doesn’t tell you where you should go or where the next city is placed. Most of the times you have to take a chance and run in one direction and hope for it to be right, if it isn’t you have to run back. So far I have been lucky and have chosen the right way every time but it puts one of mine concepts in place from the previous project where I had a game in which you explored a desert. I now see that it could need a goal and a map which wasn’t the plan from the beginning. Also the mission objectives like ”go to the next city” is very vague and not that often built in into the story but instead has to be read from the pause screen or achieved when talking to one of your characters which I can feel is bad. It would have been nicer if they would have said e.g. ”Let’s go to <insert city name here>, come talk to me when you are ready”. Might sound overdone but at least then you know what to do and where to go.

The in game stuff is not very well explained, at one moment in the first real dungeon I had to bring one bat and one snake to a door but the game never told me that one of the twins had a magic that let me control animals and instead I ran around trying to make these animals follow me all the way to the door. The twin sure is a beast master but it took me a while to figure it out. The game also never mention that when around an area where you can use the flute to discover hidden areas the game sounds weird, this as well took me a while to figure out and at first I thought that the soundtrack was the worst ever with a noise similar to what can be heard when people have recorded the outer space, just disturbances and rattle and not very sweat for the ears.

The voices and that sometimes there is only text have become better and it isn’t something I am getting annoyed over any longer, I have getting used to it now I believe. The voice acting is rather good and a bit Japanese silly when characters that look grown up sounds like a twelve year old boy but that comes with the genre I think.

Capell, the protagonist, is a coward. He and Sigmund, the real hero in the world of Infinite Undiscovery, are really look alike and I suspect it later will turn out that they are twins since Capell doesn’t have a family and also some other more story specific details I won’t go into here. But while Sigmund is made to save the world, Capell have been dragged in by accident and doesn’t want to be there. It all turns out rather funny when he tries to get away from the dangerous life as a rebellion but is put together with a couple of other characters or when he does stuff that a normal person wouldn’t do. But it works well and it is a nice touch to make the player take the role of the less fortunate and the one who doesn’t want to be the hero instead of being the Knight in the shining armor who has been raised to save the world.

Now it is time for me to go to sleep so I can continue playing tomorrow. Please comment my texts, I am trying something new here with actually thinking of what I am playing and taking notes on good and bad stuff in the game and I want to know if it is appreciated and interesting to read. Have a nice night and see you next week.

Capell from Infinite Undiscovery

Lights out

I just turned out all the lights in the appartment and I have 5 candels burning on my table now. I also switch of all day to day electricity like computers, teves and such but I am sitting here with my computer without power so I let it go on the battery.

I think that the 60 Earth Hour is a good thing to do and to participate in. Some people say that it won’t be any drastic changes but I think that if the same amount of people as last year participate something sure has to change and last year there where 50 million people who joined in and they count on the number to have grown up to a 100 million participants this year so sure it will be noticable.

I look out of the appartment and it is actually more lights on than off which isn’t so nice but it is up to each and every person.

First Impressions: Infinite Undiscovery

I can’t promise that this blog post can be spoiler free for those of you who might end up playing Infinite Undiscovery someday but there will be no major spoilers if there are any.

I have played Infinite Undiscovery for a bit over one hour today and I already played a couple of features that I haven’t seen in this form before in an Japanese role-playing game(JRPG). The game starts off with the protagonist Capell being locked up in a cell down a basement. After that the second character Aya have made her appearance and they talked and beat the crap out of two guards they decides to escape the place and goes out into a room where they have to go up an awful lot of stairs. Here the first feature comes, after a short while in the stairs a red ogre turns up at the bottom of it and starts chasing you and this takes place all the way up with other enemies attacking you and obstacles that have to be destroyed. It is both cool and a bit annoying, it is the first thing you get to do in the game and the controller isn’t there yet and it easily gets hectic. But it is cool in way that it’s a new feature and different from many other JRPG’s which is good because it’s a genre that have been standing still for a long while.

This red ogre return later when running around in a really dark forest, I couldn’t play that part during the day because I couldn’t see that much then on the television. The other new feature I have stumbled upon is when Capell has to carry Aya around and the other characters in the group take care of all the fighting. I think is cool that the designers decided to take the fighting control away from the player and letting them stand back from it all and only watching it.

So far the game is good but I hope it will become better or else I am not sure I will finish it. The graphics so far is blend, Capell looks really good while some of the environment looks a bit low-res but overall it’s a pretty good looking game. The largest problem is that there aren’t voices in all conversations, sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t, it feels like it is on random which I hope it isn’t. They should have put voice acting to all conversations, which would have raised the game a bit further.

But this is only an hour and 20 minutes into the game, I still have a lot to discover and I think it will get better, some games can be a bit dull in the beginning before the main story have been presented and before you have seen the more impressive environments so I will still give it a shot.

Now I am off to drink some Angostura 1919 rum and play Infinite Undiscovery, have a nice Friday evening!

My Xbox 360 is back

I got my xbox back today, they called me around 8 in the morning saying something I couldn’t really understand but in the end I heard him say something about if I was at home and if he could come by in a couple of minutes to hand over my xbox which was totaly okay.

Earlier this week I bought Infinite Discovery because I have been after JRPG for a while and ID was cheap so I thought it would do. The day after I recieve my prices from a contest I won over at Level7 and in that package a copy of Halo Wars is found a long with a Halo Wars t-shirt and a xbox 360 messenger bag. So all of the sudden I had 2 new games to play but now xbox to play them on. But I do have that now.

I am not done with Deadly Creatures yet, I’m at level 8 out of 10 I believe and it is a solid game, really hard from time to time which is the main reason I’m not done yet but I am working on it. We will see what happens now when I have two other games to play and a couple of other games that I want to finish.

Today’s scheme is to take care of all the stuff in my life. Fix the last things with my application to Securitas, call Ted and check if we could meet to discuss the thesis work that should be done from next week and all the way to the summer. Those are the two most important ones, then we have stuff like playing a lot of games to see which to keep and which to sell and so on and so forth.

That’s it for today!

Deadly Creatures

On my way home from the gym today I went past Game to buy myself a new game, I had been in there earlier this week to see wether or not Persona 4 would work on my PS3 but they said it wouldn’t so I trusted them. Then my choice of game became Deadly Creatures for Nintendo Wii, a game not designed for those who are afraid of bugs, spiders and snakes.

The game is a bit different compared to many other games as it doesn’t show you the story with it’s characters, instead it puts you in control of either a spider or a scorpion that gets it share of the story while running through the levels. I have only made it to level 4 so far so I don’t really know what will happen but so far it have been pretty low on story.

But I think the concept is quite interesting of letting the player take the role of someone else than the main character and letting him discover the story while he is on his own quest. I got my guesses on how the story will end and how it functions with the player role in the hole scenario but that is still to see.

The game so far have been nice, not the best game ever but a solid action title with some annoying details. There are from time to time some slowdowns in the game, nothing major but it lowers the value a bit. Then the fighting could have been a bit tighter and the environments could have been working a bit better as of know you sometimes get stuck and only get a vibrant movement out of the spider/scorpion, this aswell lowers the value a bit.

On the bright side though is that the levels are pretty cool since they put the player in a oversized world because you are a small spider/scorpion. The levels have taken place in a grave at the side of a skeleton and underground and I know  that later in the game I will get to visit the pumping station that the story involves. The game lets the player walk on all sides of things and the developers have really made sure the game doesn’t play on one plane only. At the last level I visited I got to climb some roots or branches but they went up and down and I had to go around on all sides of them, it’s taken it a step further than Super Mario Galaxy

The controls works good but not flawless and most of the time in fights I just push random button and swing my wiimote and nunchuck at random and see what happens. When exploring, which got a to small part of the game, the controller works better since it doesn’t require any special moves.

So far I like Deadly Creatures but I’m not thrilled over it but it is worth a play through atleast. After that I might sell it or something, we’ll see, I got 60% left of the game so I can still change my mind.

Rlod again

Bummer, my xbox just flashed me three red lights and now I have to send it away. I just talked to the Xbox 360 support and it will be fixed, I just have to print out a postage paper and pack the console down in a box, call UPS and make them come here to pick it up. Then I have to wait for 3 weeks before I get to see it again.

That leaves me with two remaining consoles that I have to use during this period but I’ll probably manage it. But it sucks when hardware breaks, especially when you paid a lot of money for them, glad it’s free support on rlod boxes thou. Guess I’m gonna start up my PS3 and check out some games or movies on it now, or maybe play some Locoroco on my PSP, lovely game.

Smell ya later

World of Me

Another week have past, this week I received my new bed and I got a place to do my thesis in game design at. The thesis will be written for Ted, my mentor in my specialistation project. Feels nice to have something to do during that period of time, it seems that a lot of people haven’t got anywhere to be.

Tomorrow I am going to an interview at Securitas to see wether or not I will end up there during the summer. I have worked as a security guard earlier and know what it is about but I don’t want to get stuck with it for the rest of my life which happens easier then you might think.  When I worked in Göteborg I really liked it, the collegues I had was great and the job easy enough to have for a couple of years and I made enough money to live as I wanted. Ahh well, it is just a work over the summer at the beginning and I might not get it, who knows. But it would be nice to get a real income again, I’m missing it after have been study for 1½ year.

I bought World of Goo yesterday or so, it has a reduced price on Steam during the weekend so I bought it and it’s a lot of fun. It’s made by a couple of guys, one guy is behind most of the stuff like the gameplay, design, music and art and then he have had a couple of other guys do what he can’t do for him self I would guess like the coding. When playing it starts the mind and I start to think of what I could create if I took care of the art and design stuff and let someone else code it and create music for it. I am actually thinking of starting a project in Adventure games studio since it is a really easy tool for creating point and click games and I have a odd idea for something that might work, atleast get some peoples eye to pop.

Well, going to make some food now but see you later.

Game problems

I’ve got a problem, I’m haveing a hard time finishing the games I buy before I either buy new ones or goes back to older titles that I already have finished once but would like to give a second play thru. This week I bought Lost Planet for the Xbox 360 together with Loco Roco and Racthet & Clank Size Matter for the PSP. I have played Lost Planet once since I got it home, instead I have started a new character in Fable 2 and I would really like to start up Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic again and give it a third play thru. Last week I bought Mirrors Edge, haven’t finished that one either and that is a short game but I have plans on finishing it sometime.

The problem is that older titles often pop up in my head and I think that it would be great to play one of those. A week or two ago I started a new character in Mass Effect which I played for a couple of hours but I’m not sure I’m going to continue further with the game, it takes a lot of time playing RPG’s which makes it a stupid genre to start new games in when not haveing a lot of time. And still, I really like to play SW: KotOR again but I’ll probably only going to start it, spend like 5-8 hours with it and then lay it down since some other game gets me.

A couple of years ago, when I lived at home and had a Xbox, the first one, I often bought games on sale, they are cheap and some titles are titles that you wanted to play when they were new. The thing is that there is always new games stealing the intrest which makes those game put on hold so that you can play the newer game instead. And when you finished the new game there is a new sale with another old title that you always have wanted so you buy that one too. At the peak of my Xbox games collection I had around 45 titles I think which is a lot of games and a lot of money paid for them. There was a lot of sale titles but ofcourse there was some classics in the collection aswell like Halo, Jet Set Radio Future and SW: KotOR.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this post, it is probably a way for me to complain on myself that I’m closing in on the old xbox period when I bought titles on sale just to have them and because they were games I wanted to play when they were new, Lost Planet sure is one of those titles. The game was probably really good when it was released but now I’m not so sure anymore. It isn’t a lot of fun playing and the characters are oozing of Japanese design in a bad way. Sure, I have only had the game for a couple of days and played in once so far so it might turn out being great further in but I’m not sure of it.

The same thing happend with Animal Crossing DS, Zack & Wiki and Resident Evil 4, the two later titles was bought on sale but I sold them a month or two later since I didn’t find them funny. Animal Crossing on the other hand was bought from a user on a forum on the internet, I had wanted to play the game for so long and when I got it I just couldn’t see what the fuzz was about the title.

The biggest problem is that new intresting games are released like every week and there is no way that I have time or the money to buy and play them all so some games, or actually a lot of games are put on the ”wait for a lower price” list or for the game market to cool down a bit so there is time to take in what you missed before. That time never comes thou, there is always new titles coming out that you want and mostly I spend more then a week with each title. If I buy a full price game I might spend three weeks with it atleast, Fable 2 I played thru twice before starting on something new which probably took me four or five weeks I believe.

Well, I leave it here and might come back on the topic. Am not sure I actually came to any conclusion but know you all know where I stand in the topic… or something. Thanks for reading!