Alan’s Blog

I’m not going to apologise for the delay, because I’ve done it too many times Needless to say, I’ve been busy with things and haven’t had the time to update. I’m going to try and force myself to update at least once a week.

Defender was released on XBox Live Arcade the other day. I had a clone of that on my Amstrad CPC6128 called Defend or Die, and playing the original bought back a flood of nostalgia. It still holds up today in terms of gameplay and even graphically as far as I’m concerned (I don’t know whether it has been updated at all graphics-wise for release on XBLA); but then again I’ve always been a proponent of gameplay over graphics anyway.

I’m currently working my way through Splinter Cell Double Agent on the PC front, and I think I’m about half way through. I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto 3 again on my laptop when I haven’t been at my desktop machine; which I finished last night. I still really enjoy that one, but it can be frustrating at times given the things they added in Vice City and San Andreas (bikes, planes/helicopters, etc). I’ll probably move onto Vice City next, although there are issues with playing that one on a laptop keyboard due to the game not letting you redefine the flying controls (laptops don’t have a dedicated num-pad), which makes finishing some missions that involve flying impossible without an external keyboard.

Watched Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children for the first time the other night, as well as Boogie Nights (which I’d seen before). Final Fantasy was surprisingly good considering I never played FF VII the game. Paul gave me a quick run down on the story before we started, which helped. There was also a video run through of the game on the DVD of which my only comment would be, it was subtitled and they were playing too fast, so reading the subtitles was nigh-on impossible. Boogie Nights was fun as usual, but it was officially research anyway.