What I've been playing - 19th to 30th December 2011

Christmas has been and gone and now I'm relaxed enough (finished work early \o/) to sort through what I've been up to since my last post.

Purchases
I finally got to purchase Laughing Jackal's latest PSN mini, Orbit and their previous release, Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. The former has been played a lot (more below), the latter hasn't been touched at all.

The Steam sales have also arrived but mercifully, I've managed to stave off my cravings. Except to purchase The Binding of Isaac - which everyone has been harping on about.

Christmas arrived and left me with Child of Eden (another game I've been playing a lot this week) and Professor Layton's latest game (which won't be played until I start/finish the previous game).

Dissidia 012 duodecim Final Fantasy
Just a few more characters to max out. Here's a video of one of the recent battles I had against the computer. Enjoy (me being rubbish)!



Orbit
A PSN mini from UK based developers, Laughing Jackal. This game sees you and your scientific colleague roam the planets of the solar system to explore every nook and cranny of the world. The aim is to fly around the planets (side-scroller style), in search of relics and money to upgrade your ship. Once you've flown around the planet once, you move on to the next planet and the game basically repeats this for each planet, getting larger as you go along.



Quite an addictive game and the characters do have some great lines (and the obvious Uranus jokes). Not as brilliant as OMG-Z (a chain-attack strategy game with zombies) but well worth a look and costs £2.49.

Child of Eden
This is a musical shooter where the aim is to save Project Lumi from a virus attack as the project nears completion - which would eventually reproduce a human in the world of Eden (where the much appreciated game, Rez takes place). The game uses either motion controls (i.e Kinect or in my case, PS Move) or the standard controller to give you 5 beautiful levels of on-rails shooting action. The way it works is that you lock on to enemies with your reticule and then unleash the bullets in quick succession. Firing the maximum number of bullets in time to the music nets you extra points and your score is tallied up at the end.



It's quite an experience with Move. After some fiddly calibration, the game plays brilliantly and in Trance mode (i.e. another controller in your hand - vibrating to the music) it's even better. I'd love to try this out with Kinect at some point, just to compare it with the PS3 version. I've completed the game but there's a lot to do (killing all the enemies, picking up every item or just achieving a perfect game) and it will take a few goes before I can start eating away at those trophies.

Other news
There's the cancellation of The Last Guardian that turned out to be a mistake (phew!) and Playstation Vita selling well in the first 2 days in Japan - before collapsing. A collapse that has led many a forum to cry "DOOM!"

Keep an eye out on the blog for my personal look at 2011.