Sunday 26 October 2008

GLADOS would like to remind you that you suck at physics based puzzles.

I'm posting this just after my previous article about me being completely self-sustainable because videogames and general discussion don't mix with dreams of independence. I missed out something to do with sustainability earlier: toilets. The eco-hab comes with a dry toilet. A dry toilet is something which puts poo and wee in a bucket and accelerates it's decomposition. It turns excrement into compost which I would then put on my crops in my field. Brilliant!

Now that that's over I'll talk about Portal.
 Actually I also bought Worms. I'll talk about that as well.


Portal: Still Alive (1200 Microsoft Points)
Named after the internet famous single 'Still Alive' by Jonathan Coulton. I already played the original Portal game on it's own on PC and the Still Alive addon features the original game. Or rather Portal, the original game, features a Still Alive addon of another 14 test chambers. The addon was meant as a way of getting Portal out onto the Xbox 360 over the Xbox LIVE Arcade. The Orange Box was brilliant value for money as a console game (It was half-price on steam. I opted for buying each game individually.) And Portal was meant as a brilliant value for money
standalone game. 1200 MS points is £10.20. I bought Portal on it's release for just over £5. 
Hence the 14 extra levels which if you take away the cost of the original game is about 37p a chamber. Each chamber is about 15 minutes of the most original, mind-bending gameplay you've ever experienced. I think that still fits with Valve's value-for-money strategy here. I've only played about half of the new test chambers so far but so far they've been amazingly tricky with some things I hadn't seen in the original puzzles (button reskins, cubes which self-destruct if there are more than one of them, that sort of thing). The Xbox controller handles the gameplay perfectly (better than mouse and keyboard in my opinion). Portal in it's ultimate simplicity only uses up 5 buttons (X, A, B ,Left Trigger, Right Trigger). No problems with the controls. Also, I was told that the Orange Box on Xbox 360 had optimised the 3D world to run better on an Xbox. This may be a complete lie as I never played the Orange Box. But the HD which outputs from the Xbox looks significantly different from my analog PC output. Hey, for the sake of comfort I even set the Portal graphics to simulate a PC monitor (yes you can do that!). Portal is amazing and I won't comlain about more of it. So if you've played Portal on the Orange Box there's not much more for you in the addon. If you've never played Portal, you don't know how much sophisticated culture you're missing out on, go by it
 now. If you played Portal on the Orange Box on the PS3 and are annoyed that it's all buggy and/or you want more then get an Xbox. You fool.

Worms (800 Microsoft Points)
My Portal review was long wasn't it? Well I bought Worms because I had a spare 800 points after buying Portal: Still Alive. It's still very much the same Worms as my last 2D worms game Worms World Party. I say 'my' last worms 2D game because the Open Warfare series's graphics were a little too advanced for my old ugly nintendo DS (I have yet to look into the DSi and the PSP 3000) and the Wii worms game was
A. Nothing different from normal worms gameplay
B. On the Wii.
C. Had an amazingly cheap title (a space oddity)
So now we come to Worms on XBLA. It keeps a simple and basic set of weapons. I remember Team 17 outlined this a few years back before Worms 4 Mayhem. It was on one of their blogs or something, the basic set was Shotgun, Bazooka, Grenade, Uzi, Ninja Rope. Worms on XBLA keeps to this formula. Of course included are a sample of the wierd new weapons like airstrikes, cluster bombs, banana bombs. But there's nothing outrageously silly like a concrete donkey or a holy hand grenade. Also, the Exploding Barrels don't explode with fire and thre are no fire weapons included in hte weapon set. Don't know why. The controls seem unintuitive, but I'll get the hang of them. There's a zoom feature, it's useful yet annoying at the same time. You can assign different teams to different controllers. And it's really just classic Worms gameplay, in 1080p High Defenition, on the Xbox.
Plus it's better than Battalion Wars II!


I also watched about half of Burnie Burns's talk on internet media, machinima and Halo. I can't summarise what he said because I didn't understand most of it and I only watched half. But it's quite interesting so I recommend you give it a quick look.

Also I'm listening to Killerpilze's 'ich hasse dich' at the moment. Give it a listen.
And I'm simultaneously litsening to the new Doctor Who radio series. Don't give it a listen (It's a bit 'meh').

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