The Weekend Post

Now I'm going to use my blog in the more traditional sense. That is to just witter about what is happening in my life; well really to just talk about what a fantastic weekend I had.

I went to two fantastic dance events. Red Hot and Blue on Friday and a Ceroc Tea Dance on Sunday. Maybe it's the music, people or atmosphere at Red Hot and Blue but it felt like a bit of a weekender at home. It was lovely; I guess my only complaint was that we arrived quite late so I didn't get to enjoy it quite as much as I liked. The tea dance was also great; there were those few key dances that just made it wonderful.

We had my brother and sister over on Saturday night for Ultra-Boggle Extreme. It was meant to be an extended Boggle game but we didn't really play that much of it; maybe a good thing given how ridiculously good my sister is at that game. It was lovely to socialise with them though.

Other than that I finally got around to watching some of the Unreal Tournament III video tutorials (they came with Collectors Edition which I bought for these videos; otherwise I would have bought it on Steam).They were great; I wish I had these the first time I was working with the Unreal engine; it would have made my life much easier. Anyway; even though I haven't actually played Unreal Tournament III beyond one quick single player match I've very much enjoyed building a few levels with it (they aren't multiplayer balanced, more just playing with the editor).

Since I'm now on talking about games I also played some Halo 3; a bit of single player and my first multiplayer game. I've heard great things about the Halo 3 multiplayer and I thought I'd finally check it out. The great things are completely accurate; you start up the matchmaking and it has a Starter Playlist which takes you to a simple deathmatch game. It managed to match make me with three people; two of which had also never played it before and another who had played it six times and lost five. Maybe you can attribute that to the number of people playing Halo 3 but the ability to actually find other people, in a couple of minutes, who have a workable ping and have only just started is a real testament to the game.

What I'm Playing

Did I not say, earlier in the year, that I wouldn't post a What I've Been Playing? Well due to lack of any other blogging here I figured that maybe this post is something I might finish (it still took me days to get around to posting it).

I've been playing Company of Heroes and Burnout Paradise both of which, mostly, on multiplayer. Burnout Paradise's multiplayer component is great; it's really a great model on which others should base how to get into a multiplayer game. I'm looking forward to one of their forthcoming patches that include a lot of the stuff that is great fun in the singleplayer to multiplayer. The recent Company of Heroes patch includes team matchmaking (which seems to work ok) and the stability seems to be much improved with is great.

I played a bit of Kingdom Hearts 2 last night. I know it is upscaled on the PS3 (last time I played it was on the PS2) but… that game looks fantastic. Seriously the art style is fantastic, the character animation is great. It seems such a shame that new PS3 owners (with no backwards compatibility) won't be able to enjoy games like that.

I also bought Prey when it was going real cheap on Steam. I never really enjoyed the demo (I think I might have played it on the 360 so that might have had something to do with it) but I've been playing the full game and I've been really enjoying it. It pre-dates Portal in the use of a portal like system; though, in complete contrast to Portal, you don't have any control of the portal system. The portals are used by your enemies and the game world to send you around places. It also uses things like different gravity (including some that you control) and gravity walkways to send challenges at you in all sorts of strange angles. It also has this interesting art style which consists of a mixture of alien technology and organic material (which is unpleasant at times); since the aliens have teleported chunks of the Earth then there is also a blend of the familiar. Maybe it was the low expectations I had when starting this game but I've been impressed so far; I shan't go into any more as Shamus Young, over at Twenty Sided, did a much more in-depth look at it.