3DS is Pretty Ace

So, yesterday was my birthday and I got the usual "have some money because who knows what you want" for the most part. Except for one massive, major exception, from my boyfriend.

It's even more awesome IRL.

It came with Ocarina of Time, obviously, and I promptly downloaded Four Swords onto it and hied myself into town and came home with Star Fox 64 and Super Pokemon Rumble (both of which were £15 off, which was really nice).

I can't even see 3D, but I'm still blown away by the device. The AR games are really neat and Face Raiders is totally hilarious, and I was completely amazed upon loading up Ocarina of Time. The graphics are nothing short of breathtaking.

I'm not even sure I have enough words.

All I need now is a 3DS remake of Majora's Mask or even, god forbid, Wind Waker. I wasn't even a huge fan of Ocarina of Time, but I am a total convert to the 3DS after that.

Having said that, I'm not paying the extortionate prices for the Virtual Console games!

Criticisms of the Xbox 360 Dashboard

My 360 updated a few weeks ago to the new dashboard. I promptly took it offline because I didn't want to download the broken Skyrim patch, so I couldn't really judge it. Now, with the release of the new patch which un-breaks magic resistances, I've put it back online. First impressions: "oh joy, another dashboard update". Second: AAAAAADDDDDDS. There's a lot of adverts everywhere.

I decided to go to the indie games because I had 300 points sitting around after having bought some New Vegas DLC for the other half. The games section was four sections in which wasn't cool. I found a section which had a few indie games, but after digging a bit further, I found the indie games. You can sort by release date and title, but there doesn't appear to be a way to reduce the amount displayed, so you have to scroll through 2200 games, 5 at a time. This is phenomenally poor design. The regular game store is no better.

I then went into my game library, and that suffered from a similar lack of organisation. 128 games, 5 at a time. You can sort by demo, arcade or indie. No Games On Demand option, so if I want to play Fable II or Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas I have to scroll for quite a while.

It is blatantly obvious that they've designed the new dashboard for use with just the Kinect. There's nothing in the design to indicate they even bothered thinking about people with joypads. It's all big icons and few things on every page, and has very obviously been designed by some guy who thinks form over function. I feel for the indie and arcade developers who are nigh impossible to find with this new marketplace.

And that's to say nothing about the fury I feel at having ads on a console I paid £300 to buy and £35 a year to use online. That's disgusting.

New - Empire Earth and Beneath a Steel Sky

Good Old Games is having a massive sale/giveaway sort of thing right now. A couple days ago, they gave away Empire Earth totally free, which is cool and slightly annoying because I bought it at Game ages ago and it's still in its shrinkwrap, but what you gonna do. I also noticed that they had Beneath a Steel Sky free too (except that's always free) so I added that to my account too.

Who knows when they'll get played, but hey, that's what holidays and retirement is for.

:B: - The Elder Scrolls - Skyrim

For me, the marker of a great game is that I don't want to do something else whilst playing it. There are very, very few games that have achieved this: Dark Chronicle, Bioshock, Fallout 3, and now The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim can join them.

Skyrim had claws sunk into my head so badly that I had to ban myself from playing it during the week so I didn't play past my bedtime and have to go to work on 3 hours sleep for 4 days running. Instead, the first weekend, I managed 18 hours play in 48 hours. Over the next couple weeks I slowly drip-fed myself during the week by indulging perhaps one night in the week. I really, really had it bad.

I've finished several story questlines: Dark Brotherhood, Mages College, Companions, and finally the main quest. I'm not going to spoil anything for anyone, except that I haven't been disappointed in anything so far, except perhaps the final battle against Alduin, who was, for all intents and purposes, just another dragon. But honestly, I can deal with slightly disappointing final battles; I played through Borderlands after all.

I'm now at a bit of a crossroads. I have a significant amount of other quests, both miscellaneous and regular. I can scroll down my list of regular quests for a good 5 or 10 seconds before hitting misc. I am really rather overwhelmed. I have no idea what to do next. There are still a great deal of places that I haven't found yet, and many, many more that I haven't cleared. It's a veritable rabbit hole of a videogame. Almost every time I talk to someone, I get more stuff to do! It's crazy.

Completion is another tricky proposition. With the radiant quest system, there's infinite amounts of quests in the game. So should I just finish all the regular ones? How do you even find all the regular ones? I think perhaps just emptying my regular quest list will count as complete - otherwise I'll be at this forever. And I think I could probably play it forever too. 5/5 stars.

New - Rayman Origins

Reasons I bought Rayman Origins instead of just ignoring it in favour of Skyrim:

• Quality 2D platforming games are incredibly rare these days.
• The art is incredible and I have no doubt the sound will be too.
• It's Rayman returning to it's best - the 3D versions didn't have the same oomph the first did.
• Ubisoft is completely idiotic for releasing it at the tail-end of the most packed videogame season we've seen in years, perhaps ever, and giving it next to no advertising.
• The dickheads at Ubisoft will be taking Origins' success into account when deciding whether to let Michael Ancel continue to make Beyond Good & Evil 2.

My reasons can be simplified as thus; games that are crafted so thoughtfully like Rayman should be bought by the million instead of left to languish on the shelf because their publisher is inept.

Despite making an effort to not buy any new games, I had to make an exception to support a vision of what the games industry should be.

New - Skyrim

I've been meaning to post this since Tuesday, but pretty much my entire free time has been taken up by this game.

Skyrim came out last Friday, and upsettingly, I had a trip to London booked for that weekend, so I couldn't pick it up until Tuesday. I did have Tuesday off, but due to various circumstances, including dentists, family members and Significant Others, I only got to play it for a couple of hours.

Having played for roughly 12 hours in the past two days, I can wholeheartedly say that it's fucking fantastic and I'm having so much fun. I love how there's seemingly an endless supply of quests to keep me occupied. Yes, yes, radiant engine blah blah, but these aren't miscellaneous quests I'm talking about. I have to scroll down to see all of the quests I have and I know for a fact I've barely scraped the surface. I'm so excited to spend time in this world, I think I'm going to have to go back and play now even though I quit 30 minutes ago because I'd gotten pasted by some mages. Ta-ra!

:C: - Fallout: New Vegas

After many hours and almost as many crashes, I've done everything significant in Fallout: New Vegas, and am comfortable with checking it off as completed. By no means does this mean I've finished all the quests or collected all the unique items, but given everything that's in the games I think it's fair to have just finished all the DLCs, seen all of the endings and done most of the sidequests.

I played the DLC out of order, which was a mistake. I played Old World Blues first, followed by Dead Money, Honest Hearts and finished with Lonesome Road. I would have got more out of them storywise if I had played them in release order, but what I really should have done was played them in quality order, building up to the best. I definitely shouldn't have played Dead Money after Old World Blues, as playing the worst DLC after the best can only reflect poorly on the poor one. Reflecting on it, Dead Money probably wasn't as awful as it felt at the time.

Having finished Lonesome Road, I'm not sure why everyone's got a hate-on for it. Alright, it wasn't as epic as the trailer made itself out to be, and it was a touch linear, but it was fun and it was nice to find out some of the Courier's backstory, and the equipment I got out of it was pretty bloody awesome.

Soon I'll be moving onto the Capital Wasteland. I have the Requiem for a Capital Wasteland mod installed so I can go there, and I'll be putting my playtime onto the Steam version of Fallout 3. I'm looking forward to it as Fallout 3 was special to me, but first I need to figure out why my level cap mod isn't working.

Sometime soon I'll put up a list of the mods I have installed, so you can play New Vegas the real way.