TAFE is Over

Its been 12 days of fun.  Over the last six weeks I've been learning how to operate a bar, how to make coffee's using the machine, how I should serve drinks, and identifying the correct glasses for what drinks, and now Mum's nagging me about making her some Fluffy Ducks.

Which I found has quite a few different variants.  Mum and I are going to try Cointreau, Advocaat, and Lemonade in the near future.  Should be fun.  Or terrible.  I'll report the results on facebook sooner or later.  At worst, I'm sure we can figure out other things to do with Cointreau and Advocaat.

The funniest part is that we've got some Highball glasses, but they're Sesame Street glasses.  So they'll be cute Fluffy Ducks.

But today we came across something interesting.  Our Teacher brought in some Junkmail, a thing for Dan Murphys, and it had a particularly expensive range of drinks.  One of which was particulary special.

The picture to the side is of the Johnnie Walker Queens Jubilee Scotch.  It's only a small, but gorgeous, bottle, containing a 60 year old Scotch.  And the price?  $200,000.  There are only 60 bottles in the world.

I wish I could get a whiff of that.

Remember November - Psygnosis

It may be a well known fact that I spent a LOT of time playing on my Sega Mega Drive during my youth. And a few games really stuck out. Two of which were published by Psygnosis: Puggsy, and Wiz'n'Liz.

Days were spent with Mum and I writing down Fruit and Veg combinations to the various spells available between chasing down Wabbits. And I'm sure there were months spent before I finished Puggsy, because it was that friggin hard.

You couldn't save the game (though apparently you could if you had the Sega CD version) but you got a password set. But the amount of levels were ridiculous, especially if you were trying to cover EVERYTHING. Secret rooms, difficult bosses, and even more difficult puzzles to figure out.

There were even levels that one could get stuck in. And I still remember a level at a Mill, and you had heaps of bundles of flour, but I got so much flour and just jammed myself in and couldn't get out, and had to reset the console. Oh how I cried. I didn't have the last password. I had to start from scratch.

The thing about it was that you had to move objects and swing yourself about, even leverage yourself over cliffs and up walls. It was a unique experience, and an amazing Puzzle game.

Same with Wiz'n'Liz. Though not as difficult as Puggsy, the game lived up to it's name of being a Frantic Wabbit Wescue. You get a set amount of time to start, which may be around a minute, and you complete more and more levels using whatever time you had left from the last level you finished.

Then you had to collect more Wabbits using less time, and it just keeps going and going and going. I don't think I've finished the game on it's hardest difficulty yet.

But I miss these games. And these are games that should be brought back. Show these kids what the fuck a hard game is.

I'll just add it to the wishlist though, shall I?

Halo 4

I have summoned you here for a purpose.
"Nobody summons Master Chief!"
Then it pleases me to be the first.

I'm in a bit of a financial rut at the moment, what with being a dole bludger and everything.  Mind, I'm doing that Bar and Gambling TAFE course, so it's not all bad.  But with the lack of dosh it stops me from getting brand new games.  Like Halo 4.

Now I wasn't particular optimistic about Halo 4.  Though I thought it was cool that the cover looks so be Unicron trying to gobble up the Master Chief.  But surely that wasn't going to happen, so I added a dash to my reserve of disappointment.

The last Halo game that involved the Master Chief, namely Halo 3, was disappointing.  It was pretty for a little while but before you even finished your cuppa, the game was over.  There wasn't really much to say about it after that.

The game as a whole was pretty much a series of encounters, nothing to motivate you along except to "Finish the Fight" before to moved on to being called a chap with a miniscule length of manhood by children who didn't even know what to do with their supposed manhood.

 So that's why I kept my reserves of disappointment.  Then the Reviews came out.

I take reviews with half a grain of salt, because there's always a chance that the other half of the grain will be the dignity half and will have been sucked off by those who want the game to sell well.  And I figured that was exactly the case when every single review that I came across said "Halo 4 is Top of the Pops".

But I let them be.  It's not my place to say "YOU'RE WRONG YOU SLAVE MONKEY" since I hadn't played the game itself.  But given time, I probably would.

And I did.  My friends picked up the game on the midnight launch, and they contacted me the next day to say that it was the best Halo Game to date.  And Scotty gave me an offer I wanted to take up.  He invited me to play the game with him at his place on Thursday, because he had the day off.

So Thursday, I rocked up to his place and woke him up because, expectedly, he was up until about 5am the night before playing.  We set up the Xbox and we began the latest chapter of the Master Chief.

One of the first things I noticed was the exempilary level of cinematic detail.  It's not just a set of crap looking muppets, I was almost convinced that they had gotten actual actors to play.  The twitches, the motions, all those little things that a person actually does.  Even the look of stunned silence was emphatic.

And slowly, but surely, all those reserves of disappointment drained away with the voice of Master Chief, speaking infinitely more than the entirety of the rest of the series.

The game at its core is still a Halo game, a rock-paper-scissors game with some new enemies and gear.  And new stuff is always fun.  But in the end, my only problems are that I would've liked more diverse range of enemies, and a better boss fight.  But if they're my only complaints, then that means I think it's a good game.

Reinventing Ogre Battle

You know, there has been a lot of rehashing of games lately, and better yet the reinvention of older games.  And I'm wondering if I threw out a game I'd like to play out there, that I would get to see it made.  It's not an unreasonable idea.  And considering one game I'm thinking of would be (somewhat) easily reinvented because the style has already been done by a few different developers now.

The game I'm thinking of is Ogre Battle.  Now I put it out there because I've been playing Tactics Ogre a LOT lately, and I've nothing bad to say about it after putting in 200 hours into it, but also because it's a game that can look a lot cooler now than it did then because it's a format that has been done quite a few times.

The one comparison that hit me was Dawn of War II, because as I played a little of Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen, I found that it had features that are similar to DoW2.  You customise your party in the World Map, and then in battle you command your parties across the field of play.

It seems like a straight forward thing because a lot of the groundwork has already been laid out.  It's just a matter of building the game from the ground up, though naturally that's easier said than done.