So, I was on the train home today from a meeting in town with some of my fellow boards.ie Pokéforum nerds, when my mind managed to stumble around to Minecraft. I had begun to think why the Flint and Steel is made using Flint and an Iron Ingot? So that led me to think: why not add Steel to the game, and make Flint and Steel require – literally – Flint and Steel?

Thus begins the rather large thought process.

Read the rest of this post…

So, this morning saw Portal 2 release at sometime about 5:30am – no thanks to all the people who played along with the whole Potato Sack thing and kept pushing the launch time back from mid-afternoon… –  to which I duly booted it up, slowly waited for the damn thing to decrypt the pre-loaded game files, and then streamed my entire playthrough of the game on my NGame channel.

Firstly, I should give a big shout-out to ThoughtsOfGlought and IrradiatedGamer for hooking me up with the game after winning a contest they were holding for a pre-order copy of Portal 2. And also I get to hopefully enjoy Glought dying a lot in VVVVVV soon

The game itself is brilliant, very well made, great story, and actually lasts for quite a while when you compare it to the original Portal. Overall, you get three distinct environments in which the puzzles take place, and I’d have to say that each one is about the length of the original Portal testchambers – and only the testchambers.

To put a time on the length of the game, I’d say six hours is a good figure for the story length, based on my stream video containing pretty much the entire game bar the first while lasting five and a half hours, and also the timespan between me getting the first story achievement, and the last one was 5h32m. Although that timeframe did include a couple of puzzles that well and truly had be stumped for a while, I must say.

Co-op I haven’t had much of a chance to dive into yet. Both myself and MegaGWolf played the single player from launch and were pretty damn tired afterwards, but we completed the first “intro” part of co-op, and the first set of testchambers proper – before G had to get ready for work, and I had to go to bed (after having had three hours of sleep and running on a bottle of Mountain Dew).

One thing that some people may say about it – seeing as it is released to retail on 360 and PS3 as well – is that the PC version is pretty much a console port. I would normally disagree with that, but seeing as they did screw up in where you’re manually saving the game and it advises you to “not turn off your console“, I’m on the fence about that.

Overall, it is a great game, but I do have one major bone to pick about it: the price. Full retail price of €50 for something as short and kinda unreplayable as Portal 2 is a bit of a rip-off. As with Portal 1, once you’ve gone through the game and have an idea of how to do the puzzles, future playthroughs aren’t exactly the same. This may seem a little biased considering I got Portal 1 on PC for free (special Steam offer to all); and Portal: Still Alive on Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 MS Points (€15) which had even more content that the regular Portal – but I think maybe something like €30-€35 would have been the most fair price for the game. I pre-ordered Left 4 Dead 2 back in the day and that too was €50, and I do kinda regret it considering how much I haven’t really played it, how similar it was to L4D1, and also the fact it dropped in price to €30 within a few months of launch…

Anyway, I’m not going to spoil any of the game for you, go play it for yourself if you haven’t already.

Link to my NGame recording: http://www.ngame.tv/thechrisd/thechrisdsrandomgamingstream24787

PS: If you bought it on 360 or PS3, SHAME ON YOU!!! VALVE GAMES ARE SACRED THINGS THAT SHOULD ONLY BE PLAYED ON A PC WITH A KEYBOARD AND MOUSE!!!
(I know it seems rich seeing as I bought Portal 1 on 360, but I hadn’t otherwise paid for Portal before. And the extra content…)

So, I’ve been playing F1 2010 recently, and I thought it might be an idea to maybe try write up a “racing report” style of article once I eventually finish up the first season. Now the results themselves may seem a little askew given the current difficulty settings I’m playing under (Amateur difficulty; full ABS, TCS; manual gearbox; sim fuel/tyres/damage; max flashbacks; auto pit), but I’m blaming that on the fact I’m doing an achievement run in the first year for at least:

• Rocking the boat (15)
  Finish ahead of your senior team-mate in your first season with a new team
• Crushing victory (20)
  Outclass your team mate at each race, over one season
• Consistency is the key (25)
  Score a point in every round of a season

Maybe after I finish it completely – and I finish up doing my Let’s Play of Pokémon Black – I might do a Let’s Play of one of my future seasons in the game on a harder difficulty, which should ideally offset the fact I’ll be in a much faster car, particularly as I have both Force India and BMW Sauber interested in my services for next year