Donkey Kong 64 Update

I've been playing my way through now for about 5 days, and I've clocked about 16 hours game time. The completion stats tell me I've done 24%, which isn't bad. The game is still holding my interest, but there's a lot, and by that I mean 2 out of 3 words, of swearing at it. It would be even better if the developers had paid a bit of attention to the user side. For example I've been trying to complete the arcade version of DK that's in the game. This gives me a gold banana for the first completion, and the Nintendo coin for the second. Now it's not beyond the realms of possibility that I might fail on my first attempt, so to get to retry it I have to reposition DK on the lever, press they pull button, watch the cut scene of the zoom in to the machine, sit through donkey kong stealing Pauline, and then I can start playing. And if I die in the game I have to sit through it all again. How hard would it have been to include a retry option, so I could do it in seconds, with the push of one button? As I'm a programmer I can tell you - really bloody easy. In the programming language I use in my day job it could have been done in

Msgbox "Retry" "You failed" Question YesNo
If mbResult = mbYes Call DONKEY_ARCADE

2 lines. Gits! So no, I have to sit through 5 mins of crap because a developer insists that I have to watch his cutscene.

You wouldn't necessarily believe it from this post, but I'm really enjoying the game

Currently Playing: Donkey Kong 64

I've finally gotten around to playing some games again, consequently I've chosen something from my backlog list. Donkey Kong 64 has not stood the test of time very well, the camera is all over the bloody place, needing frequent corrections, and the graphics are about what you'd expect for N64 era 3D, i.e. eye bleeding colours and blurred like it's all out of focus. Game play is actually pretty good, jump around, shoot things, find bananas.

Tomb Raider Underworld (Last time, I promise!)

I'd be really interested to know how this works. I feel pretty sure it's just a game save at a point where the glitch has been passed, i.e. not a patch. Wonder what happens to any treasures/relics collected up to that point?

Gaming Related Goodness

In the spirit of getting something on the blog, and because I've not updated in a while this is going to be a bit of a consolidated post of gaming related purchases and what-not.

I've finished 100%, with all skill points, Ratchet and Clank Tools of Destruction.
Another great installment in the series. Nothing ground-breaking, but it was the usual ton of fun to play.

We've bought Mario Kart Wii, and an extra wheel. It's bloody fantastic, and I've completed 50cc and 100cc modes. As usual 150cc mode is hard, and incredibly frustrating. The thing that really irritates me about this is that we bought it for the multi-player aspect, but you can't have all the multiplayer goodies unless you complete single player mode. Nintendo, that really sucks.

I had the buddies from university round a couple of weeks ago. It's the first visit they've had here since we did the garage to games room conversion. They were more than happy to spend most of the weekend working through the games collection, and we bust out the Vectrex for a bit of fun too. We also did some boardgaming, Carcasonne Hunter and Gatherers, and something about rivers in Egypt whose name escapes me at the moment. Both good fun. Oh yeah, and we drank some beer and ate Chinese.