Thursday, February 17, 2011

Oh the irony.........

I wrote a blog post not too long ago about collectibles in games and how they can soon come to be amazingly tiresome if not implemented properly. Well it seems like the gaming Gods took offense at my harsh words and saw fit to smite me in the form of Front Mission Evolved.

This game has 20 Sensors hidden on each level which you have to shoot, plus a further three Emblems per level that need picking up. The real ball ache is the fact that the sensors are pretty damn small and are hidden in some ridiculous places - a bunch of them are actually off the playing area and can only be seen/shot if you use a gun with a zoom feature. Yay!

Normally in such a situation you would just leap onto the interwebz and find a really good guide, perhaps with videos, to help you along. However, the game is pretty much a non-entitty in terms of sales and the guides available are not great. Someone did do a bunch of videos for some of the sensors, but they stopped after about five levels (dammit) so I'm following a written guide on PS3T, which is pretty helpful but also has a few flaws and ambiguous descriptions. As a result it is taking me about an hour to scour each level for every item and, when you consider that I could probably complete some of those levels in about ten minutes, then it soon becomes a real ballache.

I even went and had a look at the Prima strategy guide and it is absolutely APPALLING for the sensor locations. They are not even numbered in the order you encounter then, so for one map number 20 on their list is actually right at the start of the level - meaning you will miss it if you progress too far. Who the hell thought that would be an acceptable layout is beyond me.

To be honest I've seen a lot of shoddy strategy guides for various games and I often wonder how those things get made, if they aren't going to include even the most basic information then what good are they?

Still after a lot of trial and error I have got through the first three acts with everything found. So now I have six more levels to endure before I finally have the full 1k.

After that I will be at a bit of a loose end. I really want to round up a posse to challenge the Firefight missions on Halo ODST, but other than that I'm not sure what I want to play at the moment. A couple of ideas have come to mind, mainly because I have a month of Live on my backup account now, so that I have all of the online stuff done in a couple of games.

My first choice would be Virtua Tennis 09, as this is a game I've already started and would dearly love to finish off. The main problem is that I need 650 online wins (no really) in order to get the relevant Gold medals - yes, 650 wins would only HELP me towards one achievement. It wouldn't get me any points in and of itself.

My other thought was The Club, as there have been rumours of the servers being shut down so if I want to get it done then I have to start fairly soon. I could probably knock out most of the online tasks in a day or so, leaving me with a gring to 10,001 worth of kills. Considering the fact I'll be doing it on my own then it shouldn't be too rough, but at the same time I really don't want to be stuck with another incomplete game.

Choices, choices.

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