Exciting Adventures in Archaeological Computing, the Xbox and Knitting!

I came home earlier and switched on Fable 2 - not played it in ages! At least since before Christmas! I feel bad for abandoning it, but I’ve had Tombraider and Lego games calling me

I question myself – why oh why did I stop playing! It’s amazing! I completed the main story last time, and chose Love at the end. Scary blind lady, voiced by x, lets you choose between Love, Sacrifice and Wealth. Love brings your family and dog back to life so you can complete the Archaeology quest etc. My annoying hubby and child are also back though I also aged, well, my hair has turned grey!

Choosing love also made the world a happier, colourful flowery place. Seriously, it looks better. Everyone loves me, which can get annoying when you get mobbed in town for autographs but it does bring you loads of gifts.Now the game is complete, I can buy Castle Fairfax and Brightwood Tower as well a bunch of other fancy buildings. You’ll need serious amounts of money though, hundreds of thousands of thousands. That means loads of quests and buying up businesses to get rent. Apparently, if you leave the xbox on, your businesses will still accrue money (but not your houses) so that might help.

I’m going to play it again, and choose something else at the end. Bring it on!

Lego Indiana Jones is now flashing up that I’ve done 100% of the game, a little incorrect, as there are still at least 20 acheivements I haven’t unlocked so should it really be saying 100% done? Not sure.

It was an incredibly fun game to play, with loads of laughs and movie refs which I guess woudl have been amusing even to non archaeologists For example, Indy is, like in the films, scared of snakes. Willie still hates bugs. Gameplay wise, this means that you have to be someone else to solve a puzzle or cross a space that has snakes, adding another level of puzzles!

Free play in this is so much cooler than in Lego Star Wars and the characters so much cuter.  The replayability in trying to find every single piece of treasure and artefact is addictive, but in some levels gets really irritating when you have 9/10 and *really* can’t see the last bit (the treasure detector parcel comes in handy here). The sheer amount of unlockable characters is also excellent, with each fitting into a special ability category so that you might need an academic (Henry Jones Sr, Marcus etc), an excavator or high jumping girly to solve puzzle types.

The vehicles are also way better than in Star Wars, with loads to unlock and the vehicles are a lot easier to handle than the dodgy x, y, b wings so you can have more fun exploring the level and less frustration crashing.

The biggest downside is that the camera is still fixed, so you end up falling ledges and cliffs quite a lot because you can’t quite see where you are going. I guess in a game that is probably aimed at kids then adding a camera manipluation button might have been a bit much. Grown ups might appreciate it though!

I’m nearly finished Lego Indy on the xbox and this upsets me. What will I do when it ends?! Lego Batman still has two weeks before it comes out

Anyone who hasn’t seen the game, where have you been? Inspired by the Indy Lego, it came out in May but I managed some self control and didn’t buy it until after Silchester. It got 8 out of 10 on IGN and it *so* deserves it. It takes at least three goes through a level to get all the coins, treasure and artefact parts out of it. It’s just so cool, you have to play it. See my gamer score in the sidebar there? What I don’t get, is that I only have about 14% left to play but still need to unlock about 20 achievements! Where are they? There are excellent secret levels too! Lego Star Wars was really good fun but the characters are so much cooler in this, and have better personalities of their own. I can only imagine how great Batman will be! Hooray!

I caved and bought GTA4 today. I got hooked at the weekend when in Loughborough and thought I wouldn’t need it because Indiana Jones lego is on pre order for a week today – 2 games in a week!

I’m about 5% through so far, and haven’t yet seen much gun action or ladies of the night. This is probably because I still haven’t managed to get the driving thing down yet and crash all the nice shiny cars I steal. I only stopped playing tonight because I’m stuck on a driving mission trying to chase down a man who hasn’t paid protection money to the mob – nice

It is such a cool game though, and the weather and lighting effects are really really pretty. I don’t get what all the fuss is about the violence and so on, its just a really well thought out, pretty, open game.

The other really cool thing is the car radio – apparently, Iggy Pop and Karl Lagerfeld do the voices for some of the DJ’s and Iggy chose all the songs. Cool. I’ll rate it when I get it, but right now its running at about a 7 out of 10