GameLog 49 & 50

Football Manager 08 (13h) - Gateshead Season 4, 3rd - Half way through the season and we're sitting solidly in 3rd. The team is playing well and the 4 new purchases are delivering both on the field and entertaining the crowd. 2 new strikers have frontlined the attack and even Clarke is fighting for a spot. With good quality up front I've dabbled with a 4-3-3 and it seems to work well against the standard 4-4-2. Both left and right attackers have good penetration, better than the attacking wingers, although the sprints down the sidelines have declined.

We picked up an ageing AM last season not realising he would only be transferred at the start of this season. He's been playing above himself and keeps managing to get on the scoreboard. His fitness keeps him from playing every game, which lead to the formation of the 4-3-3 instead of either 4-3-1-2 or 4-1-3-2. Exited the FA cup in a poor away performance, but we're still in for the trophies. Concentrating on the FA trophy this season so we'll have one of each when we go up to Div2.


World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade (7h) - BundyBow, 12 Hunter - Started new characters again with Ben & Levi on Trial accounts. I'd moved over a Drenai hunter into the Night Elf starting area to kick along a bit. Don't know whether Ben will continue on with it or not but at least he's had a solid go now and know what it's about.


UnAngband (7h) - VRBones XVI, 14 Rohan Ranger - After a long chat with Andrew Doull about the inner workings of UnAngband, I've pumped through a couple more characters to test the level generation. There's lots of things i haven't seen before in rougelikes. There's lots of stuff on the floor, but mostly junk (skins, wood piles, etc). Features like cupboards that line the walls and hallways can be searched through to find better items. This adds a lot to the game. With the room descriptions and themed rooms like cloakrooms I found myself playing slower and exploring rather than madly running to the next battle. It doesn't feel too different at the moment, but I'll really miss it if I go back to another rouguelike. To me that's a good quality. I used to advocate strong user interfaces for the same reason. You won't get any extra sales for having an intuitive interface, but once they try it they'll never go back.


Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space (3h) - Inspired by Caffo's GameLog post i had a look at Wierd Worlds. Played pretty well, but seemed lacking compared to what I'm used to with FM08 and UnAngband. The length of game is refreshing, although I really need longer games that grab ahold of you and don't let go until sunrise.


Guitar hero III (4h) - Slowly going through Easy mode 5 starring all the songs. ~4 more to go. One song I had never played before I almost flawlessed it on the first go! Missed the final note! it was a crappy song though, so I was contemplating stuffing it anyway so it wouldn't be the first one I'd flawlessed. Tried Cliffs a couple more times, but I'm missing silly notes. I've been noticing that i play better at the start of a session. Once you cover a couple of different songs you seem to lose your way, even though you can put the guitar down, go have tea, come back and nail it. Very interesting dynamic going on there.


TrackMania Nations Forever (3h) - St Luke's has started back into TMNF for winter sport. Only 2 showed up for the first day so we spent the time looking at some of Matt's track design as well as racing online.


Battle of Tiles (1h) - Scott got past the final dragon to complete it, so I'm probably done now. I don't think I've ever put down a game and knew I wouldn't play it again apart from demos, so I don't believe this game is truly finished, but I'll mark it as such to clean up the list a little. In part that was one of the reasons for starting up the GameLogs last year: To see what games I play and where I got up to.