1074: Loving the Vita

It's fashionable to bash Sony's latest handheld, the Vita. This is partly justified, because it hasn't been selling particularly well — especially when compared to Nintendo's latest powerhouse the 3DS, which seems entirely likely to repeat the success of its predecessor the DS family. The poor sales can be attributed to its relatively high price and the fact that its proprietary memory cards are unnecessarily expensive and can't be used in anything else, unlike the standard SD cards that the 3DS uses.

But even though I know these criticisms are valid and warranted, it still bugs me a little that this means people are quickly writing off the Vita as a no-hoper, as a stillborn, with some even going so far as to compare it to disastrous past industry efforts such as Nintendo's dreadful Virtual Boy. That's just ridiculous.

Fact is, the Vita is a wonderful piece of kit. For your money, you get a gorgeous shiny gadget with a deliciously bright, big, high-resolution LED screen, two not-very-good-but-functional cameras (front and back) and not one but two touch-sensitive surfaces (again, front and back). Games specifically designed for Vita look beautiful on that big shiny screen, and the system runs downloadable PSP titles perfectly — though the lack of UMD drive means that those who have an extensive collection of physical PSP games will either need to keep their old handheld around or re-purchase their games as downloadable versions.

The PSP support is an aspect of the Vita that I can't help but feel is understated. I know, I know, you could buy a used PSP for a fraction of the price of a new Vita, but how great the games look on that LED screen shouldn't be underestimated — plus with the latest system firmware, it's possible to apply bilinear filtering to the games to smooth out edges without making them look overly-blurry, and assign the Vita's right stick and touchscreen to various functions. You'd be surprised quite how much more comfortable it is using the right stick to move the camera in games that previously used the shoulder buttons for this purpose — the PSP, let's not forget, didn't have a right stick and had that peculiar and uncomfortable "nub" instead of an actual stick on the left.

The other aspect of that PSP compatibility is that it makes the old "Vita has no games" argument sort of invalid — because not only do you have a healthy selection of largely good-quality Vita titles to draw on, you also have a huge selection of downloadable PSP titles to work your way through, too. If you're a JRPG or SRPG fan in particular, the Vita is a fantastic system. The first three Persona games; Trails in the Sky; all the Final Fantasy games up to IX plus spinoffs Final Fantasy Tactics and Dissidia Final Fantasy; Tactics Ogre; the list goes on. (It goes on longer if you're American, because you also have titles like Growlanser and Gungnir to enjoy, too. Damn you, Atlus, for not having a European arm.)

As for the actual Vita games themselves, there are some real gems there. Everybody's Golf/Hot Shots Golf is fantastic fun, and packed with content. Gravity Rush is a beautiful, stylish, challenging game that makes good use of the Vita's accelerometers alongside a more traditional control scheme. The Vita version of Need for Speed Most Wanted is a very good one, ideal for a quick race on the go. Lumines Electronic Symphony is a fantastic puzzle game — though not very toilet-friendly, as sessions tend to go on for quite a while. LittleBigPlanet is an ideal fit for the Vita's interface and touchscreen. And then there are a bunch of cheaper download-only games that are also fantastic — the strange and abstract world of Sound Shapes; the John Cleese-voiced, Unreal Engine-powered brain training of Smart As…; the freebies like that ecosystem game I've forgotten the name of and hilarious pass-and-play party game Frobisher Says.

And then you have PlayStation Minis, which is home to some surprisingly brilliant games — Velocity by FuturLab being one in particular you should really check out. And then there's the newly-added support for PlayStation Mobile, which offers super-cheap ports of some of the best iOS and Android games out there.

Need I go on? Yes, the cost of entry may be higher than a 3DS or a PSP, but the Vita is packed with a ton of possibilities that people just aren't talking about enough. "The story" about the Vita always seems to be that it's "Sony's big failure" — and while that may end up being true, it'd be nice to see, just once, a feature in the professional press detailing the many things this system does wonderfully well rather than yet another predictable article heralding its apparently-imminent doom. We've all seen this article many times over — so how about ditching the negativity for a bit and exploring the many good things the system does offer so those of us who do have one can unearth some of the platform's hidden gems — because they're out there.

If you happened to get a Vita (or PS3, for that matter) for Christmas, do feel free to add "Angry_Jedi" to your PSN friends list!

1073: It's-a Me!

As I said I probably would, I picked up New Super Mario Bros. U or whatever it's called today. Mario in HD is a pleasing sight, though I'm one of those people who still likes the blocky old pixel-art too, and to whom SD graphics aren't as offensive as they appear to be to some. But I digress.

It's somewhat ironic that the most old-school Mario experience you can get today comes from a subseries with "New" as part of its title. Ever since the first New Super Mario Bros. launched on the DS and provided traditional 2D platforming with an up-to-date 3D aesthetic, this particular offshoot of the Mario series has remained firmly and staunchly set in its ways, providing gameplay that is not fundamentally any different from Super Mario World, which, let's not forget, came out in 1990.

This is not, I hasten to add, a bad thing. Super Mario World is probably my favourite Mario game of all time — at least it was. It remains to be seen whether or not this new Wii U version will be able to uproot it, but I will always have a very fond place in my heart for the SNES classic. It was so perfectly balanced, so completely fair all the way through — even on the ridiculously difficult Special Island levels — and so packed with things to discover that I actually played it through several times, which I don't normally tend to do with platform games. 96 levels (or, more accurately, exits) was a big deal at the time, too. It's still pretty massive for a platform game even today.

New Super Mario Bros. U follows the Mario World tradition very closely, with a few bits and pieces from Mario 3 along the way. You have your top down map screen with multiple routes to your eventual destinations (castles housing bosses, naturally); you have a mixture of levels where the challenge comes from evading enemies and levels where your pixel platforming skills are tested to the limit; you have a selection of interesting but natural-feeling puzzles incorporated into the gameplay; and you have gameplay so intuitive that there isn't a tutorial because there really doesn't need to be one. (After playing so many Facebook games for work where the tutorial literally doesn't let you press anything you want to press for anywhere between ten minutes and half an hour, this is a breath of fresh air.)

There are a few intriguing additions, however, some of which may have been present in the previous Wii-based New Super Mario Bros. game which I haven't really played much of. First up, there's the baby Yoshis, who can be carried around and fed, but unlike in Mario World, their special abilities can be used even in baby form. The pink one, for example, blows up like a balloon and can be used to reach otherwise inaccessible areas; the yellow one explodes in light, useful for dark caves. I'm not sure (yet) if there's anything more to them than this, but they add some interesting new game mechanics which, as Mario games always have done in the past, encourage experimentation.

I really haven't played a Mario game seriously since Super Mario Sunshine, which I didn't really enjoy all that much, and certainly haven't finished one since Super Mario 64. I was never quite sure how I felt about Mario's shift into 3D — although I respected Mario 64 in particular, I always felt like I preferred 2D platformers, and the same is still true today. New Super Mario Bros. U looks set to scratch that itch with tight controls, challenging levels and an interesting-sounding cooperative mode that I'm keen to try out when I get some friends around.

I'm very much enjoying the Wii U so far, if you hadn't already gathered. It's a console designed for pure fun. Whereas both the PS3 and Xbox 360 are trying desperately to be that "one box you need under your TV," Nintendo are once again sneaking past to provide a system that is fun, accessible and entertaining for the whole family. It may not be the most technologically advanced system in the world (though the Gamepad is super-cool — I'm looking forward to seeing some creative uses of that), the games may not be the biggest-budget blockbusters (though the presence of Arkham City, Darksiders II and Call of Duty in the launch lineup suggests that big-name publishers are at least willing to give it a shot for now) and it's doubtful it will become any "serious" gamer's primary console, but it does what it does extraordinarily well — and that is to provide "pure" gaming experiences such as those Nintendo has always provided. Hopefully we'll see some niche publishers taking a few risks like we saw towards the end of the Wii's lifespan, too — sequels or follow-ups to Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story and Pandora's Tower would be just lovely, thankyouplease.

1072: Christmas Day

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you all had a good one. Mine was nice and quiet and relatively relaxing, which is, I guess, what it should be. There were no kids in the house (despite Andie and my parents' worrying obsession with the Santa NORAD tracker thingy) so it was pretty restrained.

Like I've said before, I sort of miss that feeling of excitement, though; that knowledge that on December 25th you'll have something awesome to unwrap and then spend the rest of the day scattering over the living room floor to play with. I had some pretty great presents over the years when I was a kid, ranging from a Super NES (unbelievably exciting at the time — and which I still own to this day, I might add) to a toy called "Manta Force" that was actually a giant spaceship filled with smaller vehicles and little dudes. On a subsequent Christmas, I got the Manta Force Battle Fortress, which complemented the main Manta Force set with a mountainside base that had working guns. That was awesome, though I never managed to get hold of a Red Venom (the "bad guys'" equivalent of the main Manta Force mothership), which was a shame. Still, the Battle Fortress was great fun to have two-player face-offs with.

This Christmas, I had a few cool goodies. Andie got me the world's biggest My Little Pony poster, which I'm looking forward to assembling (yes, it requires assembly, it's that big) and sticking on the wall of my new study. I got some books and some chocolate and a nice throw for our sofa that won't fit in our flat. And lots of money which I am looking forward to spending — the Wii U I acquired shortly before we came away will doubtless be getting some new game love (I'm thinking Mario at the very least — I haven't played a Mario game properly since Mario 64, I don't think), and I fully intend to pick up a copy of 999 for the Nintendo DS because I really want to play Virtue's Last Reward and everyone says I should play 999 first. So I will.

I've spent a bit of time rediscovering how lovely a piece of kit the Vita is, too. I downloaded a few demos and had a fiddle around with them. LittleBigPlanet for Vita looks lovely, for example, but still has floaty jumping that annoys quite a few people I know. There's a fun "brain training" game called Smart As… that features John Cleese on voiceover duties that seems quite fun, too, so I'm contemplating grabbing that as I always used to quite enjoy the old DS brain training games. (It is £20, though, which feels like a lot for that kind of game in these days of cheap crappy 69p apps, but I understand it has a healthy amount of content in it.)

I've resisted the Steam Sales so far, with a couple of minor exceptions — playing Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed got me in the mood to replay the Dreamcast Sonic Adventure games which I remember being praised quite highly back in the day (and enjoying a great deal) but which everyone seems to hate these days. I also have to play the rest of Sonic Generations at some point, which genuinely is good.

But anyway. I am just rambling away a load of bollocks now so I will curtail that forthwith and simply wish all of my readers a very merry Christmas, and a pleasant holiday season onwards towards the New Year.

1071: Christmas Eve

It's Christmas Eve. Technically it's almost Christmas Day. Exciting, huh?

I've noted this for the past few years, but I find it tough to get really excited about Christmas these days. I'm pretty sure this is fairly common for people once they get beyond a certain age, but it's felt particularly pronounced for the past few years. I'm not sure if it's because I've had a few Christmases that haven't been particularly merry, or because I've had a few years where my life hasn't been exactly what I'd call "on track", but eh. Whatever.

This year, theoretically, I am enjoying a Christmas where my life is getting back to where it should be; to where I want it to be. This is good. It still feels a little difficult to enjoy it though, to find it easy to lighten up, chill out and just accept that things are nice. The holiday season doesn't magically make your anxieties and worries go away, sadly, as these are things that stick with you through the best and worst of times.

But let's try not to be overly negative about the whole thing. Tomorrow is a day for eating to excess, for opening presents, for relaxing and doing as little as possible. It may lack that childish excitement over whether or not there's, say, a Super NES under the tree (largely because I am now old and affluent enough to purchase myself the modern-day equivalent the Wii U if I want one) and it may lack that particular "spark" that believing in Father Christmas involves, but it's a time of peacefulness, of trying to set your worries aside, and of enjoying good food and good company.

I'm sure tomorrow will be fine. And once the holiday season has passed by, we can really start to look forward to whatever it is the future holds. Hopefully the things that the future hold are good, and I can start enjoying life a bit more. That'd be nice. I would like to enjoy life a bit more.

Merry Christmas to everyone reading this. I hope you have a thoroughly pleasant day tomorrow, and eat your fill of turkey, stuffing, those little sausages wrapped in bacon and sprouts. (My fill of sprouts is "no sprouts". It is not hard to eat my fill of sprouts. Sprouts are disgusting.)

1070: Victory and Answers at Last

I finished Persona 3: The Answer. I won't lie, I am more relieved than anything, but after such an ordeal I find myself glad that I have now played the complete Persona 3 experience from start to finish. (This is, of course, excluding the female protagonist's path through the PSP version, but I think I may need a bit of a break from Shin Megami Tensei for quite a while now — so that will have to wait!)

The Answer is a curious beast. All the while I was playing it, I had a big question in my mind, appropriately enough. That question was "should this exist?"

It's a fair question. Does it need to exist? I certainly wasn't unsatisfied with the way Persona 3's original story ended, but I was also excited by the prospect of it continuing, which is why I immediately picked up a copy of Persona 3 FES as soon as it came out, despite having bought the original at full price. (Both are still on my shelf. And yes, it has taken me this long to finally get around to actually beating FES. For those who aren't keeping track, FES came out in 2008. It is now nearly 2013.) I was excited by two things: firstly, the prospect of a "director's cut" of the main Persona 3 story, and secondly, by an additional 20+ hours of gameplay that resolved more than a few unanswered questions posed by the ending.

On balance, I think I am glad that The Answer exists, because the story that runs through it and particularly its ending are very satisfying — at least, they are if you've played through all of The Journey beforehand. I just wish that the execution was better.

It's sort of difficult to imagine how they could have done it differently, however. The core concept of The Answer is that the party have trapped themselves in the situation they're in through their own regrets and desires, which means that they're literally stuck in the same place at the same time on the same day until you beat it. This means none of the awesome "life sim" aspect of Persona 3 — no going out and going to school, no balancing whether or not you should go to Track Team or Music Club after school, no hanging out with the drunken old monk in the bar in the evening, no singing karaoke to build up your Courage statistic. Just dungeons. Fighting. Lots of fighting.

I like Persona 3's combat system. (I prefer Persona 4's ability to let you take direct control over all your members, but I still like Persona 3's.) There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the idea of an add-on campaign involving a whole bunch of fighting using what is a very good JRPG combat system. However, what is wrong with The Answer's gameplay is that it is regularly cheap, unfair and controller-flingingly frustrating, particularly when it comes to boss battles, and especially later in the game.

A key part of the Persona 3 combat system is learning the various weaknesses of enemies and then exploiting them to knock them down. Knocking all the enemies in an encounter down at the same time allows the entire party to unleash an "All-Out Attack" for massive damage, so generally speaking your aim in any battle is to knock down the enemies as efficiently as possible to trigger one of these, as they will usually if not finish the battle immediately, they will certainly tip the scales in your favour.

Here's the annoyance with The Answer's bosses, though — many of them have these weaknesses as in The Journey, but they also have passive abilities that allow them a not-insignificant chance of automatically avoiding any attack with the attributes they are weak to. For example, in one encounter there are three enemies — one is weak against fire, another is weak against ice, another is weak against wind. The one who is weak against fire has the "Evade Fire" skill, which means that on a significant number of occasions when you attack it with fire and attempt to knock it down, you will simply miss. The other two also have the corresponding "Evade [x]" skills, making it very difficult to actually knock them over and deal damage. I'm all for a bit of a challenge factor, but because these mechanics are so heavily based on luck rather than skill or strategy, it just felt incredibly cheap any time I died because of them.

To add insult to injury, The Answer's final boss, while spectacular to look at as all good final bosses should be, was almost insultingly easy to beat, making the big finale more of a test of patience more than anything else. Actually, I can't be too mad about this, because if I had to repeat the cutscenes leading up to that final battle as I had to repeat the cutscenes leading up to numerous other boss battles on a number of occasions earlier in the game, I would have probably been very annoyed. As it happened, I was able to take it down in one attempt, meaning the story kept flowing nicely at the moment when it needed to be pacy.

So after completing the whole shebang I am left with somewhat mixed feelings. On the one hand, I am happy that I saw the story end conclusively. I am satisfied that I successfully beat a very difficult game. But at the same time I am a little annoyed that a game as brilliant as Persona 3 has been slightly soured in my memory by the amount of annoyance The Answer gave me.

Am I glad The Answer exists? Yes, I think I am. Will I ever play it again? No fucking way!

1069: Home

The new place is starting to come together nicely. There are still a few bits of crap lying around the place so I won't share any photos just yet, and there's still a whole heap of crap waiting for us to go and pick up from Andie's mum's at some point soon (plus the rats… I miss the rats) but on the whole, it's coming together pretty well.

I spent a large proportion of this morning sorting out the room that has become my "study". It's significantly larger than the room I was using for a similar purpose in our previous place, and there's a lovely large amount of open space in the middle, giving the whole thing a… well, sort of spacious feel.

The one nice thing about all this space is the fact that I can reconfigure it for various purposes. Perhaps the most exciting thing (exciting to me, all right, I'm sure you don't give a shit) is that there is enough room for my two gigantic and heavy wooden desks to be arranged separately, meaning that the smaller of the two can be a permanent fixture as my computer desk, but the larger of the two can sit at the side of the room as a general purpose work surface for most of the time, but when required it can be pulled out and used as — wait for it — a games table. Finally, the dream of having a Room for Board Games appears to have come true.

I am yet to try it for this proposed purpose, but there's certainly plenty of space available to do this, and there's some spare chairs we'll be able to use. The nice thing about the giant desk is that it's actually bigger than our dining table, which has proven itself on several occasions to be not quite big enough to play the more sprawling games comfortably. The giant desk, meanwhile, will quite happily house Arkham Horror with space to spare — though whether or not it will be able to handle a particularly winding dungeon in The Legend of Drizzt or Advanced Heroquest remains to be seen.

I got my electric piano set up again today, and have retrieved some of my music books. I haven't been feeling that motivated to play for quite a long time, what with everything else that has been going on in my life and all the things I've wanted to prioritise and aim for, but having this nice big room with all my music on display will hopefully get me playing a bit more. It will certainly stop people making pointed comments about how they wish I'd play the piano more. (Or perhaps it will encourage them more.)

Anyway, things are coming together nicely, in short. This is a nice feeling, and it's good to be feeling like this just before Christmas. This has, of course, had the side-effect that Christmas has completely snuck up on me almost without me realising it, but at least I have managed to get all the appropriate shopping done. I think. Possibly. I hope. I'm almost certain I will wake up in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve and realise I've forgotten presents for someone important, but we'll cross that particular bridge when we come to it.

It's got to 1am somehow. It's probably time to sleep. Today has been incredibly long in the sense that both Andie and I have got a lot done. Days "feel" longer here for some reason. Perhaps it's a side-effect of being in a nice place that we like. Or perhaps we're just using our time more efficiently. Either way, I'm not complaining!

1068: Still Waiting for The Answer

I never thought I'd say this, but I'm getting kind of sick of Persona 3.

Actually, that's not quite true. I still freaking love Persona 3. What I do not love, however, is the "epilogue" sequence The Answer that was added in the "FES" rerelease of the game. The Answer adds 20+ hours of dungeon-crawling in an attempt to resolve some of the story's loose ends, but in doing so strips out almost all of the things that made the main bit of Persona 3 such an amazingly awesome game.

For those still somehow unfamiliar with Persona 3 in general, allow me to elaborate.

The main part of Persona 3 (known as "The Journey") is nigh on 100 hours long. You begin the game at the beginning of the Japanese school year in April, and work your way up to the finale nearly a year of in-game time later. With a few exceptions, you "live" every day along the way as a relatively normal Japanese high school student — going to school, dealing with your exams, hanging out with your friends, looking for love. Because of your special Persona-summoning power, however, during the "Dark Hour" that occurs on the stroke of midnight every day, you also get to dungeon-crawl through possibly the biggest single dungeon in any RPG ever — the tower of Tartarus. You have to balance your time effectively between levelling up your "social links" with your friends, which infuse your Personas with power, and levelling up your characters through fighting in Tartarus. It's a good balance that combines dating sim/visual novel mechanics with more traditional RPG systems to produce something that gives all that fighting a huge sense of "meaning."

I won't spoil the ending of The Journey because I maintain that anyone who enjoys RPGs needs to play it, whether that's on PS2 or PSP. But let's talk about The Answer.

The Answer unfolds several months after the events of The Journey are concluded. The original protagonist is… indisposed elsewhere, so you are instead placed in the role of robot girl Aigis, a key character in the latter stages of The Journey. The original party (minus the original protagonist, and plus a new member) find themselves trapped in their dormitory, with the same day repeating itself over and over. A mysterious hole opens up in their lounge, and beneath their dormitory they discover "The Desert of Doors," which leads to "The Abyss of Time" and the answers to all their questions.

As such, the aim of The Answer is to work your way through all the doors in the Desert of Doors and figure out just what the jolly fuck is going on. Behind each door is a dungeon which, like Tartarus, is split into several sections with bosses guarding progress at regular intervals. Unlike exploring Tartarus, you don't have to manage your fatigue levels — you just keep going for as long as you think you can survive, then head back up for air when you're running low on items, health or skill points. Then you go back in, perhaps get a little deeper, perhaps beat the boss that's been giving you difficulty, and then you get a story scene when you reach the very bottom of each door's dungeon.

This process repeats a number of times over the course of about 20 hours or so, and there is no real break in it. The dungeons are all randomly-generated, and the tiles used to create them are mostly palette-swaps of what you've already seen in Tartarus. The enemies are almost all the same as what you've seen in Tartarus. And the bosses are all the cheapest, most irritating fucking assholes you will ever encounter, necessitating heavy reliance on either 1) luck or 2) copious amounts of grinding until you are overlevelled.

This is not fun, and it's starting to test my patience somewhat. Still, now, as a matter of pride I feel I have to get to the end of it for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that I actually want to find out what the titular "Answer" is. The Journey's ending is left nicely ambiguous and open to interpretation, and to be honest I would have been quite happy leaving it as is if The Answer didn't exist. As it does, however, I find myself really, really wanting to know. And that's why I'm enduring the suffering of grinding my way through these dungeons in an attempt to discover what's what.

Don't get me wrong, Persona 3's combat system is still great; Shoji Meguro's music is still J-ghetto fabulous; and the characters are still interesting — there's just not enough of the things that made The Journey great, and too many of the things that aren't the reason people play Persona 3 in the first place. I have managed to go this far without having anything spoiled for me relating to The Answer, so I have the joy of discovering what happens at the end still to come.

It had better be worth it!

1067: I Accidentally a Wii U

As the title says, I most certainly did accidentally a Wii U. And no, it's not dangerous.

Actually, it wasn't accidental at all; I'd been pondering getting one for a little while, particularly after hearing a number of my friends were having fun with their respective ones, and I saw in Game today that they were doing some quite nice deals. So, after gaining suitable approval from Andie (who is actually quite interested in playing with it too) I appear to find myself with a shiny new black Wii U plus copies of Sonic and whatever Racing Transformed and NintendoLand, which comes with the console.

I can't comment too much on the system's capabilities as we don't have reliable Internet access at our new place as yet — we're leeching Wi-Fi off our neighbours' bandwidth at present. (Legally, I might add — service provider BT offers the ability for users to set aside part of their bandwidth for public use, so we're taking full advantage of the fact that our neighbours have this facility turned on while we wait for our own high-speed line to be installed… which won't be until January 16. Boo!) However, I can comment a little on the games I have played so far.

Let's start with Sonic and… ugh, I'm going to have to actually check what the sodding thing's called, aren't I? Let's see… *rummages* Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed, commonly shortened to just Sonic Transformed. Right. Yes. Sonic Transformed. It is a kart racing game. As seemingly usually happens, someone else has beaten Nintendo, supposed masters of the kart racing genre, to the kart racing punch on their own system. And wouldn't you know it, it's actually rather good.

Sega's had a few goes at this kart racing lark with previous entries in the Sonic and All-Stars Racing series, and they've actually been quite good in my admittedly limited experience — even the iOS version is pretty decent, and it is very easy to fuck up the controls in an iOS racer. (Believe me. I know. I have suffered through a lot of them for the sake of reviewing them.) With Sonic Transformed, though, what they've done is channel Diddy Kong Racing, which is something I am very happy about because Diddy Kong Racing was freaking awesome.

For those unfamiliar, Diddy Kong Racing was a kart racer for the Nintendo 64 console, developed by Rare, who were the undisputed masters of development for that platform besides Nintendo. One of many cool things about Diddy Kong Racing was that you weren't limited to just straight kart racing — you also got to fly planes and race hovercraft over watery courses, too. This gave the game plenty more variety than your average kart racer, and meant that not only did you have to figure out how each character handled, but you also had to get to grips with each of the three vehicles' idiosyncracies, too.

Sonic Transformed also features karts, hovercrafts and aircraft. Only rather than having races focused around just one of these at a time, a single event in Sonic Transformed will more often than not see you switching back and forth between them at various points, with frequently hilarious results. For example, an After Burner-themed level sees you racing your karts across an aircraft carrier deck as F-14 Tomcats launch either side of you. Drive through the blue gate that signals a transformation, and suddenly you're flying through the air on the way to the next carrier, surrounded by dogfighting aircraft and other mayhem. Fly through the blue gate on the next carrier and you're back in your kart again, powersliding around the deck to head back the other way and repeat the whole process.

Sonic Transformed is also fantastic for Sega fanservice. While the characters and settings may not be quite as universally recognised as the old Nintendo favourites seen in the various Mario Kart games, it is absolutely delightful to be reminded of some of Sega's past masterworks — everything from Jet Set Radio to Panzer Dragoon via Skies of Arcadia, all with wonderful remixes of their iconic music, and all having their own dynamic take on the game's chaotic, track-shifting racing.

Sonic Transformed is, of course, also available on other platforms and whether or not the Wii U is the "best" platform for it is a matter of debate as I haven't played it multiplayer yet, though five-player local multiplayer is not to be sniffed at, plus there are a couple of "Party Play" modes that make use of the Gamepad device. When racing in single-player, the Gamepad is used to display a top-down map view — not particularly practical to glance at while racing, but a nice touch nonetheless.

So I'm impressed with Sonic Transformed. How about NintendoLand?

NintendoLand is clearly the Wii Sports/Play equivalent, in that it's a series of simple little games designed to showcase the system. Unlike Wii Sports and Play, however, the whole experience is fleshed out a little better, with incentives for progress, trophy scores to challenge and achievement-like stickers to collect. The games make good use of the Gamepad's capabilities, and many of them include nice little touches like displaying your face on screen during play using the Gamepad's front-facing camera. They're little more than minigames in most cases, but I can see these being fun at parties, plus the obsessive collector types out there will want to get their hands on as many "prizes" as possible.

In more general terms, I like the feel of the Gamepad a lot — it's not too heavy, and it's shaped nicely in the hand, though as with Nintendo's handhelds having to hold the stylus and use the buttons can sometimes be a little cumbersome. The use of sound is very clever — the Gamepad sound tends to complement what is coming out of your TV/home theatre speakers, giving a really nice "3D" effect as some noises are literally closer to you than others. This is put to interesting effect in NintendoLand, where the "guide" character Monita typically talks to you through the Gamepad, but her voice can also be heard in a muffled, mumbly form through the TV/HT speakers. I anticipate plenty of other games will make intriguing use of this functionality in the future.

So far I'm pretty impressed, then. It seems like a decent system that will only improve over time, and if nothing else it's likely to continue the Wii's legacy as the go-to machine for fun, easy to understand local co-op experiences. I'll be interested to try out the online functionality — particularly MiiVerse — but that will have to wait until we have proper Internet access here!

1066: Doubleplusgood

There's been a lot of hand-wringing over both Facebook and Twitter recently, mostly due to both of them tweaking their terms of service in various ways that some people don't like very much. Me, I don't particularly mind too much because at the end of the day, I'm not paying for either of them, so as the saying goes, "if the product is free, then you are the product" — I accepted this some time back and think back on it any time one or the other of them does something apparently stupid. I use both daily to stay in touch with various people, so quitting either is out of the question.

For those feeling somewhat wary of the big F and the big T, however, I'd encourage you to give the big G another shot. (Unless you're one of those people who irrationally hates Google too, in which case… err, I hear Myspace is coming back soon?) Yes, G+ is still a smokin' hot social networking service that is far from the ghost town the media likes to portray it as. It's an active, thriving community that has only gotten better over time.

The latest addition to the service, and one which could well prove to be a "killer feature" with a little refinement, is Communities. Communities are little mini-networks within G+ that allow members to post content as they would do normally on G+, but keep it all within one community rather than sharing it publicly or having to use the slightly cumbersome "Circles" system. It's a good way of bringing people together who want to talk about the same thing, and it's pretty customizable, too — you can change the community's iconic image, title, headline and basic information, but also create categories for posts to help keep things organised, too. The latter feature needs a little tweaking — you can't reassign a post to a new category if you miscategorise it upon creating it, for example — but the groundwork is there for a solid community system.

And, crucially, people are using it. Google+ may not quite have the same number of daily active users as Facebook, but there are more than enough to make these communities active, vibrant places to hang out. The board games community I joined has over 2,000 members, for example, while there are over 3,500 bronies hanging out in the "Pony+" community. The anime community has over 20,000 members, as do various photography-related communities. G+ is an attractive destination for photographers, as it provides practically unlimited space for high-quality photo storage along with some basic editing tools — and the G+ interface is a nice means of showing off one's work, too.

G+ is built to be used on a variety of platforms, too. The mobile apps for both iOS and Android are quick to be updated with new features and are consistent in their behaviour and functionality. Pretty much everything you can do on the desktop website can be done from the mobile app — and the mobile app has the added bonus of looking rather lovely, too, for those who like that sort of thing.

So if you've got a Google account, give it a shot. And by "give it a shot" I mean do more than just open it up, complain that there's no-one to talk to and then close it down — like Twitter, you need to actually "follow" some interesting people before it starts to show its true value. The new Communities feature will help people find like-minded friends more easily, as this was one weakness of the old version — it was quite tricky to find new people to follow.

Here's some links to get you started. Here's my profile. Here's the Squadron of Shame Community. Here's the "Too Old For This" Community run by my buddies Chris and Jeff. Here's the board game Community.

Now get on there and get chatting! I'll leave you with this, from The Oatmeal.

1065: The Third

Pete slumped down into the chair in front of the hotel room desk and began to type.

"It has been a long day," he wrote. It had been a long day, but not quite in the way he had anticipated when he woke up this morning. He was expecting a day of jury service followed by a bit of heavy lifting as he attempted to clear out the rest of his now-former residence in Chippenham, Wiltshire. Instead, what he got was a whole lot of sitting around in the courthouse until lunchtime before being apologetically told by the judge that the jury were being let go due to the fact that the trial they were sitting on had to be abandoned.

Pete paused, considering whether he should share further details of the trial in question now that he was technically allowed to, but that he wasn't supposed to "publicise" it due to the fact it would be restarting with a new jury at some point in the future. He eventually decided against explicit details, and instead invited his readers to have a chat with him if they wanted to know the dirt. It was a moderately interesting case, after all, and it had left him with something of an interest in the law. He resolved to check whether or not Murder One was on Netflix when he finally got "proper Internet" back in his new place… and then hastily explained to his readers that the trial he was sitting on was not, in fact, a murder trial.

He let out a theatrical sigh and wondered what to write next. This hotel room wasn't the most interesting place in the world, but at least it was warm, vaguely comfortable and had a bed in it, which was more than could be said for the floor he had been sleeping on last week. A "high-tech hobo," he had called himself — essentially squatting in his own house due to the fact that pretty much all the furniture and other stuff had been moved out in preparation for his girlfriend Andie and him to start their new life in Southampton.

The weekend had been pleasant. The new flat was good, and a lot of stuff had already been unpacked and put in its place. His study still needed putting together, but the skeleton was there — bookshelves around the outside waiting for books and the music scores that had been boxed up for a while. He winced as he remembered how heavy the box that contained them was, and reminded himself to take extra boxes to repack them when he went to pick them up from Andie's mother's house.

"Wait a minute," he said out loud, pausing the frantic clacking of his fingers on the laptop keyboard for a moment. "Why the hell am I writing this in the third person?"

No answer was forthcoming, for the room was otherwise devoid of life.

"I really, really need some sleep," he said to himself, clicking the Publish button and flicking on the hotel's painfully slow little kettle for a pre-bed drink.