Another Random Blog Post?

Oh yes it is! And what a week it has been...not entirely in terms of gaming, but just in general. There's a nice heatwave in Britain which I'm loving to bits, my holiday to Uist was a great laugh and the prospect of maybe getting a 3DS soon is also putting a smile on my face



I can feel the heat of the sun on my back just now as I'm writing this, and it's only just hit 11 in the morning here - clearly God is intending on making up for the bad winter with a brill early summer! Clears man - the check is in the mail!

I've got a few good random tales about gaming this week that I thought were quite funny, and there's also been bits and bobs of gaming news that have got all us gamers tuned in strong. One of the more major stories in the last week or so was the publication of first week sales of the Nintendo 3DS, which reached over 400,000 worldwide. Sadly not quite as strong as the original DS but still respectable nonetheless.

I've got a theory behind this - the 3DS, as we know, is a 3D system. It's not exactly easy to show off on TV or print advertisements since you need to see the true effect in order to attract the customers. Considering that they're trying to make punters buy 3D TVs in my city the moment, I'm amazed they haven't tried to comine the two together. Hell, in order to see a 3D 3DS effect on screen, you'll need a 3D bloody TV!

Hell, I'm gonna get one anyways - I played my DS for the first time in ages yesterday and fell in love with it again. It does seem to be an underdog handheld compared to the PSP but has always managed to hold it's own. I felt like I was returning home when I played Super Mario 64 DS and Metroid Prime Hunters again. It's a bizarre feeling but one I also get when I played the Nintendo Gamecube recently. It's that feeling of actually reliving your childhood memories and dreams.

I remember when I first got the Nintendo Gamecube on Christmas Day 2002 and how much I had saved and scrapped up for it over the previous year. It was everything I wanted in life and more. And I loved it to bits. Playing it again, I realized that I still did love the Gamecube, and there were many games I always wanted to get for it, but never did. So now I've got a goal to buy all those Gamecube titles that I missed out on because I gave up on it after getting an Xbox and seeing all the great PS2 titles.

A few days ago I was with a friend, and for a laugh we decided to play the Gamecube again and try out two games - Star Wars Rebel Strike and and Agent Under Fire. Two words describe our experience - bloody hell!

I know we lose kudos for saying this out loud but we did so badly at Multiplayer on Agent Under Fire that we lost to two bots. One was on Very Hard it has to be said, but we still lost to two bots! I should hang up my Gamecube controller now! That was sheer embarassment and we both agreed shamefully to 'never' tell anyone about this...sorry man but I think the Crosseyedgamers deserve to know we failed!

It would be great to say that our experience with Rebel Strike was better...and it was...slightly. We did complete missions in cooperative, but we were so damn useless we kept crashing into objects and each other rather than fufilling anything useful. Plus the target computer was on a lot, which anyone who's played the game knows will kill your medal score. Our accurracy was awful too. On one mission I had an accuracy of 8% and he had 7%! And that's with the targeting computer on!

I need to practice...a lot!

This wasn't the only bad experience I had that day when I was with my friend - the next one was even more bizarre. We were playing Fifa 09 on his Xbox 360 and we always go on the same teams - he goes Inverness Caley Thistle and I go Arsenal (my Dad's a fan of them). For some really strange reason though, his Xbox screwed up all the teams, so my previously 4 and a half star team was now a 1 star team with players that barely reached 40 out of 100 for talent! Have you ever tried to salvage a reasonable team out of players who clearly were playing football in their gap year??

I did managed to sort-of rescue my team, but still lost to my friend. Having said that, we finished at 3-2, which is a pretty respectable loss considering what the Xbox had done to the bloody game! I don't know how it managed to do that, but you should have seen our faces when we saw what the system had done to the teams - laughter mixed with mild horror!

Ah, what a fun week for game mishaps and adventures eh? Well at least the weather is inviting! I think some ice cream, a chocolate egg and a tan is in order. See you all later!