Castlevania: Harmony of Despair (Xbox 360)

Castlevania...with multi-player co-op! Great! When I started on this I immediately went online. The single player mode is just kind of there, there is no real story in this and each of the 6 levels has a time limit (30 minutes) so exploring everything in a level takes several playthroughs. There are 5 characters (even though the maximum amount of players at any one time is 6, nice job Konami) and the one I've been using the most of Soma. I got the RPG for him which does good amounts of damage. I cleared the normal difficulty mode and a few days later I beat the hard mode online too. The thing is, there are some people who play who have got really high stats and can basically destroy anything in their way fairly quickly. There were a few times were one guy just raced ahead and killed the boss of a level before I or any of the other players had even made the half-way point yet. Still, I'm looking forward to the DLC as long as it isn't over-priced and I'm starting to level up some of the other characters.






Aliens Extermination (Arcade)

After seeing Toy Story 3 I saw that my cinema's small little arcade had this game in it. I decided to give it a try but after playing it I wasn't impressed. Firstly, I didn't like that the gun was attached to the machine, you couldn't move it around freely like in Crisis Zone. Secondly, I hate the way you have to reload in this game -you have to find and shoot small pulse rifle icons dotted around a level, there is no traditional shoot outside of the screen reload. Thirdly there are many other marines running around a level, but they just got in the way too often for me. Like one just ran right in front of the screen whilst I was trying to shoot down four aliens. I died pretty quickly but I had no desire to continue.








King of Fighters '94 (Neo Geo)

My most recent Neo purchase which I immediately attempted to beat on one credit when I received it. And surprisingly, I managed it! I used the Art of Fighting team since they're the only team I nearly remembered all of the moves for, plus the A.I. falls for some dumb strategies. One way of beating the early CPU opponents is to throw a fireball from as far away from the opponent as possible, then follow it up with Ryo, Robert or Takuma's kick special move or their super move. Rugal was the most challenging opponent (he's the boss of the game and his second form is ultra cheap) but after an extremely close battle I won. It's too bad that this game doesn't have a team edit option, as I'd play it more if it did.