Games

Halo 3

The game that started my console gaming experience. For years I'd been playing games on PCs and found it annoying that there was a constant upgrade cycle on hardware required to keep playing.

I chatted with my brother who had been playing on consoles for years and had a group of people he knew wh played together regularly and so off to the shop I went 😀

This game is great in 2 ways:
• There is the single player campaign, which can be tricky on the hardest difficulty setting but is also a great story, and can be played many times with a slightly different experience due to the achievement system built in to Xbox console games. This involves hunting for items, reaching certain areas or completing a certain number of events.
• Then there is the multiplayer experience, taking place in a small lanscaped area, with plenty of places to hide, run and search through, playing with an against other players across the world. We used to play in an evening and get battered when the kids in the US got home from school and joined it!

The game has fabulous graphics and sound.

Lego Harry Potter

This is an old game, released in 2011, and we bought it for one of the kids who was/is a fan of the books and films. I've recently been looking at my XBOX360 games as I've not played this I thought I'd give it a go.

There are 2 games that cover the years of the Harry Potter story, years 1 to 4 on one disk and 5-7 on the other. The game is further split down into years, with several "adventures" to complete in each year before the credits roll at the end, a bit like the films do.

Along these adventures there are many things to complete, not all of there necessary, they just offer bonus features that can be enabled with subsequent play throughs. There are two modes of play, Story-mode and Freeplay-mode. Freeplay-mode is enabled when the adventure is completed in story-mode. Any bonus items unlocked can be enabled in freeplay to collect more bonus features.

During play there are many coins of different colours which can be collected by touching them, each colour is a different point value. Like bonus items being collected these can be traded in for bonus items instead of finding them. They are also traded in should one of the characters loose their life.

The characters, normally Harry, Hermione and Ron - although this does change depending on the adventure story, are taken through school life, learning the spells they need to complete the adventure and future ones. They can use these spells to break and manipulate objects throughout the adventure to advance and release more coins for collecting.

There is a lot of humour in the game, especially as there is no dialog, the characters just make noises and gestures. It really does work!

With the amount of things to do and collect in the game it's good value for money and will keep someone occupied for a long time completing everything. The problem I have with it is that it gets very boring breaking everything in sight to collect coins and bonus items. I got to the point I gave up and focused on completing the story.