I used to write a diary about my life many years ago, but let’s be honest – I don’t have the most exciting life, and so it wasn’t the most exciting diary. I kept one for a few years, and last time I was home I looked back to see what had changed, and naturally it was quite a lot. I won’t go into that here, though.

The idea of keeping a diary for a game first occured to me when I was waiting for Sega’s genius RPG Shining Force III on the Sega Saturn. It seemed so enormous that I’d need to create some kind of guide book or journal to help me through it, so I planned different chapters: characters, weapons, magic and a diary of the game. Somewhere I have a list of all the magic resistances, special moves and items, but I never actually wrote down a diary of what I saw and when.

Anyway, the idea stuck with me: I liked the notion of creating something to accompany a game, but few games I played seemed suited to the diary format. That is, of course, until I discovered Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life.

I haven’t kept diaries for them throughout my whole playing experience, but I wrote for two consecutive (virtual) years of Harvest Moon, and dipped in and out of Animal Crossing when I got into it.

The one thing I always tried to do with my diaries was keep them authentic; although the characters obviously don’t exist, I still enjoyed writing from the perspective of the main character, and tried to keep it all consistent as though it were a real diary I had discovered. It was a lot of fun to write, and hopefully it’ll be good fun to read too!

Diaries:

Animal Crossing (Gamecube)

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life (Gamecube).

Pro Evolution Soccer 4: Landgraff United’s Konami Cup campaign

I haven’t found another site that has a Harvest Moon diary – if you know of one, please let me know in a comment. If you have a diary for another game – any game at all – please share it with me too!

I remember writing this! I loved the original Animal Crossing, though not as much as I love the DS one, and I wanted to write a diary. So I did! Obviously this is out of date by now, but it’s still something I really enjoyed writing. This is just a post to introduce you to my characters and friends – the rest of the diaries will be moved into a separate page in a few days, so they won’t be on the main page. Enjoy!

It’s been almost two months since I visited Eville, and it certainly shows inside my house. The cockroaches were about, but that’s okay, because squishing them is one of my favourite things to do! I found twelve June tickets which are now wasted – shame that, as I could’ve won something good. I never learn, though – I think I’ve only ever entered the raffle once. I’m not much of a gambler, you see.

Somebody’s camping… it’s Peanut! She told me to start camping. What a stupid idea – why should I get into a tent when my house is the next acre over? It’s not like I can play Donkey Kong in a tent. I smiled and nodded whilst she told me about some camping thing, then went to pick more weeds. This place sure is dirty.

Murphy shouted at me when I went to say hi. Baddie. He says I’ve only been away for seven weeks, so there’s no point getting nostalgic. I suppose he has a point!

I went to see Bea, one of my best friends in Eville. First she told me she doesn’t like the warm weather, and wants to feel cold shivers running up and down her spine, but then she told me that she always feels warm on sunny days (even without a coat), and that sunny days are the best. Which is it, Bea? I shut the door behind me and felt very confused outside. Still scratching my head, I made my way over to Blaire’s house. She wasn’t in – probably out gossiping somewhere! I caught a grasshopper and went to see Tad.

He didn’t have much to say, just telling me about Katrina (guess who’s coming to town), so I wandered over to the Wishing Well and, surprise surprise, found Blaire running around. She’s always gossiping at the Wishing Well, so for research purposes only I thought I’d ask and see if there was any gossip I’d missed out on. She did tell me she likes calendars and notebooks, so she can mark the days I come to see her, then toddled off, whistling a jolly little tune to herself. That’s about the first time I’ve ever known Blaire be that happy!

Katrina’s coming in two days – I’d better get my fortune told. I wonder what it’ll be..? Maybe I’ll be rich, or popular, or clumsy!

I met a new citizen called Sandy – she appears to be some kind of ostrich-type creature! Cool! In fact… I think she might be a road runner – she called me “speedy”, and looks a bit Road Runner-esque. Pure cool.

I popped in to see Elmer, one of my bestest buddies, and he greeted me with his cheery laugh as always. Then he went on to tell me about this scary story where he found something disgusting under his furniture, but he managed to scare himself more than he scared me, and ended up stomping around in a grump! I couldn’t cheer him up, so I decided to just leave him to it.

I don’t recognise the town tune any more. Did our new citizen Becca change it whilst she was popping through? Possibly. Maybe it’s a grower.

Got stung by bees. Nuts. I was a little scared of talking to Boots in case he laughed at my injury, but he was very understanding and told me to just “chalk it up to experience”, so I did. Then he told me to forget about getting his camera back (I already had, whoops!), and gave me a glare. I took that as a hint and trundled off to the post office. There was nothing there.

Having tidied up the town a bit, and made sure none of my friends had forgotten who I am… argh, I forgot about Teddy!

I raced across town to find Teddy’s house by the sea, even ignoring the fruit and weeds lain tantalisingly by my feet. I got to his door, completely out of puff, and knocked to find… he wasn’t in! Teddyyy!

Yey, I found him! He was in a bunch of trees. Now, what would a bear be doing in the woods..? He wasn’t very happy to see me – he told me off for shaking trees, and told me I deserved to get stung… Teddy

I was so sad I didn’t even want to get my new Donkey Kong Jr. game. How could Teddy be angry at me, and say such nasty things? I decided to lock myself in my house and go to sleep. I guess not everybody missed me as much as I missed them…

I’ve played some weird games in my time, but this trumps them all, no doubt about it.

You play a seemingly twelve-year old girl named Rami (that’s her in the picture), who wears a bunny suit. She runs and jumps like most game characters. She flies a green dragon named Spot who breathes fire. Not too bad so far.

One level involves you flying through space shooting gearstick-tops with Kings’ heads on, koala bears clinging to trees and rocket-propelled postboxes. The boss is a robotic alien in a metal bowl of some description which steals cows and turns them into steaks, which it throws at you, saying “beef is on sale every Tuesday! Madam, how about beef stew for dinner?”.

The final boss encounter takes place in the insides of an ancient Japanese beast called Apocalypse, and is a translucent heart which spews Japanese words – karaoke, shogun, ninja and so forth.

I forgot about the sumo wrestler egg-thing, which spins around on a pencil until it vomits purple liquid.

There’s more, but they’re the weirdest bits, and the game’s all the better for them.

Top marks go to top bloke Damien McFerran of www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk for selling me the game. You beautiful man, you.

What’s the strangest game you’ve ever played? Did you like it? Should games be more weird?

Today for the first time since I started this blog – which was way back in January now, I recall – I topped twenty subscribers. Although that doesn’t seem a lot, it’s quite a milestone, and my average readership has risen by 50% in the past three months. Couple that with the good news that I’ve had over 100,000 hits since August and I’m a happy man this afternoon!

 A huge “thank you” goes to all my subscribers and visitors. If you know someone who’d be interested in reading the site, tell them about it! Don’t forget you can also subscribe with the RSS feed, or via email, and with the content coming thick and fast in future you won’t want to miss any of it!

Thanks again, and keep reading, subscribing, sharing and commenting! 

I like Sonic. I like Sonic a lot.

Sonic on the Master System still ranks (in my eyes) as one of the most beautiful and enjoyable games ever created. I played it again last week and wanted to cry. The same goes for Sonic Chaos, Sonic 3 and maybe Sonic 2, on a good day.

The problem is that, since Sonic 3, no Sonic games have really affected me in the same way. I love Sonic Adventure but it doesn’t make me feel loved in return. The original games were games that loved to be played – they were tight, directed games which balanced exploration with high speed but above all gave you perfect control and set pieces which make you grin like this:

A lot of people think that the Sonic games have lost their way since the 2D days – whereas Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine seem to be perfect transitions from two to three dimensions, Sonic hasn’t fared quite so well. I don’t know why. I have my suspicions. Anyway, this is supposed to be about Sonic Heroes.

I want to like it.

I really, really do. If it wasn’t a Sonic game I wouldn’t have given it the time of day, let alone persevered with it as I have. It frustrates and delights in roughly equal measures, but it often leaves a sour taste in my mouth and has me switching it off in frustration. Just as you think you’re getting the hang of it, and you’re enjoying the speed, scenery and level of exploration, the game hits you with an annoying drop, jump or group of enemies and sends you back to repeat the last four minutes.

Some levels are very clever.

Frog Forest uses rainfall to grow leaf platforms, vines to grind on and mushrooms to bounce on. The mushrooms even use the sound effect – “blawk!” – from Mushroom Hill Zone in Sonic and Knuckles – I approve of that.

It’s all going very well until you reach the end, and the camera shows what’s behind you, instead of where you should be going. I blundered into the sea a few times before working out I had to hit the spring, at which point a classic 3D Sonic setpiece takes place – you have to escape from a giant crocodile in much the same way as the killer whale/rolling boulder/GUN truck etc. escape scenes from Sonic Adventures 1 & 2. This time though, instead of running, you have to jump from swinging vine to swinging vine, which basically means getting into a rhythm of tapping A and hoping you don’t fall to your doom. It isn’t much fun.

Some levels are wonderful.

Seaside Hill combines the familiar chequered land pattern from the original Sonic with the Emerald Coast Zone from Sonic Adventure. It’s fast and bright and vibrant and everything a Sonic game should be. I think later levels rely too much on grinding to get you from A to B, and ask you to make jumps without being able to see what’s on the way. That’s not good.

This is all going a bit NGJ, and I apologise. I want to like Sonic Heroes. No, I want to love Sonic Heroes, but I can’t seem to do it. Every time it opens up to me, with fast, smooth level design and ideas that make you smile, it sucker punches me into dying without it being my fault.

Bosses are a perfect example – the last one I did lasted over five minutes without any restart points, and is basically just reams and reams of enemies. If you get killed by the last one you have to defeat them all over again. Not good.

I still haven’t made my mind up.

Normally with my games it’s very black and white whether I like them or not, but I think my love for Sonic is obscuring my (normally very accurate) game-divining-o-vision. Maybe I’ll have to spend more time with it to work it out.

Note: I posted this on my old blog a while ago, but with the new Sonic the Hedgehog game released next week I’m willing to bet this is still relevant, particularly discussion of its faults.

I haven’t fired it up since I wrote that post last year, which pretty much damns Sonic Heroes to Sega Hell.