Traditional family Christmas, playing Vice City.

I wrote this over Christmas, only recently finding it. Since I wrote this piece, "Elite: The New Kind" is no longer available for download.

We have spent the time in a traditional manner, playing computer games. Mostly Vice City. Nifty game, but a bit frustrating at times. As well as this, I've been getting into the retro sprit with a copy of Elite: The New Kind, all recompiled to work well on modern computers.

Vice City has been reviewed so many times already so I'll not rehash, the link above has a few. Enjoy, indulge. Short review: I like it (mostly).

Some of the missions are quite tricky. There are frequent places in the course of the game where you have to complete a mission before you can progress. If you can't get that mission, it can get quite frustrating. A while ago, I was quite happilly playing Jak and Daxter, reaching 66% (ish) complete, but then came the wall, the remaining missions were just a bit too difficult to complete. Even walking around became difficult as I found myself continually falling into oblivion when I failed to be pixel perfect in making a tricky jump. The game now languishes unplayed and uncompleted in the pile marked try-again-some-other-time.

In Vice City, we are at 32% complete. Finding frustrating missions so early on is not a good sign. Fortunately, they sometimes become possible with a bit of ingenuity or getting some help from the various guides that many have produced.

There are some annoying quirks. In the "Shakedown" mission, where you have to break lots of shop windows, my first attempt was to use a gun. I since found that, since the auto-aim only works on people, I am very bad at using guns. Next attempt, I used a baseball bat. Perfect, a few swings and it's shards-of-glass-a-rama. Alas, with this attempt I simply ran out of time. The next attempt would be perfect, I had a strategy and I was well practised.

Hmmm, seems all the shops have toughened glass fitted. The baseball bat doesn't break anything anymore. Even after loading in really old saves, the glass wouldn't break. It was only the discovery of the mini-gun with it's spray-bullets-everywhere philosophy that saved the mission.

Not quite frustrating, but annoying, was the purchase of the "Pole Position" club. Seems before I can get any money back from my investment, I have to sit though an annoying private dance from a woman in underwear. For ten minutes. Before you all rush out and buy the game, the word "woman" is used... inaccurately. Plastic alien from the planet Zarg is more accurate. The dancing is about as arousing as wet fish.

And yet, for all the quirks and frustrations, we still play it happily, leaving this diary neglected. And I've just bought a cargo bay extension.