Week 3 results
Starting weight (25th June) 231lbs
Current weight (9th July) 224.5lbs
Lost 6.5lbs
Average weight loss Daily 0.3lbs, Weekly 2.2lbs, Monthly 9.3lbs
Date of completion at current weight loss rate: November 7th
Sorry for the lateness of the update but I’ve been a bit distracted this week due to the launch of the new Xbox 360. I worked 6pm – 2am Thursday and left for work again at 6am. Due to the disruption I was extremely lax on food intake controls this week and was fully expecting to have gained on Friday’s weigh in. I’m pleased to say that my weight loss seems to have hit a nice rhythm and I’m consistantly losing 2lbs per week. With a little extra effort I should soon be hitting my tartget 2.5lbs. This week I’ll be branching out from merely swimming and adding in 20 minutes of cycling every morning, with a 50 length swim at lunch.
Here are some pictures of other things I’ve made and either forgotten about, rejected or plain not finished (I’m looking at you Schaffer the Ducklord!)
Many moons ago I worked at EA as a CQC tester, a job that (at the time) involved playing a finished game from beginning to end to ensure it was possible to complete it without any horrendous bugs rearing their ugly heads. Of the many games I worked on, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone on the PS2 was the one that didn’t seem to go away, bouncing in and out of our department for quite a while before it was finally released. It was with trepidation then, that I picked Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as this week’s wild card review.
The first thing I noticed about Harry was that he can’t jump. The second thing was….wait…he can’t jump? Thus I discovered that Half Blood Prince was a sandbox game and not a generic movie platformer. Don’t get over-excited, we’re not talking Saboteur or GTA here, we’re talking one of those little shell shaped plastic sandboxes that you get from Argos ? small but serviceable. The problem is that somebody forgot to give you any toys, so you’re left playing with a stick (Quidditch), some ants (Duelling) and most exciting of all ? sand and water (potion mixing)….oh and the ability to stomp around your little box to your heart’s content. This (to push the analogy to breaking point) actually rings true as the older you are ? the smaller your play area feels.
A brief summary of the activities on offer:
Potion mixing is a nice little game where you have to grab ingredients from the table and mix them in a pot whilst ensuring that nothing sets on fire and you don’t run out of time. It’s quite challenging and actually fun at times.
Quidditch requires you to fly in seemingly endless circles on your broom whilst passing through star shaped gates to rack up extra time before you catch the Snitch to win the game.
The Duelling game lets you use different combinations of spells to beat your opponent into submission. This is by far the most broken of the three activities as spell inputs don’t always register and it is possible to get through three quarters of the game using only two types of attack.
Unfortunately Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is merely a 4 hour exercise in walking from one of the mini-games to the next. In a typical 20 minute play session you will be on your way to a Quidditch game (having just finished a potions class) and be accosted by some random for a duel. Sometimes they’ll mix this up a bit by having you on your way to make a potion in the herbology shed (having just won a Quidditch game) but stopping by the duelling club on the way to…I don’t know…get a book or something.
That’s it. The graphics are average. The voice acting is fairly poor and the gameplay is repetitive and boring. The potion mixing mini game is the best thing on offer here and would have been something to praise the game for, had I not been forced to do it every 10-20 minutes.
