What We Played #61: London 2012, SingStar, Hyperdimension Neptunia

Last week was an amazing week for science. First we had the news that CERN’s boffins are almost certain enough to be reasonably confident that the Higgs boson (not “bosun” as I saw reported in a couple of places) almost certainly exists. The reported 5-Sigma level of confidence means that in a universe where it didn’t exist there would be only a 1 in 3,500,000 chance of getting the experimental results they have seen.

That covers the extremely tiny end of the size-of-things spectrum while the week’s other big science news, way out at the opposite end of that spectrum, is that scientists using the XMM-Newton space telescope have detected an 18 megaparsecs long dark matter filament. (A megaparsec is 3.09*10^22 meters.)

This thing is freaking huge! You know galaxies are big right? A couple of hundred billion stars, etc. So you know or can imagine that galactic clusters (literally clusters of galaxies) are even huger? And this dark matter filament contains and connects two galactic clusters! Just, wow! And its mass is “between 6.5 × 10^13 and 9.8 × 10^13 times the mass of the Sun”!

Yet despite all that scientific advancement they still haven’t found a way of slowing the passage of time that will allow me to get everything done that I need to. So I’ve not been playing much again, just my now-usual Mass Effect 3 multiplayer and a giggle-filled SingStar session at the weekend when I had some company.

In case you’re wondering, the left image is a graphical depiction of a proton-proton collision decaying with a signature that would indicate a Higgs boson; one of the universe’s smallest events that we had to build the world’s largest machine to detect.  The right image is a computer-generated density map of the dark matter filament overlaid on a photo of the region of space in question.  Cool, huh?

Anyway, gaming.

Josh’s gaming has consisted of continuing his Crushing run through of Uncharted 3 interspersed with “a bunch of” Treasures of Montezuma Blitz. That latter is seeing plenty of play ahead of many of his actual paid-for games thanks to its addictive nature. Haven’t played myself for a while, must get back to giving him some top-of-the-leaderboard competition.

Like a “Renaissance Batman” Aran is leaping around in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Templar Dens falling to his faction and world exploration taking precedence over story progression. After reviewing London 2012 he concludes that “there were parts that could’ve made it a great game but they were few and far between”. Aside from those he’s been expanding his Fable 2 property empire.

Toby finally caught up with one of last year’s titles:

I’ve finally got around to playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 after borrowing it off a friend. It’s exactly what I anticipated – a linear shooter with massive set pieces and very little left for the player but to shoot. In saying that, I can’t deny that I thoroughly enjoyed it, and even though it doesn’t demand too much brain cell activity it’s “fire at anything that moves” philosophy is sometimes what I need after a long day. Though that’s probably not a good thing, right?

“Immensely enjoying” Metal Gear HD on his PS Vita we find Tuffcub who’s experiencing the games for the first time having missed them first time around on PS2. He’s still playing, and gushing about, the “utterly superb” Gravity Rush. Hyperdimension Neptunia, the “aging JRPG that tells the story of the console wars” had been given a rent. What about it has made an impression on our TC? “It seems to be 75% cut scenes of heaving cleavage and an awful lot of text.”

Finally, Alex has been playing Dyad – you can read his impressions here. He says it’s “mind meltingly brilliant” without ever verging into the nasty hipster style territories a lot of these sort of games end up in. “I showed it to a PS3-less friend and he’s now thinking about buying one”, he said. Must be good, then, eh?

And that’s it from us this week. How much gaming have you found time for in the last seven days?