Everyone Loves A Quickie

Leaping over a zombie's slavering jaws, stunning enemies with pom poms and decapitating them to release glorious rainbows. All said I was quite taken by Lollipop Chainsaw. The combat lacked the finesse of  Arkham City or brutality of the God Of War series but this was offset by the Buffy on steroids main character and fantastic knowing, quirky style was fantastic. 
I had been chopping up zombies for a good fifty minutes but had to leave the house. I hadn't seen a save point yet so I went to the pause menu, but no save. I foolishly assumed that it would save at checkpoints and exited my game. Unfortunately after restarting it I was staring at a cut scene from the start of the level. No chance to go back. So I lost nearly an hour of precious game time.
To rub insult to injury I looked on the Internet and found out I was only ten minutes from the end of the level.
I think that games with long play times times definitely have a place especially with story driven games but with today's technology a few more save points wouldn't hurt. Obviously there are memory constraints but if Fallout 3 can keep up four years ago then surely today's games should be fine.
Living in a household with a single telly where not everyone plays games long gaps between saves can cause problems. As a man who lives with his girlfriend can testify, Corrie waits for no man.

Minecraft Mistakes

Minecraft on a console?
Yes I'm late to the party, but dammit I'm not a PC gamer. The creature that is Minecraft has dug it's claws into my body and laid little eggs of happiness under my skin.
I have always loved creative games. From playing around with level editors for the original Red Alert (back when I was a PC gamer) to recently making levels on Little Big Planet. Even little things that we take for granted like character editors or customising load outs, I would spend hours obssesing over.
The unfortunate thing is that console games have never really  given me the ability to scratch that creative itch until I downloaded the 360 version of Minecraft.
It's the massive lego kit I've been dreaming of.
I had loads of fun making a tower to live in. I dug long winding tunnels that snaked under the landscape. I enjoyed getting most of the achiements even though it took ages to get enough iron to make 500 meteres of track. I even made a portal to The Nether in my basement. I'd hit a nice place in the game and wanted to start making fancier and impressive structures. I felt like king of my world.
I then made the big mistake of looking for ideas online.
If you want to feel like everything you've ever done in the game is boring, simple and crude just type Minecraft into youtube.
I had the same problem comparing my simple Little Big Planet levels with the cream of the crop of user generated content online.
I get that these massive amazing structures are time consuming projects but I can't spend hundreds of hours making these creations. Therein lies the rub with user-generated content. Someone can always spend longer or I hate to say it be a bit more talented and make a city sized  masterpiece compared to the weekend you wasted building a poor man's Canary Wharf. 
But the one thing that made me carry on is it might not be amazing but it's mine. After I got over the fact I'll never make an underwater super city. I got back into it and I made some 70 foot tall pictures of 8bit  sprites that flexed my creative muscles and this set me off again.
Don't be jealous of people with too much time on their hands. Just be proud of what you do, add it to the on-line pile and improve on what you did.  Oh and don't look at YouTube.