Only had time to clear one more area in Halo 2 tonight, but I think I might have a new favourite weapon in the Needler. It has a homing effect to it, fires rapidly, and there’s been plenty of ammo around.
The Arbiter’s cloak has been useful in letting me quickly scout rooms and find a good spot from which to start the fight, but otherwise he plays just like Master Chief.
Finished two more areas in Halo 2 today, and was surprised to find that you also play as one of the enemy Covenant characters, with a special cloaking ability. That should prove to be interesting, though the plot hasn’t really advanced much so far. I’ve had to go to other sources for more information on the background that I probably missed out on in the original Halo.
I’m also a bit surprised at the difficulty of it. I’m playing on Normal, and most of the time it’s actually fairly easy, but there are occasional spikes in difficulty that are difficult to predict. It must have taken me four tries before finally defeating the Scarab, usually because I find my shield knocked down way faster than I would have expected.
There’s lots of weaponry, but so far I think my favourites are the Covenant sniper rifle and plasma rifle. There just isn’t enough ammo around for the human weapons, and the other alien weapons just aren’t as powerful or fun to use. There are probably still more types I haven’t seen yet, though.
After taking that series of battles more carefully, I finally finished off Overlord tonight. I’d already heard that the final battle was supposed to be fairly easy, but it was tougher than I expected, mainly because a few unexpected attack types kept killing off a lot of minions at once. I could theoretically play it again for the ‘evil’ ending, as I went for the ‘good’ one on this run, but there is no time, for I must press on…
What’s up next then? Well, Halo 3 is out next week and I have it on preorder, but my replacement 360 still won’t arrive for at least a couple of weeks. So, in the meantime, I figured I’d catch up on things with the PC version of Halo 2.
The PC version’s been a bit controversial, since it’s restricted to Vista for no particularly good reason, the graphics aren’t really improved *that* much (e.g., there’s a lot of jaggies on up-close shots in cutscenes), and has an incomplete implementation of the integration with XBox Live. The most annoying part of the install was where I had to enter my Live ID three times, as each time it would ask me, find another update, apply it, and then ask me for my ID again, having failed to remember it from the last time.
Still, what’s there is good enough for me. I doubt I’ll do anything with the multiplayer with H3 just around the corner, but I at least want to get through the main campaign, and finished off the night just after completing Cairo Station.
Well, I made it through the desert in Overlord tonight, which turned out to be fairly easy but tedious, as you spend 90% of your time just directing single minions to lure exploding bugs to various spots.
But, after that, you have to return to Heaven’s Peak for a series of battles, and it’s far too easy to get stuck in certain ways where you have no chance to avoid continuous damage and quickly die. And there are no save points, so you have to start the whole area over again. After failing three times in a row, I’m going to call it a night there.
I suspect this is pretty close to the end, though.
Today I thought I’d do a bit of minion farming in Overlord so I can enchant my items, but after applying a few enchantments, I realized that I had been applying them to the older, weaker items and not my newest ones. Sigh. Maybe I’ll be in a less ditzy frame of mind tomorrow.
I’m not sure how much enchantment I’m going to bother with though, as these items can ‘absorb’ over a thousand minions, and farming that many would be…dull. I suspect I’m strong enough to finish the game as-is.
Finally made it to the desert in Overlord, after finishing off the dwarf areas for good (there was still more to go than I expected after the brewery) and getting the final forge upgrade. Now I can start upgrading the armour and weapons in earnest, though I don’t have many spare minions to sacrifice at the moment. I hope I’m not going to have to grind the easier orb-collecting spots for hours just to save up minions for enchantments.
A couple more good deeds managed to knock my corruption rating from 5% down to 1% too, which I wasn’t expecting, so I might be able to get a 0% corruption run after all. As one wag in some forums noted, the game really should be called Benevolent Dictator if you take the ‘good’ route.
It should only take one or two more evenings to finish it off, since I think this is the last area. It’ll depend on how large it is and how many dungeons or adjacent sub-areas there are to it.
The only other progress is that I’m now up to level 4 in Free mode in Picross DS. The sounds associated with some of the level themes are getting a bit annoying…
I finally finished off the Heaven’s Peak and Angelis Keep areas in Overlord, and stuck with Rose as the castle’s mistress, even if Velvet is much more…seductive. The brown minions are still the mainstay of my horde, so her upgrade for them will probably be better for me. And maybe her blue minion upgrade will make them not so damn useless — they’re supposed to resurrect fallen minions, but they hardly ever do so unless I specifically park them right next to the dead ones, which is hard to do in the heat of battle.
Next up is the brewery, probably followed by the desert area, and then I’ll probably be pretty close to the end.
Not too much progress in Overlord today, just a mana powerup and some more havoc-wreaking in Heaven’s Peak. A bit of a setback actually, as I lost a ton of minions trying different ways to take down the silent cultists. They constantly resurrect each other, so maybe I just need overwhelming force to take them down en masse before they have a chance…
I also got in preorders on Halo 3, Eternal Sonata, and The Orange Box today. One of the preorder bonuses for the latter is a Valve-themed version of Peggle, and if you think the screenshots are creepy, the sound effect on the main menu is downright disturbing…
Managed to finish off most of the rest of the Dwarven areas in Overlord today and set up the ‘Trojan Statue’, except the brewery, for which I think I have to come back later. Despite the seeming non-linear layout, there are many steps which have to be done in a certain order, switching between specific areas to do so. The ability to roam freely is mostly just to clear out monsters ahead of time and find powerups.
I finished off by clearing out the Understreets in Heaven’s Peak, finally netting the next forge upgrade in the process. I now have a shiny new set of armour and a more ominous-looking axe, but they’re not enchanted yet. You have to sacrifice minions to add enchantments to them, and I’ve been afraid to do so for fear of finding the next forge too quickly and having wasted minions on obsolete equipment. There’s only one more forge upgrade though, so once I get that, it’s sacrificin’ time.
They may be tougher to kill, but the beer-swilling bastards are considerably poorer now after I wandered through their gold mine. Ha! I don’t really have anything to spend gold on until I get better smelters, though.
I’m not sure how many more areas I have left to go through in Overlord, but I know there’s still at least the Heaven’s Peak area that’s still mostly unfinished and a desert area, so hopefully it’s not too close to being done already.
