Monthly Archives: October 2007

That’s Enough Thinking With Portals

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I didn’t get around to HL2:Ep2 today, opting instead to continue messing around with Portal.

I ran through it again with the developer commentary on, and it was much quicker this time, only taking two and a half hours and a chunk of that was just waiting while listening to the commentaries.

Then I tried some of the ‘bonus maps’, which are split into two types: advanced levels, and challenges. The advanced levels take the last six puzzle levels and make them a lot harder, restricting where you can place portals, making the necessary timing on jumps tighter, removing cubes and floor spots, etc. They are indeed tougher, but I managed to get through four of them without too much frustration.

The challenge levels take those same six puzzle levels and leave the layout intact, but now you have to complete them within certain limits on the number of portals placed, steps taken, or time elapsed. These challenges are *much* tougher and I’m not sure I’ll be able to do most of them, based on my few puny attempts tonight.

I can’t waste too much time on Portal right now though. Episode 2 still awaits!

Is It Orange Cake?

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Well, the next two games I had intended to play were both on the 360, but I can’t really trust it at the moment. Although it did boot up a couple more times after this latest red ring, it’ll just keep getting worse and worse if my previous system is any indication.

So, I needed a new game to play, and hey, that Orange Box thingie was finally unlocked last night… I played through Portal first, since I knew it was shorter, and it was more intriguing since it’s fairly different from the others. It’s a series of puzzles, where you have to use a portal gun to move yourself and other objects around to get past barriers, trigger switches, and so on, by shooting portals at walls that then let you move between those spots.

Or at least that’s how it starts out, but as you approach the end of the puzzles, there’s a bit of a twist. I’m not going to spoil it, but at that point you realize that the puzzles were really just an extended tutorial, and now the real challenge begins. And the final battle and the credits sequence are just hilariously awesome.

It’s a really short game, which only took me around three and a half hours, but it’s a great game all the way through. And I still have to go back and redo it with the developer commentary, and there are some advanced puzzles and time challenges to do as well. It definitely helps make The Orange Box a worthwhile value.

Portal was a pleasant surprise, but Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is what I really got the Orange Box for, and I’ll probably start it tomorrow.

Mmmm, Crom…

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The demo for The Simpsons Game came out today, and it was kinda fun to just run around, using the character powers, exploring the map, and collecting stuff. I never figured out how to kill the Lard Boy boss though, and the constant stream of Krusty dolls got annoying quickly. Hopefully the final game has a bit more variety and puzzling to it.

The Conan demo also came out, though I didn’t see very much of it as my 360 froze again in the middle of it. What I saw wasn’t really all that interesting, though, as it was kind of like a less exciting God of War. The acting and dialogue in the initial cutscene were also rather cheesy, but that’s kind of expected in a pulp universe like Conan’s.

I also started Eternal Sonata, and although it’s a fairly traditional JRPG in a lot of ways, it has a somewhat different premise and combat system. So far it hasn’t been very difficult and it’s not very deep in terms of stats or items, but it’s managed to remain interesting. You can’t just snooze your way through combat by mashing attack, since you have to adjust your strategy to account for the layout of the combat area, where the light and dark zones are, and your ‘echo’ meter.

Ain’t Misbehavin’

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After testing it a bit further, my 360’s problems seem to have lessened a bit. I was able to play Forza 2 and Halo 3 for a few hours without any problems, and various XBLA games didn’t trigger anything, but it did freeze once more in the Flatout UC demo.

I’m still not sure how much I really trust it at this point, but all I can do is keep playing and see if it gets any worse. I really don’t want to have to send it back in again, especially for a non-reliably-reproducible problem.

And speaking of Halo 3, it looks like I might actually be able to do it on the Heroic difficulty, it’ll just take a lot more caution, sniping, and careful advancement, and I’ll have to use the less-favoured weapons more often since there’s not enough ammo of the better ones. I also got the first silver skull, though I’ll have to redo the level to get the first gold one there too.

Forza 2 still hasn’t fixed the Porsche/Pirelli money bug, which is good for me since there’s a new car pack out and I need some cash to buy those. I probably won’t really get back into it until new tracks come out though, and apparently at least one is in development and was shown at the TGS conference.

Oh You Have Got To Be Kidding Me

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I think my replacement 360 is a lemon.

The first signs of trouble were when starting up Halo 3, where there was a bit of a stutter during the Bungie logo animation. I didn’t think much of it at the time since things like that are common in PC games, where it’s just disk I/O as stuff is being loaded. Then, there was the problem I mentioned before where I lost the sound in Eets and it froze while trying to quit back to the dashboard. Again, I didn’t think much of it since it seemed to be an Eets-specific problem.

But, last night I turned it on to queue up some more demo and trailer downloads, and was greeted with those infamous three flashing lights. Oddly enough it still continued to boot normally while the lights were flashing, whereas with the previous box I’d get nothing but a blank screen. I turned it off and back on again, and the three red lights haven’t reoccurred since.

It’s now freezing on me left and right, though. I can’t complete a single chapter in Halo 3 or race in the Flatout UC demo without it freezing within a few minutes of starting, and sometimes it’ll do so while just sitting at the dashboard, or in the middle of downloads.

Ugh.

Missed You!

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Just more catching up with the 360 today, mainly with all the Marketplace stuff I missed. Saw a few trailers, but nothing particularly memorable.

There are a bunch of XBLA games of which I have yet to try the trial versions, but I only got around to two tonight. Super Puzzle Fighter was a bit of a twist on the block-dropping formula, but not really enough to grab my attention. People seem to love it, though. Space Giraffe was more interesting; it’s gotten a lot of criticism for its trippy graphics and difficulty to learn, but I thought it was a bit fun. The main problem with it is that it’s probably more ‘hardcore’ than my skills can handle, and is one of those that would take a ton of practice to master, and I don’t really have time for that. With a huge backlog of games to go, I’m trying to focus more on games that can actually be finished.

And I knocked off a few more Eets levels. It’s getting to the point now where enough new elements have been introduced and you’re given a big enough quantity of placeable items that the solution is rarely straightforward, and you really have to start thinking about it. I’ve at least managed to hit all of the par times and scores so far, at least.

Welcome Back

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I finally got my 360 back today. Well, not the same one, they wound up sending me a refurbished unit that’s actually older than the one I sent in. Though it has a model of DVD drive in it that wasn’t available when it was first made, so who knows how much of the internals have been replaced. As long as it has the new heatsink (it appears to) and works fine, I’ll be happy. It’s venting more hot air than the old one did, which indicates that the heatsink is indeed successfully moving more heat out, as it’s supposed to.

I only completed one chapter of Halo 3 before realizing I’d already missed a skull or two so far, so I might just restart, since it didn’t take very long anyway. Some differences from Halo 2 are already apparent: the Arbiter accompanies you and can help out a lot; there’s already at least one new weapon type, a rapid-firing alien pistol with a slight arc to the projectiles; the HUD curves a bit, a la Metroid Prime; there are now ‘equipment’ items you can pick up and use, like bubble shields; the Brutes have been redesigned and haven’t been as annoying as they were in 2 so far; and Grunts seem to be a lot more chatty.

And, of course, it looks a ton better than 2 did even on the PC, mainly thanks to a new lighting model and higher res textures. Getting used to the console controls after using the keyboard+mouse for 2 didn’t take as long as expected, though I still don’t feel accurate enough. Being able to aim precisely with the mouse and get headshots a lot was nice, and with the gamepad it feels like I waste too much ammo ‘sweeping’ around or trying to aim precisely and just missing. Multiplayer is also supposed to be vastly improved in 3, though I’ll focus on completing the campaign first. Might do a lot of that in co-op mode, though.

Otherwise, I spent most of the evening checking other stuff I missed out on while it was in for repairs, including various demos. Beautiful Katamari was pretty much exactly like how the PS2 games play, just in high-def, no real surprise there. Sega Rally is a bit too arcade-ish for me, and I still have to finish DiRT (which is more my style), so I’ll pass on it. Crash Of The Titans might be interesting, but the demo didn’t have any kind of tutorial on the controls, so I have no idea if I was missing out on something critical. The bit I managed to get through didn’t really show enough variety, either. It goes on the ‘maybe’ pile.

And I got a few more levels done in Eets: Chowdown, until the sound suddenly disappeared on me and trying to return to the dashboard caused it to freeze. The guide still worked and sound was restored once I got back to the dashboard, so I guess it was just a bug in Eets.

Now I still have to figure out what other downloadables I’ve missed in the meantime…

Not In The Cards

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Firing up EQ last night reminded me that Sony Online also recently released a collectible card game variant of EQ, and all current players get a free starter deck, so I downloaded the client for that, fired it up, and started the tutorial.

And then quit it halfway through the tutorial. It looks like a decent enough CCG, but I’ve only played them before as minigames like Arcomage in the M&M series or Pazaak in KotOR, and it quickly became clear that this was going to be a fairly daunting, complex one along the lines of MtG. It would take quite a bit of effort to learn it deeply enough to be good at it, and I don’t really have time for that right now.

The Waiting Game

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Having finished Super Metroid, I don’t really want to start anything new right now since my 360 is close to being returned, and anything new would just get set aside again as soon as it arrives.

Instead, tonight was spent meandering around a bit. I tried to check out Hexen, from the “id megapack” I bought on Steam a while back, but I got stuck between a rotating panel and a wall at one point, and trying to reload the game caused it to crash. I was using the zDoom engine rather than the ‘real’ one, which is probably the real problem, but zDoom adds too many enhancements not to use it.

I downloaded the new Picross DS packs for this week and completed a handful more puzzles, but mainly the easier ones. I’m getting closer to the end of the built-in puzzles though, as I’m up to level 7 (of 10) in Free mode now.

And finally I popped onto WoW and EverQuest briefly just to see if there was anything interesting going on. But there wasn’t. At least not anything obvious; you really have to wander around, inquire a bit, and do some research to find out what’s new, but I started a bit too late in the evening to bother with that.