Yay, I just got an e-mail notice that my Guitar Hero 3 order has finally shipped after being backordered for a couple weeks now. It’s continued to be damn near impossible to find in the stores, so at least I know I’ve got mine on the way now.
It won’t arrive until next week sometime, but I’ll be busy in the meantime anyway.
I spent a bit more time in Tabula Rasa tonight, running the various errand quests near the starting village and exploring the area a bit. The zones are pretty big, so it’s easy to wander into unfamiliar territory and get in over your head, but fortunately the destination spots for quests are marked on the map so you know exactly where you need to go, which quests will lead you into dangerous territory, etc.
I reached halfway through level 6 and picked the Specialist path as my level 5 career choice, and my eventual goal will probably be an Engineer. I’d been saving up my skill points, since I’m naturally reluctant to spend irreversible things, but I’ve started spending some of them now that I both need some of the new skills for the new armour and weapons I’m finding, and after learning that I’ll be able to reset my skills once I create a clone at the higher levels, so any choices I make now aren’t permanent after all.
One other difference from WoW is that not all enemies are static spawns or just roaming around. Quite often, enemy dropships will swoop in and offload enemies in certain areas, making it feel more like an actual war. They’re also supposed to fight for certain control points, which can be defended by NPCs and players nearby, and if the control point falls the players will no longer be able to use the facilities there and will have to fight to take it back. It’s kind of like PvP against a not-all-that-smart opposing team.
I’m a bad boy. I caved in and signed up for yet another MMORPG: Tabula Rasa. I was a huge Ultima fan back in the day and I was curious as to what Garriott’s been up to post-Ultima Online, so I figured I’d at least give it a try, even if I don’t stick with it.
Like the critics are fond of mentioning, it’s definitely very WoW-like in many ways, as are half the other MMOGs out there nowadays. Quests in particular are structured almost exactly the same way; you find a quest-giver, accept it, follow the instructions (which are a bit different in that there can be multiple steps of different types within a single quest), return, and choose your reward, all conveniently tracked in a quest log.
The differences become more apparent in combat though, which has a fairly quick pace to it and feels shooter-ish since there’s a heavy emphasis on guns, though that’s a bit of an illusion since it’s still largely based on your character’s skills, your weapon’s stats, etc. Still, you do have to worry about things like positioning for the best firing arcs — if you’re using a shotgun, you can damage multiple targets if you can get them lined up within the firing cone, for example.
Class and skill progression is also fairly different. Instead of picking a class from the start, everyone starts off as a blank slate (har har) and you specialize into different branches of a class tree as you gain levels, and each node of the tree has a set of skills associated with it that you can then buy points in. E.g., at level 5 I might decide to choose the Specialist branch, then the Sapper branch at level 15, and then Engineer at level 30 to finally set my true class. It’s not really a new idea, as DAoC did it before (I think), but it should help avoid the feeling that you might have been trapped by being forced to choose something right at character creation.
One of its other touted features is the collection of ‘Logos’ (in the Latin ‘knowledge’ sense, not the gaudy neon signs), and how they relate to skill development. It looks like it’s not really as big a deal as it’s made out to be, though; certain skills require you to have certain Logos before you can use them, making you go out and collect them, so it’s really just a form of making you explore a bit and go on quests to get certain skills, like various other games do in slightly different ways.
Nothing about it is really all that special so far, but it’s not a bad game either. It’s a fairly competently-executed WoW clone, that will probably wind up failing only because it’s not quite different enough to pull people away from WoW. I’ve only done a handful of the simple starting quests after the tutorial though, so I’ve probably still got a lot to learn about it.
Oh, and I should mention that this is what a proper Collector’s Edition (yes, I’m a sucker) should be like. It comes with a big, full-colour manual, glossy cards with maps of all the zones with landmarks, a coin and dogtag trinkets, a poster, and a behind-the-scenes DVD. I’m not sure if there are any in-game bonuses yet or not.
(It also came with a T-shirt, but not in the game box itself, so it was probably added in by Amazon as some kind of bonus. These T-shirts are the kind of thing you probably shouldn’t be caught dead wearing in public anyway…)
Today was the release of the long-awaited 2.3 patch for WoW, and aside from various small UI improvements and the usual class changes, the major new feature is supposed to be faster leveling and better loot at lower levels.
So, tonight we decided to put it to the test at Shadowfang Keep. I couldn’t really tell if the experience was that much better since most of the critters were green even to me, but the loot drops were definitely better than usual, with far more blues dropping than you’d expect in a single trip.
The drops are probably better to counterbalance the fact that you’ll probably be in the instances less often if you’re leveling faster. Now to see just how fast that is…
Edit: Ah, here’s a list of all the new loot in the lower-level instances.
Today I finally got back to completing some more stages in We Love Katamari. A couple of them were the traditional size-x-in-time-y stages, with the school one being a bit more interesting just by way of being a somewhat more confined space.
A couple more stages were again ones that you couldn’t really lose, and your goal is just to do as well as you can, by rolling up items and being scored by their cash value in one of the stages, and by trying to get the biggest cow or bear possible in the other. The latter one is particularly frustrating because, of course, there are cows and bears everywhere so you have to be careful and try to avoid the small ones while rolling up a ball big enough to get a big cow or bear. I gave up after a few attempts and made do with a guy in a bear costume.
And the last one for today was a fairly simple time attack, where you have to pick up 100 items as fast as possible. The twist here is that there are only 100 items in the whole stage, so you have to backtrack and pick up *everything*.
Looks like I still have a ways to go, as there are at least seven people around the main map asking for help, so it’ll probably take a couple more nights to finish. I’m also playing it on the PS3 now, and although I’m not sure it really loaded any faster, saving games is almost instantaneous now.
I still had a bit of time to kill before bed, so I figured I’d celebrate the release of Super Mario Galaxy (though I haven’t picked it up yet) by playing a bit of Super Mario Bros 3 via the ol’ GBA cartridge.
I last left off partway through World 3, and it didn’t take long before I remembered why — World 3-4 was a royal pain in the ass for me. Either the flying goomba or the Lakitu just past that would inevitably finish me off; SMB3 was a lot less forgiving about the temporary invulnerability you’d get after taking a hit, so I’d often die even if I was big when I’d take a jump only to hit a thrown spiny and then hit Lakitu himself a second later.
Tonight though, after failing 3-4 a handful of times, I was about to try 3-5 instead as an alternate path, but actually managed to beat 3-4 for once. The rest of the world was much easier, and now my game is saved right at the start of World 4.
Not much time for games today, so I just gave the new track pack (Twin Ring Motegi) for Forza 2 a try. Unfortunately, it doesn’t add any new career races that use it, which is disappointing, so you’re left with using it in the time trials and multiplayer.
The time trials were simple enough to beat; Forza could have used a bit more difficulty there or at least different target times for different rankings. And unfortunately, to race against the AI on this track you have to kind of fake it with an Xbox Live game where all the drivers are set to AIs instead of other players, but XBL is quite flaky at the moment as the maintenance period tomorrow draws near. Ah well, I’ll have to try a real race some other time. I want at least some practice on it before trying against other people…
As for the track itself, I remember it from Gran Turismo 4, but driving it feels a lot different here than it did there, for some reason. In particular, the last set of chicanes on the long course seems a lot easier to navigate here than it did in GT4, where the 45 degree bends were quite narrow. Otherwise, it’s a pretty average track, with nothing particularly tricky. There’s at least one spot where the suggested braking line is completely wrong, though; as you’re coming over one crest, the line is telling you to brake hard, but you should actually be keeping at least a bit of throttle on.
Ugh, yesterday I had intended to play Hellgate: London just long enough to finish off the quests for the Fawkes event, but it wound up taking me until 1:30am to finally finish it. The quests turned out to be awfully late-game for something released only a couple of weeks ago… At least now I can finally get rid of all the event-specific recipe components that are clogging up my inventory.
Now that the event is over though, I think I’m going to shelve HG:L for a while until they put out a few more stability patches. It’s fun, but besides the usual crashes and freezes, yesterday alone I ran across all sorts of other bugs, including PRD portals sometimes not working when you want to return through them (which is especially fun when you used them deep into a tunnel branch), falling through the floor in a station, not being able to buy stuff that stacks when your inventory is full even when it would stack with something you already have (annoying when you’re trying to buy more analyzers), being suddenly teleported back to the station’s starting point seemingly at random, my drone sometimes complaining about requirements and not spawning with the right weapon, even when they’re easily met, unique items not having the stat bonuses they’re supposed to…
Since I was swinging by a mall earlier today anyway, I figured I’d stop in at the EB Games there. Which is usually a bad idea, since I rarely leave one empty-handed… Sigh.
I picked up the PC versions that just came out of Gears of War and Call of Duty 4. That might make multiplayer with some friends and forum acquaintances difficult, alas, but I just prefer using the mouse and keyboard for shooters, and GoW even has some extra stuff (story chapters, maps, an editor) for the Windows version. I haven’t done much more than install them, but I’m sure I’ll get around to them. Eventually…
It’s strange how I’ve bought so many shooters this year, even though I didn’t really consider myself an FPS fan. I’d gotten distracted and neglected to keep up with them since ye olde “run and gun and get the red keycard” days, so maybe I just got sucked back in by the additional depth they’ve developed and the large bumper crop of good ones this year. CoD4, for example, is supposed to have a great multiplayer side, with an almost RPG-ish advancement and ranking system.
And I also picked up Flatout: Ultimate Carnage for the 360. Sometimes you want to test your technical racing prowess around a world-class racing circuit. And sometimes you just want to smash the hell out of everyone and everything…
Today was spent mostly in Hellgate: London. Despite its current bugginess (and I did experience a number of crashes, hangs, network disconnects, and falling-through-the-floor bugs), I’ve been rather eager to press forward. Partly because, well, I caved in and got the subscription. The current subscriber-only Guy Fawkes event ends tomorrow, but the major quests that are part of it were in an area I hadn’t gotten to yet. After working my way through various other zones, I’m finally at the Templar base where the quest-giver is, and I’ll try and finish the quests off tomorrow.
Hopefully these event-specific quests will be worth it. So far, about the only direct differences the subscription has made is that my stash is twice as big (which is admittedly rather useful), and that various subscriber-only recipes and crafting components have been dropping. The problem with those is that I keep seeing the same few recipes over and over again, haven’t seen enough of the other pieces to even use very many of the recipes yet, and there’s no hint as to what the resulting foodstuffs even do. I’ll be kind of glad when the event is over just so I stop getting so much of that junk.
The combat zones are getting rather repetitive in style and layout now, but along the way to the Templar Base there were actually a couple unexpected twists that gave me a new area to play in for a while, and a chance to control another squad instead of myself. They were brief sequences, but it did help break up the monotony a bit.
I also only just realized tonight that my drone has attribute points to spend when he levels up along with me, and I’ve also added the skills that let it carry a weapon and bit of armour now, which has helped a lot. I’ve given it a sniper rifle for now, which is fairly powerful, but I’m starting to have second thoughts — the screen shakes whenever it fires the rifle, which gets annoying quickly. Especially when I sometimes switch over to my own sniper rifle, and the screen never stops shaking.