Monthly Archives: November 2007

Them’s The TCP Breaks

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Well I *had* intended to spend the rest of the evening in Hellgate: London, but I kept getting disconnected every ten minutes or so, so screw that. The launch of the online play has had…problems…

So, instead I found myself back in WoW again. I was just going to do some of the more tedious quests around Taren Mill, but wound up signing the guild charter, managing stuff at the auction house, and working on mining and smithing more than anything else. Nothing in WoW ever truly goes as planned, of course.

XBLA Friday

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I wound up buying the full edition of Switchball, and completed the first two worlds (of five) tonight. As you might expect, it starts off fairly easy but then soon gets harder. It’s usually pretty clear what you have to do, but pulling off the timing, avoiding rolling off the edge, etc., can sometimes be tricky. By the end, my final time to complete the stages (your score, effectively) was far past the expected ‘bronze’ time.

Since I’m already 2/5 of the way done, it probably won’t take too long to finish as long as it doesn’t get insanely difficult. The real challenge lies in redoing the stages over and over again to try and get the bronze/silver/gold medal times. Of the 12 stages I’ve done so far, I’ve only managed to get two silver medals and one bronze, so that part could take me a while. If ever…

I also popped into Lumines for a bit, to check out some of the new skins. The “Breeze” skin is another video skin by Genki Rockets, and the song is catchy enough. I probably won’t play it in its own challenge mode much though, since the video is a bit distracting, but maybe I’ll drop it into skin edit mode every once in a while.

The other skin pack is supposed to be a holiday-themed one, but of the skins I’ve seen so far, it’s only in an abstract sense. I don’t know why I keep buying these packs when I’m not really that great at the game; I only managed to unlock four of the 20 skins in my first attempt at it, and I still haven’t even unlocked all of the basic skins yet. The “Amber Moon” song is pretty rocking though, and I expect to use it in skin edit mode a lot.

Adjective: Possessive Noun

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Tonight was fairly productive in WoW, with a run through Wailing Caverns and some quests in Hillsbrad giving me a few useful new pieces of equipment. I also hit level 25, though leveling is definitely getting slower now, so the good ol’ 2-levels-per-night days are nearing their end.

During a lull I got a chance to check out the demo for Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. It initially feels and looks a lot like a Tomb Raider clone with a male lead instead, but it puts more emphasis on making the shooting parts less arcadey than TR, forcing you to use the cover system, not letting you take too many hits too quickly, and requiring careful aiming. I didn’t get too far though, as I ran out of ammo and got slaughtered at the big fight at the ruins. There were some bits that required you to use the motion controls (walking across logs, throwing grenades) that felt awkward.

I’ll have to try the demo again to see if I can get farther, as it hasn’t really sold me on it so far. Or maybe my skills have just degraded to the point where I need to start playing on Easy… :P

Fly The Only Mildly-Pleasant Skies

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Last night everyone seemed to be busy already in WoW, so I just ran around and collected a few more flight paths. I could now fly to Gadgetzan, at level 22!

Tonight was spent finishing up the last of the Barrens quests, and we moved into the Stonetalon Mountains zone and started picking up, starting, and helping out with some quests there. I also hit level 24, which mostly catches me up with the others in the group and grants me yet another new skill. Warriors in WoW are definitely not like EQ warriors, where you basically only have three buttons: autoattack, taunt, and kick.

Time To Scratch My Rolling-Ball Itch

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Before work, I popped on my 360 to try out the trial version of Switchball, though the demo levels are little more than a basic tutorial and one ‘real’ level. There’s a lot more emphasis on environmental interaction (e.g., pushing crates into place) and less on getting the precisely right momentum and direction compared to Marble Blast Ultra.

Instead of picking up one-use powerups, you change your ball’s state at certain chargers to give you certain abilities. You usually need a specific ability to cross certain parts, so it doesn’t feel like you have as much freedom to try and use the abilities in unexpected ways.

The graphics are kinda nice, but I did notice significant screen tearing at certain points. I normally don’t mind too much, but it was pretty blatant at spots. I hope there’s a bit more variety and freedom in the full game, but it’s hard to tell from the trial. I’ll probably wind up buying the full thing anyway.

Who Patches The Patcher?

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I played a bit more Hellgate: London tonight, making it to Charing Cross Station. It’s been pretty much more-of-the-same so far, advancing through tunnels from zone to zone, killing ‘x’ number of a certain critter or activating ‘y’ of a certain item along the way in order to complete quests. There were some pretty frantic battles along the way though, especially when the tunnels opened up a bit and there were a flood of imps with ranged attacks, forcing you to seek cover. Loot has been plentiful, though I’m sticking mostly with my automatic rifle as my main weapon. The blasters require too much manual tapping of both mouse buttons, and the rocket launcher fires and reloads too slowly.

The biggest problem so far remains its relative bugginess, though. There was a small patch today to correct a minor problem, but after the patch was applied, restarting the game caused it to crash instantly every time I tried. A reboot eventually cleared it up, but upon selecting my character and entering a station, it froze a minute later. The /played time reported appears to bear no relation to time actually spent on the character, preventing me from even trying for the level-x-in-y-hours achievements. The framerate dips horribly at certain points in some stations, even though there’s nothing visually strenuous around.

There’s still a pretty decent game at its core, but damn, they really should have applied another six months or so of debugging and polishing…

These Tunnels Look Awfully Familiar…

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I didn’t spend too much time in WoW tonight, just enough to clear out some old grey quests that were partly done. I’m too obsessive to just abandon them, even though I probably should…

I spent a couple more hours in Hellgate: London, and after today’s patch it seems a bit more stable. It did hang on a blank screen immediately after the patch, but worked fine after that for the rest of the session.

I made it to the end of Act 1, defeating a few more bosses and entering a couple Hell portals. One boss I couldn’t actually kill, as he kept healing himself to full as soon as he was near death, but maybe I wasn’t meant to as the real mission was to place an item there and get out. I still have a lot of attribute and skill points saved up, as I was unsure of where to spend them, but I’ll have to decide soon as it’s becoming tougher to beat enemies with just the plain base stats and skills.

One downside of the random terrain generation is already becoming clear; there just isn’t much variety in some areas, and you’ll see the same kinds of basic rooms and connecting segments over and over again. It’s a common enough problem among all games I know of with random 3D terrain though, so it’s somewhat forgivable.

It’s Not D3, But It’ll Do

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Tonight was mostly spent playing Hellgate: London for a bit, as I finally got around to it several days after installing it. And yes, it is pretty much a 3D version of Diablo, which isn’t too surprising when you consider that a lot of the old lead people who worked on Diablo at Blizzard were working on this as well.

It feels a lot like an FPS when you first start playing, or at least it does for certain classes like the Engineer I created. You’re in a first person perspective, you have a gun, you shoot at enemies… It doesn’t take long before the Diablo elements start seeping through though — you can move the camera back fairly far to a third-person point-of-view, and aiming is more of a suggestion of what to target than a test of pixel-hunting accuracy, and you can miss enemies by a fair bit and still register a hit. Or miss, depending on your stats, and your damage is determined by your weapon, the damage type, enemy resistances, and so on. You’ll travel through randomly-generated dungeonstunnels, pick up loot after monstersdemons die, have to identify it to find out what random bonuses it has, juggle a grid-based inventory, create town portalsteleport points to jump back to the last townstation, meet people who give you questsmissions, etc. It should be sounding pretty familiar…

It has its rough edges, though. The interface felt extremely sluggish until I disabled DirectX10 support and went back to DX9. Interacting with things and people is based on radial menus that pop up when you hold down the mouse button, which takes a bit of getting used to. Network disconnects and crashes are rampant, having one or the other occur at least once every hour or so for me so far. The chat interface is awkward — its pane is too big to leave up all the time, so you usually leave it off and wind up forgetting about it.

And, of course, there’s the controversy over its subscription model, where various features that some people think should be free are reserved only for players who pay a monthly fee. It might be worth it for the new content, but I think I’m going to wait a while and see what the word-of-mouth is about whether it’s worth it or not. There are also posters with actual ads for real-world stuff like Dark Horse comics and movies in the stations, which annoy some people. I find I’m not minding the way they’re done here since they don’t break immersion too badly, but the whole ads in games issue is a whole other rant…

It’s still fundamentally a solid Diablo-style game, though, and I’m having a lot of fun with it so far. I just hope they get some of those wrinkles ironed out.

Yay For Demos

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Nothing too exciting in WoW last night, just some more levelling (22 now), and clearing out Barrens quests. Plus yet another new skill, an 8 second multi-target fear effect that might help with more chaotic battles.

I also got around to trying some of the 360 demos that I’d missed while my system was in for repairs or that were just released recently. Looney Tunes Acme Arsenal was just too bland and simplistic a platformer for me, but I’m probably not exactly the target audience either. Need For Speed: ProStreet felt rather average; it didn’t push me away like the nighttime setting and drift races of the Carbon demo did, but it didn’t really grab me either. The handling felt a bit strange in the speed challenge, and the ‘grip race’ was just a plain old 2-lap circuit race, though the physics do seem improved a bit when it comes to weight transfer.

On the XBLA side, Mutant Storm Empire is getting good reviews, but the dual-stick-shooter isn’t really my thing, and I’ve got a few of those already. Exit looks like it has potential, though; it’s got Prince of Persia-esque controls and platforming, but a lot more environmental interaction and puzzling.