Monthly Archives: July 2008

And Now It’s Nintendo’s Turn

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MotionPlus: The cynical side of me might think of it as a fix for the remote not being as good as it could have been in the first place, and I didn’t really have a problem with it in the first place, but oh well, more accuracy is still better than nothing. Wii Sports Resort might do a good job of showing how useful it’ll actually be.

Animal Crossing: City Folk: I enjoyed the DS version of Animal Crossing a fair bit, so I’ll almost certainly pick this one up. It doesn’t really look like there’s an awful lot new over the DS version so far though, aside from the setting.

WiiSpeak: Dammit, I’ve already got way too many accessories and cables running around here…

GTA DS: I still have yet to finish the other GTA games, first. I passed on the PSP-based versions of it, so I’ll probably not bother with this one too.

And there was a bunch of other stuff that I’m sure will keep the kids busy, but wasn’t really interesting, and a distinct lack of Mario or Zelda news.

And In Other 360 News…

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With E3 almost here, the news is starting to roll in at a faster pace, of course. Of stuff known so far:

Final Fantasy XIII: Not really a huge surprise that it’ll be on the 360 as well. Even with the 360 doing horribly in Japan, it’s just too big in North America and Europe to be ignored as a source of revenue for major titles, unlike the original Xbox. It’s kind of surreal to think that the 360 is the major console right now and for the near future when it comes to RPGs and the PS3 is rather lacking, when it was the complete opposite in the last generation…

Rock Band 2: 84 new songs, most of which are great, backwards compatibility, and a lot more band flexibility? Pinch me, I must be dreaming.

New Dashboard, Avatars: Eh, whatever. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the look of the old one, but I guess MS feels like they have to at least try and ride the Wii’s coattails a little bit. I just hope it makes managing all the games and DLC a bit easier, since now you have to deal with lists hundred of entries long.

Installing To The Drive: Loading times haven’t really been a problem for me, but the DVD drive is rather loud and has been a source of glitches in previous units, so this lets us avoid those problems at least. The downside is that I only have a 20GB drive, you can’t provide your own, and MS charges an arm and a leg for the larger sizes.

Demomania

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With the release of a couple high-profile demos, I realized that it’s been a while since I’ve checked out the latest 360 demos and XBLA trials. So, as a quick roundup:

Elements Of Destruction: Fun at first, but it quickly gets a bit old. It feels more like a Flash game than something I’d buy and play regularly.

Happy Tree Friends: Reminiscent of Lemmings, but not nearly as much fun.

Schizoid: It’s definitely a unique game, with its coop-dependent play and interesting presentation, but it’s more of a temporary diversion than something I’d really pay for.

Sealife Safari: More of a toy than a game.

And then for the big ones:
Too Human: It has some silly dialogue, and bad camera control, but the combat is really fun and it has the addictive Diablo-style loot. I didn’t get far enough to see the more advanced combos and skills, but I think I’ve seen enough to convince me to get it.

Tales of Vesperia: It has a mix of the Eternal Sonata art style and Star Ocean combat, and otherwise looks like ye olde generic JRPG. There was no tutorial, so maybe I’m missing something, but the combat was a bit too light on tactics and heavy on the button mashing. I don’t really dislike it, but it would go on my “eh, maybe eventually” list, which with my current RPG backlog essentially means…never.

Bye Bye Baal

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With Hellgate’s future uncertain, I turned back to Diablo 2 for my action-RPG fix and finished taking my HC necro through the rest of Act 5 normal today.

Baal himself is actually a pushover, and I just had to make sure I kept Decrepify up while the skeletons whittled away at him. The dangerous part of Act 5 for an HC player is actually the Ancients, since you have to fight all three at once, they like to move around a lot, one of them has a nasty whirlwind attack, and another can throw axes. They’re not *too* bad in normal, and I just had to run around a lot to keep throwing Decrepify on them, but I’m really not looking forward to them in NM and Hell, where they can spawn with random abilities as well.

So, I can now technically start the NM difficulty, but the usual suggestion for HC is that I farm Baal for a while until I hit level 45 or so, just to make things a bit safer.

Another Lazy Sunday Of Murdering Hobos

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I finally broke down and bought the Penny Arcade game, since it was on sale for half-price on Steam, and completed it in one shot. It’s a fairly short game and took me just over five hours, but it was still well worth the price. My impressions of the demo held up pretty well through the whole game, and it remained funny to the end.

Combat did take a bit of getting used to once past the first area, when enemies suddenly got tougher, but I got into the habit of using more items since they’re plentiful. I had to reload a few times though, after enemies got in some lucky shots, in order to go for the Immortal achievement. And the final boss also took me a few tries — the first one, Tycho got knocked out, and the second time was successful, but then I remembered I hadn’t gotten all the collectibles yet, so I got them and beat him again so that the flags get preserved in the final save (it might affect something in the next episode).

Missed It By That Much

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I play a bit more Hellgate today, but with a slightly different goal in mind. I took my brand-new Evoker character, and tried to see if I could get those timed leveling achievements.

Unfortunately, at the four hour mark, I failed to get the first one. You have to reach level 10 by that point, and I was…70% of the way through level 9. Oh well. Having had to waste time on some lockups while zoning, respawns of trash mobs, and some regenerating bosses certainly didn’t help. There’s another one for reaching level 20 by the 14 hour mark, but I doubt that one’s going to be reachable now. Patch 2.0 (if it ever comes out…) changes the achievement rewards, so I may as well wait and see if it would even be worth it to go for the bigger one.

A Cold Day In Hellgate

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I finished farming Shulgoth in Hellgate: London today, getting the achievement for him and breaking the 100,000 palladium mark in the process. Unfortunately, the very future of the game is in a bit of turmoil now…

It’s unlikely they’ll shut it down entirely, since the creditors didn’t accept the game’s IP as collateral just to do nothing with it in the case they had to foreclose. But it does make me wonder what’s going to happen to updates like the already-way-late 2.0 patch. Then again, maybe they can get someone else to do a better job. The fundamental gameplay of HG:L is pretty good, especially after all the fixes and rebalancing, but their basic weakness has always been the rather repetitive base content and the slow pace at rolling out new content. They’ve already missed their goal of releasing a major update once a quarter, and there haven’t even been any minor events recently.

London’s Ruins Make For Surprisingly Good Farming

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I’m still waiting on the 2.0 patch for Hellgate: London before I can properly repurchase my skills (and it might still be a while yet, as they just rolled out a 1.3d to tide us over), but I still did a bit of farming tonight, killing Shulgoth a bunch of times in order to get closer to the kill-him-100-times achievement and to grind out a bit of cash. He’s easy enough at this point that I can kill him by myself even without a drone.

I’ve also occasionally popped on to do some shop-hopping, bouncing back and forth between stations in order to reset the crafting merchant’s stocks, and found a handful of decent weapon mods that way. 2.0 will change a lot of things, so I might need a whole new set of equipment for my drone, if not myself.

Working Twice As Hard

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It was time yet again to catch up on some Rock Band tracks, and I picked up the two latest Rush tracks and a couple others I’ve already forgotten (they apparently weren’t that notable). “Closer To The Heart” is pretty good, but “Working Man (Vault Edition)” has been a bit controversial since they’ve already released a cover version of it before. Apparently they found the master tapes since then, and released this slight variant with different solos. It’s kind of annoying that it’s still full price for those of us who already bought the cover version, but oh well. The notecharts seem a bit off during the new solos too, though they might be better on Expert, when more of the ‘missing’ notes are filled in.

And in other news, the previews of Rock Band 2 are pretty satisfying so far, and it looks like it’ll address most of the complaints about RB1.

We Named The Brick Indy

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I was going to play some more Diablo 2 tonight, but after getting two ‘failed to join game’ errors in a row, I figured I’d better not risk it. Unfortunately, that error commonly popped up in the past when dupers and botters had figured out a new hack or way to flood the system…

So, instead I played a bit of the Lego Indiana Jones demo. It plays just like the Lego Star Wars games, as you’d expect, but they did add some new stuff to the formula. You can dig up and carry around items now, as needed for some puzzles, Indy’s whip gets used in different ways, and there are now equipable, temporary weapons that you can pick up. I don’t think I’ll buy it though, having pretty much gotten my fill via the Star Wars games.