Monthly Archives: November 2008

The Apocalypse Can Wait A Little Longer

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Well, just after complaining about it I suddenly got my Limited Edition code email for Fable 2, so I guess I can squeeze it in after all. I really do want to get to Fallout 3, but this should be a relatively quick one as well.

So far it’s a lot like the original Fable, just with a dog that helps you find treasure. They’ve also gone for a much gritter, realistic feel to the world, whereas the original was very cartoony. You start out losing your sister, growing up, discovering your destiny, etc… Some woman named Teresa is acting as my mentor, and now I have to find these three other Heroes in order to stop this Lucien guy from resurrecting an ancient power. The usual.

So far I’m mostly just exploring, as there’s a fair bit of treasure to find in the nooks and crannies of the maps. I’m in a town called Bowerstone, and some bard is following me around and trying to find inspiration. Two new features in this one are the ability to own your own businesses that generate money for you, and to work at a job like blacksmithing to make money that way as well, by playing a little minigame.

I took advantage of the blacksmithing job to get up to a four-star rating in it and used the money earned there to buy up a handful of stalls around the town market. They give me 81 gold every five minutes, even when the game isn’t playing, so when I start it up again tomorrow I should have earned a fair bit…

And with the bonus equipment from the LE code, I’m now dressed up in the Halo-ish armour, carrying the energy sword weapon, and have the title of Master Chief.

Fruit Is Now Safe From Fucking

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I finished off Episode 2 of Penny Arcade Adventures today, and it ended with a rather…different kind of robot fight. I wasn’t sure what to do at first since it seemed like nothing I did would work, but it was just a matter of getting the right combination of things.

Completing it opened up Insane Mode, but I’m not about to play through it again right away. I completed pretty much everything possible for a first run through anyway, and got most of the Steam achievements, including this one:

Monkey Knife Fight!

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I made quite a bit of progress in Penny Arcade Ep2 tonight, finally finishing up all of the tasks in the sanitarium, clearing out the rich area of town (burning down my potential new home in the process), and upgrading all of the weapons.

Now I have to sneak into a gathering of scientists by entering a robotic monkey into a combat tournament. Oh those wacky physicists…

Okay, I Lied

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I was going to start Fallout 3 next, but I decided instead to try and squeeze in the second Penny Arcade episode first, since it should be fairly short.

It’s more of the same of the first, really, with the semi-realtime reaction-based combat and usual complement of fetch quests. This time we’re trying to track down more information about the giant Fruit Fucker by visiting a robotics expert at a sanitarium. I’ve found him, but he’s not going to give up his secrets without a few quests first…

It retains the offbeat sense of humour of PA, of course. My main weapon this time is a hoe instead of a rake, and I got it upgraded into…a double-ended hoe. And one of the types of inmates we’ve been fighting has an attack named Daddy Never Hugged Me.

Demomania

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I have quite a few demos that I’ve downloaded but hadn’t had a chance to try yet, so here are some quick impressions of them:

Kudos 2: A life-simulation game, but more along the lines of the old Alter Ego games than The Sims, in that you have much more direct control and choices, in menu-driven sequences, rather than watching over someone else. Nearly everything you do affects your stats, so you have to balance work, leisure, your friends, your health, etc. Looks like it might be fun for a few playthroughs just to experiment with it.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts: Build your own vehicles out of parts you find in order to compete in challenges. Looks interesting, but the vehicles control a bit awkwardly and it’s not really clear from the demo just how much freedom there really will be in the vehicle construction. I’d wait for word-of-mouth on this one.

Mirror’s Edge: An interesting new idea, and seems to be well-done, but I’m concerned about the large number of context-sensitive controls. I just ran past all of the enemies since I couldn’t remember what the combat moves were or get the disarm timing right.

Fracture: Eh, it’s another shooter-with-a-gimmick, this time in the form of a terrain-deforming weapon that gets used constantly in contrived ways. Not my cup of tea.

Hmmm, I didn’t get nearly as many demos done as I’d hoped.

Officer Down, Finally

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And so I finished off San Andreas tonight, and the final mission didn’t take nearly as long as I expected since I managed to complete it on the first try. It was split into two parts: you first had to work your way up and down a drug lab building to take out the first target, and then it was a fairly easy chase through the city streets with an on-rails shooting segment that was again helped by mouse aiming. I did almost fail the first part though, since the building is on fire on the way back down and I got shot up quite a bit while trying to figure out where enemies were through the smoke, the right spots to hit with the fire extinguisher, the tight time limit, etc.

In the end I put just short of 48 hours into the game and hit 77.5% completion according to the stats screen, both of which are much higher than the previous GTA games. There’s just so much more to do in San Andreas. This is the one of them that I’d be tempted to try for 100% completion in…but not right away. I’m kind of sick of GTA-ish games now after doing these three in a row, so I’ll probably just chip away at it in small bursts over time.

Since my Fable 2 LCE code still hasn’t arrived after the promised 10 business days, it’s losing its turn in the queue, and Fallout 3 will be up next. But first: demos!

At Least She’s Not Named ‘Zed’

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I finished off the airstrip missions in San Andreas, giving me the jetpack, and it was well worth it. It’s pretty fun to use, and I easily got the rest of the horseshoes for the weapon spawn.

Then I started on the casino missions for Woozie, involving a war with competing Mafia-run casinos. They were pretty easy and I unexpectedly ran across some familiar faces from Vice City (Love Fist and the lawyer), and then one of the missions required me to get a keycard by taking over as a casino employee’s, uh, gimp. She’s now available as another girlfriend, the gimp suit is now available in my wardrobe, and I had to take her out on a few more dates (the suit makes it much easier) to get the keycard from her dungeon-themed home.

I should be getting close to the end now, though I know it’ll take me back to Los Santos at some point first.

Appropriately Named

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I finished off the day by doing a few more N+ episodes from the third level pack, though I probably shouldn’t have, for the sake of my blood pressure. One level in particular, named “the long and winding road that leads to your death” was full of precision wall-jumping and mine dodging and must have taken at least 30 or 40 tries. When you do something that often, you can often get the timing down precise enough that you’re taking the same path and hitting the same enemy patrol pattern each time, though that sometimes leads you to getting yourself killed in the exact same way as you did on a previous run…

N+ is still a good game, but I think I’ve hit the limit of my ability with it, and any further progress just isn’t worth the frustration.

Back To School AGAIN

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Woo, it was a really long day today in San Andreas. First off I worked a bit more on the side missions, collecting all of the oysters and the cars for the import/export mission. I also started collecting horseshoes in the new Las Venturas area (which is awfully similar to Las Vegas, of course), but held off on them for a bit since it looked like I’d need a helicopter to reach some of them. I should do them soon though, for the weapon spawns in this area. I also did the Ammu-nation weapons challenge, which is really easy on the PC thanks to mouse aiming.

I found more of the schools in the new areas, including the boat and bike schools. They weren’t too difficult, and I easily got silvers in the boat school, giving me a fairly fast boat at the Bayside dock. And the only tough bike school test was the last one, where I had to land into a stoppie from a jump, but it didn’t take too long.

After all that, I finally got back to the story missions, and discovered that Mike Toreno wasn’t dead after all. Instead he claims to be a government agent, and he sent me on a bunch of his own missions. Eventually, he had me buy an old landing strip, and the flight school missions opened up. I passed those, though one of them where I had to circle and then land the plane was really frustrating. Here the keyboard controls actually make things worse, since it’s really easy to overcorrect and swing the plane wildly around. But a lot of the time it was my own fault for forgetting to put the landing gear down… Still, I’m not looking forward to any aircraft missions.

I resumed collecting the horseshoes, but there are still about eight or so that I can’t get without a helicopter, parachute, or jetpack. Wait, jetpack? I went back and started doing the airstrip missions, since although they’re optional, the final reward will be a jetpack. I’m sure it’ll come in handy… The airstrip missions were among the ones people had a lot of trouble with initially, but there are some tricks that are now known to help a lot — in the first one I just had to stick to the coastline rather than try to fly directly there, and in the second where you have to jump a bike onto a plane you’re better off just staying off to the side and avoiding the barrels entirely and diving in at the last second.