Continuing on with the Great Dungeon Cleanup, I finished off Uldaman tonight. There was really only a single quest left, but it was annoying since it required entering the instance twice and flying all over the place in between. At least the instance part is fairly short. I also took the opportunity to knock off a handful of other overlooked quests while traveling around, as well.
Next up, Sunken Temple. That’s probably as high as I’ll be able to go by myself until I gain more levels.
I didn’t really feel like starting anything new, so I wound up back in WoW last night, and I took the opportunity to finish off the Blackfathom Deeps and Gnomeregan dungeons and prepared for Uldaman by finishing off the quests that could be done just outside the instance.
It was actually the first time I’d been to Gnomeregan, and the layout of it is a bit confusing at first. I managed to stumble into the end boss earlier than expected, skipping a big chunk of the dungeon, but it seems to be meant mainly for Alliance players anyway. I’m still missing one quest for there, since a ring I need didn’t drop, so I’ll have to come back at some point
And since I still had some time to kill this evening, I popped back into WoW just to take care of the Zul’Farrak quests I had queued up. They were, unsurprisingly, fairly easy at my way-too-high-for-it level, though the pyramid fight did get a bit hectic just due to the constant stream of enemies.
That completed seven quests in my log, and I only picked up three new ones as chained quests, so I’ve freed up four quests slots, at least.
I finished off the last two chapters of World of Goo tonight, and as expected, chapter 4 had a rather ‘virtual’ twist to things, adding a bunch of new goo types and things like blocks and slabs. The epilogue chapter was fairly short, consisting of only three real puzzles, but they were much harder than the others. I didn’t have to use any more skips, but I did have to consult some hints on a few of these later levels.
All in all it was a rather interesting, well-done puzzle game with a lot of style. I don’t think I’ll be going back to try and get the ‘OCD’ ratings on each of the levels though; I barely scraped by on most of them as it is…
Continuing my trek through unfinished games, I got back to World of Goo today and made it through the end of Chapter 3.
So far I’ve only skipped one level, “Tower of Goo” back in the first chapter. You have to build a really tall tower in that one, and I’ve failed every attempt so far. If I take it slow and stable, I wind up using too many goo balls and don’t have enough to meet the level completion quota. If I take it quickly, it winds up swaying and collapsing before I reach the pipe. Oh well, at least the game lets you skip a handful of levels if you get stuck.
Chapters 2 and 3 introduced more new goo types, of course, with a particular emphasis on fire and explosions in Chapter 3 through flammable goos and bombs. The ending, culminating in the launch of “Product Z” in the game’s story, ought to make the next chapter interesting…
Today I finished off the last two chapters in the single-player campaign of Frontlines: Fuel of War, most of which took place within Moscow. Nothing really new was introduced in these chapters, but the sheer density of enemies and prevalence of things like rocket launchers made it more difficult and slow-going than the previous areas. I took a tank through most of it, but it required a lot of backing off and hiding to allow time for repairs.
Overall, the campaign was pretty good, if short. I haven’t tried the multiplayer part yet though, which will depend on how much time I have, how many other people are around, etc. There are also achievements for completing chapters without dying or within time limits, but I’m not sure if I’ll bother trying for those.
And of course, right after I say I’m taking a break from WoW, I go and spend all day today in it… It was the start of the Lunar Festival event though, and these quests are only available for a limited time, so I had to do them soon anyway. I wound up getting all but two of the achievements for the event, and those will have to wait until I’m level 80 anyway since they involve Northrend.
And along the way I wound up picking up a couple pieces I needed for the quests in Zul’Farrak, so I’ll probably head there first whenever I return in earnest. I’ve still got a half-dozen or so quests to finish up there, that have been in my quest log for ages now, and it should be easily soloable.
I worked through a few more of the Frontlines missions over the last few days. Mission 3 started out like a stealth mission, but it wasn’t too long before the enemies had discovered where I was and most of the rest of the mission was spent trying to coax them out of hiding or sniping them. The second half involved defending a town against a couple waves of enemies, which I barely scraped by on — I’m never very good at timed bits like that.
Mission 4 was mainly a whole lotta tank battling, and then mission 5 took the battle to inside a mountain, where there were all sorts of corridors and boxes and platforms for them to hide on.
I also toyed a bit more with Defense Grid, managing to complete the ‘Grinder’ mode of Waste Disposal. In this one only ‘walker’ enemies appear, but you have to survive through 99 waves of them and the groups of them get bigger and bigger and bigger… It took a whole lot of meteor towers and a couple others I don’t often use, like inferno and concussion, but I made it with only two cores lost.
Well, I had intended to start the new game yesterday, but it turned out there were some pretty sizable downloads available for it, and by the time I got them it was fairly late.
So, tonight I started working on Frontlines: Fuel of War, the gift mentioned in previous comments. The impressions on the forums were pretty favourable, and it’s holding up pretty well so far. It’s a squad-based shooter along the lines of CoD4, though the other squad members seem to be there mostly as distractions and all the heavy lifting is up to you, of course.
The weapons are mostly fairly traditional and I didn’t vary from the standard assault rifle and rocket launcher much, but every once in a while you get to pick up a special weapon like flying drones or a controllable robot gun, and they’re always fun. In the second mission I used a little mini-helicopter to take out a tank by circle-strafing around it and pelting it with rockets while it uselessly tried to aim its main cannon at it.
You also get to ride around in vehicles on a fairly regular basis, and they pack a lot of firepower. Controlling them was a bit weird at first, since it varies depending on whether they have a turret or not, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.
I’ve only done the first two missions so far though, and it looks like the next one is a stealth/sniping one. Seems like the single-player campaign will be pretty short since there are only seven missions, but the multiplayer is supposed to be pretty meaty. It’s too bad there’s no co-op mode for the single-player campaign, though you should be able to form a squad of friends in the multi at least.
I popped into WoW briefly today, just to buy a new mount after the 3.0.8 patch went live:
Unfortunately it’s a bit taller than my wolf mount, so I get caught on doors and arches more often. Oh well, I’ll mostly be sticking with the wolf anyway.