Monthly Archives: July 2009

Dammit, I Wanted To See Lotto Numbers

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The PC was busy, so I couldn’t get back to Trine right away, and instead I caught up on the latest Fable II DLC, See The Future.

It started out with entering a cursed snowglobe, where coloured shadows had sucked all of the colour out of the world. I had to fight my way through a few villages and caves, with each shadow being immune to all but one type of damage, depending on its colour. It wasn’t too hard, though it was annoying in parts where I couldn’t use melee to regain health. Next up was a cursed skull, where I had to disguise myself as various monsters to get some wisps to free a cursed knight. Or so he claimed…

The end result was a statue of the spire, which gave me a vision of the future. I also got the ability to compete in a colosseum, though I managed to win the ultimate prize on my first time there anyway.

Miscellanea

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Instead of continuing on in Trine, I wound up doing a grab-bag of different things today.

First I fired up Crackdown for a little bit. I know I swore I wouldn’t bother trying for that last agility orb anymore, but I figured I should at least check the tops of the tallest Shai-Gen buildings, since I’d passed over them before. But it wasn’t there.

I checked out the recent XBLA games and gave Rocket Riot a try, and the trial was fun enough that I wound up buying the full game. It’s fairly simple, you pilot your legless guy around a destructible 2D map trying to accomplish the given goal by firing arcing rockets around, but there’s a decent amount of variety to the goals.

And finally, inspired by a resurrected forum post, I dusted off Test Drive Unlimited and redid the Millionaire’s Challenge once again, since it gives you a good tour of the perimeter of the island. I’m a little rusty, coming in a minute slower than my previous record, but I triggered the police way too much this time.
– test drive unlimited

Tryin’

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The next major game I want to play is King’s Bounty, partly because it’s supposed to be really good and partly because I’ve already installed it and used up an activation for it, so I should finish it before I wipe the system to put Windows 7 on it later this month…

But before that, I’m going to wind down for a bit with something simpler, so tonight I started Trine, a new platformer game. It’s fairly simple, progress from left to right, solving puzzles and defeating monsters as you go along. The gimmick to it is that you actually control three people, a mage, a thief, and a knight, which you can switch between at any time and each of which has different abilities. At any particular moment, you might want the mage to summon boxes to climb, or the thief to use her grappling hook, or the knight to beat up some skeletons. And as is typical nowadays, the puzzles are often physics-based, depending on putting a weight in the right place, swinging about, etc.

So far I’ve done the first three areas, dying a couple of times thanks to spike traps. It’s a fairly short game, so I should finish it tomorrow.

Blue Booty

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Back in Mass Effect tonight, I stole the Normandy back and got out of the Citadel easily enough, and then celebrated my freedom by finishing off a couple minor side quests and the item collections. There wasn’t much of a reward for the collections, though, just some money and xp that I didn’t really need by this point anyway.

Then it was off to Ilos to track down Saren. This also triggered the infamous sex scene, though it’s actually pretty tame and tasteful by gaming standards. Really, the worst (best) you see is a blue butt. Anyway, on Ilos I learned a lot more about the Protheans and what happened to them, and then it was back to the Citadel to save the universe.

To say more would be too spoilery, but the ending was appropriately epic. I doubt I’ll have the time to do an opposite-style playthrough (male/soldier/renegade), but I’m definitely looking forward to Mass Effect 2 now, and hoping that there’s a PC version that isn’t delayed too much…

Don’t Fear The Reapers

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It was another long day in Mass Effect, starting out with saving some space hippies. The side quests are getting a bit repetitive, though, since there’s very few different ship and planetary base layouts. So, next I headed to Noveria, where after an introductory corruption investigation, I went off to confront Matriarch Benezia. I didn’t really learn much from this segment though.

I did a couple more side quests I’d picked up along the way, and then headed off to an asteroid to do the Bring Down The Sky DLC mission. Although it only encompassed a single planet, it was still fairly meaty, with multiple places and quests to work through. The end result was a fairly nice piece of armour for Tali, for whom it’s been fairly tough to find any armour.

I then headed to Virmire to continue the plot again, and it was a fairly long segment in which I lost a crew member (though he won’t really be missed that much…), and fought Saren, though it turned out to be an unwinnable fight. I did learn a lot more about Saren’s plans though, and the Reaper that seems to be pulling all the strings.

The Council isn’t so convinced though, so now I have to find a way to work around their lack of cooperation…