Monthly Archives: June 2010

WTT FBSS 4 SMR

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We skipped the usual EQ2 night on Thursday since people were tired, so we moved it to Sunday instead.

We quickly finished off the Flowing Black Silk Sash heritage quest and although the item isn’t useful for me, that bumped the guild to level 24. We then headed off to the Splitpaw Saga content, which involved working our way through a couple of dungeons until we reached a quest hub. We only had time to do one of the quests though, and apparently we need to do three before we get the item that’ll let us teleport back there.

The entry dungeon was at least a bit more interesting in most in that getting through it involved some simple physics puzzles and blowing up cracked walls, rather than the usual old ‘kill N gnolls’…

Damn You, Steam!

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Steam suddenly launched a summer sale a few days ago, and I’ve been buying too damn much stuff on it. I haven’t spent a lot of time on anything bought in it yet, but there are some initial impressions:

Crash Time III: The hook of this one is that you play as a pair of detectives and chase down crooks in kinda-realistic police chases. Only ‘kinda’ though, since I’m not sure real detectives use robot drones that drive under the criminal’s car and blow it up, or cause horrific chain crashes… It’s better than I thought it would be, but the difficulty is a bit uneven. One of the first missions unlocked is unbeatable with the cars I have now — even accelerating flat-out, the crook can’t be caught up to and gets away.

Hearts of Iron III: Semper Fi: An expansion that supposedly fixes a lot of the problems with the original HoI3. Unfortunately the performance is really uneven, with a lot of sudden long pauses and jerky map scrolling. And some dumb stuff still seems to occur: Japan couldn’t even make it into northern China, it still seems to have trouble with making landings, etc.

Dark Void Zero: A retro-8bit-style platformer game with a jetpack. It’s pretty well-done, but damn, it’s hard. Enemy shots seem really hard to dodge while you’re using the jetpack, and the levels feel huge. I’m not even sure what to do to pass the first one yet, if I can even survive long enough.

Pushing the Borders

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There’s been a bit of a resurgence of interest in Borderlands lately as a couple of friends have picked it up as well. We spent a bit of time helping them level up, and I finished off a couple of older quests on my own and got to level 29, but we haven’t really started progressing into new areas yet.

One thing they did show me though was that there’s an easily-reached red weapons crate in the Knoxx starting area of T-Bone Junction, so I spent some time (a little too much time…) farming it. The stuff from it is too high-level for me now, but they’re worth a lot of money and I’m now maxed out on cash.

And although we’re still too low-level for Knoxx yet, we did figure out how to unlock the new Monster vehicle there and can now roam the roads freely — even if we do get squished almost right away…

“Playing” Gran Turismo

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I took a bit of a break from FF12 by returning to yet another old PS2 game — Gran Turismo 4.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to go back to an era that didn’t have analog triggers, and I found myself lurching all over the place, unsure of where the braking points were, and even the progressive and 1080i modes couldn’t really make the graphics bearable after all the recent HD racing games.

So, instead, I’ve been trying to progress in my alternate career path. I had two save games set up, one for purely A-spec racing (actual driving by me directly), and one for purely B-spec racing (using the director mode to control an AI driver). My goal with the B-spec save is to see just how far into the career mode I can get using only cars won from races, and not buying any. I was up to around 46% completion, but I started to run out of races I can still do. A huge number of the one-make races are out since the cars permitted aren’t available as rewards, and there are a few high-end races where getting a winning car build together is a bit tough.

To get a little farther, I loosened the rules a bit and allowed myself to manually run events that aren’t available in B-spec mode anyway, like license tests and the rally events. That let me do some extra one-make events, and I’m now at about 51%.

Lost

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As promised, I dusted off my Final Fantasy XII save game (idle for over three years!) and played it for a bit tonight. And had no idea what to do.

I found myself in the town of Bhujerba and near a mine and popped in there, and saw that there were still areas of the map darkened, so I figured that I still had some exploring to do. But, after wandering around for a while, those areas turned out to be unreachable because of barriers. Clearly, I need to do something else first, but I couldn’t find it in the mines. At least I got my main characters from level 14 to 16.

Back in town I wandered around a bit and upgraded a couple of pieces of armour, but otherwise I’m pretty much maxed out on available weapons and armour. I finally discovered that apparently the Marquis was expecting me and I had the option of visiting him when I talked to some guards. Doing so triggers a cutscene so clearly that’s a path forward, but it was getting late and I’ll leave that until next time.

RPGMania

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Hmm, I feel like playing an RPG now, which ones do I need to finish off…

  • Oblivion
  • Persona 4
  • Final Fantasy XII
  • Gothic 1/2
  • Drakensang
  • Dragon Age
  • Atelier Iris
  • Final Fantasy Tactics
  • Eternal Sonata
  • Divine Divinity
  • Neverwinter Nights
  • Knights of the Old Republic 2

Yikes. And that’s not counting the ones that I haven’t even started yet, but I don’t want to make my problem even worse…

Time to do a bit of trimming. Eternal Sonata can go since I wasn’t really getting that into it. A unique setting and story, but the combat mechanics didn’t really ‘click’ for me. I may as well abandon Atelier Iris since I own a couple of the later games in the series so I may as well play them instead. I didn’t make it that far into Oblivion and I need to redo the research about mods for it, so I’d want to start over anyway. In NWN I was still in the main campaign and it’s widely criticized as a waste and that I should play the expansions instead, but then I’d basically be starting over. And FFT is on the PSP so I’ll probably keep it for when I’m on the road.

So, of the remaining ones, I think this will be my preferred ordering for finishing them:

  • Final Fantasy XII (want to get it out of the way before FF13)
  • Persona 4 (really good, want to see it through)
  • Dragon Age (also really good)
  • Drakensang (still near the start, curious about what’s next)
  • Gothic 1/2 (good, but getting old)
  • Knights of the Old Republic 2 (decent so far, but supposed to have a weak end)
  • Divine Divinity (supposed to be worthwhile, but it is fairly old)

Getting through seven RPGs will still take a while, though, and I still really want to play some others like Mass Effect 2 so they might wind up sneaking into the list.

Shocked!

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I put in a lot of time over the last three days into BioShock 2, and just finished it off tonight. My original scheme of playing it on hard with the Vita-Chambers turned off was turning into a grueling slog though, so I wound up turning it down to medium.

Overall, I enjoyed it a lot. The plot was familiar-feeling, with an extremist ideologue villain and someone with a dark past and of questionable trust helping you along, but it added enough twists to keep it interesting. The ending felt like a satisfying payoff, even without a traditional Big Bad Boss Fight. There were some pretty good set-piece fights and escape sequences, though.

Combat was a lot more chaotic than it was in the first one. I preferred the drill and electric shock combo a lot in the middle sections, but fights became just a frenzied blur. Towards the end I started relying on the machine gun and rivet gun along with the bee swarm most of the time, for a more traditional ranged fight. It worked well enough that I never really bothered to try out the other weapons like the spear gun and launcher very much.

Of course, now I should play through again on hard to get the achievement for that (now being free to use the Vita-Chambers) and see what happens when you go the evil route. But…time is limited, so I think that’s enough BioShock 2 for now.

But In The Meantime…

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We had our usual Thursday EQ2 group, and wound up finishing off a handful of the longer quest series in the Everfrost zone. We’ve still got the final step to go in one of them though, since it requires clearing an area until a named goblin spawns, and it was getting late and we knew it could take a while and be rather boring. Maybe next time.

And I also picked up a little indie game called Eversion on Steam, based on the word-of-mouth on some forums. It’s a Mario-esque platformer, but the twist is that you can trigger certain ‘eversion’ points on the map to alter the atmosphere of the level, which affects how the enemies behave, which barriers become passable or impassible, and how you need to go about collecting gems on the level. It’s really short and I already got the basic and third endings for it, but it was a decent amount of fun for the cost. There’s a second ‘good’ ending if you collect all the gems, and I’m at something like 201/240, but some of them are tricky enough that I don’t really feel like spending a lot of time trying for them.