Monthly Archives: October 2010

The Price Of Loyalty Is About 35 Hours

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I spent a fairly large chunk of the weekend playing Mass Effect 2, and after 35 hours I’m finally at the point where I’ve recruited all of the crew members and done their loyalty missions, aside from the one missing one which I know will be filled in later (in comparison, it only took me 28 hours to fully complete ME1). In keeping with the one-of-each-strength philosophy, I usually take Samara and Grunt with me, for biotic and ‘tank’ support.

Amazingly enough, this actually puts me pretty close to the endgame, as apparently the recruitment and loyalty missions are the bulk of the main story in ME2, not just initial preparation, like in ME1. It makes sense though, with so many more crew members this time around and some missions are fairly extensive. Most skills are fairly well filled-in, and I’ve done most of the important research, so I’m pretty well prepared.

I’m now at a point where I can start the point-of-no-return mission, but I’ve still got a bunch of side quests I can do, largely from the DLC packs. I’m enjoying it well enough that I’m certainly going to finish off all of those first.

Shepard’s Back!

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Since I don’t want to be playing only old games, I figured I’d better get around to something more recent and recently started Mass Effect 2. It’s pretty much as has been widely reported: RPG elements have been toned down, there are fewer skills and points to spend, shooter elements are more pronounced, etc. It’s still been fun though, and I’m about eight hours into it now.

I imported a character from ME1, which kept a bunch of decisions about how things had played out in the past. I switched from the Adept class to Infiltrator though, just to try something different, and I’ve mostly been using a sniper rifle and pistol. It’s hard to get a sense for which weapons are better than others since you don’t see stats anymore, but there aren’t too many choices at this point.

So far I’ve gone to Omega and completed a handful of quests there, including recruiting Mordin, good ol’ Garrus, and Zaeed (a DLC character). I’ll probably do more recruiting next (I’m in the middle of working on the krogan now) and work on their loyalty missions and other side/DLC missions first, before really worrying about the story.

More MMO Mania

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Things have been picking up again in the MMO worlds.

WoW finally released its 4.0.1 patch, pretty much completely redoing how skills and talent trees and stats work and forcing everyone to redo their talent selections. I’ve caught up on the main trees for my priest, warrior, and mage, and so far the differences aren’t huge, but it might require more play to really tell. My mage seems to have completely lost some buffs he used to have, though. The actual Cataclysm changes are still a ways away, but hopefully I’ll get my Loremaster achievement finished before then.

In EQ2, we finally got a full group together for a couple of weeks, so we’ve worked on the heritage quest for Rahotep’s staff and some faction grinding for the Maj’Dul quests. Unfortunately we aren’t quite strong enough for Rahotep’s final step yet — we gave it a try, but he’s an EpicX2 monster, and we just couldn’t damage him quickly enough. Maybe with a handful of more levels; we’ve managed to defeat an EpicX2 before with just the four of us, but it was on the verge of turning grey to us.

EQ2 also launched the Hallowe’en event, and today I took my mystic through the major quests that are part of it. One of them involved a hedge maze where I kept getting stronger and stronger as I defeated more enemies, and at the end I took on an EpicX2 boss all by myself and won. I’ll have to redo that one a few times, both just for fun and for other rewards like collectibles and a quest that only opens up on the second attempt. A couple of the other quests also have rewards for repeated attempts that I’ll have to try for.

And I finally got around to canceling my subscription to Asheron’s Call. I’d resubscribed earlier this year with the intent of revisiting it, seeing what was new, checking out the old stomping grounds, etc., but…it’s just not going to happen, at this rate. Sayonara, AC.

F.E.A.R. Of The Dark

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In my neverending quest to free up disk space and get games off of my backlog, I started playing F.E.A.R. last week. As an FPS, it should be fairly short.

Unfortunately, I’m kind of getting bored of it already. The combat in it is actually pretty decent, in that it’s not just spray-n-pray; you have to conserve ammo, wait for opportunities, use the slo-mo ability effectively, not take on too many at once, etc… It’s just that the environments have been so bland so far. I’m something like four chapters in, and it’s just been either a bunch of office building hallways and rooms, or your typical industrial pipes and walkways. It’s not particularly scary, either. There are sudden flashes of other scenes, or you’re suddenly dumped in a ‘cutscene’ that obviously isn’t really happening, but none of it’s actually frightening. And you can tell where the story is going from a mile away.

I’ll probably play a bit more of it, just to see if it picks up any, and it’ll probably be short anyway, but if it doesn’t then I might just abandon this one.

Search And Self-Rescue

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Continuing my reposting of my Minecraft shenanigans:

Your first rescue never goes well.

I’ve been working on a lighthouse on a peninsula during the days, but at night I continue exploring the maze of tunnels I’ve made, and while working on a fairly plain straight path, I suddenly saw…a chest? I’d stumbled onto a treasure room, and was able to grab the goodies (including a record and a saddle) with no risk. I could see where the mob spawner was in the room, and having heard a few tips before, I dug down and then directly up under it, letting me destroy the spawner with impunity. The rest of the zombies hanging around were then fairly easy to dispatch.

It turns out it was just the tip end of a vast cave network down there, and although I hurried to slap torches down, I could already tell I was not alone. I fought a few zombies, a spider, and a couple creepers, discovering that I still needed to work on my timing with them. When I met the skeleton, though, I panicked a bit and he managed to pump quite a few arrows into me as I struggled to get close to him, having fallen into a pit that was actually easier to get out of than it seems when you’re panicking… I did survive with a couple hearts left though, having used up all of my pork chops. And then a damn creeper exploded.

I knew exactly where to go from my spawn point this time, but I quickly realized that I hadn’t really thought my in-case-of-death plan through. I was still using a stone block to barricade the entrance to my mine, so I had to rapidly assemble a wooden pickaxe just to get back in (there’s now a proper door in place). Unfortunately all of my sticks, coal, and torches had been on me at the time, and I wanted them and the ore that I’d picked up along the way back, so I grabbed some iron, made a sword, and headed back down. I found the area I’d died in, and it looked like there was only a zombie or two down there with my stuff and I could just jump in, grab it and, run, but it was dark in that area, I’d lost some health to another couple of zombies on the way back, and had underestimated how much the armour I’d been wearing before had helped. I got hit a couple more times, and then there was ANOTHER DAMN CREEPER. BOOM.

Now I really wanted my stuff back because as I respawned, I realized that after making my sword for the first rescue, I’d left the iron ingots in my inventory. ALL OF THEM. The best I could manage was a stone sword for now, but I stopped by my second chest in my central mining cave and picked up some torches and pork chops at least. But this time the rescue was rather anticlimactic as the monsters were all gone, perhaps all taken out by the creeper’s explosion, but I quickly lit up the area and hurried back to stash my stuff. I did manage to get most of my stuff back, except for the initial suit of armour (only the almost-broken pants were left), a flint+stone, and maybe some miscellaneous stacks of ore.

Yes, we really do have to learn things the hard way.

And here’s the aforementioned lighthouse, upon completion:

I had something else a bit more ambitious in mind, though…

Can’t Sleep, Creeper Will Explode Me

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Bah, I’m falling behind again… Perhaps I’ve been a bit too obsessed with one ‘game’ in particular, one that’s been getting a lot of attention lately: Minecraft.

It’s almost quite literally a sandbox as it drops you into a blocky world where you dig up sand and dirt and stone and ore and craft implements to help you survive and build structures, and try to avoid getting killed by the enemies that spawn in the dark. Quite often this involved diving underground, using a pickaxe to hollow out tunnels, and occasionally you’ll hit ore veins, caves, lava and water flows, and dungeons with monsters.

I’ve already talked about my experiences a bit on some forums, so I’ll just repost what I did soon after starting:

I watched Guildboss’s first-night tutorial (thanks!) and got myself well-established with a nice, safe little cave. I figured that I’d explore a bit while waiting out the night, so I started digging tunnels downwards. Despite hearing some nearby monsters, all I found were a couple of safe little cavities with some more coal and my first gold.

I spent several days just digging out my little network of tunnels, but I was starting to run low on wood for torches and picks, so I figured it was time to venture back out on the surface. I could hear *something* nearby, so just to be safe I made a chest and put everything valuable in it, heading back out with only a pick, a sword, and some extra cobblestone. Immediately, I was jumped by a spider and dead before I knew what the hell.

Fortunately, all of my stuff is safe in the chest. Unfortunately, I don’t remember where the entrance to my cave is, and in hindsight I should have built some kind of landmark on the outside. Now I’m wandering around desperately trying to find it again and, as I post this, hiding in fear at nights in puny little gravel caves…

I did eventually rediscover my old tunnels, but not after reestablishing myself with an entirely new cave system.

Ah well, I gave up looking for my old cave and started a new one within line-of-sight of my spawn point, and it’s been going pretty well. I had to dig down pretty far through a whole lotta nothing, having to run around outside just to scrounge for coal, but I eventually hit a decent cave system and started finding iron and redstone, and a bit more digging linked up with a few other caves. A couple of them include large waterfalls, where I learned how the fluid physics work and how easily you can flood the pathway up around it that you were carving out…

Getting back and forth from the entrance is a bit of a pain so I moved all of my crafting stuff down into a central cavern and have been working almost entirely underground so far. I’ve managed to slap down enough torches that there’s only the occasional monster, and no serious threats so far. I’ve even got my own pet slime trapped by water currents in a corner of my main crafting room. I’ve got enough stone saved up that I should start thinking about some actual structures now.

Disk Space Unleashed

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Argh, I’m falling out of the habit of updating again… There was a stretch where I didn’t play anything since I was out of town, but there is still a bunch to talk about.

I finished off The Force Unleashed, finally freeing up the 30 gigs of disk space it was taking up. Some of the boss fights were fairly tense and I almost lost, even playing on easy, but otherwise it was still just a matter of slogging through it to see the story. I played the three DLC packs too, but they were fairly short and easy.

On a whim I finally played The Path, a rather artsy non-game where you wander around the woods as one of six girls in a weird take on Little Red Riding Hood. Around the woods you find items relating to the girls’ personalities, encounter their (oft-metaphorical) ‘wolf’, and then tour through a bizarre interpretation of Grandma’s house. I’m not sure I learned anything from it, but it was interesting trip if you appreciate surreality.

Now that I’m pretty much done with Picross 3D, my puzzle game impulse is being satisfied by Everyday Genius: SquareLogic. It’s Sudoku-like in that you have to make the rows and columns of a square fill with non-repeating numbers, but the squares are also broken down into smaller regions with their own specific requirements, like adding up to a certain total, all numbers must be odd, one square must be higher/lower than another one, etc. It looks tough at first, but the interface helps a lot in keeping track of everything.

I downloaded F1 2010 on Steam and played through a race, albeit on the easy and shortened weekend settings just to get a taste. It plays well though, feeling authentic enough, with a decent amount of control over things like your own career and R&D. I’ll definitely have to put more time into it.

EQ2 hasn’t progressed much, as I was gone for a week. I caught up on the faction grinding I missed out on, but another group member was missing this last week, so we just goofed around in the Cleft of Rujark dungeon off of Sinking Sands.

And then there’s Minecraft. That’ll deserve its own post…