It’s not really a game, but today I played with Universe Sandbox for a bit, checking out the built-in scenarios and messing with things like dropping more planets into the solar system, altering masses and speeds, etc. Interesting, but not really a lot of long-term appeal unless you’re a serious astronomy nut, so I’m done with it.
Today’s game is actually a fairly familiar one: Ultima V. It’s the one entry in the main series that I never got around to playing, since it didn’t come out for the Atari that I had at the time, and I later got it as part of the collections but it was left in “I’ll get back to it at some point” state for ages. So, today I finally gave it it’s shot, and…yeah, of course it’s a keeper. I’ll probably continue to play it alongside the other game-a-day entries for a while. So far, I’ve picked up most of the people I want in my party (Iolo, Gwenno, Julia, Jaana, and Mariah), and visited most of the major cities, but I need to farm a bit for some gold, food, xp, and equipment. I nearly starved to death at one point, but I think I’m safe for now.
I originally tried to get the Amiga version working in an emulator, since it has better music and sound, but it also loads a lot more slowly and I couldn’t get it to actually write to the disks, so I couldn’t save the game or create a new party. Oh well, the PC version will do.
Like the name says, in Hack Slash Loot, you hack and, uh loot. That’s about it. It’s a roguelike, but the mechanics are extremely simple. There’s no inventory, so you just have to decide whether to use or discard anything you come across. You attack just by clicking on the enemies. If there’s anything deeper to it later on, I don’t know, because I kept dying over and over again because it’s also hard as hell. Cute, but I want something a bit deeper in my roguelikes.
I did at least get one achievement though, for dying in less than 20 turns…
Didn’t have time to play anything yesterday, but today I checked out Adventures of Shuggy. It’s a rather simple little platformer, all you do is collect gems and the only controls are to move around, jump, and a special action. That special action varies from level to level though, with things like jumping between multiple characters or rotating the whole level, and various other typical thing like switches and such show up in the levels. A decent enough time-killer, but there are a gazillion levels to it though, so I don’t think I’m going to bother trying to finish it.
Today I finally decided to check out the whole world of ‘social’ iPhone games, in the form of Trade Nations. I can see the appeal to it; there’s a sense of constantly making progress, and it pulls you back with reasons to return and do something at regular intervals, and it’s not too heavy-handed about hassling friends or microtransactions. But, I can also already see where it’s going, and there’s not enough real variety to what you’ll be doing. You’re just collecting resources to make more buildings to collect more resources to make more buildings to collect more resources… It wouldn’t be the first grindy game, but it’s grinding just for grinding’s sake. There’s no story to follow, or any actual challenge to the decisions you make that would count as interesting gameplay.
Of course it’s not a game you’re meant to play as a main focus, but I’ll undoubtedly wind up gradually forgetting to check in on it anyway.
Well, I was going to try Out Of The Park Baseball 11 today, as my first Mac game in this series, but by the time I’d finished mucking about with patches, I’d kinda lost my enthusiasm. The base game ran okay, but I was getting errors about the face generator, sound was missing, and it froze on the credits when I chose ‘About…’, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to look for a patch. There was one, but the patch file from the store I got it from was for the Windows version. The technical support forum directed me to the publisher’s site for updates for the GamersGate version I have, but that also turned out to only have the Windows patch. Back in the support forum they did have a Mac patch, and I figured I’d give it a try anyway, but it couldn’t find the existing install and wouldn’t let me proceed even after manually selecting the install directory, and confusingly it wanted the location of “OOTP 10” even though it had the OOTP 11 logo in the corner…
It is supposed to be the best baseball management sim out there, by far, but I’m two versions behind on it by now, the latest versions are fairly expensive (I got this one for cheap since it was right before a new version release), and I just don’t have much patience today. Maybe I’ll revisit a future version if I ever find it cheap again.
I played a bit of Tank Universal today and it’s an interesting blend of a Tron-like style, old-style tank games, and various game modes like capture-the-flag, first-person running around, puzzles, and straight-up blow-stuff-up. I got to a point where it was hard to outrun this giant enemy and failing to do so reset an annoying switch maze that I’d have to do over again, so I gave up on it at that point after a couple of frustrating attempts. Not bad, but not a keeper.
A quick one today as I played through some of the training missions in Altitude before realizing that it was pretty much mainly a multiplayer game, and I’m not really looking for any more of those for long-term play right now.
I can’t remember why I originally picked up Madballs in…Babo: Invasion or what kind of game I even thought it was. A licenseware game based on some long-forgotten kids toys from the 80s? But, it turns out it’s actually kinda fun. It’s like a mix of those marble-rolling games and a top-down shooter like Shadowgrounds, with pretty tight controls and a good amount of variety and challenge in the levels. Fun…but not quite fun enough to make the long-term play grade, alas.
So, what have I been doing in all that time missing in this blog? Probably a lot of small stuff I’ve forgotten, but the major games are:
Minecraft: I played a whole ton of Minecraft, including not just further developing my own private worlds but checking out various mod packs like the Technic Pack, Yogbox, TerraFirmaCraft, and Hack/Mine. I also completed some challenge maps, like Feed The Beast, Vechs’s Legendary map from the Super Hostile series, and one of those Skyblock-like minimal starts.
Diablo 3: I’ve gotten a wizard into Hell difficulty so far, but still have to check out the other classes. It doesn’t seem to have as much staying power as D2 did, a large part of which is that the loot seems blander, but I’ll still get a lot of hours out of it.
Disgaea 4: And once again, I got sucked into putting a ton of hours into yet another SRPG, getting some characters up to pretty much insanely maxed-out stats. I haven’t done the DLC chapters for it yet though.
MMOs: I started up LOTRO and got a character up to level 20ish, but haven’t gotten back to it recently or played any other MMOs, really. Kinda feeling a bit burned out on them for now. I’ll give Guild Wars 2 a shot when it comes out, though.
Skyrim: FUS RO duh, of course I’d be playing this one. I played a kitty wizard through the end of the base game, but actually left a good number of side quests unfinished. I figure that I’ll wait a couple of years for all the good mods, DLC, and an expansion to come out, and then go back and do a proper clear-everything run with a different type of character.
Forza 4: Good, especially with the new stuff like Rivals challenges, but I’m still only a sliver of the way through the full event list, and I’m not sure if I’ll bother to clear them all like I did with 3. Just not feeling the driving urge lately.
Mass Effect 3: Controversy over the endings aside (I haven’t seen the revised ones yet), still a pretty good game overall, and I enjoyed it just as much as the second one. Lots of different environments, good gunplay, and a decent story along the way.
Portal 2: Yay! Lots of good puzzles, interesting new elements introduced as you go, longer without being too long, and even a really good story around it. Definitely worth it.
Damn, that’s a lot of sequels…