Author Archives: heide

But My Mom Says I’m Hardcore…

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I only made it about halfway through Act 4 in Gears of War tonight because the difficulty level is really starting to annoy me. It took me numerous deaths and a lot of time just to make it through the first handful of fights of the act, thanks to cheap instant deaths from snipers and torque bows from out of nowhere, and sparser checkpoints that made me redo multiple fights in a row just to get back to the spot where I kept dying.

There isn’t really anything interesting or different so far this act, it’s just a lot harder.

Of course, I did choose the Hardcore level, but the description at the difficulty selection screen made it sound more like it was a ‘medium’ level.

Even More Wretchedness

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I hope there aren’t any more lambent wretches in the remainder of Gears of War, because after finishing Act 3, I’m going to scream if I ever see another one. I managed to get past that first fight I was having trouble with yesterday after a few more tries, but it turned out to be only the first of various encounters with them. They’re small, quick, hard to see, and often appear in large enough numbers to swarm you quickly, and finally beating them felt more like a matter of luck.

At one point I had to cross some floorboards, many of which would break and drop you down into a pit full of lambent wretches below. Fortunately I’d already heard about this part ahead of time and took it carefully enough that I didn’t fall in. After that was another well-worn cliche, riding in mining carts while under attack by, of course, lambent wretches, though it wasn’t that difficult. And near the end there was a battle with a large ‘corpser’ enemy, though the corpser itself was the easy part and I mostly kept dying to the mid-fight waves of…lambent wretches.

Other things of note: although you can be commanding a group of up to three other soldiers, quite often the game finds some excuse you split you up into two separate groups that can’t help each other out. Even if you’re only separated by the flimsiest of doors or windows.

And although there are plenty of checkpoints, some of them could be better placed. If you fail the final big battle at the end of the act, you have to waste time redoing one part where all you do is run around a bit, pick up a weapon, and have some NPC chatter. If I hear “Lookit all that juice!” one more time…

A Wretched Wretch of Wretching Wretchery

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Tonight was Act 2 of Gears of War, and fortunately there were a few surprises to it rather than endless leaps from cover to cover.

At one point I had to continually turn a crank in order to cross a canal, while taking fire from groups of nearby enemies. I used up nearly all my ammo in that crossing, praying that there’d be a resupply on the other side. There was, but there were also hordes of bat-like creatures that instantly killed me a few times before I figured out the trick to it (they don’t attack as long as you’re in light)

I was wondering if there was going to be any vehicles, and I finally found the first one in this act, though it wasn’t a very long or difficult part. Hopefully there will be more later on.

And now I’m stuck at one part near the start of Act 3, when you encounter lambent wretches for the first time. The problem is that you can’t let them get near you, since they explode when they die and kill you if you’re too close, but there’s a lot of them and they run right up to you and I just can’t kill them all fast enough. I guess I’ll just have to keep reloading and retrying until I get lucky…

Who Oils These Gears Anyway?

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I finally started playing the PC version of Gears of War in earnest tonight, having only done the tutorial before. It took a bit of getting used to the third-person view and how the screen rocks around a bit when you’re walking and running, but it’s not too bad.

They seem to have overdone it a bit on the grim-n-gritty, macho, manly-men atmosphere, but I can still appreciate it on the campiness level. It at least takes itself more seriously than Hellgate: London, which had a similar post-apocalyptic humanity-fights-back setting, but had NPCs that seemed to be trying out for Monty Python auditions…

The highly-touted cover system works fairly well, except for a couple minor problems. The first is that it seems to be slow to take cover again, which can cause problems when doing things like rescuing teammates. Numerous times I was right next to a downed teammate, behind cover, but actually rescuing him required me to pop out of cover, trigger him, and then get back under cover again, and I’d sometimes die just from being out of cover too long doing that.

The other problem is that since there’s really only one ‘action’ button, it doesn’t alway interpret what you meant to do properly. I died a few times at one spot because I held down Space to run across an open area, except that at one point it suddenly decided that my holding Space meant ‘take cover here’ instead. Except that the cover at that point was on the wrong side, leaving me open to the turret rapidly firing at me.

And oh have I died a ton… I’m playing it on the “hardcore” difficulty, since “casual” would probably be too easy (the text describes it as being for people who only occasionally play shooters), and some achievements are only given out if you’re in hardcore or higher. Fortunately, there are plenty of checkpoints, so I’ve always been able to slowly progress with enough persistence, even if I had to die a lot.

I made it to the end of Act 1 tonight, and with only five acts, it shouldn’t take too long to finish off the single-player game. I doubt I’ll do much multiplayer though, especially since the PC version can’t play together with the 360 version anyway. Which probably also means no co-op, alas.

I’m Starting To Think Peach Likes Being Kidnapped

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Yes, it’s SMG time again. I finished off the cluster of galaxies I was in and it did indeed open up a ‘secret’ cluster, though it’s not much of a secret when you get it by just playing through the game normally… I also got to go back to the area you first start in, and completed the coin collection challenge there and gained the ability to fly in some areas. The only place I’ve noticed so far where it will let me is in the main galaxy selection hub, and so far all I’ve really found is a few extra 1up mushrooms.

Of the galaxies I did, of particular note was the Matter Splatter Galaxy, which is a weird one in that the terrain only exists as long as it’s either under a spotlight or has recently been touched by these bouncing lights. If a wall moves into the shadow, you’ll just fall off the map if you then try to go wall-jump off of it. At one point you take the spring powerup and the spotlight slowly moves up the screen, and you have to try to keep up with it. Easier said than done when you factor in the spring’s awkwardness and spring-blocking obstacles… It must have taken me a dozen attempts to finally pass just that one section.

At one point, I noticed that I had 31 lives (they’re certainly not scarce in SMG), and although I hadn’t planned on it yet, I figured I’d take a stab at the final Bowser fight while I had all those lives just in case I needed them. But I didn’t; it wasn’t really all that difficult in the end, with the only frustration coming from how far back it sometimes puts you when you die, making you redo certain easy parts repeatedly. Overall though, there were probably separate galaxy stars that were tougher than the final one.

I’ve still got 41 more stars to collect, and beating the game lets me do the purple comet challenges now. In the purple challenges you just have to collect 100 purple coins, but that’s harder than it sounds when a lot of the stages have some tricky platforming in them and you have to redo the whole thing if you die, not just continue on from the last checkpoint…

I’m not sure if I’ll get all of them, though. I need to collect them all to unlock the ability to play as Luigi, but then I have to recollect all 120 stars all over again as Luigi (who’s harder to control) if I want to unlock a special galaxy, but I don’t know if I have that much patience or time. Maybe I’ll just chip away at it bit by bit in brief, spare moments…

Contractual Obligation

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I finally got back to playing a bit more of Guitar Hero 3 today as well. My last session made my left arm a bit sore for a few days, this being perhaps the most exercise it’s seen in years…

I continued along the Medium career, and left off at the beginning of Tier 8, which is where things are really going to get tough. Raining Blood was the only song I didn’t five-star when I blew through Easy, so I’m not looking forward to that one.

The boss battle against Slash again took a few retries, though fewer than I needed for Tom Morello, at least. It again went to sudden-death-and-you-lose-for-no-apparent-reason a few times, but in the end I managed to save up enough attacks to make him fail during one of the solo-ish parts.

I also had a bit of trouble with Knights of Cydonia (couldn’t find a good video of it on Medium though), failing a song completely for the first time in my Medium career. I was doing fine right up until the rapid hammer-on/pull-off section, and I’m still not very good at those. I managed to succeed the second time around just by strumming them like regular notes and being prepared by seeing the pattern the first time.

I also tried another song on Hard, and although I passed, it was…humbling. :P I’m really going to have to start explicitly practicing songs and techniques when I reach that point.

He Charges By The Parsec

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I’m up to 68 stars in Super Mario Galaxy now, and am mostly finished the cluster of galaxies I’m in right now. I think there’s one more cluster though, even though it doesn’t appear on the main map, since I can see another hut where you enter galaxies off in the distance and there’s what looks like an inactive transfer point to it.

Of particular note today was the Toy galaxy, where Mario gains a spring powerup that turns him into something like a slinky, with the ability to bounce really high. It’s a bit difficult to control though, since you never stop bouncing around, but that’s probably supposed to be part of the challenge…

It was particularly frustrating in this one section where there’s a cylinder with multiple levels of brick platforms inside. Getting to the top takes a bit of precision, but if you hit the bottom of a platform when you bounce (which is really easy in the tight space), you break the bricks, making it harder to stay on that platform. The longer you work at it, the harder it gets, as you get less and less landing space to work with. It must have taken me a good 15-20 minutes just to get to the top, and to make things worse, it turned out to be a completely optional area and the reward was just some extra star bits. :P

More Space Plumbing

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I hit the magic 60 star mark in Super Mario Galaxy tonight, so I think I could go straight to the final level(s) now, but I want to finish the main stars in the final galaxy cluster first, at least. There’s only a few more of them to go anyway, so I must still be missing a lot of hidden and comet stars, and probably won’t bother with them until after beating the main game.

Today I ran across the usual sand, ice, and fire worlds, as is pretty much expected in a Mario game nowadays, but at least there were a few new twists on them. The fire and ice were actually combined into the same galaxy, often switching between the two and even having spots where they’re on the same planetoid.

The sand galaxy also made a bit of a fool out of me. I reached one spot where an arrow told me to go one direction, but I noticed that I could go the opposite direction as well, despite quickly flowing sand, if I repeatedly jumped. It was slow going against the sand, but I discovered some star parts in that direction and thought I was going to find a hidden star for my troubles, except…I then wound up back at that same arrow. It was just a loop, and I’d been slowly going against the flow of the sand for no good reason. Ah well.

Boo!

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I’m up to 45 stars now in Super Mario Galaxy, and it continues to be fresh and exciting with every new galaxy. I think I only need 60 stars to beat the game, but I’ll probably continue collecting as many as possible, so who knows how many I’ll have at the end.

I finally got to try out two other powerups tonight: the ice flower, and the Boo mushroom. The ice flower lets you run on top of water by freezing it, and it took me a couple minutes before I realized you could wall-jump up waterfalls that are close together with it. The Boo mushroom turns you into a ghost, but all it’s been used for so far is to let you go through some bars. 99% of the time you’re still just plain old Mario, without any powerups.

I also ran across a comet that I wasn’t able to finish for the first time — it only lets you have one health point in a fairly long boss fight against Bouldergeist. It’s supposedly one of the harder comets, but I think it’ll be doable — I only lost one health point when I fought him normally, and came close in the couple attempts I made at the comet. It’ll just take some persistence.

Yay For Homicidal Bunny-Like Sidekicks

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Today I received an e-mail announcing that the first episode of Season 2 of the new Sam & Max games was now available to regular, non-GameTap subscribers. So, of course, I had to immediately buy and download it…

It’s largely the same engine as the Season 1 games, with the big new feature being proper widescreen support, the lack of which annoyed me a bit in those first episodes. It also adds a few new settings for the North Pole and reopened diner nearby, though this time Sybil’s place is inaccessible. It also reintroduces Flint Paper, from the comics and original game, but he doesn’t really have a full role in this first episode.

It’s still your standard collect-and-solve adventure game, of course, though this time they added a boxing action sequence in addition to the usual driving challenge. It seemed a bit out-of-place in an adventure game, and was difficult to control since it didn’t seem to respond properly in some cases (when the mouse is on the edge of the screen, perhaps), but it didn’t take too long to beat, either.

The game as a whole did seem a bit longer and less linear than the previous episodes, though. Some of them could be solved in as little as 1.5-2 hours, but this one took me four. It’s a pretty good start to the season, in any case.