Category Archives: DS

Pre-2014

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And yes, I’d been playing a bunch of other stuff in the meantime.

Borderlands 2: Borderlands, but more of it and with a much better story and villain, and I was happy with that.  I’ve made it most of the way through TVHM with Axton and should get around to finishing that off at some point.  I’ve also done most of the DLC, except Hammerlock’s Big Hunt, which was a boring slog.  Not sure if I’ll have time for UVHM or trying other classes in the future.

Minecraft: Of course. The 1.6 release took a long time to stabilize for mods, so I’d been putting together and playing my own custom mod pack of it, tweaking it as mods were updated. The major mod packs are catching up now, but I think I’ll stick with my own custom one for now.

Gran Turismo 6: It’s an improvement in a bunch of ways, but it’s really what GT5 should have been in the first place. It fixes up a bunch of stuff (the menu system and career mode in particular), but doesn’t really do anything revolutionary, and still has a bunch of flaws (weak leaderboards, features delayed into future patches) so it feels fairly weak compared to hearing about the new stuff in, say, Forza 5. It’s about the best I’m going to get for now though, without an XBone or PS4.

Terraria: There was a big patch (1.2) that added a whole bunch of new stuff so I started a new world and character.  I haven’t really put much time into it yet though, so I haven’t really seen too much of that new stuff.

Animal Crossing New Leaf: I caved in and picked up a 3DS due to a tidal wave of games I was interested in last year (including Fire Emblem Awakening, Etrian Odyssey 4, and Shin Megami Tensei 4), but this is the one I’ve put the most time into by far. When granted municipal powers over animal people, I turn into an obsessive petty tyrant, apparently.

Ittle Dew: An indie Zelda clone.  Fairly simple and short, but it’s still fun and pretty cute.

Bit.Trip Presents…Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien: One of those ‘continuous runner’ games where you can’t control the forward motion, just whether you jump, duck, kick, etc. Surprisingly difficult, but it’s satisfying when you finally nail a good run, and it’s still easier than the original Bit.Trip Runner game, which I gave up on in frustration.

Cookie Clicker: DON’T ASK.

MMO-wise, I finally registered Rift and gave it a try, but it didn’t really grab me.  I just haven’t been feeling the MMO urge for a while now, so I recently wound up cancelling all of the active subscriptions I still had going (Rift, EQ/EQ2, WoW, and LOTRO).  Maybe EQ Next will revive my interest, since it’s at least trying something different.

To 3D Or Not To 3D

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I haven’t paid much attention to the 3DS since I’ve learned to pretty much wait for the second revision when it comes to Nintendo handhelds.  So, now that the 3DS XL is out, will I get one?

Well, I haven’t really been playing with my handheld systems much lately anyway.  I’ve bought a whole bunch of puzzle and RPG games for my DS, but haven’t really put much time into them since I just don’t find myself in situations where I think “Hey, may as well pull out my DS…”  Given the opportunity, I’d rather play something on the PC or 360 instead.

Really, it depends on whether there are any must-have games on it.  And looking over the list of games released so far…not really.  That’s not to say there aren’t any good games for it, there are certainly ones that I would play if I had infinite time to do so, but nothing really stands out as gotta-have-this-and-it’s-only-on-3DS.

So no, no 3D for me.  And pretty much the same reasoning goes for the Vita as well, as it’s not even really about the 3D capabilities.  I’ve got too damn many consoles and too little time to worry about trying to play everything under the sun.

Oh Right, This Thing

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Yes, it’s time for yet more catching up.

I finished Forza 3 today. Well, again… I finished the six basic seasons long ago, but that left a lot of events unfinished, and today I finally got the Solid Gold achievement for getting gold in every single event. It took a while, and now there’s pretty much nothing left to do in it. Just in time for Gran Turismo 5…

I also finished off Mass Effect 2 shortly after my last post about it. There wasn’t really that much left to do at that point, just finishing off the loyalty missions and then off to the Omega 4 relay. The final mission worked out pretty well, requiring you to actually know your team, even if the final boss fight was a bit dumb. Still well worth it overall, and I’ll be looking forward to Mass Effect 3, where Liara better be more grateful about my remaining faithful to her!

I started Etrian Odyssey 3 on the DS, and it plays a lot like the first one so far, with a new sailing/fishing/exploring side game that haven’t done much with yet. I’m still only on the first floor though, and just about to gather up enough courage to go down to the next one.

And I also started a rather unusual game on the PSP: Zettai Hero Project: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman. It’s by the Disgaea guys and is kind of similar in certain ways, but different in a lot of others too. It’s turn based and you accumulate levels, but you only have yourself, you move one square at a time, your time in a dungeon is limited by an energy meter, items have a durability and wear out fairly quickly, enemy behaviour is somewhat more explicit about activation ranges and how they’ll react, you have a prinny wife… And of course, the story is Weird As Hell. It’s interesting and fun so far though, but I’m still only just barely out of the tutorial.

And in the MMO world, I did more of the Hallowe’en event quests, and am down to 11 quests left for Loremaster on my priest, but that’s about it. In EQ2 we did some more quests in the ‘Peacock Club’ quest line, but took a break last week and checked out a new zone, Pillar of Flame, picking up and completing some more quests there. We’re still level 60, but will probably begin leveling up again sometime soon.

By far I probably spent the most time in Minecraft, but that’s a whole separate topic…

Not-Yet-Made Man

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It’s been a while since the last update, but I haven’t really been playing a lot either. Well, I’ve played a bunch of games, but haven’t really put much time into each one…

I probably played Picross 3D the most, picking it up and knocking off a puzzle here and there to kill time, and a couple days ago I finally finished the last tier of the hard puzzles. I didn’t get 100% of them though, as you have to be some kind of savant to finish enough of the hard ones in time to get three stars. And I’ve still got a bunch of downloaded puzzles to keep me busy for a while yet.

I picked up a game called Puzzle Dimension on Steam out of sheer curiosity, and it’s kind of interesting. You roll a ball around a tiled map (it’s actually turn-based, with discrete moves), picking up the flowers on the level, and getting to the exit. Complicating things are squares that can only be traversed once, icy blocks that you slide on, fire blocks, gravity effects, jumping, etc… I’ve completed the first couple of ‘worlds’ so far, but there’s still plenty more to come.

I caved in and bought Victoria 2, though I haven’t really played a proper game of it yet. I did my usual introductory game as Hawaii, watching how the rest of the world unfolded, and it was actually a bit more challenging to keep things together as you couldn’t just set up the sliders and then do nothing the rest of the game. There were weird things afoot in the rest of the world, too, as Britain wound up swallowing up all of China, Egypt got picked on by nearly everyone and eventually eliminated, the US never even tried to get California back from Mexico, the UK never released any of its dominions… There’s still a lot of rough edges to it like the rebel hordes that run amok and the crazy ways that capitalists (mis)manage factories, so I’m putting this off until another patch or two.

Not much has happened in EQ2 as people have continued to be unavailable. I did at least hit level 55 and can finally use the nice reward charm I got for finishing all of the Lavastorm collections (20 to all stats, 100 health and power, and a healing proc).

Worms Reloaded was released, and I figured I may as well give it a shot. It seems to be a decent successor to Armageddon so far, though it’s a bit disappointing that teams and players are limited to 4 each. Some nice new weapons though, and I’m about halfway through the single-player campaign, though I haven’t tried multi yet.

I started playing Mercenaries 2 as my potential next game, but it’s still kind of early to judge. The graphics are a bit poorer than I expected, and the interface a bit awkward, but I’ve only done a few missions so far. I’ll give it a bit more of a chance to grow on me, at least.

And when I finish that, or it doesn’t work out, I think Mafia 2 will be next after that. I never played the first one, but it got decent reviews, and word-of-mouth on this one is pretty good so far. It’s apparently not as open-world as, say, the GTAs, but I’m okay with it being somewhat more linear and shorter. I’ve still got plenty of other games waiting…

New

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Wow, there’s a whole bunch of new stuff to catch up on.

I picked up Blur for the 360, since it looked interesting and I’m winding down on Forza 3. It’s basically like a Mario Kart-style racer, with powerups you pick up and fire at other racers, but on realistic cars and tracks. You can also use powerups to block incoming attacks instead. So far I’ve found the single-player game a bit frustrating since it seems like so much depends on random luck; I can come in second place one race, and then 18th the next, and I can imagine it getting frustrating trying to hit the specific advancement requirements.

In online multiplayer though, Blur is a blast. It doesn’t even really matter where you eventually wind up placing, with 20 players in total there’s plenty of action going on no matter where you are. There’s a level-based progression system that unlocks new cars and ‘mods’ that affect the rules slightly, and I’m up to level 13 (of 50) so far.

While picking up Blur, I noticed that Picross 3D was out. I played the hell out of the original DS Picross, so I had to pick this one up. It’s the same basic idea, expose the image within a grid by carving out unwanted blocks, but this time it’s a sculpture in a 3D block. The information you use is fairly different though, as you’re only told the total number of blocks to keep in a given row, how many groups the blocks are broken into, and not all rows are numbered. There’s a fairly lengthy tutorial that explains it all though, and I’ve perfected the Easy puzzles and just started in on the Normal difficulty.

And it’s not so new, but a fair bit of stuff has happened in EQ2 as well. I played my illusionist around the Everfrost area for a while last weekend, getting him 5 levels and burning up all the saved-up vitality xp. My mystic cleared out a bunch of the monster-farming quests in his log and then in the weekly group we went and finished off the Golden Efreeti Boots quest. Or the rest of the group did, anyway — I screwed up and missed a turn-in when we were in the Temple of Sol Ro, and then got wiped out by a level 70 dragon while trying to get back to it. I didn’t want to waste their time, so I told them to forget it and I’ll finish it myself at some later point, when everything’s lower-level.

My Poor, Neglected DS

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Reminded of it by a forum post, I fired up Animal Crossing: Wild World on my DS for the first time in ages. As expected, the place was overrun with weeds, but other than that, it was pretty much as I left it. I hooked up an old 802.11b router so I could connect to WFC, and maybe I’ll catch up on a few of the online gifts, if they’re still giving them out.

I also started The Dark Spire for the first time. It’s supposed to be an old-school, hardcore dungeon crawler, and it certainly feels like it so far. I only just made it past the character creation, but that retains the nostalgic old process of picking your race, class, and rolling for stats for each member of your party.

Catching Up

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I was out of town for a while, but I still managed to get some gaming in during the trip:

Izuna 2: It’s essentially a roguelike for the DS, similar to Pokemon Mystery Dungeon in the overall ‘feel’ to it but starring a rather excitable young female ninja and her friends instead. It relies heavily on using special items with effects when thrown as you find them, and you’re encouraged to use them often since you have very limited inventory space. Nothing really special so far, but it’s competent enough.

Final Fantasy Tactics: I’d been meaning to get to this one for quite a while now, but I’ve only made it through a handful of battles so far. I don’t know if I’ve screwed up or what, but my characters haven’t really progressed very far, I don’t have any options for improving them yet, and I’m just getting my ass royally kicked in the current battle since the enemies are numerous and much higher level. Kinda stuck for the moment.

Eets: I’ve already played the 360 version, but I also picked up the original PC version a while back. It’s largely the same gameplay, with different levels, but I’ve made it farther into it than I did on the 360. I’ve gotten 100% on the first four areas and at least unlocked all of the others, with new things like the gravity-changing aliens, the marshomech, and appearances by Penny Arcade’s Merch.

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix: Essentially Puzzle Quest in space, but with a new hex grid instead of the old Bejeweled-style grid. The hex grid makes things a bit tougher since I haven’t gotten the hang of seeing how the board will change with each move yet. Hacking leapgates is annoying due to the time limit on them, but I’ve managed to do a handful so far and I’m up to level 8.

Sins Of A Solar Empire: I started off a couple of games teamed up with an AI so that I wasn’t completely on my own. For an RTS that allegedly plays at a slower pace, I still found myself falling behind on various things like choosing research and keeping construction drones busy. I haven’t finished a game yet since I keep feeling like I screwed up too early on and need to start over, so I still have to come up with a decent starting strategy.

EverQuest: I finally got net access at my mother’s place, so I spent a bit of time in EQ as well, mainly making sure my daily xp bonus period didn’t get wasted. All I really did was pick up some more AAs via Halls of Honor again, though, finally maxing out Hastened Gathering and Innate Run Speed, and starting to pick up Doppelganger and Persistent Casting. Hopefully the latter will let me use better hastes on my charmed pets and still be able to get the stuns and recharms off reliably.

I’m getting really tired of HoH, so I’ll probably just bank a handful of more AAs for future use and start concentrating on exploring and leveling again. I also need to start working on the 10th Anniversary quests before they go away…

What Next, A Halo RTS?

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Since I had my PC busy doing other things, I also started the Sonic Chronicles DS game tonight. Sonic isn’t exactly the kind of game you’d expect to see an RPG for, but it worked for Mario, and it is by Bioware…

There are certainly parallels with the Mario RPG-ish games, with special moves that you have to use an Elite Beat Agents-like action sequence to use or avoid, a party of characters, levels and xp and equipment, environmental barriers you need certain characters to pass, etc.

So far the plot is fairly light and simple. Knuckles is missing and robots are wandering around and some agency called GUN wants us to investigate some spots and find him. I’ve made it to some kind of town and Tails’s workshop, but I think I have to backtrack a bit for some stuff I couldn’t get earlier.

I Need Help

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And as if I didn’t have enough games to play already, I couldn’t help picking up a bunch more yesterday. Far Cry 2, since I liked STALKER and am intrigued by the open-world design; Dead Space due to good word-of-mouth; Midnight Club: LA since I like open-world racers and have too many hardcore-sim ones already; Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood because the very idea of a Sonic RPG is just weird and I was curious; and finally Sins of a Solar Empire, since I had a coupon for Stardock, haven’t played an RTS in ages, and the demo was kinda nifty.

I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time to work on them when I retire.

Weekend Wrapup

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I was away for the last little while, but I still got plenty of gaming in. To quickly summarize:

I finished off the main story in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: EoT, after an number of plot revelations where I discovered that Dusknoir was actually a ‘bad guy’ (well, as bad as they get in Pokemon games), the time gear thief was actually working to stop him by placing the gears at a tower to stabilize time, and I was also from the future and the thief’s partner. A lot of the endgame was a series of linear slogs through dungeons, often without a full party, which worried me a bit since I didn’t have the opportunity to grind quests like I could back at the guild, but I managed to squeak through. The boss fight was tough since he dished out a lot of damage, and I was down to a single reviver seed, but the Smokescreen skill kept us from getting hit too often. There’s still other things to do afterwards, like opening up new areas, recruiting the rest of the Pokemon, and evolutions, but I don’t think I’ll have time for that.

I tried a game of Civ4: Colonization, but it was quickly apparent that it wasn’t really as much like base Civ4 as you might think, and I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t catch on to proper resource management and wasted a lot of effort there on things I wound up not being able to make, and gave up on that attempt. I love the Civ games, but I really need a good stretch of time where I can pay more careful attention to them.

I also restarted Darwinia (technically I had started it before, but didn’t have the save with me), and made it up to just past the mission where you first start to create armour. Most of the missions have been pretty easy so far, with the major difficulties coming from the ‘seed’ launchers that create new enemies (suicide rushes with squads seem to work best to wipe them out early on), and the damn ants. I wound up not even using the armour for the ants, and just used a bunch of squads, slowly inching them closer to the nests while they’re distracted picking up nearby souls, though even then it usually took a few attempts to finally lob enough grenades.

I finally played Depths of Peril, which is a rather interesting game in that it’s kind of like competitive Diablo. It has the same basic kill-loot-level-quest gameplay as Diablo, but you also control a ‘covenant’ where you can recruit other NPCs, and you have a house with a lifestone you have to defend. There are also a handful of other AI-controlled covenants, and they play the game much the same way you do; they have houses in town, you see them running around town and buying stuff from merchants and picking up quests, and you see them out in the combat fields, and they can actually wind up beating you to completing quests. You don’t want to let them do that, because they’ll earn influence from those quests and kills, and there’s a diplomacy aspect to it where covenants can form alliances, trade, or go to war and raid each other based on their influence and relationships to each other. You can win by either wiping out all of the other covenants, or merging them all into an alliance. In my game I wound up getting an alliance victory, mainly by letting them wipe each other out until only two others were left, and then buttering them up by giving them leftover items until they agreed to alliances.

The other new game I tried was World of Goo, a just-released puzzle game where you have a bunch of ‘goo balls’ that you can stretch out to form structures (think Meccano girders), with the goal of building up a structure that reaches a pipe on the map, with enough free-roaming goo balls left to satisfy a certain goal. The difficulty comes in the map layouts, terrain hazards, and the fundamental instability of the structure — the things you build have a very rubbery behaviour that leads to a lot of swaying, making it difficult to do things like build straight up. I’m most of the way through Chapter 1 so far, and each puzzle has been fairly different.

And the guys finally got together and for the first time we got a full band session going in Rock Band 2, unlocking a couple more achievements for me in the process. Oddly enough, playing with a full band actually seems to make things more difficult for me, since it’s harder to hear your own instrument among all the others.