Category Archives: Platforms

Liar!

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And of course, right after I say I’m taking a break from WoW, I go and spend all day today in it… It was the start of the Lunar Festival event though, and these quests are only available for a limited time, so I had to do them soon anyway. I wound up getting all but two of the achievements for the event, and those will have to wait until I’m level 80 anyway since they involve Northrend.

And along the way I wound up picking up a couple pieces I needed for the quests in Zul’Farrak, so I’ll probably head there first whenever I return in earnest. I’ve still got a half-dozen or so quests to finish up there, that have been in my quest log for ages now, and it should be easily soloable.

Tank Beats Everything

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I worked through a few more of the Frontlines missions over the last few days. Mission 3 started out like a stealth mission, but it wasn’t too long before the enemies had discovered where I was and most of the rest of the mission was spent trying to coax them out of hiding or sniping them. The second half involved defending a town against a couple waves of enemies, which I barely scraped by on — I’m never very good at timed bits like that.

Mission 4 was mainly a whole lotta tank battling, and then mission 5 took the battle to inside a mountain, where there were all sorts of corridors and boxes and platforms for them to hide on.

I also toyed a bit more with Defense Grid, managing to complete the ‘Grinder’ mode of Waste Disposal. In this one only ‘walker’ enemies appear, but you have to survive through 99 waves of them and the groups of them get bigger and bigger and bigger… It took a whole lot of meteor towers and a couple others I don’t often use, like inferno and concussion, but I made it with only two cores lost.

Watch Your Backlines, Too

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Well, I had intended to start the new game yesterday, but it turned out there were some pretty sizable downloads available for it, and by the time I got them it was fairly late.

So, tonight I started working on Frontlines: Fuel of War, the gift mentioned in previous comments. The impressions on the forums were pretty favourable, and it’s holding up pretty well so far. It’s a squad-based shooter along the lines of CoD4, though the other squad members seem to be there mostly as distractions and all the heavy lifting is up to you, of course.

The weapons are mostly fairly traditional and I didn’t vary from the standard assault rifle and rocket launcher much, but every once in a while you get to pick up a special weapon like flying drones or a controllable robot gun, and they’re always fun. In the second mission I used a little mini-helicopter to take out a tank by circle-strafing around it and pelting it with rockets while it uselessly tried to aim its main cannon at it.

You also get to ride around in vehicles on a fairly regular basis, and they pack a lot of firepower. Controlling them was a bit weird at first, since it varies depending on whether they have a turret or not, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.

I’ve only done the first two missions so far though, and it looks like the next one is a stealth/sniping one. Seems like the single-player campaign will be pretty short since there are only seven missions, but the multiplayer is supposed to be pretty meaty. It’s too bad there’s no co-op mode for the single-player campaign, though you should be able to form a squad of friends in the multi at least.

Life Without WoW

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Now that I’m officially on break from WoW, it’s time to get back to some of the other games I already had going.

So, today I finished off Defense Grid: The Awakening. I haven’t mentioned this one before since I actually started it while I was on Christmas vacation. I completed the first half-dozen or so missions back then, and today I finally went back and did the rest of them (there’s 20 in total, I think).

It’s a “tower defense” game, where the goal is to place towers on the map in order to stop waves of enemies that are trying to steal your “cores” from a particular spot on the map. There are different towers with weapon types that are useful in different ways, different styles of map layouts (wide open and you have to influence the enemy’s path by tower placement, or straightforward paths with few weapon spots so you have to choose carefully), and different enemies (slow, fast, stealthy, shielded, flying, etc.). You have no direct control over the towers; you just choose where to put them and when to upgrade them to more powerful levels, limited by your scavenged resource meter, but the possible options are still overwhelming enough that you need a solid strategy in your choices.

There was only one mission that I failed outright, but on a handful of others I did have to use the ‘checkpoint restart’ feature to rewind back a bit and try a different tactic. It usually wasn’t too difficult to complete each level, though I rarely managed to retain all of my cores. The final mission was fairly tense, with the final wave of aliens playing hot potato with my last and only remaining core while I frantically upgraded towers along the return path as I was mentally screaming “AAAAAAAH”, certain that I was about to lose. I just barely scraped by, though upon reflection I certainly could have chosen a better path.

There are different modes you can play each level in for some extra gameplay, but there just isn’t time. Next up…is a secret.

They’d Better Be Reinforcing Those Saddles

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WoW has been nothing but yet more clearing out of low-level quests, and a couple days ago I finally hit Stranglethorn Vale. It took two full days, but I finally cleared all of the quests there, including the damn Nesingwary ones. I still need to do the ones in Outland, though…

But more importantly, through all of these quests, I managed to squeak out the last little bits of faction needed to become ‘exalted’ with Silvermoon City. That got me an achievement, my first title (Ambassador), and I’ll be able to buy a chickenhawkstrider from them when the next patch goes live. I’ll probably just get the cheapo one though, since it’s just for show and I’ll prefer the wolf for actual riding.

(And I also got a few other achievements along the way, like one for hitting 1500 quests, completing a few instances, etc.)

There are still a bunch of other low-level quests to finish off, including some I’ve picked up for Zul’Farrak, but now it’s time to take a bit of a break, I think. I feel the same kind of burnout coming on as when I abandoned WoW after BC came out.

My Insurance Rates Are Horrible

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The only really major news in WoW lately is that I finally bought my flying mount, and can now knock off the rest of the exploration achievements in Outland the next time I’m over there. For now though, I’ve been spending a lot of time finishing off low-level quests in the old world and gaining faction. I have all of the home cities except Silvermoon up to exalted now, and it’s going to be a pain since I’ve done all of the newbie and Ghostland quests for it and I’m still 3500 points short. I guess I’ll have to work on other quests and see how many ‘bonus’ points I can get towards it before I have to resort to farming runecloth.

And Paul and I finally got back to Halo 3 tonight, getting through chapters 6 and 7 of the co-op campaign. I don’t think he’s letting me drive any more, though…

Still Finishing

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And it wound up not taking very long at all to finish off the Blade’s Edge quests tonight, so I also worked on blacksmithing a bit (up to 346), finished off a couple quest lines I’d forgotten about in Terrokar, and bought the riding skill level that lets me use flying mounts.

Now I just need the money to buy a flying mount. And I won’t be able to use it in Northrend for quite a while anyway…

Finishing Up

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There’s not really much new to report on the WoW front, other than hitting level 71; I’ve been working through the quests in Blade’s Edge without too much notable happening (I’m already a bit overlevelled and overequipped for it, and probably should have done Blade’s Edge before Shadowmoon Valley), and made a brief detour to Hellfire Peninsula to finish off some of the leftover quests there. It shouldn’t take much longer to wrap up in Blade’s Edge and then there’s just Netherstorm to go as far as Burning Crusade content goes.

I’ve been feeling my interest in WoW starting to wane a bit again, though. I’ve reached new (to me) content, but I’m still going it alone all the time, all my friends are already busy off doing their own things in worlds far removed from mine, and I still don’t really feel prepared to act as a tank. I really should be grouping up and practicing, but dealing with the constant parade of morons spamming me with guild invites or “want 2 tank DTK plz?” has made me rather wary of pickup groups. It feels like I’m just going through the grinding motions, much like it did when I quit shortly after BC first came out.

Maybe I’ll just finish off the BC content and then take a bit of a break and work on some of the single-player games that have been languishing lately before coming back for the WotLK content.

Blacksmithing Sucks

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As usual, it was an eventful weekend in WoW. As expected, the starting area of Northrend paid off in terms of equipment upgrades, and before long I’d replaced those ugly old shoulders and acquired a new sword that was a huge DPS jump over the old one — my measured DPS jumped from around 280 to 340.

After that it was time to get back to blacksmithing in earnest, and I scoured Silithus for thorium ore for a while and eventually got enough to raise it to 300, at which point I could start using all the fel iron ore I’d saved up. That quickly got it up to 330 before I ran out, though now I’ll just work on it as I go.

I stopped in Zangarmarsh for a bit and finished off a few old quests and got up to Honored with the Cenarion Expedition. That gets me the heroic dungeon key and a couple blacksmithing plans that should be useful. Well, once I hit 350 and can learn them… And then it was off to Blade’s Edge, where I’ll be questing for a bit. I also stuck my nose into Netherstorm to finish a couple quests that ended there and grabbed a couple flight points.