After a few more sets in Rock Band 2, where I also got the achievement for reaching a million fans, I’m now only 91 stars away from being able to do the Endless Setlist 2. It’ll apparently take just over six hours to go through that when I get to it, and there’s an achievement for doing it all without pausing even once. My biggest fear though would actually be whether my guitar’s batteries can even last that long in one stretch…
I did a handful of more missions in GTA3 tonight, and in one particularly amusing one, I grabbed three other guys and we did a bank heist and get away from the police in a run-down SUV with the hood constantly flapping up. It took several tries to complete that mission though, since the cars can’t take much damage and the police are constantly ramming you and spinning you out while you’re trying to get to the pay-n-spray.
Another amusing-but-frustrating mission was when I had to drive around and collect stolen pornography in a trail that snaked pretty much all over the city. At a few points it wasn’t clear which way to turn though, so if you acted too quickly and got it wrong (I forgot about the look-left and look-right keys) you pretty much had to start over as you’d lose too much time.
I’ve exhausted the missions given out by three of the guys now (Luigi, Joey, and the porn star over the phone), so there’s just this ‘T’ marker left right now. Hopefully the next part of the city will open up soon. (I’m 1/5th of the way through all of the missions, though only 11% complete, according to the stats.)
Tonight I finished off Episode 1 in Duke Nukem 3D, which was a bit shorter than expected (apparently the other episodes have a few more levels each). The level design was pretty good though, with some open areas you didn’t normally see in older games like this. The boss fight was a bit tough since it was difficult to avoid his chain guns and he had a ton of health, but was otherwise a fairly straightforward no-tricks fight.
I’m not sure if I’ll go ahead and do the other episodes anytime soon though, as I’m probably starting to spread myself a bit too thin already. I’ll probably keep them for some other time when I’m itching for a shooter.
Instead of doing more missions in GTA3 tonight, I ran around and collected as many of the hidden packages as I could. I know I’m not going for 100% completion, but the end result is really useful as it spawns more and more weapons at your hideout as you collect more of them (currently only the pistol, Uzi, and grenades).
There are two in the Portland area I couldn’t get though, since I have to open up other areas of the city first.
Back in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: EoT, we set off on an expedition to look for Fogbound Lake, requiring passing through a handful of dungeons that weren’t too tough. We eventually found it on the top of some plateau, but had to fight a boss there. Fortunately, with my Smokescreen skill, he hardly hit us at all and was fairly easy to beat.
It turned out that the real protector of the lake and the time gear there didn’t know anything about my amnesia though, so that remains a mystery. So, it was back to the guild and regular job hunting. Some famous explorer called Dusknoir has shown up and will obviously be important, though.
In a slight diversion today, I bought the just-released Hinterland based on the previews and discussion about it I’d seen in some forums. It’s kind of an odd game, being a combination of an action-RPG like Diablo, and a city-building game. You have to develop a settlement, hiring visitors in order to fulfill roles in the village like farming, crafting, hunting, defense, etc., but your ultimate goal is to wipe out all of the evil creatures in the surrounding countryside by venturing out and combating them head-on, by yourself or with some villagers in tow to help you out.
Both aspects of it are fairly simple: the people have levels, equipment they’re holding, and attack/defense stats derived from that, and combat is just holding down right-click on the monsters, nowhere near the depth of Diablo. And maintaining the village is fairly straightforward: make sure you have enough food-producers to cover everyone, and try to get at least one villager of each type and upgrade buildings when possible. Things get a little more complicated later on as some villagers won’t be usable until you liberate certain resource types, and you have to decide when to switch between research and production for the crafters, but that’s about it.
Still, it’s a decent amount of fun for what it is, being a cheap game from a small company. I only played one game tonight at the easy difficulty on a small map, just to get a feel for it, so I’ll have to try medium/medium next. The pace was a bit faster than I expected, but I still managed to win fairly easily in about two hours.
With Xbox Live down for maintenance today I turned back to the DS, but only got a couple of adventures completed in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon before the battery indicator came on. So, it’s back to the PC tonight, and I figured I should finally get back to a series I’ve been meaning to play for a long time now: Grand Theft Auto. I played SA for a bit on the PS2, but never got around to finishing it.
I bought the entire series as part of a Rockstar Collection on Steam a while back, but I think I’m going to skip the first two entries. I fooled around with them for a while, but just couldn’t get into them; the 2D perspective just felt too limiting and I was constantly crashing into things (and not intentionally) and getting lost. So, I’m going to kick it off with GTA3, and then Vice City and San Andreas. I doubt I’ll go for 100% completion, since I’d like to finish these within a reasonable amount of time not too far away from when the PC version of GTA4 comes out, and that’s pretty close now.
So far it’s your typical gangster story, starting out at the bottom and getting in good with the mob, and the missions so far have been fairly typical: bump off some guys, steal an armoured car, escort a hooker, etc. There are all sorts of side missions and collections to do, but I haven’t started on any of those yet.
I miss the overall map from San Andreas, but the area is small enough that it hopefully won’t take too long to learn it well.
I did another level in Duke Nukem 3D, getting me to the secret level in the first episode. I don’t really feel compelled to play it for long periods of time at a stretch though, for some reason (perhaps the nostalgia just isn’t as strong with this one), so I’ll probably continue doing just one or two levels at a time.
I also played a bit more Rock Band 2, finally starting on the instrument challenges and unlocking a handful of them, and doing a couple more random sets in tour mode, since I still need some 230+ stars to unlock the Endless Setlist 2. I’ve started trying to play on Hard with the bass when possible; I’m only scoring three and four stars on the songs so far, but I’m not failing yet, at least.
And I completed a few more chapters in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: EoT, doing a bunch more jobs, including rescues and deliveries this time. There was also a minigame where I had to identify pokemon by their footprints, which was frustrating a bit at first since there’s not much to go on besides vague clues like if it’s chicken-like (look for a bird-type pokemon), or really wide (look for a fat one), etc., but after a couple of restarts I managed to get them all right. I can also recruit other pokemon now, usually when they have a sudden change of heart after beating them up in a dungeon, and I’ve got a handful of others now.
Plot-wise, time has stopped in some forest because the “time gear” (?) was stolen, though we can’t go there yet. I was assigned to explore a waterfall that turned out to have a trap in it, met a rival group of “meanies” named Team Skull, and soon we’ll all be off on an expedition to somewhere.
I can’t believe I actually bought a Pokemon game.
In my defense, it’s the only one I’ve ever bought, and it’s not one of the regular games in the series. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time is actually more of a roguelike, similar to things like Angband and Nethack more than anything else, and I loves me some Angband.
The story, such as it is, seems to be that I’m a human who’s somehow been turned into a Pokemon and lost his memory, so it’ll probably involve finding out what happened to me. A personality test at the beginning decided that I should be a Charmander, and I chose a Mudkip as my first companion. We’ve joined up with some kind of group of hunters and formed an exploration team of our own, and you get tasks from a job board to hunt down outlaw Pokemon inside dungeons (I think more types open up later on).
Once in the dungeon you move around from room to room, killing other monsters in the way, finding items, and making your way down the floors, much like any other roguelike game, and eventually you find the one you’re hunting, beat it, and return to the guild for your reward. Combat is fairly simple, just hit ‘A’ for your basic attack or open up the menus for the more advanced attacks that Pokemon usually have. You don’t directly control your partner, but you can tweak his ‘IQ’ settings to control his behaviour.
So far I’ve done a handful of these hunting jobs and gotten up to level 11. The story so far is that time is messed up somehow, as the name of the game implies, but things are still pretty vague so far.
Duke Nukem 3D was another one of those games where I only played the shareware episode since I couldn’t afford the full game at the time, but it just got an XBLA release, and since the Doom one worked out fairly well, I figured I’d give this one a shot, too.
And it is…hard. Even on the default difficulty level I’m constantly scrounging for health and ammo, and getting killed around every other corner. Pig cops in particular can take you down quickly with their shotgun blasts. Fortunately they included a ‘rewind’ mechanism in the 360 version, that lets you revert back to any previous point in the level upon dying, and that helps out a lot.
So far I’ve done the first three levels of the first episode, and they’ve taken quite a while, since it’s not always obvious what to do next. DN3D isn’t afraid to hide necessary stuff away in obscure locations, whereas Doom was much more straightforward.