He Can Sit Down There And Sulk For All I Care

Having finally gotten my internet connection back, I downloaded a whole bunch of other tracks for rFactor (about, oh, 40…), but only had time to install and test a few. One of the Nordschleife variants was a bit amusing in that the cars all start out in a parking lot, but if you chose an F1 race, the cars were too fast to get out of the lot safely and would crash and bump all over the place. In fact, I had to disable the ‘Auto Pit’ option since it just wouldn’t behave properly in too many cases, often bumping the car right up against a barrier or even failing to start at all.

And I got a bit further in Diablo 2, taking my HC necromancer to the entrance of Nihlithak’s Temple. I’ll probably avoid Nihlithak himself though, as his Corpse Explosion is rather dangerous, and the reward isn’t really worth the risk.

Racing By Myself

I fiddled around a bit with rFactor today, reinstalling some mods for it: V8Factor (the V8 Supercars series), FSOne 2006 (the 2006 F1 season), and Historic GT & TC (imports all of the classic cars from GT Legends). There are plenty of other addons at rFactorCentral, but those were the only ones I managed to get before my internet went flaky for the rest of the weekend…

Since the FSOne and Historic mods make fairly large changes to the UI, I handled these differently this time by having separate rFactor installs just for them, but with the unnecessary vehicles deleted and the config file pointing to the first install’s track directory. This lets me run the mods separately, so they don’t conflict with each other, but all of the installs will still be able to use all of the tracks I install, without having to install them multiple times.

And, of course, I did a bit of racing, though it was more like just testing since I couldn’t get back online. Racing around the ovals was the easiest way to test out some of the new cars, but it also pointed out just how much I need to get back to trying to use the wheel — with the gamepad, the input is just too jerky, when you really need smooth, gradual turns into those corners.

Hello Again Diablo, And Goodbye

Unable to do anything further in Hellgate: London until the 2.0 patch, I turned back to Diablo 2 today and got my HC necromancer through Act 4 and up to the first waypoint in Act 5, putting him in a good farming spot.

Diablo was a bit tougher than expected, as he instantly crushed all of my skeletons as soon as he appeared, and the golem and merc didn’t last much longer after that. After finding a skill shrine and resummoning a slightly tougher group of skellies, the second time went much better, partly due to getting Decrepify on him early on and partly because he stuck to melee attacks for a while, rather than the much more dangerous lightning. Now, the next dangerous bit is going to be the ancients on the Arreat summit…

A Little Slower Than Expected

Well, I didn’t hit level 49 tonight in Hellgate: London like I hoped I would. I did get some nifty new weapons, though. I’d found a unique sniper rifle yesterday, the Voodoo Rifle, but didn’t take a close look at it until today, and it turned out to be a lot better than I thought. It does three different types of damage, has high base ignite and stun ratings, and part of the damage is splashed over an area effect, including the stun if you add a physical damage mod.

I don’t usually like to use sniper rifles since they have a really slow rate of fire, so you have to make each shot count, and it’s annoying how the screen shakes when you fire it. After slapping in some mods to add fire damage and increase the ignite attack rating though, I think it’ll be my primary weapon from here on, as ignite and the stun kick in fairly often. Enemies that usually rush towards me are often held still and killed before even getting close now.

I also found a couple pistols with some skill buffs for summoning a better drone, for buff equipment. There’s only one or two points on each though, and I can certainly do better, but I’ll just have to cross my fingers and hope for good drops.

And finally, I used the skill retrainer I’d been holding on to to reset my allocated skills to zero. But I didn’t spend any, either. The 2.0 patch is due sometime soon and it’ll add new skills to the class, so I don’t want to spend any until I see what they are. But I had to use it now, because they’ll be giving out a new retrainer with the patch, but you can’t have more than one. This way, I get to respend my skill points and still hold on to the new retrainer, effectively getting a free one.

Another Day, Another Level

Using my list of optimal zones, I hit level 48 in Hellgate: London tonight. Though it slowed down a bit, I think I could still easily do a level a day until I hit 50. Now I just have to decide whether to do that grinding before or after the rest of the main quest…

I have to think about upgrading my equipment a bit, too. I only just realized recently that I could have a separate set of armour and weapons for buffing purposes, since the stats of the drone depend only on what skill and equipment modifiers (Minion Armour +x%, Minion Health +x%, etc.) were in effect at the time it was summoned, so I don’t have to keep them on after that. I’ve got some half-decent equipment modifiers at the moment, but I still need more skill point bonuses.

Another Trip To The City, What’s Left Of It

I was lured back into an old friend today. It’s not really a great game, but there’s still something addictive about the type of gameplay Hellgate: London has, as seen in the far-too-large number of hours I’ve put into Diablo 2, Titan Quest, etc.

I complained about slow leveling before, but since then I’ve discovered that the trick is to be hunting enemies three levels above you for the maximum amount of xp per kill. Following that guideline, and making a list of zones by the level of monsters found therein, I managed to gain two whole levels today. That’ll let me get a bit further on the main quest, and there’s only three more levels until I hit the cap at 50. I’m not really sure where I want to spend my last few skill points, so I’ll hold on to those for now…

Oh Right, That Other Music Game

I got back to Guitar Hero 3 for the first time in quite a while today, mainly to check out some of the free songs released recently. I Am Murloc is silly, but fun, and the Dropkick Murphys pack isn’t really my kind of music, but was still interesting to play.

I also retried a handful of other built-in and downloaded songs, and improved on my old scores on all of them, so at least I’m getting a bit better. It did drive home just how much harder GH3 is than Rock Band, even on medium, as I didn’t even come close to 100%-ing any of them.

So Much For Cross-Platform Cooperation

I played a bit more of HC Diablo 2 today, but not on the necro. Instead, I just killed a couple hours in order to make a mule character permanent, managing to get him to the outer cloister in the process. Mules will be particularly important in HC, since otherwise I’m going to lose a ton of other stuff stored in the stash should a character die.

I was going to install D2 on my Mac and use it to do the transfer, since I have a second set of CD keys for it, but I ran into a bit of a snag. Apparently the OS X 10.5.3 update broke a bunch of older games, including D2, and it just plain won’t run at all now. Oh well, I instead resorted to drop-muling the items I had, even though it’s a bit riskier.

But I Still Have A Negative Number Of Fans

I spent a bit of time over the last couple days rocking out, or at least an approximation thereof. First, I picked up the Pixies album recently released for Rock Band. A lot of the songs are really short (some are even less than 100 notes, on medium) and not too difficult, but there’s a decent amount of variety to them, at least.

I then finally got to try out co-op mode with a friend, and it worked fairly well, though it’s still disappointing that you can’t do the world tour mode online. Something to hope for in Rock Band 2, I guess.

And this afternoon I spent a while on my HC necromancer in Diablo 2, getting him through the rest of Act 2 and all of Act 3. No real difficulties so far, though I’m going to have to watch out for the Stygian Doll monsters in the nightmare and hell difficulties. Their suicide explosion will be powerful enough then that I’ll run a very real risk of instant death. I should probably start thinking about the bone armour skills before that point…