I played my elemental druid build in D2 a bit more today, and he’s managing to survive so far despite not being able to spend any more skill points for a while yet. I just need to make it 6 more levels before I can start pumping the Dire Wolf skill… Then I’ll have to rely on them for a while until I get the fire skills up in levels.
I’ve also been “playing” another game recently, and at the office, even! For just over two months, I had ProgressQuest running in the background, and my goal was to see just how far my character could get in a single launch of the game. After 66 days, I was finally forced to reboot my workstation to apply the usual monthly security patches (the previous month’s patches hadn’t required a reboot, fortunately), and his glorious career came to an end, though he’d managed to get a decent ranking, at least (3674th out of over 27,000 as of this writing). His final stats (click to biggify):
April 12, 2008 – June 16, 2008, RIP
I’m sure I’ll have many cherished memories of ProgressQuest, like the time I clicked on a window edge but got the PQ window instead of the mail client, or the time I had to move it upwards a bit so I could see the output in a terminal window…
I finally got around to putting some time into GRID tonight, creating my own team and participating in a couple championships of the career mode. One of those actually was a destruction derby, but even the regular races felt a lot like it at times. I don’t know if I just suck at it or if it’s intentional, but it seems almost impossible for me to complete a race without a lot of bumping and crashing into other drivers, even in the open wheel races. The AI is aggressive enough that they’ll regularly bump into each other, not just me.
I also took a shot at a Le Mans event, where the entire 24 hour race is compressed down into a shorter time period of your choosing (24 minutes by default, I think), but still takes you through the whole day-night-day cycle. It made the rubberbanding of the AI really obvious though, as I could blow past some cars on the Mulsanne straight only to suddenly have them caught up and tailgating me shortly after, when I haven’t lost any time.
Sure is pretty, though…
I figured it was about time to catch up on the latest XBLA games, so I grabbed a handful of demos of those that looked interesting. Aces Of The Galaxy was the first, and it looks pretty good and plays pretty well, but I’m not terribly good at these kinds of rail shooters.
Penny Arcade Adventures Episode 1 has a fairly nifty character generator in keeping with the art style, which actually works fairly well in 3D. It’s also good that they didn’t try to use voices for the characters, since that rarely works out well for established characters. The mechanics are rather Paper Mario-ish, except that you have to switch between characters and initiate their attacks in real time, which I found a bit annoying. That aside, it looks to be fairly well-written and funny though, so it might be worth it after all and I’ll probably eventually pick it up.
And finally, Roogoo is cute, but weird. You have to save the home planet of these little creatures by…dropping blocks through discs that you rotate to match up the right block shapes? With various twists thrown in as you progress, of course. Cute, but I don’t think I really have time for it.
Yesterday I tried out another build in D2 that I haven’t done before, a fire elementalist druid. Unfortunately this looks like it’s going to be one of those builds that’s a real pain in the ass to play at low levels since you need to save nearly all your skill points for higher-level skills and synergies, leaving you extremely weak early on. This one might wind up on the Pile O’ Abandoned Characters.
Today I just needed to kill some time while waiting on some OS upgrades on another system, so I got in a bit of Hellgate: London, finishing off a couple more quests but not really getting anything interesting or moving anywhere new.
I also popped into EQ and fiddled with monster shrouds for a bit. They’re kind of neat in that they let you transform into a monster, of a level of your choice between 5 and whatever your character is at. It lets you quickly try out different classes at various levels, but it’s not a full replacement for your main character — you have barely any equipment, can’t wear regular armour and weapons, you don’t get the same spells as the real class, you don’t earn xp, and you have to unlock other types of monsters by killing a whole bunch with ones you’ve already unlocked. It’s an interesting momentary diversion, anyway.
As I suspected, I could not resist Diablo II’s clutches for long, and now I’m trying a ‘skelemancer’, focusing on amassing an army of skeletons. I’m also playing it on hardcore mode, where death is permanent, for a bit of extra spice. It does really affect the way you play, since now you have to focus on survival above all else, but the necro is a pretty easy class for that to begin with. Still, one careless moment is all it could take…
I’m up to about halfway through Act 2 Normal so far, at level 20, and I’ve managed to find three uniques so far. I’m only actually using one of them, an amulet that adds a lot of fire resist. One other was a sabre that isn’t useful to me, and the third was a voulge that my merc could use, but won’t, because it has the annoying make-enemies-flee effect on it. I’m going to have to start making mule characters soon…
I only played Diablo II for a little bit tonight, getting to the inner cloister, before realizing that I don’t really like playing a javazon that much. I could always go for one of the reliable old standbys, like a summoning necro, but I probably shouldn’t be wasting too much time on such an old game anyway…
I also killed some time with the newly released Spore Creature Creator. My designs are fairly crude so far though, compared to a lot of others:
More after the cut.
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I also rounded out the night with another catch-up session in Rock Band, where I picked up the recent MTV pack. None of the songs were really all that notable on their own, but they did have a bit of variety to the note charts. They were really short and fairly easy though, and I hit 100% on all three of them.
I also took another stab at GG&HT, improving my score on it by about 15k or so, though there’s still plenty of room for improvement. It’s one of those songs where I have a tendency to break note streaks as I’m trying to activate overdrive, actually making things worse for myself.
Despite all of the new (and even not-so-new) games I still have yet to finish, tonight I slipped back into the clutches of an old friend: Diablo II.
A new ladder season started yesterday, so it was a fresh start for everyone, taking some of the sting out of having forgotten to refresh my characters and losing them. I’m trying a javelin-based Amazon this time, since it’s one of the builds I haven’t tried yet, though I’m not actually using javelins yet since I have a pretty spiffy mace and haven’t put too many points into the javelin skills yet.
I ended this first day at the outer cloister of the monastery in Act 1, at level 13. There are already people in the 80s on the leaderboards, but I’m guessing they haven’t exactly gotten a lot of sleep lately…