Category Archives: PC

As Long As It’s Not His Booty

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And tonight I finally got around to starting King’s Bounty. It’s a modern remake of an old game of the same name, but I wasn’t familiar with it, so to me it’s mostly similar to how the Heroes of Might and Magic games work. (Which isn’t surprising, since HoMM was influenced by the original King’s Bounty…)

It’s mainly a tactical battle game, pitting your recruited units and hero against various enemies that you encounter as you wander around exploring and completing quests, with some RPGish elements in how you upgrade your own character and perform quests for people. Unlike the HoMM games, you only control your one hero and his ‘stack’ of units.

I’ve gone with a mage character, and so far, all I’ve had time for is the tutorial quests, and I will start in earnest tomorrow.

Super Mario Thief

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I finally finished up Trine today, doing the last half of the game in one burst. The levels started getting harder again, and a lot longer, but they weren’t too difficult and I picked up enough new abilities that solutions weren’t so hard to find (especially the floating pyramid).

The last level seemed rather unfair, though, since it involved a timed ascent up a tower, with obstacles spawning in the way. I played the rest of the game at a fairly casual, deliberate pace, and it was rather frustrating to suddenly be forced into a fast, frantic event with little margin for error. I eventually beat it with the thief after a good dozen or so tries, but it wasn’t really that fun compared to the rest of the game.

And then to add insult to injury, it didn’t give me the achievement for completing the game…

Vengeance!

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I got briefly distracted by Bethesda’s release of Daggerfall for free on their site. Although I already own it, it’s nice to have a zipped up package of it, and in a fit of nostalgia I set up DOSBox for it and reinstalled it. I never actually got very far in the main quest line in it before, so who knows, maybe I’ll stick with it this time. I made my typical longsword/mage character, and so far I’ve just gotten him to the city of Daggerfall and done a couple of quests for the mage’s guild. It’s the quests that lead to dungeons that I’m still wary of…

I also completed a couple more levels of Trine, and these ones were actually easier than the previous ones. I think I would have even gotten the don’t-die-in-a-level achievement in the first one if not for some experimenting near the end… Nothing really all that notable about them, though.

And I finished off the day by trying out the remake of Defender Of The Crown, which I picked up in some sale ages ago. You have to conquer England by building up armies, conquering territories, etc., but it’s just not very interesting. It’s fairly simplistic, with no real tactical depth to the combat — you select a card, press Attack, and hope you win… I don’t think I’m going to bother putting any more time into it.

Getting Wood

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I finally got back to Trine tonight, though I only had time for two more levels. I picked up a new ability for the wizard, which lets him make wooden planks as well as boxes, so now I can cross more places. The puzzles are definitely getting trickier, sometimes taking a while to think about what I really need to do to proceed, though I haven’t gotten stuck yet. I have died a handful of times though, so I can forget the complete-an-area-without-dying achievement…

Tryin’

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The next major game I want to play is King’s Bounty, partly because it’s supposed to be really good and partly because I’ve already installed it and used up an activation for it, so I should finish it before I wipe the system to put Windows 7 on it later this month…

But before that, I’m going to wind down for a bit with something simpler, so tonight I started Trine, a new platformer game. It’s fairly simple, progress from left to right, solving puzzles and defeating monsters as you go along. The gimmick to it is that you actually control three people, a mage, a thief, and a knight, which you can switch between at any time and each of which has different abilities. At any particular moment, you might want the mage to summon boxes to climb, or the thief to use her grappling hook, or the knight to beat up some skeletons. And as is typical nowadays, the puzzles are often physics-based, depending on putting a weight in the right place, swinging about, etc.

So far I’ve done the first three areas, dying a couple of times thanks to spike traps. It’s a fairly short game, so I should finish it tomorrow.

Blue Booty

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Back in Mass Effect tonight, I stole the Normandy back and got out of the Citadel easily enough, and then celebrated my freedom by finishing off a couple minor side quests and the item collections. There wasn’t much of a reward for the collections, though, just some money and xp that I didn’t really need by this point anyway.

Then it was off to Ilos to track down Saren. This also triggered the infamous sex scene, though it’s actually pretty tame and tasteful by gaming standards. Really, the worst (best) you see is a blue butt. Anyway, on Ilos I learned a lot more about the Protheans and what happened to them, and then it was back to the Citadel to save the universe.

To say more would be too spoilery, but the ending was appropriately epic. I doubt I’ll have the time to do an opposite-style playthrough (male/soldier/renegade), but I’m definitely looking forward to Mass Effect 2 now, and hoping that there’s a PC version that isn’t delayed too much…

Don’t Fear The Reapers

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It was another long day in Mass Effect, starting out with saving some space hippies. The side quests are getting a bit repetitive, though, since there’s very few different ship and planetary base layouts. So, next I headed to Noveria, where after an introductory corruption investigation, I went off to confront Matriarch Benezia. I didn’t really learn much from this segment though.

I did a couple more side quests I’d picked up along the way, and then headed off to an asteroid to do the Bring Down The Sky DLC mission. Although it only encompassed a single planet, it was still fairly meaty, with multiple places and quests to work through. The end result was a fairly nice piece of armour for Tali, for whom it’s been fairly tough to find any armour.

I then headed to Virmire to continue the plot again, and it was a fairly long segment in which I lost a crew member (though he won’t really be missed that much…), and fought Saren, though it turned out to be an unwinnable fight. I did learn a lot more about Saren’s plans though, and the Reaper that seems to be pulling all the strings.

The Council isn’t so convinced though, so now I have to find a way to work around their lack of cooperation…

Gotta Pay The Bills

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I took a bit of a break from Mass Effect tonight to pop back into EQ2. I’d been meaning to do a bit more in it anyway, but the pressing need actually came from the player housing that it has — I was worried that I was about to fall behind on the payments needed to maintain your house. It turned out I was down to 7 days left on my current upkeep, and only had enough cash on me to extend it by one more week.

So, I needed to make some money, and figured I’d pick up some while continuing along the usual quest chains. I finished off one last quest in the Peat Bog, picked up a bunch of other quests in Qeynos, and then stumbled into the Down Below, where I did some simple item collection while getting lost in the extensive tunnels. I then found my way to The Caves, where there was another batch of quests to be picked up, and left off there for the day. I made enough money to stave off getting evicted for another five weeks, at least.

I only just realized today that when I target an enemy, I can see which other ones are ‘linked’ to it by seeing targeting circles at their feet. That’ll help greatly compared to EQ1, where you had to eyeball distances between enemies, estimate whether they’re in assist range or not, and remember which enemy types are social with each other.

Kaidan Was Kind Of A Jerk Anyway

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It was a long day in Mass Effect as I finished Feros, involving a long slog through the Thorian part. Afterwards, more was revealed about Saren’s ship and how he controls people, though I still don’t know where he is.

Upon returning to the ship, the romance plot kicked in and I was forced to choose between Kaidan and Liara. A whiny marine, or blue boobies, hmmm, a tough choice indeed… I went to Luna and got my specialist class for finishing the mission there, and then worked on some more of the investigation assignments I’d picked up along the way. None of them are really related to the main plot, but they’re good for loot, xp, and bits of lore.

My level is somewhere in the 30s now, and it’s been getting annoying having to stop to break stuff down into omnigel, since there’s no convenient way to do it for large batches of items. I hit the Rich achievement, which let me buy the high-end Spectre equipment, so I don’t even really need any more weapons for the main characters. (I can’t afford them for all the crew members yet, but I’ve been sticking with Liara and Tali as my other squad members.)

I’m also starting to get personal requests from the other crew members. So far I’ve helped Wrex retrieve some old family armour, and next up I think I’ll do whatever it was Garrus requested.

Space Monkeys

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Getting back to Mass Effect, I finished up the side quests in the Citadel and resumed the main quest, wherein I was suddenly promoted to being a Spectre and sent off to investigate some leads.

I first headed off to find Liara, the final crew member, and had to search a few planets before finding her. Upon landing on a planet, you drive a vehicle called the Mako around, and the controls are a bit unwieldy since it has a large turning radius and tends to bounce around a lot once you hit uneven ground. I got the hang of it though, and soon found the ruins Liara was hiding in, cleaned out some Geth, and rescued her. Some of the fights were actually pretty tough in this part since I was still getting the hang of trying to make the most of my biotic abilities.

Now that Liara’s part of the crew, I talked to her for a while and she eventually brought up her people’s mating rituals (hubba hubba). Apparently they don’t even need to touch their partners…

I returned to the Citadel to finish off a few random quests I’d picked up along the way, start a few more new ones that appeared, and headed off to do some random exploration. There are plenty of planets that aren’t directly plot-related, but you can still land on them to find various minerals, artifacts, loot, or minor side quests, like the one where a monkey stole the data module from a crashed probe and I had to hunt down the one that stole it in another set of ruins.

I eventally landed on Feron, one of the potential leads, where I’m now in the middle of helping a group of colonists there fend off a Geth invasion.