Category Archives: PC

Weekend of WoW

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Unsurprisingly, I’ve spent the last few days in WoW doing a bit of catching up. I’m already up to level 42; six levels in three days isn’t too bad… I’ll probably take it at a bit more leisurely pace from here on, though.

I finished off the blacksmithing quests in Orgrimmar that had been bugging me for a while. I had to collect a lot of tin for them though, since I couldn’t afford to buy it. Tin seems rather difficult to find, but I had fairly good luck in Thousand Needles. And I also finished off some other miscellaneous quests to try and get rid of some items that had been clogging up the bank, though in my hunger for quests I seem to have found a few more…

I eventually decided to go with a standard protection build, and switched over to using a shield and a single-handed sword. Though fights do take slightly longer now, I can definitely survive a lot better as well, often only losing a small bit of health and being able to charge right into the next fight.

I gained a lot of my levels doing all of the quests that I could in the Arathi Highlands and Dustwallow Marsh, and now I’m working on them in the Badlands area. As usual, I had to run through some Alliance zones in order to get there, but I made sure to explore them along the way so that I could get the achievements. I will have that Explorer title one day…

Also Back…Sort Of

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Alright, fine. Tonight I reinstalled World of Warcraft, reactivated my account, and upgraded to WotLK.

The curiosity about the new expansion finally got the better of me, and it looks like I won’t be spending any more time in Tabula Rasa after all, so what the hell. I don’t make any guarantees about long-term longevity or such, though. Hell, it might take me another year just to finish off the Burning Crusade areas.

I’ve still got a lot of catching up to do, though. All I’ve really done so far is installed a few mods and finished off a couple quests I was still in the middle of.

Things That Begin With ‘F’

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Picking up where I left off before I was so rudely interrupted by hardware failure…

On Saturday I finished off the remaining sidequests in Fable 2, hunted down the remaining gargoyles and silver keys, and then finished the game. The final boss fight was…well, they definitely went for a different approach to it, and saying anything more would be too big a spoiler.

Unfortunately, because of the ending I chose, I lost my dog and my family. So, of course, I immediately went out and married the bustiest whore I could find. A few other post-game quests opened up, so I did them and picked up a few more achievements along the way.

In the end, Fable 2 took me around 26 hours, and was definitely a lot longer and better than the original. It’s not quite game-of-the-year material, but it wasn’t a waste.

After that, I finally got around to starting Fallout 3. I’m only a couple hours into it so far, but it’s pretty impressive so far. A lot of people thought it was a big risk to resurrect an old series from a different gameplay era with a fanatic fanbase and give it to a company with no connection to the original teams, but Bethesda seems to have pulled it off. It retains a lot of the same atmosphere of the originals while updating the gameplay without making it too much of an Oblivion clone.

I’m going with a high-INT character for dialogue options and focusing on energy weapons, and combat has been challenging so far, with a lot of scrimping for ammo. I’ve gone to the nearby town of Megaton and made a bit of cash though, so hopefully I can upgrade my equipment soon.

I haven’t run across too many quests yet, but one of the ones I have is interesting in that I had to choose to either disarm a bomb in the middle of the town, or set it off myself, depending on whether I wanted to help the sheriff or some shady figure in the bar. But then I went and told the sheriff about the shady guy’s request, he ran off to arrest him, got shot in the back while doing so, and then I wasted the shady guy. I’m not sure if that was the ideal outcome, but hey, free guns and ammo off both their bodies!

Unfortunately my gaming box has been hijacked to take over my server roles temporarily, so I may have to shelve it for a little while longer…

Fruit Is Now Safe From Fucking

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I finished off Episode 2 of Penny Arcade Adventures today, and it ended with a rather…different kind of robot fight. I wasn’t sure what to do at first since it seemed like nothing I did would work, but it was just a matter of getting the right combination of things.

Completing it opened up Insane Mode, but I’m not about to play through it again right away. I completed pretty much everything possible for a first run through anyway, and got most of the Steam achievements, including this one:

Monkey Knife Fight!

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I made quite a bit of progress in Penny Arcade Ep2 tonight, finally finishing up all of the tasks in the sanitarium, clearing out the rich area of town (burning down my potential new home in the process), and upgrading all of the weapons.

Now I have to sneak into a gathering of scientists by entering a robotic monkey into a combat tournament. Oh those wacky physicists…

Okay, I Lied

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I was going to start Fallout 3 next, but I decided instead to try and squeeze in the second Penny Arcade episode first, since it should be fairly short.

It’s more of the same of the first, really, with the semi-realtime reaction-based combat and usual complement of fetch quests. This time we’re trying to track down more information about the giant Fruit Fucker by visiting a robotics expert at a sanitarium. I’ve found him, but he’s not going to give up his secrets without a few quests first…

It retains the offbeat sense of humour of PA, of course. My main weapon this time is a hoe instead of a rake, and I got it upgraded into…a double-ended hoe. And one of the types of inmates we’ve been fighting has an attack named Daddy Never Hugged Me.

Demomania

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I have quite a few demos that I’ve downloaded but hadn’t had a chance to try yet, so here are some quick impressions of them:

Kudos 2: A life-simulation game, but more along the lines of the old Alter Ego games than The Sims, in that you have much more direct control and choices, in menu-driven sequences, rather than watching over someone else. Nearly everything you do affects your stats, so you have to balance work, leisure, your friends, your health, etc. Looks like it might be fun for a few playthroughs just to experiment with it.

Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts: Build your own vehicles out of parts you find in order to compete in challenges. Looks interesting, but the vehicles control a bit awkwardly and it’s not really clear from the demo just how much freedom there really will be in the vehicle construction. I’d wait for word-of-mouth on this one.

Mirror’s Edge: An interesting new idea, and seems to be well-done, but I’m concerned about the large number of context-sensitive controls. I just ran past all of the enemies since I couldn’t remember what the combat moves were or get the disarm timing right.

Fracture: Eh, it’s another shooter-with-a-gimmick, this time in the form of a terrain-deforming weapon that gets used constantly in contrived ways. Not my cup of tea.

Hmmm, I didn’t get nearly as many demos done as I’d hoped.

Officer Down, Finally

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And so I finished off San Andreas tonight, and the final mission didn’t take nearly as long as I expected since I managed to complete it on the first try. It was split into two parts: you first had to work your way up and down a drug lab building to take out the first target, and then it was a fairly easy chase through the city streets with an on-rails shooting segment that was again helped by mouse aiming. I did almost fail the first part though, since the building is on fire on the way back down and I got shot up quite a bit while trying to figure out where enemies were through the smoke, the right spots to hit with the fire extinguisher, the tight time limit, etc.

In the end I put just short of 48 hours into the game and hit 77.5% completion according to the stats screen, both of which are much higher than the previous GTA games. There’s just so much more to do in San Andreas. This is the one of them that I’d be tempted to try for 100% completion in…but not right away. I’m kind of sick of GTA-ish games now after doing these three in a row, so I’ll probably just chip away at it in small bursts over time.

Since my Fable 2 LCE code still hasn’t arrived after the promised 10 business days, it’s losing its turn in the queue, and Fallout 3 will be up next. But first: demos!