Damn Spammers

I finished off Darwinia this morning, and it didn’t take as long as expected, though I did know that the Escort mission was going to be short. The remaining enemies were no threat, and although I only had to save 100 Darwinians, I wound up with 505 at the end.

The Temple level was then the final one, where I had to destroy boxes representing the spam emails that had the virus that corrupted the system in the first place. They complicated matters by sending out tendrils that would respawn enemies even on other islands, so that no area was completely safe.

But, it actually turned out to be a fairly easy level. The boxes were all fairly close to beam drop-off points, so I just rushed in some squads and dropped airstrike markers by the boxes, which were enough to destroy them. Presto, level completed in no time. I still went ahead and mopped up the remaining enemies scattered all over the place though, just to make it less anticlimactic.

And so ends Darwinia. Despite the rather easy win, it was still an interesting game in that every level introduced something new and unexpected, so it was never really boring. Beating it unlocked a level editor, but I don’t really have time to fiddle with it.

Purge The Red Heretics

Tonight I finished off two more levels in Darwinia. In Pattern Buffer, I encountered evil red Darwinians for the first time, and I was not prepared for them as they flooded out of portals in waves. I hadn’t used Armor much in the previous levels, but it was essential here for keeping the red ones away from my spawning areas and mission objectives (they’d try to take back stations that I parked my own green Darwinians at).

And in the Biosphere level I had to take over a whole bunch of Darwinian generators, which started off under the control of the red ones. Armor proved useful here too, but the Darwinians themselves were also key to controlling areas. The generators were on a bunch of different islands, so I’d have to clear out a generator or two with some squads to establish a beachhead, park some Armor near them to keep the other red ones on the island from taking them back, take control of the generators with green ones, generate a bunch of other green ones, and then use squads to cover them as I swarmed the rest of the generators on the island.

I also started the Escort mission, but didn’t have time to finish it. It doesn’t look too tough, though; it’s just a bunch of clearing out, and the only annoying part was a bunch of hard-to-reach seed launchers. I snuck around and eliminated those, and the rest will be trivial. (I suspect that I wasn’t really meant to take out the launchers, so that I would have had to escort the Darwinians through the level while still fending off enemies spawned by the seeds.)

After that I think there’s only one level left, Temple.

Hand-Holding Little Green Men

Getting back to regular gaming, I figured I may as well finish off what I started over the holiday weekend first. I only had time to do the Receiver level in Darwinia tonight, but it was fairly straightforward; I just had to clear enemies off of a bunch of islands and then guide some Darwinians over to them to operate the soul-catchers. The only real catch was that one island had those annoying ants, but I hit the goals before even reaching it, and there was a new big-headed snake enemy. It ate up a bunch of squads before I decided to try an Armour unit against it, and after getting one set up as a turret they went down quickly.

There’s at least three more levels to go (Pattern Buffer, Biosphere, and Escort), so it’ll probably take a few more days to finish it off. These later levels take longer just to do all of the guiding necessary.

Not To Be Confused With Pegging

Though I shouldn’t be letting myself get distracted any further, I couldn’t resist getting Peggle Nights now that it’s out on Steam for really cheap. It’s more of the same of the original game, with one new character and green peg ability added, but the new maps are a nice change of pace.

I finished off the main adventure mode tonight, but my skills must be rusty as I only full-cleared one board, though I at least managed to ‘ace’ (a new award where you beat a certain score) four of them. The final master level is a bit more difficult than expected too, since nearly all of the pegs can only be reached indirectly.

Weekend Wrapup

I was away for the last little while, but I still got plenty of gaming in. To quickly summarize:

I finished off the main story in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: EoT, after an number of plot revelations where I discovered that Dusknoir was actually a ‘bad guy’ (well, as bad as they get in Pokemon games), the time gear thief was actually working to stop him by placing the gears at a tower to stabilize time, and I was also from the future and the thief’s partner. A lot of the endgame was a series of linear slogs through dungeons, often without a full party, which worried me a bit since I didn’t have the opportunity to grind quests like I could back at the guild, but I managed to squeak through. The boss fight was tough since he dished out a lot of damage, and I was down to a single reviver seed, but the Smokescreen skill kept us from getting hit too often. There’s still other things to do afterwards, like opening up new areas, recruiting the rest of the Pokemon, and evolutions, but I don’t think I’ll have time for that.

I tried a game of Civ4: Colonization, but it was quickly apparent that it wasn’t really as much like base Civ4 as you might think, and I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t catch on to proper resource management and wasted a lot of effort there on things I wound up not being able to make, and gave up on that attempt. I love the Civ games, but I really need a good stretch of time where I can pay more careful attention to them.

I also restarted Darwinia (technically I had started it before, but didn’t have the save with me), and made it up to just past the mission where you first start to create armour. Most of the missions have been pretty easy so far, with the major difficulties coming from the ‘seed’ launchers that create new enemies (suicide rushes with squads seem to work best to wipe them out early on), and the damn ants. I wound up not even using the armour for the ants, and just used a bunch of squads, slowly inching them closer to the nests while they’re distracted picking up nearby souls, though even then it usually took a few attempts to finally lob enough grenades.

I finally played Depths of Peril, which is a rather interesting game in that it’s kind of like competitive Diablo. It has the same basic kill-loot-level-quest gameplay as Diablo, but you also control a ‘covenant’ where you can recruit other NPCs, and you have a house with a lifestone you have to defend. There are also a handful of other AI-controlled covenants, and they play the game much the same way you do; they have houses in town, you see them running around town and buying stuff from merchants and picking up quests, and you see them out in the combat fields, and they can actually wind up beating you to completing quests. You don’t want to let them do that, because they’ll earn influence from those quests and kills, and there’s a diplomacy aspect to it where covenants can form alliances, trade, or go to war and raid each other based on their influence and relationships to each other. You can win by either wiping out all of the other covenants, or merging them all into an alliance. In my game I wound up getting an alliance victory, mainly by letting them wipe each other out until only two others were left, and then buttering them up by giving them leftover items until they agreed to alliances.

The other new game I tried was World of Goo, a just-released puzzle game where you have a bunch of ‘goo balls’ that you can stretch out to form structures (think Meccano girders), with the goal of building up a structure that reaches a pipe on the map, with enough free-roaming goo balls left to satisfy a certain goal. The difficulty comes in the map layouts, terrain hazards, and the fundamental instability of the structure — the things you build have a very rubbery behaviour that leads to a lot of swaying, making it difficult to do things like build straight up. I’m most of the way through Chapter 1 so far, and each puzzle has been fairly different.

And the guys finally got together and for the first time we got a full band session going in Rock Band 2, unlocking a couple more achievements for me in the process. Oddly enough, playing with a full band actually seems to make things more difficult for me, since it’s harder to hear your own instrument among all the others.

The Mafia Means Business

And back in GTA3, I tried to work on more of the vigilante missions back on the original island. Unfortunately that was complicated by the fact that I’d left the Mafia and Triads rather pissed off at me, so I was being shot at constantly in large areas of the city. A regular police car wouldn’t survive, so I had to go fetch the Enforcer truck back on Staunton island, and even then it kept getting blown up suddenly from presumably too much damage.

I got enough vigilante kills for one more bribe at the safehouse and then gave up on it for the night.

Grand Theft Auto, For Real

I did a handful of more missions in GTA3 tonight, finally getting to the titular one and stealing some cars as a mission goal, not just for my own transportation. I also opened up a new weapons shop on the north end where I can now buy a rocket launcher, and did the vigilante mission to get a couple police bribe stars near my hideout. The vigilante mission is a piece of cake once you know a certain cheat-ish trick…

I should be getting close to the halfway point, according to the stats page.

So Much For Being A Good Samaritan

I figured I’d try the GTA3 ambulance missions, since the rewards are useful (health and adrenaline pickups at the hideout, and infinite running stamina). However, after numerous attempts, screw that. The ambulance tips over way too easily, the entrance to the hospital to drop people off is really narrow, and gang members would pull me out of the ambulance, instantly ending the mission.

So, I wound up starting on the missions for the Yakuza on the new island instead, and opened up a bunch of other mission-givers. I’m sure something’s going to drive me away to the next part of the city, though…

Grand Theft Loyalty

I did more missions in GTA3, resulting in a gang war with the Triads, and finally got introduced to the big boss of the Portland area. He had a bunch of missions as well, but they ended with getting betrayed by him, and I fled to the next area on Staunton Island.

So, it was time to hunt the hidden packages again, and now I have shotgun, body armour, and molotov pickups outside my hideout. The body armour one will be particularly handy, since I know where a couple other ones are, but they’re annoying to get to.

There’s also a new side mission to steal certain car models and park them at the docks, and I already collected most of them, mainly because I kept seeing them as I was driving away from the drop-off spot. There are some that are much rarer though, or won’t show up until later. Overall, I’m at 27% completion now.

Grand Theft Porn

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.)