Category Archives: PC

Gettin’ Paid In Africa

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I played a bit of Far Cry 2 as today’s game, after having only briefly started it before.  I’m not usually big on shooters, but this one’s different enough in how it’s more of an ‘open world’ one, with various factions and buddies to get missions and rewards from, lots of terrain to explore, etc.  It reportedly gets kind of repetitive once you get tired of clearing the same checkpoints of guards over and over, but I haven’t reached that point yet.  A keeper for now, I think.

Not The Good Drugs

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Today I randomly picked Black Market to check out, though I couldn’t remember where I’d gotten it in the first place.  One of those big indie bundles, probably.  Anyway, it’s a space trading game with a main storyline, but it felt more simplistic than I’d like.  I’d rather spend my time in Space Rangers 2 instead, so I’m not going to pursue this one any further.

Damn Ninjas

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Today’s game was Sengoku, one of Paradox’s grand strategy games but set solely in Japan in the warring states period.  I don’t really know much about that era though, so the constant shifting of territory between names I couldn’t recognize didn’t really mean anything to me. I thought I had a relatively good, peaceful development period going when my neighbour suddenly attacked and overwhelmed me, despite having good relations with them.  Not a bad game, but for my grand strategy fix I’ll go to Crusader Kings 2 instead, so it’s not a keeper.

Seriously

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Today I played Serious Sam: The Random Encounter and it’s…a bit of an odd duck.  Take the frantic shooting action of Serious Sam, and put it in…a turn-based JRPG?  It actually kind of works though, as combat consists of you running backwards away from a huge pack of enemies, selecting which weapon to use, and then you can move up and down to adjust your aim and dodge bullets while the turn executes, and then it freezes for the next turn and you can pick another weapon or item, etc.

It’s an interesting take on the JRPG style that’s appropriate for the Serious Sam series, but it got kinda repetitive very fast, as you wind up in fights every few steps you take.  Interesting, but not a keeper.

Mmmm, Bacon…

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I played The Baconing once before, but couldn’t remember much about it, so I revisited it as today’s game.  It’s a fairly standard ARPG whose main strength lies in the setting and characters rather than the combat, but it’s a bit too “monkey cheese” for me and I kept dying since you can lose health extremely rapidly.  Not a keeper.

Totally Gratuitous

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I checked out Gratuitous Tank Battles as my game for today, and it’s fairly standard tower defense with a few twists, like being able to design your own units, choose both the attacking and defending sides, and manually designate targets.  It’s hard to judge just how well I was actually doing though, especially since you don’t get much warning about what kinds of units are coming, so it feels like I just have to slap down a variety of defenses and hope that’s sufficient.  Not a keeper, though I think the previous game, Gratuitous Space Battles, might fit my tastes better.

Gatling Gears

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Today’s game is Gatling Gears and, eh… It seems competent enough for the type of game it is (Ikari Warriors-style ‘shmup’), but that genre doesn’t really do much for me, so off the hard drive it goes. It doesn’t help that it made me go through EA login and serial key registration twice, one time not even allowing me to paste my password. I try and use strong, unique, 16+ character passwords wherever possible, and forcing me to type them in by hand is a quick way to really piss me off…

Game-A-Day

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I suppose I should actually say something once in a while…

I’ve recently realized that I might have a few too many games, and hardly any of them even get played at all. I’m therefore putting something into motion that I’ve intended to do for a while now — play a different game that I haven’t played before every day. It’ll only be for an hour or two to get a feel for it and decide if it’s worth playing any further. If so, it gets put on the short list to come back to later, otherwise it gets uninstalled.

So, over the weekend I binged a bit and started with 1000 Amps, which is interesting but not really grabbing me enough to play much further; Blocks That Matter, which had a similar reaction but it’s short so I might finish it anyway; and Faerie Solitaire, which I might keep around just as an idle time-waster.

Tonight, I played the first chapter of Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon. It has a lot of the same mindless shooty fun as the previous Xbox game, but it also has some annoyances too, like how I constantly get swarmed in ways that make it hard to shoot, the active reload is really hard to hit, and some enemies just take waaay too many hits to kill. Apparently there are only three chapters though, so I think I’ll keep it and just do one runthrough, not bothering to farm weapons.

Hallelujah!

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Tonight, the SOE games suddenly came back online sooner than expected (the last update Sony gave said it was still “at least a few more days”), and I immediately hopped back into EQ2. Doing the tradeskill dailies in Odus for my Illusionist bumped him up to level 85 crafting, and with that I headed off to Velious and knocked out almost the entire tradeskill quest chain within a few hours. That took him right to level 90 jewelcrafting, and he now just has to go back after a day or two (the NPC won’t talk to me again until then) to get the whistle for starting the flying mount quests.

The MMO Mashup

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WoW: The big news here of course is Cataclysm, which came while this site was idle…and went. I made it through all of the zone content fairly quickly, usually only taking a couple days per zone. It was fun enough, but it’s awfully railroaded, with almost no choice in how to go about working your way through things.

After that, the expansion felt kind of empty. There wasn’t really any reason to revisit the zones, I didn’t feel like grinding instances over and over for equipment I didn’t really need for anything, the faction grinding rewards seemed kind of weak, archaeology was fun for a while but now it’s down to tediously grinding for Uldum sites… Cataclysm is probably the expansion I lost interest in the quickest. About the only thing I really ought to do is work some more on my Worgen druid and see what the revamped lower level zones are like, but it’s a low priority.

EQ2: I can’t remember where I left off, but our group has pretty much finished with The Bonemire, and…we haven’t really done anything lately. Scheduling problems meant we couldn’t get the group together for a few weeks, and with that loss of momentum, we haven’t even bothered trying to regroup in a couple months now.

I’ve still been playing a fair bit by myself, though. I got my mystic up to level 90 alchemy and took him through all of the tradeskill quest lines in the Odus and Velious expansions, netting a flying mount in the process and unlocking some faction gear I can’t wear yet. I’ve also been leveling my illusionist alt, getting him to 72 and taking him through the Kunark zones right now and working on his tradeskill as well.

Vanguard: And I finally gave Vanguard a shot, along with a handful of other forum members who got caught by the curiosity bug around the same time. I’m only level 14, having gone through the tutorial island and a small handful of quests on the mainland, so it’s still early yet, but it seems like a pretty decent game. It has some of that old-school EverQuest feel, but with a more interesting combat system, unique crafting and diplomacy systems, and a lot to see and do.

Champions Online: And oh yeah, I tried this too, but the tutorial section didn’t really grab me, so I never bothered going back to it, even though it’s now free-to-play.

I’d like to get back and play more EQ2 and Vanguard still, but, well, there’s still that whole SOE-is-down-for-who-knows-how-long thing…