Category Archives: PC

Stupid Gnolls

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We finally got our EQ2 group going again on Sunday, and finished a few of the quests in the Sundered Splitpaw content, getting the stone that lets us teleport back there whenever we want.

Well, except for one group member, who got killed during one instance and couldn’t get back in and get credit for the quest. We’d already exhausted the group quests that contribute faction, so we tried to do a solo quest for him, but it turns out that it really does force you to do those solo — you wind up alone in your own instance even if you’re in a group. It’s a rather unfortunate design consequence, and hopefully we’ll be able to work out some way to help him out.

We’re getting a bit restless being stuck at level 50 though, so I think sometime soon we’re going to flip the AA switch and get back to leveling up in new areas.

Conquering…Part Of The World

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I spent a good chunk of Saturday playing a game I’d meant to get to for a while now: Europa Universalis III. I took the easy way out and played as Britain, which can largely keep to itself and avoid the conflict in Europe. First priority was to sell off the provinces near France, then I conquered Scotland, and then absorbed Ireland into the empire.

From that point on it was mainly a matter of economics, trying to get as much money and research as I could. Around the 1460s I finally got the Quest For The New World national idea and started colonizing North America, beginning around the Newfoundland and Nova Scotia territories. It’s slow going from that point on though due to colonial range restrictions and slow colony growth.

At that point I started a new game and flipped things around out of curiosity, playing as the Huron instead, with a goal of just seeing how long I could survive as soon as the Europeans arrived and what the state of Europe was at that point. It was tougher than expected though, since they start off next to the Iroquois, and it wasn’t long before we found ourselves at war.

Beating the Iroquois militarily wasn’t that tough, but what makes combat among native tribes annoying is that they can take over territories instantly, turning it into a game of whack-a-mole as they take over a couple provinces, you beat them and take one back, they retreat to another province and take it over, repeat… And then even once you’ve beaten them, the revolt risk in the captured territories remains high, and the instant any rebels appear they reset the revoltrisk-raising nationalism flag on that territory. It took a lot of luck and reloads before they finally settled down and I’d fully assimilated them into the Huron nation.

It was calm from that point on, and once I hit around 1530, I finally noticed the border of another new nation nearby, though it’s still an unknown territory and they haven’t yet revealed themselves.

Both games are still in progress though, as there’s still a long ways to go until 1820…

So Lonely

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Our weekly EQ2 group got delayed again, but I hung around and played my illusionist alt for a while, getting him from 48 to 50 and completing a handful of quests for the Sootfoot goblins in Lavastorm. The same ones I already did on my mystic, but I don’t really want to get too far ahead on an alt and spoil upcoming surprises.

I also farmed my good friend Fire Toad whenever he spawned, and got a number of decent items for my other alts. I was surprised to have an Ornate Chest spawn when I killed a plain, non-named enemy though, as I’d only ever seen them on ‘special’ monsters before. I guess it’s possible for any drop, but just ultra-ultra-rare.

So Dirty

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It initially started out as a brief diversion one night, but I played Dirt 2 for a bit and then proceeded to pretty much finish it off over the next few days.

I mainly did the rally, trailblazer, rallycross, and gatecrasher events, though. The ones involving buggies and trucks, like landrush and raids, were not exactly my favourites; I was fine once I got ahead, but the AI would always create a mess in the first few turns, often locking wheels with me or spinning me around or into the side of the track, leading to numerous restarts.

In the end I wound up doing the minimum of those events needed to complete all of the major events, including the world tours, X Games events, and the Colin McRae Challenge. The latter ended with a nice little tribute video to the guy, which was rather touching.

I’m not technically done everything in it yet, but with all those major events out of the way, and most achievements completed, I’m considering it finished.

Mixed Bag

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A handful of smaller games or gameplay sessions I’ve done recently:

Puzzle Chronicles is one of the games I grabbed in the recent Steam sale and…I’m kind of regretting it. The art and story are terrible, even if they aren’t really relevant to the gameplay (I wish it would let me name my guy Pouty McPouterson). The gameplay is weird, though. It builds on the usual match-falling-blocks, but they fall horizontally, and you fight for control over board area with the opponent. It’s hard for me to visualize combos that way, and there’s a ton of different gem types to complicate things further. Not really what I was expecting.

I played a bit more of Joe Danger, getting through the second series of challenges. I finally discovered the trick to racking up scores (doing, well, tricks), but it quickly becomes a lot of stuff to keep track of while you’re trying to do tricks, avoid obstacles, hit the goals for the track, etc. It’s still a good game, but I’m just no good at it.

Cuboid got a bit more play due to checking out the Playstation Plus benefits, which adds some extra levels and an editor. I didn’t get Plus, but I played it for a bit anyway, getting to about two-thirds of the way through the beginner levels. Things are getting complicated now, with things like weight-sensitive switches, teleporters that split the block into two, ‘health’ pickups and move limits before you ‘die’, etc. I’ll have to get back to it again at some point when I have more time and brainpower to dedicate to it.

In Borderlands, I cleared out the rest of the quests for New Haven and Rust Commons East, which puts me at the start of the Krom’s Canyon area. Our group hasn’t really played together much recently, but hopefully we’re not too far apart now that I’ve caught up a bit.

And in an effort to clear out some older games, I tried the expansions for Quake and Quake II, but couldn’t get them to work since they crash immediately. It would be better to use them with a modern engine port anyway but…it’s just not worth the effort to me.

WTT FBSS 4 SMR

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We skipped the usual EQ2 night on Thursday since people were tired, so we moved it to Sunday instead.

We quickly finished off the Flowing Black Silk Sash heritage quest and although the item isn’t useful for me, that bumped the guild to level 24. We then headed off to the Splitpaw Saga content, which involved working our way through a couple of dungeons until we reached a quest hub. We only had time to do one of the quests though, and apparently we need to do three before we get the item that’ll let us teleport back there.

The entry dungeon was at least a bit more interesting in most in that getting through it involved some simple physics puzzles and blowing up cracked walls, rather than the usual old ‘kill N gnolls’…

Damn You, Steam!

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Steam suddenly launched a summer sale a few days ago, and I’ve been buying too damn much stuff on it. I haven’t spent a lot of time on anything bought in it yet, but there are some initial impressions:

Crash Time III: The hook of this one is that you play as a pair of detectives and chase down crooks in kinda-realistic police chases. Only ‘kinda’ though, since I’m not sure real detectives use robot drones that drive under the criminal’s car and blow it up, or cause horrific chain crashes… It’s better than I thought it would be, but the difficulty is a bit uneven. One of the first missions unlocked is unbeatable with the cars I have now — even accelerating flat-out, the crook can’t be caught up to and gets away.

Hearts of Iron III: Semper Fi: An expansion that supposedly fixes a lot of the problems with the original HoI3. Unfortunately the performance is really uneven, with a lot of sudden long pauses and jerky map scrolling. And some dumb stuff still seems to occur: Japan couldn’t even make it into northern China, it still seems to have trouble with making landings, etc.

Dark Void Zero: A retro-8bit-style platformer game with a jetpack. It’s pretty well-done, but damn, it’s hard. Enemy shots seem really hard to dodge while you’re using the jetpack, and the levels feel huge. I’m not even sure what to do to pass the first one yet, if I can even survive long enough.

Shocked!

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I put in a lot of time over the last three days into BioShock 2, and just finished it off tonight. My original scheme of playing it on hard with the Vita-Chambers turned off was turning into a grueling slog though, so I wound up turning it down to medium.

Overall, I enjoyed it a lot. The plot was familiar-feeling, with an extremist ideologue villain and someone with a dark past and of questionable trust helping you along, but it added enough twists to keep it interesting. The ending felt like a satisfying payoff, even without a traditional Big Bad Boss Fight. There were some pretty good set-piece fights and escape sequences, though.

Combat was a lot more chaotic than it was in the first one. I preferred the drill and electric shock combo a lot in the middle sections, but fights became just a frenzied blur. Towards the end I started relying on the machine gun and rivet gun along with the bee swarm most of the time, for a more traditional ranged fight. It worked well enough that I never really bothered to try out the other weapons like the spear gun and launcher very much.

Of course, now I should play through again on hard to get the achievement for that (now being free to use the Vita-Chambers) and see what happens when you go the evil route. But…time is limited, so I think that’s enough BioShock 2 for now.

But In The Meantime…

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We had our usual Thursday EQ2 group, and wound up finishing off a handful of the longer quest series in the Everfrost zone. We’ve still got the final step to go in one of them though, since it requires clearing an area until a named goblin spawns, and it was getting late and we knew it could take a while and be rather boring. Maybe next time.

And I also picked up a little indie game called Eversion on Steam, based on the word-of-mouth on some forums. It’s a Mario-esque platformer, but the twist is that you can trigger certain ‘eversion’ points on the map to alter the atmosphere of the level, which affects how the enemies behave, which barriers become passable or impassible, and how you need to go about collecting gems on the level. It’s really short and I already got the basic and third endings for it, but it was a decent amount of fun for the cost. There’s a second ‘good’ ending if you collect all the gems, and I’m at something like 201/240, but some of them are tricky enough that I don’t really feel like spending a lot of time trying for them.

New

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Wow, there’s a whole bunch of new stuff to catch up on.

I picked up Blur for the 360, since it looked interesting and I’m winding down on Forza 3. It’s basically like a Mario Kart-style racer, with powerups you pick up and fire at other racers, but on realistic cars and tracks. You can also use powerups to block incoming attacks instead. So far I’ve found the single-player game a bit frustrating since it seems like so much depends on random luck; I can come in second place one race, and then 18th the next, and I can imagine it getting frustrating trying to hit the specific advancement requirements.

In online multiplayer though, Blur is a blast. It doesn’t even really matter where you eventually wind up placing, with 20 players in total there’s plenty of action going on no matter where you are. There’s a level-based progression system that unlocks new cars and ‘mods’ that affect the rules slightly, and I’m up to level 13 (of 50) so far.

While picking up Blur, I noticed that Picross 3D was out. I played the hell out of the original DS Picross, so I had to pick this one up. It’s the same basic idea, expose the image within a grid by carving out unwanted blocks, but this time it’s a sculpture in a 3D block. The information you use is fairly different though, as you’re only told the total number of blocks to keep in a given row, how many groups the blocks are broken into, and not all rows are numbered. There’s a fairly lengthy tutorial that explains it all though, and I’ve perfected the Easy puzzles and just started in on the Normal difficulty.

And it’s not so new, but a fair bit of stuff has happened in EQ2 as well. I played my illusionist around the Everfrost area for a while last weekend, getting him 5 levels and burning up all the saved-up vitality xp. My mystic cleared out a bunch of the monster-farming quests in his log and then in the weekly group we went and finished off the Golden Efreeti Boots quest. Or the rest of the group did, anyway — I screwed up and missed a turn-in when we were in the Temple of Sol Ro, and then got wiped out by a level 70 dragon while trying to get back to it. I didn’t want to waste their time, so I told them to forget it and I’ll finish it myself at some later point, when everything’s lower-level.