Category Archives: PS3

Pre-2014

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And yes, I’d been playing a bunch of other stuff in the meantime.

Borderlands 2: Borderlands, but more of it and with a much better story and villain, and I was happy with that.  I’ve made it most of the way through TVHM with Axton and should get around to finishing that off at some point.  I’ve also done most of the DLC, except Hammerlock’s Big Hunt, which was a boring slog.  Not sure if I’ll have time for UVHM or trying other classes in the future.

Minecraft: Of course. The 1.6 release took a long time to stabilize for mods, so I’d been putting together and playing my own custom mod pack of it, tweaking it as mods were updated. The major mod packs are catching up now, but I think I’ll stick with my own custom one for now.

Gran Turismo 6: It’s an improvement in a bunch of ways, but it’s really what GT5 should have been in the first place. It fixes up a bunch of stuff (the menu system and career mode in particular), but doesn’t really do anything revolutionary, and still has a bunch of flaws (weak leaderboards, features delayed into future patches) so it feels fairly weak compared to hearing about the new stuff in, say, Forza 5. It’s about the best I’m going to get for now though, without an XBone or PS4.

Terraria: There was a big patch (1.2) that added a whole bunch of new stuff so I started a new world and character.  I haven’t really put much time into it yet though, so I haven’t really seen too much of that new stuff.

Animal Crossing New Leaf: I caved in and picked up a 3DS due to a tidal wave of games I was interested in last year (including Fire Emblem Awakening, Etrian Odyssey 4, and Shin Megami Tensei 4), but this is the one I’ve put the most time into by far. When granted municipal powers over animal people, I turn into an obsessive petty tyrant, apparently.

Ittle Dew: An indie Zelda clone.  Fairly simple and short, but it’s still fun and pretty cute.

Bit.Trip Presents…Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien: One of those ‘continuous runner’ games where you can’t control the forward motion, just whether you jump, duck, kick, etc. Surprisingly difficult, but it’s satisfying when you finally nail a good run, and it’s still easier than the original Bit.Trip Runner game, which I gave up on in frustration.

Cookie Clicker: DON’T ASK.

MMO-wise, I finally registered Rift and gave it a try, but it didn’t really grab me.  I just haven’t been feeling the MMO urge for a while now, so I recently wound up cancelling all of the active subscriptions I still had going (Rift, EQ/EQ2, WoW, and LOTRO).  Maybe EQ Next will revive my interest, since it’s at least trying something different.

The Lost Year

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So, what have I been doing in all that time missing in this blog?  Probably a lot of small stuff I’ve forgotten, but the major games are:

Minecraft: I played a whole ton of Minecraft, including not just further developing my own private worlds but checking out various mod packs like the Technic Pack, Yogbox, TerraFirmaCraft, and Hack/Mine.  I also completed some challenge maps, like Feed The Beast, Vechs’s Legendary map from the Super Hostile series, and one of those Skyblock-like minimal starts.

Diablo 3: I’ve gotten a wizard into Hell difficulty so far, but still have to check out the other classes.  It doesn’t seem to have as much staying power as D2 did, a large part of which is that the loot seems blander, but I’ll still get a lot of hours out of it.

Disgaea 4: And once again, I got sucked into putting a ton of hours into yet another SRPG, getting some characters up to pretty much insanely maxed-out stats.  I haven’t done the DLC chapters for it yet though.

MMOs: I started up LOTRO and got a character up to level 20ish, but haven’t gotten back to it recently or played any other MMOs, really.  Kinda feeling a bit burned out on them for now.  I’ll give Guild Wars 2 a shot when it comes out, though.

Skyrim: FUS RO duh, of course I’d be playing this one.  I played a kitty wizard through the end of the base game, but actually left a good number of side quests unfinished.  I figure that I’ll wait a couple of years for all the good mods, DLC, and an expansion to come out, and then go back and do a proper clear-everything run with a different type of character.

Forza 4: Good, especially with the new stuff like Rivals challenges, but I’m still only a sliver of the way through the full event list, and I’m not sure if I’ll bother to clear them all like I did with 3.  Just not feeling the driving urge lately.

Mass Effect 3: Controversy over the endings aside (I haven’t seen the revised ones yet), still a pretty good game overall, and I enjoyed it just as much as the second one.  Lots of different environments, good gunplay, and a decent story along the way.

Portal 2: Yay! Lots of good puzzles, interesting new elements introduced as you go, longer without being too long, and even a really good story around it.  Definitely worth it.

Damn, that’s a lot of sequels…

Roundup

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There’s a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff I’ve played recently that don’t really warrant their own articles:

I’ve played Gran Turismo on the PSP a bit more, but only to grind for cars. I’m not really enjoying the lack of structure to it, so I’m just trying to collect as many of my favourite cars as I can before GT5 comes out, since you’ll be able to import your garage from the PSP game. The best way to grind for cash is to do two-lap S-class races on the test ring, which gets terribly boring, so I don’t do very many at a time.

I’m still working on Forza 3 as well, getting closer to finishing off everything on the event list. I know there’s at least one more car pack on the way though, so I’m trying to leave some events open to use them in and focusing mainly on stock and restricted-model events for now. Along the way I finally saved up enough credits to buy the Shelby Daytona Coupe and Ford GT40 cars, which I’ve been after for quite a while now.

I played through Limbo on XBLA over the course of two days. A rather short game, but very atmospheric and a decent platformer. Well, until the end and the gravity puzzles, the solutions to which get a little hard to figure out… A good game, but maybe not for its full price.

And speaking of platformers, I fired up Super Mario Galaxy 2 for about an hour, getting the first 3 or 4 stars. It feels pretty much like the first one so far, the major new addition being Yoshi and the new abilities you get while riding him. I’m sure I’ll like the rest of it, if I can find time…

And I also played a bit of the Lego Harry Potter game on PC. I don’t know diddly about Harry Potter, but it plays a lot like the Star Wars games, with magic spells in place of the force. There is a lot more variety though, as you wind up with characters with multiple abilities and need to switch between them, and the ‘hub’ world is huge and has tons to explore and collect. It’s not very hard so far, but it’s enough of an advancement over the older games that it doesn’t feel stale.

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.

Newer

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But that’s not all that’s new…

There’s a flood of new racing games, and I also picked up ModNation Racers for the PS3. It’s much more Mario Kart-like with the arcadey handling, twisty tracks, shortcuts, random powerups, etc. The big hook for it is that you can customize things though, and there are already plenty of them (mostly well-known characters of course) being shared online. For your racer and vehicle, it’s purely cosmetic, but you can create tracks as well and I’ll have to check a bunch of them out.

Single-player also seems to suffer from the unfairness of becoming a target for attacks 10 feet from the finish line, dropping you back three places. Fortunately you can spend boost power on shielding yourself, but the timing is tricky. The AI is tough, and the passing requirements for unlocking items for modding are even tougher, so completing the single-player campaign isn’t going to be easy. Unfortunately, online has its problems too. Lobbies have to fill up from scratch with every new race, meaning you often only get half the full complement of 12 racers. And you have to go through annoyingly-long loading screens as you toggle back and forth between the online race, the ModSpot, the race, the ModSpot…

I also picked up 3D Dot Game Heroes out of curiosity, and it’s pretty much a clone of Zelda: Link To The Past, except in a 3D voxel-like presentation. There’s kind of a cheeky self-awareness to it all, but otherwise it hasn’t really had much of an effect so far, so it pretty much remains a Zelda-alike. I’ve only done the first temple (of six) so far, which is pretty much just part of the tutorial.

And as if I didn’t have enough racing games already, I wound up picking up Gran Turismo for the PSP when it was set at a new ‘classic’ pricing on PSN. It definitely feels like Gran Turismo, but I’m still struggling with the controls a bit. Using the dpad leads to fishtailing like crazy (though it’s better for minor adjustments to straighten yourself out), and with the analog nub I find myself lurching around corners trying to find the right amount of steering. Maybe it’ll just take time to adjust after playing Forza 3 so much lately.

The challenges are pretty much like the license tests of previous games, but the passing requirements are pretty fair and I’ve managed to get at least silver on all of them so far, and a few golds. No reward cars though, just cash. Other than that, you just pick a car and track and race a random selection of AI cars. (There’s a ‘drift mode’ too but I haven’t tried it yet.)

It’s not entirely what I’d hoped for, but it might be fun in small bursts, and it’ll get me a head start in GT5.

I Almost Forgot What It Felt Like

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Yesterday I managed to do something that I haven’t done in a while now: complete a game. And not just one game, but two games!

First, I played Flower, which I bought a while back but hadn’t even tried yet. This one was actually pretty quick to finish as it’s fairly short, but it’s still pretty good. You control a petal that glides around on the wind, and it’s serene and relaxing to start, and then suddenly develops into something much more game-like. It’s really more about the emotional effect it induces than gameplay, though.

And second, I finished off Little Big Planet’s main story levels. I did about half of them two weeks ago (and forgot to write about it), and went back and did the rest of them today, along with some of the community levels with a friend riding co-op. It was a decent enough game, but the controls and physics were frequently aggravating enough that I don’t think I really want to spend any more time on it. It treats everything, yourself included, as real objects, and the momentum makes it really difficult to do things like jump on small platforms. The lives system also seemed a bit unfair at times; there would often be one really difficult section and if you failed it, you had to go back and redo the much-easier rest of the level all over again, and the aforementioned control issues didn’t help.

I’ve also recently played through a bit of New Super Mario Bros Wii, and so far I’m up to the middle of world 2. I don’t know if the game’s getting harder, or if my reflexes are getting worse (I used to be able to finish the original SMB no sweat), but it feels a lot tougher than I’m used to. Making jumps doesn’t seem as precise as I’d like, which leads to a lot of deaths.

And I also fired up Lego Rock Band and worked through the first two tiers of songs. The presentation is cute, as expected, and there are a few good songs in there, but a lot of them are teen-oriented ones that I haven’t heard of before, and don’t really appeal all that much to me. I’m thus still not sure whether I’ll export the songs back to RB2 or not. I’m not sure how far into LRB I’ll get when I’d prefer to play songs back in RB2 either. LRB does have at least one new feature: occasional rock challenges where you do something storyline-related, like demolish a building or scare ghosts with your music. They don’t really play that much differently, with just some restrictions like not being able to use star power, but they have custom background animations at least.

Trophies From School

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I also revisited Disgaea 3 today, since a recent patch added trophy support to it.

Unfortunately none of the trophies were awarded retroactively, but it turns out that I wouldn’t have gotten very many anyway. A lot of them are for fairly rare or tricky things, and I spent a while working on them. I mainly worked through all 100 floors of an item world while in the Land of Carnage, which got me a trophy for doing so, a bunch of the pirate trophies, and a couple for mystery floors seen along the way.

I have around 1/3rd of the trophies so far. I’m not sure how much time I’ll spend on them, since some of them require just plain luck in tough spots.

Bad Timing

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I was plagued by internet issues again today, so I started out by getting back to an offline game — Disgaea 3. Four new chapters centered around Raspberyl had been released recently, so it was as good a time as any to finally do them. They were fairly short though, with only four maps per chapter rather than the 6-7 or so of the main story, and I was able to steamroller through them with my rather overpowered characters. A nice little diversion, but not as substantial as I’d hoped.

I made it into EQ long enough to earn another 13 AAs, and would have gotten the final 30th one in the bank except for getting completely disconnected just as I was working on it. I got dropped just as I was in the middle of looting a nice twink weapon, too. But fortunately my internet access was restored just before I had to head to bed, and when I logged in the weapon was still on my cursor. There was also an angry fire goblin standing right next to me, but he was easily placated and I quickly finished off that 30th AA.

Next stop, level 77.

Better Than Perfect

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In today’s round of Disgaea 3, I wound up making a “perfect” Baal Sword for Laharl, except that its defense rating is even just slightly better than what the guide said it should be for some reason. Hey, I’ll take it… The sword made a bigger difference than I thought it would, taking his ATK from around 50 million to nearly 88 million, and he now does 1.4 billion damage with his Dark X Slash skill.

That’s the best his equipment can possibly get, and any further improvement will have to come through raising his aptitudes and buying more skill levels. It seems kind of unnecessary now though, now that he can pretty much kill anything in one hit.

Next up for improvement was my own fist fighter character, so I leveled up another Trapazohedron, this time focusing on SPD. Technically I could have just duped more of the ATK ones I’d already made, but SPD helps both attacks and defense for fist users. I managed to make a perfect one this time, duped it a few times, and put them on my fist fighter.

He’s still not as powerful as Laharl, since I hadn’t raised his aptitudes nearly as much (that part is way too tedious) and he doesn’t have his leveled-up rank 40 weapon yet, but he can still do 140 million damage per special attack, up from around 12 million before I made these Trapazohedrons.

With two powerful characters, I could finally take on the Baal fight in Land of Carnage, taking out each pair of guards before they had a chance to attack, and then sacrificing my fist fighter to draw Baal out so Laharl could get in the killing blow.

And…that’s about it. That’s the toughest designed fight in the game. There are still other things that could be tougher, like floor 100 item gods in LoC, or trying to steal the obscenely-powerful magichange weapons, but it’s all random stuff from here on, so this might be where I finally consider Disgaea 3 “finished.” And it took a mere 130 hours, according to the save screen…

Slightly Imperfect

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Back in Disgaea 3, it was time to level it up the Trapezohedron for a rather dramatic improvement in stats. I duped a few of them first, so that I had fresh copies I could level up in different ways, and then tried to follow a guide to creating “perfect” items, which requires passing certain bills early on, double-killing bosses, finding enough level spheres, reverse pirating, etc.

I thought I followed it pretty strictly, but in the end I wound up with stats slightly lower than what the guide said they should be. I think I might have found a level sphere too early, before all of the ATK bills had been passed, so that some level ups didn’t get the full effect. Oh well, it’s only something like a 0.1% difference, so it’s good enough as is.

I then wanted to dupe more of them, of course, and discovered the hard way that someone equipped with one of these is tough to beat. I had to rearrange my equipment and give Laharl the Puppy Paw Stick before I could reliably beat the dropouts. And, in the end, Laharl now has a complete, rarity-matched set of these Traps and his rank 40 weapon, and in total he now has over 50 million ATK and does over 207 million damage with some of his special attacks. The only improvement left for him will be to level up his weapon as well, though that’ll make a smaller difference.

I then finally went back and defeated Baal easily, now that his 47 million HPs wasn’t so intimidating anymore. Baal was also available in the Land of Carnage afterwards, and I took a shot at that, but…one of his guards killed Laharl in one hit. No matter how obscenely powerful you get, the game always has something worse to throw at you…