Category Archives: Xbox

Yeah, I Know…

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I haven’t really been playing that many different games lately, just mainly fiddling with different Minecraft mods now and then, but I’m trying to get back to finishing more stuff.  To summarize the last few months:

Mass Effect 3: Finished it long ago, but now that all of the DLC is out, I’m starting to work my way through that.  I just did Leviathan, which is only a few hours long, but adds some interesting backstory to the universe.  Not bad.

Forza Horizon: I did wind up picking it up and completed pretty much every single race in it.  It’s not quite as open as say, TDU, but it’s still a much more open, looser racing experience than the main Forza games, which can be a bit stuffy and ‘sterile’.  Well worth it.

LOTRO: I kinda lost interest towards the end of Moria, where it was just endless wandering of twisty corridors and revisiting spots over and over again.  When the anniversary event came around this year, I managed to push through and finish most of those areas, so I can finally move on to the post-Moria content.

World of Warcraft: I caved in and bought Pandaria, but haven’t really done much with it yet.  I created a Pandaren monk and got her to level 16, but the urge to continue on isn’t all that great.

The Simpsons: Tapped Out: Yeah, it’s one of those silly social games, but as a minor Simpsons fan I figured I should at least check it out.  It’s kinda fun designing your own little version of Springfield, ‘quests’ keep you interested in what might be uncovered next, and the atmosphere’s pretty much what you expect, but it’s also a pretty blatant cash grab.  Oodles of premium-only buildings, and the cost of the premium currency seems absurd, like you’d have to spend hundreds of dollars to get it all.  It also doesn’t help that I continually get disconnected from the server, and reconnecting often hangs forever, and I need to force quit the app and relaunch it.

Coming up, in the short term, I’m hoping to finally get some time into Dragon’s Dogma and Borderlands 2, at least.

Mars Attacks, Again

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Today I checked out XCOM: Enemy Unknown since, well, it just came out.  It still feels like I’m in the tutorial, as things have been heavily scripted and railroaded so far, but a lot of the feel of the old X-Com is still there, which is encouraging.  It’s a bit simpler than the original in some ways, having removed stuff like free aiming, action points, and kneeling/prone positions, but it adds in others like class specializations, skill choices, and varying mission and funding rewards.  Combat is still as brutal as ever, with a high attrition rate among rookies and those damn lucky shots the aliens always seem to get.  Definitely one I’ll be playing more of.

And I also checked out the Forza Horizon demo.  Definitely a lot of similarity to Test Drive Unlimited, though you’re confined to the roads and it’s hard to tell from the demo just how much variety there really is.  The events were decent enough, though occasionally kind of bizarre like the race against a plane.  About the only thing I didn’t like is how it always asked if you wanted to do a Rivals race on the same track right after the event.  NO, I want to do something else now, not just redo the same race again!  A good chance I’ll pick it up, if I can find the time…

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…

FINALLY

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Over the weekend, I was feeling a bit nostalgic and fired up Crackdown, just to bounce around a bit and look for that one agility orb that still eluded me. After a little while I’d checked various out-of-the-way places where I thought it might be, but to no avail, and was starting to feel like I’d wasted my time again.

But, as I was heading to the northern end of the Shai Gen territory, I scanned the horizon and there it was, blatant as could be on the dome of a large central building there. I’m not sure how I missed it all the other times I’d gone orb-hunting, except that most of my horizon-scanning had been in the denser areas and this northern area has very few taller buildings, so maybe I’d been less likely to look upward.

I still don’t have all of the hidden orbs, but nuts to them.

Oh Right, This Thing

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Yes, it’s time for yet more catching up.

I finished Forza 3 today. Well, again… I finished the six basic seasons long ago, but that left a lot of events unfinished, and today I finally got the Solid Gold achievement for getting gold in every single event. It took a while, and now there’s pretty much nothing left to do in it. Just in time for Gran Turismo 5…

I also finished off Mass Effect 2 shortly after my last post about it. There wasn’t really that much left to do at that point, just finishing off the loyalty missions and then off to the Omega 4 relay. The final mission worked out pretty well, requiring you to actually know your team, even if the final boss fight was a bit dumb. Still well worth it overall, and I’ll be looking forward to Mass Effect 3, where Liara better be more grateful about my remaining faithful to her!

I started Etrian Odyssey 3 on the DS, and it plays a lot like the first one so far, with a new sailing/fishing/exploring side game that haven’t done much with yet. I’m still only on the first floor though, and just about to gather up enough courage to go down to the next one.

And I also started a rather unusual game on the PSP: Zettai Hero Project: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman. It’s by the Disgaea guys and is kind of similar in certain ways, but different in a lot of others too. It’s turn based and you accumulate levels, but you only have yourself, you move one square at a time, your time in a dungeon is limited by an energy meter, items have a durability and wear out fairly quickly, enemy behaviour is somewhat more explicit about activation ranges and how they’ll react, you have a prinny wife… And of course, the story is Weird As Hell. It’s interesting and fun so far though, but I’m still only just barely out of the tutorial.

And in the MMO world, I did more of the Hallowe’en event quests, and am down to 11 quests left for Loremaster on my priest, but that’s about it. In EQ2 we did some more quests in the ‘Peacock Club’ quest line, but took a break last week and checked out a new zone, Pillar of Flame, picking up and completing some more quests there. We’re still level 60, but will probably begin leveling up again sometime soon.

By far I probably spent the most time in Minecraft, but that’s a whole separate topic…

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.

Well That Makes It Easier

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It’s been a while since the last update, but not a lot is really new.

We had our EQ2 group and finished off getting the teleport stone for Sundered Splitpaw, but it turns out that the quests at the ends of the chains are raid events, way beyond our abilities. So, we’ve headed back to Sinking Sands and turned leveling back on, completing a handful of generic quests there and I hit level 51 soon afterward.

I also spent a bunch of time on alts on Saturday. I got my monk from 14 to 24 in Antonica, with the help of the vitality bonus and turning in some collections that had accumulated from leftover bits. And I got my ranger from 8 to 14 almost entirely on collections. I doubt I’ll really put much more time into them, but it was something different to do.

I’ve also been playing a lot of Forza 3 again. I discovered that the achievement for getting gold in all events doesn’t actually have to be done in season mode, even though the text says it does, which will make it a lot easier since I won’t keep getting interrupted by the R1 championship. So far I’ve done all of the drag strip events and the first three endurance events, which normally don’t seem to come up in season mode at all.

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.

Pushing the Borders

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There’s been a bit of a resurgence of interest in Borderlands lately as a couple of friends have picked it up as well. We spent a bit of time helping them level up, and I finished off a couple of older quests on my own and got to level 29, but we haven’t really started progressing into new areas yet.

One thing they did show me though was that there’s an easily-reached red weapons crate in the Knoxx starting area of T-Bone Junction, so I spent some time (a little too much time…) farming it. The stuff from it is too high-level for me now, but they’re worth a lot of money and I’m now maxed out on cash.

And although we’re still too low-level for Knoxx yet, we did figure out how to unlock the new Monster vehicle there and can now roam the roads freely — even if we do get squished almost right away…

Okay, That’s Enough Cars

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I played a handful of more races in Forza 3, and wound up spending most of the money I’d accumulated in order to get that achievement for owning at least one car of every manufacturer (unfortunately the expensive DLC ones count), so I won’t be getting that Shelby Daytona Coupe anytime soon. Ah well.

I also went back and started playing Project Gotham Racing 4 again. I got frustrated with it a long time ago when I couldn’t beat the invitational event for the Impreza 22B, but I put some more time into the career mode and enjoyed it a lot. I eventually got back around to that same invitational, and after what felt like 20+ tries, finally won that damn Subaru. It was well worth it though, as it’s probably one of the best cars in its class for the game.

The drifting-related events were still frustrating me a lot though, especially the Time-Vs-Kudos ones, so I wound up dropping the difficulty down to easy soon after. That made a lot of the more straightforward races a bit *too* easy, but I just wanted to have some fun, and as I made my way up the rankings some of the Master-level events were still a bit close. Those A-class cars are a handful to control. I eventually hit rank 1, and although there are still a bunch of other ‘arcade’ events to do, I think that’s all I’ll do in PGR4 for now.

I’m kind of a bit tired of racing games now, so I think it’s time to get back to other genres for a bit. Next up, finishing Bioshock 2…