Category Archives: Specific Games/Series

Time Flies

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Boy, it’s kind of embarrassing to have the posts on the front page cover a five-year span. I’ve had…issues, but that’s not for here.

I’ve certainly been playing games, but of them all, Minecraft still dominates a lot of my playtime. I hardly touch vanilla anymore, just modpacks nowadays, and over the last few years I’ve tried:

  • Age of Engineering: A gated progression pack, where you proceed through a series of ‘ages’ where each age unlocks a new tier of machines and you progress to the next tier by crafting a certain item. Each age depends on stuff produced by the previous age so you can’t really skip ages, and many recipes are changed to make mods more interdependent on each other and more difficult to make. Can get a bit grindy, but I actually stuck with it all the way through this one and ‘beat’ it by crafting the hardest item in the pack, a creative vending upgrade, at which point you basically have infinite resources. Even if my base kinda looks like a hot mess…
  • Sprout: I had high hopes for this one since it’s by the author of Regrowth, another really good modpack. It is very well-crafted, as all of the mods fit together well and create a nice, coherent world…but I couldn’t really get into it. I guess I was expecting something a bit more goal-oriented like Regrowth, but this one has only vague, nonessential quests.
  • Craft of the Titans: A challenge pack where your goal is to survive an extremely hostile world (lots of new and aggressive monster spawns, even in daylight) and eventually get strong enough to work your way through defeating various bosses. I eventually got tired of this one before beating all of them, but did make it fairly far.
  • Project Ozone 2: Also a challenge pack, though not as hostile (just the occasional blood moon) and with more intermixing between the mods. Did almost all of the quests in it aside from killing the Chaos Guardian, which I gave up on after a while.
  • All The Mods Expert: Anther progression pack with customized, more-difficult recipes where it takes quite a bit of effort just to get to the basic sets of machines like Ender IO furnaces and grinders. No real end goal to it, so I stopped after I had a base where most processing was almost fully automated.

There are a few other packs I’m tempted to try out, like Modern Skyblock 2, Divine Journey, and Forever Stranded, but I think I might be kinda sick of Minecraft, for a little while at least…

You Can’t Go Hearthstone Again

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I hadn’t played WoW in quite a while, but I wound up buying Legion in the recent Black Friday sale and have been working my way through Pandaria with my shadow priest (with xp disabled once I hit 90 so I don’t overlevel too much), and it’s been fun in that comfortably-scratches-an-old-itch sense, but I’m still feeling kind of unsatisfied overall.

I think that’s more on me than the game, though. For a while now I thought I’d just been temporarily “burned out” on MMOs and would eventually come back to them refreshed and ready to go again, much like other gaming genres at various times, but it just hasn’t happened. I think I just don’t have room in my life anymore for the social and time commitments for raiding and regular grouping, and past that, sure there are some new sights to see and new mechanics to play with here and there, but an awful lot of what’s left is just more bear ass collection and faction grinding.

And I could apply that equally well to Guild Wars 2, LOTRO, EQ2, etc. Sorry MMOs, you were fun while it lasted!

(Wish I’d realized that before buying expansions for some of these that I never even reached. :P )

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…

More MMO Mania

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Things have been picking up again in the MMO worlds.

WoW finally released its 4.0.1 patch, pretty much completely redoing how skills and talent trees and stats work and forcing everyone to redo their talent selections. I’ve caught up on the main trees for my priest, warrior, and mage, and so far the differences aren’t huge, but it might require more play to really tell. My mage seems to have completely lost some buffs he used to have, though. The actual Cataclysm changes are still a ways away, but hopefully I’ll get my Loremaster achievement finished before then.

In EQ2, we finally got a full group together for a couple of weeks, so we’ve worked on the heritage quest for Rahotep’s staff and some faction grinding for the Maj’Dul quests. Unfortunately we aren’t quite strong enough for Rahotep’s final step yet — we gave it a try, but he’s an EpicX2 monster, and we just couldn’t damage him quickly enough. Maybe with a handful of more levels; we’ve managed to defeat an EpicX2 before with just the four of us, but it was on the verge of turning grey to us.

EQ2 also launched the Hallowe’en event, and today I took my mystic through the major quests that are part of it. One of them involved a hedge maze where I kept getting stronger and stronger as I defeated more enemies, and at the end I took on an EpicX2 boss all by myself and won. I’ll have to redo that one a few times, both just for fun and for other rewards like collectibles and a quest that only opens up on the second attempt. A couple of the other quests also have rewards for repeated attempts that I’ll have to try for.

And I finally got around to canceling my subscription to Asheron’s Call. I’d resubscribed earlier this year with the intent of revisiting it, seeing what was new, checking out the old stomping grounds, etc., but…it’s just not going to happen, at this rate. Sayonara, AC.

Disk Space Unleashed

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Argh, I’m falling out of the habit of updating again… There was a stretch where I didn’t play anything since I was out of town, but there is still a bunch to talk about.

I finished off The Force Unleashed, finally freeing up the 30 gigs of disk space it was taking up. Some of the boss fights were fairly tense and I almost lost, even playing on easy, but otherwise it was still just a matter of slogging through it to see the story. I played the three DLC packs too, but they were fairly short and easy.

On a whim I finally played The Path, a rather artsy non-game where you wander around the woods as one of six girls in a weird take on Little Red Riding Hood. Around the woods you find items relating to the girls’ personalities, encounter their (oft-metaphorical) ‘wolf’, and then tour through a bizarre interpretation of Grandma’s house. I’m not sure I learned anything from it, but it was interesting trip if you appreciate surreality.

Now that I’m pretty much done with Picross 3D, my puzzle game impulse is being satisfied by Everyday Genius: SquareLogic. It’s Sudoku-like in that you have to make the rows and columns of a square fill with non-repeating numbers, but the squares are also broken down into smaller regions with their own specific requirements, like adding up to a certain total, all numbers must be odd, one square must be higher/lower than another one, etc. It looks tough at first, but the interface helps a lot in keeping track of everything.

I downloaded F1 2010 on Steam and played through a race, albeit on the easy and shortened weekend settings just to get a taste. It plays well though, feeling authentic enough, with a decent amount of control over things like your own career and R&D. I’ll definitely have to put more time into it.

EQ2 hasn’t progressed much, as I was gone for a week. I caught up on the faction grinding I missed out on, but another group member was missing this last week, so we just goofed around in the Cleft of Rujark dungeon off of Sinking Sands.

And then there’s Minecraft. That’ll deserve its own post…

Just When I Thought I Was Out…

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I’ve been dabbling in another miscellaneous pile of stuff lately:

Right after I finished the Mafia 2 main story, they released the first DLC pack, Jimmy’s Vendetta, which adds a bunch of free-roam missions like you’d expect from a GTA-ish game. It’s unfortunate that they’ve chopped the game up like this, but I’m invested this far into it, may as well get a little bit more fun out of it…

I’m about halfway through it now, and most of the missions haven’t been very difficult, but Paddy Wagon must have taken me 20+ attempts before I could finally beat it. You get mobbed by so many enemies, many with machine guns, that just surviving the fights is difficult, especially with enemies approaching from multiple directions. I eventually beat it by luring a cop car along with me to the final fight, and they helped thin out the enemies.

Overall though, Jimmy’s Vendetta feels…soulless. The missions are fun, and it’s nice to have more to do, but there’s very little extra voicing (just some generic environmental responses), no mid-mission chatter, nobody ever comes along or helps you out, the mission intro is just a page of text… It just doesn’t feel right.

WoW surprised everyone by releasing a bit of pre-Cataclysm content with an event in Durotar about the trolls retaking the Echo Isles. No real challenge to it, but it was still interesting, and I did it on both of my 80s for the achievement (and my 40 mage, but he couldn’t do the final quest for the achievement).

I briefly played Puzzle Quest 2, but only long enough to get through the tutorials in the first town. Not a lot seems different so far, but it’s been so long since I played the first that I’m fuzzy about the minor details that might have changed anyway.

And tonight I took another shot at VVVVVV on my Mac and surprised myself by managing to collect the final two trinkets. One of them wasn’t really that bad — I just hadn’t bothered to spend the time on it before — but the other was the infamous Veni Vidi Vici one, and it must have taken me over 200 attempts tonight to get it, not including all of my previous failed attempts. You have to let yourself fall through a bunch of spike-riddled screens, bounce off a platform, and fall all the way back through them, and it took forever to finally get the timing right. Getting the timing right on one screen isn’t really that hard, but you have to chain those successes all in a row to get through them all. Oddly enough, the return trip seemed easier than expected; the problem was mainly getting past that bounce successfully and consistently.

And that’s probably all I’ll do in VVVVVV, since the things still left over like the time trials and gravitron are just crazy-difficult.

Come Back, Braking Line!

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A couple days ago I felt like playing a driving game, but I’m still waiting on the next Jalopnik pack for Forza, so I fired up GRID instead. I’d never actually put much time into it past the initial day or two for some reason, and over a few hours I managed to complete all of the first-tier events in the American and European leagues, and a couple in the next tiers.

It’s a lot harder than I remember it being, though. Even on the easiest setting, AI cars would constantly be riding my tail right until the finish, making me vulnerable to small mistakes. And since I almost always start towards the back of the pack, working my way past all the AI cars inevitably feels like a game of bumper cars, only rarely emerging unscathed. It’s still fun, even if a bit more frustrating than I’d liked when I was hoping for a bit more of a relaxing cruise to victory…

I also popped into EQ2 for a bit. I’d almost forgotten that it was a double-xp weekend, and although I didn’t get any adventuring done, I did gain five tradeskill levels each on my provisioner and jewelcrafter. These bonus weekends are about the only time I work on tradeskills anymore, as it gets too grindy otherwise.

And speaking of MMOs, last night I loaded WoW for a little while, partly to test the RealID chat with a friend, to check the oracle eggs (nothing good yet again), and to do some new quests around Sen’Jin village related to the upcoming Cataclysm release. They weren’t particularly difficult, but they did grant some nice rewards like an illusion-granting token and a unique cloak graphic.

Not-Yet-Made Man

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It’s been a while since the last update, but I haven’t really been playing a lot either. Well, I’ve played a bunch of games, but haven’t really put much time into each one…

I probably played Picross 3D the most, picking it up and knocking off a puzzle here and there to kill time, and a couple days ago I finally finished the last tier of the hard puzzles. I didn’t get 100% of them though, as you have to be some kind of savant to finish enough of the hard ones in time to get three stars. And I’ve still got a bunch of downloaded puzzles to keep me busy for a while yet.

I picked up a game called Puzzle Dimension on Steam out of sheer curiosity, and it’s kind of interesting. You roll a ball around a tiled map (it’s actually turn-based, with discrete moves), picking up the flowers on the level, and getting to the exit. Complicating things are squares that can only be traversed once, icy blocks that you slide on, fire blocks, gravity effects, jumping, etc… I’ve completed the first couple of ‘worlds’ so far, but there’s still plenty more to come.

I caved in and bought Victoria 2, though I haven’t really played a proper game of it yet. I did my usual introductory game as Hawaii, watching how the rest of the world unfolded, and it was actually a bit more challenging to keep things together as you couldn’t just set up the sliders and then do nothing the rest of the game. There were weird things afoot in the rest of the world, too, as Britain wound up swallowing up all of China, Egypt got picked on by nearly everyone and eventually eliminated, the US never even tried to get California back from Mexico, the UK never released any of its dominions… There’s still a lot of rough edges to it like the rebel hordes that run amok and the crazy ways that capitalists (mis)manage factories, so I’m putting this off until another patch or two.

Not much has happened in EQ2 as people have continued to be unavailable. I did at least hit level 55 and can finally use the nice reward charm I got for finishing all of the Lavastorm collections (20 to all stats, 100 health and power, and a healing proc).

Worms Reloaded was released, and I figured I may as well give it a shot. It seems to be a decent successor to Armageddon so far, though it’s a bit disappointing that teams and players are limited to 4 each. Some nice new weapons though, and I’m about halfway through the single-player campaign, though I haven’t tried multi yet.

I started playing Mercenaries 2 as my potential next game, but it’s still kind of early to judge. The graphics are a bit poorer than I expected, and the interface a bit awkward, but I’ve only done a few missions so far. I’ll give it a bit more of a chance to grow on me, at least.

And when I finish that, or it doesn’t work out, I think Mafia 2 will be next after that. I never played the first one, but it got decent reviews, and word-of-mouth on this one is pretty good so far. It’s apparently not as open-world as, say, the GTAs, but I’m okay with it being somewhat more linear and shorter. I’ve still got plenty of other games waiting…

No Saunas, Though

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I just realized that I haven’t written about EQ2 in a while now, and in short: Steamfont. A couple weeks ago one of our party members was going to be a bit late, so the rest of us goofed off doing some quests in Steamfont for a little while. When he arrived, we figured that since we were already there, we may as well just keep on doing them and go check out the Klak’Anon instance as well.

It turned out to be more of a challenge than expected, with some spots where you encounter a ton of roamers, or waves of spawns, of things ^^^-rank and equal-level. I actually died a few times in there, and it took long enough that we had to spend this last week in there as well. We’ve still got one quest that’s sending us back in there, but hopefully it’ll be quick to finish off next week.

I’ve also gotten my illusionist up to level 54, mainly just farming and doing quests in Lavastorm. With his help, I’ve actually completed the Lavastorm collections and gotten a fairly nifty charm item…which I can’t wear until I hit level 55…