Category Archives: Specific Games/Series

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.

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.

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.

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’…

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.

Junkie No More

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I just got around to changing my Xbox Live gamertag and shall now be known as HalibutBarn instead. MS has been rather oversensitive lately about ‘inappropriate’ names, so I figured I’d better change it before I suddenly wind up suspended for being a drug reference or something.

I finally started Bioshock 2 a little while ago, and this time I’m playing on Hard and going for the achievement for not using any Vita-chambers. So far the main struggle has just been to avoid running out of ammo and money, which are in scarce supply. Otherwise, it’s still a pretty familiar-feeling game and that’s perfectly fine considering how good the first one was. I’ve only made it to Pauper’s Drop so far, but I’ve fought one each of a Big Daddy and Big Sister, and the fights were fairly tense. The Big Sisters in particular are going to be tough, being as quick as they are.

In EQ2, we’ve mainly just romped around Everfrost some more for the last couple weeks, finally reaching the NE and NW corners and finishing a handful of quests, including the HQ for Tobrin’s Mystical Eyepatch. I also did a bit of soloing on my own to clean out some of the simpler quests and pick up collection items.

The city of New Halas was also finally released, and I immediately moved my shaman there to be with his barbarian brethren. It’s a really nice city too, with almost everything within fairly easy reach (the dock is a bit farther away though) and the tradeskills all clustered near the bank. The housing is really nice, and I finally upgraded from the starting apartment to a five-room house, which feels a bit sparse even with 160+ items in it now. I also started up a new dwarven warlock character, but haven’t gotten very far into the Halas newbie zone with him yet.

And I’ve played a bit more of Forza 3, but I’m not as enthusiastic about it as I was before, as now I’m pretty much just trying to grind credits and fill out the event chart. Maybe I’ll look at something like Blur next…

Getting My Mac Wet

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It’s been a while since the last update, so there’s a bit to cover…

In WoW, I finally saved up enough Champion’s Seals to buy the Argent Hippogryph. I was initially thinking of going for the Sunreaver Dragonhawk, but then someone pointed out that it doesn’t actually land on the ground and that suddenly seemed disconcerting. I then started saving them up for the other minipets and mounts, but in the meantime I managed to find all of the Horde tournament minipets on the AH for fairly cheap (it’s easier to grind for 300 gold than it is for 40 seals), so I’m not sure what I’m going to save for next. The warhorse, perhaps…

I got my mage to level 40, enabling him to work on tradeskills again, and soon had JC maxed out at 300 and enchanting near-maxed at 296. It did cost about 700 gold in materials that I didn’t already have on hand, though.

And I found a few more soloable quests in Icecrown that must have been opened up by raised faction levels. I now only need 14 more to hit Loremaster.

Steam finally came out for the Mac, and I already have access to a handful of Mac versions of games I previously bought. For now I’ve only downloaded Toki Tori, Civ 4, and a few Popcap games like Peggle, though.

In EQ2, we did the Temple of Cazic-Thule last week. It’s kind of an annoying place since there’s plenty of roamers that lead to long strings of fights, and a lot of grindy quests, but we did manage to complete the heritage quest for the Screaming Mace in there and I picked up a couple of item upgrades. There’s also an inner instance, and we worked our way to the top of it only to get squashed by the boss in no time flat. It’s frustrating that you immediately get locked out of it for 18 hours after only a single attempt.

Last weekend we then tried the Tower of the Drafling in Rivervale and cleared it out pretty easily, and also completed the Hierophant’s Crook and Bone Bladed Claymore HQs. And then this last Thursday we went and explored Permafrost for a while, discovering a bunch of quests and uncovering a fair chunk of the map, but there’s still a lot of stuff left partially-done and we haven’t seen any of the dungeons there yet.

And finally, I’m essentially “finished” Forza 3 for now after completing the R2 and R1 championships and getting the Season 6 achievement. There’s still plenty of races to do as I’m only around 28% completion according to the stats screen, but I’ll work on them occasionally on a more casual basis.

I also picked up the most recent exotic car pack, and the Mosler MT900S is extremely nice, and easily my favourite R2 car now. And I also discovered that the AI isn’t very good at oval races, with the R2 speedway series involving some rather impressive pileups…

One More

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On Friday we had an impromptu last-minute gathering to do the Amphitheatre of Pain ring event in Zul’Drak, and that got me the last few quests I needed for the Zul’Drak quest achievement. That just leaves Icecrown to go now, though it’s going to be the hardest since it’s mainly group quests left, and as the highest-level outdoor zone in the game, they won’t be duoable like all the other zones.

I also played my mage a fair bit and got him up to level 39. I’m currently doing quests in Dustwallow Marsh, but it’s an annoying place for a mage since you get attacked by roaming crocs and spiders constantly, when as a mage I prefer to launch fights from afar.

I finally got FUEL installed and working now that they’ve added more serial keys on Steam, and spent a little while doing a few races, roaming around the open world, and playing online a bit with a friend. It was fun for a little while, but I can see how it could get a bit boring and repetitive. Fortunately it was only $4.

And speaking of racing games, I completed a handful of series in Forza 3 as well, putting me partway into the R2 championship and at driver level 40. I’ve also rediscovered the Impreza WRX STi as one of my favourite class C cars, as it made the Fujumi Kaido point-to-point races much easier.

Two To Go

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A bit more progress in WoW lately as I managed to finish off the zone achievements for Nagrand and Blade’s Edge with a friend’s help. That got me the Loremaster of Outland achievement, and now I just have Zul’Drak and Icecrown to go for the big one. For Zul’Drak I just need to do a run through Gundrak, which will eventually happen in a random, but for Icecrown I’ll need some group help.

This morning I also managed to nab three of the Argent Tournament minipets from the AH for only 300 gold each. That’s about the price at which I’d prefer to just pay gold for them rather than having to grind Champion Seals for them; that’s 120 seals total, or about two weeks of doing dailies, but less than a week’s worth of gold farming.

And in EQ2 last night we went and checked out a new dungeon, The Obelisk of Lost Souls. It’s extremely maze-like but fortunately one of the group members had the map. Some rooms were pretty tough fights since even the monsters down below would aggro and swarm us, but there was only one death for the whole evening. We eventually gained access to the inner area and an inner instance called the Vestibule, but that’s as far as we can go until we complete an access quest (and only one member has it so far since you need a drop to start it).

We also wandered over to the Temple of Cazic-Thule in Feerrott to farm a wraith for the start of the Screaming Mace quest. With the long respawn time, we could only get three of the four drops needed though, so I’ll have to get mine later.