Instead of doing more missions in GTA3 tonight, I ran around and collected as many of the hidden packages as I could. I know I’m not going for 100% completion, but the end result is really useful as it spawns more and more weapons at your hideout as you collect more of them (currently only the pistol, Uzi, and grenades).
There are two in the Portland area I couldn’t get though, since I have to open up other areas of the city first.
With Xbox Live down for maintenance today I turned back to the DS, but only got a couple of adventures completed in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon before the battery indicator came on. So, it’s back to the PC tonight, and I figured I should finally get back to a series I’ve been meaning to play for a long time now: Grand Theft Auto. I played SA for a bit on the PS2, but never got around to finishing it.
I bought the entire series as part of a Rockstar Collection on Steam a while back, but I think I’m going to skip the first two entries. I fooled around with them for a while, but just couldn’t get into them; the 2D perspective just felt too limiting and I was constantly crashing into things (and not intentionally) and getting lost. So, I’m going to kick it off with GTA3, and then Vice City and San Andreas. I doubt I’ll go for 100% completion, since I’d like to finish these within a reasonable amount of time not too far away from when the PC version of GTA4 comes out, and that’s pretty close now.
So far it’s your typical gangster story, starting out at the bottom and getting in good with the mob, and the missions so far have been fairly typical: bump off some guys, steal an armoured car, escort a hooker, etc. There are all sorts of side missions and collections to do, but I haven’t started on any of those yet.
I miss the overall map from San Andreas, but the area is small enough that it hopefully won’t take too long to learn it well.
I’m on to the last chapter now of Paper Mario: TTYD, as Chapter 7 turned out to be pretty short and I finished it off in one go tonight. It was a fairly simple revisit-each-previous-area quest to find someone, and then a trip to the moon to infiltrate the X-Naut base. The weirdest part here was encountering another Thwomp in the base, upon which a quiz show broke out…
Before going on, I think I’m going to grind xp a bit (I’m still a few levels below the recommended point), and do a few other things like climbing the wrestling ladder again and doing the Pit of 100 Trials, since I suspect this will pretty much be the point of no return.
I got back to Paper Mario: TTYD today and finished off Chapters 5 and 6 in one shot. The most notable bit of this stretch was a segment where you solve a few mysteries on a train ride, right out of the old detective novels. Well, with less murder, this is a Mario game after all… It did turn into the usual bit of exploration and combat at the end, but at least it didn’t make me backtrack a half-dozen times like other chapters have.
I must be pretty close to the end now, as there’s only one more star to collect. For that, I apparently need to convince a village of Russian-like bob-ombs to shoot me out of their cannon…
I also kicked off Chapter 5 in Paper Mario: TTYD tonight, this time with a seafaring theme. Of course, our group was almost immediately shipwrecked and split up… It didn’t take long to find the others though, and after rescuing Bobbery, the Bob-omb navigator, he joined our party. As a bomb, I can now use him to open up cracked areas that I’d seen in other spots before, and he’ll undoubtedly be necessary for the rest of this chapter.
Now I have to figure out how to get into a cave where the alleged treasure is hidden…
While sorting some CDs away, I stumbled upon the Trackmania United disc and couldn’t resist firing it up for a bit of online play. My ladder ranking had fallen a lot since I hadn’t played in a while, but with the way the rankings work, I was gaining hundreds of ladder points per track. If I had kept playing, it wouldn’t have taken long to crack the 100,000 rank mark again. (That might not sound impressive until you note that there are now well over a million players on the rankings…)
And then it was back to Paper Mario: TTYD, where I did Chapter 4 all in one go. This one took place in Twilight Town, with the expected spooky theme and Boos all over the destination. Though I wasn’t expecting to see villagers being turned into pigs… Unfortunately not only do they make you run back and forth between the town and a steeple numerous times, but the plot twist (Mario’s name and body is stolen) essentially has you redoing everything you just did in the chapter all over again after the chapter has supposedly ended. Clever, perhaps, but annoying.
One interesting thing it did was that in order to get Mario’s name back, you had to guess the enemy’s name. But in order to prevent people from just plugging it in from a walkthrough, the enemy had also stolen a letter of the alphabet that you needed, so you had to go ‘rescue’ this letter before you could properly enter his name.
Fiddling around with all these other games is all well and good, but sometimes I have to remind myself that I’ve still got six zillion other games left to finish off first. So, today I finally got back to Paper Mario: TTYD.
I finished off Chapter 3, which was a fairly uneventful climb through the rest of the wrestling rankings, with the obligatory twist about who was really behind all the recent disappearances, and after beating the real enemy I got the star for that chapter.
Since I had recently picked up Yoshi in my party, I could explore a few new areas in the sewers and found some more star pieces and shines there, and finally remembered to go use the shines to upgrade party members (Yoshi and Goombella, for now). And I went and did a few more jobs from the Trouble Centre that had opened up, though in the end I think I pretty much broke even on the costs and rewards.
Next up, the Twilight Woods.
I got back to Guitar Hero 3 for the first time in quite a while today, mainly to check out some of the free songs released recently. I Am Murloc is silly, but fun, and the Dropkick Murphys pack isn’t really my kind of music, but was still interesting to play.
I also retried a handful of other built-in and downloaded songs, and improved on my old scores on all of them, so at least I’m getting a bit better. It did drive home just how much harder GH3 is than Rock Band, even on medium, as I didn’t even come close to 100%-ing any of them.
I popped into EQ again tonight, but only to do a bit of shopping. Most of the good items in the bazaar were well out of my price range, since I haven’t exactly been earning much money lately, but there were a few lucky bargains. For just over 1000 plat out of the 8000 total I had, I managed to replace four of my weakest pieces of armour, for a net increase of 350 HP (a 13% increase), 282 mana, 21 AC, 15 INT, and 20 charisma. Unfortunately I’m capped on INT at the moment and will need to earn some more AA points before I can unlock a higher cap and actually use those extra points…
There’s a promotion going on now where returning EQ and EQ2 players can play for free for the next couple months (and trial accounts too, from the sounds of it), and I figured I may as well pop back into it for a bit.
I sold off some junk I was carrying around, and decided I may as well finally get around to processing the claimable items and veteran rewards I’d been accumulating. You get them for purchasing expansions or subscribing for a certain number of years, but I’d never gotten around to actually assigning them to a character, since I wasn’t sure if maybe I’d want them on an alt or something. I finally just stuck the major ones on my main enchanter, though of all of them, the only really important one is a self-resurrect ability. It’s only usable once a week, but it still means having to go begging for a res less often.
I also got a taste of just how out-of-date my gear is. Compare my current gloves on the left with the pair on the right that were being offered in trade chat (click for big):
I visited a few old places, and Qeynos was the same as ever and I was the only person there. I went on over to Erud’s Crossing, where I discovered that the Kerrans on the island there had somehow shrunk over the years…
Firiona Vie and Karnor’s Castle were also the same, though I was a bit surprised to find some people actually in Karnor’s. Freeport is a radically different city now, having been redone a few years back, but I don’t think it’s for the better. It’s too big and twisty now, and the graphics aren’t really *that* much better, with way too many perfectly flat surfaces and angles still (the rock texture looks really fake when you get closer).
And just for kicks, I took the boat to the Ocean of Tears, which has apparently also been redone. The boat’s a lot faster now, too.
I missed most of the later expansions, so I’m sure a lot of new zones have been added. Looking at the atlas, I can see the Buried Sea zones off of Toxx Forest, a bunch of new ones in Northern Antonica, off of Crescent Reach, a bunch off of the Lavastorm Mountains, a small handful in Faydwer, a couple in the southeast of Antonica, off the desert, and a bunch of new Planes, which will almost certainly be too high level for me.
Maybe I’ll get around to checking out some of those new zones, as soon as I figure out which ones are within my level range. And maybe I’ll go revisit a bunch of the older zones and put together a little travelogue of nostalgia…