Being separated from my main game consoles for a while, I pretty much played exclusively on my DS over the holidays (aside from some brief turns at Guitar Hero at a friend’s). It at least gave me a chance to finally catch up on some of the older games I have for it:
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I procrastinated a bit more on moving to the Hard career of GH2 by playing a handful more of the download and bonus songs in GH3 tonight. I even finally broke the 200k score mark with that new German song, albeit I dropped down to Easy to do so; I only hit something like 195k on it on Medium. There are still a whole bunch of other bonus songs I haven’t even tried yet, but the motivation just isn’t there as much as it is for the more well-known songs.
Right now I seem to be having the most trouble with rapid descending and ascending scales, and rapidly alternating pairs of notes. For the former, I always seem to lose my spot in the sequence and don’t get the timing right, and for the latter I just can’t keep in sync with which one I’m supposed to be on at a given moment.
I think I’m getting better at hammer-ons and pull-offs at least, though I still need to find a good song for practicing them.
I haven’t had a lot of time for gaming the last few days, so there are only a few minor updates:
I haven’t started the Hard career in GH2 in earnest yet, but I have downloaded a few more of the new songs for GH3. The “We Three Kings” song is…different; it starts off as a recognizable interpretation of it, but then goes off into its own new thing. “Ernten Was Wir Säen” is kinda fun, and fairly long and dense with notes even at the Medium level.
Unfortunately, the star power activation on my guitar continues to get worse and worse, and now I have to tilt and shake it around a lot before it finally kicks in. When I have some free time after the holidays, I’m going to have to crack it open and see if it’s something that’s easy to fix.
There’s a new 0.7 patch for Hellgate: London, which finally fixes a lot of the more annoying minor bugs and adds a HoradrTransmogrifying Cube, and this is the condition in which they should have actually shipped the game. They’re falling behind on the new content though, and the December content looks like it’ll be delayed until January now. It better knock my socks off or I probably won’t bother to keep my subscription going any longer.
I also toyed around briefly with a Hardcore Elite character, which is the most difficult the game can get (larger numbers of more powerful monsters, and your character dies permanently). I took a Summoner so I would have a pet that would be able to tank for me and let me run away if things get too dangerous. It definitely changes the way you play, since you have to be a lot more cautious and aware of enemy abilities and special attributes, it shifts your equipment focus towards survivability rather than killing power, etc. He’s still only level 7 so far though.
And finally, I’m up to level 35 in WoW, finally got my Berserker stance (easier than expected since the challengers only attacked me one at a time, not in pairs like some comments said they would), and am working on some profession-related quests in order to advance further. I’ve got cooking components that I don’t want to mix because I’m already at the cap and wouldn’t gain any points until I finish this Gadgetzan quest. I also still need to do my Brutal Armor quest, though it needs pieces from places like RFK and by the time I get them I might not even need it anymore…
I figured I’d better keep up my pretend-guitar skills, so I finally got back to finishing off the Medium difficulty in Guitar Hero 3 today. It was actually easier than expected, as I passed the remaining songs without any failures and even beat Lou on the first try (though it was pretty close at the end).
I then went back and started the Hard career mode in GH2, since it’s supposed to be a bit easier than GH3’s hard mode and would be a gentler introduction to having to use the fifth fret. It’s still a pretty harsh jump though, and it took me about four tries just to pass Surrender in the first tier.
I did eventually pass the first tier, but I really need to practice shifting my fingers a lot more. Too often I’m losing track of where they are and pressing the wrong fret when I think it’s the right one.
There hasn’t really been anything really meaty to report lately; work and other things have been distracting me enough that I’ve only gotten in scattered little bits of gaming here and there:
Arkadian Warriors and GripShift came out on XBLA this week. AW is kinda Diablo-ish, but simplified a lot, and I’ve already got a few other action RPGs to complete (the Champions of Norrath games, Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2, Sacred 2, etc.), so I’m not really interested in a stripped down version. I did buy GripShift though, even though I already have it on the PS3, since now I can play it on the LCD monitor and the XBLA version has a few more features (achievements, online multi).
I’ve completed a few more championships in PGR4, including a Major, but haven’t unlocked anything else yet. I’m saving up my Kudos for the Aston Martin car package right now, with just another 30,000 or so to go… The competition is getting a bit tougher, and I’ve had to restart some races multiple times now in cases where they got too far ahead and there was no chance of catching up. And I still hate the drift/star-collection events, since it’s something I still can’t pull off consistently.
I’ve also been picking away at WoW a bit, popping on briefly to complete a quest here and there, and gained a few more levels in the last couple weeks to take advantage of rest xp. I don’t really have the time to commit to it seriously right now though, so it’s pretty much something I just fall back on when I want to see some old friends and I’m too bored/lazy to arrange something else.
Yes, it’s SMG time again. I finished off the cluster of galaxies I was in and it did indeed open up a ‘secret’ cluster, though it’s not much of a secret when you get it by just playing through the game normally… I also got to go back to the area you first start in, and completed the coin collection challenge there and gained the ability to fly in some areas. The only place I’ve noticed so far where it will let me is in the main galaxy selection hub, and so far all I’ve really found is a few extra 1up mushrooms.
Of the galaxies I did, of particular note was the Matter Splatter Galaxy, which is a weird one in that the terrain only exists as long as it’s either under a spotlight or has recently been touched by these bouncing lights. If a wall moves into the shadow, you’ll just fall off the map if you then try to go wall-jump off of it. At one point you take the spring powerup and the spotlight slowly moves up the screen, and you have to try to keep up with it. Easier said than done when you factor in the spring’s awkwardness and spring-blocking obstacles… It must have taken me a dozen attempts to finally pass just that one section.
At one point, I noticed that I had 31 lives (they’re certainly not scarce in SMG), and although I hadn’t planned on it yet, I figured I’d take a stab at the final Bowser fight while I had all those lives just in case I needed them. But I didn’t; it wasn’t really all that difficult in the end, with the only frustration coming from how far back it sometimes puts you when you die, making you redo certain easy parts repeatedly. Overall though, there were probably separate galaxy stars that were tougher than the final one.
I’ve still got 41 more stars to collect, and beating the game lets me do the purple comet challenges now. In the purple challenges you just have to collect 100 purple coins, but that’s harder than it sounds when a lot of the stages have some tricky platforming in them and you have to redo the whole thing if you die, not just continue on from the last checkpoint…
I’m not sure if I’ll get all of them, though. I need to collect them all to unlock the ability to play as Luigi, but then I have to recollect all 120 stars all over again as Luigi (who’s harder to control) if I want to unlock a special galaxy, but I don’t know if I have that much patience or time. Maybe I’ll just chip away at it bit by bit in brief, spare moments…
I finally got back to playing a bit more of Guitar Hero 3 today as well. My last session made my left arm a bit sore for a few days, this being perhaps the most exercise it’s seen in years…
I continued along the Medium career, and left off at the beginning of Tier 8, which is where things are really going to get tough. Raining Blood was the only song I didn’t five-star when I blew through Easy, so I’m not looking forward to that one.
The boss battle against Slash again took a few retries, though fewer than I needed for Tom Morello, at least. It again went to sudden-death-and-you-lose-for-no-apparent-reason a few times, but in the end I managed to save up enough attacks to make him fail during one of the solo-ish parts.
I also had a bit of trouble with Knights of Cydonia (couldn’t find a good video of it on Medium though), failing a song completely for the first time in my Medium career. I was doing fine right up until the rapid hammer-on/pull-off section, and I’m still not very good at those. I managed to succeed the second time around just by strumming them like regular notes and being prepared by seeing the pattern the first time.
I also tried another song on Hard, and although I passed, it was…humbling. :P I’m really going to have to start explicitly practicing songs and techniques when I reach that point.
I’m up to 68 stars in Super Mario Galaxy now, and am mostly finished the cluster of galaxies I’m in right now. I think there’s one more cluster though, even though it doesn’t appear on the main map, since I can see another hut where you enter galaxies off in the distance and there’s what looks like an inactive transfer point to it.
Of particular note today was the Toy galaxy, where Mario gains a spring powerup that turns him into something like a slinky, with the ability to bounce really high. It’s a bit difficult to control though, since you never stop bouncing around, but that’s probably supposed to be part of the challenge…
It was particularly frustrating in this one section where there’s a cylinder with multiple levels of brick platforms inside. Getting to the top takes a bit of precision, but if you hit the bottom of a platform when you bounce (which is really easy in the tight space), you break the bricks, making it harder to stay on that platform. The longer you work at it, the harder it gets, as you get less and less landing space to work with. It must have taken me a good 15-20 minutes just to get to the top, and to make things worse, it turned out to be a completely optional area and the reward was just some extra star bits. :P
I hit the magic 60 star mark in Super Mario Galaxy tonight, so I think I could go straight to the final level(s) now, but I want to finish the main stars in the final galaxy cluster first, at least. There’s only a few more of them to go anyway, so I must still be missing a lot of hidden and comet stars, and probably won’t bother with them until after beating the main game.
Today I ran across the usual sand, ice, and fire worlds, as is pretty much expected in a Mario game nowadays, but at least there were a few new twists on them. The fire and ice were actually combined into the same galaxy, often switching between the two and even having spots where they’re on the same planetoid.
The sand galaxy also made a bit of a fool out of me. I reached one spot where an arrow told me to go one direction, but I noticed that I could go the opposite direction as well, despite quickly flowing sand, if I repeatedly jumped. It was slow going against the sand, but I discovered some star parts in that direction and thought I was going to find a hidden star for my troubles, except…I then wound up back at that same arrow. It was just a loop, and I’d been slowly going against the flow of the sand for no good reason. Ah well.
I’m up to 45 stars now in Super Mario Galaxy, and it continues to be fresh and exciting with every new galaxy. I think I only need 60 stars to beat the game, but I’ll probably continue collecting as many as possible, so who knows how many I’ll have at the end.
I finally got to try out two other powerups tonight: the ice flower, and the Boo mushroom. The ice flower lets you run on top of water by freezing it, and it took me a couple minutes before I realized you could wall-jump up waterfalls that are close together with it. The Boo mushroom turns you into a ghost, but all it’s been used for so far is to let you go through some bars. 99% of the time you’re still just plain old Mario, without any powerups.
I also ran across a comet that I wasn’t able to finish for the first time — it only lets you have one health point in a fairly long boss fight against Bouldergeist. It’s supposedly one of the harder comets, but I think it’ll be doable — I only lost one health point when I fought him normally, and came close in the couple attempts I made at the comet. It’ll just take some persistence.