After one more failed attempt to grab the GH3 bundle, I gave up and just placed an order online. It’ll take a bit longer since they’re still backordered, but at least now all I have to do is wait and it’ll eventually just show up.
I also tossed in a standalone copy of GH2, and the 360 version has some GH1 tracks available as DLC, for something like over 160 songs total. I’ll have a bit of catching up to do…
I thought I’d grab a copy of Guitar Hero 3 today, but it looks like it’ll be as hard to get as GH2 was when it first came out. I checked six places around the Sunridge area after work, but none of them had it in stock, instead reassuring me that they’d have more copies “in a week or two.”
It was particularly frustrating because the Future Shop site showed it as being in stock, so I placed an order for it for in-store pickup as soon as I got to work, and I was supposed to get an email within three hours telling me it’s ready to be picked up. Seven hours later I finally got a response, telling me that my order was cancelled because they were out of stock. Even though their site still said they had some. It’s supposedly updated every hour, so if it was correct, I could have popped down over lunch and picked one up instead. Ugh.
Oh well, I can wait. People are still playing the previous GH games a lot, so the multiplayer community isn’t going to disappear after a week like it does in so many other games. So, instead, I bought a few other things I’d been meaning to get: the PS2->PS3 memory card adapter, Ratchet & Clank Future, The Witcher, and Hellgate: London. After all that transferring, organization, and installation, I didn’t have much time left for actual playing, though.
The memory card reader worked well enough for my 8MB card, but wouldn’t recognize the 32MB card at all. Not too surprising since it’s an unofficial third-party card, and Sony’s only ever officially supported 8MB cards, but it’s still disappointing. I just had to fire up the old PS2 and copy saves from the 32MB card to the 8MB in passes, which was made more annoying by the lack of a card format function, so every save had to be individually deleted to free up more space after each pass. Oh well, it’s a one-time thing, at least. I also got to try the system backup function on the PS3 afterwards, which is something I wish my 360 had.
Hellgate: London is a bit of a risk since the initial reviews are a bit mixed. The gameplay is supposed to be solid, but it’s a bit buggy at the moment, and the choice to make some fundamental features exclusive to the paid subscription players is a bit controversial. Even without having actually played it yet, the installer’s already annoying me — it asked for the registration key twice in a row, on completely different types of screens, for some reason, and then wouldn’t run until a Vista hotfix was installed. Here’s hoping that the gameplay really is great…
I was surprised to find The Witcher at the store at all, since it’s a lesser known title that isn’t even showing up in a lot of online stores here. It’s also a bit controversial since the North American release has been censored a bit, removing some nudity on playing cards that you can collect. It wasn’t really worth importing just for that though. And I’m sure there’ll be a fan patch to ‘fix’ it before too long…
WoW tonight was spent pretty much just finishing off various minor quests in the Barrens. There’s still plenty of them to go though, as I’ve only really been doing the ones near Crossroads. I’m finally starting to find tin and silver deposits, so mining and blacksmithing are progressing pretty well, at least. And I hit level 18, but none of the skills at that level are particularly exciting. 20 will be the big one.
I let the 360 run some endurance races in Forza 2 with an AI driver just as a stress test, and it seems to be holding up well enough. With the PS3 having moved in, I’ll need to rearrange my gaming area a bit, though. The old PS2 was thin and flat, whereas all of the new systems are…not. And I’d like to give the 360 a bit more ventilation space — it had plenty before, but just in case…
And speaking of Forza 2, one of the first things I did with the returned 360 was buy the Twin Ring Motegi track, but it turns out that it doesn’t add any career races that use it, which is disappointing. It’ll really only be usable in arcade mode and multiplayer.
Tonight we ran through and did all of the quests in Ragefire Chasm. I remember doing them once before, but that was ages ago, so I’d forgotten most of the details. Hopefully it won’t be too long before we’re ready for Wailing Caverns, where the good loot starts to show up.
And now that I’ve chosen my professions, I’ve been doing so much mining that my character probably has copper poisoning now. There’s still a long way to go, though… I’m tempted to just sell the ore/bars and build up some cash, but then that just keeps me from building up my own skills.
I also hit level 16 and gained yet another new type of attack that I have to cram into my hotkeys somewhere. This one should be a fairly useful one though, as it guarantees I’ll grab aggro for at least six seconds. Hopefully that’ll help keep things off the healers, which I’ve been doing a miserable job of so far.
On the WoW front, I finally decided to take blacksmithing as my secondary profession, since as another group member pointed out, there are plenty of specialization possibilities down the road so it doesn’t really matter if multiple people have it.
And I finally got level 14 and got two more new skills, as if I wasn’t already running out of hotkeys as it is… I’m finding it difficult to care much about the skills with conditions like “can only be used after the opponent dodges” though, since there’s plenty enough occupying my attention already.
My warrior hit level 13 tonight, as I was running around cleaning up old newbie quests. Or at least trying to clean them up — for every quest I completed, it seemed like there were two more new ones to take on. Augh! I think I’m close to exhausting the ones in the Mulgore area though, and hopefully we’ll soon be grouping up and working on common quests more often.
I’ve also discovered that warriors have a lot more different attacks than I expected, and I’ve already run out of spaces on my main hotkey bar. They’re all useful in different situations, so I want them all available, but there just isn’t room. I think for now I’ll stick with a two-handed weapon though, so I won’t need to use the shield bash attack right away. I’ll probably have to switch back to it later on though, as a more reliable way of interrupting casting.
A bit more progress in the new WoW group tonight, finally hitting level 10 and opening up the all-important talent trees. Though I just realized that I actually forgot to spend my first point before logging off…
I don’t really know much about warriors other than that in general you choose between trading off DPS and damage absorption, so I’ll have to start studying the skill trees more closely. Since we’ll mostly be helping each other out, damage absorption isn’t as important at these low levels when there’s healing around, so it’ll probably be best to go flat-out DPS for now.
It’s still hard to get into the flow of how a warrior should act when I’m still gaining completely new skills, but I’m sure that’ll come soon enough. For now all I can really do is charge to start the fight, use the taunt-generating attack whenever I have the rage for it, and stun to try and interrupt spells. I keep forgetting to refresh the battle shout buff though, so I’ll have to try and focus on that some more.
I do wonder though, if this other warrior guy becomes a regular member, having two warriors might be a bit redundant. Perhaps a mage would be a better choice to complement the group…
Like trying to quit the mafia, WoW sank its claws back into me tonight as a group of us decided to try starting over again on a new server. The hardest part of the early game isn’t surviving though, it’s just getting everyone together in the same place…
I’m trying a warrior for the first time, though it’s too early to tell if I really like it or not. The power curve flattened out really quickly though, and by level 7 or 8 I was already having trouble with monsters only one level above me. Maybe I just need a better weapon, though.
As I expected, I finished HL2:Ep2 fairly quickly tonight. The final battle was simultaneously one of the best and most frustrating battles ever in the HL series. Best because it’s something actually different from the typical ‘boss fight’, but also frustrating in (without spoiling too much) dealing with the car and the Hunters. I swear I had to quickload eight or nine times at one point because of the damn car’s handling.
Although the episode did improve a lot in its second half, the beginning was still fairly uninteresting, so it’s a fairly average episode overall. It took me about ten hours, so it was still reasonable value for its price, and I’ll still be interested in Ep3.
I still haven’t really checked out Team Fortress 2, but team-based multiplayer games like that require a bit more of a long-term time commitment than I want to give it right now. I don’t really have time to start anything new tonight, but the news that Beautiful Katamari came out yesterday reminded me that I still haven’t finished the second one, so perhaps I’ll start on that again tomorrow.
I was starting to get concerned, but HL2:Ep2 definitely improved tonight, perhaps due to one major factor: running over things is fun. ;) Especially Hunters, which die in a single hit if you’re going fast enough, and it’s often easier than trying to take them down in a straight firefight.
There was one point at which Alyx and I got pinned down in a house and had to fend off multiple Hunters and Combine troops without the help of the car, and that was probably the best, most tense battle of the episode so far. The Hunters break into the house itself and will shred you to pieces unless you effectively use the hallways and stairs for cover.
The night ended by arriving at the place we’ve been seeking all along, and I’m probably pretty close to the end based on the achievement list. Speaking of which, I got a whole bunch more of them tonight since a lot of them depended on getting to certain parts of the story or having the car. Again, I wound up doing things I might not have bothered with before (stealing grenades, racing D0G, etc.) if not for the achievements.