Category Archives: Specific Games/Series

But Does Freeman Have A Valid License?

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A bit more progress in HL2:Ep2 tonight, though I seem to be taking it a lot more slowly than most people, as I’ve only just gotten to the car after 5 hours in.

Not too much of note happened tonight; it was mostly just crawling through some mines and an industrial yard, fighting zombies/zombines, with a couple set piece battles that weren’t all that tough or interesting. In one I had to hold off waves of zombies while Alyx sniped them, and that took a few tries, but it was fairly easy once I figured out the trick. I’m hoping it picks up a bit now that I have the car.

I picked up a couple more achievements, one for one of the set pieces and the one I’d been working on for kills with thrown items, so now I can go back to using more conventional weapons for the rest of the episode and not having to try for tricky gravity gun kills. I definitely can’t get the grub achievement now though, and I’ve also missed the garden gnome needed for one of the more difficult achievements. If I want to get those, it’ll take another run through the episode. Which I was going to do anyway for the developer commentary nodes, but you can’t get achievements while in that mode, so I’d need a total of three runs through. I think those achievements can wait for a while…

Is There A Can Of Raid For Antlions?

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I got a bit further in HL2:Ep2 today, and it’s been nothing but antlions, antlions, and more antlions. Including a new variant, the acid antlion, and they’ve actually got a decent AI. They’ll try to stick to their strong long-range attack, hide behind obstacles when not firing, and try to sneak up on you if you retreat.

In the middle there was a defend-this-spot battle involving turrets, and it was simultaneously less and more frantic than a similar battle in the original HL2 (at Nova Prospekt). You only have two turrets to take care of this time, they don’t fall down so easily, and you’ve got backup from a couple other NPCs, but things get tense at the end when it’s difficult to avoid being overrun.

I also had a vortigaunt for a companion instead of Alyx for a while, and their shock attack is pretty powerful. After a while all the third-person pseudo-praise you get from him gets a bit discomfiting. “Ah, this seems like a situation for which the Freeman is uniquely suited!” “Um, yeah, thanks…again…”

I hope I’m done with antlions for the rest of the episode, as I’m kind of sick of them now and I’ve completed the web cache achievement and almost got the squish-all-grubs achievement (328 of 333). I’m getting close to that kills-with-thrown-objects achievement, too (26 of 30), which was tough to try for up to this point since there isn’t much to throw around with the grav gun inside the antlion nest.

I Wish My 360 Had Half A Life

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Well, I was going to play with Halo 3’s theater mode mode to get a screenshot of the Ghost collision I mentioned before, but my 360 has decided that tonight is a red ring night. Maybe it’ll be more cooperative tomorrow…

I fired up HL2:Ep2 (finally) instead, but didn’t get very far into it. About the only notable thing so far is encountering the new Hunter enemy, though I didn’t get to fight it. The Vortigaunt model has been completely redone, so they don’t look quite so bad next to the rest of the NPCs anymore.

The other big thing that’s new with Ep2 and the rest of the Orange Box is the introduction of ‘achievements’ to Steam, similar to the 360’s but without the point values. Trying to get achievements gives you a bit of extra challenge, extends the game a bit, and of course, lets you prove your bragging about your ‘leet skillz.’ It’s already changing how I approach Ep2 as I now first try to kill enemies with the gravity gun instead of conventional weapons, in order to try for the “kill 30 enemies with thrown objects” achievement.

I Didn’t Shoot You In The Back, It Was…Um…Him.

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HL2:Ep2 got stood up again in favor of an impromptu Halo 3 co-op session. Alyx is going to be so mad at me…

The co-op mode in Halo 3 is a ton of fun though, since you’re a stronger force, you don’t have to worry about checkpoint respawns as much, you can cover multiple vehicle roles (when you’re not running each other over), provide covering fire for each other, etc. Or accidentally crash into each other trying to jump Ghosts over the same ramp at the same time. ;) (I’m going to have to find that in the replay theatre…)

The only downside is that since you’re much stronger, the campaign speeds by that much quicker, making it feel even shorter. Rooms that I might have spent 10 minutes carefully clearing by myself can be blazed through in a couple minutes when you’ve got three people. Oh well, there’s still some more skulls to hunt down…

I finally got to play with the vehicles, but I’m not too impressed by the new ones so far, though I’m sure there are more that I haven’t seen or tried yet. The Ghost, my old standby from H2, is still great but less frequently available, and I still don’t like driving the Warthogs.

Otherwise, things went by in too much of a blur for anything else memorable to stand out. The other downside of co-op is that you’re not always the hero, so occasionally someone else gets all the glory while you were standing there admiring the texture on a rock. :) At some point down the road I’m going to have to replay it again by myself just so that it deliberately takes longer and I can focus on it battle by battle.

Ain’t Misbehavin’

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After testing it a bit further, my 360’s problems seem to have lessened a bit. I was able to play Forza 2 and Halo 3 for a few hours without any problems, and various XBLA games didn’t trigger anything, but it did freeze once more in the Flatout UC demo.

I’m still not sure how much I really trust it at this point, but all I can do is keep playing and see if it gets any worse. I really don’t want to have to send it back in again, especially for a non-reliably-reproducible problem.

And speaking of Halo 3, it looks like I might actually be able to do it on the Heroic difficulty, it’ll just take a lot more caution, sniping, and careful advancement, and I’ll have to use the less-favoured weapons more often since there’s not enough ammo of the better ones. I also got the first silver skull, though I’ll have to redo the level to get the first gold one there too.

Forza 2 still hasn’t fixed the Porsche/Pirelli money bug, which is good for me since there’s a new car pack out and I need some cash to buy those. I probably won’t really get back into it until new tracks come out though, and apparently at least one is in development and was shown at the TGS conference.

Welcome Back

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I finally got my 360 back today. Well, not the same one, they wound up sending me a refurbished unit that’s actually older than the one I sent in. Though it has a model of DVD drive in it that wasn’t available when it was first made, so who knows how much of the internals have been replaced. As long as it has the new heatsink (it appears to) and works fine, I’ll be happy. It’s venting more hot air than the old one did, which indicates that the heatsink is indeed successfully moving more heat out, as it’s supposed to.

I only completed one chapter of Halo 3 before realizing I’d already missed a skull or two so far, so I might just restart, since it didn’t take very long anyway. Some differences from Halo 2 are already apparent: the Arbiter accompanies you and can help out a lot; there’s already at least one new weapon type, a rapid-firing alien pistol with a slight arc to the projectiles; the HUD curves a bit, a la Metroid Prime; there are now ‘equipment’ items you can pick up and use, like bubble shields; the Brutes have been redesigned and haven’t been as annoying as they were in 2 so far; and Grunts seem to be a lot more chatty.

And, of course, it looks a ton better than 2 did even on the PC, mainly thanks to a new lighting model and higher res textures. Getting used to the console controls after using the keyboard+mouse for 2 didn’t take as long as expected, though I still don’t feel accurate enough. Being able to aim precisely with the mouse and get headshots a lot was nice, and with the gamepad it feels like I waste too much ammo ‘sweeping’ around or trying to aim precisely and just missing. Multiplayer is also supposed to be vastly improved in 3, though I’ll focus on completing the campaign first. Might do a lot of that in co-op mode, though.

Otherwise, I spent most of the evening checking other stuff I missed out on while it was in for repairs, including various demos. Beautiful Katamari was pretty much exactly like how the PS2 games play, just in high-def, no real surprise there. Sega Rally is a bit too arcade-ish for me, and I still have to finish DiRT (which is more my style), so I’ll pass on it. Crash Of The Titans might be interesting, but the demo didn’t have any kind of tutorial on the controls, so I have no idea if I was missing out on something critical. The bit I managed to get through didn’t really show enough variety, either. It goes on the ‘maybe’ pile.

And I got a few more levels done in Eets: Chowdown, until the sound suddenly disappeared on me and trying to return to the dashboard caused it to freeze. The guide still worked and sound was restored once I got back to the dashboard, so I guess it was just a bug in Eets.

Now I still have to figure out what other downloadables I’ve missed in the meantime…

Not In The Cards

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Firing up EQ last night reminded me that Sony Online also recently released a collectible card game variant of EQ, and all current players get a free starter deck, so I downloaded the client for that, fired it up, and started the tutorial.

And then quit it halfway through the tutorial. It looks like a decent enough CCG, but I’ve only played them before as minigames like Arcomage in the M&M series or Pazaak in KotOR, and it quickly became clear that this was going to be a fairly daunting, complex one along the lines of MtG. It would take quite a bit of effort to learn it deeply enough to be good at it, and I don’t really have time for that right now.

Your Mother Named You *Botwoon*?

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I yet again failed to complete Super Metroid, though I did beat a couple more bosses (Botwoon and Darygon) and picked up a few more abilities (space jump, plasma beam, and spring jump). That’s nearly all of them, and I’m close to full on energy tanks, so the end can’t be too far off.

I think I’m sick of wall jumps and the grappling beam, after a few areas where you had to successfully pull their moves off a good half-dozen times in a row, without fail. Fortunately the space jump mostly obsoletes the need for those from here on. Also, the bosses have been fairly easy since Phantoon; I beat him while on my last energy tank, while I barely broke a sweat on the two above.

I also finally got my copies of Halo 3 and Eternal Sonata from Amazon. I got the Collector’s Edition of Halo 3 and unfortunately, like almost everyone else who got it, the game disc was loose and scratched up a bit, and the steel tin is slightly bent in a bit on one side. The scratches don’t look too serious though; there’s only one easily visible one and it extends outward from the center, which is much less damaging than one that runs parallel to the tracks. MS has instituted a replacement program if it fails to play properly, but it would help if I get my 360 back from them first so I can even check…

Road Rage

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Halo 2 was much more cooperative tonight, so I managed to get through one more area (Uprising) without any more Live trouble. This level was actually pretty fun, with a lot of time spent driving a Ghost and blasting the hell out of everything, and the Brutes didn’t seem nearly as annoying as in the last level. It’s when they’re in the tight corridors and smaller rooms like the last level that they’re a real pain.

This was probably the last Arbiter level, since there’s only two left, the next one is a Chief level, and they’ll almost certainly end with another Chief level. I should be able to finish it off and find out tomorrow, anyway.

Dammit, Halo

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Another Halo 2 chapter, another “invalid checkpoint” error… I hadn’t fully completed the level when it happened this time, so I couldn’t simply select the next level as the starting point, but it didn’t put me back at the beginning this time either. Instead I just won’t get an achievement for completing this chapter. It was a fairly long one, so I don’t really want to redo the whole thing just to get the achievement right now.

It seems to happen when I lose my connection to XBox Live, which is happening more often now thanks to the mass influx of Halo 3 players. It’s not like the 360 though, where you still get achievements even if you’re offline (just without a timestamp on them); with the PC version, you don’t get the achievement at all if you’re offline at the time.

There were no Flood in this chapter, thankfully, but this was the introduction of the Brutes, and they’re also plenty annoying. They’re hard to hit when they’re in ‘berserk’ mode, and take a ton of damage. There were also a few pairs of Hunters, placed in just the wrong spots as I’d already spent most of my good ammo on the preceding battles.

The level design wasn’t all that impressive either, with roughly three different areas, each of which was made up of fairly repetitive elements. At the end there was one really frustrating room where I had to carefully hit-and-run at the entrance, but the enemies loved to lob grenades, and getting hit with a plasma grenade is instant death, making you redo the whole long, careful slog through the room. I think it took me five or six attempts total.