Category Archives: Types

Oh Right, This Thing

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Yes, it’s time for yet more catching up.

I finished Forza 3 today. Well, again… I finished the six basic seasons long ago, but that left a lot of events unfinished, and today I finally got the Solid Gold achievement for getting gold in every single event. It took a while, and now there’s pretty much nothing left to do in it. Just in time for Gran Turismo 5…

I also finished off Mass Effect 2 shortly after my last post about it. There wasn’t really that much left to do at that point, just finishing off the loyalty missions and then off to the Omega 4 relay. The final mission worked out pretty well, requiring you to actually know your team, even if the final boss fight was a bit dumb. Still well worth it overall, and I’ll be looking forward to Mass Effect 3, where Liara better be more grateful about my remaining faithful to her!

I started Etrian Odyssey 3 on the DS, and it plays a lot like the first one so far, with a new sailing/fishing/exploring side game that haven’t done much with yet. I’m still only on the first floor though, and just about to gather up enough courage to go down to the next one.

And I also started a rather unusual game on the PSP: Zettai Hero Project: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman. It’s by the Disgaea guys and is kind of similar in certain ways, but different in a lot of others too. It’s turn based and you accumulate levels, but you only have yourself, you move one square at a time, your time in a dungeon is limited by an energy meter, items have a durability and wear out fairly quickly, enemy behaviour is somewhat more explicit about activation ranges and how they’ll react, you have a prinny wife… And of course, the story is Weird As Hell. It’s interesting and fun so far though, but I’m still only just barely out of the tutorial.

And in the MMO world, I did more of the Hallowe’en event quests, and am down to 11 quests left for Loremaster on my priest, but that’s about it. In EQ2 we did some more quests in the ‘Peacock Club’ quest line, but took a break last week and checked out a new zone, Pillar of Flame, picking up and completing some more quests there. We’re still level 60, but will probably begin leveling up again sometime soon.

By far I probably spent the most time in Minecraft, but that’s a whole separate topic…

The Price Of Loyalty Is About 35 Hours

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I spent a fairly large chunk of the weekend playing Mass Effect 2, and after 35 hours I’m finally at the point where I’ve recruited all of the crew members and done their loyalty missions, aside from the one missing one which I know will be filled in later (in comparison, it only took me 28 hours to fully complete ME1). In keeping with the one-of-each-strength philosophy, I usually take Samara and Grunt with me, for biotic and ‘tank’ support.

Amazingly enough, this actually puts me pretty close to the endgame, as apparently the recruitment and loyalty missions are the bulk of the main story in ME2, not just initial preparation, like in ME1. It makes sense though, with so many more crew members this time around and some missions are fairly extensive. Most skills are fairly well filled-in, and I’ve done most of the important research, so I’m pretty well prepared.

I’m now at a point where I can start the point-of-no-return mission, but I’ve still got a bunch of side quests I can do, largely from the DLC packs. I’m enjoying it well enough that I’m certainly going to finish off all of those first.

Shepard’s Back!

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Since I don’t want to be playing only old games, I figured I’d better get around to something more recent and recently started Mass Effect 2. It’s pretty much as has been widely reported: RPG elements have been toned down, there are fewer skills and points to spend, shooter elements are more pronounced, etc. It’s still been fun though, and I’m about eight hours into it now.

I imported a character from ME1, which kept a bunch of decisions about how things had played out in the past. I switched from the Adept class to Infiltrator though, just to try something different, and I’ve mostly been using a sniper rifle and pistol. It’s hard to get a sense for which weapons are better than others since you don’t see stats anymore, but there aren’t too many choices at this point.

So far I’ve gone to Omega and completed a handful of quests there, including recruiting Mordin, good ol’ Garrus, and Zaeed (a DLC character). I’ll probably do more recruiting next (I’m in the middle of working on the krogan now) and work on their loyalty missions and other side/DLC missions first, before really worrying about the story.

More MMO Mania

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Things have been picking up again in the MMO worlds.

WoW finally released its 4.0.1 patch, pretty much completely redoing how skills and talent trees and stats work and forcing everyone to redo their talent selections. I’ve caught up on the main trees for my priest, warrior, and mage, and so far the differences aren’t huge, but it might require more play to really tell. My mage seems to have completely lost some buffs he used to have, though. The actual Cataclysm changes are still a ways away, but hopefully I’ll get my Loremaster achievement finished before then.

In EQ2, we finally got a full group together for a couple of weeks, so we’ve worked on the heritage quest for Rahotep’s staff and some faction grinding for the Maj’Dul quests. Unfortunately we aren’t quite strong enough for Rahotep’s final step yet — we gave it a try, but he’s an EpicX2 monster, and we just couldn’t damage him quickly enough. Maybe with a handful of more levels; we’ve managed to defeat an EpicX2 before with just the four of us, but it was on the verge of turning grey to us.

EQ2 also launched the Hallowe’en event, and today I took my mystic through the major quests that are part of it. One of them involved a hedge maze where I kept getting stronger and stronger as I defeated more enemies, and at the end I took on an EpicX2 boss all by myself and won. I’ll have to redo that one a few times, both just for fun and for other rewards like collectibles and a quest that only opens up on the second attempt. A couple of the other quests also have rewards for repeated attempts that I’ll have to try for.

And I finally got around to canceling my subscription to Asheron’s Call. I’d resubscribed earlier this year with the intent of revisiting it, seeing what was new, checking out the old stomping grounds, etc., but…it’s just not going to happen, at this rate. Sayonara, AC.

F.E.A.R. Of The Dark

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In my neverending quest to free up disk space and get games off of my backlog, I started playing F.E.A.R. last week. As an FPS, it should be fairly short.

Unfortunately, I’m kind of getting bored of it already. The combat in it is actually pretty decent, in that it’s not just spray-n-pray; you have to conserve ammo, wait for opportunities, use the slo-mo ability effectively, not take on too many at once, etc… It’s just that the environments have been so bland so far. I’m something like four chapters in, and it’s just been either a bunch of office building hallways and rooms, or your typical industrial pipes and walkways. It’s not particularly scary, either. There are sudden flashes of other scenes, or you’re suddenly dumped in a ‘cutscene’ that obviously isn’t really happening, but none of it’s actually frightening. And you can tell where the story is going from a mile away.

I’ll probably play a bit more of it, just to see if it picks up any, and it’ll probably be short anyway, but if it doesn’t then I might just abandon this one.

Disk Space Unleashed

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Argh, I’m falling out of the habit of updating again… There was a stretch where I didn’t play anything since I was out of town, but there is still a bunch to talk about.

I finished off The Force Unleashed, finally freeing up the 30 gigs of disk space it was taking up. Some of the boss fights were fairly tense and I almost lost, even playing on easy, but otherwise it was still just a matter of slogging through it to see the story. I played the three DLC packs too, but they were fairly short and easy.

On a whim I finally played The Path, a rather artsy non-game where you wander around the woods as one of six girls in a weird take on Little Red Riding Hood. Around the woods you find items relating to the girls’ personalities, encounter their (oft-metaphorical) ‘wolf’, and then tour through a bizarre interpretation of Grandma’s house. I’m not sure I learned anything from it, but it was interesting trip if you appreciate surreality.

Now that I’m pretty much done with Picross 3D, my puzzle game impulse is being satisfied by Everyday Genius: SquareLogic. It’s Sudoku-like in that you have to make the rows and columns of a square fill with non-repeating numbers, but the squares are also broken down into smaller regions with their own specific requirements, like adding up to a certain total, all numbers must be odd, one square must be higher/lower than another one, etc. It looks tough at first, but the interface helps a lot in keeping track of everything.

I downloaded F1 2010 on Steam and played through a race, albeit on the easy and shortened weekend settings just to get a taste. It plays well though, feeling authentic enough, with a decent amount of control over things like your own career and R&D. I’ll definitely have to put more time into it.

EQ2 hasn’t progressed much, as I was gone for a week. I caught up on the faction grinding I missed out on, but another group member was missing this last week, so we just goofed around in the Cleft of Rujark dungeon off of Sinking Sands.

And then there’s Minecraft. That’ll deserve its own post…

Just When I Thought I Was Out…

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I’ve been dabbling in another miscellaneous pile of stuff lately:

Right after I finished the Mafia 2 main story, they released the first DLC pack, Jimmy’s Vendetta, which adds a bunch of free-roam missions like you’d expect from a GTA-ish game. It’s unfortunate that they’ve chopped the game up like this, but I’m invested this far into it, may as well get a little bit more fun out of it…

I’m about halfway through it now, and most of the missions haven’t been very difficult, but Paddy Wagon must have taken me 20+ attempts before I could finally beat it. You get mobbed by so many enemies, many with machine guns, that just surviving the fights is difficult, especially with enemies approaching from multiple directions. I eventually beat it by luring a cop car along with me to the final fight, and they helped thin out the enemies.

Overall though, Jimmy’s Vendetta feels…soulless. The missions are fun, and it’s nice to have more to do, but there’s very little extra voicing (just some generic environmental responses), no mid-mission chatter, nobody ever comes along or helps you out, the mission intro is just a page of text… It just doesn’t feel right.

WoW surprised everyone by releasing a bit of pre-Cataclysm content with an event in Durotar about the trolls retaking the Echo Isles. No real challenge to it, but it was still interesting, and I did it on both of my 80s for the achievement (and my 40 mage, but he couldn’t do the final quest for the achievement).

I briefly played Puzzle Quest 2, but only long enough to get through the tutorials in the first town. Not a lot seems different so far, but it’s been so long since I played the first that I’m fuzzy about the minor details that might have changed anyway.

And tonight I took another shot at VVVVVV on my Mac and surprised myself by managing to collect the final two trinkets. One of them wasn’t really that bad — I just hadn’t bothered to spend the time on it before — but the other was the infamous Veni Vidi Vici one, and it must have taken me over 200 attempts tonight to get it, not including all of my previous failed attempts. You have to let yourself fall through a bunch of spike-riddled screens, bounce off a platform, and fall all the way back through them, and it took forever to finally get the timing right. Getting the timing right on one screen isn’t really that hard, but you have to chain those successes all in a row to get through them all. Oddly enough, the return trip seemed easier than expected; the problem was mainly getting past that bounce successfully and consistently.

And that’s probably all I’ll do in VVVVVV, since the things still left over like the time trials and gravitron are just crazy-difficult.

Come Back, Braking Line!

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A couple days ago I felt like playing a driving game, but I’m still waiting on the next Jalopnik pack for Forza, so I fired up GRID instead. I’d never actually put much time into it past the initial day or two for some reason, and over a few hours I managed to complete all of the first-tier events in the American and European leagues, and a couple in the next tiers.

It’s a lot harder than I remember it being, though. Even on the easiest setting, AI cars would constantly be riding my tail right until the finish, making me vulnerable to small mistakes. And since I almost always start towards the back of the pack, working my way past all the AI cars inevitably feels like a game of bumper cars, only rarely emerging unscathed. It’s still fun, even if a bit more frustrating than I’d liked when I was hoping for a bit more of a relaxing cruise to victory…

I also popped into EQ2 for a bit. I’d almost forgotten that it was a double-xp weekend, and although I didn’t get any adventuring done, I did gain five tradeskill levels each on my provisioner and jewelcrafter. These bonus weekends are about the only time I work on tradeskills anymore, as it gets too grindy otherwise.

And speaking of MMOs, last night I loaded WoW for a little while, partly to test the RealID chat with a friend, to check the oracle eggs (nothing good yet again), and to do some new quests around Sen’Jin village related to the upcoming Cataclysm release. They weren’t particularly difficult, but they did grant some nice rewards like an illusion-granting token and a unique cloak graphic.

Live Fast, Die Often

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As expected, I finished off Mafia 2 today. Things were starting to get complicated for Vito in the first part, and today things spiraled just a bit out of control, dragging in everyone from the Chinese to the feds.

Overall it continued to be a pretty good play experience. There was only one point where some grinding for cash was needed, but that didn’t take very long. I upgraded one of the DLC cars for the achievement, but there wasn’t really any point where a fast car really seemed necessary, another symptom of how much wasted opportunity the game has by being so short. The irritating one-shot deaths continued right till the end, but fortunately checkpoints seemed to be much saner, except perhaps for one part of the observatory.

I’m sure there’ll be more DLC though, as there are already Steam achievements listed for more missions. And yes, I managed to get all of the Playboy magazines…

Fast Track To The Mob

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I’ve given up on Mercenaries 2 due primarily to poor controls, and unfortunately I made it halfway through Mafia 2 today. I say unfortunately, because it looks like it’s going to be pretty short.

In terms of the world, the city is very pretty, with lots of distinct buildings and landmarks and a great feel to the atmosphere, but there’s not much reason to explore it beyond what you need for the missions. The handling on the cars takes some getting used to, but that’s fairly understandable for the era of cars involved here.

The plot is pretty basic mob cliches, but I think it does a far better job of taking itself seriously than GTA4 did, as it sticks to a fairly small scope and doesn’t get unrealistically wild and crazy (so far, anyway). Combat has a great feel to it, with enemies running around and stumbling and trying to find their own cover, much like you’d expect in a chaotic battle. Combat has been fairly limited too, happening sparingly rather than non-stop battle from start to end of a chapter. There’s even one chapter that I think didn’t involve a single fight.

The most irritating things so far are that you can get hit by unlucky one-shot kills, forcing you to suddenly and unexpectedly restart at the last checkpoint. The checkpoints are mostly plentiful, but the foundry battle in Chapter 8 was particularly annoying since there’s a massive, long fight and only one mid-battle checkpoint. And what made it extra-annoying was that I had to redo that chapter in order to pick up a couple Playboy magazines that I had missed due to being distracted by the frustration of all the insta-deaths… (I had to redo chapter 4 for the magazines as well, but that one wasn’t nearly as bad.)

I’m still enjoying it a lot, but at this rate I should easily finish it tomorrow.