Category Archives: Racing

Buyer’s Remorse

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So another Steam sale has come and gone and I bought a few too many games (as usual) and I haven’t really played many recently, so it’s time to start working through the backlog again…

Infested Planet: I’m not terribly good at RTSes, but this one is more up my alley. You’ve got a squad of soldiers on maps full of enemies and the goal is simple: eliminate them all. The tricky part is that you’ve only got a small handful of soldiers and there are massive numbers of those enemies constantly spawning from hives, so you have to plan out where to strike, proceed aggressively enough to push the enemy back but not so aggressively that you get overrun, protect your flank and bases so the enemy doesn’t take them back, buy the right upgrades for your current goal, etc. Enemy mutations can happen mid-battle so you suddenly have to adapt to something new, rethink your approach, and redeploy your resources. It gives you tons of choice and so far has let me proceed at pretty much my own pace, which I really like.

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure: Remember that old game Oregon Trail? Now imagine it as a scrolling shooter. With unicorn stampedes. And narwhals. And a whole bunch of other random, silly scenarios. It gets repetitive rather quickly, but it was only a buck and it’s great fun while it lasts.

GRID Autosport: A brand-new entry in the GRID series, this one leans more towards ‘serious’ racing. There’s not as much choice or career persistence as in something like Forza, but it’s nice to have a wider variety of racing disciplines (it includes endurance and open wheel races as well as the usual sports cars). I’m terrible at handling the RWD cars so far though; I just keep spinning out… I’d gotten kind of tired of GT6, so this should scratch my racing itch for a while.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons: An adventure game where you control two characters (the brothers) simultaneously, each one on a different analog stick, and many of the puzzles depend on coordinating the two. It’s really short and not very difficult, but it’s very well-done and moving. To say more would be spoilery, but it’s definitely recommended.

Pre-2014

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And yes, I’d been playing a bunch of other stuff in the meantime.

Borderlands 2: Borderlands, but more of it and with a much better story and villain, and I was happy with that.  I’ve made it most of the way through TVHM with Axton and should get around to finishing that off at some point.  I’ve also done most of the DLC, except Hammerlock’s Big Hunt, which was a boring slog.  Not sure if I’ll have time for UVHM or trying other classes in the future.

Minecraft: Of course. The 1.6 release took a long time to stabilize for mods, so I’d been putting together and playing my own custom mod pack of it, tweaking it as mods were updated. The major mod packs are catching up now, but I think I’ll stick with my own custom one for now.

Gran Turismo 6: It’s an improvement in a bunch of ways, but it’s really what GT5 should have been in the first place. It fixes up a bunch of stuff (the menu system and career mode in particular), but doesn’t really do anything revolutionary, and still has a bunch of flaws (weak leaderboards, features delayed into future patches) so it feels fairly weak compared to hearing about the new stuff in, say, Forza 5. It’s about the best I’m going to get for now though, without an XBone or PS4.

Terraria: There was a big patch (1.2) that added a whole bunch of new stuff so I started a new world and character.  I haven’t really put much time into it yet though, so I haven’t really seen too much of that new stuff.

Animal Crossing New Leaf: I caved in and picked up a 3DS due to a tidal wave of games I was interested in last year (including Fire Emblem Awakening, Etrian Odyssey 4, and Shin Megami Tensei 4), but this is the one I’ve put the most time into by far. When granted municipal powers over animal people, I turn into an obsessive petty tyrant, apparently.

Ittle Dew: An indie Zelda clone.  Fairly simple and short, but it’s still fun and pretty cute.

Bit.Trip Presents…Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien: One of those ‘continuous runner’ games where you can’t control the forward motion, just whether you jump, duck, kick, etc. Surprisingly difficult, but it’s satisfying when you finally nail a good run, and it’s still easier than the original Bit.Trip Runner game, which I gave up on in frustration.

Cookie Clicker: DON’T ASK.

MMO-wise, I finally registered Rift and gave it a try, but it didn’t really grab me.  I just haven’t been feeling the MMO urge for a while now, so I recently wound up cancelling all of the active subscriptions I still had going (Rift, EQ/EQ2, WoW, and LOTRO).  Maybe EQ Next will revive my interest, since it’s at least trying something different.

Yeah, I Know…

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I haven’t really been playing that many different games lately, just mainly fiddling with different Minecraft mods now and then, but I’m trying to get back to finishing more stuff.  To summarize the last few months:

Mass Effect 3: Finished it long ago, but now that all of the DLC is out, I’m starting to work my way through that.  I just did Leviathan, which is only a few hours long, but adds some interesting backstory to the universe.  Not bad.

Forza Horizon: I did wind up picking it up and completed pretty much every single race in it.  It’s not quite as open as say, TDU, but it’s still a much more open, looser racing experience than the main Forza games, which can be a bit stuffy and ‘sterile’.  Well worth it.

LOTRO: I kinda lost interest towards the end of Moria, where it was just endless wandering of twisty corridors and revisiting spots over and over again.  When the anniversary event came around this year, I managed to push through and finish most of those areas, so I can finally move on to the post-Moria content.

World of Warcraft: I caved in and bought Pandaria, but haven’t really done much with it yet.  I created a Pandaren monk and got her to level 16, but the urge to continue on isn’t all that great.

The Simpsons: Tapped Out: Yeah, it’s one of those silly social games, but as a minor Simpsons fan I figured I should at least check it out.  It’s kinda fun designing your own little version of Springfield, ‘quests’ keep you interested in what might be uncovered next, and the atmosphere’s pretty much what you expect, but it’s also a pretty blatant cash grab.  Oodles of premium-only buildings, and the cost of the premium currency seems absurd, like you’d have to spend hundreds of dollars to get it all.  It also doesn’t help that I continually get disconnected from the server, and reconnecting often hangs forever, and I need to force quit the app and relaunch it.

Coming up, in the short term, I’m hoping to finally get some time into Dragon’s Dogma and Borderlands 2, at least.

Gotta Post Fast

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Yeah, I know…  While cleaning out some space on my Steam drive, I figured I should at least give some games one quick shot before deleting them.

Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is an okay kart racer, but it does still seem to rely on random luck a lot, and the PC version isn’t the greatest, with no multiplayer and confusing keyboard prompts that don’t actually work if you have a controller plugged in (you can’t even use the keyboard to enter your name).  There’s another just-released Sonic kart racer that’s supposed to be a lot better anyway.

Mars Attacks, Again

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Today I checked out XCOM: Enemy Unknown since, well, it just came out.  It still feels like I’m in the tutorial, as things have been heavily scripted and railroaded so far, but a lot of the feel of the old X-Com is still there, which is encouraging.  It’s a bit simpler than the original in some ways, having removed stuff like free aiming, action points, and kneeling/prone positions, but it adds in others like class specializations, skill choices, and varying mission and funding rewards.  Combat is still as brutal as ever, with a high attrition rate among rookies and those damn lucky shots the aliens always seem to get.  Definitely one I’ll be playing more of.

And I also checked out the Forza Horizon demo.  Definitely a lot of similarity to Test Drive Unlimited, though you’re confined to the roads and it’s hard to tell from the demo just how much variety there really is.  The events were decent enough, though occasionally kind of bizarre like the race against a plane.  About the only thing I didn’t like is how it always asked if you wanted to do a Rivals race on the same track right after the event.  NO, I want to do something else now, not just redo the same race again!  A good chance I’ll pick it up, if I can find the time…

The Lost Year

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So, what have I been doing in all that time missing in this blog?  Probably a lot of small stuff I’ve forgotten, but the major games are:

Minecraft: I played a whole ton of Minecraft, including not just further developing my own private worlds but checking out various mod packs like the Technic Pack, Yogbox, TerraFirmaCraft, and Hack/Mine.  I also completed some challenge maps, like Feed The Beast, Vechs’s Legendary map from the Super Hostile series, and one of those Skyblock-like minimal starts.

Diablo 3: I’ve gotten a wizard into Hell difficulty so far, but still have to check out the other classes.  It doesn’t seem to have as much staying power as D2 did, a large part of which is that the loot seems blander, but I’ll still get a lot of hours out of it.

Disgaea 4: And once again, I got sucked into putting a ton of hours into yet another SRPG, getting some characters up to pretty much insanely maxed-out stats.  I haven’t done the DLC chapters for it yet though.

MMOs: I started up LOTRO and got a character up to level 20ish, but haven’t gotten back to it recently or played any other MMOs, really.  Kinda feeling a bit burned out on them for now.  I’ll give Guild Wars 2 a shot when it comes out, though.

Skyrim: FUS RO duh, of course I’d be playing this one.  I played a kitty wizard through the end of the base game, but actually left a good number of side quests unfinished.  I figure that I’ll wait a couple of years for all the good mods, DLC, and an expansion to come out, and then go back and do a proper clear-everything run with a different type of character.

Forza 4: Good, especially with the new stuff like Rivals challenges, but I’m still only a sliver of the way through the full event list, and I’m not sure if I’ll bother to clear them all like I did with 3.  Just not feeling the driving urge lately.

Mass Effect 3: Controversy over the endings aside (I haven’t seen the revised ones yet), still a pretty good game overall, and I enjoyed it just as much as the second one.  Lots of different environments, good gunplay, and a decent story along the way.

Portal 2: Yay! Lots of good puzzles, interesting new elements introduced as you go, longer without being too long, and even a really good story around it.  Definitely worth it.

Damn, that’s a lot of sequels…

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…

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…

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.

Roundup

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There’s a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff I’ve played recently that don’t really warrant their own articles:

I’ve played Gran Turismo on the PSP a bit more, but only to grind for cars. I’m not really enjoying the lack of structure to it, so I’m just trying to collect as many of my favourite cars as I can before GT5 comes out, since you’ll be able to import your garage from the PSP game. The best way to grind for cash is to do two-lap S-class races on the test ring, which gets terribly boring, so I don’t do very many at a time.

I’m still working on Forza 3 as well, getting closer to finishing off everything on the event list. I know there’s at least one more car pack on the way though, so I’m trying to leave some events open to use them in and focusing mainly on stock and restricted-model events for now. Along the way I finally saved up enough credits to buy the Shelby Daytona Coupe and Ford GT40 cars, which I’ve been after for quite a while now.

I played through Limbo on XBLA over the course of two days. A rather short game, but very atmospheric and a decent platformer. Well, until the end and the gravity puzzles, the solutions to which get a little hard to figure out… A good game, but maybe not for its full price.

And speaking of platformers, I fired up Super Mario Galaxy 2 for about an hour, getting the first 3 or 4 stars. It feels pretty much like the first one so far, the major new addition being Yoshi and the new abilities you get while riding him. I’m sure I’ll like the rest of it, if I can find time…

And I also played a bit of the Lego Harry Potter game on PC. I don’t know diddly about Harry Potter, but it plays a lot like the Star Wars games, with magic spells in place of the force. There is a lot more variety though, as you wind up with characters with multiple abilities and need to switch between them, and the ‘hub’ world is huge and has tons to explore and collect. It’s not very hard so far, but it’s enough of an advancement over the older games that it doesn’t feel stale.