Category Archives: RPG

Did I Or Didn’t I?

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I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age and I’m right at the end, just running around cleaning up sidequests, hunts, high-end gear, etc. I couldn’t remember how deep into the endgame stuff I’d gotten when I played the PS2 original though, so out of curiosity I fired it up to take a look and they were actually pretty close: both 88 hours in, very similar gear, and I’m currently level 57 versus 59 in the old save.

And then something suddenly hit me: I’m not sure now if I actually finished the original FF12, even though if you’d asked me before today I’d have sworn that yeah, of course, it’s one of the few Final Fantasy games that I have actually completed! My old saves were certainly ready to finish the game, but none of them were in what I’d consider a ready-to-head-to-the-ending spot; the most recent saves were just off in random zones in the world where I’d been doing hunts, not even by any teleport stones or the airship that I’d typically park myself by for the ‘final’ save. I don’t even really remember the ending, though I’d have chalked that up to it just not being very memorable, but who knows now. So did I actually finish it and just not leave an obvious save file for it, or did I get so caught up in endgame stuff that I just plan forgot to actually finish the game? *shrug*

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.

2014!

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As if nothing happened!

Okay, I blacked out for a bit during the holidays and when I woke up I had a whole bunch of new games in my Steam catalog, but we can deal with this, we can work through it…

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+: This is…definitely not the Pac-Man I was used to.  This new edition has a whole bunch of different maps and modes and a lot of them are time-based instead of score-based, and the triggers that cause dots and fruits to appear vary, and there can be tons of ghosts, and sometimes the maps expands…

It actually works really well; the original Pac-Man was just about memorizing patterns, but in these variants you have to react to a changing board, think about what ghosts will be woken up by the path you take, consider how long you can go before resorting to a power pellet in an easy-to-get to place (but in very limited supply), look for shorter paths to reduce the time taken to get that next fruit, and so on.  It makes you face a whole bunch of different challenges at lightning-fast speed, but it doesn’t make it feel like an impossible task.  Even a scrub like me could survive the 5-minute time attack modes, the true humiliation not coming until discovering that my score ranking on the leaderboards was…lacking.

So yeah, it’s a fun, surprisingly well-designed update of a classic game.  And I’m not going to play it anymore.  As good as it is, it’s the kind of game that takes a lot of practice to perfect, and with my backlog, I just don’t have the time to spend replaying this over and over just to shave off a few seconds here and there.

Hammerwatch: This game has been described as Gauntlet-like, and that’s pretty apt; it’s top-down maze-navigating monster-killing with simple attacks as one of various classes. There are differences, of course. There’s a persistent stats/skill system that lets you improve your character as you progress.  The levels are enormous, so there’s more of a Diablo-ish feeling of exploration and there’ll be a ton of backtracking. There are ‘optional’ switch-hittin’ and button-pressin’ objectives on each floor, but the gold you find for upgrades is pretty tight, so you’ll probably want to make sure you do them anyway, leading to a lot of that backtracking. And if you’re prone to RSI, this game will murder your thumb (at least with the paladin that I’ve tried so far). You can carefully lure monsters in small packs, but there’s a combo system that really wants you to just dive in to masses of enemies and kill everything as quickly as possible, and there are a lot of enemies.

It’s been pretty fun so far, and I played a bit longer than expected due to that “just a little further…” effect, but I do wonder if it’ll start to get too repetitive and thumb-wrecking at some point. I’ve done one of four bosses so far, so I’ll keep going until at least the second boss.

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.

Rocket Operative

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I’m still way behind, but I managed to check out two games today.

Rocket Knight is a fairly old-school platformer, run through the level jumping and attacking and collecting until you fight the boss at the end, but with a possum with a jetpack.  There are some neat moves you can do, and overall it’s fun, but the directional controls are really twitchy with the analog stick on my controller, so I was constantly shooting off in the wrong direction whenever I tried to go straight up.  Not really worth keeping.

And I also finally put some  time into Drox Operative, which I bought way back when it was in beta but never got around to actually installing.  That happens way too often these days…  Anyway, it’s a bit unusual in that it’s a Diablo-like much like Soldak’s other games, but with spaceships.  You start out in a solar system, fly around to planets to explore, fight enemies, start quests, collect loot, and it’s done with a typical ARPG stat/skill/inventory system.  It’s also like Soldak’s other games in that there are multiple paths to victory or loss, depending on how you ally with other races or succeed or fail at quests, and the world dynamically evolves; quest enemies are gathering strength and growing while you’re puttering around.  I’ll try and put some more time into this one.

MMO Mania

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Yeah, I’ve been slacking again…  I’ve been spending a lot of time in MMOs lately, and they always make it easy to overlook spending some time on other games as well.

My mesmer is up to level 40 in Guild Wars 2 now.  I haven’t really said much about it, but it has been different enough from the traditional MMO experience to remain fairly fun.  The world events manage to keep me involved in group efforts and pull off what feels like meaningful wins without actually forcing me to group up with random yahoos.  Crafting is interesting in that it rewards you for experimenting, but I’m also often left frustrated at not being able to figure out what the fourth ingredient in some recipe is, and the drop rate on the ‘fine’ ingredients leaves my crafting lagging behind.  The personal story missions sometimes feel unfairly difficult — in one of them I had to face three waves of 5-8 enemies each wave and just kept dying over and over and over again while gradually whittling them down — but at least they’re trying something a bit more personally customized. Tactics can be quite different even within the same class depending on what talents and weapons you use; I’m doing well with both the staff and scepter/gun combos with my mesmer (scepter/gun is more of a glass cannon, unloading a ton of damage at once but then having to survive until cooldowns refresh, whereas staff is more about stacking condition damage), but could still stand to practice and experiment with other combos, too.  Haven’t tried any of the dungeons or PvP yet either.

I’ve also been playing more LOTRO, getting my lore-master up to level 26, and I also created a few alts to do other tradeskills on, since components for them were clogging up my bank and bank slots are expensive.  I’ve finally moved out of the ‘lowbie’ zones into the Lone-lands and North Downs, where spots of civilization are starting to become farther apart.

Maybe The Towers Come Later

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(I’m kind of cheating by backdating this one, but I didn’t write about it the same day I played it for some reason.)

I finally got around to trying Dungeon Defenders, yet another tower-defence-style game, though I only really got through the tutorial map. Overall it seems decent enough, with my only real concern being that the first-person perspective and combat needed makes it really hard to watch your defences and evaluate how they’re actually performing, especially once the level becomes cluttered enough that you’re not really sure what effect it’s having on pathing.  I’d definitely spend more time on it though, and maybe get some co-op going.

It’s Hard To Put Down The Books Too

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I popped into Lord Of The Rings Online this morning intending just to check the points store, since there’s some kind of summer sale going on, but I wound up playing a good 6 hours or so and doing a bunch of quests for the summer festival event and getting the Sunshine title.  I really should put more time into LOTRO…if I can remember how to actually play my character…  I think I only killed maybe three things today, that got in my way as the rest was just running around, talking, racing horses, and fishing.

And I Forgot To Study Too

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After a weekend spent mainly in Guild Wars 2, I tried out Academagia today.  It’s essentially Harry Potter: The Realism Sim, where you create a student, choose their attributes and specialties, go to classes, meet friends, have various events happen to you, and so on.  Not in the interactive adventure sense though, but through a whole ton of text and menu options, like those dating sim/princess maker-type Japanese games.

It looks like there’s a fair bit of depth to it in terms of what you can develop and discover, but it’s not really grabbing my interest, so away it goes.

Mine Is Probably Pretty Dark, Yeah

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Today’s new game is also a brand new…ish game, the just-released-a-couple-hours-ago PC port of Dark Souls.

It’s known mainly for being difficult, and oh yeah, it is.  The first boss took me four tries to beat, and that took a bit of luck.  Individual fights with regular monsters still have to be approached with care or they’ll knock half your health off.  You’re not just mowing through everything at breakneck speed, and upgrades are gradual.

It’s a refreshing change from the usual RPG type I play though, so I’ll certainly stick with it.  I did play a bit of the predecessor, Demons Souls, but never really gave it a proper chance.