Non-Sticky Goo

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I finished off the last two chapters of World of Goo tonight, and as expected, chapter 4 had a rather ‘virtual’ twist to things, adding a bunch of new goo types and things like blocks and slabs. The epilogue chapter was fairly short, consisting of only three real puzzles, but they were much harder than the others. I didn’t have to use any more skips, but I did have to consult some hints on a few of these later levels.

All in all it was a rather interesting, well-done puzzle game with a lot of style. I don’t think I’ll be going back to try and get the ‘OCD’ ratings on each of the levels though; I barely scraped by on most of them as it is…

Fun With Balls

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Continuing my trek through unfinished games, I got back to World of Goo today and made it through the end of Chapter 3.

So far I’ve only skipped one level, “Tower of Goo” back in the first chapter. You have to build a really tall tower in that one, and I’ve failed every attempt so far. If I take it slow and stable, I wind up using too many goo balls and don’t have enough to meet the level completion quota. If I take it quickly, it winds up swaying and collapsing before I reach the pipe. Oh well, at least the game lets you skip a handful of levels if you get stuck.

Chapters 2 and 3 introduced more new goo types, of course, with a particular emphasis on fire and explosions in Chapter 3 through flammable goos and bombs. The ending, culminating in the launch of “Product Z” in the game’s story, ought to make the next chapter interesting…

Suck It, Napoleon

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Today I finished off the last two chapters in the single-player campaign of Frontlines: Fuel of War, most of which took place within Moscow. Nothing really new was introduced in these chapters, but the sheer density of enemies and prevalence of things like rocket launchers made it more difficult and slow-going than the previous areas. I took a tank through most of it, but it required a lot of backing off and hiding to allow time for repairs.

Overall, the campaign was pretty good, if short. I haven’t tried the multiplayer part yet though, which will depend on how much time I have, how many other people are around, etc. There are also achievements for completing chapters without dying or within time limits, but I’m not sure if I’ll bother trying for those.

Liar!

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And of course, right after I say I’m taking a break from WoW, I go and spend all day today in it… It was the start of the Lunar Festival event though, and these quests are only available for a limited time, so I had to do them soon anyway. I wound up getting all but two of the achievements for the event, and those will have to wait until I’m level 80 anyway since they involve Northrend.

And along the way I wound up picking up a couple pieces I needed for the quests in Zul’Farrak, so I’ll probably head there first whenever I return in earnest. I’ve still got a half-dozen or so quests to finish up there, that have been in my quest log for ages now, and it should be easily soloable.

Tank Beats Everything

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I worked through a few more of the Frontlines missions over the last few days. Mission 3 started out like a stealth mission, but it wasn’t too long before the enemies had discovered where I was and most of the rest of the mission was spent trying to coax them out of hiding or sniping them. The second half involved defending a town against a couple waves of enemies, which I barely scraped by on — I’m never very good at timed bits like that.

Mission 4 was mainly a whole lotta tank battling, and then mission 5 took the battle to inside a mountain, where there were all sorts of corridors and boxes and platforms for them to hide on.

I also toyed a bit more with Defense Grid, managing to complete the ‘Grinder’ mode of Waste Disposal. In this one only ‘walker’ enemies appear, but you have to survive through 99 waves of them and the groups of them get bigger and bigger and bigger… It took a whole lot of meteor towers and a couple others I don’t often use, like inferno and concussion, but I made it with only two cores lost.

Watch Your Backlines, Too

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Well, I had intended to start the new game yesterday, but it turned out there were some pretty sizable downloads available for it, and by the time I got them it was fairly late.

So, tonight I started working on Frontlines: Fuel of War, the gift mentioned in previous comments. The impressions on the forums were pretty favourable, and it’s holding up pretty well so far. It’s a squad-based shooter along the lines of CoD4, though the other squad members seem to be there mostly as distractions and all the heavy lifting is up to you, of course.

The weapons are mostly fairly traditional and I didn’t vary from the standard assault rifle and rocket launcher much, but every once in a while you get to pick up a special weapon like flying drones or a controllable robot gun, and they’re always fun. In the second mission I used a little mini-helicopter to take out a tank by circle-strafing around it and pelting it with rockets while it uselessly tried to aim its main cannon at it.

You also get to ride around in vehicles on a fairly regular basis, and they pack a lot of firepower. Controlling them was a bit weird at first, since it varies depending on whether they have a turret or not, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.

I’ve only done the first two missions so far though, and it looks like the next one is a stealth/sniping one. Seems like the single-player campaign will be pretty short since there are only seven missions, but the multiplayer is supposed to be pretty meaty. It’s too bad there’s no co-op mode for the single-player campaign, though you should be able to form a squad of friends in the multi at least.

Life Without WoW

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Now that I’m officially on break from WoW, it’s time to get back to some of the other games I already had going.

So, today I finished off Defense Grid: The Awakening. I haven’t mentioned this one before since I actually started it while I was on Christmas vacation. I completed the first half-dozen or so missions back then, and today I finally went back and did the rest of them (there’s 20 in total, I think).

It’s a “tower defense” game, where the goal is to place towers on the map in order to stop waves of enemies that are trying to steal your “cores” from a particular spot on the map. There are different towers with weapon types that are useful in different ways, different styles of map layouts (wide open and you have to influence the enemy’s path by tower placement, or straightforward paths with few weapon spots so you have to choose carefully), and different enemies (slow, fast, stealthy, shielded, flying, etc.). You have no direct control over the towers; you just choose where to put them and when to upgrade them to more powerful levels, limited by your scavenged resource meter, but the possible options are still overwhelming enough that you need a solid strategy in your choices.

There was only one mission that I failed outright, but on a handful of others I did have to use the ‘checkpoint restart’ feature to rewind back a bit and try a different tactic. It usually wasn’t too difficult to complete each level, though I rarely managed to retain all of my cores. The final mission was fairly tense, with the final wave of aliens playing hot potato with my last and only remaining core while I frantically upgraded towers along the return path as I was mentally screaming “AAAAAAAH”, certain that I was about to lose. I just barely scraped by, though upon reflection I certainly could have chosen a better path.

There are different modes you can play each level in for some extra gameplay, but there just isn’t time. Next up…is a secret.

They’d Better Be Reinforcing Those Saddles

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WoW has been nothing but yet more clearing out of low-level quests, and a couple days ago I finally hit Stranglethorn Vale. It took two full days, but I finally cleared all of the quests there, including the damn Nesingwary ones. I still need to do the ones in Outland, though…

But more importantly, through all of these quests, I managed to squeak out the last little bits of faction needed to become ‘exalted’ with Silvermoon City. That got me an achievement, my first title (Ambassador), and I’ll be able to buy a chickenhawkstrider from them when the next patch goes live. I’ll probably just get the cheapo one though, since it’s just for show and I’ll prefer the wolf for actual riding.

(And I also got a few other achievements along the way, like one for hitting 1500 quests, completing a few instances, etc.)

There are still a bunch of other low-level quests to finish off, including some I’ve picked up for Zul’Farrak, but now it’s time to take a bit of a break, I think. I feel the same kind of burnout coming on as when I abandoned WoW after BC came out.

My Insurance Rates Are Horrible

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The only really major news in WoW lately is that I finally bought my flying mount, and can now knock off the rest of the exploration achievements in Outland the next time I’m over there. For now though, I’ve been spending a lot of time finishing off low-level quests in the old world and gaining faction. I have all of the home cities except Silvermoon up to exalted now, and it’s going to be a pain since I’ve done all of the newbie and Ghostland quests for it and I’m still 3500 points short. I guess I’ll have to work on other quests and see how many ‘bonus’ points I can get towards it before I have to resort to farming runecloth.

And Paul and I finally got back to Halo 3 tonight, getting through chapters 6 and 7 of the co-op campaign. I don’t think he’s letting me drive any more, though…