Wait, Cars Can’t Drive On Ladders…

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While sorting some CDs away, I stumbled upon the Trackmania United disc and couldn’t resist firing it up for a bit of online play. My ladder ranking had fallen a lot since I hadn’t played in a while, but with the way the rankings work, I was gaining hundreds of ladder points per track. If I had kept playing, it wouldn’t have taken long to crack the 100,000 rank mark again. (That might not sound impressive until you note that there are now well over a million players on the rankings…)

And then it was back to Paper Mario: TTYD, where I did Chapter 4 all in one go. This one took place in Twilight Town, with the expected spooky theme and Boos all over the destination. Though I wasn’t expecting to see villagers being turned into pigs… Unfortunately not only do they make you run back and forth between the town and a steeple numerous times, but the plot twist (Mario’s name and body is stolen) essentially has you redoing everything you just did in the chapter all over again after the chapter has supposedly ended. Clever, perhaps, but annoying.

One interesting thing it did was that in order to get Mario’s name back, you had to guess the enemy’s name. But in order to prevent people from just plugging it in from a walkthrough, the enemy had also stolen a letter of the alphabet that you needed, so you had to go ‘rescue’ this letter before you could properly enter his name.

An Action-(RPG)-Packed Saturday

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In order to test out my drone’s new weapon, I played a bit more of Hellgate today. Well, more than a bit, as I wound up clearing out most of the quests in the Liverpool station, leaving only the Necropolis to go. The new weapon is a bit of a bust, though; the phasing attack doesn’t kick in as often as I’d like. That’s partly because the drone prefers to use the Wart’s Leg to attack while it’s tanking, so it doesn’t actually get off many phasing attacks. I need that Leg on it though, since that’s where most of its armour comes from. Oh well.

The Hellgate servers were down for a while for a restart, and during that time I also did a bit more Baal farming in Diablo 2. My HC necro gained three levels along the way, but it was otherwise uneventful.

Toys For Robots

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I finished off the new levels in the first N+ pack tonight. Again, most were fairly easy, but a few did give me a bit of trouble. Especially “Dances With Rockets” — I am apparently not good at being chased by large missiles. Hopefully it won’t be long before the other packs arrive.

I also spent a bit more time in Hellgate: London again, though this time I was looking for something specific. My drone has been using the same weapon for ages now, and the amount of damage it does isn’t really all that great. The drone’s job is mainly to tank though, and I deal all the real damage, so I thought it would be better for it to have a ‘utility’ weapon instead. I’m already hitting enemies with the Ignite effect with my weapon, but it would be useful to have the Phased effect as well, so I’ve been looking for a good weapon to do phased damage, with a strong phase attack rating.

After a bit of searching, I tried a couple, and I think for now I’m going to try using a ‘phase cannon’ grenade-launcher style weapon on my drone. The range is a bit short, but it has a very high phase attack strength and splash damage. The main problem now is fitting it into the rest of the drone’s equipment; after adding a couple skill points and some free stat points to the drone, I was able to squeeze it into its existing equipment, but the stat feed requirements are supposed to be overhauled in the (hopefully) upcoming 2.0 patch, so I may have to rearrange the equipment yet again. Fortunately, the patch will add a stat retrainer that will reset the drone’s stats too, so I can respend its stat points and avoid wasting any on unnecessary stats.

If 2.0 ever arrives…

Waiting For A Savior

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I did another 50 or so of the new N+ levels today, and they’re getting a bit tougher, but still nowhere near as hard as the base levels. It’s too bad that these new levels don’t have leaderboards and don’t count towards the achievements, though. I’ll also have to give the co-op levels a try sometime.

I also did a bit of shop-hopping in Hellgate: London, finding a nice Master Engineer 3 weapon for buffing and some weapon mods that might come in useful later on. I can’t really play properly since I haven’t reset my skills yet because I’m still waiting to spend them on the new skills which won’t be introduced until patch 2.0 which won’t be released until…who knows. Everything went to hell at Flagship just before 2.0 was going to be released, and it may be a while yet before things settle down and they can start working on the game again. They laid off all of the actual developers though, which certainly doesn’t help… But it looks like Namco might sweep in and save the day, after all the behind-the-scenes business finagling surely going on right now.

Ninja Needs Gold, Badly

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There was an N+ level pack released today, and fortunately they’re an easier set of levels, as I’d hit a difficulty wall in the standard set of single-player levels. And there are two more packs on the way, also pretty cheap, so it’s a good deal overall.

I also tried out the trial of 1942: Joint Strike, but was rather underwhelmed. You only get to try out a single mission, and it went straight from being relatively bland and easy to a nearly game-ending bullet hell as soon as I reached the first boss. Pass.

Doesn’t Race Well With Others

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I didn’t really get much gaming done last night, opting instead to try and clean up my rFactor install a bit.

Most rFactor mods live peacefully side-by-side, but a few have been a bit of a pain. Aside from the previously-mentioned issue of having to restart to get them to initialize properly, a handful of them have vehicles that don’t behave properly when you’re in the “all vehicles and tracks available” mode, popping up error messages and displaying a placeholder model on the track. So far, it looks like the Historic Rally Cars, GP2 2006, and Renault Super Clio mods are the ones that cause trouble for me.

Fortunately I can deal with them by setting up a separate rFactor install just for them. It wastes a bit of disk space, but I’ve still got a bunch free on one drive, and some stuff like the track data can be deleted and pointed back at the main install so that I don’t have to duplicate those. The main problems it causes are that the user profiles can’t really be shared between the installs, so any setting changes have to be redone in each one, and each install will have to be patched separately whenever a new update comes out.

Oh, the things we do for our pretty cars…

Edmonton Makes You Dumb

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I fiddled with rFactor a bit today, first racing tractor-trailers around Jacksonville Superspeedway. That wasn’t really as much fun as it might sound, so I figured that with the Edmonton Grand Prix coming up, I’d fool around a bit on there.

I selected the Toyota Atlantic series and loaded up the Edmonton track, but as soon as I started the practice session, it was obvious something was wrong. All of the AI drivers were behaving like complete morons, constantly spinning out, colliding with each other, and hitting the barriers. After putting in a handful of laps, I checked the timing and not a single AI driver had managed to complete a single lap yet.

But it turns out I’d just forgotten the cardinal rule of dealing with mods, and hadn’t restarted the game after switching series. After restarting it, everyone behaved properly, and I tried another practice session with a mixed set of vehicles. I came in second-last, my BMW M3 only a few seconds faster than the lawnmower.

Lost? Seems Like Plenty Of It Around

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I was going to play a bit more of Paper Mario today, but instead I got distracted by something I’d been curious about for a while now: Lost Winds, one of the launch WiiWare titles.

It turned out to be, as expected, a rather short little game that only took a little over three hours to finish. I think that’s a fair length for it though, as any longer and the more annoying aspects of the controls would have become far more frustrating. You move the protagonist with the nunchuk, but use gestures with the remote for any other actions, including jumping, lighting torches, blowing objects around, attacking enemies, and so on. It works pretty well most of the time, though sometimes it’s a bit hard to push that rock just where you really want it.

It’s fairly easy, since it’s generous with the revives and most of the enemies aren’t much of a threat to begin with, and I didn’t even get hit once during the final boss battle. The only real challenge was figuring out where to go next, since you have to backtrack to some areas and it’s not immediately obvious were the new part you can go is. It’s definitely not the game you want if you’re looking for a challenge, but it was decent enough for a relaxing weekend time-killer.

Damn You Madagascar

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I killed a bit of time this afternoon playing Pandemic II, a nifty little Flash game where your goal is to wipe out the world by developing a virus/bacterium/parasite and infecting as many countries as possible. Morbid, but fun.

The best strategy seems to be to lie low as long as possible, getting rid of the more visible symptoms and letting harmless infections spread widely, and then piling on the more lethal attributes once most of the world is infected. I haven’t successfully gotten the entire world, though; Madagascar seems to escape most of the time since the only infection vector is a single port, and they shut their borders too early.

And I tried to play a full championship season in rFactor, with the 1979 GP cars, and the first track that came up was one of the built-in oval speedways. A bit odd, since that wasn’t part of the actual 1979 season, but whatever… And then the second race came up…on that same oval again. Turns out that I hadn’t yet downloaded the specific map pack that this mod wants, so it was just dumping me on a default track. Oh well, the more tracks, the merrier.

Mario Retires From The Ring

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Fiddling around with all these other games is all well and good, but sometimes I have to remind myself that I’ve still got six zillion other games left to finish off first. So, today I finally got back to Paper Mario: TTYD.

I finished off Chapter 3, which was a fairly uneventful climb through the rest of the wrestling rankings, with the obligatory twist about who was really behind all the recent disappearances, and after beating the real enemy I got the star for that chapter.

Since I had recently picked up Yoshi in my party, I could explore a few new areas in the sewers and found some more star pieces and shines there, and finally remembered to go use the shines to upgrade party members (Yoshi and Goombella, for now). And I went and did a few more jobs from the Trouble Centre that had opened up, though in the end I think I pretty much broke even on the costs and rewards.

Next up, the Twilight Woods.