Missed It By That Much

I play a bit more Hellgate today, but with a slightly different goal in mind. I took my brand-new Evoker character, and tried to see if I could get those timed leveling achievements.

Unfortunately, at the four hour mark, I failed to get the first one. You have to reach level 10 by that point, and I was…70% of the way through level 9. Oh well. Having had to waste time on some lockups while zoning, respawns of trash mobs, and some regenerating bosses certainly didn’t help. There’s another one for reaching level 20 by the 14 hour mark, but I doubt that one’s going to be reachable now. Patch 2.0 (if it ever comes out…) changes the achievement rewards, so I may as well wait and see if it would even be worth it to go for the bigger one.

A Cold Day In Hellgate

I finished farming Shulgoth in Hellgate: London today, getting the achievement for him and breaking the 100,000 palladium mark in the process. Unfortunately, the very future of the game is in a bit of turmoil now…

It’s unlikely they’ll shut it down entirely, since the creditors didn’t accept the game’s IP as collateral just to do nothing with it in the case they had to foreclose. But it does make me wonder what’s going to happen to updates like the already-way-late 2.0 patch. Then again, maybe they can get someone else to do a better job. The fundamental gameplay of HG:L is pretty good, especially after all the fixes and rebalancing, but their basic weakness has always been the rather repetitive base content and the slow pace at rolling out new content. They’ve already missed their goal of releasing a major update once a quarter, and there haven’t even been any minor events recently.

London’s Ruins Make For Surprisingly Good Farming

I’m still waiting on the 2.0 patch for Hellgate: London before I can properly repurchase my skills (and it might still be a while yet, as they just rolled out a 1.3d to tide us over), but I still did a bit of farming tonight, killing Shulgoth a bunch of times in order to get closer to the kill-him-100-times achievement and to grind out a bit of cash. He’s easy enough at this point that I can kill him by myself even without a drone.

I’ve also occasionally popped on to do some shop-hopping, bouncing back and forth between stations in order to reset the crafting merchant’s stocks, and found a handful of decent weapon mods that way. 2.0 will change a lot of things, so I might need a whole new set of equipment for my drone, if not myself.

Working Twice As Hard

It was time yet again to catch up on some Rock Band tracks, and I picked up the two latest Rush tracks and a couple others I’ve already forgotten (they apparently weren’t that notable). “Closer To The Heart” is pretty good, but “Working Man (Vault Edition)” has been a bit controversial since they’ve already released a cover version of it before. Apparently they found the master tapes since then, and released this slight variant with different solos. It’s kind of annoying that it’s still full price for those of us who already bought the cover version, but oh well. The notecharts seem a bit off during the new solos too, though they might be better on Expert, when more of the ‘missing’ notes are filled in.

And in other news, the previews of Rock Band 2 are pretty satisfying so far, and it looks like it’ll address most of the complaints about RB1.

We Named The Brick Indy

I was going to play some more Diablo 2 tonight, but after getting two ‘failed to join game’ errors in a row, I figured I’d better not risk it. Unfortunately, that error commonly popped up in the past when dupers and botters had figured out a new hack or way to flood the system…

So, instead I played a bit of the Lego Indiana Jones demo. It plays just like the Lego Star Wars games, as you’d expect, but they did add some new stuff to the formula. You can dig up and carry around items now, as needed for some puzzles, Indy’s whip gets used in different ways, and there are now equipable, temporary weapons that you can pick up. I don’t think I’ll buy it though, having pretty much gotten my fill via the Star Wars games.

He Can Sit Down There And Sulk For All I Care

Having finally gotten my internet connection back, I downloaded a whole bunch of other tracks for rFactor (about, oh, 40…), but only had time to install and test a few. One of the Nordschleife variants was a bit amusing in that the cars all start out in a parking lot, but if you chose an F1 race, the cars were too fast to get out of the lot safely and would crash and bump all over the place. In fact, I had to disable the ‘Auto Pit’ option since it just wouldn’t behave properly in too many cases, often bumping the car right up against a barrier or even failing to start at all.

And I got a bit further in Diablo 2, taking my HC necromancer to the entrance of Nihlithak’s Temple. I’ll probably avoid Nihlithak himself though, as his Corpse Explosion is rather dangerous, and the reward isn’t really worth the risk.

Racing By Myself

I fiddled around a bit with rFactor today, reinstalling some mods for it: V8Factor (the V8 Supercars series), FSOne 2006 (the 2006 F1 season), and Historic GT & TC (imports all of the classic cars from GT Legends). There are plenty of other addons at rFactorCentral, but those were the only ones I managed to get before my internet went flaky for the rest of the weekend…

Since the FSOne and Historic mods make fairly large changes to the UI, I handled these differently this time by having separate rFactor installs just for them, but with the unnecessary vehicles deleted and the config file pointing to the first install’s track directory. This lets me run the mods separately, so they don’t conflict with each other, but all of the installs will still be able to use all of the tracks I install, without having to install them multiple times.

And, of course, I did a bit of racing, though it was more like just testing since I couldn’t get back online. Racing around the ovals was the easiest way to test out some of the new cars, but it also pointed out just how much I need to get back to trying to use the wheel — with the gamepad, the input is just too jerky, when you really need smooth, gradual turns into those corners.

Hello Again Diablo, And Goodbye

Unable to do anything further in Hellgate: London until the 2.0 patch, I turned back to Diablo 2 today and got my HC necromancer through Act 4 and up to the first waypoint in Act 5, putting him in a good farming spot.

Diablo was a bit tougher than expected, as he instantly crushed all of my skeletons as soon as he appeared, and the golem and merc didn’t last much longer after that. After finding a skill shrine and resummoning a slightly tougher group of skellies, the second time went much better, partly due to getting Decrepify on him early on and partly because he stuck to melee attacks for a while, rather than the much more dangerous lightning. Now, the next dangerous bit is going to be the ancients on the Arreat summit…

A Little Slower Than Expected

Well, I didn’t hit level 49 tonight in Hellgate: London like I hoped I would. I did get some nifty new weapons, though. I’d found a unique sniper rifle yesterday, the Voodoo Rifle, but didn’t take a close look at it until today, and it turned out to be a lot better than I thought. It does three different types of damage, has high base ignite and stun ratings, and part of the damage is splashed over an area effect, including the stun if you add a physical damage mod.

I don’t usually like to use sniper rifles since they have a really slow rate of fire, so you have to make each shot count, and it’s annoying how the screen shakes when you fire it. After slapping in some mods to add fire damage and increase the ignite attack rating though, I think it’ll be my primary weapon from here on, as ignite and the stun kick in fairly often. Enemies that usually rush towards me are often held still and killed before even getting close now.

I also found a couple pistols with some skill buffs for summoning a better drone, for buff equipment. There’s only one or two points on each though, and I can certainly do better, but I’ll just have to cross my fingers and hope for good drops.

And finally, I used the skill retrainer I’d been holding on to to reset my allocated skills to zero. But I didn’t spend any, either. The 2.0 patch is due sometime soon and it’ll add new skills to the class, so I don’t want to spend any until I see what they are. But I had to use it now, because they’ll be giving out a new retrainer with the patch, but you can’t have more than one. This way, I get to respend my skill points and still hold on to the new retrainer, effectively getting a free one.