Gatling Gears

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Today’s game is Gatling Gears and, eh… It seems competent enough for the type of game it is (Ikari Warriors-style ‘shmup’), but that genre doesn’t really do much for me, so off the hard drive it goes. It doesn’t help that it made me go through EA login and serial key registration twice, one time not even allowing me to paste my password. I try and use strong, unique, 16+ character passwords wherever possible, and forcing me to type them in by hand is a quick way to really piss me off…

Game-A-Day

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I suppose I should actually say something once in a while…

I’ve recently realized that I might have a few too many games, and hardly any of them even get played at all. I’m therefore putting something into motion that I’ve intended to do for a while now — play a different game that I haven’t played before every day. It’ll only be for an hour or two to get a feel for it and decide if it’s worth playing any further. If so, it gets put on the short list to come back to later, otherwise it gets uninstalled.

So, over the weekend I binged a bit and started with 1000 Amps, which is interesting but not really grabbing me enough to play much further; Blocks That Matter, which had a similar reaction but it’s short so I might finish it anyway; and Faerie Solitaire, which I might keep around just as an idle time-waster.

Tonight, I played the first chapter of Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon. It has a lot of the same mindless shooty fun as the previous Xbox game, but it also has some annoyances too, like how I constantly get swarmed in ways that make it hard to shoot, the active reload is really hard to hit, and some enemies just take waaay too many hits to kill. Apparently there are only three chapters though, so I think I’ll keep it and just do one runthrough, not bothering to farm weapons.

FINALLY

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Over the weekend, I was feeling a bit nostalgic and fired up Crackdown, just to bounce around a bit and look for that one agility orb that still eluded me. After a little while I’d checked various out-of-the-way places where I thought it might be, but to no avail, and was starting to feel like I’d wasted my time again.

But, as I was heading to the northern end of the Shai Gen territory, I scanned the horizon and there it was, blatant as could be on the dome of a large central building there. I’m not sure how I missed it all the other times I’d gone orb-hunting, except that most of my horizon-scanning had been in the denser areas and this northern area has very few taller buildings, so maybe I’d been less likely to look upward.

I still don’t have all of the hidden orbs, but nuts to them.

Hallelujah!

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Tonight, the SOE games suddenly came back online sooner than expected (the last update Sony gave said it was still “at least a few more days”), and I immediately hopped back into EQ2. Doing the tradeskill dailies in Odus for my Illusionist bumped him up to level 85 crafting, and with that I headed off to Velious and knocked out almost the entire tradeskill quest chain within a few hours. That took him right to level 90 jewelcrafting, and he now just has to go back after a day or two (the NPC won’t talk to me again until then) to get the whistle for starting the flying mount quests.

The MMO Mashup

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WoW: The big news here of course is Cataclysm, which came while this site was idle…and went. I made it through all of the zone content fairly quickly, usually only taking a couple days per zone. It was fun enough, but it’s awfully railroaded, with almost no choice in how to go about working your way through things.

After that, the expansion felt kind of empty. There wasn’t really any reason to revisit the zones, I didn’t feel like grinding instances over and over for equipment I didn’t really need for anything, the faction grinding rewards seemed kind of weak, archaeology was fun for a while but now it’s down to tediously grinding for Uldum sites… Cataclysm is probably the expansion I lost interest in the quickest. About the only thing I really ought to do is work some more on my Worgen druid and see what the revamped lower level zones are like, but it’s a low priority.

EQ2: I can’t remember where I left off, but our group has pretty much finished with The Bonemire, and…we haven’t really done anything lately. Scheduling problems meant we couldn’t get the group together for a few weeks, and with that loss of momentum, we haven’t even bothered trying to regroup in a couple months now.

I’ve still been playing a fair bit by myself, though. I got my mystic up to level 90 alchemy and took him through all of the tradeskill quest lines in the Odus and Velious expansions, netting a flying mount in the process and unlocking some faction gear I can’t wear yet. I’ve also been leveling my illusionist alt, getting him to 72 and taking him through the Kunark zones right now and working on his tradeskill as well.

Vanguard: And I finally gave Vanguard a shot, along with a handful of other forum members who got caught by the curiosity bug around the same time. I’m only level 14, having gone through the tutorial island and a small handful of quests on the mainland, so it’s still early yet, but it seems like a pretty decent game. It has some of that old-school EverQuest feel, but with a more interesting combat system, unique crafting and diplomacy systems, and a lot to see and do.

Champions Online: And oh yeah, I tried this too, but the tutorial section didn’t really grab me, so I never bothered going back to it, even though it’s now free-to-play.

I’d like to get back and play more EQ2 and Vanguard still, but, well, there’s still that whole SOE-is-down-for-who-knows-how-long thing…

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…

The Price Of Loyalty Is About 35 Hours

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I spent a fairly large chunk of the weekend playing Mass Effect 2, and after 35 hours I’m finally at the point where I’ve recruited all of the crew members and done their loyalty missions, aside from the one missing one which I know will be filled in later (in comparison, it only took me 28 hours to fully complete ME1). In keeping with the one-of-each-strength philosophy, I usually take Samara and Grunt with me, for biotic and ‘tank’ support.

Amazingly enough, this actually puts me pretty close to the endgame, as apparently the recruitment and loyalty missions are the bulk of the main story in ME2, not just initial preparation, like in ME1. It makes sense though, with so many more crew members this time around and some missions are fairly extensive. Most skills are fairly well filled-in, and I’ve done most of the important research, so I’m pretty well prepared.

I’m now at a point where I can start the point-of-no-return mission, but I’ve still got a bunch of side quests I can do, largely from the DLC packs. I’m enjoying it well enough that I’m certainly going to finish off all of those first.

Shepard’s Back!

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Since I don’t want to be playing only old games, I figured I’d better get around to something more recent and recently started Mass Effect 2. It’s pretty much as has been widely reported: RPG elements have been toned down, there are fewer skills and points to spend, shooter elements are more pronounced, etc. It’s still been fun though, and I’m about eight hours into it now.

I imported a character from ME1, which kept a bunch of decisions about how things had played out in the past. I switched from the Adept class to Infiltrator though, just to try something different, and I’ve mostly been using a sniper rifle and pistol. It’s hard to get a sense for which weapons are better than others since you don’t see stats anymore, but there aren’t too many choices at this point.

So far I’ve gone to Omega and completed a handful of quests there, including recruiting Mordin, good ol’ Garrus, and Zaeed (a DLC character). I’ll probably do more recruiting next (I’m in the middle of working on the krogan now) and work on their loyalty missions and other side/DLC missions first, before really worrying about the story.

More MMO Mania

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Things have been picking up again in the MMO worlds.

WoW finally released its 4.0.1 patch, pretty much completely redoing how skills and talent trees and stats work and forcing everyone to redo their talent selections. I’ve caught up on the main trees for my priest, warrior, and mage, and so far the differences aren’t huge, but it might require more play to really tell. My mage seems to have completely lost some buffs he used to have, though. The actual Cataclysm changes are still a ways away, but hopefully I’ll get my Loremaster achievement finished before then.

In EQ2, we finally got a full group together for a couple of weeks, so we’ve worked on the heritage quest for Rahotep’s staff and some faction grinding for the Maj’Dul quests. Unfortunately we aren’t quite strong enough for Rahotep’s final step yet — we gave it a try, but he’s an EpicX2 monster, and we just couldn’t damage him quickly enough. Maybe with a handful of more levels; we’ve managed to defeat an EpicX2 before with just the four of us, but it was on the verge of turning grey to us.

EQ2 also launched the Hallowe’en event, and today I took my mystic through the major quests that are part of it. One of them involved a hedge maze where I kept getting stronger and stronger as I defeated more enemies, and at the end I took on an EpicX2 boss all by myself and won. I’ll have to redo that one a few times, both just for fun and for other rewards like collectibles and a quest that only opens up on the second attempt. A couple of the other quests also have rewards for repeated attempts that I’ll have to try for.

And I finally got around to canceling my subscription to Asheron’s Call. I’d resubscribed earlier this year with the intent of revisiting it, seeing what was new, checking out the old stomping grounds, etc., but…it’s just not going to happen, at this rate. Sayonara, AC.