I also spent a bit of time in Hellgate: London today, hitting level 45 and beating a couple of the sub-bosses in Stonehenge again, but nothing particularly exciting otherwise.
My subscription’s still good for a little while yet, but I’m not sure if I’ll renew it yet. The upcoming changes in the 2.0 patch don’t really sound all that exciting, and I’m not much of a PvPer. It’s probably not worth continuing to pay for a game that I only play every once in a while as a distraction.
Back in Beyond Good & Evil, I proceeded to the upper halls of the factory, where it turned primarily into a stealth mission. The stealth system isn’t too complex or precise; I could kick a guard in the back, have him see me running away, and then 30 seconds later he’d declare that it must have been a false alarm… But, it works well enough.
I investigated an area with conveyer belts carrying boxes, and an x-ray machine revealed that there were people inside. On the way out of there, Pey’j got captured by the guards. He had given me a disc that talked about a spaceship hidden away at the lighthouse that he had been working on, and a bit more about Jade’s childhood (he was raising her after losing her parents, somehow), but I still need some codes to get to the ship.
I met Double-H again, and we helped each other out a few times as we snuck around, and it was mainly just a matter of not getting caught until reaching the final room, where there was a boss fight. It was another fairly easy one though, as Double-H and I just had to hit the legs simultaneously to knock it down and then fire a disc at the inner chamber to damage it while it was down. I wasn’t able to catch Pey’j in time though, and he got loaded into a crate and sent off to the old slaughterhouses.
I then had to escort Double-H back to the resistance hideout within a time limit, but that was easy enough. After that I earned some more pearls by doing another hovercraft race, beating a shark-guy in some kind of shuffleboard game (which was really frustrating since it felt like it depended too much on luck, and took a good half-dozen tries), and by infiltrating an Alpha Sections warehouse in the city.
I had more than enough pearls now and bought the jump kit for the hovercraft, which it was implied will be necessary for getting into the slaughterhouse, as part of an off-course excursion during the third hovercraft race, and that’s where I left off for now.
I did a bit more shopping in Beyond Good & Evil, including getting a Neutralizing Cannon, since it’s about the only thing that costs pearls that I can afford right now. I found an area in the city with a bunch of conveyer belts and force fields, but not much came of it aside from earning a pearl. I also found a place called the Vorax Lair, where there were a couple simple puzzles and a monster carrying another pearl.
After that I finally headed to the factory, using the Neutralizing Cannon to get rid of the guard robot that had prevented the hovercraft from approaching it before. I’ll have to remember to go back and use it on them in a few other places, too. In the factory, the main goal is to photograph a few specific areas, but so far I’ve found a ranged weapon, rescued a resistance agent named Double-H, and fought a boss monster called a Reaper. It was a fairly easy fight though, since as long as I was ready to nail it with the ranged weapon as soon as he finished leaping around, he never got a chance to counterattack.
I then got the main elevator working, so I can head to the upper floors, but that’ll wait for tomorrow.
I spent a bit of time just exploring around in Beyond Good & Evil, but the area I can roam in is limited by barriers at the moment. I still managed to photograph a few more animals, found some ‘cash’ in crates, won a hovercraft race, and found a ‘looter cavern’ where I had to pursue a thief’s hovercraft through an obstacle course, winning some more cash and a pearl at the end.
After that I went to the bar to meet with the resistance guy, who challenged me to a game of Three Coconut Monty, and gave me a room key for winning. In there, I found the resistance HQ, where they explained about how people are being kidnapped by the Alpha Section agents and sent through a factory, slaughterhouse, and then off to the moon, and they want me to help investigate what’s actually happening to the people.
So, next I’m supposed to be off to the factory, but I also got a city pass that opens up a few new areas. I stopped in a shop and bought a few more health upgrades for myself and the hovercraft, and I’ll have to do a bit more exploring.
Next up will be Beyond Good & Evil, a game that I started playing on the PS2, but repurchased for the PC when it came out on Steam recently (I hadn’t gotten very far anyway). It took a bit of experimenting to get it to run well on Vista, but it seems to be stable now. (For anyone else having similar troubles, the trick is to turn off “HW Vertex Processing” in the config program.)
It’s an action-adventure in the Zelda vein, where you play a female photojournalist named Jade on an alien planet, getting caught up in some kind of conspiracy about the aggressive DomZ that are constantly attacking the planet, and the Alpha Section troops that are protecting the population from them. Or are they… A resistance group seems to think something fishy’s going on. It’s a colourful world, both literally in the fairly bright colour schemes all over the place and in the various characters around, like Pey’j, the gruff pig-guy assistant of yours, or the Jamaican-sounding rhino-like black market parts dealers.
I’ve played the first ‘dungeon’ so far, and although there was some combat, it’s mostly exploration, puzzle-solving, and photography. Yes, your career as a photojournalist does really matter, and taking pictures of the various animal species, including a lot that are off the beaten path or in the middle of attacking you, can net a lot of cash and bonus equipment. You can also capture maps with it, and I’m sure there will be other uses later on. Pey’j also follows you around and helps out in combat and in some of the puzzles.
There’s also an open world element to it, where you can just roam around the world in your hovercraft. It’s not exactly GTA-ish in its breadth or size, but next up I’ll probably do a bit of exploration and see if I can find any interesting secrets or more animals to photograph before continuing on with the story.
The only annoying things so far are some interface quirks, like how it asks what language you want every single time you start it (what, in case I suddenly go multilingual between sessions?), and how the default controls are split up so that you have to use the keyboard to move the menu cursor and the mouse button to select, not just one or the other.
Continuing on in Heretic, I started running across even more new weapons in the second episode, like the firemace and phoenix rod, roughly analogous to a grenade launcher and rocket launcher, respectively.
The rest of episode 2 was fairly uneventful, though I missed the secret level. The final boss turned out to be a pair of minotaur-like creatures, which weren’t too dangerous as long as I maintained my distance, but they had tons of health.
Episode 3 started out rough though, with plenty of the more dangerous monsters right off the bat, including iron liches, before I’d barely found any weapons. I just barely managed to squeak through in spots, mainly by avoiding the first iron lich completely. This episode also introduced a naga-like creature with a rapid-fire low-damage attack, with the twist that the first attack is followed up with a stronger single blast a split second later, so if you strafe to the side to dodge the initial volley, you could still get hit by the second.
The ‘final’ boss had two phases: at first he’s riding some kind of hell-dino-horse-thing, and he’s fairly easy to beat since he only has a close-range attack. Then comes the really annoying part, where he starts summoning in those annoying wizards like crazy. My only hope was to just keep constantly moving so that the wizards wouldn’t hit me, firing at the boss when possible, which wasn’t often because he’d teleport around, quite often just after I’d caught up with him and only hit him once or twice. It took a couple tries, but I lucked out and down he went.
That ends the original Heretic episodes, and although there are two ‘expansion’ episodes, I don’t think I’m going to bother with them. I’ve had my fill of nostalgia for now, and other games await.
Before continuing on with Heretic, I took a slight detour to finish off another game instead: Yoshi’s Island DS. I hadn’t touched it in quite a while, but I only recently realized that there are only five worlds in it instead of the original’s six worlds, so I was closer to the end than I thought.
I only had to complete five more levels, but it took a bit longer than expected. Either the difficulty ramps up a huge amount in these later levels, or my platforming skills have waned a lot. I’d built up 87 extra lives by this point, but by the time I finished the game, it had fallen down to only 44 left. It felt like I’d spent forever redoing some parts, especially one in 5-7 (called “Superhard Acrobatics!”, appropriately enough) that involved annoyingly-placed piranha plants and dodging fire wheels while on moving platforms.
The final level was interesting in that it had five different paths you could take through it, depending on which baby type you selected. I tried all of them but wasn’t having much luck until I gave Wario’s a few tries, and eventually did it that way, since it was mainly based on puzzles rather than speed or precision. And then, ironically enough, the final boss fight was fairly easy, and I got it the first try.
Now, am I going to go back and get better scores in order to unlock the secret levels and bonus games? Hell no.
So, what’s next? Definitely not another RPG, since I’m kind of burned out on them after blazing through Suikoden V. Instead, I want to shoot stuff, so I picked up where I left off in Heretic. Yes, the 14-year old fantasy shooter based on the Doom engine. I picked it up as part of the Steam id megapack, since it’s one of those shareware games I played a bit when it first came out but never got the full version, and it still holds up decently well. I’m playing it using the ZDoom engine though, so I can use mouselook and set a higher resolution.
I left off partway through the first episode, so I finished that off, managing to find the secret level by accident. The only really notable thing was the two iron liches at the end of the episode, and killing them unleashed a huge flood of wizards that took me a couple attempts to survive.
The second episode has already added a few new things, like a new enemy that looks like an alien/scorpion/man hybrid and shoots fire, and a new bellstaff weapon. I ended for the night at the start of the third level here, but they’re fairly quick levels (usually a half hour each at most), so it shouldn’t take too long to finish it off. There are five episodes total, though only the first three are Heretic proper and the other two are an expansion pack.
It took much less time to finish off Suikoden V today, and I first spent an hour or so just getting ready, organizing my equipment and skills and such, and grinding for a bit more cash. Finally, with everyone at or near level 60, I was ready to set off for the final set of ruins.
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Well, I *almost* finished Suikoden V today, but after spending most of the day on it, I’m pretty damned close. Endgame spoilers ahoy:
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