Grab Bag Of Disappointment

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I played Sacred a bit more tonight, but at one point I was escorting some Prince to another place to drum up support for an upcoming war, and he died along the way. He was a pretty good fighter, but we just got completely overwhelmed at one spot. Unfortunately, I’d forgotten to save recently… The game auto-saves, so I went back to see where the last one was, but it was over an hour before that point, so there are a lot of side quests I’d have to redo.

Ugh. It’s really my own fault, but it has sapped a lot of my enthusiasm for tonight. It’s a decent game, but not *that* good, so I’m tempted to say I’ve seen enough of it to get the ‘feel’ of it and just shelve it again and wait for Sacred 2.

Next up, I got around to checking out the Nine Inch Nails songs released for Rock Band yesterday (March Of The Pigs, The Collector, and The Perfect Drug). They’re good songs, but…they’re not really guitar songs. The guitar bits in March of the Pigs are very short, and in the other two you wind up playing other instruments as well (a piano in The Collector and a mandolin in The Perfect Drug) just to give the guitar player something to do.

I played the bass lines in them as well, and March of the Pigs and The Collector are much more interesting that way, but there’s a huge stretch of absolutely no bass activity in The Perfect Drug. Again, they’re not bad songs, but as far as Rock Band goes they’re really biased towards the drums, which are supposed to be quite complex and challenging on all of them.

And I capped off the night with a bit more time in N+, where I redid a couple earlier episodes just to beat a friend’s score on them (tee hee), and did a couple new episodes. I’m up to Episode 29 now, but I haven’t finished Episode 24 yet, as 24-4 drove me nuts for a while and I eventually gave up on it. The difficulty is definitely rising rapidly now, and I’m often retrying dozens of times per level and swearing constantly at the screen. Of course, that’s exactly what its sadistic designers intended, and user-made levels are notorious for often being near-impossible…

Names Are Deceptive

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Well, after reading up a bit more about Battle Mages in Sacred, it turns out they’re not really the hybrid I thought they were, and they’re really most effective as a pure caster. Since I’d already selected a few non-appropriate skills, and you’re limited in the total you’ll get to choose, I decided to start over again.

It didn’t take too long to catch up to where I was before since I wasn’t that far in to begin with, and it’s much easier this time around now that I’ve pretty much gone pure mage. Part of that is luck, having found a couple fireball upgrade tokens, and now I kill most monsters in one cast. I finished off all the side quests I could find in the first few towns, getting me up to level 10, and made my way to Porto Vallum to continue the main quest line.

I did knock the difficulty back down to Bronze, though. Not that Silver was too hard, but higher difficulties are usually overcome in action RPGs by more grinding for levels and better loot, and I don’t really want to waste more time than necessary on that.

Also, the main problem I’m having with the game so far is in the controls. Clicks work *most* of the time, but I regularly run into cases where, say, right-clicking to cast a spell doesn’t actually do anything because the cursor was too close to a selectable target, altering the intended function. The “/nopickup” feature from Diablo 2 is also sorely missed; no, I didn’t really want you to run halfway across the screen and pick up that gold on the ground mid-battle…

The Holy Aspect Ratio

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Sacred 2 is being released later this year, reminding me that I hadn’t really had a good playthrough of the original Sacred yet, so I think I’ll mess around with it for a bit. I bought the Sacred Gold pack at some point, but I think I played it for less than an hour before getting distracted.

It’s a very Diablo-ish action RPG with a lot of the same hack-n-slash, random loot, interface similarities, etc. Quests are more plentiful though, and skills are more like Diablo 1, learned by finding or buying gems that add points to the skills rather than choosing paths in a tree a la D2. The graphics are a bit crude, locked at 1024×768 (I think), without widescreen support, and lacking the finely polished art direction of Diablo, but they suffice.

I created a Battle Mage in order to get a taste of both fighting and magic, since I’ll be unlikely to have time to try multiple different types of characters. So far, he can pretty much hold his own in a toe-to-toe fight with a monster of the same level, but for groups and tougher monsters I pretty much have to run in a circle and alternate between casting fireballs and healing. I don’t have very many skills yet though, so I’m sure my tactics will change as time goes on.

Right now I’m level 7 and still finishing off the townspeople’s quests before continuing on too far with the main quest. I chose the ‘Silver’ level of difficulty, the highest it would let me before unlocking more, so it can’t hurt to scrounge every reward and be as tough as possible before getting too deep…

Crysis Management

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Okay, *now* I’ve finally gotten around to starting Crysis.

It has a reputation for demanding extremely high system specs, but it’s running pretty well so far on my system, even with everything on High. The end result is indeed very pretty, with a ton more foliage than I’ve ever seen in any other game.

It’s a traditional shooter in many ways, but its main feature is that it’s like its predecessor Far Cry in there are often multiple approaches you can take to any particular battle. Although the overall path is still linear, there’s enough openness to the world that you could choose to stealthily take the enemies out in small groups, or create diversions to draw troops away from your path, or go rampaging in guns blazing, or take a more tactical, cover-heavy approach, or bypass certain hotspots or patrols entirely.

The other big feature is that your character has a nanosuit that you can set to one of four different modes: improved armour (the default), where your energy tank acts as a shield; improved speed, where you run faster; improved strength, mainly for jumping higher; and cloaking, making you nearly impossible to spot. Cloaking is by far the most useful of them, since it lets you sneak right past enemies, hide away after drawing their attention, and get the drop on them. You just have to watch out for the limited battery charge, which forces you to move from cover to cover while it recharges, so you can’t just run around permanently cloaked.

The rifle you start with is pretty useless since you run out of ammo soon, but once you pick up a different one from an enemy, there’ll be plenty of ammo for it. You can only hold two different types of long guns, and so far I’ve been sticking with the North Korean assault rifle and switching the other around as necessary. The ‘precision rifle’ is nice, but I’ve hardly found any ammo for it and abandoned it as soon as I ran out. There’s a shotgun, but I haven’t bothered with it yet since most of my fighting has been at longer ranges.

The story starts out fairly typical: an archaeological expedition has radioed for help and a squad of special soldiers has been sent in to extract them. But, of course, nothing goes as planned and nothing is as it seems… The North Koreans are interested in something alien and ancient that was discovered here, and only brief glimpses of it have been seen so far, mostly to kill off other members of our squad (now down to just me and one other member, Psycho). A big shift in focus is supposed to be coming up soon though.

So far the highlight has been a segment where you take control of a tank at the start of the level. In most other games, tank segments like that are more like a rail shooter, where you just have to make sure you fire at the right time and spot of the pattern, but here it’s a lot more interesting because it’s a wide open area with more freedom to move around and you have to be wary of dangers from things like roaming squads of RPG launchers. The vehicles are rather hard to control, which is expected with tanks but it also applies to the regular cars. They’re still useful though, just as additional firepower and protection if nothing else.

Right now I’m at the start of the sixth level, of eleven according to a FAQ, so it probably won’t be too long a game. It’s a pretty good ride so far, though.

I’ll Pursue Lu Bu If I Damn Well Please

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Well, I had intended to start Crysis tonight, but before I knew it it was late again, so I popped in Dynasty Warriors 6 for a quick spin instead.

I’ve only played DW5 before, and this one is similar of course. All the same characters, big battles, etc., but that’s expected since it is based on a telling of actual Chinese history. The main things new in this one that I’ve noticed so far are skill trees for each character, and the ability to climb, jump, and swim to places that would have been off-limits before.

Based on this unlocking guide, I started with Zhao Yun’s musou mode and beat the first battle fairly easily. The second one, where you have to escort Liu Bei and some peasants to the docks was a lot tougher though, and I’ve failed it twice so far. First time because I ran off to protect some peasants but wound up losing all of them, and the second time because Liu Bei decided to take the long way around the map and I just lost too much health to attrition.

Maybe I should level him up a bit more in Free Mode before continuing on in Musou mode. Or maybe actually read the manual for once…

This Post Is Not About Crysis

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Since The Witcher is on hold, I thought I’d get back to a more action-oriented game, and hey, whaddaya know, I already had Crysis installed and patched up. I’d played it briefly before, but only far enough to get through the first couple firefights, still in the tutorial really.

When I fired it up though, the cursor was behaving oddly at the main menu. Its position on the screen was a bit to the lower-right of where it thought it was, making it hard to click on specific spots. It was still bounded by the screen, and restricted from a bit of the left hand side of the screen, so there were some buttons that couldn’t be clicked at all.

Thinking that I might have goofed up the install somehow by accidentally running the patch for a second time (I wasn’t sure if it was already applied or not), I uninstalled, reinstalled, and repatched Crysis. And, while waiting on those steps to finish, I got in a bit more time with N+.

I made it through another five episodes tonight and most of them were uneventful, except for episode 14, the first real sign that the difficulty curve is ramping up. Level 14-2 took a good dozen or so attempts since there was one vertical shaft where I had to bounce from wall to wall all the way up, but there were mines on the wall and they were close enough together that there was little margin for error, so you had to pull off the whole sequence of walljumps perfectly. Each time I tried, I went straight for that shaft first since there was no point in wasting time on the other, easier ones if I was going to botch it on that one anyway.

Then, level 14-4 was the real torture test, being one of those levels where you’re chased by missiles nearly non-stop. The slightest hesitation, all too easily caused by landing in just the wrong spot or getting too close and grabbing a wall instead of falling, and the missiles get you. It’s stopped from being too frustrating by there being a real sense of progression as you keep trying, though. First you can’t figure out how to reliably drop onto the ledge with the door key without falling into the pit of mines below. Then you figure out how to do that more or less reliably, but keep hitting a slope and falling into the pit as you try to get out. Then you learn how to slow your jump to avoid hitting the slope and can get off that ledge reliably, but can’t make it up to the upper keys without getting hit by the missiles. Then you figure out how to weave through the ledges to avoid the missiles, but get caught by them when you slow down to get a key. Then you learn how to get close enough to touch the key without slowing down too much, but aren’t sure how to turn around and get the other key. And so on… Victory was eventually mine though, and with it the achievement for completing 15 episodes.

Eventually, the Crysis reinstall finished, but the cursor still behaved strangely. Running out of ideas, I poked around the menus a bit, and restarted it in DX9 mode just for kicks (the default is DX10, apparently), and tada, it worked fine again. I just installed Vista SP1 on this system, and it does mess with DX10 a bit (mainly to add DX10.1), so maybe it’s involved here. Edit: Turns out it’s not an SP1 problem, but just a Crysis bug when the desktop and game resolutions don’t match. It’s fine now that they’ve been set to the same.

Oh well, DX9 is good enough for me for now, but by this point it was too late to kick off a new game anyway. I don’t like to start it only to have to quit while it’s still halfway through the tutorial.

XBLA Wednesday

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The XNA community and sample games were revealed today, so I had to give some of them a whirl. JellyCar is a weird little game, where you have to ‘drive’ a car forwards and backwards over various obstacles to reach the finish. The twist is that the physics are extremely rubbery — your car bounces around easily, and can be easily crushed, squished, and stretched by the obstacles, making it a fight just to keep it under control.

The other one I tried was The Dishwasher, which is a really well done side-scrolling fighter with a fairly distinctive style. It’s not really my preferred genre though, and I think I beat the sample level only because I had it on easy.

Today was also the release day for N+, which is the 360 port of a free Flash game (which you can get here). The graphics are only slightly improved, but the important part is that the gameplay is perfectly intact and the controls are still smooth with the analog stick. There are also all-new levels, some new multiplayer modes, and a level editor that’ll let you share your levels.

I did the first ten single-player episodes (of 45) tonight without too much trouble, with only a small handful that I had to repeat more than once. I’m sure it’ll get a lot tougher though, as the original game was infamous for its brutal difficulty in the later levels.

Music For The Messes

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So, with The Witcher on hold, I need a new primary game. But not tonight — tonight is for…music!

The DLC pack for Rock Band is pretty good this week. El Scorcho (Weezer) is a really easy song, but still pretty fun to play. I even got 100% on it, albeit still on Medium, but I rarely get 100% on anything. Why Do You Love Me (Garbage) is a pretty good song and a bit tougher, with actual chords, but I almost managed to 100% it if not for a screwup on the last half-dozen notes. Sex Type Thing (Stone Temple Pilots) is a classic, and the most challenging of the bunch, with more variety in transitions and power chords.

I also went back and beat my previous scores on a handful of songs like Outside, Ten Speed (Of God’s Blood and Burial), Pleasure (Pleasure), and Go With The Flow, though I can still only get four stars on that last one. Way too many long sets of repeated notes on which it’s easy to break the combo.

After that I spent a bit more time in Audiosurf, mainly in Sonic Youth songs, where I took some of the slower ones from Rather Ripped in order to get the Stainless achievement. Unfortunately, even though I’ve added a bunch of friends’ names, the friend score servers are down right now. Even when they’re working though, it doesn’t keep a very long list of the songs they’ve played, so it’s tough to try and find songs on which you can try to beat them.