F.E.A.R. Of The Dark

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In my neverending quest to free up disk space and get games off of my backlog, I started playing F.E.A.R. last week. As an FPS, it should be fairly short.

Unfortunately, I’m kind of getting bored of it already. The combat in it is actually pretty decent, in that it’s not just spray-n-pray; you have to conserve ammo, wait for opportunities, use the slo-mo ability effectively, not take on too many at once, etc… It’s just that the environments have been so bland so far. I’m something like four chapters in, and it’s just been either a bunch of office building hallways and rooms, or your typical industrial pipes and walkways. It’s not particularly scary, either. There are sudden flashes of other scenes, or you’re suddenly dumped in a ‘cutscene’ that obviously isn’t really happening, but none of it’s actually frightening. And you can tell where the story is going from a mile away.

I’ll probably play a bit more of it, just to see if it picks up any, and it’ll probably be short anyway, but if it doesn’t then I might just abandon this one.

Search And Self-Rescue

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Continuing my reposting of my Minecraft shenanigans:

Your first rescue never goes well.

I’ve been working on a lighthouse on a peninsula during the days, but at night I continue exploring the maze of tunnels I’ve made, and while working on a fairly plain straight path, I suddenly saw…a chest? I’d stumbled onto a treasure room, and was able to grab the goodies (including a record and a saddle) with no risk. I could see where the mob spawner was in the room, and having heard a few tips before, I dug down and then directly up under it, letting me destroy the spawner with impunity. The rest of the zombies hanging around were then fairly easy to dispatch.

It turns out it was just the tip end of a vast cave network down there, and although I hurried to slap torches down, I could already tell I was not alone. I fought a few zombies, a spider, and a couple creepers, discovering that I still needed to work on my timing with them. When I met the skeleton, though, I panicked a bit and he managed to pump quite a few arrows into me as I struggled to get close to him, having fallen into a pit that was actually easier to get out of than it seems when you’re panicking… I did survive with a couple hearts left though, having used up all of my pork chops. And then a damn creeper exploded.

I knew exactly where to go from my spawn point this time, but I quickly realized that I hadn’t really thought my in-case-of-death plan through. I was still using a stone block to barricade the entrance to my mine, so I had to rapidly assemble a wooden pickaxe just to get back in (there’s now a proper door in place). Unfortunately all of my sticks, coal, and torches had been on me at the time, and I wanted them and the ore that I’d picked up along the way back, so I grabbed some iron, made a sword, and headed back down. I found the area I’d died in, and it looked like there was only a zombie or two down there with my stuff and I could just jump in, grab it and, run, but it was dark in that area, I’d lost some health to another couple of zombies on the way back, and had underestimated how much the armour I’d been wearing before had helped. I got hit a couple more times, and then there was ANOTHER DAMN CREEPER. BOOM.

Now I really wanted my stuff back because as I respawned, I realized that after making my sword for the first rescue, I’d left the iron ingots in my inventory. ALL OF THEM. The best I could manage was a stone sword for now, but I stopped by my second chest in my central mining cave and picked up some torches and pork chops at least. But this time the rescue was rather anticlimactic as the monsters were all gone, perhaps all taken out by the creeper’s explosion, but I quickly lit up the area and hurried back to stash my stuff. I did manage to get most of my stuff back, except for the initial suit of armour (only the almost-broken pants were left), a flint+stone, and maybe some miscellaneous stacks of ore.

Yes, we really do have to learn things the hard way.

And here’s the aforementioned lighthouse, upon completion:

I had something else a bit more ambitious in mind, though…

Can’t Sleep, Creeper Will Explode Me

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Bah, I’m falling behind again… Perhaps I’ve been a bit too obsessed with one ‘game’ in particular, one that’s been getting a lot of attention lately: Minecraft.

It’s almost quite literally a sandbox as it drops you into a blocky world where you dig up sand and dirt and stone and ore and craft implements to help you survive and build structures, and try to avoid getting killed by the enemies that spawn in the dark. Quite often this involved diving underground, using a pickaxe to hollow out tunnels, and occasionally you’ll hit ore veins, caves, lava and water flows, and dungeons with monsters.

I’ve already talked about my experiences a bit on some forums, so I’ll just repost what I did soon after starting:

I watched Guildboss’s first-night tutorial (thanks!) and got myself well-established with a nice, safe little cave. I figured that I’d explore a bit while waiting out the night, so I started digging tunnels downwards. Despite hearing some nearby monsters, all I found were a couple of safe little cavities with some more coal and my first gold.

I spent several days just digging out my little network of tunnels, but I was starting to run low on wood for torches and picks, so I figured it was time to venture back out on the surface. I could hear *something* nearby, so just to be safe I made a chest and put everything valuable in it, heading back out with only a pick, a sword, and some extra cobblestone. Immediately, I was jumped by a spider and dead before I knew what the hell.

Fortunately, all of my stuff is safe in the chest. Unfortunately, I don’t remember where the entrance to my cave is, and in hindsight I should have built some kind of landmark on the outside. Now I’m wandering around desperately trying to find it again and, as I post this, hiding in fear at nights in puny little gravel caves…

I did eventually rediscover my old tunnels, but not after reestablishing myself with an entirely new cave system.

Ah well, I gave up looking for my old cave and started a new one within line-of-sight of my spawn point, and it’s been going pretty well. I had to dig down pretty far through a whole lotta nothing, having to run around outside just to scrounge for coal, but I eventually hit a decent cave system and started finding iron and redstone, and a bit more digging linked up with a few other caves. A couple of them include large waterfalls, where I learned how the fluid physics work and how easily you can flood the pathway up around it that you were carving out…

Getting back and forth from the entrance is a bit of a pain so I moved all of my crafting stuff down into a central cavern and have been working almost entirely underground so far. I’ve managed to slap down enough torches that there’s only the occasional monster, and no serious threats so far. I’ve even got my own pet slime trapped by water currents in a corner of my main crafting room. I’ve got enough stone saved up that I should start thinking about some actual structures now.

Disk Space Unleashed

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Argh, I’m falling out of the habit of updating again… There was a stretch where I didn’t play anything since I was out of town, but there is still a bunch to talk about.

I finished off The Force Unleashed, finally freeing up the 30 gigs of disk space it was taking up. Some of the boss fights were fairly tense and I almost lost, even playing on easy, but otherwise it was still just a matter of slogging through it to see the story. I played the three DLC packs too, but they were fairly short and easy.

On a whim I finally played The Path, a rather artsy non-game where you wander around the woods as one of six girls in a weird take on Little Red Riding Hood. Around the woods you find items relating to the girls’ personalities, encounter their (oft-metaphorical) ‘wolf’, and then tour through a bizarre interpretation of Grandma’s house. I’m not sure I learned anything from it, but it was interesting trip if you appreciate surreality.

Now that I’m pretty much done with Picross 3D, my puzzle game impulse is being satisfied by Everyday Genius: SquareLogic. It’s Sudoku-like in that you have to make the rows and columns of a square fill with non-repeating numbers, but the squares are also broken down into smaller regions with their own specific requirements, like adding up to a certain total, all numbers must be odd, one square must be higher/lower than another one, etc. It looks tough at first, but the interface helps a lot in keeping track of everything.

I downloaded F1 2010 on Steam and played through a race, albeit on the easy and shortened weekend settings just to get a taste. It plays well though, feeling authentic enough, with a decent amount of control over things like your own career and R&D. I’ll definitely have to put more time into it.

EQ2 hasn’t progressed much, as I was gone for a week. I caught up on the faction grinding I missed out on, but another group member was missing this last week, so we just goofed around in the Cleft of Rujark dungeon off of Sinking Sands.

And then there’s Minecraft. That’ll deserve its own post…

Just When I Thought I Was Out…

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I’ve been dabbling in another miscellaneous pile of stuff lately:

Right after I finished the Mafia 2 main story, they released the first DLC pack, Jimmy’s Vendetta, which adds a bunch of free-roam missions like you’d expect from a GTA-ish game. It’s unfortunate that they’ve chopped the game up like this, but I’m invested this far into it, may as well get a little bit more fun out of it…

I’m about halfway through it now, and most of the missions haven’t been very difficult, but Paddy Wagon must have taken me 20+ attempts before I could finally beat it. You get mobbed by so many enemies, many with machine guns, that just surviving the fights is difficult, especially with enemies approaching from multiple directions. I eventually beat it by luring a cop car along with me to the final fight, and they helped thin out the enemies.

Overall though, Jimmy’s Vendetta feels…soulless. The missions are fun, and it’s nice to have more to do, but there’s very little extra voicing (just some generic environmental responses), no mid-mission chatter, nobody ever comes along or helps you out, the mission intro is just a page of text… It just doesn’t feel right.

WoW surprised everyone by releasing a bit of pre-Cataclysm content with an event in Durotar about the trolls retaking the Echo Isles. No real challenge to it, but it was still interesting, and I did it on both of my 80s for the achievement (and my 40 mage, but he couldn’t do the final quest for the achievement).

I briefly played Puzzle Quest 2, but only long enough to get through the tutorials in the first town. Not a lot seems different so far, but it’s been so long since I played the first that I’m fuzzy about the minor details that might have changed anyway.

And tonight I took another shot at VVVVVV on my Mac and surprised myself by managing to collect the final two trinkets. One of them wasn’t really that bad — I just hadn’t bothered to spend the time on it before — but the other was the infamous Veni Vidi Vici one, and it must have taken me over 200 attempts tonight to get it, not including all of my previous failed attempts. You have to let yourself fall through a bunch of spike-riddled screens, bounce off a platform, and fall all the way back through them, and it took forever to finally get the timing right. Getting the timing right on one screen isn’t really that hard, but you have to chain those successes all in a row to get through them all. Oddly enough, the return trip seemed easier than expected; the problem was mainly getting past that bounce successfully and consistently.

And that’s probably all I’ll do in VVVVVV, since the things still left over like the time trials and gravitron are just crazy-difficult.

Come Back, Braking Line!

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A couple days ago I felt like playing a driving game, but I’m still waiting on the next Jalopnik pack for Forza, so I fired up GRID instead. I’d never actually put much time into it past the initial day or two for some reason, and over a few hours I managed to complete all of the first-tier events in the American and European leagues, and a couple in the next tiers.

It’s a lot harder than I remember it being, though. Even on the easiest setting, AI cars would constantly be riding my tail right until the finish, making me vulnerable to small mistakes. And since I almost always start towards the back of the pack, working my way past all the AI cars inevitably feels like a game of bumper cars, only rarely emerging unscathed. It’s still fun, even if a bit more frustrating than I’d liked when I was hoping for a bit more of a relaxing cruise to victory…

I also popped into EQ2 for a bit. I’d almost forgotten that it was a double-xp weekend, and although I didn’t get any adventuring done, I did gain five tradeskill levels each on my provisioner and jewelcrafter. These bonus weekends are about the only time I work on tradeskills anymore, as it gets too grindy otherwise.

And speaking of MMOs, last night I loaded WoW for a little while, partly to test the RealID chat with a friend, to check the oracle eggs (nothing good yet again), and to do some new quests around Sen’Jin village related to the upcoming Cataclysm release. They weren’t particularly difficult, but they did grant some nice rewards like an illusion-granting token and a unique cloak graphic.

Live Fast, Die Often

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As expected, I finished off Mafia 2 today. Things were starting to get complicated for Vito in the first part, and today things spiraled just a bit out of control, dragging in everyone from the Chinese to the feds.

Overall it continued to be a pretty good play experience. There was only one point where some grinding for cash was needed, but that didn’t take very long. I upgraded one of the DLC cars for the achievement, but there wasn’t really any point where a fast car really seemed necessary, another symptom of how much wasted opportunity the game has by being so short. The irritating one-shot deaths continued right till the end, but fortunately checkpoints seemed to be much saner, except perhaps for one part of the observatory.

I’m sure there’ll be more DLC though, as there are already Steam achievements listed for more missions. And yes, I managed to get all of the Playboy magazines…

Fast Track To The Mob

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I’ve given up on Mercenaries 2 due primarily to poor controls, and unfortunately I made it halfway through Mafia 2 today. I say unfortunately, because it looks like it’s going to be pretty short.

In terms of the world, the city is very pretty, with lots of distinct buildings and landmarks and a great feel to the atmosphere, but there’s not much reason to explore it beyond what you need for the missions. The handling on the cars takes some getting used to, but that’s fairly understandable for the era of cars involved here.

The plot is pretty basic mob cliches, but I think it does a far better job of taking itself seriously than GTA4 did, as it sticks to a fairly small scope and doesn’t get unrealistically wild and crazy (so far, anyway). Combat has a great feel to it, with enemies running around and stumbling and trying to find their own cover, much like you’d expect in a chaotic battle. Combat has been fairly limited too, happening sparingly rather than non-stop battle from start to end of a chapter. There’s even one chapter that I think didn’t involve a single fight.

The most irritating things so far are that you can get hit by unlucky one-shot kills, forcing you to suddenly and unexpectedly restart at the last checkpoint. The checkpoints are mostly plentiful, but the foundry battle in Chapter 8 was particularly annoying since there’s a massive, long fight and only one mid-battle checkpoint. And what made it extra-annoying was that I had to redo that chapter in order to pick up a couple Playboy magazines that I had missed due to being distracted by the frustration of all the insta-deaths… (I had to redo chapter 4 for the magazines as well, but that one wasn’t nearly as bad.)

I’m still enjoying it a lot, but at this rate I should easily finish it tomorrow.

Not-Yet-Made Man

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It’s been a while since the last update, but I haven’t really been playing a lot either. Well, I’ve played a bunch of games, but haven’t really put much time into each one…

I probably played Picross 3D the most, picking it up and knocking off a puzzle here and there to kill time, and a couple days ago I finally finished the last tier of the hard puzzles. I didn’t get 100% of them though, as you have to be some kind of savant to finish enough of the hard ones in time to get three stars. And I’ve still got a bunch of downloaded puzzles to keep me busy for a while yet.

I picked up a game called Puzzle Dimension on Steam out of sheer curiosity, and it’s kind of interesting. You roll a ball around a tiled map (it’s actually turn-based, with discrete moves), picking up the flowers on the level, and getting to the exit. Complicating things are squares that can only be traversed once, icy blocks that you slide on, fire blocks, gravity effects, jumping, etc… I’ve completed the first couple of ‘worlds’ so far, but there’s still plenty more to come.

I caved in and bought Victoria 2, though I haven’t really played a proper game of it yet. I did my usual introductory game as Hawaii, watching how the rest of the world unfolded, and it was actually a bit more challenging to keep things together as you couldn’t just set up the sliders and then do nothing the rest of the game. There were weird things afoot in the rest of the world, too, as Britain wound up swallowing up all of China, Egypt got picked on by nearly everyone and eventually eliminated, the US never even tried to get California back from Mexico, the UK never released any of its dominions… There’s still a lot of rough edges to it like the rebel hordes that run amok and the crazy ways that capitalists (mis)manage factories, so I’m putting this off until another patch or two.

Not much has happened in EQ2 as people have continued to be unavailable. I did at least hit level 55 and can finally use the nice reward charm I got for finishing all of the Lavastorm collections (20 to all stats, 100 health and power, and a healing proc).

Worms Reloaded was released, and I figured I may as well give it a shot. It seems to be a decent successor to Armageddon so far, though it’s a bit disappointing that teams and players are limited to 4 each. Some nice new weapons though, and I’m about halfway through the single-player campaign, though I haven’t tried multi yet.

I started playing Mercenaries 2 as my potential next game, but it’s still kind of early to judge. The graphics are a bit poorer than I expected, and the interface a bit awkward, but I’ve only done a few missions so far. I’ll give it a bit more of a chance to grow on me, at least.

And when I finish that, or it doesn’t work out, I think Mafia 2 will be next after that. I never played the first one, but it got decent reviews, and word-of-mouth on this one is pretty good so far. It’s apparently not as open-world as, say, the GTAs, but I’m okay with it being somewhat more linear and shorter. I’ve still got plenty of other games waiting…

Summer of FPS

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I haven’t really played a lot of games recently, besides grinding through a few more series in Forza 3 and knocking off more puzzles in Picross 3D.

I did wind up caving in and buying Victoria 2, though. I was initially hesitant to; I liked the first Victoria but didn’t play it much since the UI is rather weak and POP management gets fiddly, but Paradox games are typically somewhat…troubled on initial release and need at least some patches and an expansion before they really shine. The word-of-mouth about V2 was very positive though, so I wound up getting it anyway, and it is indeed a pretty decent game. There are still some troubles with the economy and things like way too many rebels popping up mid-game though, so I’ve shelved it for now until we see how well the next patch helps.

Otherwise, I’ve been thinking of getting back to some of the FPSes on my backlog, to counterbalance the ultra-long RPGs. I can probably burn through a bunch of them fairly quickly and at least free up some drive space. So far I’ve played through Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, a remake of one of the more old-school shooters. The gimmick here is that there are tons and tons and tons of enemies in each level, keeping things at a frantic pace. Unfortunately it was a bit too frantic for me, and I turned the difficulty down one notch to Easy midway through. I could probably finish it on Normal, but it would take a ton of reloads and I just want to run through these games as fast as possible, not master them.