Is It Full Of Necroholics?

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I finished off the Pharos tower in FF12 tonight, culminating in a series of three boss fights without any breaks, but they weren’t really that tough. Just making it through the previous sections with a decent amount of mana left was the real challenge, since there was an extremely long stretch without a save point. That tower was probably the longest single dungeon in the whole game (so far, at least), and there isn’t really much more to go now.

Now is the time to do a bit more exploration and prep work, though. I bought all the best new items and spells I could, I have some loot items to track down to make other stuff (like the Sagittarius bow for Fran), I could do some more hunts if I want to, and…I have a spear to go fetch.

The Necrohol of Nabudis will be next, both for the Zodiac Spear (I hope I did the requirements properly), and a merchant there with some more high-end items.

So Dirty

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It initially started out as a brief diversion one night, but I played Dirt 2 for a bit and then proceeded to pretty much finish it off over the next few days.

I mainly did the rally, trailblazer, rallycross, and gatecrasher events, though. The ones involving buggies and trucks, like landrush and raids, were not exactly my favourites; I was fine once I got ahead, but the AI would always create a mess in the first few turns, often locking wheels with me or spinning me around or into the side of the track, leading to numerous restarts.

In the end I wound up doing the minimum of those events needed to complete all of the major events, including the world tours, X Games events, and the Colin McRae Challenge. The latter ended with a nice little tribute video to the guy, which was rather touching.

I’m not technically done everything in it yet, but with all those major events out of the way, and most achievements completed, I’m considering it finished.

Mixed Bag

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A handful of smaller games or gameplay sessions I’ve done recently:

Puzzle Chronicles is one of the games I grabbed in the recent Steam sale and…I’m kind of regretting it. The art and story are terrible, even if they aren’t really relevant to the gameplay (I wish it would let me name my guy Pouty McPouterson). The gameplay is weird, though. It builds on the usual match-falling-blocks, but they fall horizontally, and you fight for control over board area with the opponent. It’s hard for me to visualize combos that way, and there’s a ton of different gem types to complicate things further. Not really what I was expecting.

I played a bit more of Joe Danger, getting through the second series of challenges. I finally discovered the trick to racking up scores (doing, well, tricks), but it quickly becomes a lot of stuff to keep track of while you’re trying to do tricks, avoid obstacles, hit the goals for the track, etc. It’s still a good game, but I’m just no good at it.

Cuboid got a bit more play due to checking out the Playstation Plus benefits, which adds some extra levels and an editor. I didn’t get Plus, but I played it for a bit anyway, getting to about two-thirds of the way through the beginner levels. Things are getting complicated now, with things like weight-sensitive switches, teleporters that split the block into two, ‘health’ pickups and move limits before you ‘die’, etc. I’ll have to get back to it again at some point when I have more time and brainpower to dedicate to it.

In Borderlands, I cleared out the rest of the quests for New Haven and Rust Commons East, which puts me at the start of the Krom’s Canyon area. Our group hasn’t really played together much recently, but hopefully we’re not too far apart now that I’ve caught up a bit.

And in an effort to clear out some older games, I tried the expansions for Quake and Quake II, but couldn’t get them to work since they crash immediately. It would be better to use them with a modern engine port anyway but…it’s just not worth the effort to me.

WTT FBSS 4 SMR

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We skipped the usual EQ2 night on Thursday since people were tired, so we moved it to Sunday instead.

We quickly finished off the Flowing Black Silk Sash heritage quest and although the item isn’t useful for me, that bumped the guild to level 24. We then headed off to the Splitpaw Saga content, which involved working our way through a couple of dungeons until we reached a quest hub. We only had time to do one of the quests though, and apparently we need to do three before we get the item that’ll let us teleport back there.

The entry dungeon was at least a bit more interesting in most in that getting through it involved some simple physics puzzles and blowing up cracked walls, rather than the usual old ‘kill N gnolls’…

Damn You, Steam!

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Steam suddenly launched a summer sale a few days ago, and I’ve been buying too damn much stuff on it. I haven’t spent a lot of time on anything bought in it yet, but there are some initial impressions:

Crash Time III: The hook of this one is that you play as a pair of detectives and chase down crooks in kinda-realistic police chases. Only ‘kinda’ though, since I’m not sure real detectives use robot drones that drive under the criminal’s car and blow it up, or cause horrific chain crashes… It’s better than I thought it would be, but the difficulty is a bit uneven. One of the first missions unlocked is unbeatable with the cars I have now — even accelerating flat-out, the crook can’t be caught up to and gets away.

Hearts of Iron III: Semper Fi: An expansion that supposedly fixes a lot of the problems with the original HoI3. Unfortunately the performance is really uneven, with a lot of sudden long pauses and jerky map scrolling. And some dumb stuff still seems to occur: Japan couldn’t even make it into northern China, it still seems to have trouble with making landings, etc.

Dark Void Zero: A retro-8bit-style platformer game with a jetpack. It’s pretty well-done, but damn, it’s hard. Enemy shots seem really hard to dodge while you’re using the jetpack, and the levels feel huge. I’m not even sure what to do to pass the first one yet, if I can even survive long enough.

Pushing the Borders

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There’s been a bit of a resurgence of interest in Borderlands lately as a couple of friends have picked it up as well. We spent a bit of time helping them level up, and I finished off a couple of older quests on my own and got to level 29, but we haven’t really started progressing into new areas yet.

One thing they did show me though was that there’s an easily-reached red weapons crate in the Knoxx starting area of T-Bone Junction, so I spent some time (a little too much time…) farming it. The stuff from it is too high-level for me now, but they’re worth a lot of money and I’m now maxed out on cash.

And although we’re still too low-level for Knoxx yet, we did figure out how to unlock the new Monster vehicle there and can now roam the roads freely — even if we do get squished almost right away…

“Playing” Gran Turismo

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I took a bit of a break from FF12 by returning to yet another old PS2 game — Gran Turismo 4.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to go back to an era that didn’t have analog triggers, and I found myself lurching all over the place, unsure of where the braking points were, and even the progressive and 1080i modes couldn’t really make the graphics bearable after all the recent HD racing games.

So, instead, I’ve been trying to progress in my alternate career path. I had two save games set up, one for purely A-spec racing (actual driving by me directly), and one for purely B-spec racing (using the director mode to control an AI driver). My goal with the B-spec save is to see just how far into the career mode I can get using only cars won from races, and not buying any. I was up to around 46% completion, but I started to run out of races I can still do. A huge number of the one-make races are out since the cars permitted aren’t available as rewards, and there are a few high-end races where getting a winning car build together is a bit tough.

To get a little farther, I loosened the rules a bit and allowed myself to manually run events that aren’t available in B-spec mode anyway, like license tests and the rally events. That let me do some extra one-make events, and I’m now at about 51%.