Treachery Most Foul

On my recent two-week trip to Japan, I played effectively no video games, but I did spend a lot of time reading Horus Heresy books on my Kindle. The first was a collection of short stories called Tales of Heresy, which featured some very cool looks into various times, places, and factions of the 31st millennium. One of my favorite featured The Emperor himself in a prominent role laying out his vision of the Imperial Truth to a religious man at the end of the Terran Unification. Another told the tale of the bloodthirsty primarch Angron taking leadership of his legion of Space Marines, the World Eaters.

After that collection, I moved on to a duology about the Dark Angels legion and their primarch, Lion El'Jonson. The first book, Descent of Angels, was decent but had no real relevance to the events of the heresy; it was just an origin story of sorts for this legion, which I believe stay loyal during Horus' rebellion. I am now reading the follow-up, Fallen Angels, which is considerably better written (many different authors write the various books of the Horus Heresy series), and will presumably shed some light on what exactly the Lion is doing with his legion while the Imperium tears itself apart with internecine conflict.

Every time I look at the Horus Heresy wikipedia page, there are three or four more novels I find that I want to read. I'm on my 14th (!) at the moment. It's a pretty epic series, with many different players with a variety of motives and many different conflicts across the galaxy, all centered around a handful of key highly charismatic figures. I don't know of much else like it.

Arean Exodus

I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's short story collection The Martians, tonight. It is set in the same universe as his trilogy of books about the colonization of Mars and the effects thereof on both the planet and the people doing the terraforming. It was a nice series of vignettes featuring a few familiar characters and locations, a few new recurring characters, and even some alternate-timeline stories within that universe. There were also two or three stories that if they did not break the fourth wall, otherwise pulled some kind of stunt that made it so that the stories were about the author and/or his process used writing the Mars books. I'd say this book is for fans of the series only, really.

I'm really excited to read 2312, by the same author, which appears to be set again in the same universe, a little further on in time so that even more of the solar system is extensively colonized. Reviews for that book on Amazon are all over the map, which signals to me that it may be right up my alley as far as Robinson's works go.

That won't be my next foray, though. I'm going to be dipping back into the grim, dark future in which there is only war. I've got 4 more Horus Heresy novels queued up, as well as the novel Metro 2033 (the inspiration for the game series), and a re-read of Tai-Pan I have going, as well.

The Lone Wanderer Wanders On

Over the last few days I polished off the remaining Fallout 3 DLC I had not played, along with a few miscellaneous sidequests I had read about being interesting. The Pitt ended up being a little more interesting than I thought it would, if not upending my stance on slavers (they die), at least upending my stance on Dostoevsky's hypothetical Utopia built on the suffering of one innocent child. Mothership Zeta, though, was pretty forgettable. And with that, and some 87 hours in Fallout 3, I am done with the game. Bethesda's RPGs are too big and too numerous to attempt to wring every little thing from. I'll be playing New Vegas next, I'd imagine, before getting around to Skyrim at some point.

It occurs to me now that Fallout 3 and Brood War have both been knocked off the Priority Queue. I'm going to have to work on Half-Life and Dark Souls some, as well as the Starcraft II campaign.

After a long time in the queue, I've finally come around to giving Company of Heroes a try. I've only played a couple of missions so far, but I like what I've seen.  The World War II setting would never have brought me around on it's own, rather the game's stellar reputation was what convinced me so long ago to try it. The quality is readily apparent. I'm looking forward to playing more of it soon.

I picked up the ipad version of Pendulo Studios' point-and-click adventure game Yesterday, because I knew it had a strong emphasis on the occult in its plot. That might sound weird, but it intrigued me. I've played a little bit of it so far, and I have been enjoying it. I don't care so much for the puzzle solving bits, which often boil down to experimentation or using the game's hint system, but the story is interesting, and voice acted well enough.

Tonight I jumped on Skype with Lonesteban and we played a few games of Dota 2 and Starcraft II, my very first experience with the latter online. We lost every game, but had a good time doing it. I'd like to get to a point where I am semi-competent at Starcraft; at the very least to my approximate Dota 2 skill level, which is not advanced, but neither that of a complete novice. A great deal of practice will be necessary, but then I'm not in any hurry. The game will be around for a while, I'm sure.

F.A.T.H.E.R., I have returned to Dunwall.

Right around the time I was starting to flag in the Anno 2070 campaign, it wrapped itself up. The rogue AI F.A.T.H.E.R. was destroyed. The ten missions I played through were introducing new gameplay elements right up to the very end, presumably in an effort to teach the player the majority of what they would want to know to take on further challenge missions or to play online with others. Like I've mentioned before, I'll never play the game with others, but I may get back around to it for some of the individual challenge missions and the Deep Ocean expansion campaign. It is a pretty neat game, though a few aspects of how to accomplish this or that task could use a bit more clarity. It's got really haunting, melancholy music, too.

Over the weekend I was sort of clearing my plate for The Knife of Dunwall, the new Dishonored DLC missions where you play as Daud, another character from the main game, another of The Outsider's chosen, and the true assassin of the Empress. Daud is one of Corvo's targets late in the game, though you can choose to let him live, like with all the rest. I killed very few people in my play through of Dishonored, and none purposefully. Playing Daud, though, I am killing everyone. The story seems to set up the possibility for Daud to be redeemed, but that won't happen in my world. No, Daud may offset some of the consequences of his actions in one way or another, but he is still a murderous assassin, and will see a fitting end, I'm sure.

The DLC is three full missions, if I'm not mistaken, which is a fair portion of content when you consider that the main game is only nine--ten, if you are generous. There is supposed to be a further mission set later that should push the total up to 16 or so, main game included. If you never got around to playing Dishonored last year, now would be a great time to go back and get caught up. It was my number 3 game of 2012.

While I was clearing my plate for the Dishonored DLC, I replayed the first hour of BioShock Infinite, played an hour or so of Half-Life 2, which I will at some point actually finish, and played a game or two of Dota, even. On my agenda currently is playing the Knife of Dunwall. After that, I'm not so sure.

I've been reading The Martians, by Kim Stanley Robinson. It is a collection of short stories and companion piece to his Mars trilogy. Some of them seem to exist in a parallel universe where the initial "First 100" colonization mission never occurred, or at least not until much later, and characters on that mission stayed behind on Earth until much later. I just finished a longer story, novella length, called Green Mars (which is also the title of the second book in the trilogy proper), which seems like it might kind of be the centerpiece of the collection. It was the story of an expedition of climbers going up Olympus Mons over a couple of months, and it was pretty great. It makes me want to try rock climbing.

Tears

Read that title any way you like and it'll still be appropriate for Bioshock Infinite. I came away from the game pretty high on it. It is not without flaws or questionable decisions relating to the mechanics or the narrative, but most aspects of Infinite are head and shoulders above what a lot of games possess. I liked it a lot. I'm not sure what else there really is to say about it, other than I really liked Elizabeth as a character, and that people are right when they say that not a lot is ultimately made of the themes that the game seems to so boldly set out to take on near the beginning. Where the Vox Populi and Daisy Fitzroy in particular end up going is kind of mystifying. These are a good sort of criticisms for a game to have, though. Some semblance of an attempt was clearly being made to stretch boundaries, and I will applaud that, at least.

I have been playing more Anno 2070, too. I am nearing the end of the base game's story campaign, but after that there are still a ton of one-off missions to do, an expansion campaign, a free-play mode, and even multiplayer (which I will probably never touch). It's a great game to chill out with.

I've neglected Dota 2 for a few months, being busy and focusing on other strategy-oriented games, but I was able to get in the other night and play a good game as Slardar. There is a new guide system that lets you browse character guides created by the community and bookmark them for use while you play. Suggested skills and items from the guide will be highlighted within the UI while you play, which is a pretty cool feature. I wonder if it won't cement many cookie-cutter builds in the community, though. Regardless, it is handy and anything that can be done to make the game more newb-friendly is probably a good move, overall.

Aww, Come On!

This is just a placeholder, since Google/Blogger has somehow broken their list functionality.

I just wanted to add Proteus to the Pile and Moby Dick and The Last of the Mohicans to the Booklog!

While I'm here, I'll just make a note that I've been playing a lot of Starcraft II, Anno 2070, and Bioshock Infinite, lately.

I ended up doing an Uninstall on Monday Night Combat--wow, I expected more from that game. tsk tsk.

Gravity Bone, the Blendo Games game included with Thirty Flights of Loving, was pretty cool, though. I'd like to play all of the Citizen Abel series that these two are a part of, but I'm not sure if they are all released to the public.

Telegraph Avenue, Anno 2070

I just finished Michael Chabon's novel Telegraph Avenue, an unremarkable book about unremarkable people. The author has a way with words, I'll allow that. He writes some good characters. Otherwise, meh. Not really my kind of thing.

I got Anno 2070 a few days ago on a Steam sale, and I've been enjoying it quite a bit. It's a kind of hybrid city-builder/strategy/simulation game set in a future dystopia where climate change has caused all the icecaps to melt and coastlines have shifted to a degree that the existing nations' borders and agricultural centers no longer apply. I've only been playing the free-play continuous mode, but there are a bunch of discrete missions in there to try, as well, and it has an online-enabled metagame layer to it that is reminiscent of something Blizzard might do with one of their games. It's cool; I plan to delve deeper.

Adrift On A Dead Calm Sea

I've been pretty non-committal since finishing up Brood War. I've been using my precious free time to catch up on a few other things, such as sleep, season 2 of the HBO Game of Thrones adaptation, and even a tiny, tiny bit of reading.

I don't think I've mentioned it yet, but I've been reading a book called Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon. It's well written, but not all that interesting, to be honest. It's not terribly long, though, so I figure I'll finish it in case something crazy happens. I want to get on with reading something cooler. This book is all about normal people and their normal lives--boring. I'm planning to read a book about people living on Mars next--not boring. I even began, Cloud Atlas-style, a nested re-read of an old favorite, James Clavell's Tai-Pan, the story of the swaggering Scotsman and merchant prince Dirk Struan and the founding of Hong Kong. So much for contemporary fiction.

As for what I have been playing, I plowed through some monsters playing my Diablo III barbarian last night. His name is Orda (Khan) and he's just level 15, so far. Oh, while I'm here, I uninstalled Titan Quest again, too. Space constraints on my hard disk being the main reason, but it is kind of funny that I am still here playing Diablo for the Nth time, and I still have never been able to pull myself past the threshold of Act II in Titan Quest.

Dust 514, the free-to-play massively multi-player online first-person shooter (F2PMMOFPS), is now in open beta on PSN (still an odd choice of platform, I think). I decided to check it out, hoping for the best. As of this writing, it is no good. No good at all. I have a list of technical things I think are wrong with it, but I'll focus on the main problem--it is very clearly a second-tier shooter. No one would ever play this over Battlefield if they are at all concerned with how well the game plays. The only reason I can see to have interest in this game is in the theme. You either are interested or in some way already connected with EVE Online, or way into the sci-fi aesthetic and sick of the modern military thing. Which--OK, fair enough. Dust 514 will not hang on to anyone through the fidelity of its play, though. Not without some major changes from Beta to final release.

I picked up Metal Gear Rising, and played it a couple of nights. It's really an uphill battle to get into this kind of game, for me. Not even the Metal Gear-ness of it is compelling me to sit down with it again. I didn't get the parry system during my first session, and kept getting killed by the Blade Wolf miniboss. For my second session, I had been informed how to actually parry, and so was able to kill the thing fairly simply; but I only played another 10 minutes or so after that before having to go to bed. I guess I'll play more, sometime.

With the release of Heart of the Swarm and my finishing Brood War, it was a great time to start Starcraft II. Being a grizzled old hand, I'm playing the Wings of Liberty campaign through on hard. I'm only three missions in thus far--still in the beginning tutorial stages. There are a lot of new units to learn in SCII, and more in the campaign than in the multiplayer modes, I'm told. Old, familiar units even have new capabilities. I barely was able to finish the third mission after two or three failures because I didn't know barracks now have add-ons you have to construct in order to train medics to heal your marines. I didn't find that out until after the mission while I was looking up strategies on how to get the harder achievements for the mission, one of which requires you to venture out and kill 4 of the 8 zerg hatcheries on the map.

There seems to be a lot of cool stuff to dig into in SCII, even just in the single player side of things. I'll eventually dig into multi, too, probably with Heart of the Swarm once I pick that up. For now, it's just on through the campaign, checking out how it's done, now, and seeing the infamously bad writing for myself.

Where It All Began

Prompted by a thread I saw on NeoGAF where people are posting screenshots from the first game they ever played.

This is Hang-On, built into the Sega Master System in the U.S.

Brood War Completed!

Bringing to an end one of the most concentrated gaming efforts of recent memory, I completed Starcraft: Brood War tonight. I've played almost nothing else for the last month or more. It has been an epic struggle to re-familiarize myself with how the game plays and fight an uphill battle against some very challenging missions. Brood War is, after all, the expansion meant to be played after finishing the 30-ish missions of the original Starcraft, which I did--a considerable amount of time in the past. I don't remember the original campaigns being anywhere near as hard as the ones in the expansion.

I consider this one of the great conquests in my gaming career, easily up there in terms of challenge and discipline required to finish Demon's Souls or a Halo game on Legendary, if not quite so hard as some of the more challenging content in FFXI (which owes its difficulty entirely to having to coordinate with other people). Many games feel good to finish; few feel like a real accomplishment.

I'm savoring it.

This also marks my first title knocked off of my priority queue. I'll be moving on to Starcraft II soon (it's installing right now), but with a detour through a few other things, which I'll write about soon.

P.Q.: Broodiest of Wars

I am still working on Starcraft: Brood War. I have played almost nothing but that over the last couple of weeks. What a fantastic game. It's very long, too, and not short on challenge, either. I am currently in the middle of the third mission in the Zerg campaign, the final one in the expansion. This campaign has 10 regular missions and a secret one before the finale that can be accessed if mission 9 is completed under a certain constraint. I hope to see them all. Thus far, I've been able to work through Brood War at the rate of about a mission per day, but they may be getting more difficult; certainly, the one I am on now seems pretty tough.

I am least familiar with playing the Zerg of all three races in Starcraft. They have three or four units that I still don't really understand the function of, but I'm going to need to learn them well, I think, to pull out a victory in some of these missions. I'm much closer to my goal now than I was when I picked up the game again a couple of weeks ago, but there's still a long way to go, and uphill all the way.

Not on the agenda, but partaken of nonetheless, is Dragon Quest IX. My daughter likes to play with my old DS Lite, and up until now I've turned it on and given it to her with New Super Mario Bros. booted up. She can't play it, but she can play with it, and that's enough for her, at the moment; she's more interested in Jetpack Joyride, but that's another discussion. She's also found where I keep my DS games, and over the course of picking them up off the floor a few times, I was lured back into playing one of them--DQIX. I played it for only a couple of hours back when I first got it, but I figured it would be a nice, easy, stress-free way to relax a little in lieu of concentrating and struggling with Starcraft, so I put another hour or so into the game this past Sunday. Maybe I'll keep playing it, here and there.

P.Q.P.Q. (Priority Queue Progress Quest)

I mentioned planning to play Point Lookout for Fallout 3. Well, that's done. I was surprised by how much of a mini-expansion it was compared to the relatively brief quest-line-and-a-couple-of-unique-areas approach the other DLC modules I've played have taken. Point Lookout actually brings a fairly sizeable new geographic area to the game, with several separate quest lines and points of interest to explore. It's also got some wicked hard enemies to fight--or maybe that's just because I'm getting near the level cap of 30, and every new location I go to matches to my level. It was a good amount of content overall; it took me probably 5-6 hours to see and do more or less everything it had to offer. I've still got The Pitt and Mothership Zeta DLC to play, as well as plenty of wandering around the Capital Wasteland to do before I'm done with Fallout 3 for good.

The main thing I've been working on over the last week, aside from a bit of iOS gaming on the short trip I took to my hometown, is Starcraft: Brood War. I checked past entries of this blog, and it's been a solid two years since I began the expansion, and finished the first three missions. Well, as of right now, I'm through the eight missions of the Protoss campaign, and into the third of the Terran. That is easily the most concentrated burst of Starcraft I've ever played, and I think it's finally beginning to click. Odd that it would be halfway into the expansion before that would happen, don't you think? Some 40-ish missions, I'd guess. Well, it is a complex beast, and I can be thick-headed. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself with this burst of progress and enthusiasm, but right now I feel like I could maybe ride this wave all the way through the end of Brood War and into or even through Starcraft II before its expansion Heart of the Swarm appears this March. That would be true craziness, right there.

P.Q.: Dark Souls, Fallout 3 DLC

As promised, I have been working on my priority queue. I included Dark Souls on there more as an afterthought for the time being, but nevertheless I spent a few hours playing it over the past couple of weeks. Previously, playing the PS3 version, I had progressed up to the Capra Demon. Now, on the PC version, I have gotten past him and down into The Depths. This meant playing through the rest of The Undead Parish and defeating the twin gargoyles at the top, which didn't turn out to be too difficult with the help of a summoned NPC to distract them. The next boss, though, the Crapra Demon himself, took quite a bit more effort. I must have tried the fight 10 times before finally slaying the beast and being able to move down into the grim sewer areas that follow. I've made it a good way through them, finding the next bonfire and another door of white mist. That is where I left off, for now.

This weekend I loaded up Fallout 3 again, and polished off the Broken Steel DLC, and played through the Operation Anchorage DLC, as well. Broken Steel was the better of the two, offering some post-game narrative content on the scouring of the Capital Wasteland of the Enclave, along with an interesting choice of whether to rain down missiles on them, or to possibly take out Megaton, the Brotherhood of Steel, Project Purity, or Rivet City, instead. I am a big fan of the Brotherhood in the Fallout world, and less so of The Enclave, so I eliminated them, as a true Paladin of the Wastes would.

Operation Anchorage was, I guess, Bethesda trying to pull of a Call of Duty mission in Fallout 3. It didn't work out all that well, if I'm honest. I felt like I was playing a pretty average PS2 game, the kind entitled something like Conflict: Desert Storm that I used to rent in college. Kind of half-assed. From a world background narrative perspective, it wasn't that interesting, either. The Chinese invaded Alaska for oil, and that presumably sparked the nuclear war that left the world in the state it currently exists in in the Fallout universe. I'm not sure that is new information. In any case, it was a simulation authored by the general in command after the fact, so its veracity is in doubt, anyway.

I guess I'll do Point Lookout next.

A Memory of Light, Wheel of Time Finished

It feels odd to have finished the Wheel of Time. I believe it was Christmas of 1996 when I was given The Eye of the World by an aunt. I was fifteen, and I had always liked reading, and reading fantasy, as a kid, but had kind of fallen out of the habit in favor of playing SNES games and Magic: The Gathering in my free time. At 814 pages in paperback, it was the biggest book I'd ever considered tackling, and half of what made me give it a whirl was just the challenge of seeing if I could finish a book that long. I never imagined it would turn out to be fourteen volumes of a similar size and heft, or that I would read many of them twice or thrice over as the years wore on, in anticipation of the next volume being released.

Well, the final book has finally come and gone. Although--unbelievably--only two years have passed for the series' characters throughout all the tumult their world and their lives seen, it's been sixteen years for me. That is fully half my lifetime thus far. So now, to be done with the story, or at least to know how it all plays out, and to have lost some of those characters I know so well to their ultimate fates, and the rest to the end of the narrative, it just feels weird. Forgive the wordplay, but it's as if I closed the book on one chapter of my life.

The characters and the world of Robert Jordan (and to some extent, Brandon Sanderson's) Wheel of Time are to me what Tolkien's works are to many people, and to the world of fantasy fiction, in general. I read Jordan--extensively--long before I ever picked up The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. Growing up in parallel to, if much faster than, Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egwene, and others always made the series resonate with me more than a lot of fiction, and a small part of me is sad that I'll never get another view into how their world and their lives are coming along.

They say endings are one of the hardest things to do in fiction, and I believe it, having seen so many seem to go up in smoke, even harming for many the quality of the work prior to the ending. I am fairly satisfied with the way The Wheel of Time ended up. With the series having gone on for so long, there was almost no chance of every little matter being wrapped up in a grand and superlative way. I feel like the way it ended was mostly appropriate and fulfilling, even if I have a bone or two to pick here and there. I'm looking forward to the series' capstone encyclopedia which is due out in a couple of years, and in several years, eventually introducing The Eye of the World to my daughter. Maybe she'll enjoy it as much as I have over the years. I wouldn't rule out re-reading the series again for myself at some point, either. It wouldn't be the first time.

A Priority Queue

I have a lot of games that I want to finish; that is a given. There are a small handful that I feel that are a bit more urgent, and that I want to really focus on due to imminent sequels and/or sequel announcements, but also because I feel particularly behind, here. This is what I have been thinking of over the last couple of weeks as my priority queue:

Half-Life 2 and its related games Lost Coast, Episode 1, and Episode 2
Starcraft: Brood War and Starcraft II
Fallout 3 DLC and Fallout: New Vegas
Dark Souls

These are the most pressing, I feel, and followed at a little bit of a distance by the next tier of stuff including Halo 4, Red Dead Redemption, the Company of Heroes games, and others I won't start trying to pick out just yet.

I want to hone in my focus to these games to relatively quickly address each of them. Realistically speaking, I would be happy to polish off each of them by the end of the year; or by the end of summer if I am lucky.

I did just wrap up one loose end, my Inferno difficulty run of Diablo III on my now wizened (level 3 paragon!) wizard. The spirit moved me, though, and I had to create a new character, a barbarian this time, and play just a little bit of his eventual run up to level 60. Of course, I also enjoy a dip into Dota 2 (I've been playing Mirana and Slardar lately) or what have you (SpaceChem), as well, so there will always be more competing for my time.

Paramount among my leisure time activities for the moment, though, is the final volume of the Wheel of Time series, A Memory of Light. I'm about 250/900s of the way in right now, and it's been very action-packed thus far, especially by the standards of this often slow series. There are a thousand and one disparate threads still needing to be woven back together before the ending, so I don't see the pace letting up much. It's a sprint to the finish line, which is nice, because for a while there during the middle of the race it felt like the runner had lain down for a nap. We've long been told that not everything will be wrapped up in a nice, neat little bow at the series' end; I just hope nothing too major is left unexplained. Open-ended is fine, but if we somehow got through the entire series not knowing just what the hell Demandred was up to, that would be quite a disappointment. It's bad enough we never saw more of the world outside of the main kingdoms and the Aiel Waste. I always wanted the story to visit Shara or the Island of the Madmen as shown in the "Big White Book" series encyclopedia released so long ago.