Words Are Wind

Despite my best intentions, I never get around to playing what I think I'll play. Zero minutes of Mass Effect 3 played since last I wrote here. I have dabbled in several things, but committed to nothing. To recount:

Dota 2 - The International 4 happened over the past couple of weeks. I thought I might watch some, and play some, turns out I had only time for one game in either category. I want to play more, because Dota is a ton of fun. It's discouraging, though, to know that I'll never be better than more than about 3 in 10 players. I feel this way about most multi-player games, these days. Kids and the childless and the underemployed have it so nice, with ample time to get good.

Vlad the Impaler - A cool text adventure game with a gothic horror motif, set in Istanbul during the time of Vlad Tepes. It's like someone made this just for me. There are different choices to make in character creation and in your investigations that drive the narrative forward, and different outcomes to the whole thing. It's good.

A.R.E.S. Extinction Agenda - very obviously heavily derivative of Mega Man games, but with some new twists, including analog 360-degree firing and the ability to construct consumables and upgrades from scrap dropped by enemies. It seemed cool if that's the type of thing you were looking for, games which are in short supply in this day and age, and native to the PC. This was part of my knock-em-off-the-backlog initiative.

Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny - I'd played Wolf 3D before, but not a hell of a lot of it. I picked it up the other day in the Quake-Con related Steam sale, along with the expansion and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Boy, are these games tough to return to. Having to hold down a key in order to strafe is a deal-breaker. This and the older Doom games both are better in retrospect than to actually sit down and try to play with a modern control scheme. Unmodded, their mouse implementations are so foreign to modern conventions that it is debilitating. Quake fares much better, with a little tweaking of the options--and Quake is a better game, as well, much as I love the Dooms.

Goat Simulator - I guess we broke this out again, not too long ago. It's fun to fly around with the controllable jetpack mutator installed. I wish there were more areas to the game, but it is just a dumb toy, after all.

Hearthstone - I'm not sure what happened here, but apparently I am back to grinding out daily quests in order to collect more cards to build a good Shaman deck. I think that's my favorite class, for now at least. The Naxxramus expansions comes out today, or the first part of it does, at least. That will be interesting to check out.

Minecraft - Because there's just nothing like it for getting into a world and going exploring. Cube World is cool, too, but I kind of felt more like wandering and less like fighting.

Destiny beta - On the PS3, even. I like it. It's Halo crossed with Diablo but without Borderlands' questionable sensibilities. I wonder how much actual content there is, here. Every mission I've been on save the multi-player modes have been on the same big map. It is fun, though maybe only just engaging enough. How the story stuff plays out and how much of the rest of the solar system we get to see and how varied the play can be with only three character classes and limited amounts of enemies all remains to be seen. I'm keeping my PS3 pre-order, content with how it performs (freely online, I might add), though I am still hoping for a PC version.

Where the Wind Takes Me

I've been kind of flitting from thing to thing for the past three weeks, not really committed to any one game, but dabbling in quite a few, some even for more extended periods.

Super Mario 3D Land saw a few minutes' play, as did my replay of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow on the PC.

I wanted to play a little more Morrowind, but the install was corrupted, so I ditched that once more, and instead started Skyrim. The fifth Elder Scrolls game feels a whole lot like the fourth, but with some quality of life improvements. This is my first time really focusing on a bow-wielding in this series, though, and together with stealth, it's working out pretty well, so far. I would guess Skyrim would see a lot of play time, but to be honest, that is scarce these days, so I'm not too sure about that.

I've spent a little time with Shogun 2, trying to crack that game, somewhat half-heartedly. I've got it in me to give it a few more honest tries, when the wind is right. It was right for Dota 2 last week. I played three or four matches, the first in quite a while. It's still great fun.

I caught a not-so-fresh whiff of Terraria, though. It just strikes me as a flat Minecraft. I don't care for the way it handles, and I feel no motivation to build or explore as a consequence of that. I know it has dissimilarities to Minecraft, but I can't help but feel like I'd rather play the latter, and spend that time in game with a world with more depth, if you will. Rather than play Terraria any more, maybe I'll check out Starbound sometime in the future. The space exploration angle has caught my eye.

The Spelunky daily challenge is still part of my routine, and doesn't show any signs of fading from it. I keep getting further and collecting more treasure; I think I might complete it at some point--through the temple, anyway. Another game I might complete at some point, because it really is very interesting, is Dark Souls. I've gotten back around to my quest there, and made some good progress in the last week or so. Namely, getting through the Depths and the Gaping Dragon, and on into Blighttown, on my way to wherever that second bell is. I doubt I'll be done with this game by the time the sequel is out, but I'm not too concerned with that.

Another very challenging and interesting game I've dipped into is La-Mulana. It's got a fun look and feel, and great music, too. Imagine if the combination of Metroid and Castlevania occurred on the SNES rather than the PSX, and now dress that in an Indiana-Jones-by-way-of-Japan style, that is about what you're looking at with La-Mulana. It is known for difficult bosses and even more difficult puzzles. I'm drawn to explore its ruins some more.

It would be remiss for me to not mention The Banner Saga here. I'm a few hours in, and have been really very impressed with all aspects of the game. It's a war story set in a frozen Nordic fantasy land where you play the leaders of two refugee caravans traveling the land in search of safety and salvation, and it's very well done. It makes an interesting companion piece to games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre. It shares many themes and motifs with those, though the execution is quite different.

On the book front, I'm about 365 pages into Red Storm Rising now; still under the half-way point, but it's pretty good, so far. It's wild seeing a presumably realistic take on how World War III might have played out in the mid-eighties.

Vitalogy

I got rid of my Xbox 360, as I talked about doing before, and used the credit from trading it and all the games in to get a Vita! Why? Why not! It's a semi-viable platform these days. It's perfectly good for playing classic PSX games and the few really stand-out PSP games. I spent a lot of this past weekend with it, playing a little bit of Assassin's Creed III: Liberation, but mostly having fun revisiting Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Metal Gear Solid, and Vagrant Story, while also checking out Killzone: Liberation, which I had never played on the PSP but did own, and digging back into my Tactics Ogre game, which looks and plays great, as one might expect.

Tactics Ogre is hard and deep and very involved, and I am lost somewhere in the middle with a cadre of fighters whose equipment and abilities have been badly mismanaged to this point. My kunoichi are garbage against most enemies, and I don't know why. I'm thinking it may be due to using the wrong slash/blunt/pierce affinity, but that doesn't explain why their ninjutsu also sucks. I'll have to work it out; I really like this game and want to finish it--multiple times, to see all the various branching stories and whatnot.

Diablo III has had an expansion announced, and I want to get my barbarian up to level 60 and through Inferno before that comes out. I don't think there is a date yet, and I am sure I have plenty of time, but I've gone ahead and gotten back into playing some over the last few days, advancing from level 23 to 26, from toward the end of Act II normal to the beginning of Act III. I also had my third ever legendary item drop yesterday, and what's more, it was even an upgrade! It was a belt that I doubt I will replace anytime soon. I like to play drops-only, at least until Inferno. Once there, things may get a little tougher--at launch, Inferno was insanely out of balance. After several patches, though, I anticipate a smoother difficulty curve, especially since drop rates have been drastically improved during the same time.

In other leisure time, I finished up Dishonored's The Brigmore Witches DLC, and uninstalled it. I love the game, but I need to play other stuff when I want that sort of experience. I have some Deus Ex and Thief and System Shock things to get to, as well. I also touched on Neverwinter; I need to sock away some more time for that; its decently entertaining. I even got in a couple of matches of Dota 2 with a friend/podcast listener. Fun times, all around.

Where Am I Going To Find The Time?

That is the question, these days. I have a hundred things vying for my free time, and it's harder than ever to find. Longtime readers will know that I spend an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to prioritize how I spend my leisure time. I almost don't even have time for that anymore!

Not to worry, though, I keep buying games. Relentlessly. Why, just today I bought about 8 EA games through the Humble Bundle. When will I play these? How long do I have left on this Earth?

Well, I have been playing a few things. The final Dishonored DLC, The Brigmore Witches, is out, and brings to a close Daud's campaign. I'm through the first level of that, another fine Dishonored stage. What a great game. I can't wait for a potential sequel, and I hope they expand more on the world they've just started to reveal in this game.

For some reason I've been playing Civ V recently, as well. I'm not sure what really brought it on, but I played to the bitter end a doomed Russian empire as Catherine the Great, ultimately falling broken, but unbent, to Augustus Caesar's aggressions. Now I've started up a large scale game as Attilla the Hun, where if things work out, I'll be doing the aggressing.

I've also begun playing an MMO. A free-to-play one, actually--Neverwinter, set in the popular Dungeons and Dragons world. Apparently the city of Baldur's Gate is in that world. Apparently Baldur's Gate is a city. Who knew. Anyway, it has many of the usual post-WoW and contempo-F2P traits you would expect in such a thing, but where it begins to deviate, in my limited MMO experience, is in the combat system, which is very timing-based, and does not use an auto-attack system. It seems pretty cool, so far, after maybe 5 hours, max. I had heard it was fun, and was interested, but what put me over the edge was hearing from a friend who was playing it, and asked me to join up so we could play together. Where am I going to find the time?

This past weekend was the culmination of The International 3, the Dota 2 tournament to end all tournaments. I haven't played in a while, but watching the best teams in the world slug it out was really something to behold. The grand finals went the full five games this time, and they were each incredible to watch. Alliance and Na'Vi were neck and neck much of the time; there were some real nail-biters in there, and game 5 was unforgettable.

So, there you have it. Now to play a game for a bit.

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.

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.

The Raven Of Dunwall

I had just begun playing Dishonored when I blogged last. I have finished it now, playing stealthily all the way through, and only purposefully killing four guards in the prison escape. One other unknown person somehow died in the first real mission, completely unknown to me until the mission summary card. I loved Dishonored. I had a great time playing through it--a  24+ hour long journey full of many quickloads and much tinkering and exploring of the available scenarios and pathways. I can't really imagine playing it any other way. I practically never used many of the weapons and powers available to Corvo, but I still feel like I had a very satisfying time with it. I spent much of it Blinking around rooftops of the plagued city, which I'm told is rendered in an Edwardian fashion, sneaking up on guards and leaving them unconscious and stashed in dark corners. If I some day do a replay, maybe I'll try another approach. I do highly recommend the game, at whatever price you're willing to pay for a very-well-executed immersive sim (the label I've see applied to Deus-esques, as I term them).

Otherwise, I've just been playing a smattering of several things: continuing my campaign in X-Com (classic, still), which I've decided to take an Ironman approach to; playing a few random matches of Dota 2, trying to pick back up my game of Half-Life 2 (same art director as Dishonored), and trying to gain some experience with and within The Temple of Elemental Evil.

I've been busy and doing some more reading over the last several days. I'm working on Cloud Atlas at the moment, which strikes me as surprisingly complex and fantastical for something I assumed to be mainstream. Is it, though?

The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions

I bought both Dishonored and XCOM: Enemy Unknown this week, fully intending to play both. So far, I've only had time to play Dishonored. Hell, the new Walking Dead Episode 4 was out last night, but I went ahead and played Dishonored more because I knew I only had a couple of hours and didn't think I'd get through that in one go. The Walking Dead will probably be on tonight's docket.

Dishonored is great. It's very much like Deus Ex, thus far, with a Bioshock-ian clearly vision-inspired world and cohesion of art and atmosphere. It has other similarities to Bioshock 2, in particular, in its supernatural abilities, the way those abilities scale, and its dual-wield-by-default setup. It's great fun, and like the games I've compared it to, it lends itself to experimentation and playing with its systems. It looks great, too, in terms of both graphical quality and art direction. The characters are dressed quite snappily, too, I might add. I wonder if the developer might do more in this universe, because it seems very well realized and fleshed-out for what I'm guessing is a game of maybe 12 to 15 discrete levels around one city. I've seen big maps of the seas of the world with archipelagos and such that leads me to believe there is a much larger world outside of the city of Dunwall. I'm about 5 hours into the game, taking my sweet time. I'm only on the first assassination mission, so far.

Last week, something possessed me, and I plowed through the brunt of Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising, right through to the end. It was more good fun in the vein of the base game, with a twist in squads being able to be corrupted by Chaos, and the addition of wargear tailored for units on either end of the Purity/Corruption spectrum. By the end of the game, you will lose one of your valued squadmates, whom you've brought up with you through two full campaigns to that point, and that kind of hurts, but altogether the story puts a nice cap on this little saga. Retribution, the next expansion, takes up the Space Marines' story some years later, with a few new faces, and some old ones having moved on, apparently.

I've begun playing Retribution, as well, but only The Last Stand mode, for now. I just finished the book Know No Fear, about the Ultramarines being ambushed by the traitor Word Bearers legion at the beginning of the Horus Heresy, and so I felt like suiting up in blue and gold and spilling some blood in the name of the Emperor. The Last Stand is a suitable stand in for a match of Dota when I don't feel like trying too hard or only have 15 or 20 minutes to kill, plus it has persistent unlocks, which are always fun.

On the subject of space marines, I also took a brief look back into Space Marine, specifically the multiplayer, and was surprised to see people playing it. It probably helps that there was a big THQ sale on Steam this past weekend. I may hop back in that from time to time, as well. We're not likely to see another good game like it (or a sequel) anytime soon.

I played a good bit of X-Com: UFO Defense (the classic game) over the last week or two, as well. I've finally gotten a handle on the tactical interface and overall movement of the game. I feel like I now know how to play, and the next step is just getting good at it. Surprisingly, I don't think the new game is going to make obsolete the old one. Sure, there are a lot of similarities in the two, but I think the classic one remains distinctively different; enough to make sure I'll keep it around for a good while longer. I'd love to eventually beat it, one of these days.

Lastly, I played a few more minutes (a few more stages) of Dustforce, though there's not much to say about it. It's a difficult platformer, but still nice to play. And of course, I was able to get in a couple of matches of Dota 2, busy as I have been. It's becoming a perennial favorite, even if I do not focus a lot on it some weeks.

Slower Than Light

Since the last post, I've been playing:

MGS: PW - no real update
Diablo II - no real update
The Walking Dead ep.3 - good, but went on a little too long
Dota 2 - been random-ing at hero select lately, it's been fun
FTL - awesome space captain roguelike, playing on easy; it's still hard
Darksiders - made a tiny bit of progress, got Ruin, War's horse
Dustforce - skill-based 2D platforming, nice game
The Temple of Elemental Evil w/ Circle of Eight (Desura) - complex, intimidating
X-Com: UFO Defense - complex, intimidating; ancient, clunky UI
Torchlight II - like the first but more, better; playing an Engineer

I need to make another road map or game plan (haha) some sort. I have, and am in the middle of way too many RPGs, in particular. I keep getting into new games and others that I still mean to finish (say Fallout 3) keep getting pushed further and further back in the queue. I really am going to need to crank through to the end of a game or two to finish out this Fall's big games. I'd like to pick up Assassin's Creed 3, Halo 4, Dishonored, and maybe Darksiders II or something else, but as it stands now, I can only buy one more game before I finish something!

Of the games listed above, I could probably power through Lord of Destruction for Diablo II, I might get lucky and beat FTL on easy, and Darksiders could probably be polished off without too much trouble if I put in a concerted effort. Torchlight II is just a matter of time, but it may be quite a bit of time. Beyond that, I'd probably have to dig deeper into the stuff I am in the middle of, and pull out something like Half-Life 2 or Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising or one of any number of other things I have going.

Progress on the backlog has been really slow lately, partly due to being a dad and being busy, but also choosing to spend my more limited time on longer (or endless) games, and other pursuits such as getting in some physical activity, reading, and sleeping on occasion.

Maybe I'll choose something and do an Uninstall this week. It is always nice to knock something off the pile, one way or another.

Uninstall: Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising

This week I decided to finally shit or get off the pot, as they say, with Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. I bought the game two or more years ago on sale for $7.50 on Steam, and it had been sitting there installed ever since. Turns out is a fairly hardcore military game that edges more toward the simulation side of things than the all out bombast of a Call of Duty game. It wasn't bad, just a little slow and deliberate, with a lot of bland open terrain between objectives. I completed the first mission of the campaign, achieving all objectives, and would probably play more given a surplus of free time or some interest in playing virtual soldier. I can't lay claim to either of those at the moment, though, and so I had to uninstall.

It's a Sunday afternoon as I write this, and I've just finished up Diablo II with my barbarian. That was fun. I made a small foray into the expansion fifth act, but I'm not sure whether I'll complete that. I need to get back into D3 and earn some money and paragon levels while I finish up Inferno with my wizard there.

I loaded up MGS Peace Walker HD this week to get back around to doing some of the story-related post-game content present there. I'm going back and re-watching all of the cut-scenes, as well. I am a sucker for Metal Gear, indeed. I wonder when in 201X the newly-announced Ground Zeroes will release. Could it come as early as 2013? I think that would be wise if they want to be able to sell a good number of copies on the 360 and PS3. There is speculation we may see a PC release as well, which would be interesting.

A good friend recommended that I check out a game called Don't Starve, which is currently in beta, and available through the Chrome application store. It's a survival game in the Minecraft sense, where you are dropped into a world and have to make do with raw materials that you find around the world. It's a 2D isometric game, though, with an interesting Edward Gorey-like art style that you might call Gothic, though I'm not certain the label applies, personally. It didn't do anything for me. In practice it felt more like proceeding onto the next thing like you do in a facebook game than having fun. It's a game of "Here's a list of shopping items you need to survive, now go find them within this time limit."

And finally, of course, I've been playing a lot of Dota 2. I'm into playing a hard, carry-type hero, and my current pick is Slardar. I've had mixed results, to be honest. I've had some just downright terrible games, and then I've had some of the best I've ever played within a couple of days. Dota is a game of extremes, to be sure.

Uninstall: NightSky

I've been out of town for the last 10 days, but before I left Oregon, I did manage to do an uninstall for Call Of Podcast on the game NightSky. It feels good to check out an indie game that's been on my backlog for who knows how long. NightSky is a physics puzzle game featuring a ball in silouhette. You use the left and right arrow keys to spin the ball clockwise and counter-clockwise (which rolls the ball of course, but has other applications, as well). There are eight or ten worlds each consisting of eight or ten short stages--most seemed to be exactly three screens long. I'm sure your well-versed gamer mind can fill in the details. It's a nice looking game, has relaxing music, and the puzzles are neither too brain-dead easy nor overly exacting in terms of required technique. There are even secret exits to discover, and a few bonus stages to tackle. I give it 2 out of 2 balls in silouhette.

To further catch this blog up to the point when I left on this business trip, I ran through the next little section of Darksiders leading into the 2nd big dungeon. I'm on my way to meet someone... Uriel, their name might be. No, wait, Uriel Septim is a character from Oblivion. This person, they do have a name. I assure you.

I also finished up my 20 matches of Dota 2 playing Faceless Void. I saw Gabe Newell on a video saying that (Dota honcho) Icefrog advised him to randomly select his heroes until he became good at the game. I'm not sure if that is the approach for me--but then, I'm not sure it's not. However, I do feel like my pick a hero, play 20 matches method has been effective so far. I'm through Windrunner, Bounty Hunter, Omniknight, Silencer, and Faceless Void, now. I'm still thinking I want a hard carry next. Void is a carry, but he can be pretty fragile. I want a big slab of hard-hitting meat, but I'm not sure who fits that bill the best in Dota 2. I'd like to try Chen or Visage, maybe, but I'm not sure I'm ready for sub-units and ctrl-groups in Dota. The 2012 International is happening this weekend, and I want to watch a bunch of that, so maybe that will help me decide on a hero to learn next.

I'll bet you can't guess what game I've been playing in my hotel room here in Arkansas. Oh, you got it. That's right, the O.G., the recently retired, the reknown, Diablo II. With a "II." I just can't seem to get enough of the loot pinata, slot-machine effect. Well, and I'd never played a few of the classes available in that game, and had only completed it a single time as an Assassin. Knowing how finicky D2 is about skill point allocation, I looked up a build for a Barbarian, and have been busy over the last week and a half filling it out in-game. It revolves mostly around the Double Swing and Frenzy skills, basically just attacking so quickly and so heavily that enemies are effectively stun-locked when they are able to survive past the first couple of hits. It's fun. I've just finished up Act III on Normal. I've had three set items drop to this point, and one of them, a breastplate, I'm actually wearing. I've been playing offline, not that it really matters. I don't really plan on doing anymore than finishing Act IV, maybe the expansion act, and then just leaving the character to rot on this computer for any future trips out of town. After all, patch 1.0.4 for D3 came out just after I left town, and there's more I need to delve into, there.

Uninstall: Moon Base Alpha

Wow, has it been over two weeks, already?

I haven't been playing much of anything new. I did an Uninstall for Call Of Podcast on Moon Base Alpha, the free NASA-affiliated game about repairing broken parts of a moon base in Shackelton Crater in the year 2035 or so. It was alright, for a free edutainment type of thing from the people behind America's Army. I am a big space enthusiast, so that was fun. I think Shattered Horizon was better, though. Moon Base Alpha is all about tedium, though there is that sense of satisfaction of mastering a routine through optimization of technique and efficiency.

I've played a bit more Darksiders since my last post, but still not enough to really go at length. Diablo III and Dota 2 have been getting a good amount of attention, of course. I finally managed to kill Belial and get to Act III of Inferno. I'm taking a break now until I come back from a business trip and the next patch is live, though. In Dota, I've been playing Faceless Void and having a blast playing a carry. Dota is so good. I've never enjoyed a competitive multi-player game as much as I do it.

Oh, I forgot about CS: GO. I did play some more of that, as well, and it's good fun. I like the Arms Race mode, known as GunGame in CS: Source.

Uninstall: Bit.Trip Runner

I have too many other games of this sort that I like better. That's it, in a nutshell.

It's been a while since I blogged, and there are a few reasons for that. General business, a move and visit from family, balls-to-the-wall swampedness at work, and Diablo III. Among other games.

I've played quite a few things lately. Thirty Flights of Loving, the game attached to the Idle Thumbs kickstarter, episodes one and two of The Walking Dead, Darksiders, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a little bit of Crusader Kings II and Civ V, and even a couple of things on the ipad. Plus a good amount of both Dota 2 and Diablo III.

I'd love to go into detail about each, and I might at some point, but I can't right now. I just didn't want to let this blog go to seed any further, and I have a trip lined up for the rest of this week, so it seemed like now would be the right time for a quick status update.

I will say that I finished off 20 matches of Dota as Silencer, and I'm thinking of trying a carry next, maybe Faceless Void. I got a nice weapon upgrade in Diablo for a pittance on the auction house that might carry me through Belial, or at least help out with farming act II. I've only played a couple of hours of Darksiders, but so far so good. I'm kind of excited about the sequel to that. The Walking Dead is pretty good, CS: GO seems to me (total CS neophyte) to be a streamlined and modernized update to that game, and CK II is going to need to be revisited at some point. Maybe with that Westeros mod.

Uninstall: Bloody Meat Cube Edition

This time around it's Super Meat Boy! It's a fine game; don't misunderstand me. I made it through the first world and a little bit more in the next and in the dark world--probably 25 stages all in all. The problem is that it's just not my bailiwick. There's not much of a hook for me right now, and as blisteringly difficult as the game is, I think a hook is required. So, as little storage space as was freed by doing so, I proceeded to uninstall.

Elsewise, I've been playing more Dota 2 and Diablo 3, of course. I've been playing Silencer lately in Dota. I'm having trouble getting last hits with him, though. I'm not sure if it's just that his attack animation is slow, or whether my lane partner is just quicker, or if I just have bad timing altogether. Fortunately, he can be built in manner that he can still provide support to the team for relatively little gold. I'd prefer to get more gold farm in on him, though, and build more like a semi-carry. It'll take more practice.

Diablo update: I'm farming Act I of Inferno, both for upgrades for myself, and for things to sell on the auction house. Auctions seem to have almost ground to a halt; I'm barely able to sell anything, and when I do it's for peanuts. Perhaps my bar for auctionability is set low. I did find two solid upgrades in the waist and chest slots for my wizard the other night, though, and both in the same session. Repair costs since the last patch are brutal, and eat heavily into anything gained on farming runs. Blizzard says they're going to back off wear and tear costs if not death costs, so hopefully the situation will improve.

What E3?

Essentially nothing has changed about my short-term outlook on video games as a result of E3 2012. It may as well not have even happened. All three platform holders's conferences were a bust for anything I care about. The list I made in the last post can stay as is.

Let's put that worthlessness behind us. I've been playing a whole lot of Diablo III over the last few weeks, and I'm currently half an experience bar away from level 60 on my wizard, and a mere act and a half away from Inferno. The real money auction house went up yesterday; and my first round of auctions is ticking down to rejection right now. I'd be overjoyed if any of them sold, but being that they're all middle-of-the-road items in every sense, I'm doubting there's much interest. Additionally, prices are still settling into some sort of readability, so it's entirely possible that pricing I made yesterday afternoon looks astronomically out of whack today. If all goes well, I should hit 60 tonight. I hesitate to guess when I'll hit Inferno, though. I think I may run into a gear check before then. We'll see, though. I believe I'm pretty well kitted out for the time being.

I've also made some time to play Dota, as well. I finished up my 20 game self-imposed trial period learning Omniknight, and I'm trying to decide on my next hero. So far I've done Windrunner and Bounty Hunter in addition to Omni. The first two are lane pusher/ganker types while the latter is support, so I guess I should probably try a carry of some sort, next.

I need to get around to something else once I hit a comfortable farming pattern in Diablo. I plan to balance that with regular Dota and a third pillar, which ideally would be a game I could progress through to the end. I might not stress too much about finding one until our upcoming move is done with, though. We're moving out of our one-bedroom apartment into a bigger two-bedroom townhouse. Maybe I'll get lucky and the commute will turn out to be a bit shorter!

Grimrocking The Lanes

For the last couple of weeks, I've only been playing two games: Dota 2 and Legend of Grimrock.

I've got over 50 hours in Dota 2 at this point, and I'm still having a blast. I think this is the first multiplayer game to really click with me to this degree, save something like FFXI or WoW, I guess. It's looking so far like this will be a year of Dota and Diablo. I've played 20 matches each with Windrunner and Bounty Hunter, and I'm trying a few other heroes for the time being. Omniknight may be the next I focus on for a while.

The design of Dota is genius. It's symmetrical in some ways (map layout), and less so in others (team makeup), and is in many ways a zero-sum game, meaning that whatever advantages you take the other team are deprived of, and vice versa.  The game is as much about denying your opposition the resources of experience and gold, and through them, morale, as it is accruing those things for yourself. It's simple on the surface, but with a great and unseen depth of strategies and mechanics below. All these things make it less than beginner-friendly, but if you are interested enough to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and learn the game, the reward is an amazingly fun and interesting game, even after the hundredth or thousandth match on the same map. I think of it as more like a board game in that respect. Chess, Checkers, Igo, Shogi; none of these games suffer from lack of variety in settings. Besides, Dota has somewhere around a hundred characters to choose from. That alone is likely more variety than I'll ever need.

Legend of Grimrock is something I've been looking forward to since first reading about it last year sometime (if memory serves). It's a very old-school first-person dungeon crawl, much like Eye of the Beholder or Etrian Odyssey, both of which I enjoyed, and Dungeon Master, which I only heard about recently in articles relating to Grimrock. I couldn't really tell you why I was so excited for the game, except that I like role-playing game mechanics, simple, straight-forward designs, and exploratory environmental puzzles often found in large temples or dungeons. Also, the game looks gorgeous, if the amount of art is limited.

I never got far at all into Eye of the Beholder, and though I finished Etrian Odyssey, that game featured an entirely different battle system to what seems to be the norm in this genre, so I can't really point to nostalgia, exactly, for my interest in Grimrock, but perhaps rather an appreciation for it's aforementioned old-school sensibilities is what attracted me. Regardless, I am having a ball making my way through the dungeon of Mount Grimrock. Hidden switches, floor panel switches, trapdoors, and teleports are just a few of the elements used in the puzzles in this game, and many of them are optional, hiding a secret piece of equipment or cache of consumables rather than something critical to advancement through the dungeon. That only makes them all the more devious and alluring in their design.

It's a real pleasure to play Legend of Grimrock, but I'm afraid it is probably an acquired taste, and one unpalatable to many of today's gamers. But then, it's a DD-exclusive game for the PC, so someone merely being aware of its existence is already halfway to the point of being receptive to it's charms, I reckon. I was up entirely too late last night playing this game.

Trine to Make Some Headway

The game I'm trying to polish off most actively at the moment is Trine. I have to mention up front that it's a real bummer you can't walk away from the game at a checkpoint mid-level and have it save your progress. You have to begin again at the beginning of a level every time you play. I don't quite get why this is the case. It's not that the levels are too long, it's just a bit of an oversight.

Aside from that little business, Trine is a great game. It's got nice and inventive platform levels based around a solid physics engine and the various abilities of your three-fold player character. The graphics are beautiful, and the art is colorful and attractive, if full of unimaginative stock fantasy trappings. The platforming is more in the realm of action-based than puzzle-based, and largely dependent on your gaming the physics system--which can be a little fiddly--but that is part of the fun. I'm given to understand that people have been able to play all the way through the game with each of the three player character aspects and only that aspect (wizard, thief, knight), but for me half of the fun is rotating between the three to find the most efficient or feels-like-cheating way to advance. I'm just to the start of the 14th of 15 levels, so I'm pretty near the end. I've heard that the last level is nightmarishly hard, but then I've also heard that it was patched at a later date to be more reasonable. I'll cross that chasm when I come to it. Maybe it will involve swapping to the wizard to place a floating platform in the air, and then swapping to the thief to grapple onto the platform and swing over to the other side.

I have to admit that I almost picked up Trine 2 when it was on sale for $7.50 this past weekend on Steam, but I'm trying to stick to a policy of not buying a game unless I am ready to play it right then and there. As you can see, my backlog needs trimming. Great trimming. Plus, after I finish Trine, there is a bonus DLC level I'll need to play through before I can even contemplate playing the sequel, which will without a doubt be available for $5 or less before I run out of other games to play.

I guess my second-place focus game of the recent days has been Freespace 2, though I haven't played it in a week or so. I'm up to the 6th or 7th mission, about half way through the first of three acts to the game. It's cool, so far. I do kind of miss the open and independent nature of an X series game, but this is a completely different animal. It's Ace Combat in space. Space Combat. It's got a pretty involved storyline, too, so I should probably pay more attention and focus a little more on it at some point.

For the rest of the time I've been gaming lately, it's been all multiplayer stuff: TF2 just for shits and giggles (what a great game), Tribes: Ascend to continue to see what it's all about (I'm kind of into it, kind of lukewarm on it, thus far), and a whole hell of a lot of Dota 2.

I'm at 42 hours of Dota played now, according to Steam. I've been trying to learn to play Bounty Hunter, who works much better as a ganker than a lane pusher/farmer, as I've been discovering. I had one of the most demoralizing games I've ever had 2 nights ago, but I checked out a couple of video guides to the hero and turned in a pretty decent performance in a game last night, though we still lost to a team with a well-fed Lycanthrope. It's still a lot of fun, even losing, as long as you feel like you have a handle on the action and strategy. I think that, like anything worth doing, playing Dota is worth learning properly, though it takes effort and perseverance, and a willingness to accept defeat and learn from it.

A Caped Crusader's Space G.E.D.

I finally beat another game! It's felt like an eternity since Max Payne, but I guess it wasn't really that long ago; it was only about a month, which hasn't been that long if you consider how busy I've been. Yes, it was Batman: Arkham Asylum that I took down the other night. If you just total up the time I spent in-game (not the time it was paused while I did something else), I probably spent around 12-14 hours on it. It was good fun; it's about as great a game as you could ever hope for given the long and storied history of licensed franchises. That's not fair; it's actually much better than said history would allow you to hope for.

While I recognize it as being an extraordinary example of both an action/adventure game and one based on another property; I want to mention that as good as the game was, it never really hooked me. I could have quit at any time and never come back. I made myself play through to the end. I don't think this is any fault of the game's. I think that it's just my lack of interest in this type of game. I like Batman as much as the next guy, but I think that's part of the problem--the next guy also isn't a huge fan, but maybe goes to see every entry in the Nolan-directed movie series. I think being a more interested fan of Batman would have pushed me over the edge. Certainly if a game of the same caliber but skinned as Warhammer 40K or, I don't know, Wheel of Time   came out, I would be over the moon for it. As Batman, or some wholly original IP? It's merely a great game that I feel a little clinical detachment from.

I am completely attached to Dota 2, on the other hand. It puts me into a certain headspace where I fully engage with the give and take of the game, how the power-defining economies of experience and gold are developing, how the lay of the map is changing with falling towers and roving player characters, and how my own character development is proceeding--how my farm is coming along, you might say. I should find another character I like as much as Windrunner, in case someone else ever picks her before I can, and so that I don't go so far down one playstyle that I can't acclimate to another. This game is good. How good? So good. I can't wait to see what Valve have in store for it as it is released and matures. Their track record with for extended support is great, with games like TF2 and the L4D series receiving tons of content updates. Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat even get the occasional balance patch, if I'm not mistaken.

Dota 2 is coming along as a player in e-sports, as well, with large tournaments being held for large cash prizes. Spectating matches is a major part of being involved very deeply with a game like this or Starcraft, and that functionality is built right into the game client. I've watched a few matches there, but I prefer to tune into a shoutcasted match online if I'm going to spectate. I like to know what's going on and why players do the things they do, since I'm still fairly green.

Freespace 2 is a lot of spacey, dog-fighty, fun, especially with the nice PC flight stick I bought. While a great deal more complicated than Colony Wars, it's pretty similar in that it's a bunch of scripted missions more like Call of Duty to the X series' S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. I'm still digging into it, but so far it's a lot of fun. I have to admit that the stick really does a lot to improve the feel of the game versus playing with a mouse or just the keyboard.

I got one of those new iPads, the third iteration of them, if you're counting. I'm not buying any media this March in protest of "Big Content" and their shenanigans, but I did have some free app codes from the little cards they give you at Starbucks. I was able to download Bejeweled (3?) and Tetris, which are fun, of course, as well as a few other free to play games I haven't tried yet. I'll have to check some of those out this weekend, I guess, and maybe do a little roundup post.