I Need To Focus

The good news is that I finished a game this week. The bad news is that it was just the campaign missions of UniWar. It counts though, because those 21 missions, 7 for each race, probably totalled 5 hours or more of my time! Plus, I've played a crapload of the game in VS. matches.

The other bad news is that I decided EVE just isn't for me, after all. The lack of explicit direction kind of made me down on it, but it was the subscription that killed it outright. Just having that $15 a month hanging over my head when I'm not certain I will even want to log on in a given week is enough to put me off. I want to play the game, or a game like it, but I want to play on my own terms. The subscription might not be a total deal-breaker, (we'll probably see whenever The Old Republic is released), but when you consider it combined with the extreme complexity of EVE, the whole game becomes this huge time investment that I don't want to make.

The other games I've played the most of over the last couple of weeks have been Super Mario Galaxy and Battlefield Bad Company 2. Galaxy continues to wow me with inventive levels, and I continue to rack up points, ranks, and unlocks in BC2. There isn't a lot of else to report, other than that I finally got back into Torment and hope to continue that to it's conclusion soonish.

I've really got to concentrate on finishing one game at a time. I've wondered if I shouldn't just try to play whatever I want whenever I want, but going that route seems to lead to playing a few hours of many different things, and not really getting deep into any of them. I think now I should probably try to concentrate on them like books, to either finish them altogether, or to wring as much as I can out of them before shelving them.

It's an odd fact that a lot of games lend themselves to this approach; many of them can easily be seen as single-hit experiences. It's the rare video game that many players treat like a traditional board-based or pen-and-paper or physical game, as something to come back to and play over and over, at any time, and for the pure enjoyment of the mechanics as opposed to any desire to follow a narrative through to its end.

So, for games that can be finished and don't offer much more than that, then that's what I'll try my best to do (Galaxy, STALKER, Planescape, etc.). For other games that offer more, like multi-player modes or replayability and character growth, I'll dip into them whenever I feel like a little of what they have to offer (Starcraft, BC2, Torchlight, Demon's Souls, etc.). Naturally, there are some games with overlap in both.

On a final note, I reinstalled Starcraft this week and got restarted on the Zerg campaign. I'm going to teach myself how to play well enough to finish all the campaigns, at least. I hope. SCII and the new battle.net look pretty awesome.

The Omnigamer

I have been all over the place in my gaming this week.

To begin with, I closed out March by finishing God of War, bringing my March completion total to 2, after Far Cry 2 on the 1st of the month. It was a good game. I would put it solidly in the B+/A- range if I were a game reviewer, and 5 years on, that's pretty impressive. Like Wolverine, God of War is the best there is at what it does. I'm not going to dive into the sequel(s) just yet, though. I wouldn't want to burn myself out on the formula.

Swept up in the enjoyment of action-y, platform-y gaming, I decided to finally get down to brass tacks with Super Mario Galaxy. I've had my Wii for going on 2 years now, I think, and still hadn't played any more of this game than I could at a GameStop back when it first was released. The sequel being on the horizon helped muster my hype, as well. After a couple of hours and 4-5 levels, I can tell you, it's great! It's Mario, and it's easy to forget how genius Nintendo's design can be when you go so long between playing entries in the series as have I. I put maybe 2 hours each into Mario 64 and Sunshine, so this is the first three-dimensional Mario experience I'm committing myself to, and I dig it. It's hard not to feel like a kid again in these inventive and colorful worlds filled with cute graphics and sounds. I might even be able to get my wife to try this game out.

Between these games and all the others I've dabbled in this week, I've kept up my wargaming, gold-starring my second gun in Bad Company 2 with Emily, and spending a couple of hours playing Battlefield 1943 when the PS3 happened to be turned on on account of a DVD being watched. I also messed around just long enough to make sure I'd seen every map in 1942, though I don't really intend to play it when newer versions are out. I'm going to surf through all the Battlefield Vietnam maps just the same, just to poke around at the series history. On PC, I'll continue to play Day of Defeat, though when I logged on last night I was getting killed almost before I even spawned in. The engine and UI update to that game, along with Steam achievements, do a lot to extend it's life well past its contemporaries. In other Battlefield news, a co-worker lent me Bad Company 1 so I could log a few matches of that to count toward my veteran status in 2, and play through the campaign at some point.

The rest, I fear, are the dregs. These are the games I played some, but not enough to really talk about or to make any significant progress, with perhaps one exception. In Dawn of War II, I played through one mission twice, losing the first time as I tried to recall how to play the game well. I fought my way to the end of one stratum of Torchlight, did a few small tasks that paid in STALKER, and proceeded through a few more tutorial missions in EVE Online. I've spent a good deal of time this week playing UniWar on iphone, though. I'm halfway through all the campaign missions, and I've got probably 20 separate a-synchronous vs. matches going with other players. It's a great hex-based, turn-based, StarCraft-like 3-race strategy game. The unit balance is really well done.

That's about it, for now.

March Game Blitz

It's been a hell of a busy month. First, a Road Map re-vamp:


I've been playing a crapload of Bad Company 2, lately with a friend who I got to buy the game. She's new to it, and hasn't played that many shooters, but she seems like she's having fun when we're in the squad taking out guys together. What a great game; this might be the best multiplayer shooter, or at least on a level with Team Fortress 2.

Playing Bad Company 2 (and it's veteran system) got me really interested in trying out other games in the series (and outside it, even). First, I picked up Day of Deafeat: Source on Steam for 10 bucks. It's a WWII-themed multiplayer shooter on smaller maps, more in the classic form of the genre, but updated with modern UI and achivements and such, being a Valve game. It's fun, and I found a newb-friendly server to play on, too. Next, I was in Best Buy and saw the Battlefield 1942 Complete Collection (all expansions + BF Vietnam) for another 10 bucks, and so I picked that up for the veteran status and to see what the original was like on PC. It's kind of archaic, but definitely functional, and there are plenty of servers still up and going. I only messed around in 3-4 matches so far, but you can see the lineage, especially when you look forward to Battlefield 1943, which I purchased on PSN for $15. This was released only last year, if memory serves, and it's "a re-imagining" of 1942's Pacific theater maps. It's very good, especially for a downloadable title. It runs on the Snowblind Engine, same as Bad Company 2 (and the original). It's got Wake Island, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Coral Sea, which is a planes-only map. I'd recommend it to anyone wanting a quick-access shooter on their box without needing to toss in a disc after they've watched a movie or what have you. I think, along with BC2, this one will have the longest half-life with me, just by virtue of its convenience.

MAG, incidentally, is having a double-XP weekend this week, along with some free DLC. I'd like to check that out after a good week of nothing but Battlefield (as far as shooters).

The rest of my console gaming lately has been playing God of War (the first). It's good! It's not f'ing amazing or anything, but it's plenty fun. It's not been since Ninja Gaiden Black that I played a game in this genre, and that was a while ago, but leaving aside graphics (resolution) I think I like God of War better. I think NGB has the advantage as far as depth of the fighting system, but I'm not one to delve into that stuff. I'm a button masher when it comes to this type of game. I vastly prefer the story and presentation of God of War to Ninja Gaiden's senseless jumble of random anime tropes. It seems like Ninja Gaiden's combat was a lot faster, though. Kratos definitely lumbers at times, and hits with force, whereas Hayabusa is all about speed and precision. I guess both games have their moments.

Repeated issues with my PC led me to wipe it and install Windows 7, along with replacing the GPU and Motherboard (courtesy of Dell), meaning that the last few weeks of PC gaming has been more about re-downloading and re-installing and re-modding than playing very much. Just last night I re-downladed Torchlight, and thanks to the magic of the Steam Cloud, it installed and there was my savegame and all my settings, just waiting for me to jump back into the game. Awesome! I want to finish this one up reasonably soon (and start another playthrough, probably).

I also have really been meaning to get into and play and finish the Dawn of War II campaign, to get some more of the 40K goodness up in this bitch, and to then get the new Chaos Rising expansion and maximize my Space Marine Glorious Brodiosity For Make Benefit Of Glorious Emperor. Since re-installing the game I've just played a few rounds of The Last Stand mode as I mentioned on the podcast.

Having finished up Far Cry 2, I now have a real taste for the open-world shooter. Also possessing three STALKER games, I was debating on which to dive into. I'd started Shadow of Chernobyl (the first) before, but had recently heard that the new one, Call of Pripyat (the third) was definitely the one to play. I tried starting with CoP, but the sense of backstory and availability of kick-ass mods to the original led me back to it, tweaked out with the Complete 2009 mod that makes the UI better, fixes tons of bugs, and just all around makes the game better (and waaaay better looking, too; even better than vanilla CoP). A couple of hours in, STALKER feels like Oblivion with guns (ignore the fact that Fallout 3 has been tagged just that), which to me, is AWESOME.

Last but not least, I let my curiosity get the better of me and resubscribed to EVE Online, creating a new character and starting off a new career as a space explorer. I think I'm supposed to make tons of money charting unknown places and salvaging stuff from them. I managed to piss off the agent giving me my missions, though, and now she's not talking to me. I have no idea what I need to do to get back into her good graces. In the meantime, I'm starting on some of the military training missions in order to be able to defend myself against rats (the npc mobs in the game) and other player-character pirates and such when I'm out in the wilds of the void. What a crazy game. It's very cool and sci-fi-economic-political, but dense doesn't even begin to describe the complexity of EVE. I need a lot more time to acclimate.

As you can see, I've got a lot on my plate right now!

Lust for Power

This is the common theme to the games I've been playing over the past week.

I mentioned a $5 deal on EVE Online last post, and I bit on that one, which includes 30 days of play time. EVE is a giant galactic MMO all on one server, and where players start out as a random spacer and must choose a career path of either industry, business, military, politics, or some melange of all. It's ridiculously deep and amazingly hardcore, but remains fairly accessible and user-friendly through great design and thorough tutorials. It's also a gorgeous game, running at some obscene resolution on my PC, and has a great soundtrack of atmospheric orchestral music.

I began as a Caldari, a member of a super capitalist society controlled by huge mega-corporations that lend it a strong economy and much military might. My character is an Achur, described as "intensely spiritual, the material world holds little interest to the average Achur." Regardless, I've gone through a few tutorial missions, and started down the path to making money through mining and doing missions for agents at various space stations around the galaxy. One of the coolest things about EVE is the skill training queue. Your skills are trained in real time, even when you are offline, so it's possible to queue up skills (as long as they're start time is within the next 24 hours) to begin training even when you are offline. As long as you check in before your queue runs out and can update it, you're constantly making progress.

At some point last week a thought came to me: I should play a Paladin in Diablo II. I went home and started one up, playing on b.net for a couple of nights, and progressing to level 10, but I was haphazard with my stat and skill points, and ended up dissatisfied with my character development. Rather than start over, I've just left him in limbo for now and started a Sorceress, this time doing some research for a nice skill build to adapt and pursue as I level up. She's level 8 or 9 now. I'm going a Frost/Fire route, aiming for Frozen Orb, Fire Ball, and Meteor to be my main spells. I've been dipping my toes into D2 periodically for a while now, but this is the first time in a while I've really wanted to delve deep. This is probably due to WoW scratching that particular itch most of the time. I'll never finish off my Pile of Shame if I keep this up...

On the progress front, I spent almost all day yesterday playing Mass Effect, so that I finished off all of Noveria and Virmire, did the Luna mission, and visited another uncharted world or two. I'm at the point now where Saren's goals have come to light, and the Council is refusing to listen to Shepard about striking him preemptively on the planet Ilos. On Luna, I unlocked a class specialization, so I'm apparently now an Operative, a sub-class of Infiltrator. I've also been a relentless renegade, meting out justice in the most cold and pragmatic way I can manage, wanting to see how hardline cynical and unforgiving Shepard can be. Mass Effect is the first game I've been able to be "evil" in, and it feels good at times. I really enjoyed being able to browbeat Wrex down from the proverbial ledge he was about to jump. A commander has to keep their subordinates in line.