Dungeon Runnin'

Ever buy a game and then, for whatever reason, have it sit and gather dust for a decade without really sinking your teeth into it? That's what happened with my copy of Diablo. I bought it around the time it came out in '97 or '98 based on the demo, and for the life of me I can't recall ever getting much farther than the Butcher, and I have no clue why I never played it much. I mean, I played through all of FFVIII and X in the intervening years. I could have better spent those 150 hours or so on it! Hell, I even played through Xenogears twice (and don't regret that quite so much).

It's not like I don't like hack 'n' slash loot games; I adored Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath for PS2. Just, for some weird reason, I never got around to giving Diablo it's due. Maybe I just gravitate toward a joypad more than mouse and keyboard.

Well, better late than never. I've had my Diablo disc floating around, and I wanted to play it a few months ago, but couldn't install it on my Mac. Then, with the D3 announcement recently, it occurred to me that my wife's computer, slow and lame as it is, does run XP, and is only around half the age of Diablo, and thus should be able to run it well. And it does. It runs it "windowed" in thick black borders due to the game's low resolution, but there's nothing at all hindering play.

I created a warrior, who is now up to level 6, and I've killed the Butcher again and am about to start level 3 of the dungeon. I'd like to finish the game this time, and then later get D2. Incidentally, this and Etrian Odyssey makes two games I'm playing concurrently that center around massive dungeons.

Reducing the Pile

At long last, I completed Etrian Odyssey. This is my first DS game actually finished. Completed, in this case, is only a technicality, since the main game and it's narrative end with the boss at the end of the 25th floor. As I've mentioned before, there are still 5 more floors left to map with the difficulty level ratcheted up a few notches. I want to see through the mapping at least; we'll just have to see about the bonus bosses. This game has been quite long and satisfying enough without having to grind, grind, grind, to reset and refine your characters' skill point allocations. That said, my party is very well-rounded, and took down the 'last boss' at level 61 all around with no trouble at all. I could probably handle whatever the 6th stratum has in store.

In another effort to down the Pile, I've picked up Shadow of the Colossus, concurrent with the same effort by the guys on the new 1UP FM podcast I picked up. This game is incredible. I've taken down 7 of the colossi so far, and each battle has been absolutely epic. In all my years of gaming, I've never seen anything like this. The colossi are enormous, and their efforts to shake you off as you scale their giant bodies looking for their Achilles' heel have you with a death-grip on your controller, thanks to the clever decision to have the 'hold on' button set to R1. I kind of wish I had a Dual Shock 3 to see how much rumble would add to the experience. The flying and swimming colossi battles I've seen so far were just awesome.

An interesting contrast to the battles is the world itself, which is the definition of tranquil natural beauty. You have all manner of terrain with expansive vistas and soft ambient lighting that makes it seem like there's a light mist over the land. There's hardly anything at all happening here outside the passage of time; water flows, birds fly, lizards crawl, and cyclopean golems slumber.

I tracked down a near-mint copy of MGS3: Subsistence, and spent a couple of hours last night playing the original 1987 Metal Gear for MSX2. It's cool. It's pretty hard, though; it really takes patience, because Snake hasn't learned to move in more than 4 directions yet, and his bullets only travel about 20 feet before disappearing into thin air. Thankfully, there is a save game feature in the emulated ROM for PS2. I want to get through both this and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.

Guns of the Patriots

Today being the release date of Metal Gear Solid 4, I got my stuff done at work and took off an hour early to give myself some quality time with the game this evening. I purchased the limited edition at (sigh) EB/GameStop. First impressions: wow!

I've spent about four and a half hours with the game so far, between the attract mode (the PMC advertisments), virtual weapons range and mission briefing, and the main game. First off, the controls have been improved tremendously, though taking cover on walls and shifting between standing, crouching, and prone remain kind of clunky. Camo is much improved over MGS3. I got a kick out of Snake's Ipod, and the new Drebin weapon upgrade system looks like it's going to be pretty deep. I chose to play through my first time on the 2nd of the 4 difficulty levels offered.

Prior to today, I'd been concentrating my efforts on Etrian Odyssey, and will continue to do so on days I take public transport to and from work. I've made it down to B22F as of this writing, and it was awesome to get down into the fifth stratum and uncover more of the truth about the labyrinth. It was a pleasant surprise to make it down there without having the secret spoiled to me beforehand (though I had my suspicions). Though B25F is where the main game ends, there is actually a sixth stratum that goes down to a 30th floor with extra hard bosses and such. I wonder what its motif might be...

18 Floors Down the Yggdrasil Labyrinth

Since my last update, I've been playing Etrian Odyssey almost exclusively. I thought that after hopping back in I would just make my way through the third stratum (B11-B15), but once I got on a roll I couldn't stop, and as of this writing I'm busy mapping out B18 in the fourth stratum, the Sandy Barrens. The plot (the garnish that it is) has started to kick in, and I'm eager to see where it goes, and what the final strata are like.

I finally unlocked the Ronin and Hexer classes, not that I plan to use them much. My core unit of Protecter, Landsknecht, Combat Medic (Caduceus FTW!), Survivalist, and Troubador, has yet to encounter any F.O.E. they couldn't take down. This game is crazy addictive. It takes just the very core gameplay of your typical turn-based JRPG, adds a nice character customization system, and then puts you in a long dungeon-crawl and leaves you to do the mapping yourself with the stylus. It may not sound like a lot of fun, but in practice it's great. And the story is told in first-person, as if by a DM, so there's no melodramatic latter-day FF protagonist angsty crap.

In other news, I played just long enough of GTA IV to get past that one mission I was on, and I failed once again to get past Green Grass and High Tides on hard guitar in Rock Band.

Time Wasters of the Week

I went and got Boom Blox for my new Wii, and it's pretty fun. My wife even enjoyed playing that some. At present, however, I only have one wiimote/nunchuk combo. I'll have to get another sometime for some real multiplayer Wii action. I still have yet to try out any of the other Wii games I have. I guess that's what happens when you get a new system complete with a respectable catalogue of it's games dropped on you from out of the blue sky.

Otherwise, I put the final nail into the coffin of Puzzle Quest (at least until the expansion pack) by consulting a FAQ and fast-tracking my way through the crafting system for that last achievement.

The myriad of RPGs on my stack has prompted me to institute a perpetual one-RPG-in-active-progress policy. In other words, there will always be one RPG (as defined by myself) in the rotation, until they're either all finished (not likely), or further notice. Puzzle Quest has just been knocked off, and the next game sliding into that niche once more is Etrian Odyssey. I'll probably just knock out the 3rd stratum and then sub that one out for another RPG, but for now the decision is made.

The only other game I've been playing is GTA IV. I put in around 6 hours or so over this Memorial Day weekend, and I'm up to around 30% or more finished. I'm taking missions on Algonquin from Playboy X, Packie, and Francis at present. I gave up tonight after my 3rd or 4th attempt at a mission taking out some union and mafia goons at a construction site. This game is fun as ever, and the story is starting to get pretty good.

Party like it's 1998

Being ten years late to the party is a good excuse to suck at StarCraft, don't you think? I've got to learn how they do this keyboard & mouse stuff that I hear is so good for RTS and FPS. It's got to be good, because those seem to be the only genres (besides the cash-grab MMORPG) that computer games come in.

It took me a couple of tries just to beat the third mission of the Terran campaign in StarCraft. You're given a corner of the map, some resources, and you just have to survive for 30 minutes against a pretty modest Zerg siege. My problem is that I just don't know what to do. Or rather, how to go about it quickly enough. I'll click a unit, then lead it somewhere, then tell it to do something, and sit there and watch the whole time. I get the feeling I should be issuing commands non-stop, but I'm just not good enough with the interface to jump my focus around the map constantly, and of course I'm not familiar with the hotkeys (or really hotkey interfaces in general). I've just never extensively gamed with keyboard & mouse enough to get accustomed to it in the way I am with a gamepad.

I think StarCraft is a good place to really jump into it, though. It's really a seminal example of a computer game (note that I don't say PC, since I'm running it on my Mac). I'm going to pick up the Diablo Battle Chest at some point, too. I did play that quite a lot when it came out, but I've never touched D2 at all, and I've had some very strong recommendations toward it (hi Secksi).

Otherwise, I've been knocking around in WoW a little. My trial will end any day now, but I'm not going to subscribe. For now, at least. I figure I've got enough other games to play through, and scarcely can afford the time to spend even a few hours a week in Azeroth. I've made it over to the second zone, and hit level 7 with my Hunter. I wonder how long I'd have to play to get a pet.

I also spent a ton of time playing Etrian Odyssey this week. See, I started to ride the local public transport some this past week. Only two days of the five, but that bus and train time really starts to add up... to nearly 3 hours a day, in my case. So, I've made it down into the 3rd stratum of the dungeon (B11F). There was this sick quest for the 8th floor that involved staying down there for 5 full days (which equated to something like 3,200 steps taken and/or turns taken in the random battles), during which I became grossly over-leveled, and that made plowing through to the end of the stratum a cinch (after finishing all of the mapping and questing to be done there, naturally). I might take a break from the game again, as I did after completing the first stratum. There are five strata in the main campaign, and a sixth postgame stratum featuring crazy hard bosses and such. At this rate I'll finish the game by like September.

Calls

I just finished the single-player campaign of Call of Duty 4. It was incredible! Not to mention very intense. I'd heard how good it was, but I'd also heard about how totally staged everything felt. Both are true, but I was expecting the latter to overshadow the former, but I was pleasantly surprised when it didn't, really. The weapons were great, and the settings and plot were also excellent.

There are some really cool moments in there, but I'm glad I only played it as a loaner, because it's probably not a campaign I'd ever play again (as it's pretty linear, and not really compelling for a replay, awesome as it is), and because I'm not about to get involved in CoD4 multiplayer. From what I hear it's buckets of fun, and I don't doubt it, but I'd rather play multiplayer Team Fortress 2 than just about any other shooter--when I decide to spend some time playing anything multiplayer, that is. I've got plenty of single-player stuff on my plate, and lined up on the buffet table taking up half of the room.

Speaking of which, I've been playing Etrian Odyssey a lot this week. Imagine my surprise when, on B7F, I discovered an item that opened up whole new wings of floors B5F through B3F(as far as I've delved so far)! Damn, I thought I was done with those floors! This game is serious business. I've been reading some about the sequel that just came out in Japan, and it sounds even greater. I'm hoping I can finish the first sometime before the sequel is released stateside (it's yet to be announced at all, so there's a decent chance of it).

I've felt an odd calling back to FFXI lately. It's as if a million gil farmers cried out at once, and were silenced. But seriously, I don't know what it is. I know I shouldn't get into that again, but I miss the friends I made there, and I'll be damned if I didn't have some amazing gear for Nascia (kinda miss her too...). I'm looking into things.

I've also heard a call to a couple of Blizzard products, oddly enough. I wouldn't call myself a PC gamer at all, but waaaay back in the day I did play some stuff. I owned both Warcraft 2 and Diablo (still got them somewhere). To see if I could stem my FFXI yearning, I downloaded the free 10 day WoW trial, as much just to see if it'd run on my MacBook as anything. It runs, alright. I don't care for the trackpad in WoW, so I'd have to get a mouse, but it does run. At the moment I have a level 3 Night Elf Hunter. I had a level 8 Human Warrior on my brother-in-law's PC, but I'm sure that guy's long gone. Jeff doesn't even play WoW anymore, as far as I know.

Then today, I was listening to some Starcraft 2 talk on a podcast (GFW radio--The Brodeo, for the win), and thought I might try to pick up the original. I'm pretty sure Blizzard games are dual Windows-Mac OS compatible as a rule, and Starcraft is basically the paragon of RTS excellence. I played the demo way back in the day, but that was it.

Not falling for it.

I really enjoyed the demo I got for God of War: Chains of Olympus, but there are two reasons why I'm not going to buy the game:

A) I'm pretty sure that, like any somewhat decent PSP game from a western developer, it will see an enhanced PS2 release before the year is up, and no doubt shortly thereafter all three God of War games will be available for $29.99 in a boxed trilogy pack, a la GTA, DMC, Hitman, Resident Evil, MGS, and even those WWE games, ffs.

B) Quick-time events suck. They are the most contrived bullshit play mechanic to come out of the last generation of console gaming. Chains of Olympus takes their suckitude that much further by placing them in the middle of boss fights. So yeah, if you don't manage to hit X or the Circle or whatever the fuck button in the half-second window you have, the boss recovers from their stun state and gains back a whole shitton of health. As far as I can discern from the demo, there is no way to defeat the bosses without succeeding at this retarded crap. They aren't even the same each time you try it, either, so you can't just memorize the necessary sequence of buttons to hit. Who the hell thought this was a good idea?

Who the hell thought QTE's were a good idea in the first place? You'd think that something being the one real flaw in a game like RE4 would let people know that, hey, this mechanic sucks shit, and maybe they shouldn't put it in their game. Maybe this is just par for the course with GoW games. I wouldn't know; this is the first one I ever tried.

So, I had a $30 gift card to use at Circuit City, and if you got GoW:CoO there, you could get half off any PSP accessory, such as a bigger memory stick, which I could probably use. However, due to the reasons I outlined above, I held off on the game, and instead picked up the newest Gyakuten Saiban/Ace Attorney game, Apollo Justice, purely on faith (and because I already have the first three, and I might as well get it too, at this point).

A coworker lent me his copy of Call of Duty 4, too, so I'm giving that a run-through, and I want to try the multiplayer, even though I have no time to really spend on that, and would really prefer to dig deeper into Team Fortress 2 if I came across time to do so. Meanwhile, my DS pile of shame continues to mount, and so I've taken some time over the last two evenings to venture forth into Sekaiju no Meikyuu, that forest labyrinth of Etrian Odyssey (another game I need to complete before the sequel arrives)!