Travel and Return

I recently went with my family to Japan for about three weeks, during which time I was able to play games relatively little, but I did get some time in, mostly in the company of my brother-in-law.

We played some Destiny with his and my sister-in-law's characters, and that was good fun. Their characters were level 25 to 28, and well advanced from my own meager level 21, but the content they had to run was all basically the same, with small differences brought on by the increase in difficulty settings. Destiny, it's a nice game to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Also over at their place, I got in a little time with my battle.net account, grabbing a few levels on my Diablo III Witch Doctor (which is still in season, for some limited time), and also to show off Hearthstone and give a quick lesson on how that game is played and what the better (and worse) parts of that are.

The only real gaming accomplishment to speak of during this time was my completion of Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition's Black Pits campaign, which is just a series of arena battles in which you level up a party to about level 9-10 and in the end face some pretty tough opponents. I'm glad I did it, but it wasn't a whole lot of fun.

I had more fun, though ultimately limited by a desire to not get dragged down in what is essentially an obsolete experience, with Far Cry. It holds up well for a game that is 10 years old, and only just taking formative steps into the open-world shooter genre. The core gameplay and concept of what you would see later in subsequent Far Cry games, Crysis, STALKER, and others, is in place and very solid and a lot of fun, but the world is not completely open, and there's not a whole lot to do other than follow the critical path. It also seemed overly easy, though I stopped playing on the third or fourth mission, just after the first time you get a hang glider. I can get the same, but better, from other games in my library, and next time I have that hankering, I'll play Far Cry 3 or another game.

Lacking a definite go to for game of the year, I'm getting into Wasteland 2. So far it's pretty good. The combat draws a lot from XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and feels more like that game than Fallout or Fallout 2 (and certainly nothing like the original Wasteland). The writing seems good, if not remarkable just yet, and the mission design so far is interesting, forcing you to make a choice early on about which of two fires to put out, the other being left to burn. I'll need to play a lot more to know whether it is GOTY material.

Shooting Lots Of Guys (Slicing A Few)

It's been a violent week in gaming. Aside from the odd game of Chess or Words With Friends, there's been a whole lot of dying going on.

It started with the bitter rivalry between two warring factions of an unnamed African nation coming to a head. I was put in a position to help an infamous and terminally ill arms dealer known as The Jackal bring to an end this conflict, and at the same time to help millions of refugees find a safe way out of the chaos. This was the final resolution of the mission given to my character in Far Cry 2, which was a very satisfying game in the end, and one of the most well-realized worlds I've had the pleasure to play in; a feat that was aided, no doubt, by it's novel choice of settings, a lush and realistic cross section of Africa's many types of geography.

I ordered Battlefield: Bad Company 2 from Amazon on the strength of it's multi-player demo for the 360, and the game arrived this past Tuesday, ushering a renaissance of XBL/PSN fragging into my living room. Together with MAG, another arrival this week, I've spent as much time shooting guys online in the last five days as in the last five months. Both games are a ton of fun, and both have the ever-addicting experience point and unlock system. I'm still level bullshit in BC2, but I've reached level 8 in MAG, which is when you get access to the biggest (256 players) game mode. EA has been having problems maintaining the servers for BC2 (guess it sold big), so this weekend I've mostly been playing MAG instead. I really like it, but the selection of maps seems pretty limited. I'll need a lot more time with both of these games to come to any real conclusions, but at first blush both are brilliant.

For some reason I got the itch the other day to finally start the God of War series. No one needs any explanation of what God of War is, but I have actually never played one up until this point. I played for a few hours, enjoying it, to a point where Kratos is storming his way through Athens on the way to encounter Ares. I have no real idea of how long the game is, but I'd guess it's 12-15 hours or something, putting me probably 1/5 of the way in.

Jungle, Desert, and Savannah

These are the landscapes I've been seeing a lot of playing Far Cry 2 a ton over the last week. It's not a perfect game by any means, but it's absolutely unmatched in terms of presenting a gorgeous wide-open world that feels alive in many respects. For a few reasons, mostly concerning the somewhat repetitive nature of it's mission structure, it's best enjoyed in small doses, but I've been cramming it in trying to finally polish the game off so that I can move my focus on to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. It's appeal hasn't suffered a whole lot, even so. I really like this game.

Elsewhere, I made a foray back into Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, which is fun. I want to keep at it and eventually finish it off before Puzzle Quest 2 eventually comes out. It's a shame about the warp gate hacking; without that the game would be a lot better. There's also DLC for the original PQ that I'd like to get, but it's overpriced on XBL. Maybe there'll be a sale sometime.

On the RPG front, I'm still working through Planescape when I get the hankering for some good dialogue and a weird world with crazy rules. A graphical update or a full-on Mass Effect-like fully voice acted remake of this game would be incredible. The next thing coming from the same people is Fallout: New Vegas. I will be anticipating that quite a bit.

Lastly, a new multiplayer game has caught my fancy, and that's Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Right now just the demo is out on XBL, and it's only one map and one mode, but it's huge amounts of fun, and it makes me want to play it more than any of the other several great multi-player games I have on tap. I may have to pick it up when it's released next month, but do I really want to spend a completion token on it? I don't even have any at the moment, though I have a few reasonably close. Questions, questions...

Oh, before I go I feel like I need to shout out a couple of iphone games that still get a ton of play from me, and those are drop7 and Words With Friends, an asynchronus Scrabble clone. I also bought UniWar for a few bucks last week, and it's pretty cool; a hex-based strategy game with three different factions. Canabalt gets pretty frequent play, too.

Normandy. Requesting permission to dock.

The arrival of Mass Effect 2 is imminent. I am more excited for this than I have been for a game in quite some time. I've been unable to buckle down and concentrate on any one game, so I've been futzing around with a whole lot of them. In no particular order:

WoW - I jumped into this for a bit to see if I could re-kindle the flame. No luck. I did a daily quest and then jumped into an instance and immediately did not want to be there. The group wiped, I logged out at the Spirit Healer, and uninstalled. Maybe I'll be back for Cataclysm.

Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers - This was on sale for $5 on XBLA, and I bit, being a long-time player of Magic in my junior high and high school days. It's a very basic take on the game, bordering even on too simple for a seasoned veteran like myself, but the core mechanics are still solid and fun. To another Magic player, I'd liken it to playing with stock starter decks right off the shelf. I'll be back around to this one here and there. I like it.

Canabalt - I just bought this on my iphone today for $3, and it's pretty cool. You're a guy running across the rooftops of a city under attack from big alien Voltrons (or something). The guy runs, and you tap the screen to make him jump over obstacles and gaps. Very simple, very addictive, great music and art. I'd put this one up there with Drop7 and Galcon. It's a perfect game for the platform.

Sins Of A Solar Empire - Galactic 4X RTS. Basically, you control a galactic empire. It seems incredibly deep, and I only brushed the surface of the 4 tutorials available to beginners. I like what I've seen so far, though.

Borderlands - This game has always given me issues with my graphics card, and after tinkering around with some settings this weekend, I booted up the game to stress test my setup, and ended up running through a couple of leftover quests with my Playthrough 1 clear-saved character. This game gets F-U-N right.

Far Cry 2 - I had a couple of hours to kill and still wanted to stress-test my machine, so I loaded up this beauty and ran through a couple of objectives. I am constantly amazed by how good this game is when I go and play it. Why haven't I been able to stick with it? It's so immersive and atmospheric. I was stalking through some high grass with a high-powered sniper rifle last night, picking off my target's guards one by one, remaining unseen, and it felt great. I love this game.

Shattered Horizon - This is a PC FPS I've been playing a lot lately. It's set in space, and you're a mercenary astronaut taking part in multi-player only battles for control of various asteroids and mining bases in the debris of an exploded moon that is orbiting Earth. You have full 360-degree movement, which makes for some really bewildering firefights. There's nothing else really like it, and it's really fun, not to mention gorgeous.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - I decided to finally see what the multiplayer is all about in the COD/MW series, and I have to admit that I'm surprised; it's really good. The gameplay is fast and frenetic, the frame rate locked at 60 fps, and death even quicker than that. It also does the carrot-on-a-stick routine as well as any MMO. That next unlock is always just a few more games, a few more kills away. Let it be known: the hype is justified. I've been back to this game almost every day the last week or so.

Aaaahhhhhh. That's better. Now that I don't have all of these impressions clouding up my mind, I can hone my focus in on Commander Caroline Shepard's next outing. Can not wait.

Onward, To A Lean 2010

Here's to thinning out the pack and adding onto it as little as possible in the coming year. 2009 has been nuts, but I think I'm just about caught up to where I need to be (for now) in terms of looking backward. There are plenty of games of '08 and '09 that I haven't even gotten around to picking up yet, but until I finish off some of what I've already bitten off, their status is iffy (Dead Space, Batman, Mirror's Edge, et. al). There are others I will definitely get (Uncharted 2, Assassin's Creed 2), but those too will have to wait.

I've got one completion in the bank as of now (Borderlands) and that's going to buy me Mass Effect 2, I think. If I can manage to knock off some more of the games I'm halfway into (Yakuza 2 is a prime candidate), then I'll start thinking about others.

Meanwhile, I've been distracted by Demon's Souls and Planescape: Torment, and there is little chance I'll be finishing either of those anytime soon. I follow my heart, though. If I feel like dropping a weekend into WoW in the middle of the Fall release feces tornado, then by the Great Old Ones, I shall.

P.S. Far Cry 2

Playcation

I took a trip this past week for Memorial Day weekend, so I did a lot of gaming on the go and with friends.

Before leaving, though, I played Far Cry 2 for another evening, at one point infiltrating a marina mercenary base and blowing up their fuel supply for one of my buddies.  I think I'm going to parcel this game out over several months or years like I have Oblivion and likely will Fallout 3, as well.  Speaking of Oblivion, I'm planning to pop that in just this evening after writing up this post and having dinner.

Arriving at some friends' house for a barbecue, the outdoor munching and conversation shifted indoors as the sun went down and the mosquitoes came out.  In a gathering full of moderate to hardcore gamers, it's no wonder Left 4 Dead on the 360 on my friend's 47" TV was a big hit.  My friend's wife (he prefers to watch) and I played through the No Mercy campaign right up to the end, and she (Louis) and I (Bill) were the only two to make it onto the helicopter to escape.  The game plays very well on the 360, but the limit of 2-player only for splitscreen kind of sucks for what is meant to be a 4-player experience.

Everything else I played over the past week has been portable.  I worked a little further into the fourth trial (Miles Edgeworth as the defendant) in the first Ace Attorney game on a couple of plane rides, and started Galaxy On Fire on my iPhone, and played completely through Underworlds, also on said device.  There's no denying the iPhone as a powerful platform for gaming at this point.

Galaxy On Fire is a fully 3D mission-based space flight game, a la Colony Wars, albeit suitably simplified for the platform.  I have to go against my usual stance here and recommend tilt controls over the digital analog (not an oxymoron) stick.  Touch-sensitive Dpads/sticks just do not work very well for me at all.  I can sort of hack it in iDracula just by sliding around in a circle, but here it's too imprecise and you end up obscuring too much of the screen.  Thankfully, the tilt controls work pretty well in GOF, and you can enable autofire on your ship's cannons just by double-tapping the fire button.  The game features a familar mission progression and seems to later enable free roaming in the galaxy and all the cargo trading you'd expect in a space game.  I'm looking forward to playing more.  This was a pretty awesome value for $3.

I believe I have written on this blog that I would be all over a Diablo-alike for the iPhone, and true to my word, I was all over Underworlds for a couple of days, playing right through it (about 3 hours) and starting another run immediately thereafter.  It's basically Diablo shoehorned onto the iPhone.  It's definitely not as polished or eminently replayable as Diablo, and it kind of runs like shit, but there is enough there to make for a pretty addictive mobile dungeon hack.  I'll outline a list of wishes for the next update or sequel:

• It needs to run better, with less stuttering in the frame rate.
  
• Touch controls need to be more sensitive and precise.
  
• There needs to be more than one real character class (the melee-centric warrior).
  
• Gear changes should be reflected on the character model, ideally.
  
• The level cap (10) needs to be done away with to encourage replays on higher difficulty settings.
  
• There needs to be a better shopkeeper interface for choosing which loot to buy/sell.
  
• There was music, but I barely noticed it.
  

I fear this reads like I hated the game, but that's really not the case at all.  I really enjoyed it, and have spent more time with it than any other iPhone game with the possible exception of Galcon.  Underworlds is a really solid foundation for an excellent Diablo clone, and for $1, it's practically an obligatory purchase. 

All Quiet On The Digital Front

There has not been much at all to report over the past week.  

I played some WoW, getting up to level 52 on my warrior, and starting to move into the last couple of tiers of zones in the "old world."  I want to explore every zone here before I venture into Outland and other Burning Crusade content.  I should probably work on hitting 60 and getting my epic mount to speed that process along.

I've spent a few more hours exploring and merc'ing around war-torn Africa in Far Cry 2.  This is a game that is beautiful in it's simplicity.  It's an open-world mission-based FPS, like a cross between Oblivion, GTA, and some shooter.  Most of the missions are of a pretty similar cutout, but roving around taking guys out and looking for hidden diamonds just doesn't seem to get old.

I finished the adventure mode of Peggle Deluxe this week, and started into Peggle Nights.  Great games, as everyone knows.  I also finished the third trial in the first Phoenix Wright, and got started on the fourth.  I'm saving this for my trip to Arkansas, along with some iPhone games and demos I picked up, too.  I've got a bunch of old games and systems there, too, though.  Maybe I'll hit up the retro while I'm home.

Checkpoint

It's been a pretty light week in terms of gaming. That's probably because I cranked through the final 10 episodes of Battlestar Galactica and then went to see Star Trek on top of that.

I finished up the second trial in the first Phoenix Wright game, and I'm into the second investigation phase of the third trial, Turnabout Samurai. I didn't think I'd like this game as much as I do, but it's got a lot of character.

I got some more into Far Cry 2 one night, doing another weapon convoy mission and an assassination, as well as roaming around the countryside unlocking more safehouses and causing a ruckus. My next mission is another buddy mission for Quarbani Singh. Still loving it.

And of course, I spent a lot of time playing WoW, mostly running around The Hinterlands knocking out quests and earning a lot more gold now that I've given up blacksmithing and have gotten my skinning up and running. I finally decided (at level 49, lol) to see what glyphs are all about, and picked up a few of them to make a few of my abilities more useful. I also jumped into a Warsong Gulch match last night, which is a CTF scenario, whereas Arathi Basin is more of a control point game. It was pretty fun. PvP is a whole other game than PvE, and battle tactics are drastically different. Thankfully, my spec is actually probably better suited to PvP, though it is more than effective enough at PvE, obviously. I focus on demobilization and burst damage, because one way or another, PvP fights tend to end quickly.

Some Things To Write About

I took a burnout break from WoW this past week from about Wednesday until Sunday night when boredom finally got the better of me. Consequently, I actually have some other games to thought-spew about! Just to get WoW out of the way, though, I'm almost to level 47, still mucking around Stranglethorn, and my skinning skill is already almost at 300! Incredible how fast that levels.

After scraping away a year or more's worth of dust, I found my copy of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney in my DS game drawer and finally gave it a whirl. I played through the first case trial all in one go, and kind of got a feel for how the game works. It's not really like anything else I've played before, but seems pretty enjoyable. As of now, I'm into the second trial case, about to begin the actual court proceedings.

Chronologically, the next thing I played was some Galactrix, followed by several hours of Far Cry 2. Nothing much to say about PQ: G, other than that it remains pretty fun, and good for wasting time. Playing FC2, though, is a really unique experience. I completed a couple of sabotage type missions with one of my npc buddies and then did a couple of convoy ambush missions for the arms dealers in the countryside to open up more guns to buy for myself. I also did some diamond hunting and guard post scouting and safe house unlocking.

One incident that was totally awesome was approaching a checkpoint from the side just as a roving death squad was motoring through town. As they drove away I manned a gun emplacement and shot at them to get their attention, and as they turned around to come back I got off of my turret and ran across the road to some cover, and fired some shots at them with my automatic rifle as they drove into the little clump of buildings. Then, just as they came alongside the wall I was hiding behind, I pulled out my flamethrower and smoked both the driver and the guy manning the gun mount, and the jeep crashed and exploded and set the whole area ablaze. It was one of those Kodak moments you wish all your friends could have been there to see. I love the fire in this game. I read that during playtesting they had to tone the fire down because people could throw a molotov and set the whole country alight and kill the Jackal (main bad guy and target in the game) from miles away. How cool is that?

I tried out a bunch of demos this weekend, as well. The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Bionic Commando multiplayer, and Red Faction: Guerilla.

Riddick has gotten huge amounts of acclaim, or rather, Butcher Bay has. Dark Athena has gotten less. This demo was from the latter. It seemed ok. The graphics were better than I had been led to believe (save Riddick's own model, which still looks last-gen). It was a lot harder than I was expecting, too. The demo was on the normal difficulty level, but I must have died at least 20 times just in the 15 minute or so demo section. I think I went into it expecting typical FPS type gameplay, but there seemed to be a lot heavier emphasis on stealth tactics that I didn't quite pick up totally in this short bit of game. I don't feel super compelled to pick up the game, but if I ever find it for $20 or something I may give it a go for Butcher Bay alone.

Bionic Commando, sadly, felt kind of janky. I didn't care for how the swing/jump was implemented (seemed like it required too many presses of the A button), and I really didn't like how the gun targeting and shooting felt. Your reticle is freaking huge, and you don't really have any indication of where exactly in there you're hitting. It seemed like maybe the game was registering a hit as long as the target was anywhere inside that huge reticle, which would make sense, since you'd likely need a large degree of aim-assist to shoot anything while swinging around wildly, but there just needs to be better feedback as to whether you're actually hitting the guy you're aiming for. It felt like I was shooting buckshot at something a football field away. The multiplayer character models suck, too. And 2 out of the 3 games I played, I was the pink guy, out of 8 possible colors. That's just not cool.

Red Faction: Guerilla was pretty exciting as a demo, though. It gave off Crackdown vibes in the way the character and camera are controlled, and the destructability of practically every object in the environment could potentially blow the doors of open-world mission-based gameplay. I liked the sledgehammer for breaking stuff, and the sticky remote-detonated mines are awesome. I'll be keeping an eye on this one in the future.

The Uninteresting Files

That's pretty much what this blog is fast becoming, the more I play WoW. The funny thing is that I haven't spent all that much time playing WoW, it's just been a disproportionate amount of my gaming time, altogether. As far as I can recall since last I wrote, I have made it to level 45, done a bunch of exploring around the world, and dropped Blacksmithing as a profession, replacing it with Skinning, instead, in an effort to both make more gold and to streamline my play experience. I'm not that into combing the AH for mats to collect for big complicated recipes, but I do like going out and killing and looting stuff!

I got that Green Hills of Stranglethorn achivement, finally finished the Warrior quest to get my Whirlwind Axe (long after twinks would have discarded it, no doubt), and did a bunch of other quests in random places. I finally visited the last Horde city, Silvermoon, in the blood elf starting area. Leaving from there I discovered a handful of other zones I had not yet been to, including The Hinterlands, The Badlands, Loch Modan, and Searing Gorge, I think. I had about half an hour of a podcast to kill last night, so I thought I'd jump into WoW to do it. I wasn't really feeling it, though, so after just one short quest I was done for the night. I might shelve it altogether until the weekend.

I got back into Far Cry 2 a couple of nights last week, doing a couple of missions and taking over some safehouses and finding some diamonds. I can see that there's a ton of fighting checkpoint guards and roaming death squads in the game, but it hasn't really bugged me yet. I get the same thing from the leapgate hacking in Galactrix. I've heard all about how much of an annoying hassle it is, but it just hasn't gotten to me yet. Similarly, I'd heard that the ending of Assassin's Creed was a huge letdown, but since I knew to expect that, I was strangely accepting of it. I think if you go into something with your expectations tempered a bit, your reactions aren't so volatile. I really dig Far Cry 2 so far, though. I'm still just like 3% into it or something ridiculous, though.

I just downloaded a free iphone game, Dark Nova, to get me through some idiotic training meeting thing at work. It's a kind of space trading thing.

Playlog - last week of March 2009

I played a bunch of different things lightly over the last week, spending some time in TF2 playing on the new (to me) Egyptian-themed map, and messing around with the two Peggle variants on my system (a demo and the Half-Life themed one).

I also finally got a chance to play some Far Cry 2, having picked it up for the nice price of $15 on Steam.  I pretty much love that service.  I only played with it for a couple of hours, but it seems pretty cool so far.  I started out as the Irishman, but I think I'm going to go back and choose the black guy instead.  I like his suit.  I want to get more into this one soon.

I accidentally purchased Aurora Feint II: The Beginning on iTunes (clicked the wrong link).  That's cool, because I probably would have bought it anyway.  It's a tile-match puzzle game with a sort of meta element where you earn crystals and then can purchase character upgrades and stuff.  It's sort of like Puzzle Quest, but only in that it's a puzzle game with a little something else to it.  This is more of a Tetris Attack/Puzzle League game than PQ's take on Bejeweled.  Also, you can apparently battle with other players.  You might have to buy the more expensive version, though.  This one was only $1.99.

The two games I played the most in the last 7 days were WoW, and Half-Life.  I got my Warrior up to almost 37, and did a crapload of quests in the Thousand Needles zone.  I downloaded an awesome mod for the game called ArkInventory which lets you pool all your inventory bags and then have stuff autosort into different columns.  This should totally have been in the game from the beginning.  I can't fathom why after what, 5 years, it isn't, other than the fact that futzing around with your bags is another form of timesink, which we all know MMO developers would sacrifice their very souls for the sake of.  Which reminds me, I need to check my auctions.

So, Half-Life is the game I made the biggest strides in this week (relative to game size, of course, since I played WoW for much longer).  This is an extremely long game, by modern FPS standards.  I remember the days of Doom and Quake, and those were long games, to be sure, although I'm not sure they were this long.  Those games were neatly divided up into levels and chapters, though, so they may be easier to wrap your head around than Half-Life.  I made it from some part just after Gordon gets ambushed and left for dead with no weapons to another part after killing a helicopter and fighting my way through an alien/paramilitary conflict.  I think I'm on chapter 13 or 14 of 19--around 60-70% of the way through.  I got stuck once where I needed some ammo to set off some of those laser-triggered mines in a crawlspace.  I had used it all up sometime in the previous 20 minutes since, and I really didn't want to replay that stuff, so I looked up how to cheat and made the game give me a clip of 9mm ammunition to allow me to clear my path ahead.

Half-Life continues to surprise me with how unique and novel it feels compared to modern FPS.  Valve created these situations and scenarios for you to work through, totally unconventional for the time (and indeed, now), and trusted that you'd find your own way through.  Contrast this to the clear and unmistakable indicators of modern games and that most blatant man-behind-the-curtain phenomenon, the quest arrow--used even in titles so lofty as the mighty Bioshock.  It's not that I feel like a genius for solving Half-Life; it's that I don't feel like an imbecile who needs to be led around by the hand.