Twaddling About

I don't really know where my head is with games lately. I suppose I need to just continue to focus on one thing, like I have been with FFXIV until the last week or so, when I deviated from the path. I went and dawdled in several things, but I may get back to Eorzea while my last couple of free weeks is in effect, before I have to take the sub plunge or not.

Grand Theft Auto III - I really wanted to hear the soundtrack and run around this iteration of GTA again, for the first time in about 17 years. It's still pretty fun, and I find the simplicity of the game refreshing. Granted, I have yet to play GTA V at all. I should get that at some point.

Minecraft - Similarly, I just wanted to jump into a world and waste some time poking at things without thinking too much about it. I dug deep into a mountain and that's about it.

No Man's Sky - It had a big update recently, and I thought I should check that out. It still seems too survival-oriented for me, like one big festival of gathering up stuff from a list to process into other things to give yourself even the barest improvement in quality of life. At least there's a new story thing that is kind of interesting, and the visuals are very nice. It's still no Elite: Dangerous, though.

Elite: Dangerous - Speaking of which, I had a craving for some deep space exploration and serenity, so I got in here and ranged out a few thousand light years to double my liquid assets by selling exploration data at a far-flung outpost. I have my next expedition planned, as well.

FFXIV - I'm working my way through the main story quests of A Realm Reborn. My character is a level 41 Warrior now. I'm still enjoying the game. I think I'll pick it back up tonight.

The Quickest of Hits

I've had a pretty crazy week, touching on a lot of different games, but basically all just because the whim struck.

Grand Theft Auto III - How many years has it been? I wanted to hear the soundtrack again, and just see what the game felt like after so much water under the bridge.

The Elder Scrolls Online - Revisiting the Orc paladin-analog I created here. Zenimax Online's dedication to the game has made me consider playing it more.

God of War II - Hype around the PS4 reboot made me want to go back and play this one that I never got to, previously. The first 45 minutes or so were pretty impressive.

Team Fortress 2 - I've been on a bit of a shooter kick lately. What really is the greatest of all time?

For Honor - I do like melee combat systems in games. This one seems good and crunchy so far.

Magic: The Gathering Arena - Maybe I do like this better than Hearthstone, after all?

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon - It was the game going when I turned on the Switch. Still very cool, of course.

Urban Exploration

In my last post I talked about playing a lot of DLC. I'm still doing that, really. I did finish up the Mass Effect 2 content with Arrival, a cataclysmic event for one star system that sets up the lead-in for Shepard's trial in the beginning of Mass Effect 3. I'm going to have to play that game sometime.

For further DLC adventures, and to scratch that GTA itch while V is released for the consoles but not yet for the PC, I decided it was time to check out The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, the two extra modules available for IV. I thought they were both pretty well done, and succeeded in introducing new protagonists and cadres of characters with interesting enough stories to tell that also interwine with and do a little bit to flesh out the story of Niko Bellic, the original GTA IV protagonist. I think one reason these two mini-GTA campaigns worked so well for me was their smaller scope. They don't bog you down in too many irrelevant missions before moving on with the key events of the story. Additionally, I was doing very little of the ancillary stuff in the games. I would move from story beat to story beat very quickly as compared to how I have played these games in the past. I think this approach just works better in the more self-serious world of GTA IV. Overall, I thought Johnny Klebitz and Luis Lopez's stories each made for solid smaller-scale entries in the GTA series. Having them both also set in Liberty City I'm sure was convenient for Rockstar, but it also worked well to show us the city from other angles, to give it a more well-realized feel. I would recommend playing these, probably prior to playing GTA V.

I've dug into a trio of 2D platform cave exploration type games recently; Cave Story+, Spelunky, and La Mulana. It was recurring discussion of Spelunky on a couple of podcasts I like that kicked it off. I already owned Cave Story+, and had heard good things, but had never played it. Checking that out, first, it seemed ok, but didn't really grab me. It seemed very talky, and I wasn't really into that at the time. I may try it again sometime in the future. Spelunky, though, did a pretty good job of grabbing me right off the bat. Where these other two games are broadly similar to a Metroidvania type game, Spelunky is a roguelike in the form of a 2D platformer and has very nice production values. Where Cave Story and La Mulana look and sound like 16-bit games, Spelunky looks and sounds like your memories of 16-bit games. It's a challenge, and a lot of fun. One of the coolest features of the Steam version of Spelunky is the daily challenge, where everyone who plays that day is given the same randomized world to play a single time, and a leaderboard rank to compare scores with other players around the world. Finally on this tip, I started playing some La Mulana. It turns out this is a pretty hardcore Metroidvania type, and may take up to 30 hours or so to finish. Having seen someone fight the final boss and finish the game, I doubt I'll ever have the patience to go through that, but I do plan to play some more of the game. I like what I've seen so far, and they've just announced a sequel, as well.

I should write about Dear Esther, but it would be hard to say much without spoiling either the game or the effect of playing the game, so I'll just say that if you already own it through some means, or are able to pick it up for a few bucks, and you have an open mind about "gaming" "experiences," you should play it. I thought it was great, and absolutely gorgeous. It only takes about maybe an hour or 90 minutes to walk through. Walk through--because you won't be doing anything but walking, be advised, but I thought it told a story well enough just the same.

Elsewhere, I've played a little bit of Skullgirls, which has a nice tutorial mode that teaches the complete novice fighter such as myself essential skills like blocking and such. I've also checked out The Basement Collection, a compilation of stuff by the creator(s) of Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac. That was full of odd things. I checked that my Anmesia save file does still load, and tentatively queued up more Fallout: New Vegas DLC for sometime soon. I need to toss some more hours into 2013 releases, too.

Game Soup

Though I finished GTA IV's story last week, I found myself drawn back to the game several times this week to tie up loose ends and because I guess I really just hadn't had enough.  I hopped back into Liberty City three or four nights to finish the Assassin missions, find all of the random stranger encounters, and mess around trying to get a few achievements.  I think I'm finally done, until I feel like playing The Lost and Damned.

Another nice time-waster for me this week was iDracula, a 99 cent iphone "twin stick" shooter.  You play a guy with a gun, several guns, killing various monsters that try to swarm you.  The controls aren't flawless (my left thumb doesn't slide all that well on the left "stick", but maybe that's just me), but they work well enough.  It's nothing revolutionary, but it's pretty fun and it's got freaking great graphics.  It's two dimensional and sprite-based, like a higher resolution Diablo II.  Someone really needs to take this "engine" and make a Diablo clone.  It could totally work, but I fear for the world's economic recovery if that were ever to come to pass.

I had occassion to try out a couple of new games this week, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, and Crysis.  Hulk is pretty good, but kind of ugly these days, being a PS2 game, and also very simplistic.  It feels good jumping around an open city and smashing stuff, but this game's time was definitely 2005.  We're in a post-Crackdown world now, and the team that made Hulk should be coming out with their new game, Prototype, this year sometime (barring delay or cancellation, of course).  

Crysis, though--awesome.  All I'd ever heard about it was that there was some sort of suit involved and that it is pretty much the de facto standard PC benchmark these days.   I didn't know how amazing it would look on my PC (the game defaulted settings to high, but I should probably back it off a bit for a smoother framerate--I'm still new to the PC thing), or much about how open-ended the mission structure seems (I'm only about half an hour in so far).  I sat down with it out of curiosity more than anything, since I'd picked it up for only ten bucks.  I came away pretty impressed.  I knew I liked this game when I put the nanosuit into maximum strength mode and punched down my first tree.

Otherwise, I played some SuperSFIITurboHDRemix.  There was like one other guy online when I wanted to play, and he beat me over and over.  I lost with every character, except Akuma, who I don't have unlocked.  It was fun, though, and I won a few rounds here and there.  I stretched out my Noby Noby Boy some, tried out the Just Cause demo on Steam (not great as a PC port), and lastly spent a couple of hours killing stuff in WoW.  Ropvanks is now level 32 Warrior, with craptastic gear.  I'm using this mace I found and this goofy tiki head shield and random junk armor I've gotten from quests.  I'm still in Ashenvale, but I'll be leaving there soon, I think. 

Murder And Mayhem In Liberty City

Apart from a little bit of Team Fortress 2 and World of Goo, which I picked up for $5 on Steam yesterday, I spent all my game time this past week playing GTA IV.

I am now at the final mission(s), a choice that boils down to either money or revenge, or more likely, Niko's cousin or love interest. My choice is for revenge, but I'll probably end up doing both to see what's different in the ending. I attempted each path once so far but died, and had to go to bed. I had already been playing like 6 hours anyway.

This past week I managed to crank through all the rest of the Irish mob jobs and then the Italian mafia jobs so that now all that's left is the ending of the main thread and the Assassin missions, and the tons and tons of side stuff you can do in the game. I'll probably end up doing some of that stuff and going for achievements, too, after finally finishing off the story.

There are a few choices you have to make in the game, whether to kill guy X or guy Y, or whether to kill guy Z or just walk away. The former scenarios, I opted to kill Playboy X, Francis McReary, and now Dimitri Rascalov. There was one odd mission where it looked like I was going to be given the choice of killing Phil or Ray (mafia capos), but the boss decided for me and had me go kill Ray, which would have been my choice anyway. In each of the kill/walk away scenarios, I used my better judgment, which as far as I can recall, was walking away each time save Vlad, whom I remember killing. The most interesting was Niko's long-awaited confrontation with "that special someone," Darko Brevic. I figured that it would have been the height of hypocrisy to kill him for having been only what Niko has become over the course of the game, a hired killer with little allegiance to anything but money. I'm not sure what impact any of these decisions have on the outcome of the game, but at the very least, a few of them helped me to define for myself what sort of character Niko would become, and I like that.

I've seen and heard a lot of people saying they don't like the person he becomes in the game, and that's fine for me. I don't have to like every character I control in a game (though I do happen to like Niko), as long as they're somewhat well defined and believable as a character. Aside from the necessary exaggerations and implausibilities (it is a game, there has to be insane fun stuff), Niko passes this test in my eyes. It's a tough line to walk in this series, though.

As Rockstar takes it in a less cartoon-ish and more serious crime fiction direction, it's hard not to lose some of the outlandishness (Area 52 jet-packs in GTA: SA), which often means losing some of the fun (no planes in GTA IV). I think GTA IV is a sweet spot, pretty satisfying on both ends, without undermining one hand with the other. This story just would not work in Crackdown, nor would Crackdown's insane (and awesome) gameplay work for this story (or any story, really).

Addendum: I finished the story last night, choosing the revenge route. After checking out the other ending on Youtube, I'm happy with my choice.

The One Where I Got An iPhone

I have to write these posts more often. A week goes by and I play so many different things that I can hardly recall them all.

I replaced one mobile platform with another this week. Well, I actually sold my PSP months ago, but this week I finally sold my stock (games) in it, upon seeing the lastest crop of (seemingly credible) rumors about the next PSP. Whether it's the PSP 4000, PSP2, PSPi, or whatever, sooner or later they're going to come out with one done right, with a second analog, no shitty UMD drive, a download service (to be fair, they kinda already have this), and maybe a touch screen. I'll pick up one of those. For the moment, I'm fine with my 10+ DS game backlog, and my new iPhone.

Yeah, my 2 year contract with Verizon was up, and for only $20 more per month I was able to go from a shit phone I never used for anything but calling to a fucking revelation in mobile computing. The iPhone is god. The Internet in my pocket, accessible anywhere, not to mention a phone and iPod in one, and a decent (potentially great) mobile gaming platform. I've had it for 7 days, and I already find it indespensible. But the games--I've downloaded and tried out a small handful, and found two so far that I really, really like.

One is Galcon, which is sort of mini-RTS. There are a bunch of planets on the screen, and you face off against one or two enemies (CPU or humans online, if you can believe that) sending ships from planet to planet to conquer them and take over the entire system. Incredibly accessible, and crazily addictive. One game of Galcon can be over in 10-20 seconds, and they rarely last longer than a couple of minutes. It's pretty much the perfect mobile game to sit and play while you wait. There's a free demo version, and the full thing is $5. Well worth it, in my book.

The other is called Tap Defense, which is pretty much your standard tower defense game. Most people pretty much know what they're getting with this type of thing, so suffice it to say that it works really well on the touch screen, and it's a lot of fun. I hadn't ever actually played one before, but this is cool. And free!

Elswhere, also in the cheap and novel category, was Noby Noby Boy, the newest creation from the guy behind the Katamari series. It is insane. I picked it up about the time everyone's cumulative stretch length had reached the Moon. I wouldn't really call it a game, it seems more like a toy, just one that you download and play with on your TV using a Playstation controller. That's not to say it's not cool, it's just literally unlike anything that there's pretty much ever been in gaming. I like it, and I'll probably mess with it from time to time to contribute to Girl's space expansion.

I felt like knocking through some more of GTA IV this weekened, so I had a couple of sessions of that, totalling 6 or 8 missions done. According to the game's menus, I'm about 45% of the way done. The story is probably only about 65% of the total, though. I'm liking playing this like Oblivion--doing a bunch at a time, taking a long break, and then coming back later for another hit. At this rate I'll be ready for Lost & Damned around the time the next DLC pack comes available.

And finally, triumphantly, I finished the Starcraft Terran campaign. That last mission was giving me hell for a while. I kept trying to go back to saves I made along the way, but I had painted myself into a corner more or less from the beginning by being slow to gather resources and not discovering a Vespene geyser in a key base location. I must have spent 4 hours across a couple of days to no avail, and finally went online looking for strategies. That convinced me to try out the seige tanks' special seige mode and use them for offense and defense both. The mission is to take out a giant ion cannon on the other end of the map, but to get to it you have to fight off two seperate and very well entrenched Terran armies and then make your way past all the turrets, ghosts, and other guardians to blow it up. In the end I had like seven battlecruisers and a host of tanks, goliaths, marines, and ghosts storm the cannon and take it out with a combination of Yamato guns and nuclear missiles. It still took an hour and a half, not counting failed raids and stratagems gone awry forcing reloads along the way. It was an oddyssey in and of itself. Hard to believe that's only a third of (half of) the game.

PC is finally here!

That's right, it finally arrived.  My long overdue entry into PC gaming is manifest.  To celebrate, the first thing I did after all the preliminary setup was to go and download Steam, and promptly pick up the Half-Life series, specifically the Source engine remake of the original, and The Orange Box, which of course has the sequel and all of it's....quasi-sequels.

Interestingly enough, on the PC the box comes with a couple of things not in the console versions: Lost Coast, another add-on to HL2, and Peggle Extreme, a Valve-themed version of the popular Pop Cap game.  And so the first game I played on my new machine was Peggle.  The second was Portal; I just played through the whole thing again (for the fourth time, if I remember right) before writing this.  I figured it was a good "training session" to get me re-acclimated to the first-person mouse & keyboard scheme.

I can never get enough Oblivion, so I picked up the full box version, featuring both expansions, as well.  And this is just the beginning.  I've got a lot of catching up to do!

Before the arrival of my new machine, and in the post-Killzone interim, I want back to GTA IV.  I'm somewhere in the middle of the game, and apparently doing things backwards, somewhat.  Most accounts I've heard of people playing the game, they've gotten to the point where they have to choose to kill either Playboy X or Dwayne and then later gone on to do the big bank robbery straight-out-of-the-movie-Heat mission.  Either way, I've past both of those now and have finally opened up the last island.

When I first started playing these games, with GTA III, I used to ignore the missions and such for hours and just go blow stuff up and see how long I could survive with a full wanted level.  That's not where GTA IV shines, though.  If I want to do that I'll go play Crackdown.  I find GTA IV is best when I'm moving swiftly from mission to mission, and not just the main plotline ones, but including the side activities like helping the random people around the city or stealing rare cars for Brucie, or just doing the social activities with Niko's friends and girlfriends (though these get tiresome).

Lastly, Necovia/Lonesteban and I finished up Gears of War on Hardcore last night, getting the A Dish Best Served Cold achivement to unlock RAAM in Gears 2.  That was a lot of fun, and I think it's really telling that the parts we had the most trouble with in the game were the parts where we were forced to go separate ways and couldn't watch each other's back so well.  Still a great game, though.  Gears 2 Horde Mode soon!

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.

Lord Bane's Bane

For the past week I've been going back and forth between GTA IV and Puzzle Quest, but mostly concentrating on the latter. I'm at the final battle now, but Lord Bane is freaking tough. He gets turn after turn without end.

I went through most of the game relying on the same weapons and spells, namely a Great Axe, which has a 50% chance of awarding an extra turn anytime I do 5 or more damage, and a suite of spells designed to change gems en masse to match 3 or 5 of a kind in several places around the board, gaining me extra turns and doing damage to my enemies at the same time. However, I read up on some tips for the game on a couple of boards, and found that I have the gear and spells to make a strong damage build work for my wizard, too. I tried that build out on some of the battles leading up to the end, and it was awesome how powerful it felt compared to what I had been using, but it didn't stop me from hitting a brick wall at Lord Bane. After a while of that build I swapped back to a hybrid of my extra turn-focused build and the all-out damage one, and I came really close to beating him, but lost nonetheless.

Well, at this point the only other achievement I need (besides the one for beating Lord Bane) is related to the crafting system, which I haven't touched. Maybe if I get into that I can forge some bad-ass new gear to take down Bane and kill two birds with one stone.

As for GTA, I've just arrived at the second safehouse, in Bohan.

The Future, Conan?

I haven't played a whole lot that I want to ramble on about this week; just a couple of hours of Puzzle Quest, a little bit of Hexic HD, and a bunch of GTA IV. I don't want to say a lot about the latter, partly because I'm just so sick of hearing about it in the press, and partly because I'm only maybe 15% into the game. Suffice it to say that it's a lot like III through San Andreas, but better--it's a lot of fun.

I thought I'd take this opportunity, then, to take a look into the future, all the way to the year 2000 (and 9). Thinking about the month of May, and the lack of any games I want to pick up releasing therein, I set my eyes to the beyond, and even beyond the beyond (not the shitty PSX RPG), to take stock of what's coming out over the horizon, and what of that I'm interested in.

A quick list:

Metal Gear Solid 4

Etrian Odyssey 2

Ninja Gaiden 2

Too Human

Fallout 3

Halo Wars

Resistance 2

Yakuza 2

MOON (little known DS game)

Mirror's Edge (that trailer looks incredible!)

Persona 4

FF and DQ remakes for the DS

Bionic Commando Re-Armed (the remake of the 8-bit)

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix (...come to Butthead....)

I guess that about covers it. Not all of those are sure buys, but they're definitely on my radar. So many games!

Giving up on a couple.

Meh, I've had enough GTA: San Andreas and Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles.

I've put in a lot of time and effort with both, and enjoyed them, but I don't think I'm ever going to see them through to the end.

I finally beat Death in Rondo of Blood last time I played, woot! The next level is a boss gauntlet... Oh well, as a kid I never beat Castlevania or Castlevania III, both of which I really loved, so why should Rondo be any different? These old school Castlevanias are just hard as hell. The more forgiving playability (you might say easiness) of Symphony of the Night is a big part of why it's lodged solidly in my top three games of all time.

As for San Andreas, well, I've really just had enough GTA altogether. I was pretty much done after Vice City, and even though I'm sitting at around 75% of the way through the story of San Andreas, I haven't been playing it or having fun with it the way I did with the first two entries in this incarnation of the series. The days of GTA III and Vice City were the halcyon days of collegiate life in the dorm. My roommate and I would trade the controller back and forth over these two games and just have a blast for hours at a time. When I play San Andreas now, I'm solo, and it's just not that involving. I'd rather just cut to the chase, and to play a GTA game that way just isn't right, so I'm going to just walk away.

Lord knows I've got other stuff I could be playing.

I am getting GTA IV, but if I hadn't already had it on order for the awesome bargain price of $42 since a year or more ago, I might have held off for a while. I just hope the jump up to "IV" brings some significant differences to the formula. The story and presentation looks pretty good this time around, at least.