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.

Better Use Of My Time

It occurred to me while playing Killzone 2 this past week that I didn't really like the campaign, and I wasn't going to waste anymore time with it. We talked about it on the last Call Of Podcast (Dad Man Walking), but I've got a baby on the way, and I'm looking at a drastic drop in the amount of free time I have for gaming. It's already started in a lot of ways. We're doing baby shopping, doctor visits, birthing classes, and the whole nine yards. Anyway, I've got games I figure are more fun--indeed, more important--to play. I was prompted to make a short list of "must complete" games that I'm going to focus on over the next several weeks before the baby is due (at the end of June). Said list:

STALKER
Fallout 2
Demon's Souls
Deus Ex
Portal 2
The Witcher 2

I'm well into the first 3, and the second 3 are my preliminary choices for last major pre-baby completion status. It's impossible to say how much time I'll have to play games in the second half of the year, but I'm betting it won't be a hell of a lot, and thus this initiative.

I've kicked off by jumping back into STALKER last night, and I'm planning a separate play diary of that, maybe in further blog posts here, or on twitter.

Otherwise, I spent the majority of my time gaming since the last post playing Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. I enjoyed the hell out of that game. As of this writing, I have collected every feather, every flag, and every treasure. I've finished every shop quest and own every piece of equipment and every piece of real estate available for purchase in the game. I've done every mission there is in the game, save two that were exclusive to the uber deluxe collector's edition of the game (I have done the Copernico missions that were exclusive to my PS3 copy of the game). I've finished the DLC, solved all of the glyph puzzles and played the Truth mission, and basically have seen all there is to see in the game.  I've only played about an hour of the multiplayer yet, though, and have done practically none of the VR missions.  There are also a couple of Ezio skins I haven't unlocked (Raiden from MGS4, and the Desmond skin). I got my money's worth, though, no doubt.

On a bit of a whim, I finally decided to load up X-Com: UFO Defense. It's a classic, as anyone who was gaming on PC in the early 90's will tell you. At first brush, it's a whole lot deeper than I was expecting, and I'll really need to sit down and get into it at some point in the future. It looks like it could be pretty addictive.

 

Workin'

Lonesteban and mine's Internet radio spectacular, Call Of Podcast, is off to a running start. I got a website up this week to host it upon, and I got the RSS feed working through iTunes, as well. We're due to record episode 12 tonight sometime. It's a lot of time and work (and a little money) to put together and present a show, but it's a lot of fun, too, and cool to have a body of "work" to look back on later. I've been dealing with getting that set up and sorted out a lot this week.

The average time to produce and post an episode is probably 4-5 hours, you can figure 2 hours to record, including the pre and post-show chatter, and then 2-3 hours later of playback and editing and processing and posting. There's very little prep or organization that goes into it so far, just a little reading of the news throughout the week (we'd do that anyway). We like to keep it kind of fast and loose, like a real conversation. I listen to a ton of podcasts, and I like most the ones with the least rigid structure.

As a side note, I have feeds to let me know when there are comments on this site or the one hosting the podcast, so either of these places or twitter is a great place to comment or submit questions and the like.

As far as gaming over the last week or so, I've been mostly focusing on two titles, with a tad of Killzone 2 multiplayer thrown in (I just unlocked the medic class for play).

The first of the games I've been working on this week is Demon's Souls. This is a fantastic game. I had it waiting for me here when I arrived back from my recent trip to Japan, and I've spent maybe 12 hours with it so far. It only took a couple to finish 1-1, the first level of the Boletarian Palace, but then I spent probably 3 or 4 times that amount of time playing in 4-1, the Shrine of Storms, playing co-op with other players (visiting their games as a blue phantom) and leveling up so that finally I was able to completely loot the level and kill the demon boss. Later I went back and played through 2-1, in Stonefang Tunnel, in just one sitting and only dying one time, with the help of my own summoned blue phantom, and a well-placed message on the ground in the boss' chamber.

Refer back to a post I made about the original Diablo for more of why I like Demon's Souls so much. The dark, Gothic fantasy, the great music, and the very cool art direction are all a large part of it, but there's also the fact that in this game, there is no cannon fodder. There are no trash mobs. Anything can kill you, and most of the time within two or three strikes, and often enough with just one. Additionally, death means something, and on more than one level. One death, and you go from your physical form to your soul form, losing the ability to summon phantoms for help as well as losing half of your maximum HP, and that's not to mention all the souls you've gained and have on you at the time. Subsequent deaths will just cost you any souls you have accrued since your last (though you can get them back, if you play well enough), but death also puts you back at the beginning of a level with everything in that level respawned.

It sounds punishing and Draconian, and it can feel that way, for sure, but it very rarely feels unfair. The game is very friendly to the methodical player, and very unfriendly to those who would rush in headlong, throwing caution to the wind. There are some skeleton knights at the beginning of level 4-1 that are incredibly tough when you initially encounter them. They come rolling at you and attack very quickly, and can be your death before you know what's going on, at first. But then, after a while, through death and trial and error, you learn how they move, and when they are vulnerable. I rock through them without a second thought now. I've been through that section of 4-1 probably 50 times, and I enjoy encountering them, now.

My other focus this week has been Borderlands. I'm trying to finish it off. It's been too long since I completed something, and I've got a ton more to move on to, as well. A user-created app I downloaded fixes a lot of the gripes I have with the PC rush-job port (which is what it feels like), but aside from that, this game needs help with story and quest direction. Both are pretty uninteresting, and the world is basically one big brown junkyard. It's a good thing the shooting mechanics and crazy loot and off-the-wall guns are so much fun. And I should emphasize how much fun they are, because were it not for them, I'd have given this thing up for the midden heap long ago, but I'm really enjoying my playtime with it.

I haven't done much co-op of the game because A) I don't want to mess around trying to get it to work on GameSpy's shit and B) I kinda prefer to play solo and at my own pace, though with as throwaway as the questlines and story are in the game, I'd hardly be missing anything if I rushed through with some other people. I should probably give it more of a go...

Killz0wned

I just finished up Killzone tonight, so now I'm ready for KZ2 when it comes out, and more importantly, my plate is pretty clean for the imminent arrival of my new PC.  

Final verdict--I liked the game, but didn't love it.  I'm glad I played it, though.  I can't really think of any other FPS I've played on PS2.  The story was pretty cool, I guess.  On par with a summer popcorn flick.  I'm excited to see where it goes in the sequel, as the Helghast are pretty cool as an adversary.  I just hope they aren't so AI-deficient in KZ2.

The other night I downloaded the Resident Evil 5 demo on my 360.  I went into it with low expectations, and I wasn't disappointed.  Capcom, and the Resident Evil series in particular, aren't known for drastically changing games up from iteration to iteration.  RE4 was a remarkable exception, and it's extensive overhaul of the by-then stale RE formula was in large part responsible for that.  RE5 is Capcom lapsing back into their old ways, the same ones that have given us 50+ games in the Mega Man arch-series and 15 or more under the umbrella of Street Fighter.  Entire polygon models are recycled from a 5-year-old  game, and the GUI looks like something they slapped together in Crayon Physics.  

I'm sure people will eat it up, what with the online co-op and all, but it just seems sloppy, and stands out as another instance of Japanese developers having pretty much lost the plot over the last few years and the switch to HD.

Holding Pattern

This week has been much the same as the last.  Highlights being finally finishing Metroid Fusion and playing Gears of War co-op through acts 2 and 3 on Saturday night.

It was nice in Metroid to finally accrue all of Samus' lost power-ups and be able to face down the SA-X for once.  Most of the game you're avoiding or running in terror from it.  I almost had to call foul on the game, though, for pulling the old Metroid escape sequence but spiking it with a final boss battle.  I almost didn't make it through in terms of either life or time.  I'm done with this one.  It was cool to see where the overarching plot went, but by all reports Metroid: Zero Mission is the better GBA outing in the series, and I've got that in the queue waiting for a likely time.

I played some more Burnout Paradise this week, too.  That's a great game.  It's got a bunch of those qualities that keep you coming back to a game, like short, attainable goals, a sense of progression from unlocking more cars and beating more events, and a great online mode.  The sense of speed in the game is also excellent.  I crash a lot.

I put maybe 4 hours into Killzone this week, too.  I'm up to the beginning of the 8th mission, of 11.  I have a few gripes forming: a) checkpoints in this game are few and far between,  b) enemy grenades seem way too unfairly deadly, c) the Helghast are beyond stupid AI-wise (and need more lines of spoken dialogue, or at least the frequency with which they spout their limited lexicon dialed back a bit).  Otherwise, it's cool.  The level design is kind of sparse, but I'd chalk that up to it being a hardware limitation, since the art-direction is pretty spot-on.  Also, some of the dialogue is a bit overwrought--it's standard action-flick fare.  Again, the limitations of the PS2 are the albatross around this game's neck.  I'm excited to see how the sequel turns out when it's released in a month or so.  The weapons and sense of being there and atmosphere are already pretty great.

I had a few minutes to kill tonight and so I played some Hexic.  My brain just does not work the way that game wants it to.  I got my best score to date, nonetheless.  I think I made two of the star-flower things.  If I understood the victory conditions correctly, I would need at least 18, arranged in the proper manner, to make 3 black pearls, and then get those arranged together, to win.  I hope Puzzle Quest Galactrix is released soon...

Progress Report 01/19/2009

I got some good time in with an assortment of games this past week. Variety is always nice. I've been jumping into Metroid Fusion for 30 minutes to an hour at a time every couple of days. It's good, but not totally engaging me the way Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night have in the past. That's probably no fault of the game's, though; in an era of gigantic open world, open-ended gaming, it just seems kind of quaint. I do enjoy it, just in a more connoisseur-ial fashion. I appreciate it.

Finishing Gears of War 2 left me wanting more, and coincidentally there's a Gears 1 achievement I want to unlock so that I can unlock the final playable character model in Gears 2 multiplayer, so I popped the first game into my system this week and started off a playthrough on Hardcore difficulty. I finished Act 1 so far, and hopefully someone will jump in with me for some buddy action!

I've been extremely impressed by the post-release DLC support (entirely free to this point) that Burnout Paradise has received over the last year, and all the raving (and my desire for something new to play before/after watching a DVD without having to toss a disc in) finally convinced me to pick it up from the PSN store. I've never played another Burnout before, but it sorta reminds me of a mix of Ridge Racer and GTA's driving engine. It's a free-roaming city street racing game, but you have no goals you have to meet, or anything you really have to do in order to progress, except just have fun.

What's really cool is the (almost) seamless online integration. I can just hit right on the d-pad a couple of times and all of the sudden I'm online and there are a bunch of other players around the city doing things, cooperatively or competitively. I'm in the same city, on the same street as before, only now there are real people driving (a few) of the other cars on the road. I got into a game the other night where a couple of the 8 people had headsets (I don't, on PSN), and they were able to give directions and coordinate with the rest of us to meet up in certain areas and do things to complete some multiplayer challenges. It's good, mindless fun, not something with a million cars and parts you really have to worry over or races you have to practice a whole lot at, like a lot of other racing games.

When I was logging onto the PSN store to get that, I noticed a new PSOne Castlevania up on the store that I'd never played before, and it was only $6, so I impulse bought Castlevania: Chronicles. Turns out this is a port of an old Japanese PC adaptation of the original NES Castlevania. I knew about the game since it came out in 2001, but I'd thought it was just a PSX update of the NES Castlevania. The difference, essentially, is a bunch of extra levels and some tunes that weren't in the NES game. Win-win. Tough game--luckily you can save at the beginning of each level. The graphical fidelity is somewhere between 8- and 16- bit--adequate.

Lastly, I played through missions 2 and 3 in Killzone last night, since Netflix streaming on the 360 was being difficult. As I've said before, it's a classic example of a developer trying to outdo their platform. It's like how Crytek future-proofed Crysis by making it for 2010 machines in 2007. Except Killzone's case is a little dumb when you consider the fact that PS2's aren't upgradeable. Apart from the frame rate, and brain-dead enemies, I think it's a pretty good game. The graphics are pretty impressive at times for a PS2 game, and the weapons are cool. I also like how you can choose to control any of the people in your squad. I played for a bit as the assassin woman, and I just added a new guy with a minigun. More will be written about this one later.

Light Week

I didn't play much at all this past week. I put about an hour into Killzone, a couple into Metroid Fusion, and about the same into WoW. I was getting over jet lag part of the time, and the rest of the time making good on my fitness resolution, watching movies and shows on Netflix, and watching the fallout from the EGM closure/massive 1UP layoffs online. EGM used to be so awesome back when I was in high school. You know what else was true of that time? We didn't have the Internet in practically every home in the world where anyone cares about gaming.

If I had to name the one big thing I did, it would be (in WoW) to have finished up all of quests in my level range in the Stonetalon Mountains zone. Next I need to finish up the Ashenvale stuff, and try to catch up on instances, too. I got my dire wolf mount, also, which is cool.

At the top of my list of priorities for completion right now is probably Metroid Fusion, because it'll probably be the quickest and easiest to get through, but also because I've been playing it off and on for god knows how long, and I really need to finish it to be caught up on the (real) Metroid series. They really need to come out with that rumored Metroid Dread for the DS.