Detours

I have been making some good progress through Mass Effect 3, but it is also true that my attention has been diverted in a number of different directions, in the meantime. I am planning on paring that back down some and continuing on Shepard's quest very soon.

The Steam summer sale happened recently, and with that my backlog swelled again to even greater volume. I have knocked a few off the pile, though. Quickly and dirty reviews:

Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior - fun and fairly unique melee-focused combat featuring a number of historical warrior types. Did I uninstall this? What was I thinking? I want to go play more right now. The downside is that there doesn't seem to be much balance. Samurai appear to be the best class overall, by historical rankings in the leaderboards. Pirates look to be bringing up the rear. Cool game, but I'm not sure how much potential there is for a serious competitive scene.

Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams - a great platformer with a gorgeous presentation, and quite difficult, too. There don't seem to be a huge amount of stages, but the ones I saw--up through the first boss fight--are large and feature a number of secrets. There is also the fact that each exists in two states, happy fairy land and dead Halloween land. You play as two girls, one at a time, shifting back and forth from girl and world to girl and world. Recommended for platformer fans.

Garry's Mod - I don't get it. I guess it's kind of a meta-Minecraft in which you can construct not only worlds, but game types, as well. I messed around a bit with dropping objects into the world, and I saw that there were a ton of people playing original game types on various servers, but I didn't join any. I tried to get onto something running some sort of Fallout: New Vegas roleplaying thing, but it was taking forever to connect, so I cancelled and quit out. This seems like a deep, deep hole, and I don't know that I want to jump down it.

Goat Simulator - Finally a game that Mia appreciates. She's three years old, today.

Wizorb - it's 8-bit-esque JRPG Arkanoid.

I also returned to a number of games for a bit more, and even finished off the Bioshock franchise, as it exists now, with the second part of Infinite's Burial at Sea expansion. It was good, and did a decent job of elaborating on the events of Infinite and connecting them to those of the original Bioshock. Not that that was really necessary, but it was a nice touch, I thought.

I let Mia check out some World of Goo, Peggle, and Hearthstone while sitting on my lap. She seems think they're variously OK for up to about 5 minutes before bombing off to do something else.

I made a tiny bit more progress through Half-Life 2. At this pace I'll finish itup sometime in 2016, making this one of the more extended contiguous (to my definition) playthroughs I've ever done. It's a great, great game, though. It feels great to play. Maybe I just don't want it to end.

I've kind of reached a multiplayer FPS crisis. That is, I don't know if there is a game for me in this genre. Battlefield has evolved to something I don't really care for. Call of Duty has never been my thing. Counter-Strike seems like the best game out there, but after about 15 or 20 minutes, I feel like I'm done for the day. Matches seem to last longer than that. Plus, Counter-Strike is extremely skill-intensive, and I'll never be that good. I need something more casual, I think. Maybe Borderlands or the upcoming Destiny or another co-op game, like the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, is more my speed these days. I've tried the Left 4 Dead games, but they just don't seem to take, either. They're incredibly intense and repetitive, and like with CS, I want to bail out after just a short time. The aforementioned multiplayer in Mass Effect 3 is pretty good, maybe I'll stick with that for the time being, while I'm playing the campaign, anyway. I should also play the Payday series, which I do own.

Going forward, I guess I'll try to focus on ME3, though I am awaiting Diablo III's 2.1 patch and the Destiny beta. We'll see how that goes.

I Am A PC Zombie (The Chair Is Cast In The Shape Of My Ass)

I kicked off last weekend with a few rounds of Left4Dead, which I have played remarkably little of, actually. I played the No Mercy campaign co-op with a friend on their 360 once, but aside from that and some brief messing around on my PC copy just to see what it was all about, I haven't devoted almost any time to the game. I'm an antisocial hermit in the habit of playing multi-player games alone (see WoW and Demigod), so of course I started to play through the Death Toll campaign alone before being joined by a friend for a few minutes before having to quit out for dinner that night. I need to at least get through all of the campaigns once.



I spent the rest of the weekend playing WoW and Demigod. My Orc warrior is at level 64 and a half, currently, and I've pretty much exhausted Hellfire Peninsula of quests I can handle on my own (and a few of the group ones, even). I've moved into Zangarmarsh, but I'm not sure how long I should stay. At the rate I'm going, I'll hit 70 before really experiencing more than 3 of the zones in Outland, and then need to move on to Northrend. I guess that's a good thing, though, especially if I end up playing more characters through these levels.




After getting the hang of Demigod, I bumped the difficulty up to normal and played a single-player tournament of 8 games with the Rook. I won all 8 with minimal trouble, so from there I decided to bump it up to hard and my first few games have been a good deal more difficult since. I'm currently 2 games into another tournament, having won both through my own sheer persistence as a building demolisher and portal captor. My AI teammates have been made of fail in hard mode, so far. Like, remarkably stupider than the AIs on the opposing teams. I guess the difficulty level is affected in the form of stupifying your teammates. The game is an absolute blast, though, still--even with me continuing to play the same Demigod the entire time. There is an untold amount of depth to the game, and multiple layers of strategy to explore in every match. What battle tactics do you use, what skill trees do you follow, what items and armor do you purchase, what team enhancements do you purhcase, and how do you balance spending between yourself and the team as a whole? Every match plays out in an entirely different manner.



What do you get when you take a A Link to the Past and World of Warcraft and combine them into an iphone game? Zenonia. I've spent some more time with it this week, and if you like those two great flavors, then you'll like the combination, as long as you can deal with the JRPG-ish cheese in the characters and story, anyway.

Direct2Drive is having a huge sale this month with PC games heavily discounted. I bought Civilization IV, Thief: Deadly Shadows, and Ess Tee Ay El Kay Eee Arr all for $5 each. Civ 4 makes me go WTF and want to try the tutorial, Thief isn't Vista compatible (I wish I had noticed that small text before purchasing), and S.T.A.L.K.E.R., after only 20 minutes or so, I can tell is going to be A.W.E.S.O.M.E. I'll be writing more about this one soon, count on it.

Finally, Lonesteban and I recorded a podcast of about an hour of us shooting the shit about gaming and other cool stuff. It doesn't have a name yet, and it's not currently available except by email, but if it continues, there should eventually be a site where it's hosted and an RSS feed and all that stuff. If any of you 3 people reading this are interested, leave me a comment or something and I can probably send you a copy.

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. 

The Fast And The Deliberate, Crushing Hammer Of Doom

Much of the past week I spent playing Burnout and Starcraft, an interesting juxtaposition. One is a seat-of-the-pants, devil-may-care, caution-to-the-wind affair at insane velocities, and the other perfects that feeling of constructing, painstakingly and with much mumbling and hand-wringing, a scenario of ultimate reckoning for one's enemies. Both are absolutely fantastic.

I completed enough events to get my A liscense in Burnout, unlocking several more cars and having fun tearing around the city in the process. Playing GTA or Crackdown or some such, you can never fully enjoy the driving models they present. You're constantly crashing--same as in Burnout--but each and every time, you're out on the street on your feet again and more often than not end up relegated to shitty little hatchback that all the sudden is the only thing anyone drives in the city. In Burnout, though, when you careen off a ramp, over a cliff, upside-down and face-first into a brick wall, you're treated to a dynamic, slow-mo, deconstruction of your car, and then there you are back on the road and burning rubber again. There's nothing stopping you from being reckless as you can be.

I'm at the end of the Terran campaign in Starcraft, on the 10th and what I believe to the the final mission. It goes without saying that this is an outstanding game. I'll just say that so far I've really enjoyed the Terrans and their awesome bunkers, Goliaths, Ghosts, and Battlecruisers. I'm excited to try the Zerg shortly, as well. This game gives me a feeling I haven't had since the days of monochrome green army men out in the yard, those and Battle Beasts. And the Lego army wars I used to set up in the days before I discovered the NES.

I also breifly popped onto WoW last week (a couple of times), to hit level 31 and do a few quests and take care of my auctions. I signed up for another 6 months, might as well use it! I jumped into Left 4 Dead for just about half an hour, in a versus game. It was cool. I got to play as the infected, the smoker, the boomer, the hunter, and the tank. Do people play as the witch? I don't know yet. I need to carve out some time in my schedule for both this and TF2.

Finally, I tossed into the PS3 an (odd) X-mas present from my mom, Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga Volume 1 Avatar Tuner. I think that's all of it's titles. I was expecting more of the same from Nocturne, which I quit and sold halfway through, but from the hour or so I played it seems to be a little more to-the-point, with sprucier graphics and more of a plot. I read that it's only 20 to 30 hours, too, which at this point is a plus in my book, for a JRPG.