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.

E3 2009 and Oblivion

Not much in the way of a play report this week, just a little Peggle, TF2, and Phoenix Wright, aside from jumping back into Oblivion and doing a bunch of the Dark Brotherhood stuff.  That's where my focus has been, mainly.  It has been a series of pretty interesting quests so far, probably some of the most inventive I've seen in the game, and I've already been through the main story, the fighters', mages', and theives' guilds plus the whole vampirism and finding a cure thing and a whole bunch of other random quests.  There was one where I was locked in a house with 5 treasure hunters and had to off them all one by one without anyone suspecting it was me, and there was a big WTF moment when I had to go kill X group of people.  Oblivion is an awesome game.

I have been so tempted to rush out and pick up Red Faction: Guerilla.  That demo on XBL (the single-player one) is insane fun.  I am definitely going to buy this game at some point.  I hope I can find a good deal on it somewhere soon.  I did pick up the Freedom Force games in the Steam sale last week, based solely on recommendations and Irrational's (later) pedigree, including BioShock.  I only messed around with the demo for Freedom Force Vs. The Third Reich before buying, but it seemed cool (and complicated at first), and both games were only $6.74 together.  I absolutely love Steam.

This past week was probably the biggest news week for gaming that will happen all year.  Certainly, it was.  It was E3, and not the lame E3 from the past couple of years, but a full-on assault of megaton announcements.  Some of what I'm most looking forward to, in no particular order:

Metroid: Other M

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

Crackdown 2

Left 4 Dead 2

Final Fantasy XIV

PSP Go (price drop lol)

Metal Gear Solid: Rising

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

So much new stuff came to light that I'm probably forgetting stuff, and there are a few things I think are cool that I'm not even going to bother to mention.  I'm skepical of Microsoft's "Project Natal" motion stuff, and I think Peter Molyneaux's Milo thing is outright bullshit.  Nintendo's fingertip pulse thing is a giant WTF and Sony's motion stuff actually looks the most interesting.

It's a great time to be a gamer.

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.

Week of World of Warcraft

I spent the last week playing WoW almost exclusively, but I can hardly remember what I did in the game. It all just seems to blur together. I spent a bunch of time in Stranglethorn Vale doing quests and a little PvP here and there. There was this one poor Warrior a few levels below me that I ran into and killed repeatedly. Another time I was drafted into a ganking party, which basically just amounts to griefing people. I left pretty soon after I realized we weren't going to get any honorable kills doing that.

It's so hard to think of specific things I did that warrant mission in the game. It's kind of amazing considering the amount of time I spent playing it over the last week. I'm halfway through level 43 now, and almost have the Green Hills of Stranglethorn achievement. Basically, I did a lot of running around killing stuff and taking the proof of that work back to people who would shower me with silver pieces and experience points. I also messed around with some mods and checked out a lvl 4 Draenei warrior that was left on my account from it's previous steward. It's more fun than it sounds. It's like a treadmill, but a really good one. I guess. At any rate, I'm going to be playing a larger variety of stuff this week.

My DS backlog is fat and bloated and disgusting, so I whittled a few games off of it this weekend. I briefly tried them all out just long enough to confirm that I'd never play them again, and once or twice wondered why I ever bought them in the first place. Gone now, are: Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword, Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime, and Lunar Knights. Each of these must have been on my shelf a year or more. I'm trying to get away from the buy-and-sit-on-it thing, and move toward a buy-and-play-it-right-away model. Strike while the iron is hot and all that. Which is one reason I want to play more Far Cry 2 and Galactrix this week.

The other games I played just a little last night were Peggle and Pixel Junk Eden. I'm working through the adventure modes of both Peggle Deluxe and Peggle Nights, and I'm still just barely into Eden, as well. Cool game, though.

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.

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.

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!