Diablo Has Returned

I mentioned in my last entry that I was planning to play a lot of ipad games on my trip to Japan. Well, that didn't happen. In fact, it seems like there is no better way to ensure that I will not play a game than for me to blog about doing so. It's very strange.

I didn't play much of anything at all on the trip itself, since I was mostly busy doing a myriad of other things. I played a battle or two of Tactics Ogre on the planes there, and while I was in Tokyo I picked up a copy of Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, which I've spent about 5 hours playing, since.

It's definitely Monster Hunter! I really enjoyed what I played of Tri on the Wii (about 50 hours' worth, if I recall), and that experience helps to make heads or tails of this game, which is pretty similar, but does have a few key differences. Being on PSP, there is of course no right-hand method for camera control. I've tried "the claw," but haven't found it really necessary thus far. I've only done the first single player quest and a bunch of tutorial quests at this point, but there is a way to center the camera behind you by tapping the L button, and that has been sufficient. I like to think I'll have time to play a lot more of this game sometime in the future. We'll see.

Arriving back in the States after a couple of weeks, I would have liked to jump back into playing a lot of Dota 2, but I overworked some muscles in my back and was laid up on the couch, instead. I have slowly worked myself up to sitting at the PC by playing some matches of Tribes and messing around a bit with the new level creator tool for Portal 2. I have made one level so far, and it is hardly an inspired work of genius. It's cool that you can do that, though.

And, of course, one of the biggest releases of the year has just dropped on us. Yes, Diablo III is here at long last. 24 to 36 hours on from release, it is even playable, when the servers are up. I was at least able to get on last night (about 24 hours post official release) long enough to create my female Wizard, Meiairi, and play through the first couple of quests. I'm still only about halfway through the content that I played through three times during the beta. I went with the Wizard because it was the most fun of the three classes I played in beta, and yes, because she is sexy. Her beam attacks are particularly sexy. When I played the beta, the rune system had yet to be implemented, so I am excited to get into that once I get her to level 6. She's at 5 now.

The real currency auction house (Blizzard seems to be calling it the RMTAH) is not yet online, unfortunately. I'm really looking forward to making a buck on that. If I could even just make enough money playing Diablo to pay for the next expansion pack or some Steam games, I'd be thrilled. And if I can make more than that....

Falling Behind

Man, it's like I haven't played anything over the last couple of weeks. Well, that's not exactly true. I did manage to get through the Portal 2 co-op mode with a friend. That was pretty fun. I tooled around in Portal 1 some, also. I guess Valve wasn't doing Steam Cloud back when I played through it on PC the first time, because I didn't have any saves or anything for it when I loaded it back up. That was well over two years ago, though. I'm not sure when they began the cloud thing. I need to finish up a playthrough to unlock all the challenge rooms and such. I'll bet my playthrough of Half-Life: Source is lost, too. Steam shows me having played 5 hours of that game, but I finished it, so something is off, there. Maybe they started tracking times when I was midway through.

So the resolution games for the last couple of weeks have been Sniper Elite, which I played about an hour of--pretty cool so far, very deliberate--and Trine, which I played about 45 minutes of just last night--also pretty cool, but no saving mid level? WTF? I'll need to replay almost all of that level, now.

I've been sick and otherwise indisposed lately, so I haven't played anything else but some Team Fortress 2. It's the perfect game to mess around in and kill off a couple of podcasts. Plus, I've been meaning to put more time into it forever to try out all the classes really well and to get a bunch of items. I found my second Gunslinger arm for the Engineer yesterday. I already have a vintage one though, so someone hit me up if you want a trade!

Resolve

A lot of the games I've been playing lately are ones that have been selected by Resolution on Call Of Podcast, or are on my short list of "must finish" games that I would like to knock out before my baby is due this summer.

Portal 2 was on that list, and when it was released last week, I played through it as quick as I could across three evenings. I only made it through the single-player portion, but hope to tackle the co-op soon. I had a great time with it, just like the first. I'll refrain from talking any more about it, because just look at the internet this week. It's lousy with Portal 2 talk.

I've also been playing a lot of STALKER, another game on that short list. I think I've made some pretty good progress, such that I'm about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through it now. Maybe I can finish that game off this week, and then move on to Fallout 2 before The Witcher 2 is released. I've been live-tweeting my playthrough with the hashtag "#stalk3r," because there's constantly something cool and interesting happening in the Zone.

For Resolution, I've dug into Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 and Max Payne. Both are pretty good, and I'll carry on playing RGG3 to keep up my language practice and because I'm a fan of the series. With Max Payne, I came to a good stopping point. Maybe I'll come back to it eventually.

In the few days leading up to Portal 2's release, you could play any of the "potato sack" indie games to speed along its release. I contributed by checking out Super Meat Boy briefly (really needed a pad for this), and playing a couple of hours in Killing Floor, which plays kind of like a cross between the end scene of a Left 4 Dead scenario and Counter-Strike. You get one life per round, and kills earn you money you can spend to upgrade your arsenal between rounds. It's pretty simple, and fun.

"I'd like to get my hands on the guy responsible for all of this."

I believe it's considered dramatic irony when one of the Barneys, Half-Life's ubiquitous security guards utters the phrase above. This may also be the first little inkling of trouble coming with the mute protagonist convention. I realize why they do it, but I'm never really put off when the Master Chief contributes to the conversation as any normal human being would. I don't feel disconnected or at odds with the way the narrative is unfolding, even when the speakers are lunkheads like Dom and Marcus. I may not like the character very much (Altair), but them having a personality adds to the experience in a way that, until speech recognition and AI are improved dramatically, casting myself as the main character cannot.

The mute main character bothered me in Chrono Trigger, Dragon Quest, and others. It can be said to have worked in Portal, but how many characters are there in that game that are trying to have a conversation with you? A Portal with a character who wisecracks back at GLaDOS wouldn't have had the same charm, but grunts and sighs and exclamations of "a ha!" may have added something used sparingly. Think Samus Aran in Metroid Prime. By contrast, some of the most awesome main characters are the ones with a lot of dialogue; Solid Snake, Kiryuu Kazuma, Leon S. Kennedy, the Prince of Persia, even Lara Croft and the aforementioned Gears.

I completed Half-Life: Source this weekend. I'd heard that Xen was really frustrating because of the platforming, but I didn't have much trouble at all with that. It was those flying big-head bastards that got to me the most. I thought the big headcrab boss battle was cool as a level of its own, but the final boss was kind of frustrating in how he could kill you with outright with one of his attacks, and how he kept teleporting me away to annoying places where I'd have to make annoying jumps to get teleported back to continue fighting him. I fought him for probably half an hour before I realized he was absorbing energy from the crystals in on the walls of his chamber and blew them up. The thing is, I'm not sure that even really helped to kill him, since there wasn't much indication as such. It didn't seem to stop him from using his most annoying attacks, that much is sure.

I never knew that Half-Life had more than one ending, but I discovered both. The bad ending gave me flashbacks to the end of the shareware version of Doom, where the final telepad takes you to a room of demons that rip you to shreds. You buy the full version and the telepad then warps you to Deimos as it should. I never knew that Gordon Freeman was supposed to be "hired" by the G-man, either. I know next to nothing of the Half-Life 2 story, so I'll be interested to get into that series later on sometime. I think my next FPS has got to be Far Cry 2, though.

I messed around some more with Crysis last Friday night. I decided to bump my resolution one level down to 1920X1080, I think it is. Before it was 2xxxX12xx or something. I'm not great at remembering resolution numbers. At any rate, I couldn't tell any difference in looks, but the frame rate seems better, and there seems to be less v-sync issues. I think I'm sort of getting the whole power suit thing. I've been taking a stealthy approach so far, but setting the suit to strengh mode and then going and punching down buildings on top of enemy soldiers is fun, too. I get the feeling the game is meant to be as much an open playground as a linear progression through specific battlegrounds.

Finally, I played some WoW, levelling up to 37 and into some kick-ass new gear, a nice scarlet helm with bull's horns on the sides, and a viscious looking new two-handed axe. When I first concieved of my warrior, I intended him to be a tank primarily. Extreme damage seems to be the way to go for solo play, though--the quick way, at the very least. Just being a warrior grants me a suite of abilities to call on when facing multiple mobs at once, so that I can pretty easily survive 2 and 3-on-1 encounters with mobs at or around the same level. My cool new axe actually has a chance at striking nearby foes in addition to the one I'm fighting at the moment. Both of these drops came from Scarlet Monastery, which my brother-in-law ran me through alone several times and let me take all the cool stuff for myself. It was easy as breathing to his 80 rogue.

I did some exploring around Desolace and got the achievement for that, also did a bunch of mining and smithing. I have a problem--too many quests. My log is full. I think I'm going to go over to Hillsbrad and do all of those and maybe come back to Desolace or another appropriate zone later. There's just too much to explore! Since I don't see myself hardcore raiding at 80, I've been thinking I might roll and Alliance character and see some of the other stuff in the game. God knows when that'd be. I might want to try some other MMO by then.

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!