Embark: Holiday 2009 & Games Of The Year

I was just packing things for the annual pilgrimage to see family around the Christmas holiday. Not games; I've not yet completely decided what I'm going to take. I'm tempted to try installing Planescape: Torment on my wife's shitty old laptop just to be able to take that with me. I don't have any sort of Windows virtual machine on my MacBook, unfortunately. I am bringing the game files and my saves with me on a USB HDD, on the off chance that my parents' old-by-2002-standards machine can be coaxed into running it. I think it just may.

I've been playing a lot of Torment lately, and I'm still in Sigil, the starting city, though I've got four members in my party now, and will probably soon recruit a fifth. The writing in this game is remarkable, and the way it parcels out the background of The Nameless One irresistibly compelling.

Aside from the aforementioned epic, which roots me to my chair for three to eight-hour stretches, I've done some dabbling this week with Red Faction: Guerilla multiplayer, enticed by a 5x (!) XP period, and Torchlight, goaded by the game's new Steamworks and Steam Achievement integration. I also was forced to rush out to Best Buy this weekend to pick up the Metroid Prime Trilogy on Wii for the insane bargain price of $20. It's a hell of a package to begin with, and that good of a deal made me turn in my Borderlands completion token to get it. Now I'll need to complete something else (Torment, maybe) before Mass Effect 2 arrives on January 26th.

At first the Trilogy disc wouldn't load up on my Wii, and I was afraid I'd gotten one of the bum one that has trouble reading dual-layer DVDs, but after a couple of tries it booted up. It was probably just the fact that I hadn't turned on the Wii since whenever I posted about the Legend of Zelda. I actually had to replace the AA's in the wiimote, which is a regular occurrence when I go to get my waggle on. I played through Metroid Prime 1 when it came out on the gamecube, (but never touched either of the other games in the series), so I thought I probably wouldn't replay the entire thing, but that it'd be a good place to jump into to test out the new Wii motion-control scheme. It takes some getting used to, but by the end of the intro space station segment and descent to the planet the game takes place on, I had more or less become accustomed to it, and I actually quite like it. Swapping of visors could maybe done a better way, but it's not hard to come to the conclusion that given time and evolution, such a control scheme could obsolete the twin-stick method--which is really not that great to begin with, merely the best we have at the moment.

Starting up Metroid Prime 1 again, though,... I don't know... I might want to replay the damned thing. It's probably a bad idea; I should probably just move on to the second game in the series whenever I feel like playing it after the holidays.

This week also happens to be a week of Pure White World Tendency for the Demon's Souls universe, so I took the opportunity to jump into 1-1 to go to the execution grounds to the left of the beginning area and kill Miralda and collect some loot. While crawling around the Boletarian Palace now at soul level high 30's, I decided to pay our old friend Red Knight a visit and kill him. It was an especially sweet victory. From there I moved on back to 2-2, the level I have been working on, and got summoned as a blue phantom to someone else's world and shown the way to the boss, Flamelurker, and how to fight him. We killed him and I won my body back and then promptly went and fought him with my own summoned companion.

I wouldn't have won that battle alone, at least not without several attempts under my belt. My companion and I kept trading hate back and forth, attracting the beast this way and that, taking advantage of backstab opportunities as they came, using almost MMO-like tactics. What an awesome game. I think it's safe to call it my Game Of The Year 2009, and since I'm going to go ahead and name it, why waste time? I'll lay it out here:

My 2009 GOTY: Demon's Souls

Runner-Up: Red Faction: Guerilla

See the posts I've made about each game for my reasons why. There are a whole host of 2009 games I haven't even touched, but if I can't be compelled enough to buy and play them, then they don't deserve a spot in the running, then, do they? Similarly, there are some outstanding games I played in 2009 (Far Cry 2, Torment to name a couple) that, were they 2009 games, might belong in one of those spots, but alas; they aren't. I would like to give a shout-out to a few honorable mentions that were just edged out of the Runner-Up spot, though: Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Demigod, and Torchlight.

For those keeping track:

2007 GOTY: Bioshock, Runner-Up: Halo 3

2008 GOTY: Metal Gear Solid 4, Runner-Up: Gears of War 2

I guess I really like to shoot/slice stuff?

Two New Contenders Enter The Ring

The Royal Rumble of my gaming time continues to get more and more packed. Borderlands and Torchlight come available this week on Steam, and I'm looking forward to playing both.

The last couple of weeks have actually been pretty sparse in terms of gaming. I played a few hours of Dawn of War II two weekends ago, and had a couple of sessions of Firefight, both times teamed up with one other, played just a bit of Yakuza 2, a little TF2 here and there, and a few minutes each of Rock Band and Red Faction: Guerilla, showing a friend how awesome it is. Oh, and there were two post-podcast sessions of Demigod, too.

It's been so light due to being sick, tired, busy, and spending time watching movies and reading. I'm reading Halo: The Fall of Reach at the moment. It's pretty good for a book based on a video game universe! Three of the existing 6 Halo books are by this author, so I'm pretty sure those at least will be worthwhile, too. The two Mass Effect novels I read were decent, but I'd say this is a little better. I was kind of worried that delving too much into the fiction would ruin my 'blank slate' picture of the Chief, and I guess that has been supplanted somewhat, but I'm not exactly put off by what the novel has presented.

Heights To Which I Don't Even Bother Aspiring

In the XBLA release of Ikaruga you can download replays of any score on the leaderboards. The no.1 playthrough is truly something to behold. There is a lot to be learned there, but in my first several attempts at mimicry, the only thing I managed to do any more quickly and efficiently was get myself killed. In my own bumbling way of playing the game, I was able to get much farther, albeit racking up a much smaller score.

I'll never be a super hardcore endgame WoW player, and I have no delusions about this. All I hope for is to hit the cap and still be entertained there by PVP, and to be able to get cool items through that with which to own the opposing faction. Especially the Death Knights. Especially the Death Knights.

I played a bunch more WoW, in what has become my weekend (and weeknight) routine as of late. I finally blew off all of my Azeroth quests and leapt head-first through the Dark Portal, and man, am I glad. After a remarkably short time questing, I already have gear that is on a whole new level compared to what I had up to this point. The greens I'm wearing from Hellfire Peninsula quests are probably comparable to blues and purples from Oldworld. There were also a couple of really cool quests where I went on bombing runs from the back of a wyvern. The only bad thing about Outland so far is the much higher frequency of being ganked. I hate to think about Northrend. I suppose I will have to pick up Wrath soonish, though.

I also spent a couple of hours leveling my Mage alt with Lonesteban's own, a Rogue. For the time being we are both of a level. A mistake in quest reward choice left me with an offhand item and not being able to wield staff, so I trained sword and dagger skills and did my best to find a one-handed main weapon with a stat I could use. In the end I bought a sword with 2 stamina for 1 gold on the auction house.

Otherwise, I played some Wrecking Crew mode in RFG. I'm going for a couple of acheivements in that along with the ones for multiplayer. I don't know if I'll ever get all of the single player ones, though, unless a patch addresses some of the issues with a couple of them. I'm debating picking up the upcoming single player DLC pack, as well, but 10 bucks is kind of a lot in digitally distributed gaming these days.

Playlog 7/6 -7/15

I got a bunch of Red Faction: Guerilla multiplayer action in over the past week, and man, that's a blast. I hope it continues to have a solid playerbase, because it's pretty unique, and it's got a great experience system with character model unlocks. The game modes end up pretty varied as well, because not only do they switch up the objectives and have 21 maps to play on, but there are tons of awesome weapons in the game (everything from the single player and more) around 10 backpacks with crazy abilities like jetpacking around, vertical superthrusting, rhino demolition charging through walls, x-ray vision, stealth, concussive blasts, super speed, healing, firepower enhancements, and tremor inducing. Combinations of the backpacks and weapons lead to insane and chaotic action. As far as competitive console multiplayer, it's more fun than Gears in my eyes, and right up there with Halo in terms of playability. Buy this game!

Another one you can buy, and real cheap, too: Drop7 for iPhone/touch. It's a puzzle game on a 7x7 grid of blocks where billiard balls numbered 1-7 are placed one at a time (with no time limit per move) in rows and columns. They disappear when their number is equal to the number of consecutive, touching balls in their row of column. Fill a row up, and all 7s in that row will explode. If that leaves 4 balls, and one or more of those is a 4, then those will also explode. Not only are there the numbered balls, but there are solid color balls that once caught beside an exploding ball, have their shells cracked and become regular number balls. Over time the whole playfield is shifted up by a new row of solid balls, and if any column is shifted up out of the playfield, the game ends. Like most puzzle games, it's hard to explain but simple to grasp if you try it. Drop7, however, isinsanely addictive--once it clicks. Go try the lite version and give it about 5 minutes so you get over the impulse to just match numbered balls and expect them to explode (because they won't).

So, apart from those, I've been playing a ton of WoW. Not only did I finally get my Warrior to level 60, and begin tying up loose ends in Azeroth before heading to Outland, but I also went and created an alt. People who knew me from my time in FFXI won't be super surpised to find out she's a mage, a blood elf, specifically. Currently level 11, I plan to level her up using the Frost spec, which is more or less universally considered best for solo PvE and PvP, too. The thought occurred to me to give her the name Nascia, that's not Nascia. Her name is Orene, on the Jubei'Thos server. Not on Blackrock with Ropvanks, so for the moment I can't twink her, though I may transfer Rop over at some point in the future. He needs all his own gold for mounts and stuff on the way to 80, anyway.

So, Rop is through Winterspring and messing around in Eastern/Western Plaguelands a bit before heading through the Dark Portal, and Orene is still just getting started in Eversong Woods. Man, WoW is addictive. I fully intend to check out 2-3 other upcoming MMOs, but I can easily see myself coming back to WoW time and again. I still may let me subscription lapse in August, though, if for no other reason than to hit Mass Effect or Shivering Isles in Oblivion.

I like to shoot stuff.

I've played a bunch of shooters on XBLA this week. I jumped back into the original Geometry Wars trying to best my high score there--only managing to get approximately halfway there. I also booted up Rez again for the first time in forever to chill out to some techno and shoot some things all at once. I even played a game of Ikaruga. Some of the most satisfying games are purely mechanical, divorcing narrative and lore entriely from the experience.

Others garnish the main dish with it, like the other two games I spent a lot of time with over the last week. Red Faction: Guerilla serves it up merely as a raison de demolishment, and it works just fine. I completed that game's story campaign this week, and tried a single match of the multiplayer just to check it out and see the experience system. I'm still going to be playing RF:G for a while, because it's so damned awesome. I still have several achievements within reach in the single-player game (and Wrecking Crew), and I want to get a bunch of xp and unlock stuff in multiplayer, too. This is the Game Of The First Half Of My Year, which is based on the games I played in the time period, rather than what was released therein.

I also played a whole bunch of WoW. I'm level 58 now, working on quests all over Kalimdor, but mainly in Winterspring, Un'Goro Crater, and Silithus. I got the achievement for completing 500 quests yesterday. The new guild I joined, The Blood Knights, is working out pretty well. I joined after receiving a blind invite, having nothing to lose, but it seems like a good fit, actually. It seems to be made up of more casual, non-raiding types who level lots of alts and don't mind fielding my noobish questions about whether I should wear Pants A or Pants B. My WoW plan right now is to power on to 60, get my epic mount, complete the exploration achivements for Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms, and then probably jump into The Burning Crusade content and be on my way to 70.

Another Full Week

It was another busy week in gaming at chez Elmdor.

I played more WoW than anything, raising my Warrior up to almost level 56, and knocking through several zones in the process: The Blasted Lands, Azshara, Felwood, and on to Un'Goro Crater. Not that I exhausted them all of quests, just that I got in and looked around and quested until I was satisfied with each. I still want the achievement for exploring each zone fully, but that'll wait until I get my epic mount for the speed boost in running around (plus the help that being 60 will figure into things). This game is addicting, but it hasn't gotten it's hooks all the way into me the way FFXI did, and I don't think it ever will. At least I hope it won't. I like playing other things (and having a good marriage and being able to perform somewhat well at work).

Speaking of other things, I sat down with Red Faction a couple of nights this week, and ended up playing for longer than I expected both times. Yes, it's still badass. I'm at the final sector now, Eos, and still finding new weapons to play with. The rail gun is pretty cool. You can shoot guys through cover with it.

I played a bunch of Geometry Wars 2 and Super Stardust HD, as well. GW2's Pacifism mode is the real genius in that game, but the whole thing remains remarkably awesome. I like how the original GW isn't quite obsolete, too, with it's rotating gun modes, original music, and different multiplier scoring system from the Evolved mode in GW2. It doesn't look as clean as GW2, though. Stardust is also great, but I'm still pretty new to it. I laid waste to Lonesteban's high score in arcade mode, though, more than tripling it with a 16-and-a-half minute first life. Take that, you craven!

Elsewhere, I pulled out my GBA Final Fantasy II in-progress game from 2+ years ago and tried to continue on from that. I think I found the thread, now just to find where it leads. I also bought a couple of new iPhone games for a buck each, Knights Onrush and Hero of Sparta. I've only tried Knights so far, but it seems to be a simple and fun castle defense game, somewhat like a tower defense game, but on a more micro scale.

Tenebrous Maelstrom of Umbral Inferno

This is what my mind is like when I try to recall the games I played over the last week. I've been kind of busy. Let's do a list with quick and dirty impressions:

Hitman: Blood Money PC demo - good, but kind of low-fi, Xbox 1 gen-looking.
Vanguard Storm lite - simple FFTA-style strategy. $5? Not a good price on the app store.
GeoDefense lite - coolest tower defense I've played on iPhone. Didn't buy it, though.
UniWar Lite - complex hex-based 3-way strategy. Need to play more.

Einhander - still really hard, still fucking awesome.
Pixel Junk Monsters - probably coolest tower defense game I've played at all (short time only)
Super Stardust HD - played a couple of games. Already nearing Lonesteban's high score. Makes me want to play more Geometry Wars 2, too.
World of Warcraft - jumped in and killed some stuff for the first time in a month. Currently killing stuff in The Blasted Lands. Still level 52.
Red Faction: Guerilla - liberated Badlands, finished all guerilla actions up to and into Oasis, still having a ball. Most fun game in a while. So great.

I picked up Twilight Princess again after playing the initial couple of hours probably a year ago. I figured it's about time I played a Wii game, and since it's been years and years since I really played a Zelda game (the last was Ocarina of Time), where better to start? So far I've played through the first dungeon, the Forest Temple, got the boomerang, and made my way across Hyrule Field to Kakariko Village. The dungeon took me a while to get through. It was really well designed, though. It will be cool to get further into the game and see more. It's really similar to OoT in a lot of ways, so far.

I never played Wind Waker past a couple of hours in, when someone asked me to go collect butterflies for him. I kind of wish I had stuck with it now, though. Ah well, Twilight Princess it is. I have Phantom Hourglass for DS, too.

The Wii may end up getting a lot of play in the latter half of the year. Besides Zelda, I have Super Mario Galaxy to play through, and I'm more excited than I should be about both Metroid Prime Trilogy and New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Who knows, I might dip into VC stuff at some point, too. I want to play FFIV: The After Years...

Take My Hand

Since last writing here, I righted a longstanding wrong in my gaming experience. Back in 2001, I bought Ico just as it came out, but for whatever reason I never got around to finishing it. I'm not even certain how far into it I got, but if I stopped where I think I did, I was only 30 minutes or from the end.

I started Ico this Saturday, and after three or four sessions, finished it tonight with a time of about 6 hours into it. What a beautiful game. The castle the game is set in is remarkably consistent and well realized. If you see a big building, you can go into it, and just about any feature you see in the game, you will traverse at one point or another. Every time you "zone" onto a new screen, you are right where you ought to be; there are no awkward transitions between one area and the next. It feels like a real environment you could actually walk around in. It's gorgeous, too, and solemn and majestic.

The only things that slightly break the illusion are elaborate puzzles and constructions in each area, but what can you do? Ico is just about the perfect environment navigation puzzle game. I can't really think of one better. I appreciate the lesser focus on combat in Ico as compared with Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Maybe I should try the newest Prince of Persia game sometime.

I wonder at the connections between Shadow of the Colossus and Ico. SotC is apparently a prequel to the latter, and seems to show the origin of the horned boy phenomenon. Both games share an evil, black, misty antagonist, and of course both games share a similar architecture. Maybe The Last Guardian will elaborate some, in its way, on this mysterious world.

Elsewise, I probably put 10 hours into Red Faction: Guerilla over the last week. It's a blast. I've done a crapload of Guerilla Actions to this point, and am working on liberating Badlands and Oasis. The weapons in this game are awesome, especially the Nano Rifle, which shoots a bullet of something like anti-matter that just disintegrates a big chunk of whatever it hits. It's great for say, taking out struts and buttresses of a big bridge over a wide chasm as an armed convoy rolls across it.

I still have yet to try Red Faction's multiplayer, but the single player is doing more than enough to keep me entertained for the time being. This is easily the most purely fun game I've played since Crackdown.

Killer, Crusader, Revolutionary

I was up until 6 a.m. over this past Saturday night, binging on Oblivion.

I followed the Dark Brotherhood quest line to its inexorable conclusion, with no shortage of surprises along the way. Just as I was starting to question the point of moving from one dead-drop to another for another parcel of gold and another mark, the whole thing got turned on its head in a crazy and amazing way. No one should play Oblivion and skip over this 'faction.'

Right after finishing that, I started on the first expansionary quest line, Knights of the Nine. I had previously thought to just create a new character for each faction, and had for a few, but here I just decided to continue on with my Rogue I had been using as an assassin. It's easier to fast travel around the world if you've been around a bunch of places before. So I took my remorseless death dealer on a pilgrimage around the world to the shrines of the nine divines, gathered the sanctified relics of a holy knight, restored an ancient order of crusaders, and led them to combat an evil from beyond the realm of mortals. It only took about 4 and a half hours.

Now the only major things left in Oblivion are the Arena (no plans to do this) and the larger Shivering Isles expansion, which I'll come back for sometime later. My copy of Red Faction arrived yesterday afternoon.

I got about three hours with the game last night; long enough to liberate the first of six Martian sectors. It's pretty awesome so far. This GeoMod 2.0 tech is tons of fun. If you've ever wanted to plant charges around the circumference of a giant smokestack and blow them all at once, this is your game. You can demolish bridges as your enemy is crossing them, or just bring down their base on top of their heads. The game has a GTA-like open world mission-based structure to it, but gives you even more freedom to go about your objectives, simply because if you don't like where the entrance or exit to a building is, you can create your own in seconds.

I've been on a number of different mission types so far, ranging from defending rebel camps to extracting hostages, destroying important enemy facilities, and puzzle-like destruction challenges that give you time and weapon/ammo limits. It's great fun so far, and I'm excited to explore more of Mars and blow more stuff up for fun and profit. The multiplayer has been getting a ton of praise from RL friends of mine and lots of people on forums and podcasts, too, so I'll need to check that out soon.

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.