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.

I Need To De-frag My Brain

I don't think I can even summon up a complete list off all the games I've played over the last week.  It's been so disparate lately with getting my new PC and installing and sampling tons of stuff--the dust has got to settle so I can see the way forward from here.

Console side first - Thin Lizzy tracks came out for Rock Band last week, so I downloaded those and tried them out.  They're from a forthcoming live album, so it's the first anyone's really ever heard them, though each of the songs (Jailbreak, Cowboy Song, and The Boys Are Back) are fairly well-known.  Love me some Thin Lizzy!  I also played some of the awesome Megadeth DLC, Peace Sells.... But Who's Buying?

On top of that, I played some Burnout the other day after downloading the re-start patch (which institutes a previously unavailable event re-start option, among other things), and got my B liscense.  I also downloaded the Halo Wars demo and have booted that up a couple of times since.  I dig it!  It's like a streamlined-for-console-controls version of Starcraft.  I was a little skeptical--cautiously optimistic--but playing the demo has cemented it for me.  I'm definitely going to be picking that up.  I'm glad, because I'm a big fan of the Halo franchise, and I'd hate to see it shitted up.

PC gaming-wise is where it starts to get a little hazy.  Let me just go through each of the games installed on my computer this week, and you can assume that I've spent an hour or two at the very least with all of them:  Team Fortress 2, Diablo II, Starcraft, Oblivion, WoW, Mount and Blade (demo), and Half-Life: Source.

Mount and Blade is an interesting Indie game.  The closest comparison I can make is Oblivion, but M&B is much more about factions.  You can join one of several in the game, and you actually accrue your own army as you go along.  I played for only a couple of hours so far, but it's pretty cool.  You start out on a giant overworld-style map, and you go around to the tons of little villages and castles that dot the land, encountering armies and bandits along the way that take you into a battlefield mode to fight.  It's your army versus theirs in a full-on medieval battle, done in a way unlike any I've ever seen before.  If you're mounted, you can gallop by enemy dudes and strike them with your sword, or feather them with arrows if you can figure out how to shoot halfway decent; I couldn't!  You can take prisoners or recruit guys from local villages, you can become the vassal of a local lord, or just do whatever, it seems, and the local economy is effected.  Towns become richer or poorer based on how the war is going, or one of several other factors you can no doubt influence.  I want to get back to this one eventually for more in-depth play.

The other main thing I focused a lot on this week was Half-Life: Source, the most-current (for now) version of the original HL game.  I played Half-Life some back in 1999, during my first year at college, but I'm pretty sure that was all LAN deathmatch.  I may have played the first hour or so of the campaign, but that's about it.  I'm beginning a full series playthrough now (probably to continue to about the point when HL2: Episode 3 is released), though, and it's still pretty great, even 10 years later.  I'm to a point now about maybe halfway in (or less), where there's a big tentacle monster in a missile silo, if you're familiar with the game.  Now I really understand people's aversion to headcrabs...

Stasis

This week has been much the same as the last as far as gaming goes: lots of Halo online with guys I went to college with, a little Rock Band, and a little Nocturne. Most of my free time the last couple of weeks or so has been spent watching seasons of The Wire, but that's another discussion altogether, and I like to keep this blog focused on gaming.

The biggest thing to note is the progress I made in Nocturne; it was only a few hours' worth, but I made it through a couple of key boss battles and kind of got the momentum rolling once again. There was this gauntlet of 3 bosses ending with a battle against Thor, with no saves in between. Thor kept kicking my ass until started exploiting the game's battle system. Basically, if I go to fight him with a demon in my party who can null his lightning, then every time he uses it, it costs him the rest of his actions for that whole turn. So, finally I managed to down him, and go back to the save point to ensure I don't have to do it again, and lucky for that because the next time I set foot in that area, I get ambushed by Dante from Devil May Cry. It seems he's been set to hunt down a demon matching my description, and then he owns my entire party. Awesome cameo! Anyway, I came back at him with a bunch of phys-immune demons and beat him back so that now he's either questioning his orders or reporting back to Lucifer that I've passed his test. So now I get word that there is a powerful fiend lurking nearby, and I search him out, and find Daisoujou, some kind of Necro-Buddhist monk with a mean sutra who is currently blocking my progress. I'll figure him out later.

Aside from that, I've just been looking at how much I'm going to have to spend to get a nice gaming PC sometime soon. I'm thinking that I'm going to work on cleaning some more of my backlog out over the next few months, and then sometime around my birthday in February, get a nice rig to play some of this stuff on PC I keep hearing so much about. A quick list of stuff I want to get:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. & its expansion Clear Sky

Sins of a Solar Empire

Half Life series

Team Fortress 2

Left 4 Dead

Fallout 3

WoW (maybe)

Oblivion (maybe, for mods)

past games going back 10 years or more

future releases like StarCraft II & Diablo III

There's tons of stuff on PC, and I'm looking forward to, for once, having the capability to dabble in some of it. For now, though, I have to try to save up some cash, or at least refrain from spending too much while I've still got this massive glut of things to work through.

The Current Rotation

Most of this past week I've been going back and forth between Halo 3 multiplayer and Rock Band 2, with a little bit of Diablo II and SMT: Nocturne thrown in there for spice. This is the current status quo, and it's hard to imagine it changing much in the near future. Three of those games are the perennial type, ones that you can just keep coming back to forever and ever. The fourth is one of those cursedly long JRPGs that eat my life for months at a time. Perhaps for the sake of progress I should spend more of my time on Nocturne per time spent on the others.

I've gotten a number of remarkable achievements in this Halo 3 Indian Summer I've been having, including the Double Double (2 Double Kills in a ranked free-for-all game) today. I actually had 4 doubles that game. Relatively speaking, I was on fire. I still finished in the bottom half of the scoreboard, though. Tough crowd. Halo multi is a ton of fun, but it's a good thing I don't give a shit about my kill/death ratio, because it's terrrrrrrible. I'm the type of guy that like to just jump on a mongoose and go headlong kamikaze into the other team's base just for the thrill. I also like sticking guys with plasma grenades and blowing up warthogs with rocket launchers. This is making me want to go play some more.

Oh yeah, Tokyo Game Show was this past week. Yeah, I almost didn't know it either, with the lack of just about anything to speak of there. We got Halo 3 Recon announced, and.... ... .... Bayonetta looks kind of cool? Aside from that, the biggest story seems to be that Capcom's RE team is apparently pulling their head out and giving us somewhat of an intuitive control scheme for RE5. Sucks that it's co-op centered. How the hell am I going to find anyone to play with when all my friends are either on US Central or Japan time, and we've all got full-time jobs to boot? And I for one ain't going near an AI-controlled partner. I'd sooner play her with my toes on my guitar controller.

18 Floors Down the Yggdrasil Labyrinth

Since my last update, I've been playing Etrian Odyssey almost exclusively. I thought that after hopping back in I would just make my way through the third stratum (B11-B15), but once I got on a roll I couldn't stop, and as of this writing I'm busy mapping out B18 in the fourth stratum, the Sandy Barrens. The plot (the garnish that it is) has started to kick in, and I'm eager to see where it goes, and what the final strata are like.

I finally unlocked the Ronin and Hexer classes, not that I plan to use them much. My core unit of Protecter, Landsknecht, Combat Medic (Caduceus FTW!), Survivalist, and Troubador, has yet to encounter any F.O.E. they couldn't take down. This game is crazy addictive. It takes just the very core gameplay of your typical turn-based JRPG, adds a nice character customization system, and then puts you in a long dungeon-crawl and leaves you to do the mapping yourself with the stylus. It may not sound like a lot of fun, but in practice it's great. And the story is told in first-person, as if by a DM, so there's no melodramatic latter-day FF protagonist angsty crap.

In other news, I played just long enough of GTA IV to get past that one mission I was on, and I failed once again to get past Green Grass and High Tides on hard guitar in Rock Band.

Time Flies

Has it already almost been a week? The big thing over this past weekend was some XBLA stuff, some Rock Band, and gearing up for MGS2. A lot of that time was spent on Puzzle Quest alone. I'm determined to play that game all the way through to the end. I have no clue how far into it I might be, though. It's just too good of a game; that devious combination of puzzle and rpg tropes is the definition of addicting.

I flew a few missions more in Ikaruga, too. I've made it up to around halfway through the 3rd level (on easy with max lives and continues). That game is beautiful in it's simplicity, and it looks great in high-def. Not a bad deal at $10, either.

I found Monster Hunter Freedom for PSP used, and in mint condition, for $20 at EB the other day, so I decided to give it a whirl. My first impressions are "someone please tell me how to play this game." A couple of times now I've gone off on my first quest for the hunter's guild, which from what I can make of the briefing, is just a test to see if you can either survive a trip out into the wilds or if you can actually find this cryptic artifact that I'm assuming actually exists, not having seen any evidence that would lead me to actually believe in it. I've just wandered around so far, attacking random things and wondering where the hell this "paws pass" or whatever it is I'm looking for is. My PSP battery died halfway through my morning commute today, and that didn't help matters.

My first couple of hours with Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance were spent reading the 3 'books' of back story in the "special" menu of the game. It's interesting how those are set up. There is meant to have been a book published by one of the minor characters in the first MGS, detailing the behind-the-scenes happenings in and around the events at Shadow Moses. The first article of interest is a mock book review of said book, the second a mock-noir recounting by a bumbling journalist of his own investigations into the incident and the book (kind of humorous), and the third is the 'book' itself, which reveals a few previously unknown facts about the Patriots, a guy called Richard Ames, and what really happened in those islands north of Alaska's Fox archipelago. Altogether this stage-setting amounts to about 500 'pages' (a paragraph or so each). I try not to dwell on what my reading all of this says about myself.

As far as the game proper, I've made it through the Tanker chapter, and about an hour or so into the Raiden section of the game. I've only played through MGS2 once in the past, so my memories of the story are nebulous at best. I'm thoroughly enjoying it to this point.

1998 2: 2008

I guess I have a thing for 10-year-old games at the moment. I've been re-playing Metal Gear Solid from the collection I recently picked up. I had only planned to re-play MGS2 as a refresher before 4 comes out in June, but I figured I might as well hop in at MGS1 considering the last two games in the series I played were MGS3 and Portable Ops (and, as anyone reading this no doubt is aware, the series chronology goes: 3>PO>1>2>4).

This is my fourth or fifth time through the game, counting solo and co-op (passing the controller back and forth with a friend) playthroughs. The game holds up amazingly well, especially with the texture smoothing the PS3 can do for it. There's also an option to stretch the image to 16:9, but while that has worked for me in the past with GTA: San Andreas, it makes MGS look really off. Most amazingly, though, is how the actual gameplay holds up. I keep trying to figure out if this is a sign of one amazing game or a whole industry's stagnation.

At first it was a bit jarring not to be able to pull off Metal Gear moves I've become accustomed to, like the somersault, rail-hang, or box-climb (let alone first-person aiming). Before long, though, I was once again used to the relatively simplistic control scheme of the original MGS. Even after all this time, the game feels nearly perfectly executed, including the cut-scenes. The character models are now overly blocky, but none of the impact is lost. Truly an amazing feat if there ever was one. And David Hayter just sounds so good. Also, the hand-drawn character portraits present in the codec calls are hella cool, and they should have stuck with those throughout the series.

I'm just past the torture sequence, at around 6-and-a-half hours in, which is somewhere around half-way if I remember correctly. I know I still have the Hind (D), Sniper Wolf, Vulcan Raven, and the Rex/Liquid fights to go. I'll probably finish the game this week and move on the part 2 shortly.

More contemporaneously, I've picked up Ninja Gaiden DS, and it's awesome! This is hands-down the best gameplay use of the stylus I've seen yet. Admittedly, I've not played Zelda yet, but all indicators point to Ninja Gaiden one-upping it in the control department. Ryu controls smoothly and swiftly outside of battle, and quickly and precisely in battle. Like any good ninja, his sole purpose is to flip out and kill people.

This game was created expressly for the DS, and it really shows. Even in DS-as-book orientation, the game just feels awesome to play (even for a lefty like myself, thanks to the flip option). Stabbing and jabbing with the stylus is like second nature, and jumping maneuvers like the Flying Swallow or Izuna Drop also feel great to pull off by flicking the stylus up to jump, then across or up again to perform the attack. When I think of the feeling of playing this game, there's only one other game that comes to mind with such a smooth sense of fighting and mobility, and that's Symphony of the Night, and that's a hell of a game to draw comparison to.

Briefly, I downloaded the demo of Ikaruga on XBLA, and it's pretty cool (and tough). I also popped in Rock Band for a bit, in perverse observance of Europe's plight with this game. And finally, I hit up Puzzle Quest for a few minutes. They really should have created unique quests in that game for each of the character classes. I'm so far in with my Wizard that it'd be a huge waste of time to start over with another character (but I have anyway, once before), but I'd like to try out other classes, such as the 4 new ones they are adding in the ex-pac just over the horizon.