I mentioned appreciating my good Warhammer 40,000 games in my last entry. Space Marine is one such game. Always good for a quick taste of the power and majesty of what it is like to blast some orks as one of Primarch Guilliman's finest, the Ultramarines. I wanted to see if anyone was playing the multiplayer mode of this still, in light of Eternal Crusade seeming dead. No luck, at least not at that time. I may try again sometime, but even if no one is playing, the campaign is still pretty cool.
Another game I jumped into for a little bit on a whim was Just Cause 2. It's just a big open-world playground where the object of the game is literally just to go in and cause chaos around the countryside to somehow whip up enough anti-government sentiment to topple it. It's ludicrous, but the game world is a gorgeous tropical paradise where everything can be flown or driven, and the character has a great grapple-arm and parachute combination to make the most of doing daring stunts.
I accidentally clicked on Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin Edition in my library the other day, but I might have carried on playing it had my save from the original version of the game been usable. Alas, it was not, so at some point I will have to restart the game in this version. That will be fun, when the time comes.
I have made record progress through Spelunky. I managed to get the Tunnel Man everything he needed to open up a permanent shortcut to the temple zone, and I've been running nothing but that zone ever since, trying to familiarize myself with its traps and denizens. It is by far the most ruthless set of stages yet. I've made it through to Olmec several times, but have yet to manage to beat him and win the game. That is my next goal. Eventually I would like to be able to go from the entrance of the caves through Olmec, and even on to the hell zone. Who knows if I'll ever be able to pull that off, though.
I also continue to make progress through The Witcher 3. I am to the point now where I am ready to rescue Dandelion from his captors. I have seen Triss and the other mages off from Novigrad with the help of the former Redanian spymaster, Sigi I think he's called. Next I'm going to pay a visit to the sorceress Philippa Eilhart at the request of the Redanian King Radovan. I think I'm getting these names right. I've also been going around Velen doing low level quests, trying to catch up my quest log to my character level. There's a lot in this game.
I've also found myself playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within again lately. I'm allowing myself to reload after bad moves this time, and things are shaping up well for the very early stages of this campaign. I've just finished the first month and have already captured a live Sectoid for research and I'm working on unlocking beam weapons, now. This is such a cool game.
Showing posts with label The Witcher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Witcher. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Friday, January 19, 2018
Though This Battle Is Lost, We Will Fight On, Brothers!
It's time to pour one out for Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade. The multiplayer third-person shooter with aspirations to the Battlefield-like genre blend of open conflict both on foot and in vehicles, and with a long-promised-but-never-realized open world component, seems to be basically dead. I fired it up last night looking for a game I was never able to match into, and coincidentally also yesterday the developers posted a blog entry that amounted to them issuing and apology, lamenting their low numbers, and promising to do more. I can't see the game pulling out of this tailspin, to be honest. Games are a rough business at the best of times, and in the current environment a game like this that was released far to early to Early Access, that eternal curse, with no fanfare, is as good as dead, and no doubt destined to be as forgotten as any lost civilization in the darkness of Old Night.
I will hug my Relic 40K games close and support them as much as I can going forward.
The 4X bug came back to bite me over the weekend, and after reinstalling both of Amplitude's Endless Legend and Endless Space, I finished off suspended campaigns in both. I was able to pull out a win in Legend, as the Drakken, taking a diplomatic victory. I think this game must have been in progress for two years or more, but it's done now. In Space, however, I wasn't able to salvage the setup I'd found myself in. Somehow I had two games set up as myself playing the Pilgrims against a single other faction, the Hissho. I'm not sure how that happened, other than maybe they both started out as the same game in the base game, and I then completed it there in addition to in the expanded version of the game. In either case, I ended up conceding, unable to do any real damage to the other faction's fleets in war. I was inspired to start a new campaign, though, as the hostile Cravers, which exist only to consume and expand, and in fact cannot take part in diplomacy. It's early on in that campaign yet; I'm still expanding to fill my starting area and having to tech up to the point where I can get further out to start warring on other species.
I've been doing daily sessions of Spelunky, too. I'm still trying to get good again. I've never been great at the game, but I do hope to finish it someday, still. I think if I just keep at it regularly it'll begin to happen eventually.
Every time I play The Witcher 3, I'm convinced again that it is one of the best games out there. I'm pretty invested into playing Gwent within the game, as well. I still only have cards for the Northern Realms deck, but I may be on my way to getting the right cards for the Scoia'tel deck, as well. As goes the main thrust of the quest to find Ciri, I'm currently trying to track down Dandelion, who may have seen her recently. That involves talking to other people in the area who he's had contact with, to get a clue on where he might be, since the tavern he runs with Zoltan Chivay was left abandoned. I can hardly wait to play more.
I will hug my Relic 40K games close and support them as much as I can going forward.
The 4X bug came back to bite me over the weekend, and after reinstalling both of Amplitude's Endless Legend and Endless Space, I finished off suspended campaigns in both. I was able to pull out a win in Legend, as the Drakken, taking a diplomatic victory. I think this game must have been in progress for two years or more, but it's done now. In Space, however, I wasn't able to salvage the setup I'd found myself in. Somehow I had two games set up as myself playing the Pilgrims against a single other faction, the Hissho. I'm not sure how that happened, other than maybe they both started out as the same game in the base game, and I then completed it there in addition to in the expanded version of the game. In either case, I ended up conceding, unable to do any real damage to the other faction's fleets in war. I was inspired to start a new campaign, though, as the hostile Cravers, which exist only to consume and expand, and in fact cannot take part in diplomacy. It's early on in that campaign yet; I'm still expanding to fill my starting area and having to tech up to the point where I can get further out to start warring on other species.
I've been doing daily sessions of Spelunky, too. I'm still trying to get good again. I've never been great at the game, but I do hope to finish it someday, still. I think if I just keep at it regularly it'll begin to happen eventually.
Every time I play The Witcher 3, I'm convinced again that it is one of the best games out there. I'm pretty invested into playing Gwent within the game, as well. I still only have cards for the Northern Realms deck, but I may be on my way to getting the right cards for the Scoia'tel deck, as well. As goes the main thrust of the quest to find Ciri, I'm currently trying to track down Dandelion, who may have seen her recently. That involves talking to other people in the area who he's had contact with, to get a clue on where he might be, since the tavern he runs with Zoltan Chivay was left abandoned. I can hardly wait to play more.
Friday, December 22, 2017
Tallarn and Temeria
Progress continues little by little in both Opus Magnum and Super Mario Odyssey.
The real meat masticated in my gaming jaws lately has been with The Horus Heresy: Battle of Tallarn and The Witcher 3.
Tallarn takes the largest military engagement of the fictional galactic civil war that kicked off the Warhammer 40,000 setting and envisions it as a hex-based tactical war game. On one side is the traitorous Space Marine legion the Iron Warriors, and on the other is the ragtag planetary defense made up mostly of idle Imperial Guard on the world when it was killed from orbit by the opposition. Battles play out on small hex grids covered in a virus bomb miasma that doubles as fog of war, with small squadrons of tanks and other armored vehicles of various types including flying transports and the gigantic bipedal war machines known as Titans, and their cousins, the slightly smaller Knights.
Tallarn is very clearly a pretty quick port from iOS, but with a few key rebindings, I was able to make it feel pretty good on PC despite the big dopey UI. Scenarios can be played relatively quickly and simply, which is a plus for a player with my level of sophistication and dedication to games like this. I have completed the Apocalypse campaign from both sides so far, one of four or five in the game. As a very fervent fan of setting and especially the novel series that to a large part defines it, I have been enjoying this relatively simple war game. I'm actually reading the collected stories around this particular theater alongside playing the game, and it's harmonizing nicely. I might even recommend the game to non-setting fans, but the developer HexWar has about 20 other games that I'm guessing are similar enough that are set in other, real-world historical, settings that are probably worth looking at as well.
In The Witcher 3, I've gone back to flip flopping between control devices and settings for play. Last night I put in a good hour or two on the TV with the pad again. I think the sweet spot may actually end up being at the PC with the pad. There's no doubt the game looks better on my PC monitor, and the 360 pad control scheme, for all its own oddness, may just edge out the mouse and keyboard scheme due to some iffy menu design choices. It seems like they tried to come up with something that worked both ways, when they probably would have been better off coming up with two separate menu systems dedicated each way. I'm sure there are a lot of reasons why doing that would suck for the development of the game, but it would have been nice. There are too many little rough edges on either scheme for me to be completely comfortable just yet, but with some refinement I may be able to get to that point, and it might as well be with the pad, for the same reason I play Bethesda's RPGs that way; it gets really tiresome holding down W for hours at a time with my middle finger, and that's just not a problem using an analog stick for movement.
Progression-wise, I have now made it to Noveria and met up with Triss Merigold. Apparently she and Geralt fell out about six months previous to this, which does a bit to explain how he could begin the game once again apparently an item with Yennifer of Vengerberg. I don't know if there will be more to explore to that story, or whether the player is meant to respect their privacy on the matter and decide for Geralt who he is more interested in romantically going forward. As a player of the previous games, I feel like I know who Triss is. I'm interested in learning more about Yen before committing to anyone, if I do. I've read the first couple of books in the Witcher series, but I don't remember if there was enough in them to know much of anything about Yen from those. It's been a good long time since I read those. It was before The Witcher 2 came out. Now most or all of the rest of the series has been released, and I own some of them, so at some point I'll actually delve deeper in.
Apart from meeting up with Triss, I'm still following leads toward Ciri. I helped to awake the dream-scryer Corinne Tully in a "haunted" house, last. I want to follow the main thread to the next large piece or event, but I also don't want the rest of the game to get away from me. I don't want to outlevel any quests or contracts or potentially great witcher gear out there. I'm still settling in to how this game flows, nearly 50 hours in, now. Granted, I was away from it for two and a half years between hours 35 and 36, but the point still stands.
Today is my last day of work for 2017. I'm hoping to get in some real solid game time over the break, along with a good bit of reading, as well. I'll have my GOTY/BOTY posts in the next week or so, as well. I have already declared a GOTY and two runner ups on the GameBytes Show podcast, but I do reserve the right to change these up through the 31st!
The real meat masticated in my gaming jaws lately has been with The Horus Heresy: Battle of Tallarn and The Witcher 3.
Tallarn takes the largest military engagement of the fictional galactic civil war that kicked off the Warhammer 40,000 setting and envisions it as a hex-based tactical war game. On one side is the traitorous Space Marine legion the Iron Warriors, and on the other is the ragtag planetary defense made up mostly of idle Imperial Guard on the world when it was killed from orbit by the opposition. Battles play out on small hex grids covered in a virus bomb miasma that doubles as fog of war, with small squadrons of tanks and other armored vehicles of various types including flying transports and the gigantic bipedal war machines known as Titans, and their cousins, the slightly smaller Knights.
Tallarn is very clearly a pretty quick port from iOS, but with a few key rebindings, I was able to make it feel pretty good on PC despite the big dopey UI. Scenarios can be played relatively quickly and simply, which is a plus for a player with my level of sophistication and dedication to games like this. I have completed the Apocalypse campaign from both sides so far, one of four or five in the game. As a very fervent fan of setting and especially the novel series that to a large part defines it, I have been enjoying this relatively simple war game. I'm actually reading the collected stories around this particular theater alongside playing the game, and it's harmonizing nicely. I might even recommend the game to non-setting fans, but the developer HexWar has about 20 other games that I'm guessing are similar enough that are set in other, real-world historical, settings that are probably worth looking at as well.
In The Witcher 3, I've gone back to flip flopping between control devices and settings for play. Last night I put in a good hour or two on the TV with the pad again. I think the sweet spot may actually end up being at the PC with the pad. There's no doubt the game looks better on my PC monitor, and the 360 pad control scheme, for all its own oddness, may just edge out the mouse and keyboard scheme due to some iffy menu design choices. It seems like they tried to come up with something that worked both ways, when they probably would have been better off coming up with two separate menu systems dedicated each way. I'm sure there are a lot of reasons why doing that would suck for the development of the game, but it would have been nice. There are too many little rough edges on either scheme for me to be completely comfortable just yet, but with some refinement I may be able to get to that point, and it might as well be with the pad, for the same reason I play Bethesda's RPGs that way; it gets really tiresome holding down W for hours at a time with my middle finger, and that's just not a problem using an analog stick for movement.
Progression-wise, I have now made it to Noveria and met up with Triss Merigold. Apparently she and Geralt fell out about six months previous to this, which does a bit to explain how he could begin the game once again apparently an item with Yennifer of Vengerberg. I don't know if there will be more to explore to that story, or whether the player is meant to respect their privacy on the matter and decide for Geralt who he is more interested in romantically going forward. As a player of the previous games, I feel like I know who Triss is. I'm interested in learning more about Yen before committing to anyone, if I do. I've read the first couple of books in the Witcher series, but I don't remember if there was enough in them to know much of anything about Yen from those. It's been a good long time since I read those. It was before The Witcher 2 came out. Now most or all of the rest of the series has been released, and I own some of them, so at some point I'll actually delve deeper in.
Apart from meeting up with Triss, I'm still following leads toward Ciri. I helped to awake the dream-scryer Corinne Tully in a "haunted" house, last. I want to follow the main thread to the next large piece or event, but I also don't want the rest of the game to get away from me. I don't want to outlevel any quests or contracts or potentially great witcher gear out there. I'm still settling in to how this game flows, nearly 50 hours in, now. Granted, I was away from it for two and a half years between hours 35 and 36, but the point still stands.
Today is my last day of work for 2017. I'm hoping to get in some real solid game time over the break, along with a good bit of reading, as well. I'll have my GOTY/BOTY posts in the next week or so, as well. I have already declared a GOTY and two runner ups on the GameBytes Show podcast, but I do reserve the right to change these up through the 31st!
Monday, December 11, 2017
Going with Geralt
I mentioned last entry that I was experimenting with how to return to The Witcher 3, and I have settled for now on at my PC, using mouse and keyboard. I may hop over to the TV through the Steam Link from time to time, but I haven't been able to shake the feeling that the PC experience is the best one. I went and met the Bloody Baron and did his questline, and at the moment I'm knocking out a few sidequests and contracts that I have found myself having outleveled. Experience seems kind of hard to come by, so I'm sure it'll pay to be thorough, aside from exploring the cool narratives of the world. The next big plot point I'm sure is waiting in Novigrad. I'm to go there to meet Triss Merigold, whom Geralt has been an item with during the last couple of games, and also to hunt for signs of Ciri. I have a couple of other errands to run first, though.
I'm also playing some Spelunky here and there, still. I don't know if I'll ever finish that game. Oh well, I'll be all over Spelunky 2 as soon as that comes out, either way.
The end of Super Mario Odyssey also can't be far away now. I'm in the Luncheon Kingdom now, and I have just found the painting that lets you warp to the Mushroom Kingdom, or at least a small part of it.
Progress also continues apace in Opus Magnum. The critical path puzzles are nice and doable, which I appreciate. It's always cool to see the finished process, as well.
I'm also playing some Spelunky here and there, still. I don't know if I'll ever finish that game. Oh well, I'll be all over Spelunky 2 as soon as that comes out, either way.
The end of Super Mario Odyssey also can't be far away now. I'm in the Luncheon Kingdom now, and I have just found the painting that lets you warp to the Mushroom Kingdom, or at least a small part of it.
Progress also continues apace in Opus Magnum. The critical path puzzles are nice and doable, which I appreciate. It's always cool to see the finished process, as well.
Friday, December 1, 2017
Ready to Rejoin the Rivian Roamer
I am ready to return to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt!
I wrapped up my playthrough of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night last night, coming up to a total of 200.5% of the game explored. I believe the last .1% could be gained by going into the final room and then using a library card to warp out of it before saving the game again. I also seem to remember some kind of glitch in the castle towers using the sword familiar maybe to somehow get outside the castle walls. That might make it possible to add a few more percentage points to the tally, but I don't recall exactly. I'm ready to another Richter playthrough at some point, too. I did that once, in college, I think. If I recall, you can get to most but not all places in the game and actually finish it. I'd like to explore some of the other ways to play at some point, as well, including as an Axe Armor (which I remember being very limited) and with your luck stat to the max but others lowered, which could be another fun spin on the game.
Opus Magnum also continues to captivate me. I've been playing a lot of its sub-game Sigmar's Garden, which is a kind of Shanghai variant played with the marbles used in the main game. It's diverting and goes well with a podcast. I want to get to 100 wins for the achievement and to see whatever story dialog goes along with doing so.
I have to work out exactly how I'm going to go forward with The Witcher 3. I briefly considered restarting the game, but being 35 hours in, I think I'd probably rather just continue on. I'm sure the game will end up over 100 hours in all, maybe 150, even. I think I remember the essentials, even though I might like to rewatch a few cutscenes. I also need to decide whether I'll play at my PC with mouse and keyboard, or on the Steam Link with a controller, or maybe even at my PC with a controller. I may re-familiarize myself with the game at the PC, then move over to the TV. Or, maybe it's better to just re-acquaint myself with the game using the pad from the jump. Content on screen isn't really a worry, since I'll mostly play when the kids are asleep, though at times I may want to play on the PC while they use the TV. Still, The Witcher isn't usually overly adult, it's only that way at certain times.
I wrapped up my playthrough of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night last night, coming up to a total of 200.5% of the game explored. I believe the last .1% could be gained by going into the final room and then using a library card to warp out of it before saving the game again. I also seem to remember some kind of glitch in the castle towers using the sword familiar maybe to somehow get outside the castle walls. That might make it possible to add a few more percentage points to the tally, but I don't recall exactly. I'm ready to another Richter playthrough at some point, too. I did that once, in college, I think. If I recall, you can get to most but not all places in the game and actually finish it. I'd like to explore some of the other ways to play at some point, as well, including as an Axe Armor (which I remember being very limited) and with your luck stat to the max but others lowered, which could be another fun spin on the game.
Opus Magnum also continues to captivate me. I've been playing a lot of its sub-game Sigmar's Garden, which is a kind of Shanghai variant played with the marbles used in the main game. It's diverting and goes well with a podcast. I want to get to 100 wins for the achievement and to see whatever story dialog goes along with doing so.
I have to work out exactly how I'm going to go forward with The Witcher 3. I briefly considered restarting the game, but being 35 hours in, I think I'd probably rather just continue on. I'm sure the game will end up over 100 hours in all, maybe 150, even. I think I remember the essentials, even though I might like to rewatch a few cutscenes. I also need to decide whether I'll play at my PC with mouse and keyboard, or on the Steam Link with a controller, or maybe even at my PC with a controller. I may re-familiarize myself with the game at the PC, then move over to the TV. Or, maybe it's better to just re-acquaint myself with the game using the pad from the jump. Content on screen isn't really a worry, since I'll mostly play when the kids are asleep, though at times I may want to play on the PC while they use the TV. Still, The Witcher isn't usually overly adult, it's only that way at certain times.
Monday, January 4, 2016
2015 Wrap-Up GOTY and BOTY
Twenty-fifteen. It was a heck of a year for video games. Here are my picks, the absolute cream of the crop.
My Game of the Year: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Honorable Mention: The Witcher III: Wild Hunt
There were a number of other great games this year, such as Fallout 4, Invisible, Inc., Her Story, and more, many more, I haven't even played. Games as a hobby just keeps getting better.
Past years:
2014: Elite: Dangerous/The Banner Saga
2013: Spelunky/Hearthstone
2012: Dota 2/Diablo III
2011: The Witcher 2/SpaceChem
2010: Mass Effect 2/Castlevania: Lords of Shadow
2009: Demon's Souls/Red Faction: Guerilla
2008: Metal Gear Solid 4/Gears of War 2
2007: BioShock/Halo 3
Backlog-wise, I added fewer by far titles to my list than in any other recent year, having (probably) shrunken the list along the right side of this web page over the last year, at least by a few titles.
I didn't complete a whole hell of a lot of games this year, rather focusing on discrete goals within a smaller pool of at times very large games. Here is my list of 26 accomplishments, in reverse chronological order:
Game of Thrones (Episode 6)
Fallout 4 (Institute)
Game of Thrones (Episode 5)
Game of Thrones (Episode 4)
Game of Thrones (Episode 3)
Game of Thrones (Episode 2)
Game of Thrones (Episode 1)
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Chapter 2)
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Chapter 1)
The Taken King (Destiny)
House of Wolves (Destiny)
The Dark Below (Destiny)
Old World Blues (Fallout: New Vegas)
Dead Money (Fallout: New Vegas)
Her Story
Lonesome Road (Fallout: New Vegas)
The Price of Neutrality (The Witcher)
Monk to 70 (Diablo III)
Side Effects (The Witcher)
Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China
Damn Those Swamps! (The Witcher)
Crusader to 70 (Diablo III)
Assassin's Creed Rogue
Warcraft III (Humans)
Journey
Witch Doctor to 70 (Diablo III)
Past years' totals:
2014:32
2013:33
2012:23
2011:21
2010:23
2009:19
2008:26
2007:15
I have a prospective list of 2016 plays worked up, in a post below. We'll see how that plays out, of course. I have already played some Skyrim and KOTOR, for what that's worth.
Reading-wise, 2015 was a pretty dismal year. I spent nine or ten months not reading Moby Dick before finally buckling down and getting through it, and enjoying it, after all. Otherwise it was just a year of Warhammer 40K fiction, mostly Horus Heresy books. The list:
Deathwatch: Xenos Hunters
Moby Dick; or The White While
Fear to Tread
Shadows of Treachery
I'll finish Angel Exterminatus (another Horus Heresy novel) soon, and then go for something a little more... literate, I suppose is the word. My 2016 reading goal is merely to feel better at the end of the year about what I read than I do this year.
Book of the Year: Moby Dick
Honorable Mention: Shadows of Treachery
My Game of the Year: Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Honorable Mention: The Witcher III: Wild Hunt
There were a number of other great games this year, such as Fallout 4, Invisible, Inc., Her Story, and more, many more, I haven't even played. Games as a hobby just keeps getting better.
Past years:
2014: Elite: Dangerous/The Banner Saga
2013: Spelunky/Hearthstone
2012: Dota 2/Diablo III
2011: The Witcher 2/SpaceChem
2010: Mass Effect 2/Castlevania: Lords of Shadow
2009: Demon's Souls/Red Faction: Guerilla
2008: Metal Gear Solid 4/Gears of War 2
2007: BioShock/Halo 3
Backlog-wise, I added fewer by far titles to my list than in any other recent year, having (probably) shrunken the list along the right side of this web page over the last year, at least by a few titles.
I didn't complete a whole hell of a lot of games this year, rather focusing on discrete goals within a smaller pool of at times very large games. Here is my list of 26 accomplishments, in reverse chronological order:
Game of Thrones (Episode 6)
Fallout 4 (Institute)
Game of Thrones (Episode 5)
Game of Thrones (Episode 4)
Game of Thrones (Episode 3)
Game of Thrones (Episode 2)
Game of Thrones (Episode 1)
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Chapter 2)
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Chapter 1)
The Taken King (Destiny)
House of Wolves (Destiny)
The Dark Below (Destiny)
Old World Blues (Fallout: New Vegas)
Dead Money (Fallout: New Vegas)
Her Story
Lonesome Road (Fallout: New Vegas)
The Price of Neutrality (The Witcher)
Monk to 70 (Diablo III)
Side Effects (The Witcher)
Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China
Damn Those Swamps! (The Witcher)
Crusader to 70 (Diablo III)
Assassin's Creed Rogue
Warcraft III (Humans)
Journey
Witch Doctor to 70 (Diablo III)
Past years' totals:
2014:32
2013:33
2012:23
2011:21
2010:23
2009:19
2008:26
2007:15
I have a prospective list of 2016 plays worked up, in a post below. We'll see how that plays out, of course. I have already played some Skyrim and KOTOR, for what that's worth.
Reading-wise, 2015 was a pretty dismal year. I spent nine or ten months not reading Moby Dick before finally buckling down and getting through it, and enjoying it, after all. Otherwise it was just a year of Warhammer 40K fiction, mostly Horus Heresy books. The list:
Deathwatch: Xenos Hunters
Moby Dick; or The White While
Fear to Tread
Shadows of Treachery
I'll finish Angel Exterminatus (another Horus Heresy novel) soon, and then go for something a little more... literate, I suppose is the word. My 2016 reading goal is merely to feel better at the end of the year about what I read than I do this year.
Book of the Year: Moby Dick
Honorable Mention: Shadows of Treachery
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
To The Finish
I was taking stock of all of the RPGs I am currently in the midst of playing or want to be playing soon, and something's got to be wrapped up and finished off. My first candidate for that is Fallout: New Vegas. I've got a couple more DLC modules to wrap up, Dead Money and Old World Blues, and at least one other optional quest line I'd like to do before putting a figurative bow on the whole thing. I think that'll be my main focus from here on, with my weekly alphabet tour of the backlog in progress, as well.
Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet - You play a little flying saucer and navigate through caves looking for pickups and the way forward. With the 2D, side-on perspective, it reminds me of a helicopter game I think we had on an old Win 3.1 computer back in the early '90s. You would fly a helicopter through caves to pick up POWs, if I remember correctly. I don't care about this game.
Jolly Rover - It's a point and click adventure game with a cartoon dogs-as-pirates theme. It seemed light-hearted and fun in tone, but as is the case with this type of game, it also seemed very tedious. I have yet to really get into one of these. What Telltale did with The Walking Dead was a lot more enjoyable.
I played a little bit more of The Witcher 3 the other night, mostly just to check out the changes to movement in the latest patch. It feels like a good change. I'm not trying to charge through this game by any means; there is no rush, and I'd rather savor it at my leisure than concern myself much with finishing off a massive 100+ hour beast like this for no good reason. With New Vegas, I'm almost done with it anyway, and I'd like to leave some space between it and Fallout 4, which I'm probably going to begin on day one.
I've made some good progress into Assassin's Creed Unity, as well. I've left off at the beginning of sequence 6 for now, which feels like a good early break point. I'll pick up there later on sometime. Again, no rush here. I don't think I'll be playing Syndicate until some time after release. I am liking Unity, so far, but it hasn't kicked into high gear just yet with regards to the plot. Just the standard play around Paris is pretty good. I've been trying to do some of the lesser-involved side stuff around to earn money to buy better gear. I'm not sure I care enough to do the riddles and mysteries, but the random assassinations and such are fun enough. I'm pretty well over the flag equivalents and treasure chests scattered around the world. If I'm very near one on the map or walk right up on it, I'll grab it, but otherwise I'm not going out of my way for that sort of filler.
Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet - You play a little flying saucer and navigate through caves looking for pickups and the way forward. With the 2D, side-on perspective, it reminds me of a helicopter game I think we had on an old Win 3.1 computer back in the early '90s. You would fly a helicopter through caves to pick up POWs, if I remember correctly. I don't care about this game.
Jolly Rover - It's a point and click adventure game with a cartoon dogs-as-pirates theme. It seemed light-hearted and fun in tone, but as is the case with this type of game, it also seemed very tedious. I have yet to really get into one of these. What Telltale did with The Walking Dead was a lot more enjoyable.
I played a little bit more of The Witcher 3 the other night, mostly just to check out the changes to movement in the latest patch. It feels like a good change. I'm not trying to charge through this game by any means; there is no rush, and I'd rather savor it at my leisure than concern myself much with finishing off a massive 100+ hour beast like this for no good reason. With New Vegas, I'm almost done with it anyway, and I'd like to leave some space between it and Fallout 4, which I'm probably going to begin on day one.
I've made some good progress into Assassin's Creed Unity, as well. I've left off at the beginning of sequence 6 for now, which feels like a good early break point. I'll pick up there later on sometime. Again, no rush here. I don't think I'll be playing Syndicate until some time after release. I am liking Unity, so far, but it hasn't kicked into high gear just yet with regards to the plot. Just the standard play around Paris is pretty good. I've been trying to do some of the lesser-involved side stuff around to earn money to buy better gear. I'm not sure I care enough to do the riddles and mysteries, but the random assassinations and such are fun enough. I'm pretty well over the flag equivalents and treasure chests scattered around the world. If I'm very near one on the map or walk right up on it, I'll grab it, but otherwise I'm not going out of my way for that sort of filler.
Monday, June 29, 2015
Old Favorites and New Hype
E3 2015 has come and gone, and with the excitement building for upcoming releases such as Fallout 4, Dishonored 2, and Metal Gear Sold V: The Phantom Pain, I've been revisiting prior games in those series. I wrote before about playing the Lonesome Road DLC for Fallout: New Vegas, which I did go on to complete (it was alright; more might have been done to spell out Ulysses' actual motivations, as I felt he was just kind of crazy).
I've also been revisiting Dishonored, beginning at first a high-action, high-chaos playthrough before noticing myself falling back to my natural stealth style of playing, and restarting the game with an eye toward attaining non-lethal/ghost ratings on every mission. It turns out I already did that on a few during my first run through the game, at least with Corvo. With Daud I ended up killing practically everyone in every level. This'll be a fun challenge if I get back to it.
The exceptional trailers for The Phantom Pain got me ruminating on the events of the series plot post Snake Eater, as well as the character and motivations of Big Boss and Miller (who is featured prominently in TPP trailers), so to refresh myself on the series I took to YouTube for cut-scene extracts of Portable Ops and Peace Walker. The former is largely irrelevant with regard to TPP, but does have some events of overall series import, such as the introductions of Colonel Campbell and Frank Jaeger, and the jumping-off point of Zero and Ocelot recruiting Big Boss to begin The Patriots with the fortune known as The Philosophers' Legacy. This is all in 1970 in the series' timeline.
Peace Walker is actually more relevant to Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain than I had recalled, as it is the events there in Costa Rica and Nicaragua that put MSF (Militaires Sans Frontiers) and Mother Base on the world stage as a nuclear power, teeing-up the 1975 "IAEA" (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspection happening as Snake infiltrates the US military prison base in Ground Zeroes, which turns out to be a front for an attack on Mother Base, presumably by Cipher, Zero's cronies post Patriots falling out, namely Sigint and Para-Medic, Paz, Skull Face, presumably, and others. The other Patriots, Big Boss, Ocelot, and Eva, seemed to have all went separate ways before 1974, when Peace Walker is set. Pease Walker also apparently cement's Snake's identity as Big Boss, and his determination to be loyal to neither country nor mentor, but to himself, and that his mission will be determined by the times and to resist attacks from the existing world order to destroy his "army without borders".
Then, replaying Ground Zeroes for more on Skull Face, Paz, Chico, and all that, I got hung up on how well the game plays and have begun doing some more side missions therein. All this is in addition to reviewing all of the promo material, trailers and demos, available for The Phantom Pain. At this point I am as excited for its release as I have been a game in a long while. It looks great, both from a lorehound perspective and a fan of open world and stealth games.
I've made some good progress in The Witcher 3, doing the Crones of Crookback Bog quest as well as another where I ran into Letho from the second game. That was a pretty great bit of fan service. I wonder what would have happened there for someone who had killed Letho, or at least indicated as much in the shave scene toward the start of this game. I told him he was welcome to go stay at Kaer Mohren, so perhaps I'll see him again later in the game.
Last and least, I played an F game, Fish Fillets 2, which was a painfully CD-ROM era looking puzzle game and X-Files homage/parody. I also played a G game, Gish, a hyper-difficult physics platform game where you play as a 12-pound ball of tar trying to hurl and cling and slide and push your way through contrived maze levels with unintuitive and difficult-to-grasp controls. I did not particularly like either of these.
I've also been revisiting Dishonored, beginning at first a high-action, high-chaos playthrough before noticing myself falling back to my natural stealth style of playing, and restarting the game with an eye toward attaining non-lethal/ghost ratings on every mission. It turns out I already did that on a few during my first run through the game, at least with Corvo. With Daud I ended up killing practically everyone in every level. This'll be a fun challenge if I get back to it.
The exceptional trailers for The Phantom Pain got me ruminating on the events of the series plot post Snake Eater, as well as the character and motivations of Big Boss and Miller (who is featured prominently in TPP trailers), so to refresh myself on the series I took to YouTube for cut-scene extracts of Portable Ops and Peace Walker. The former is largely irrelevant with regard to TPP, but does have some events of overall series import, such as the introductions of Colonel Campbell and Frank Jaeger, and the jumping-off point of Zero and Ocelot recruiting Big Boss to begin The Patriots with the fortune known as The Philosophers' Legacy. This is all in 1970 in the series' timeline.
Peace Walker is actually more relevant to Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain than I had recalled, as it is the events there in Costa Rica and Nicaragua that put MSF (Militaires Sans Frontiers) and Mother Base on the world stage as a nuclear power, teeing-up the 1975 "IAEA" (International Atomic Energy Agency) inspection happening as Snake infiltrates the US military prison base in Ground Zeroes, which turns out to be a front for an attack on Mother Base, presumably by Cipher, Zero's cronies post Patriots falling out, namely Sigint and Para-Medic, Paz, Skull Face, presumably, and others. The other Patriots, Big Boss, Ocelot, and Eva, seemed to have all went separate ways before 1974, when Peace Walker is set. Pease Walker also apparently cement's Snake's identity as Big Boss, and his determination to be loyal to neither country nor mentor, but to himself, and that his mission will be determined by the times and to resist attacks from the existing world order to destroy his "army without borders".
Then, replaying Ground Zeroes for more on Skull Face, Paz, Chico, and all that, I got hung up on how well the game plays and have begun doing some more side missions therein. All this is in addition to reviewing all of the promo material, trailers and demos, available for The Phantom Pain. At this point I am as excited for its release as I have been a game in a long while. It looks great, both from a lorehound perspective and a fan of open world and stealth games.
I've made some good progress in The Witcher 3, doing the Crones of Crookback Bog quest as well as another where I ran into Letho from the second game. That was a pretty great bit of fan service. I wonder what would have happened there for someone who had killed Letho, or at least indicated as much in the shave scene toward the start of this game. I told him he was welcome to go stay at Kaer Mohren, so perhaps I'll see him again later in the game.
Last and least, I played an F game, Fish Fillets 2, which was a painfully CD-ROM era looking puzzle game and X-Files homage/parody. I also played a G game, Gish, a hyper-difficult physics platform game where you play as a 12-pound ball of tar trying to hurl and cling and slide and push your way through contrived maze levels with unintuitive and difficult-to-grasp controls. I did not particularly like either of these.
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Witchering Busily
It's been a busy few weeks! The Witcher 3 is out, but that's not all I've been playing, believe it or not. I've been bopping around to a number of things without much of a clear goal in mind other than knocking a few things off of the backlog and just having a good time. Thoughts:
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - It's great! It's all I know and love about the series, but more of it than ever, and in the context of an open world. The previous games were open, within a defined space, and ushered you along from locale to locale as the plot unwrapped. So far Wild Hunt appears to just keep opening up and leaving the entire world there for you to revisit as the adventure progresses and Geralt's abilities and capabilities expand. I've put in about 25 hours so far, and I'm really still just getting my feet wet. I'm at level 6, only just getting a grip on the main quests in the Velen region.
Fallout: New Vegas - The recent announcement of Fallout 4 made me want to go back and revisit this world, and I was primed to do so, standing right at the beginning of the Lonesome Road DLC adventure into The Divide, a war-torn and storm-ravaged region to the west of the Mojave wasteland which the Courier apparently has some history in. The antagonist here is a guy calling himself Ulysses, another former courier, one who somehow fell in with Caesar's Legion before apparently falling out again and retreating to The Divide for whatever reason, leaving a trail of clues for our player character courier to find and track him down for some kind of final confrontation. This has been a pretty straight-forward trek thus far, through ruins and missile silos and such. I'm intrigued to make it to the end to see what this is all about.
Elite: Dangerous - Frontier finally made arrangements for everyone to get Steam keys for the game, so I popped on long enough to make sure mine worked and the save transferred over alright. I'm still in my Asp, still out in a nebula far from home. Just this week the Powerplay update hit, introducing a few new ships and the new faction war system. I wish I had more time to delve back in, but right now I really don't, so this is pretty well back-burnered for the time being.
Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles - Something recently made me want to play Rondo and Symphony again, and this is the best way to do that. Unfortunately the copy I'm on now is new, a PSN download, and I have yet to unlock the two games I really want to play, and instead am currently limited to the 2.5D remake of Rondo, which is horrendously ugly and manages to feel pretty clunky, to boot. I hope to unlock the two good games soon.
The Chaos Engine - My C game for the GameBytes podcast. It's an old Amiga game, I read. It's very arcade-like, being a top-down shooter score chase. It reminds me of other old top-down games from the NES, like Mission: Impossible or Ikari Warriors or certain levels of Bionic Commando.
Deja Vu (The MacVenture Series) - My D game. This is just Deja Vu, the old first-person adventure game, the same one I remember from the NES, only this is the version made for Macs around that time. It was neat to see it again, but I really have no time for this sort of game these days. Too obtuse, too tedious.
Eets Munchies - My E game. Turns out this is by Klei, who have also done bigger and better things. I'm guessing it's a sequel to Eets Chow Down, which is the name of an XBLA game from several years ago that I remember, but never played. Munchies is clearly a port of an iPad game. You arrange things on a level then hit a button to let Eets navigate the level, going for a all the sweets therein before eating the cake at the end to finish. There are a thousand basic puzzle games like this on the iPad, none of them very interesting, as far as I can tell.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - It's great! It's all I know and love about the series, but more of it than ever, and in the context of an open world. The previous games were open, within a defined space, and ushered you along from locale to locale as the plot unwrapped. So far Wild Hunt appears to just keep opening up and leaving the entire world there for you to revisit as the adventure progresses and Geralt's abilities and capabilities expand. I've put in about 25 hours so far, and I'm really still just getting my feet wet. I'm at level 6, only just getting a grip on the main quests in the Velen region.
Fallout: New Vegas - The recent announcement of Fallout 4 made me want to go back and revisit this world, and I was primed to do so, standing right at the beginning of the Lonesome Road DLC adventure into The Divide, a war-torn and storm-ravaged region to the west of the Mojave wasteland which the Courier apparently has some history in. The antagonist here is a guy calling himself Ulysses, another former courier, one who somehow fell in with Caesar's Legion before apparently falling out again and retreating to The Divide for whatever reason, leaving a trail of clues for our player character courier to find and track him down for some kind of final confrontation. This has been a pretty straight-forward trek thus far, through ruins and missile silos and such. I'm intrigued to make it to the end to see what this is all about.
Elite: Dangerous - Frontier finally made arrangements for everyone to get Steam keys for the game, so I popped on long enough to make sure mine worked and the save transferred over alright. I'm still in my Asp, still out in a nebula far from home. Just this week the Powerplay update hit, introducing a few new ships and the new faction war system. I wish I had more time to delve back in, but right now I really don't, so this is pretty well back-burnered for the time being.
Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles - Something recently made me want to play Rondo and Symphony again, and this is the best way to do that. Unfortunately the copy I'm on now is new, a PSN download, and I have yet to unlock the two games I really want to play, and instead am currently limited to the 2.5D remake of Rondo, which is horrendously ugly and manages to feel pretty clunky, to boot. I hope to unlock the two good games soon.
The Chaos Engine - My C game for the GameBytes podcast. It's an old Amiga game, I read. It's very arcade-like, being a top-down shooter score chase. It reminds me of other old top-down games from the NES, like Mission: Impossible or Ikari Warriors or certain levels of Bionic Commando.
Deja Vu (The MacVenture Series) - My D game. This is just Deja Vu, the old first-person adventure game, the same one I remember from the NES, only this is the version made for Macs around that time. It was neat to see it again, but I really have no time for this sort of game these days. Too obtuse, too tedious.
Eets Munchies - My E game. Turns out this is by Klei, who have also done bigger and better things. I'm guessing it's a sequel to Eets Chow Down, which is the name of an XBLA game from several years ago that I remember, but never played. Munchies is clearly a port of an iPad game. You arrange things on a level then hit a button to let Eets navigate the level, going for a all the sweets therein before eating the cake at the end to finish. There are a thousand basic puzzle games like this on the iPad, none of them very interesting, as far as I can tell.
Monday, May 18, 2015
Clear The Deck!
It's been a full several weeks, and I've been doing some podcasting with the Game Bytes crew, Lawman, Killt, and Redeye, to use their noms de plume, as well as tidying up of the game docket. The Witcher 3 releases today, and heading into that maelstrom, here's what I've been playing, in no particular order, and just for the record:
The Witcher - I finished up Side Effects and then played through The Price of Neutrality, as well. These were both pretty good little miniature Witcher adventures using the first game's systems and settings. The former is more light-hearted and comedic, the latter more of the hard-bitten dark fantasy side of the series, complete with hard choices and unforeseen consequences. They were worth doing, but could have and probably should have been folded into the main game somehow. Perhaps in addition to being available stand-alone.
The Witcher 2 - I had last played before they updated the game to the Enhanced Edition, about 4 years ago, so it's hard to really pinpoint what was new, aside from the obvious new cutscenes at the beginning and end of the game, and the new arena battle mini-game and tutorial intro to the game. I saw all of those things, still having an end-game save, and access to the others readily available. What I did not see was a couple of quests added to the third chapter of the game, one available on Iorveth's path, and one on Roche's path. My save was from my latter playthrough, Roche's path, but past the point where the added quest was accessible. No big deal, I think I got the quick refresher I was looking for on the game. I'm ready for Wild Hunt.
Minecraft - My older daughter, soon to be 4, prompts me to play it sometimes. We don't do much but run around looking at animals and random digging, but it's still worth mentioning.
Titanfall - I bought this along with all the full season pass at a heavy discount to play the multiplayer one evening with the Game Bytes guys I mentioned, on a stream, it turns out. It was good fun, but I lack the kind of time it takes to devote to a game like this to really get the most out of it. Plus, it really takes up a lot of hard drive space, which is the one area where my PC is really deficient. I only have about 500 GB in total available after the OS and other stuff is accounted for.
Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China - I finished it in about 6 hours' play time. It turned out to be pretty cool, overall. The art and presentation was the best part, but the play was alright, as well. It didn't overstay its welcome, which is nice. I only hope one day we can have a full-size AC in this setting, and preferably with Shao Jun starring again. I'm looking forward to the India and Russia games to come in this series.
Diablo III - My Monk is sitting pretty at level 70, and now with a decent compliment of endgame gear, to boot. I've actually dipped into the endgame on this character for the first time since they added Greater Rifts and all that goes along with them--everything since the 2.0 patch, really. It really makes me want to revisit all of my characters to some degree, and I probably will, in time.
Elite: Dangerous - Not much to report here, I'm still in that nebula, still scanning stars, still far from home. I'm not sure when I'll return, but I may weave this game in and our with my witchering in the coming months.
A Virus Named Tom - Pure backlog duty, here. I'm taking a sort of alphabetic approach, now that I have a weekly podcasting outlet. This game turns out to be a riff on Pipe Dream, where the core centers around rotating grid pieces to allow for the flow of electros on a circuit. There are a few added elements, mostly things that make it more stressful, such as having to control a grid-bound character as a cursor for your rotations, and then having to deal with other enemies and obstacles also on the grid, as well as environmental effects that blind you to the condition of the board and the like. Not really my type of thing, but it's a nicely put together package nonetheless.
Blocks That Matter - More backlog duty. I haven't gotten in much time, just yet, but it seems like a kind of combination 2D puzzle-platformer and Minecraft-like. I'll have to give it another go or two, but this also is probably not really my type of thing.
The Witcher - I finished up Side Effects and then played through The Price of Neutrality, as well. These were both pretty good little miniature Witcher adventures using the first game's systems and settings. The former is more light-hearted and comedic, the latter more of the hard-bitten dark fantasy side of the series, complete with hard choices and unforeseen consequences. They were worth doing, but could have and probably should have been folded into the main game somehow. Perhaps in addition to being available stand-alone.
The Witcher 2 - I had last played before they updated the game to the Enhanced Edition, about 4 years ago, so it's hard to really pinpoint what was new, aside from the obvious new cutscenes at the beginning and end of the game, and the new arena battle mini-game and tutorial intro to the game. I saw all of those things, still having an end-game save, and access to the others readily available. What I did not see was a couple of quests added to the third chapter of the game, one available on Iorveth's path, and one on Roche's path. My save was from my latter playthrough, Roche's path, but past the point where the added quest was accessible. No big deal, I think I got the quick refresher I was looking for on the game. I'm ready for Wild Hunt.
Minecraft - My older daughter, soon to be 4, prompts me to play it sometimes. We don't do much but run around looking at animals and random digging, but it's still worth mentioning.
Titanfall - I bought this along with all the full season pass at a heavy discount to play the multiplayer one evening with the Game Bytes guys I mentioned, on a stream, it turns out. It was good fun, but I lack the kind of time it takes to devote to a game like this to really get the most out of it. Plus, it really takes up a lot of hard drive space, which is the one area where my PC is really deficient. I only have about 500 GB in total available after the OS and other stuff is accounted for.
Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China - I finished it in about 6 hours' play time. It turned out to be pretty cool, overall. The art and presentation was the best part, but the play was alright, as well. It didn't overstay its welcome, which is nice. I only hope one day we can have a full-size AC in this setting, and preferably with Shao Jun starring again. I'm looking forward to the India and Russia games to come in this series.
Diablo III - My Monk is sitting pretty at level 70, and now with a decent compliment of endgame gear, to boot. I've actually dipped into the endgame on this character for the first time since they added Greater Rifts and all that goes along with them--everything since the 2.0 patch, really. It really makes me want to revisit all of my characters to some degree, and I probably will, in time.
Elite: Dangerous - Not much to report here, I'm still in that nebula, still scanning stars, still far from home. I'm not sure when I'll return, but I may weave this game in and our with my witchering in the coming months.
A Virus Named Tom - Pure backlog duty, here. I'm taking a sort of alphabetic approach, now that I have a weekly podcasting outlet. This game turns out to be a riff on Pipe Dream, where the core centers around rotating grid pieces to allow for the flow of electros on a circuit. There are a few added elements, mostly things that make it more stressful, such as having to control a grid-bound character as a cursor for your rotations, and then having to deal with other enemies and obstacles also on the grid, as well as environmental effects that blind you to the condition of the board and the like. Not really my type of thing, but it's a nicely put together package nonetheless.
Blocks That Matter - More backlog duty. I haven't gotten in much time, just yet, but it seems like a kind of combination 2D puzzle-platformer and Minecraft-like. I'll have to give it another go or two, but this also is probably not really my type of thing.
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Three Weeks, Five Days, Twenty-Three Hours
That is the approximate time left until The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is released. I haven't thought of myself as excited for this game as I was for the second in the series, but the fact of the matter is that I do a quick calculation of how much time is remaining to allocate to gaming before this behemoth barges into my life and commandeers all of my time.
I've already waved off Pillars of Eternity for the time being, and between my steady engagements of Diablo III and Elite, I'm already unsure I'll have enough time to knock out the other couple of things I've picked up over the last week.
Diablo III Season 3 is under way, and I'm playing a Monk this time around. I've got her (Iskra) up to level 51, so far. I should be able to grind out the rest of the way to 70 before the Witcher 3 hits. I'm liking Monk a lot, so far. It's fast and powerful. It does seem heavy on the passive, healing focus, and aura type skills, though. I'm still not sure what I'll do in this game after I get one of each class to 70. On one hand, I'd like to further refine each of my characters in terms of gear, Torment levels, and Paragon points, but on the other I might like to have a go at Hardcore classes, or future seasonal rewards.
In Elite, I finally scraped up enough money to buy my Asp Explorer, a ship I had been wanting for a long time. I outfitted it as best I could for long-range exploring, and set out on an expedition to several points of interest within the galactic neighborhood. I'm currently still hanging out in the most interesting nebula I've seen so far, scanning loads of Type O stars and black holes. I'm thinking once I'm done here, rather than continuing on to the Bubble Nebula like I'd thought about, that I'll return to civilization to see how much I can get for my exploration data, and go from there. Before my next expedition, I want to be able to hop longer distances at once. Right now I can go about 20 LY at a time, but an Asp at it's full potential should get nearer to 35 LY. That will make traveling from place to place that much faster, and also make it possible to get to more and more remote stars and regions in the less densely populated areas between spiral arms and on the edges and outer regions of the galactic disc.
Elite is going to be my furthest back-burnered of games I consider a going concern, but I'll still be progressing in it, little by little.
As a sort of preparation for the upcoming big release, I'm going back and revisiting the first two Witcher games. I'd like to check out all the additional CDPR content available to both; two side adventures in the first game, and the material added to the second after I'd finished it at launch. So far, I've played through one of the side adventures in The Witcher, a fan-made module called Damn Those Swamps! which was of middling quality. I've begun the first of the CDPR ones, which I believe is called Side Effects, a fully voice acted side story that begins with Geralt trying to get his bard friend Dandelion out of debt to some shady characters in Vizima he owes money to. These are each probably a few hours long.
Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China came out yesterday, a mostly 2D take on the series, starring Shao Jun, a Chinese Assassin from the early 1500s, who first appeared in the short film Assassin's Creed Embers, where she made a pilgrimage to Tuscany to seek guidance from Assassin Mentor Ezio Auditore in his final days. It's kinda neat so far, with an emphasis on being stealthy, and a very nice art style. Some of the play from the 3D games is a natural fit for this game type, and some not, really. I'm only a couple of levels in so far, but looking to play more soon. Hopefully I can get through this before The Witcher 3 hits, as well. It shouldn't be too difficult. It seems built for replayability.
Kind of on a whim, I began Batman: Arkham City a couple of weeks ago. That game starts off very strong. It's got a very solid feel to it, and an interesting, if not at all believable, premise. Given ample time, I'd play more. We'll see if that should ever come to pass, though.
I've already waved off Pillars of Eternity for the time being, and between my steady engagements of Diablo III and Elite, I'm already unsure I'll have enough time to knock out the other couple of things I've picked up over the last week.
Diablo III Season 3 is under way, and I'm playing a Monk this time around. I've got her (Iskra) up to level 51, so far. I should be able to grind out the rest of the way to 70 before the Witcher 3 hits. I'm liking Monk a lot, so far. It's fast and powerful. It does seem heavy on the passive, healing focus, and aura type skills, though. I'm still not sure what I'll do in this game after I get one of each class to 70. On one hand, I'd like to further refine each of my characters in terms of gear, Torment levels, and Paragon points, but on the other I might like to have a go at Hardcore classes, or future seasonal rewards.
In Elite, I finally scraped up enough money to buy my Asp Explorer, a ship I had been wanting for a long time. I outfitted it as best I could for long-range exploring, and set out on an expedition to several points of interest within the galactic neighborhood. I'm currently still hanging out in the most interesting nebula I've seen so far, scanning loads of Type O stars and black holes. I'm thinking once I'm done here, rather than continuing on to the Bubble Nebula like I'd thought about, that I'll return to civilization to see how much I can get for my exploration data, and go from there. Before my next expedition, I want to be able to hop longer distances at once. Right now I can go about 20 LY at a time, but an Asp at it's full potential should get nearer to 35 LY. That will make traveling from place to place that much faster, and also make it possible to get to more and more remote stars and regions in the less densely populated areas between spiral arms and on the edges and outer regions of the galactic disc.
Elite is going to be my furthest back-burnered of games I consider a going concern, but I'll still be progressing in it, little by little.
As a sort of preparation for the upcoming big release, I'm going back and revisiting the first two Witcher games. I'd like to check out all the additional CDPR content available to both; two side adventures in the first game, and the material added to the second after I'd finished it at launch. So far, I've played through one of the side adventures in The Witcher, a fan-made module called Damn Those Swamps! which was of middling quality. I've begun the first of the CDPR ones, which I believe is called Side Effects, a fully voice acted side story that begins with Geralt trying to get his bard friend Dandelion out of debt to some shady characters in Vizima he owes money to. These are each probably a few hours long.
Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China came out yesterday, a mostly 2D take on the series, starring Shao Jun, a Chinese Assassin from the early 1500s, who first appeared in the short film Assassin's Creed Embers, where she made a pilgrimage to Tuscany to seek guidance from Assassin Mentor Ezio Auditore in his final days. It's kinda neat so far, with an emphasis on being stealthy, and a very nice art style. Some of the play from the 3D games is a natural fit for this game type, and some not, really. I'm only a couple of levels in so far, but looking to play more soon. Hopefully I can get through this before The Witcher 3 hits, as well. It shouldn't be too difficult. It seems built for replayability.
Kind of on a whim, I began Batman: Arkham City a couple of weeks ago. That game starts off very strong. It's got a very solid feel to it, and an interesting, if not at all believable, premise. Given ample time, I'd play more. We'll see if that should ever come to pass, though.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
I've completed the game twice now. The second time was really only the second half of the game replayed to take the alternate path, but altogether I probably spent 40 hours with the game, though I have no way of verifying that estimation. This is very likely my game of the year. No other 2011 release has been or is as highly anticipated by me as The Witcher 2, and it delivered on all counts.
Assassins of Kings not only took what was great about The Witcher and ran with it, but completely revamped the combat system to great effect. It was pretty difficult at the beginning of the game (a patch in the time since I last played the prologue and first chapter did some balancing), but after getting the hang of it and investing some skill points into the various development trees, I became a formidable master swordsman/mage/alchemist hybrid.
The role-playing choices to be made in the Witcher games absolutely shame anything I've seen in any other games. Not only are the consequences truly meaningful to the development of the game's plot, the choices are rarely set up in a neat black/white good/evil dichotomy, and it's almost never immediately obvious what the ramifications of a choice will be. There is no spectrum on which your character mathematically drifts one way or the other depending on these choices; there is only the often harsh realization that a decision you made hours of playtime ago has just now come back around to you through an elaborate chain of cause and effect.
One key decision near the end of chapter 1 completely changes the plot, availability of quests, and mission objectives for the rest of the game, not to mention many of the locations visited in chapter 2. This is the point from which I went back and replayed from after finishing the game initially. Without spoiling too much, you choose to align (but not necessarily ally) yourself with either the elvish guerilla Iorveth or the vengeful special forces commander Vernon Roche and where you are and what side of the conflict you are on in chapter 2 plays out accordingly.
I can't imagine how CD Projekt Red will be able to carry over all 16 possible end-game world states to The Witcher 3. Most likely they will leave behind entirely many of the characters of this game. The overall political situation of the world of the game is pretty much the same at the ending of the game no matter what choices you make, but major characters (to this story) live or die, and individual kingdoms may be with or without a monarch or at peace or at war. Geralt though, is likely bound in the same direction with the same objective no matter how the saga of the kingslayers has played out. The ending of the first game in the series was similar; no matter who you allied with, Geralt's job was done and he was leaving the kingdom with a fat coin purse when things got real complicated all of a sudden. Something ends, something begins, they said, and if I had to guess the same is true here.
I just hope it's not a 4 year wait for the next game in the series. The Witcher 2 uses a new engine that the developers built specifically for this game, and so now that that groundwork is laid, here's hoping they can get The Witcher 3 done in closer to 2 or 3 years. The way the series is built so far, there is an overarching story arc of Geralt recovering lost memories of his adventures before the events of the games (including those that happened in the popular series of Witcher novels that the games were inspired by), and each game is a self-contained story of the witcher becoming embroiled in grand schemes and political maneuvering while just trying to do his profession (monster slayer for hire with a peculiar warrior's moral code) and earn some coin.
Two games in, and The Witcher has become one of my favorite series in gaming, and Geralt himself one of my favorite characters, right up there with the likes Solid/Naked Snake, Ezio Auditore, FemShep, and the cast of Uncharted. The wait begins for the next entry!
Assassins of Kings not only took what was great about The Witcher and ran with it, but completely revamped the combat system to great effect. It was pretty difficult at the beginning of the game (a patch in the time since I last played the prologue and first chapter did some balancing), but after getting the hang of it and investing some skill points into the various development trees, I became a formidable master swordsman/mage/alchemist hybrid.
The role-playing choices to be made in the Witcher games absolutely shame anything I've seen in any other games. Not only are the consequences truly meaningful to the development of the game's plot, the choices are rarely set up in a neat black/white good/evil dichotomy, and it's almost never immediately obvious what the ramifications of a choice will be. There is no spectrum on which your character mathematically drifts one way or the other depending on these choices; there is only the often harsh realization that a decision you made hours of playtime ago has just now come back around to you through an elaborate chain of cause and effect.
One key decision near the end of chapter 1 completely changes the plot, availability of quests, and mission objectives for the rest of the game, not to mention many of the locations visited in chapter 2. This is the point from which I went back and replayed from after finishing the game initially. Without spoiling too much, you choose to align (but not necessarily ally) yourself with either the elvish guerilla Iorveth or the vengeful special forces commander Vernon Roche and where you are and what side of the conflict you are on in chapter 2 plays out accordingly.
I can't imagine how CD Projekt Red will be able to carry over all 16 possible end-game world states to The Witcher 3. Most likely they will leave behind entirely many of the characters of this game. The overall political situation of the world of the game is pretty much the same at the ending of the game no matter what choices you make, but major characters (to this story) live or die, and individual kingdoms may be with or without a monarch or at peace or at war. Geralt though, is likely bound in the same direction with the same objective no matter how the saga of the kingslayers has played out. The ending of the first game in the series was similar; no matter who you allied with, Geralt's job was done and he was leaving the kingdom with a fat coin purse when things got real complicated all of a sudden. Something ends, something begins, they said, and if I had to guess the same is true here.
I just hope it's not a 4 year wait for the next game in the series. The Witcher 2 uses a new engine that the developers built specifically for this game, and so now that that groundwork is laid, here's hoping they can get The Witcher 3 done in closer to 2 or 3 years. The way the series is built so far, there is an overarching story arc of Geralt recovering lost memories of his adventures before the events of the games (including those that happened in the popular series of Witcher novels that the games were inspired by), and each game is a self-contained story of the witcher becoming embroiled in grand schemes and political maneuvering while just trying to do his profession (monster slayer for hire with a peculiar warrior's moral code) and earn some coin.
Two games in, and The Witcher has become one of my favorite series in gaming, and Geralt himself one of my favorite characters, right up there with the likes Solid/Naked Snake, Ezio Auditore, FemShep, and the cast of Uncharted. The wait begins for the next entry!
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Making This A Thing Again
Blogging has really gotten away from me lately. I blame my job. I hardly have time to trawl the RSS feeds or NeoGAF anymore, much less wax on and on about games. Fortunate then, that I haven't been playing a hell of a lot new or different in the last month. I think it really only amounts to four games.
Bioshock 2 was the last Resolution pick I managed to get to. I played a couple of hours, and was really enjoying it. All the hullabaloo surrounding the original game was about the plot and all it's significance and this and that and zzzzzz.... did everyone forget how much fun it was? Bioshock 2 is here to remind you. I'm excited to go back and play more, and what's more, the Minerva's Den DLC was recently released for the PC version, which I'm playing. I'll probably have to pick that up--again, as I bought it for the 360 version before catching a RROD to the console's face.
I also finally got around to finishing up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Now that's a great open-world shooter. It's got some light role-play elements to it as far as choosing which missions to take and choosing who to ally yourself with, and it's got a great big expansive world to run around in and tons of dynamic stuff happening everywhere you go. It's also steeped in atmosphere unlike what you get with many other games.
Also steeped in its own very specific atmosphere is the PC adventure game Blade Runner. A Call Of Podcast listener was kind enough to send me a copy of this hard-to-find gem, and it's quite a find. If you can get it to run on a modern system, it still looks pretty good, and of course the sound is excellent and very reminiscent of the movie. Again I only got to play it for an hour or two, but I was instantly hooked, and mean to get back to it as soon as possible, perhaps when my next game relenquishes its hold on me.
Yes, the long-awaited sequel to The Witcher is out, and I have played it. I have completed it, and gone back to play more. It's good. Very good, in fact, and I'll write more about it, and in detail, in my next entry, due soon-ish.
Bioshock 2 was the last Resolution pick I managed to get to. I played a couple of hours, and was really enjoying it. All the hullabaloo surrounding the original game was about the plot and all it's significance and this and that and zzzzzz.... did everyone forget how much fun it was? Bioshock 2 is here to remind you. I'm excited to go back and play more, and what's more, the Minerva's Den DLC was recently released for the PC version, which I'm playing. I'll probably have to pick that up--again, as I bought it for the 360 version before catching a RROD to the console's face.
I also finally got around to finishing up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Now that's a great open-world shooter. It's got some light role-play elements to it as far as choosing which missions to take and choosing who to ally yourself with, and it's got a great big expansive world to run around in and tons of dynamic stuff happening everywhere you go. It's also steeped in atmosphere unlike what you get with many other games.
Also steeped in its own very specific atmosphere is the PC adventure game Blade Runner. A Call Of Podcast listener was kind enough to send me a copy of this hard-to-find gem, and it's quite a find. If you can get it to run on a modern system, it still looks pretty good, and of course the sound is excellent and very reminiscent of the movie. Again I only got to play it for an hour or two, but I was instantly hooked, and mean to get back to it as soon as possible, perhaps when my next game relenquishes its hold on me.
Yes, the long-awaited sequel to The Witcher is out, and I have played it. I have completed it, and gone back to play more. It's good. Very good, in fact, and I'll write more about it, and in detail, in my next entry, due soon-ish.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Missions Accomplished
It's rare that I finish a game, relative to how often I play them, which is about every day. It so happens, though, that just this week I've finished two of them, The Witcher, and Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines.
Finishing The Witcher was the culmination of about 5 months of on and off role playing as Geralt of Rivia, the White Wolf, a professional monster slayer. Geralt is minding his own business with the other members of his Witcher order when their fortress, Kaer Morhen is attacked by a mysterious group of mages who kill one of their dwindling number and make off with the alchemical and magical secrets behind the Witchers' abilities to mutate normal humans into the superior warrior-monk-mercenaries that make up their order. Geralt and the other remaining Witchers agree to split up and comb the realms of the world for clues as to who is behind the attack and why, and to attempt to recover the Witchers' stolen secrets and prevent whatever evils their mysterious mage assailants are plotting.
Geralt makes his way to Vizima, capital of the kingdom of Temeria, and before long finds himself embroiled in local power struggles, race relations, and close to picking up the trail of those who attacked Kaer Morhen. The plot of The Witcher proceeds through a prologue, five large chapters of action, and an epilogue, and in total took me 60 hours to play through, taking time to go out of my way to finish 95% of the available side quests available on my single playthrough. There are actually three distinct ways to play through the game, taking either of two sides to the main conflict, or a completely neutral path to the end of the game. Major plot points apparently play out the same way, but the alliances you forge and those you spurn can have a large effect on what type of people you are surrounded by, and which other characters are open to you for friendship and more other, more amorous, relations.
I played Geralt more as a proxy for myself, often choosing the side of the conflict that I thought personally was more in the right. It's all shades of gray in The Witcher. Consequences of your choices are never laid out to you beforehand, and there is nothing approximating Mass Effect's meters of how much you are leaning to one end of the spectrum or the other. I felt like because of those factors, I played more with my own mind than how I play Commander Shepard, whom I tend to steer in a certain direction for consistency and gameplay benefits, and whom I see more at a step removed from myself. Shepard and Mass Effect I enjoy more like something being presented to me, but Geralt and The Witcher it was easier to see as something I was actually participating in.
There is a lot you have to be willing to overlook with the technical aspects of the game--random glitches, varying quality in the VA, every citizen of Vizima being one of about 10 models wearing different colored outfits, a less-than-perfectly optimized game engine, a combat system that can seem finnicky at times, and more, but when you balance all of that with the excellent story being told, the nice visuals, music, and excellent role-playing to be had, I can easily recommend the game, especially to people who are RPG fans, or certainly anyone who likes Mass Effect and could play that with badass swordsmanship, alchemy, and magic swapped in in place of guns and tech/psi powers. Incidentally, the game is easily playable on any system that would run the Mass Effect games.
Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines was, overall, pretty mediocre. It kind of makes me melancholy in a way for the bad old days of shitty, dumbed down versions of real console games that I used to play on the Game Boy and Game Gear. Games cast in the mold of their bigger brothers but shoehorned onto a smaller platform never turn out well. This game really should have been re-thought and designed from the ground up for the PSP, like the Metal Gear Solid games have been. I'm not sure how they could have done it and maintained the open-world feel of Assassin's Creed, but it probably could have been better than this half-hearted approximation. The VA and music were not great, either, and there were a lot of audio glitches in the game.
The game wasn't all bad, though. The fighting felt pretty faithful to AC on 360, and the story was at least a little interesting, though probably relatively inconsequential to the overall mythos. I spent probably 5-6 hours playing it, and I felt I got my money's worth. But then, only about $2.50 came out of my own pocket for the game. I wouldn't necessarily recommend the game, but if you got it as a pack-in or on the cheap, it'd be worth a try.
I've had a hankering for some Call Of Duty/Modern Warfare type multiplayer lately, so I installed COD4 from Steam. I played through the single player on a borrowed 360 copy, but this game came in a Steam COD pack I bought earlier this year. After messing around with punkbuster some, I was finally able to get into the action, with mixed results. I don't think these maps are meant to be played with a maximum of 50 players. I eventually found a server with a more manageable pace of play, but by that time I had been repeatedly owned for about 45 minutes straight and was ready to move on to something else. Still, this game is a lot of fun, and nothing else I've found can completely substitute for it in every way.
Keeping up with the RPG pile, after finishing The Witcher, I've moved onto the Fallout series, starting with the first. I'm not planning on barreling through all 5 games in the series sequentially or anything, I just thought I'd stick to the pattern of new school (Mass Effect 2), old school (Planescape), new school (The Witcher), and come back to the old with this game. At the rate I'm going, I'm expecting this to last me probably until around next May when The Witcher 2 is released, but we'll see. I'll probably end up playing this like I did Oblivion, just doing a bunch of random stuff and then rolling a new character and trying other stuff, eventually getting around to the main quest line once I kind of get the hang of the game. This game is old, and it plays like an old game, so it's going to take some getting used to. I'm off to a decent start with my first (of this go around at the game) character. I don't really have any sense of the scale and scope of this game, but I'm excited to uncover it.
Friday, November 26, 2010
Two Steps Forward, A Hundred Steps Back
I haven't purposefully neglected writing here; it's just been really busy at work lately, heh. I've also been busy outside of work. I was called away for about 10 days for a family emergency, and then the new Wheel Of Time book, Towers of Midnight, arrived at my door and I had to immediately take a week of free time and read straight through that.
Here I am now, though, making amends. I've got quite a bit to cover from the last 3-4 weeks.
First off, Civ V. I played a few more games and achieved every victory condition at least once before prying myself away to play other games for a while. Civ is amazingly addictive, and I'm looking forward to going back to play a bunch more, to try and get a win with each Civ, at least, which will be a lot more gaming, since I've gotten wins with only 4 of the 20ish Civs currently playable. I'm not sure what type of victory I should go for with the rest. I may re-instate the score victory condition for those games.
While out of town, I did some light gaming, just played a little Diablo II, Minecraft, and emulated Demon's Crest for SNES on my Macbook, and while I'm here I may as well mention iPhone standards Canabalt, Galcon, and Words With Friends. I also tried out Doom II RPG and Civ Rev, both of which I had picked up very cheap, but didn't care for them for one reason or another.
Since arriving back home, I haven't played a whole hell of a lot. I played some League of Legends, which I continue to be mediocre at. I'm sticking with one champion until I can learn the greater movements of the game, and once I'm confident with the game at large, then I might find another type of champion to play depending on what mood I'm in. I had some reward cash at Best Buy that I had nothing better to do with, and used it to get the retail collector's pack of LOL, which comes with a redeemable code that unlocks 20 champions and gives some Riot Points (the cash currency) that you can use to either buy more champions or skins for the ones you already own. I think I may be able to purchse Influence Point bonuses also. IP are the points you earn by playing matches that can be used to buy enhancements for your champions or to unlock more of them for play.
The rest of my Best Buy rewards cash I spent on Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines, the PSP game. I was kind of curious, and it wasn't much real, actual cash out of my pocket, so I figured, what the hell? It turns out to be a PSP-fitted follow-up to AC1. You play as Altair again, this tracking down the remaining Templars and more artifacts like the Apple of Eden from the first game, visiting the island of Cyprus. A lot of things from AC1 are there, they're just kind of ill-fitted into a junior-sized version of the game. The cities are open-world, but the wards are small, sparsely populated, and separated by loads. I'm about halfway through the game, and so far it's also been laughably easy. I don't know whether to laud the game for what it's pulling off on the PSP, or condemn it for being what it is, limited in scope by the choice of platform. It's not bad, per se, but it's not pulled off with the same flair that MGS: PW is.
Finally, I'm making a concerted effort this holiday weekend to finish, or come as close as possible to finishing, The Witcher. It may not be doable in such a short time. This is one of those games that I'll take a long time away from, and then come back and wonder why I don't just plow through to the end of it. It's really engrossing when I've got the time to devote to it. I'm in the middle of chapter 3 right now, of 6 if I'm not mistaken. The sequel is coming out next year, and I may upgrade my video card just for that.
I almost forgot what prompted the title of this post--Steam is having one of their famous sales this weekend, and I bought Alpha Protocol for cheap, and just now got a bundle of 5 different indie games for $5 total. There is no resistance.
Here I am now, though, making amends. I've got quite a bit to cover from the last 3-4 weeks.
First off, Civ V. I played a few more games and achieved every victory condition at least once before prying myself away to play other games for a while. Civ is amazingly addictive, and I'm looking forward to going back to play a bunch more, to try and get a win with each Civ, at least, which will be a lot more gaming, since I've gotten wins with only 4 of the 20ish Civs currently playable. I'm not sure what type of victory I should go for with the rest. I may re-instate the score victory condition for those games.
While out of town, I did some light gaming, just played a little Diablo II, Minecraft, and emulated Demon's Crest for SNES on my Macbook, and while I'm here I may as well mention iPhone standards Canabalt, Galcon, and Words With Friends. I also tried out Doom II RPG and Civ Rev, both of which I had picked up very cheap, but didn't care for them for one reason or another.
Since arriving back home, I haven't played a whole hell of a lot. I played some League of Legends, which I continue to be mediocre at. I'm sticking with one champion until I can learn the greater movements of the game, and once I'm confident with the game at large, then I might find another type of champion to play depending on what mood I'm in. I had some reward cash at Best Buy that I had nothing better to do with, and used it to get the retail collector's pack of LOL, which comes with a redeemable code that unlocks 20 champions and gives some Riot Points (the cash currency) that you can use to either buy more champions or skins for the ones you already own. I think I may be able to purchse Influence Point bonuses also. IP are the points you earn by playing matches that can be used to buy enhancements for your champions or to unlock more of them for play.
Finally, I'm making a concerted effort this holiday weekend to finish, or come as close as possible to finishing, The Witcher. It may not be doable in such a short time. This is one of those games that I'll take a long time away from, and then come back and wonder why I don't just plow through to the end of it. It's really engrossing when I've got the time to devote to it. I'm in the middle of chapter 3 right now, of 6 if I'm not mistaken. The sequel is coming out next year, and I may upgrade my video card just for that.
I almost forgot what prompted the title of this post--Steam is having one of their famous sales this weekend, and I bought Alpha Protocol for cheap, and just now got a bundle of 5 different indie games for $5 total. There is no resistance.
Friday, September 24, 2010
8 Days Gone
Then, as it was, it shall ever be, and though the course may change some times, rivers always reach the sea.
I will finish The Witcher. Eventually. It's an awesome game, with a great dark fantasy world and a smooth operating badass protagonist. In one session a few nights ago I bedded two separate attractive females, and I am entirely unrepentant about enjoying it. One I knew was eventually going to invite Geralt to her bed, but I didn't figure it would happen so soon. I also like the dice poker and crazy quests you end up taking on in this game. I must be getting near the end of chapter 2 by now.
I'm actually in chapter 3 of FFT: WotL now, working down the job trees on getting to the ninja and arithmeticians and such. I understand there are new classes in this version of the game, including one that looks like a dark knight from some art in the manual. That would be cool. I just love the plot of this game. It's so much more interesting than the typical JRPG tripe. This is a kingdom plagued by real problems in addition to the supernatural ones. It's almost like the video game version of George RR Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire. It's pretty telling that even though I consider this one of my favorite games of all time, I wouldn't have been able to clearly recall or summarize the plot until having played through this remake with it's amazing localization. Wiegraf actually has motivation! Delita's actions actually kind of make sense! So good.
Some months ago I was playing and writing about Demigod, a 'Defense of the Ancients-inspired game,' or whatever we're calling this little sub-genre that it and League Of Legends belong to. I really enjoyed that game until something else came along and distracted me from playing it any more. Cut to the present, and I've decided to try out LOL after having heard good things, read good things, and out of curiosity about the free-to-play business model that a lot of online games are going to these days. I've played a game just about every night this week, and I'm kind of getting into it. LOL, I'm given to understand, is much closer to what the original DOTA mod for Warcraft III ended up evolving into, though not without some additions and changes to spruce things up a bit and make the game a little more inviting and less incredibly unfriendly for newbs, as DOTA and Heroes of Newerth are reputed to be.
Upon completion of a match of LOL, a player is awarded Influence Points, which can be used to purchase either perks that strengthen the player's character in game or permanent access to the game's champions, it's player characters. There are something like 60 champions to choose from, 10 of which are free to play at any one time, the selection rotating every week. I've been playing in practice matches so far, but only earning like 30-70 points per match, which isn't a whole hell of a lot. It could take quite a while of playing before you have enough points to purchase much of any worth, from what I can tell. That's to be expected when the company would rather you pay with your money than time, I guess.
I guess I should talk a little about how the game plays. I'll try to get into that in my next post.
I will finish The Witcher. Eventually. It's an awesome game, with a great dark fantasy world and a smooth operating badass protagonist. In one session a few nights ago I bedded two separate attractive females, and I am entirely unrepentant about enjoying it. One I knew was eventually going to invite Geralt to her bed, but I didn't figure it would happen so soon. I also like the dice poker and crazy quests you end up taking on in this game. I must be getting near the end of chapter 2 by now.
I'm actually in chapter 3 of FFT: WotL now, working down the job trees on getting to the ninja and arithmeticians and such. I understand there are new classes in this version of the game, including one that looks like a dark knight from some art in the manual. That would be cool. I just love the plot of this game. It's so much more interesting than the typical JRPG tripe. This is a kingdom plagued by real problems in addition to the supernatural ones. It's almost like the video game version of George RR Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire. It's pretty telling that even though I consider this one of my favorite games of all time, I wouldn't have been able to clearly recall or summarize the plot until having played through this remake with it's amazing localization. Wiegraf actually has motivation! Delita's actions actually kind of make sense! So good.
Some months ago I was playing and writing about Demigod, a 'Defense of the Ancients-inspired game,' or whatever we're calling this little sub-genre that it and League Of Legends belong to. I really enjoyed that game until something else came along and distracted me from playing it any more. Cut to the present, and I've decided to try out LOL after having heard good things, read good things, and out of curiosity about the free-to-play business model that a lot of online games are going to these days. I've played a game just about every night this week, and I'm kind of getting into it. LOL, I'm given to understand, is much closer to what the original DOTA mod for Warcraft III ended up evolving into, though not without some additions and changes to spruce things up a bit and make the game a little more inviting and less incredibly unfriendly for newbs, as DOTA and Heroes of Newerth are reputed to be.
Upon completion of a match of LOL, a player is awarded Influence Points, which can be used to purchase either perks that strengthen the player's character in game or permanent access to the game's champions, it's player characters. There are something like 60 champions to choose from, 10 of which are free to play at any one time, the selection rotating every week. I've been playing in practice matches so far, but only earning like 30-70 points per match, which isn't a whole hell of a lot. It could take quite a while of playing before you have enough points to purchase much of any worth, from what I can tell. That's to be expected when the company would rather you pay with your money than time, I guess.
I guess I should talk a little about how the game plays. I'll try to get into that in my next post.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
En Taro Adun, Executor
My life for Aiur! For Adun! I have returned. I have returned. I have returned. My life for Aiur! For Adun! I have returned.
Yes, I have been playing a lot of Starcraft recently. I beat it, actually, finally finishing off the game with the Protoss campaign. Each race's campaign was 10 missions, and if I had to guess, each took somewhere around 12-15 hours to beat, it not more, counting all of the failed strategic gambits and false starts and reloads. Thus, I've been counting each campaign as a separate game. I did the same with Oblivion's guild quest lines, and will split other games into halves as it suits me, perhaps Super Mario Galaxy will count again if I go and collect all the stars, or Peace Walker if I can ever finish all of the missions it has to offer.
I've enjoyed Starcraft, but have yet to get fully comfortable playing it. Each campaign would probably need to be twice as long for comfort to set in, and what do you know, I have the Brood War expansion waiting, which features an additional campaign for each race, and a few new units, too, from what I gather. By the time I'm done with that and the SC2 campaign(s), I should be ready to try multi-player. At this pace, it'll be at least a year before I get there, though.
As far as strategy goes, I want to finish Dawn of War II next, and then I've got that game's first expansion, Company of Heroes complete and Dawn of War I complete to play, as well as the aforementioned Brood War, and I'll want to pick up Warcraft III at some point, too, since I don't own it, yet. That's not to mention turn based or or 4X or SRPG or DOTA type games!
It's been a few weeks since I've written up a post about what I've been playing, but the list is fairly small. In addition to finishing off Starcraft, I picked up Bayonetta, and have been enjoying that some, though I'm still not very far in. The last week or so has been almost all Starcraft, though I've been trying to get back into The Witcher, an effort which was put off by a failed GPU fan. Dell replaced my card, though, and so that will be back on just as soon as I get back from my trip this weekend for Labor Day. While out of town I'll be playing FFT: War of the Lions, which I've also put a few hours into over the last couple of weeks. Both that and Bayonetta I only have dabbled in (though I'm an old hand at FFT on PSX), but both are looking very good, and I'll have more to say on those later.
The game plan now (and it's always subject to change) though is to focus on Bayonetta, The Witcher, and DoW II once I get back, and to play more FFT and MGS PW while I'm gone.
I've also been reading recently--my first venture into the Warhammer 40K universe, a book called Eisenhorn by Dan Abnett. It's almost a noir detective story, only set in the far flung future and strung out across the galaxy over centuries, chronicling the lengths one Imperial Inquisitor will go to in service of the God Emperor. It's very good. Very, surprisingly, good. I was expecting a level of quality along the lines of books emblazoned with Dragonlance or Halo or Mass Effect logos, but it puts them to shame. I would recommend it to anyone interested in sci-fi, especially anyone who likes Dune or anything with more fantastic elements. Eisenhorn is an omnibus of three novels Xenos, Malleus, and Hereticus, with two interleaving short stories, the first of which, Missing In Action, I thought was especially good.
Yes, I have been playing a lot of Starcraft recently. I beat it, actually, finally finishing off the game with the Protoss campaign. Each race's campaign was 10 missions, and if I had to guess, each took somewhere around 12-15 hours to beat, it not more, counting all of the failed strategic gambits and false starts and reloads. Thus, I've been counting each campaign as a separate game. I did the same with Oblivion's guild quest lines, and will split other games into halves as it suits me, perhaps Super Mario Galaxy will count again if I go and collect all the stars, or Peace Walker if I can ever finish all of the missions it has to offer.
I've enjoyed Starcraft, but have yet to get fully comfortable playing it. Each campaign would probably need to be twice as long for comfort to set in, and what do you know, I have the Brood War expansion waiting, which features an additional campaign for each race, and a few new units, too, from what I gather. By the time I'm done with that and the SC2 campaign(s), I should be ready to try multi-player. At this pace, it'll be at least a year before I get there, though.
As far as strategy goes, I want to finish Dawn of War II next, and then I've got that game's first expansion, Company of Heroes complete and Dawn of War I complete to play, as well as the aforementioned Brood War, and I'll want to pick up Warcraft III at some point, too, since I don't own it, yet. That's not to mention turn based or or 4X or SRPG or DOTA type games!
It's been a few weeks since I've written up a post about what I've been playing, but the list is fairly small. In addition to finishing off Starcraft, I picked up Bayonetta, and have been enjoying that some, though I'm still not very far in. The last week or so has been almost all Starcraft, though I've been trying to get back into The Witcher, an effort which was put off by a failed GPU fan. Dell replaced my card, though, and so that will be back on just as soon as I get back from my trip this weekend for Labor Day. While out of town I'll be playing FFT: War of the Lions, which I've also put a few hours into over the last couple of weeks. Both that and Bayonetta I only have dabbled in (though I'm an old hand at FFT on PSX), but both are looking very good, and I'll have more to say on those later.
The game plan now (and it's always subject to change) though is to focus on Bayonetta, The Witcher, and DoW II once I get back, and to play more FFT and MGS PW while I'm gone.
I've also been reading recently--my first venture into the Warhammer 40K universe, a book called Eisenhorn by Dan Abnett. It's almost a noir detective story, only set in the far flung future and strung out across the galaxy over centuries, chronicling the lengths one Imperial Inquisitor will go to in service of the God Emperor. It's very good. Very, surprisingly, good. I was expecting a level of quality along the lines of books emblazoned with Dragonlance or Halo or Mass Effect logos, but it puts them to shame. I would recommend it to anyone interested in sci-fi, especially anyone who likes Dune or anything with more fantastic elements. Eisenhorn is an omnibus of three novels Xenos, Malleus, and Hereticus, with two interleaving short stories, the first of which, Missing In Action, I thought was especially good.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
A Million Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood
...and sorry I cannot travel them all.
I finished up Call of Duty (the first) this past weekend, and enjoyed it thoroughly. I'm tempted to jump right into the expansion, United Assault, I think it's called, but I should probably knock out at least something else from my stable of games 'in progress,' first. What, though, is the question.
Waffling, I have dabbled a little in Rez HD and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 the past couple of nights. I'll never quite get the former, though it is a curious flashy thing. I'm not sure how much longer I'll be playing the latter, either. I'm considering letting my Live account fall to silver level. There's plenty of good shooters that I own on Steam and that are currently neglected. I don't play online enou----oh fuck, I just realized that I have to stay gold to maintain Netflix instant watch. Goddamn you, Microsoft. I guess that settles that.
I have enough RPGs in my backlog that the single genre could probably equal the playtime of all other games on the list, so I'm thinking I need to constantly be working on one amongst everything else. Planescape is down, and currently I'm working my way (slowly) through The Witcher. It's great, and I'll have more to say about it on the next Call Of Podcast. I kind of want to hit Fallout (the first) next, but who can say. It may be months before I'm done with Geralt of Rivia.
I've played a little bit of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker every day since purchasing it. It's good for an hour here and there; a quick 2-3 missions, some Mother Base maintenance, and I'm done. It's definitely a descendant of Portable Ops, but done better. I did go back and try the controls in PO, and PW's are an improvement on one variant of that game. There are key differences though, that are not reproduceable in PO. I won't go into them, but suffice it to say that PW's setup is better, overall. Peace Walker is satisfying in a long-term growth kind of way, but the individual missions so far have been pretty easy. I've had one major 'boss' fight, and it was on a whole other level from the rest of them. It was pretty tough to do the stealthy, recruit/abduct everyone way, but pretty satisfying when I finally pulled it off. I'm into the game, so far, just not head over heels, yet.
I finished up Call of Duty (the first) this past weekend, and enjoyed it thoroughly. I'm tempted to jump right into the expansion, United Assault, I think it's called, but I should probably knock out at least something else from my stable of games 'in progress,' first. What, though, is the question.
Waffling, I have dabbled a little in Rez HD and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 the past couple of nights. I'll never quite get the former, though it is a curious flashy thing. I'm not sure how much longer I'll be playing the latter, either. I'm considering letting my Live account fall to silver level. There's plenty of good shooters that I own on Steam and that are currently neglected. I don't play online enou----oh fuck, I just realized that I have to stay gold to maintain Netflix instant watch. Goddamn you, Microsoft. I guess that settles that.
I have enough RPGs in my backlog that the single genre could probably equal the playtime of all other games on the list, so I'm thinking I need to constantly be working on one amongst everything else. Planescape is down, and currently I'm working my way (slowly) through The Witcher. It's great, and I'll have more to say about it on the next Call Of Podcast. I kind of want to hit Fallout (the first) next, but who can say. It may be months before I'm done with Geralt of Rivia.
I've played a little bit of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker every day since purchasing it. It's good for an hour here and there; a quick 2-3 missions, some Mother Base maintenance, and I'm done. It's definitely a descendant of Portable Ops, but done better. I did go back and try the controls in PO, and PW's are an improvement on one variant of that game. There are key differences though, that are not reproduceable in PO. I won't go into them, but suffice it to say that PW's setup is better, overall. Peace Walker is satisfying in a long-term growth kind of way, but the individual missions so far have been pretty easy. I've had one major 'boss' fight, and it was on a whole other level from the rest of them. It was pretty tough to do the stealthy, recruit/abduct everyone way, but pretty satisfying when I finally pulled it off. I'm into the game, so far, just not head over heels, yet.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Bad As I Want To Be
Last week I finished up my romp through Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and I thoroughly enjoyed the game, as I mentioned on the latest Call Of Podcast. It's the type of game where you can see all of the seams, the load times in the menus are inexcusable, and it's probably a bit short for some, but it's cool all the same. It has its one trick, and it does it well. Even the QTE's, which I normally despise, were ok because they were so forgiving, and just required one button press, rather than the "test of strength" variety in some games. I even played one of the bonus campaign levels (I have the special edition), the Jedi Temple, and enjoyed the cool fight at the end of that one. One gripe I have though, is with the dark side (non-canon) ending. It was just nowhere near as cool as it should have been, to set up Starkiller's further dark side missions post-game (the other two bonus campaign levels, Hoth and Tatooine). I wonder if the sequel will be any good.
The biggest story for this blog update is that I finally started inFamous, which has been sitting on my shelf for probably a year, now. I've gone from platforming and shooting lightning in Galaxy and SW:TFU to doing both at the same time in this game. I mentioned being kind of "meh" about it on the podcast, and after putting in a few more hours, I'm starting to like it a little more. I'm being as comically evil as I can possibly be. I push people around with myforce electric powers just for fun, and if I'm given the choice to help some people or do something rude and selfish, I'll go the latter rout, with total disregard and contempt for the citizens of Genericity (that's not it's real name, but it'll do). In a way, I'm projecting my own jaded, seen-it-all gamer disdain into Cole, who is a perfect conduit for it, since he's kind of a cock, himself. I want to see if willing him to be as evil as possible will actually make him into a bad guy, or if he'll wuss out and have a change of heart at the end. More games need to let you be the bad guy, and actually be a bad guy. Like, reprehensible.
The game does an odd thing where it sends you into the sewers to get through these very straight-forward platformy sections, only they're super duper easy; because Cole tends to suction onto whatever surface is nearby, it feels like a three-year-old could blow through those sections. I would actually appreciate a little more of a challenge there, something more akin to the jumping puzzles in a Prince of Persia game. I do like Cole's Spider-Man act out in the open city, though. It makes getting to the rooftops a lot easier and pretty effortless. I also like his power line grind ability. That's just fun. The electric scatter grenades and the gound pound thing are cool, as well. Now that I think about it, Cole's powers have a lot in common with Starkiller's.
Apart from those two main things, I made just a little progress in The Witcher, moving into Chapter II. This is going to be a pretty long game. It's very good so far, though. I played a little more Bad Company 2 with Esteban after recording the podcast this weekend. I think it's still my favorite multiplayer shooter. I also went back to Super Mario Galaxy and got my star count up to 78 before shelving that game for a while to return to Monster Hunter Tri on on the Wii. I got in one good hunt online, taking down a Qurupeco with one other player, and getting my Hunter Rank to level 6. There's a lot left to do in that game, yet.
The biggest story for this blog update is that I finally started inFamous, which has been sitting on my shelf for probably a year, now. I've gone from platforming and shooting lightning in Galaxy and SW:TFU to doing both at the same time in this game. I mentioned being kind of "meh" about it on the podcast, and after putting in a few more hours, I'm starting to like it a little more. I'm being as comically evil as I can possibly be. I push people around with my
The game does an odd thing where it sends you into the sewers to get through these very straight-forward platformy sections, only they're super duper easy; because Cole tends to suction onto whatever surface is nearby, it feels like a three-year-old could blow through those sections. I would actually appreciate a little more of a challenge there, something more akin to the jumping puzzles in a Prince of Persia game. I do like Cole's Spider-Man act out in the open city, though. It makes getting to the rooftops a lot easier and pretty effortless. I also like his power line grind ability. That's just fun. The electric scatter grenades and the gound pound thing are cool, as well. Now that I think about it, Cole's powers have a lot in common with Starkiller's.
Apart from those two main things, I made just a little progress in The Witcher, moving into Chapter II. This is going to be a pretty long game. It's very good so far, though. I played a little more Bad Company 2 with Esteban after recording the podcast this weekend. I think it's still my favorite multiplayer shooter. I also went back to Super Mario Galaxy and got my star count up to 78 before shelving that game for a while to return to Monster Hunter Tri on on the Wii. I got in one good hunt online, taking down a Qurupeco with one other player, and getting my Hunter Rank to level 6. There's a lot left to do in that game, yet.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Back to Zero
Pulling myself up from the quicksand of the backlog minus world, today I saw the credits roll on Super Mario Galaxy, the first. I wouldn't say I've completed the game though, by any means. There are still probably 10 or more levels I haven't even seen yet. You only need about 65 stars to have found and beaten Bowser and saved, Peach, though. I currently have 66 out of 120 or 121, whatever the maximum total is. I doubt I'll get them all, but I would like to at least see all of the levels, which are the best part of the game, hands down.
This weekend I also plowed through several more levels of The Force Unleashed, and I'm enjoying it. I put it on Easy and I'm just tearing through the legions of guys in my way on my mission to help Darth Vader overthrow Emperor Palpatine. It's good for that, and the story is also pretty good, for Star Wars.
I'm wrapping up all the loose ends in the first chapter of The Witcher, as well. There's a hellhound boss called The Beast that gives a lot of players trouble, from what I've read of the game online. I killed that and also made a choice to stick up for the witch Abigail, who was being persecuted by the corrupt and hypocritical villagers of Vizima. That part was pretty awesome, with Geralt pulling out a speech much like Clint Eastwood's from the end of Unforgiven. I love this guy. Player agency in The Witcher is done nicely, and a little different from something like Mass Effect, though they have a lot in common. Geralt, unlike Shepard, is his own person, and you just make the decisions for him. He has his own past and his own attitude, whereas with Shepard, you determine those things yourself. It's easier to get into the character's swagger when it's at that slight remove.
Trials HD was on sale this week on XBLA, so I picked that game up (along with Shadow Complex), and had a go with it for a while. It's simple and fun; you control a motorbike stunt rider through tons of crazy physics puzzles, competing with friends over leaderboards for best times. It's viewed from the side, like Excitebike of old, but there are no other riders on the course at the same time or anything like that. It's purely time trials, which is probably where they got the title.
This weekend I also plowed through several more levels of The Force Unleashed, and I'm enjoying it. I put it on Easy and I'm just tearing through the legions of guys in my way on my mission to help Darth Vader overthrow Emperor Palpatine. It's good for that, and the story is also pretty good, for Star Wars.
I'm wrapping up all the loose ends in the first chapter of The Witcher, as well. There's a hellhound boss called The Beast that gives a lot of players trouble, from what I've read of the game online. I killed that and also made a choice to stick up for the witch Abigail, who was being persecuted by the corrupt and hypocritical villagers of Vizima. That part was pretty awesome, with Geralt pulling out a speech much like Clint Eastwood's from the end of Unforgiven. I love this guy. Player agency in The Witcher is done nicely, and a little different from something like Mass Effect, though they have a lot in common. Geralt, unlike Shepard, is his own person, and you just make the decisions for him. He has his own past and his own attitude, whereas with Shepard, you determine those things yourself. It's easier to get into the character's swagger when it's at that slight remove.
Trials HD was on sale this week on XBLA, so I picked that game up (along with Shadow Complex), and had a go with it for a while. It's simple and fun; you control a motorbike stunt rider through tons of crazy physics puzzles, competing with friends over leaderboards for best times. It's viewed from the side, like Excitebike of old, but there are no other riders on the course at the same time or anything like that. It's purely time trials, which is probably where they got the title.
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