Not too long ago Egosoft released another iteration to the X series called X3: Albion Prelude. It's actually an expansion to X3: Terran Conflict, and requires that game to run. I spent about 18 hours with Terran Conflict and never really clicked with it. It's quite the deep space trader game. Albion Prelude does a little bit to improve the graphics and user interface, and also adds a stock exchange in case the game's incredibly deep economy wasn't complex enough for you. I picked up Albion Prelude for the might-as-well price of $10, hoping that the game finally would hook me, but I'm sad to report that it has not.
I think that there are some fundamental problems with both of these games, and those revolve around how long it takes to do anything. I spent more time just staring at stations as they drew nearer, my ship on auto-pilot and time sped up to 600%, than I did having any fun with the game. I'm sure that the capacity is there to have a whole fleet of AI guys run my trade empire for me, but that's not something I would accomplish in the first, say, 50 hours of play. That's stretching it a bit, even for a guy like me, who's willing to put time into a rewarding game to get the most out of it (S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Far Cry 2). I like what X looks like, but I can't get on with the execution. There is another major entry in the series set to be released later this year, I believe, called X: Rebirth. I'll be watching it; maybe it will be the one to click.
In the meantime, I have Freespace 2, hailed by many as an essential classic in the space flight genre. I've only played just the first mission so far, along with the three training missions. It seems fun. I think I am going to need a better controller than the mouse, though. I want to see if I can get my 360 pad to work with it.
Elsewise, this past weekend I played a little bit of both Batman: Arkham Asylum and Just Cause 2. Not really anything to report on either, just that I spent an hour or so with them.
I've spent a great deal more time playing Dota 2 over the last few weeks than anything. I'm still learning the basics and some intermediate stuff that a total newb wouldn't get to, as well as learning more about how to build my Windrunner for success. I'm kind of hooked on Dota 2, and I want to stick with it and really learn the game, because it's a lot of fun. It jives with a lot of what I enjoy about several types of games.
Showing posts with label X3: Terran Conflict. Show all posts
Showing posts with label X3: Terran Conflict. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Monday, July 26, 2010
My Happy Place
I'm at a real good place right now with video games. Peace Walker is friggin' great, I got a free game from Valve that is really fun (Alien Swarm), and for less than ten dollars/Euros, I got two more great games in Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions for PSP, and the independant, one man production Minecraft (PC/Mac browsers).
I was just playing some Peace Walker and had another epic battle (Extra Ops 80-something) vs a bombing helicopter. I wasn't even really attempting to win it, just trying out different weapons as recon for a future run, but I managed to neutralize all of the ground troops and get the chopper pilot to stupidly hang his head out of the cockpit, which meant that some splash damage from one of my surface-to-air missiles took him out and netted me the machine for Outer Heaven's hangars. I wasn't aware that was even possible; I thought you had to tranquilize pilots to capture the vehicles. I suppose not!
The PSP redux of Final Fantasy Tactics arrived from Amazon today, and I played it for about 45 minutes, long enough to get through the intro stuff and to the world map for the first time. Yep, that's my good old FFT, but damn the translation is a hell of a lot better in this version. I can't wait to play all the way through and experience the story the way it should have been told over a decade ago. My last playthrough was just before moving back to the US from Japan, but I only got to somewhere in the midst of Chapter 4, probably about 75% of the way through the main game.
Yesterday I jumped back into X3 for a while and ran a couple of trade routes and explored a couple of new sectors of the galaxy, and then decided to check out Valve's gift to us all, the free Alien Swarm on Steam. It's a top-down co-operative class-based action shooter, kind of like Left 4 Dead meets Gauntlet or Smash TV or something. I ended up playing all the way through the game over the course of a couple of hours with random people on Steam. One guy was a total douche, spouting racial slurs and always rushing everyone through the levels, but thankfully he was easily ignored. I didn't feel like grabbing another group just for some quick action. It's a pretty quick game, especially if everyone knows what they're doing. Only the d-bag had played before, but even with 3 greenhorns we didn't have much trouble, on the normal difficulty setting. I could see myself playing more; the game has got a cool class system with weapon unlocks and experience points, and the action is tight.
I read on NeoGAF about an awesome little (though actually fucking huge) game called Minecraft. You're dropped into a tile-based and randomized 3D world, that looks a lot like the recent game 3D Dot Game Heroes, or what you would expect a 3D 8-bit world to look like. You start with nothing but you can punch trees to get lumber and then craft various things like a workbench that lets you craft more complicated things like pickaxes or hoes to till the soil with. From there, you can go mine in the world, just anywhere, it seems, or go do whatever. It's basically a huge randomized world/construction set with monsters and caves and all kinds of crazy stuff, and it's really neat looking and interesting. Check the thread
In the 30 minutes or so I spent checking out the game tonight I generated two worlds, did some climbing and exploring, and other stupid things like digging straight down for a hundred feet and not being able to get back up. I have no idea what this game is about, but it's awesome.
I was just playing some Peace Walker and had another epic battle (Extra Ops 80-something) vs a bombing helicopter. I wasn't even really attempting to win it, just trying out different weapons as recon for a future run, but I managed to neutralize all of the ground troops and get the chopper pilot to stupidly hang his head out of the cockpit, which meant that some splash damage from one of my surface-to-air missiles took him out and netted me the machine for Outer Heaven's hangars. I wasn't aware that was even possible; I thought you had to tranquilize pilots to capture the vehicles. I suppose not!
The PSP redux of Final Fantasy Tactics arrived from Amazon today, and I played it for about 45 minutes, long enough to get through the intro stuff and to the world map for the first time. Yep, that's my good old FFT, but damn the translation is a hell of a lot better in this version. I can't wait to play all the way through and experience the story the way it should have been told over a decade ago. My last playthrough was just before moving back to the US from Japan, but I only got to somewhere in the midst of Chapter 4, probably about 75% of the way through the main game.
Yesterday I jumped back into X3 for a while and ran a couple of trade routes and explored a couple of new sectors of the galaxy, and then decided to check out Valve's gift to us all, the free Alien Swarm on Steam. It's a top-down co-operative class-based action shooter, kind of like Left 4 Dead meets Gauntlet or Smash TV or something. I ended up playing all the way through the game over the course of a couple of hours with random people on Steam. One guy was a total douche, spouting racial slurs and always rushing everyone through the levels, but thankfully he was easily ignored. I didn't feel like grabbing another group just for some quick action. It's a pretty quick game, especially if everyone knows what they're doing. Only the d-bag had played before, but even with 3 greenhorns we didn't have much trouble, on the normal difficulty setting. I could see myself playing more; the game has got a cool class system with weapon unlocks and experience points, and the action is tight.
I read on NeoGAF about an awesome little (though actually fucking huge) game called Minecraft. You're dropped into a tile-based and randomized 3D world, that looks a lot like the recent game 3D Dot Game Heroes, or what you would expect a 3D 8-bit world to look like. You start with nothing but you can punch trees to get lumber and then craft various things like a workbench that lets you craft more complicated things like pickaxes or hoes to till the soil with. From there, you can go mine in the world, just anywhere, it seems, or go do whatever. It's basically a huge randomized world/construction set with monsters and caves and all kinds of crazy stuff, and it's really neat looking and interesting. Check the thread
In the 30 minutes or so I spent checking out the game tonight I generated two worlds, did some climbing and exploring, and other stupid things like digging straight down for a hundred feet and not being able to get back up. I have no idea what this game is about, but it's awesome.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
...Three Weeks Later
I've been absolutely swamped with work and doctor's appointments and whatnot lately, and while this is the first chance I've gotten to blog any, I have been doing quite a bit of gaming. I've forgone watching these Rome DVDs, in fact, to fit in more time with some of these games. I'll write this time period up in chronological order.
A few weeks ago Steam had a sale going on the X series, a long-running one where you play a space entrepreneur, and sometime privateer, out to make your own mark on the galaxy. I did some quick research, and it was clear that the game to buy from this series is the most recent (and by all accounts, most complete) entry, X3: Terran Conflict. It was only ten bucks, and I like space and had recently come to the conclusion that EVE Online and its monthly subscription weren't right for me, so I bit.
The game is vast and expansive, and by turns bewildering and incredibly difficult, but it is also strangely compelling. Even 18 hours in, I feel like I have barely scratched the surface. Every mission I try to take on is either outright impossible or so difficult as to make it virtually so. Missions don't preclude you from taking them if say, you aren't in the right type of ship, or don't have a cargo bay big enough to transport the items in question, or don't have a ship fast enough to get to a place before the time limit of the mission. So, right out of the gate, you are surrounded by missions and tasks you can attempt to do for people around the galaxy, but that would be functionally impossible to finish. Still, I am compelled to get somewhere in this game. I think what I need most is money to buy better ships for myself and money to invest in hiring other ships to run trade routes and money to build factories and stations with which to make more money to use to start to be able to get out and actually do some things to build some reputation with the various factions in the universe. First, I need to find some good trade routes to run, then I need to run them for a while to build up some cash, and get the whole ball rolling. We're talking hundreds of hours of potential playtime here, if one wanted to see and do everything in this game. Did I mention that there is actually a plot and a series of story missions to play through? I think 100+ hours into the game is probably a prerequisite to get anywhere into it at this point, though.
The other large and very time-intensive game I've been playing lately is Monster Hunter Tri. I covered the basics about the game in my last post, but I've been delving farther in since. I have about 35 hours now on the in-game clock, and I'm at the end of the third tier of guild quests in offline mode, about to hunt a Royal Ludroth. What I've been playing some in the last couple of weeks is the online mode, where you can group up with 3 other players and head out to co-operatively kill these huge monsters for their horns and hides and such, which you can use to forge bigger and better weapons and armor with. As co-op usually does, it adds a lot to the playability of the game. You can group with people more experienced in order to learn how to handle the epic battles that some of the bigger game present you with. I've grouped up with people a few times now, and working together we were able to do in 10-15 minutes what it took me 3-4 hours to accomplish alone, and by the skin of my teeth. The closest parallel I know how to draw is trying to solo VT or IT mobs in FFXI vs. taking them down in a 3 or 4-man party. Monster Hunter is a little more fair than that when you play solo, but only if you have the experience and skill that comes with a lot of trial and error. The action is solid, and the progression addicting. It's fun.
With May winding down, I decided to try and finish a couple of games to keep my pace up for the year. I'm shooting at about 2 per month. With that in mind, I went back in the last couple of days and polished off Torchlight. I was at floor 23 or 24 of 35 when I'd last left off, so I had about a quarter of the game left. Well, I'm done now. The game started off really easy, so much so that I was playing on Hard mode with my Vanquisher.
Let me tell you, it gets a whole hell of a lot more difficult in that last stratum of the dungeon. I was dying pretty much every time I ran into a room with more than 2-3 enemies to fight at a time. The elemental damage from some of those guys was fucking brutal, one-shotting me time and time again. Luckily, you have a few options for where you want to respawn, and how much of a death penalty you are willing to incur when you do so. If you opt to respawn in town, you don't lose anything at all, so what I would do is set a town portal wherever I wanted my 'checkpoint' to be, and when I died I could just respawn in town and immediately take the portal back into the dungeon. All I had to do was cast another portal spell as soon as I'd used the first, and I was set. This strategy worked fine right up to the last boss, who was such a hardass that I can't even begin to describe what it was like to fight him. He literally must have had a million hit points, and my average attack would hit for maybe 500, with crits doing about 1500. If I'd had to rely on my pistols alone, I'd have been there all night, but luckily I had my flechette traps and Hail of Arrows abilities pumped up and used those, primarily, to whittle him down over 15-20 minutes of non-stop death/respawn looping. This guy would spawn scores of helper enemies that I had to try to deal with. More often than not, he would actually kill them all himself in some sort of move that looked to be him consuming their life essence back into his own. I never noticed his HP actually increase, however. I must have died 30 times. Here, I just said "fuck it," and elected to spawn right at the entrance to that floor, which was entirely given over to his lair anyway, and took the hit to my gold total. There is an achievement for beating him on Very Hard Hardcore mode, which is one level higher than I was playing on, and with perma-death. Yeah, on Hardcore, one death permanently erases your character, which of course means no respawns on the final boss, or anywhere else. I can't imagine how I'd kill that guy on Easy without dying a bunch, so I have no fucking clue how anyone could do that.
So now, I'm done with Torchlight. There is a lot more that the game has to offer, including higher difficulty, other character classes, a 100-floor alternate dungeon, tons of loot, and crazy ass mods, and I might be back for some of that at some point, but for now I move on to the next game I need to complete!
In all of this gaming confusion, I had to take a business trip up to Seattle, and I took my DS along for the ride, since the new Mac Steam platform is incompatible with the version of OS X on my MacBook. I played a little bit of Touch! Kirby, which is still one of the best implementations of the DS stylus controls that I've ever seen, and a little bit more of the Final Fantasy IV remake. I also got in a little bit of Battlefield with Lonesteban, the first I've played of that game in weeks. That's all for now! My goal for this week is to finish off Planescape: Torment and to play some more Monster Hunter and X3.
A few weeks ago Steam had a sale going on the X series, a long-running one where you play a space entrepreneur, and sometime privateer, out to make your own mark on the galaxy. I did some quick research, and it was clear that the game to buy from this series is the most recent (and by all accounts, most complete) entry, X3: Terran Conflict. It was only ten bucks, and I like space and had recently come to the conclusion that EVE Online and its monthly subscription weren't right for me, so I bit.
The game is vast and expansive, and by turns bewildering and incredibly difficult, but it is also strangely compelling. Even 18 hours in, I feel like I have barely scratched the surface. Every mission I try to take on is either outright impossible or so difficult as to make it virtually so. Missions don't preclude you from taking them if say, you aren't in the right type of ship, or don't have a cargo bay big enough to transport the items in question, or don't have a ship fast enough to get to a place before the time limit of the mission. So, right out of the gate, you are surrounded by missions and tasks you can attempt to do for people around the galaxy, but that would be functionally impossible to finish. Still, I am compelled to get somewhere in this game. I think what I need most is money to buy better ships for myself and money to invest in hiring other ships to run trade routes and money to build factories and stations with which to make more money to use to start to be able to get out and actually do some things to build some reputation with the various factions in the universe. First, I need to find some good trade routes to run, then I need to run them for a while to build up some cash, and get the whole ball rolling. We're talking hundreds of hours of potential playtime here, if one wanted to see and do everything in this game. Did I mention that there is actually a plot and a series of story missions to play through? I think 100+ hours into the game is probably a prerequisite to get anywhere into it at this point, though.
The other large and very time-intensive game I've been playing lately is Monster Hunter Tri. I covered the basics about the game in my last post, but I've been delving farther in since. I have about 35 hours now on the in-game clock, and I'm at the end of the third tier of guild quests in offline mode, about to hunt a Royal Ludroth. What I've been playing some in the last couple of weeks is the online mode, where you can group up with 3 other players and head out to co-operatively kill these huge monsters for their horns and hides and such, which you can use to forge bigger and better weapons and armor with. As co-op usually does, it adds a lot to the playability of the game. You can group with people more experienced in order to learn how to handle the epic battles that some of the bigger game present you with. I've grouped up with people a few times now, and working together we were able to do in 10-15 minutes what it took me 3-4 hours to accomplish alone, and by the skin of my teeth. The closest parallel I know how to draw is trying to solo VT or IT mobs in FFXI vs. taking them down in a 3 or 4-man party. Monster Hunter is a little more fair than that when you play solo, but only if you have the experience and skill that comes with a lot of trial and error. The action is solid, and the progression addicting. It's fun.
With May winding down, I decided to try and finish a couple of games to keep my pace up for the year. I'm shooting at about 2 per month. With that in mind, I went back in the last couple of days and polished off Torchlight. I was at floor 23 or 24 of 35 when I'd last left off, so I had about a quarter of the game left. Well, I'm done now. The game started off really easy, so much so that I was playing on Hard mode with my Vanquisher.
Let me tell you, it gets a whole hell of a lot more difficult in that last stratum of the dungeon. I was dying pretty much every time I ran into a room with more than 2-3 enemies to fight at a time. The elemental damage from some of those guys was fucking brutal, one-shotting me time and time again. Luckily, you have a few options for where you want to respawn, and how much of a death penalty you are willing to incur when you do so. If you opt to respawn in town, you don't lose anything at all, so what I would do is set a town portal wherever I wanted my 'checkpoint' to be, and when I died I could just respawn in town and immediately take the portal back into the dungeon. All I had to do was cast another portal spell as soon as I'd used the first, and I was set. This strategy worked fine right up to the last boss, who was such a hardass that I can't even begin to describe what it was like to fight him. He literally must have had a million hit points, and my average attack would hit for maybe 500, with crits doing about 1500. If I'd had to rely on my pistols alone, I'd have been there all night, but luckily I had my flechette traps and Hail of Arrows abilities pumped up and used those, primarily, to whittle him down over 15-20 minutes of non-stop death/respawn looping. This guy would spawn scores of helper enemies that I had to try to deal with. More often than not, he would actually kill them all himself in some sort of move that looked to be him consuming their life essence back into his own. I never noticed his HP actually increase, however. I must have died 30 times. Here, I just said "fuck it," and elected to spawn right at the entrance to that floor, which was entirely given over to his lair anyway, and took the hit to my gold total. There is an achievement for beating him on Very Hard Hardcore mode, which is one level higher than I was playing on, and with perma-death. Yeah, on Hardcore, one death permanently erases your character, which of course means no respawns on the final boss, or anywhere else. I can't imagine how I'd kill that guy on Easy without dying a bunch, so I have no fucking clue how anyone could do that.
So now, I'm done with Torchlight. There is a lot more that the game has to offer, including higher difficulty, other character classes, a 100-floor alternate dungeon, tons of loot, and crazy ass mods, and I might be back for some of that at some point, but for now I move on to the next game I need to complete!
In all of this gaming confusion, I had to take a business trip up to Seattle, and I took my DS along for the ride, since the new Mac Steam platform is incompatible with the version of OS X on my MacBook. I played a little bit of Touch! Kirby, which is still one of the best implementations of the DS stylus controls that I've ever seen, and a little bit more of the Final Fantasy IV remake. I also got in a little bit of Battlefield with Lonesteban, the first I've played of that game in weeks. That's all for now! My goal for this week is to finish off Planescape: Torment and to play some more Monster Hunter and X3.
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