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By heide, August 23, 2010 7:55 pm

I haven’t really played a lot of games recently, besides grinding through a few more series in Forza 3 and knocking off more puzzles in Picross 3D.

I did wind up caving in and buying Victoria 2, though. I was initially hesitant to; I liked the first Victoria but didn’t play it much since the UI is rather weak and POP management gets fiddly, but Paradox games are typically somewhat…troubled on initial release and need at least some patches and an expansion before they really shine. The word-of-mouth about V2 was very positive though, so I wound up getting it anyway, and it is indeed a pretty decent game. There are still some troubles with the economy and things like way too many rebels popping up mid-game though, so I’ve shelved it for now until we see how well the next patch helps.

Otherwise, I’ve been thinking of getting back to some of the FPSes on my backlog, to counterbalance the ultra-long RPGs. I can probably burn through a bunch of them fairly quickly and at least free up some drive space. So far I’ve played through Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, a remake of one of the more old-school shooters. The gimmick here is that there are tons and tons and tons of enemies in each level, keeping things at a frantic pace. Unfortunately it was a bit too frantic for me, and I turned the difficulty down one notch to Easy midway through. I could probably finish it on Normal, but it would take a ton of reloads and I just want to run through these games as fast as possible, not master them.

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By heide, August 8, 2010 10:35 pm

There’s a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff I’ve played recently that don’t really warrant their own articles:

I’ve played Gran Turismo on the PSP a bit more, but only to grind for cars. I’m not really enjoying the lack of structure to it, so I’m just trying to collect as many of my favourite cars as I can before GT5 comes out, since you’ll be able to import your garage from the PSP game. The best way to grind for cash is to do two-lap S-class races on the test ring, which gets terribly boring, so I don’t do very many at a time.

I’m still working on Forza 3 as well, getting closer to finishing off everything on the event list. I know there’s at least one more car pack on the way though, so I’m trying to leave some events open to use them in and focusing mainly on stock and restricted-model events for now. Along the way I finally saved up enough credits to buy the Shelby Daytona Coupe and Ford GT40 cars, which I’ve been after for quite a while now.

I played through Limbo on XBLA over the course of two days. A rather short game, but very atmospheric and a decent platformer. Well, until the end and the gravity puzzles, the solutions to which get a little hard to figure out… A good game, but maybe not for its full price.

And speaking of platformers, I fired up Super Mario Galaxy 2 for about an hour, getting the first 3 or 4 stars. It feels pretty much like the first one so far, the major new addition being Yoshi and the new abilities you get while riding him. I’m sure I’ll like the rest of it, if I can find time…

And I also played a bit of the Lego Harry Potter game on PC. I don’t know diddly about Harry Potter, but it plays a lot like the Star Wars games, with magic spells in place of the force. There is a lot more variety though, as you wind up with characters with multiple abilities and need to switch between them, and the ‘hub’ world is huge and has tons to explore and collect. It’s not very hard so far, but it’s enough of an advancement over the older games that it doesn’t feel stale.

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By heide, August 8, 2010 12:48 pm

I just realized that I haven’t written about EQ2 in a while now, and in short: Steamfont. A couple weeks ago one of our party members was going to be a bit late, so the rest of us goofed off doing some quests in Steamfont for a little while. When he arrived, we figured that since we were already there, we may as well just keep on doing them and go check out the Klak’Anon instance as well.

It turned out to be more of a challenge than expected, with some spots where you encounter a ton of roamers, or waves of spawns, of things ^^^-rank and equal-level. I actually died a few times in there, and it took long enough that we had to spend this last week in there as well. We’ve still got one quest that’s sending us back in there, but hopefully it’ll be quick to finish off next week.

I’ve also gotten my illusionist up to level 54, mainly just farming and doing quests in Lavastorm. With his help, I’ve actually completed the Lavastorm collections and gotten a fairly nifty charm item…which I can’t wear until I hit level 55…

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By heide, July 21, 2010 11:52 pm

Copied and pasted from a forum post I made about it because I’m lazy tonight:

Since I am perpetually dumb with money and overly curious, I wound up snagging Pole Position 2010 when I was combing through the Paradox deals on Impulse. I don’t really have much experience with this kind of game beyond a couple of sessions of BATRacer, though.

To get the obvious out of the way, the presentation is…rough. There’s a lot of sloppiness to the interface, like text fields that overlap each other, or how it’s difficult to tell what the overall state of your R&D is without going into each part and clicking the overview option and backing out and moving on to the next part, or how it forces a German keyboard layout onto you and swaps the ‘y’ and ‘z’ keys, or how the cars go in the opposite direction that they’re supposed to on some tracks. Graphics were not a high priority either, as the cars and tracks look like they were ripped from an N64 game, and when racing you don’t even see the cars on the track, just a little pointer indicating their current position.

The ‘tutorial’ is also terrible. It just pops up and gives you a description of each screen as you navigate to it for the first time, and it doesn’t convey any sense of the flow of the game. It was only through trial and error while poking around the screens that I discovered the right order that things have to be done in.

If you can get past those though, it looks like there’s a decent amount of potential depth to the game, as you control pretty much every aspect of team management. You first have to hire staff like your chief engineer, team doctor, team manager, etc., and they act as modifiers on various other aspects (e.g., your lawyer reduces fines). You decide what sponsorship to place on each location of the car, though you really only get to choose from up to three possibilities. You can adjust the inventory levels and pricing of fan merchandise to generate more income. And you can build facilities to help improve things like car construction and research (though in another bit of sloppiness they have a predefined list of places you can build which includes…the Northwest Territories as the location in Canada? Someone was throwing darts at maps).

The real meat is in car construction though, where you have to design parts (there’s around 20 total), construct them, assemble them onto the chassis, and do your testing in the wind tunnel and on-track. This all takes time and staff, so you’ll probably need to supplement it with parts delivered from suppliers, too, and for the low-end teams the supplier parts are probably better than what you’d make anyway. Parts are of varying quality based on things like a performance index, drag coefficient, reliability rating, weight, and wear-and-tear, and you’ve got the usual per-car settings for things like suspension stiffness, tire pressure, brake balance, camber, etc. The drivers give you some feedback about the settings during the practice sessions, but it didn’t really seem like enough; they wouldn’t shut up about the rear brake balance in my sessions, but only mentioned the other settings once or twice. There doesn’t seem to be a persistent log of their feedback either, so you have to watch their little portraits in the corner for the feedback balloons that pop up very briefly.

And then you get to the race, where you may as well sit back and cross your fingers while it plays out for you. The only real control you have is to set a driver’s mode to ‘attack’, ‘save fuel’, ‘hold position’, etc., or to pit early, but the race speed is fast enough that it doesn’t really feel like I can meaningfully switch modes based on what’s actually happening on the track. But the pace is too slow to actually sit there and watch all the laps at the slowest speed, so you may as well hit the time acceleration and just see what the final results are.

I’ve only played a few hours so far, so I haven’t gotten into any of the longer-term stuff like sponsor and team renegotiations, keeping up your team morale, what it’s like when you actually get good parts… I wish I’d played something like Grand Prix Manager 2 for a basis for comparison, though; I’ve heard it been recommended before, but it way predates my interest in the sport.

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By heide, July 18, 2010 5:03 pm

It’s been a while since the last update, but not a lot is really new.

We had our EQ2 group and finished off getting the teleport stone for Sundered Splitpaw, but it turns out that the quests at the ends of the chains are raid events, way beyond our abilities. So, we’ve headed back to Sinking Sands and turned leveling back on, completing a handful of generic quests there and I hit level 51 soon afterward.

I also spent a bunch of time on alts on Saturday. I got my monk from 14 to 24 in Antonica, with the help of the vitality bonus and turning in some collections that had accumulated from leftover bits. And I got my ranger from 8 to 14 almost entirely on collections. I doubt I’ll really put much more time into them, but it was something different to do.

I’ve also been playing a lot of Forza 3 again. I discovered that the achievement for getting gold in all events doesn’t actually have to be done in season mode, even though the text says it does, which will make it a lot easier since I won’t keep getting interrupted by the R1 championship. So far I’ve done all of the drag strip events and the first three endurance events, which normally don’t seem to come up in season mode at all.

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By heide, July 13, 2010 12:52 pm

We finally got our EQ2 group going again on Sunday, and finished a few of the quests in the Sundered Splitpaw content, getting the stone that lets us teleport back there whenever we want.

Well, except for one group member, who got killed during one instance and couldn’t get back in and get credit for the quest. We’d already exhausted the group quests that contribute faction, so we tried to do a solo quest for him, but it turns out that it really does force you to do those solo — you wind up alone in your own instance even if you’re in a group. It’s a rather unfortunate design consequence, and hopefully we’ll be able to work out some way to help him out.

We’re getting a bit restless being stuck at level 50 though, so I think sometime soon we’re going to flip the AA switch and get back to leveling up in new areas.

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By heide, July 13, 2010 12:44 pm

I spent a good chunk of Saturday playing a game I’d meant to get to for a while now: Europa Universalis III. I took the easy way out and played as Britain, which can largely keep to itself and avoid the conflict in Europe. First priority was to sell off the provinces near France, then I conquered Scotland, and then absorbed Ireland into the empire.

From that point on it was mainly a matter of economics, trying to get as much money and research as I could. Around the 1460s I finally got the Quest For The New World national idea and started colonizing North America, beginning around the Newfoundland and Nova Scotia territories. It’s slow going from that point on though due to colonial range restrictions and slow colony growth.

At that point I started a new game and flipped things around out of curiosity, playing as the Huron instead, with a goal of just seeing how long I could survive as soon as the Europeans arrived and what the state of Europe was at that point. It was tougher than expected though, since they start off next to the Iroquois, and it wasn’t long before we found ourselves at war.

Beating the Iroquois militarily wasn’t that tough, but what makes combat among native tribes annoying is that they can take over territories instantly, turning it into a game of whack-a-mole as they take over a couple provinces, you beat them and take one back, they retreat to another province and take it over, repeat… And then even once you’ve beaten them, the revolt risk in the captured territories remains high, and the instant any rebels appear they reset the revoltrisk-raising nationalism flag on that territory. It took a lot of luck and reloads before they finally settled down and I’d fully assimilated them into the Huron nation.

It was calm from that point on, and once I hit around 1530, I finally noticed the border of another new nation nearby, though it’s still an unknown territory and they haven’t yet revealed themselves.

Both games are still in progress though, as there’s still a long ways to go until 1820…

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By heide, July 9, 2010 12:36 pm

Our weekly EQ2 group got delayed again, but I hung around and played my illusionist alt for a while, getting him from 48 to 50 and completing a handful of quests for the Sootfoot goblins in Lavastorm. The same ones I already did on my mystic, but I don’t really want to get too far ahead on an alt and spoil upcoming surprises.

I also farmed my good friend Fire Toad whenever he spawned, and got a number of decent items for my other alts. I was surprised to have an Ornate Chest spawn when I killed a plain, non-named enemy though, as I’d only ever seen them on ‘special’ monsters before. I guess it’s possible for any drop, but just ultra-ultra-rare.

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By heide, July 5, 2010 10:46 pm

It initially started out as a brief diversion one night, but I played Dirt 2 for a bit and then proceeded to pretty much finish it off over the next few days.

I mainly did the rally, trailblazer, rallycross, and gatecrasher events, though. The ones involving buggies and trucks, like landrush and raids, were not exactly my favourites; I was fine once I got ahead, but the AI would always create a mess in the first few turns, often locking wheels with me or spinning me around or into the side of the track, leading to numerous restarts.

In the end I wound up doing the minimum of those events needed to complete all of the major events, including the world tours, X Games events, and the Colin McRae Challenge. The latter ended with a nice little tribute video to the guy, which was rather touching.

I’m not technically done everything in it yet, but with all those major events out of the way, and most achievements completed, I’m considering it finished.

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By heide, July 5, 2010 10:41 pm

A handful of smaller games or gameplay sessions I’ve done recently:

Puzzle Chronicles is one of the games I grabbed in the recent Steam sale and…I’m kind of regretting it. The art and story are terrible, even if they aren’t really relevant to the gameplay (I wish it would let me name my guy Pouty McPouterson). The gameplay is weird, though. It builds on the usual match-falling-blocks, but they fall horizontally, and you fight for control over board area with the opponent. It’s hard for me to visualize combos that way, and there’s a ton of different gem types to complicate things further. Not really what I was expecting.

I played a bit more of Joe Danger, getting through the second series of challenges. I finally discovered the trick to racking up scores (doing, well, tricks), but it quickly becomes a lot of stuff to keep track of while you’re trying to do tricks, avoid obstacles, hit the goals for the track, etc. It’s still a good game, but I’m just no good at it.

Cuboid got a bit more play due to checking out the Playstation Plus benefits, which adds some extra levels and an editor. I didn’t get Plus, but I played it for a bit anyway, getting to about two-thirds of the way through the beginner levels. Things are getting complicated now, with things like weight-sensitive switches, teleporters that split the block into two, ‘health’ pickups and move limits before you ‘die’, etc. I’ll have to get back to it again at some point when I have more time and brainpower to dedicate to it.

In Borderlands, I cleared out the rest of the quests for New Haven and Rust Commons East, which puts me at the start of the Krom’s Canyon area. Our group hasn’t really played together much recently, but hopefully we’re not too far apart now that I’ve caught up a bit.

And in an effort to clear out some older games, I tried the expansions for Quake and Quake II, but couldn’t get them to work since they crash immediately. It would be better to use them with a modern engine port anyway but…it’s just not worth the effort to me.