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By heide, May 17, 2011 12:17 pm

Over the weekend, I was feeling a bit nostalgic and fired up Crackdown, just to bounce around a bit and look for that one agility orb that still eluded me. After a little while I’d checked various out-of-the-way places where I thought it might be, but to no avail, and was starting to feel like I’d wasted my time again.

But, as I was heading to the northern end of the Shai Gen territory, I scanned the horizon and there it was, blatant as could be on the dome of a large central building there. I’m not sure how I missed it all the other times I’d gone orb-hunting, except that most of my horizon-scanning had been in the denser areas and this northern area has very few taller buildings, so maybe I’d been less likely to look upward.

I still don’t have all of the hidden orbs, but nuts to them.

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By heide, October 4, 2010 12:57 pm

Argh, I’m falling out of the habit of updating again… There was a stretch where I didn’t play anything since I was out of town, but there is still a bunch to talk about.

I finished off The Force Unleashed, finally freeing up the 30 gigs of disk space it was taking up. Some of the boss fights were fairly tense and I almost lost, even playing on easy, but otherwise it was still just a matter of slogging through it to see the story. I played the three DLC packs too, but they were fairly short and easy.

On a whim I finally played The Path, a rather artsy non-game where you wander around the woods as one of six girls in a weird take on Little Red Riding Hood. Around the woods you find items relating to the girls’ personalities, encounter their (oft-metaphorical) ‘wolf’, and then tour through a bizarre interpretation of Grandma’s house. I’m not sure I learned anything from it, but it was interesting trip if you appreciate surreality.

Now that I’m pretty much done with Picross 3D, my puzzle game impulse is being satisfied by Everyday Genius: SquareLogic. It’s Sudoku-like in that you have to make the rows and columns of a square fill with non-repeating numbers, but the squares are also broken down into smaller regions with their own specific requirements, like adding up to a certain total, all numbers must be odd, one square must be higher/lower than another one, etc. It looks tough at first, but the interface helps a lot in keeping track of everything.

I downloaded F1 2010 on Steam and played through a race, albeit on the easy and shortened weekend settings just to get a taste. It plays well though, feeling authentic enough, with a decent amount of control over things like your own career and R&D. I’ll definitely have to put more time into it.

EQ2 hasn’t progressed much, as I was gone for a week. I caught up on the faction grinding I missed out on, but another group member was missing this last week, so we just goofed around in the Cleft of Rujark dungeon off of Sinking Sands.

And then there’s Minecraft. That’ll deserve its own post…

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By heide, September 3, 2010 10:07 pm

It’s been a while since the last update, but I haven’t really been playing a lot either. Well, I’ve played a bunch of games, but haven’t really put much time into each one…

I probably played Picross 3D the most, picking it up and knocking off a puzzle here and there to kill time, and a couple days ago I finally finished the last tier of the hard puzzles. I didn’t get 100% of them though, as you have to be some kind of savant to finish enough of the hard ones in time to get three stars. And I’ve still got a bunch of downloaded puzzles to keep me busy for a while yet.

I picked up a game called Puzzle Dimension on Steam out of sheer curiosity, and it’s kind of interesting. You roll a ball around a tiled map (it’s actually turn-based, with discrete moves), picking up the flowers on the level, and getting to the exit. Complicating things are squares that can only be traversed once, icy blocks that you slide on, fire blocks, gravity effects, jumping, etc… I’ve completed the first couple of ‘worlds’ so far, but there’s still plenty more to come.

I caved in and bought Victoria 2, though I haven’t really played a proper game of it yet. I did my usual introductory game as Hawaii, watching how the rest of the world unfolded, and it was actually a bit more challenging to keep things together as you couldn’t just set up the sliders and then do nothing the rest of the game. There were weird things afoot in the rest of the world, too, as Britain wound up swallowing up all of China, Egypt got picked on by nearly everyone and eventually eliminated, the US never even tried to get California back from Mexico, the UK never released any of its dominions… There’s still a lot of rough edges to it like the rebel hordes that run amok and the crazy ways that capitalists (mis)manage factories, so I’m putting this off until another patch or two.

Not much has happened in EQ2 as people have continued to be unavailable. I did at least hit level 55 and can finally use the nice reward charm I got for finishing all of the Lavastorm collections (20 to all stats, 100 health and power, and a healing proc).

Worms Reloaded was released, and I figured I may as well give it a shot. It seems to be a decent successor to Armageddon so far, though it’s a bit disappointing that teams and players are limited to 4 each. Some nice new weapons though, and I’m about halfway through the single-player campaign, though I haven’t tried multi yet.

I started playing Mercenaries 2 as my potential next game, but it’s still kind of early to judge. The graphics are a bit poorer than I expected, and the interface a bit awkward, but I’ve only done a few missions so far. I’ll give it a bit more of a chance to grow on me, at least.

And when I finish that, or it doesn’t work out, I think Mafia 2 will be next after that. I never played the first one, but it got decent reviews, and word-of-mouth on this one is pretty good so far. It’s apparently not as open-world as, say, the GTAs, but I’m okay with it being somewhat more linear and shorter. I’ve still got plenty of other games waiting…

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By heide, December 28, 2009 1:15 pm

Yeek, I’ve been falling way behind with the updates…

Not much has happened in EQ2 since the holidays have interfered with most everyone’s plans. We finished up some Butcherblock quests and picked up the starter quests in Zek, and then worked on the first stages of the Glowing Black Stone quest. My illusionist alt is currently level 30 and working through the BB quests as well.

I played through Pixeljunk Shooter over a couple of days. It’s short, but pretty good, reminiscent of the old scrolling shooters like Zeppelin and Fort Apocalypse. Your main goal is to rescue scientists and collect diamonds, but to get to them you have to manipulate various fluids and gasses by shooting passages that let them flow around, interact with each other, and so on. I’ll be looking forward to a sequel.

I played a bit of Europa Universalis Rome: Vae Victus. Since I’m still new to the EU series I started out with the Pictii, a minor province in the Scotland area. Unfortunately it’s a rather slow way to learn, as it takes quite a while to get the funds, population, and civilization rating to actually start expanding, and I kept getting overrun by barbarians. I started another game as Carthage, which is much more advanced, but haven’t done much with it yet.

I picked up DiRT 2 for myself over the holidays, and played through all of the rookie-level events. It is, of course, much like the original DiRT, except that the rally raid mode seems different (point-to-point, whereas wasn’t the original’s on circuits?), and there are no hill climb events. The difficulty seems inconsistent, too — I can do certain events like rallies on casual and beat the pants off the AI, but raids and rallycross on casual are only just barely beatable.

And last but not least, a friend got me Borderlands for xmas and that’s what I’ve primarily been playing the last few days. It’s basically Diablo crossed with an FPS, and the variety of weaponry you can find is tickling the loot whore in me. So far we’re level 16 and have done most of the first couple starting areas.

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By heide, November 15, 2009 9:58 pm

This weekend I also finally got around to starting Torchlight, and it can pretty much be summed up as…Diablo. That’s about it, really. It’s kind of like a blend of the original Diablo and Diablo 2, with a lot of the mechanics of the latter, but the underground dungeon focus of the former.

I’m playing an Alchemist, and currently I’m developing my golem summoning skills, though I’m not sure what to do for my own attacks yet. Unlike D2, you don’t have to buy prerequisite skills, so I’m even more hesitant than usual to spend skill points too early…

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By heide, September 3, 2009 8:49 pm

Today they released AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard For Gravity on Steam, and I’d preordered it a while ago to take advantage of a discount. Yes, that is its full name.

It’s basically about jumping off of buildings and try to land in a ring at the bottom, scoring as much as you can along the way by ‘hugging’ and ‘kissing’ buildings (get near them once to tag it for a ‘kiss’, but stay close to it for a sustained period for a series of ‘hugs’), hitting glass score plates, flipping off protesters, and spraying graffiti (though I don’t think I’ve unlocked the latter two yet). It’s all about maximizing your score by trying to find the best routes and taking appropriate risks; swing wildly about and you can reach more buildings for kisses and hit more scoring spots, but you’re more likely to bounce or crash.

There’s been a decent variety to the levels so far, with some taking place on a mountain as well, where you have to make sure you keep enough lateral momentum not to crash into the mountainside while still keeping close enough to ‘hug’ it. They can get fairly hard too, with some taking me numerous attempts just to land safely at all, or only scoring one or two stars when I thought I’d done fairly well.

There’s also some kind of surreal dystopian twist to the world it takes place in, seen through things like news updates at the level select screen (reported by the most disinterested DJ ever) and ‘meditations’ you unlock, but that’s just background flavour so far.

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By heide, August 8, 2009 10:04 pm

I haven’t played much lately since I’ve mainly been reinstalling stuff after upgrading my hardware and installing Windows 7. But, with plenty of free disk space now, I put GTA4 back on and played through the first handful of missions.

I’m not sure I like the melee combat system, though. Moving around is so slow and blocks and disarms are hard to pull off. This mission where I had to rescue my cousin and then chase down a loan shark took me a good four tries before I beat it, mainly thanks to trouble with the melee.

But at least the performance is pretty good now.

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By heide, August 2, 2009 10:07 am

Yesterday I also spent a bit of time with Hard Truck Apocalypse, which I’d picked up in some sale a little while ago. It’s reminiscent of Autoduel, being based around driving around with armed vehicles, doing quests and shooting up other people’s trucks.

The story is rather cliche (the basic out for revenge for my father’s death, etc.) and the production values are rather low, especially the horrible voice acting. It’s also rather convenient that everybody in the future has to wear masks that just happen to remove the need for facial animations in the cutscenes… Still, you get to drive around and blow stuff up, which can be fun enough on its own. The main complaint so far is that there’s been an awful lot of backtracking through the same roads, but it looks like I’ll be sent to a new area next at least.

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By heide, July 4, 2009 8:26 pm

Instead of continuing on in Trine, I wound up doing a grab-bag of different things today.

First I fired up Crackdown for a little bit. I know I swore I wouldn’t bother trying for that last agility orb anymore, but I figured I should at least check the tops of the tallest Shai-Gen buildings, since I’d passed over them before. But it wasn’t there.

I checked out the recent XBLA games and gave Rocket Riot a try, and the trial was fun enough that I wound up buying the full game. It’s fairly simple, you pilot your legless guy around a destructible 2D map trying to accomplish the given goal by firing arcing rockets around, but there’s a decent amount of variety to the goals.

And finally, inspired by a resurrected forum post, I dusted off Test Drive Unlimited and redid the Millionaire’s Challenge once again, since it gives you a good tour of the perimeter of the island. I’m a little rusty, coming in a minute slower than my previous record, but I triggered the police way too much this time.
- test drive unlimited

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By heide, June 11, 2009 9:01 pm

I was able to play around with Prototype for a bit today. It definitely has the open-world feel, though it’s a bit empty right now since I’m still fairly close to the start. There isn’t really much to do except a few races, starting the next mission, and causing some minor havoc that’s not really worth the effort in terms of xp earned. Stuff should be opening up soon though, as I can ‘consume’ certain people, gain their memories, and open up parts of the story and new people to meet.

The premise is a bit overwrought — you’re the product of some experiment gone wrong, an infection is spreading, and you’re out for revenge, blah blah blah. The movement isn’t as precise as Crackdown, and probably deliberately so, and there’s no stopping to contemplate how to reach a particular point — you just run straight up the side of a building. The controls while sprinting and wall-running are a bit awkward, and I’m constantly overshooting the tops of buildings and falling off the other side, but apparently there are upgrades that will help refine the controls.

And for someone who’s wanted so desperately by the military, it’s kind of odd how I can run up a wall, leap off a building and land in the middle of the street with a big concrete-breaking thud, or sprint through traffic and bounce off the roofs of cars, and nobody wandering around seems to think it odd.