I bought Prototype today, but it was taking forever to download from Steam, so in the meantime I started up Crackdown to get me in the right frame of mind.
I also had another motive for returning to Crackdown: that one last damn agility orb that I’m still missing. I’m up to 498 of 500, I know where one is (and want to make it the very last one I pick up), and now there’s just one left. Damned if I know where it is, though. I’ve considered following guides to all of the orbs, but that gets tedious quickly, so I just ran around listening for the orb-nearby sound.
Alas, by the end of the evening, the agility orb still eluded me. I did pick up a good 15-20 more hidden orbs though, putting me at 283 of 300 of them. I don’t think I’m going to waste any more time on that agility orb, though — congrats orb, you’ve beaten me.
After EQ, I actually spent most of the day in WoW, though. I finished off most of the quests in Netherstorm, a couple I’d left hanging in Blade’s Edge, and finally headed off to start the Wrath of the Lich King zones in earnest. I’ll focus on Howling Fjord first, where I’m cleaning up some quests around Angmar, but haven’t decided where to go after that.
I was a bit surprised at how much money I made, going from something like 350 gold at the start of the day to nearly 700 at the end. I’m going to need at least 2000 sometime in the near future, for the dual specialization and cold weather flying abilities.
I played a bit of EQ tonight, but just enough to use up the daily double xp period. I really need to find a new place to hunt…
Afterward, I played a bit of Zen of Sudoku while waiting for an update, and it’s kind of a mixed bag. The interface for marking potential numbers works well, but when the screen gets full of them, telling them all apart can get a bit difficult. There’s also not much tracking of stats, just a bunch of trophies for hitting certain milestones, and not even basic stuff like timing how long the puzzle took, or saving one for later. It does at least randomly generate them though, so I don’t run out of them like with the DS Brain Age games.
And then I tried out Zeno Clash, a brawler game with with a rather unique art style that was released today. It’s based on the HL2 engine, and you do get some guns, but it’s primarily focused on melee combat with punches, kicks, blocks, throws, etc. I’m only a few fights into it so far, but even on ‘normal’ difficulty (which is actually the lowest it goes) I’m not very good at it and succumb to the temptation to just mash buttons too often. It is nifty, though.
I have quite a few demos that I’ve downloaded but hadn’t had a chance to try yet, so here are some quick impressions of them:
Kudos 2: A life-simulation game, but more along the lines of the old Alter Ego games than The Sims, in that you have much more direct control and choices, in menu-driven sequences, rather than watching over someone else. Nearly everything you do affects your stats, so you have to balance work, leisure, your friends, your health, etc. Looks like it might be fun for a few playthroughs just to experiment with it.
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts: Build your own vehicles out of parts you find in order to compete in challenges. Looks interesting, but the vehicles control a bit awkwardly and it’s not really clear from the demo just how much freedom there really will be in the vehicle construction. I’d wait for word-of-mouth on this one.
Mirror’s Edge: An interesting new idea, and seems to be well-done, but I’m concerned about the large number of context-sensitive controls. I just ran past all of the enemies since I couldn’t remember what the combat moves were or get the disarm timing right.
Fracture: Eh, it’s another shooter-with-a-gimmick, this time in the form of a terrain-deforming weapon that gets used constantly in contrived ways. Not my cup of tea.
Hmmm, I didn’t get nearly as many demos done as I’d hoped.
And so I finished off San Andreas tonight, and the final mission didn’t take nearly as long as I expected since I managed to complete it on the first try. It was split into two parts: you first had to work your way up and down a drug lab building to take out the first target, and then it was a fairly easy chase through the city streets with an on-rails shooting segment that was again helped by mouse aiming. I did almost fail the first part though, since the building is on fire on the way back down and I got shot up quite a bit while trying to figure out where enemies were through the smoke, the right spots to hit with the fire extinguisher, the tight time limit, etc.
In the end I put just short of 48 hours into the game and hit 77.5% completion according to the stats screen, both of which are much higher than the previous GTA games. There’s just so much more to do in San Andreas. This is the one of them that I’d be tempted to try for 100% completion in…but not right away. I’m kind of sick of GTA-ish games now after doing these three in a row, so I’ll probably just chip away at it in small bursts over time.
Since my Fable 2 LCE code still hasn’t arrived after the promised 10 business days, it’s losing its turn in the queue, and Fallout 3 will be up next. But first: demos!
It was another looong day in San Andreas today, and I’m almost finished now.
Continue reading 'I Hate Planes'»
I finished off the airstrip missions in San Andreas, giving me the jetpack, and it was well worth it. It’s pretty fun to use, and I easily got the rest of the horseshoes for the weapon spawn.
Then I started on the casino missions for Woozie, involving a war with competing Mafia-run casinos. They were pretty easy and I unexpectedly ran across some familiar faces from Vice City (Love Fist and the lawyer), and then one of the missions required me to get a keycard by taking over as a casino employee’s, uh, gimp. She’s now available as another girlfriend, the gimp suit is now available in my wardrobe, and I had to take her out on a few more dates (the suit makes it much easier) to get the keycard from her dungeon-themed home.
I should be getting close to the end now, though I know it’ll take me back to Los Santos at some point first.
Woo, it was a really long day today in San Andreas. First off I worked a bit more on the side missions, collecting all of the oysters and the cars for the import/export mission. I also started collecting horseshoes in the new Las Venturas area (which is awfully similar to Las Vegas, of course), but held off on them for a bit since it looked like I’d need a helicopter to reach some of them. I should do them soon though, for the weapon spawns in this area. I also did the Ammu-nation weapons challenge, which is really easy on the PC thanks to mouse aiming.
I found more of the schools in the new areas, including the boat and bike schools. They weren’t too difficult, and I easily got silvers in the boat school, giving me a fairly fast boat at the Bayside dock. And the only tough bike school test was the last one, where I had to land into a stoppie from a jump, but it didn’t take too long.
After all that, I finally got back to the story missions, and discovered that Mike Toreno wasn’t dead after all. Instead he claims to be a government agent, and he sent me on a bunch of his own missions. Eventually, he had me buy an old landing strip, and the flight school missions opened up. I passed those, though one of them where I had to circle and then land the plane was really frustrating. Here the keyboard controls actually make things worse, since it’s really easy to overcorrect and swing the plane wildly around. But a lot of the time it was my own fault for forgetting to put the landing gear down… Still, I’m not looking forward to any aircraft missions.
I resumed collecting the horseshoes, but there are still about eight or so that I can’t get without a helicopter, parachute, or jetpack. Wait, jetpack? I went back and started doing the airstrip missions, since although they’re optional, the final reward will be a jetpack. I’m sure it’ll come in handy… The airstrip missions were among the ones people had a lot of trouble with initially, but there are some tricks that are now known to help a lot — in the first one I just had to stick to the coastline rather than try to fly directly there, and in the second where you have to jump a bike onto a plane you’re better off just staying off to the side and avoiding the barrels entirely and diving in at the last second.
I finished off the last handful of story missions in San Fierro in San Andreas tonight, and basically wiped out the Loco Syndicate in the process, including Ryder, Toreno, and Jizzy. That opened up the last area of the map, so it was time to get back to side missions.
I tried doing the Vigilante mission with a motorcycle, now that my bike and SMG skills were maxed out and I could just shoot at them from behind, but I couldn’t pass it in the half-dozen or so attempts I tried. I could often get up to level 10 or 11, but something would screw up the run, like getting three stars and being constantly assaulted by police vehicles, making it impossible to get to the target, or trying to go for a pay-n-spray only for no cars to spawn nearby (you can’t spray the police bike), or a cop to appear out of some obscured spot and bust me, or for the targets to wander into the city where they’re much harder to chase down and shoot, or… Oh well, apparently it’ll be easier once I get access to the Hunter helicopter.
I did the photo ops in San Fierro, and I should have actually done them sooner in order to get the weapons at the garage there. Along the way I discovered how to get into the airport without having done Pilot School, and could get the heat-seeking rockets there. I also did the NRG-500 challenge, though I used a small glitch to give me unlimited time to complete it, since it’s really tricky. It wound up taking me over 11 minutes, whereas you normally only get a few.
And I finished off a series of missions that unlocked the obligatory car collection mission. I could only get the first list of cars done tonight, since few of the cars are common ones you’ll find nearby like in previous games and the huge distances you have to travel make it slow going. But at least this time they made it so that they’re guaranteed to spawn in certain spots, so you don’t have to go waste time wandering around and waiting for them to spawn.
Today was mainly spent working on story missions in San Andreas, and I managed to finish off Woozie’s tasks and do enough from a pimp named Jizzy to meet Mike Toreno, who is somehow involved in the plot that betrayed CJ and got his mother killed. Again, there was one mission that I had to redo a number of times thanks to bad luck right at the end, where I had to find a van at the airport, get rid of the bodyguards on bikes, and then take care of the occupants when they got out. It wasn’t really that long or difficult though, so it wasn’t too frustrating.
I also did a bit more weapons practice and maxed out my skill with silenced pistols, shotguns, and SMGs. It doesn’t really seem to make that big a difference (careful aiming is far more important), but the faster rate of fire is nice, at least.
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