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By heide, April 11, 2009 11:33 pm

And as mentioned, I spent a bit of today on some of the other smaller games I have lined up:

And Yet It Moves: It’s a platformer, but the twist here is that everything looks like it’s made out of paper (which doesn’t really affect anything), and that you can rotate the world, affecting the gravity of you and everything around you. Puzzles usually involve having to use that rotation to move things out of the way or into certain spots, chasing enemies away by luring others around, jumping onto ledges you wouldn’t be able to get to directly, etc. I only did the first few levels today.

The Maw: You’re an alien and you lead a blob-like creature around as he eats a whole bunch of stuff. But there are puzzles as well and your creature gains certain abilities from eating some enemies and uses them to get through and so on. And it’s always growing as you eat all these enemies, and he gets rather large. Cute, but fairly short and not all that difficult. I finished it in about 5 hours, DLC levels included, and only had to redo one level to get 100% completion.

Braid: I already beat the 360 version, but I picked it up for PC as well just to have an ‘archival’ copy.

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By heide, March 24, 2009 11:13 pm

I was out of town for a while, but I still managed to get some gaming in during the trip:

Izuna 2: It’s essentially a roguelike for the DS, similar to Pokemon Mystery Dungeon in the overall ‘feel’ to it but starring a rather excitable young female ninja and her friends instead. It relies heavily on using special items with effects when thrown as you find them, and you’re encouraged to use them often since you have very limited inventory space. Nothing really special so far, but it’s competent enough.

Final Fantasy Tactics: I’d been meaning to get to this one for quite a while now, but I’ve only made it through a handful of battles so far. I don’t know if I’ve screwed up or what, but my characters haven’t really progressed very far, I don’t have any options for improving them yet, and I’m just getting my ass royally kicked in the current battle since the enemies are numerous and much higher level. Kinda stuck for the moment.

Eets: I’ve already played the 360 version, but I also picked up the original PC version a while back. It’s largely the same gameplay, with different levels, but I’ve made it farther into it than I did on the 360. I’ve gotten 100% on the first four areas and at least unlocked all of the others, with new things like the gravity-changing aliens, the marshomech, and appearances by Penny Arcade’s Merch.

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix: Essentially Puzzle Quest in space, but with a new hex grid instead of the old Bejeweled-style grid. The hex grid makes things a bit tougher since I haven’t gotten the hang of seeing how the board will change with each move yet. Hacking leapgates is annoying due to the time limit on them, but I’ve managed to do a handful so far and I’m up to level 8.

Sins Of A Solar Empire: I started off a couple of games teamed up with an AI so that I wasn’t completely on my own. For an RTS that allegedly plays at a slower pace, I still found myself falling behind on various things like choosing research and keeping construction drones busy. I haven’t finished a game yet since I keep feeling like I screwed up too early on and need to start over, so I still have to come up with a decent starting strategy.

EverQuest: I finally got net access at my mother’s place, so I spent a bit of time in EQ as well, mainly making sure my daily xp bonus period didn’t get wasted. All I really did was pick up some more AAs via Halls of Honor again, though, finally maxing out Hastened Gathering and Innate Run Speed, and starting to pick up Doppelganger and Persistent Casting. Hopefully the latter will let me use better hastes on my charmed pets and still be able to get the stuns and recharms off reliably.

I’m getting really tired of HoH, so I’ll probably just bank a handful of more AAs for future use and start concentrating on exploring and leveling again. I also need to start working on the 10th Anniversary quests before they go away…

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By heide, January 28, 2009 10:12 pm

I finished off the last two chapters of World of Goo tonight, and as expected, chapter 4 had a rather ‘virtual’ twist to things, adding a bunch of new goo types and things like blocks and slabs. The epilogue chapter was fairly short, consisting of only three real puzzles, but they were much harder than the others. I didn’t have to use any more skips, but I did have to consult some hints on a few of these later levels.

All in all it was a rather interesting, well-done puzzle game with a lot of style. I don’t think I’ll be going back to try and get the ‘OCD’ ratings on each of the levels though; I barely scraped by on most of them as it is…

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By heide, January 27, 2009 10:38 pm

Continuing my trek through unfinished games, I got back to World of Goo today and made it through the end of Chapter 3.

So far I’ve only skipped one level, “Tower of Goo” back in the first chapter. You have to build a really tall tower in that one, and I’ve failed every attempt so far. If I take it slow and stable, I wind up using too many goo balls and don’t have enough to meet the level completion quota. If I take it quickly, it winds up swaying and collapsing before I reach the pipe. Oh well, at least the game lets you skip a handful of levels if you get stuck.

Chapters 2 and 3 introduced more new goo types, of course, with a particular emphasis on fire and explosions in Chapter 3 through flammable goos and bombs. The ending, culminating in the launch of “Product Z” in the game’s story, ought to make the next chapter interesting…

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By heide, November 12, 2008 11:52 pm

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.

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By heide, October 15, 2008 11:19 pm

Though I shouldn’t be letting myself get distracted any further, I couldn’t resist getting Peggle Nights now that it’s out on Steam for really cheap. It’s more of the same of the original game, with one new character and green peg ability added, but the new maps are a nice change of pace.

I finished off the main adventure mode tonight, but my skills must be rusty as I only full-cleared one board, though I at least managed to ‘ace’ (a new award where you beat a certain score) four of them. The final master level is a bit more difficult than expected too, since nearly all of the pegs can only be reached indirectly.

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By heide, October 14, 2008 9:10 pm

I was away for the last little while, but I still got plenty of gaming in. To quickly summarize:

I finished off the main story in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: EoT, after an number of plot revelations where I discovered that Dusknoir was actually a ‘bad guy’ (well, as bad as they get in Pokemon games), the time gear thief was actually working to stop him by placing the gears at a tower to stabilize time, and I was also from the future and the thief’s partner. A lot of the endgame was a series of linear slogs through dungeons, often without a full party, which worried me a bit since I didn’t have the opportunity to grind quests like I could back at the guild, but I managed to squeak through. The boss fight was tough since he dished out a lot of damage, and I was down to a single reviver seed, but the Smokescreen skill kept us from getting hit too often. There’s still other things to do afterwards, like opening up new areas, recruiting the rest of the Pokemon, and evolutions, but I don’t think I’ll have time for that.

I tried a game of Civ4: Colonization, but it was quickly apparent that it wasn’t really as much like base Civ4 as you might think, and I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t catch on to proper resource management and wasted a lot of effort there on things I wound up not being able to make, and gave up on that attempt. I love the Civ games, but I really need a good stretch of time where I can pay more careful attention to them.

I also restarted Darwinia (technically I had started it before, but didn’t have the save with me), and made it up to just past the mission where you first start to create armour. Most of the missions have been pretty easy so far, with the major difficulties coming from the ‘seed’ launchers that create new enemies (suicide rushes with squads seem to work best to wipe them out early on), and the damn ants. I wound up not even using the armour for the ants, and just used a bunch of squads, slowly inching them closer to the nests while they’re distracted picking up nearby souls, though even then it usually took a few attempts to finally lob enough grenades.

I finally played Depths of Peril, which is a rather interesting game in that it’s kind of like competitive Diablo. It has the same basic kill-loot-level-quest gameplay as Diablo, but you also control a ‘covenant’ where you can recruit other NPCs, and you have a house with a lifestone you have to defend. There are also a handful of other AI-controlled covenants, and they play the game much the same way you do; they have houses in town, you see them running around town and buying stuff from merchants and picking up quests, and you see them out in the combat fields, and they can actually wind up beating you to completing quests. You don’t want to let them do that, because they’ll earn influence from those quests and kills, and there’s a diplomacy aspect to it where covenants can form alliances, trade, or go to war and raid each other based on their influence and relationships to each other. You can win by either wiping out all of the other covenants, or merging them all into an alliance. In my game I wound up getting an alliance victory, mainly by letting them wipe each other out until only two others were left, and then buttering them up by giving them leftover items until they agreed to alliances.

The other new game I tried was World of Goo, a just-released puzzle game where you have a bunch of ‘goo balls’ that you can stretch out to form structures (think Meccano girders), with the goal of building up a structure that reaches a pipe on the map, with enough free-roaming goo balls left to satisfy a certain goal. The difficulty comes in the map layouts, terrain hazards, and the fundamental instability of the structure — the things you build have a very rubbery behaviour that leads to a lot of swaying, making it difficult to do things like build straight up. I’m most of the way through Chapter 1 so far, and each puzzle has been fairly different.

And the guys finally got together and for the first time we got a full band session going in Rock Band 2, unlocking a couple more achievements for me in the process. Oddly enough, playing with a full band actually seems to make things more difficult for me, since it’s harder to hear your own instrument among all the others.

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By heide, August 9, 2008 8:01 pm

As expected, I finished off both Braid and Paper Mario: TTYD today. Some of the later puzzles in Braid are fairly devious, but I wasn’t stuck for too long on most of them. There was one though, in world 5-4, that I had to get a hint for from a forum. I would never have solved it myself, since I wouldn’t have even thought of the trick necessary. The final world was fairly clever, with one long ‘chase’ sequence that winds up being the game’s big emotional reveal.

And the ending is…rather difficult to interpret. You can read in all sorts of metaphors about loss and guilt and experience, depending on your own perspective, but I’m not really enough of a smarty-man to fully evaluate it.

Paper Mario: TTYD took a bit longer than expected, and I almost failed to finish it since I wasn’t really well-prepared enough. Grinding levels turned out to be extremely slow, so I just barged ahead with the final chapter. It was full of the requisite puzzles that require you to exercise all of the skills and use all of party members you picked up along the way, of course, but at the end was a sequence of boss fights that depleted a few too many of my healing items. The final fight was fairly long and had two stages to it, and I wasn’t very confident of success at the midway point since I was almost completely out of items, but I just barely finished the boss off, with stats low enough that I probably would have only survived one or two more rounds. I had a similar problem with the GBA Mario & Luigi game, where I have a save right before the final boss but still haven’t beat him in the few attempts I tried.

But it’s over, at least, even if it’s a fairly traditional everything’s-back-to-normal Mario ending.

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By heide, August 8, 2008 10:40 pm

Not much gaming tonight as I got caught up in watching the Olympics, so I just popped into Braid long enough to pick up another five or so puzzle pieces. World 5 is tricky in that reversing time causes a shadow copy of you to appear and go through the same actions you just rewound, so you have to help yourself by performing the second part of what you want to do, rewind, and then go perform the first part and try to sync up with your clone.

The goal this weekend will be to finish Braid (shouldn’t take much longer), finish Paper Mario: TTYD (on the last chapter), and…okay I’m not quite close enough to finish The Witcher, but I should at least get back to it.

Edit: This entry seems to be attracting Google searches about defeating the World 5 level Lair, in which case I suggest: make the shadow do all the work.

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By heide, August 7, 2008 8:28 pm

I finished off worlds 3 and 4 in Braid tonight, after a few more “aha!” moments. Platforms and enemies that seemed to be completely pointless at first glace often turn out to be the key to the puzzle in hindsight. I wish I could say more, but it’s a game that really should be played without any spoilers. Completing a world also lets you piece together a simple jigsaw puzzle for that level, creating scenes that will probably turn out to be meaningful once more of the story is revealed.

I also tried out the demo for Pixeljunk Eden on the PS3. It’s an…interesting game, even if I barely had any idea what I was doing. Too interesting for me, probably, as I never do well with games with weird control schemes like the tethered swinging around in this one.