I finished Forza 3 today. Well, again… I finished the six basic seasons long ago, but that left a lot of events unfinished, and today I finally got the Solid Gold achievement for getting gold in every single event. It took a while, and now there’s pretty much nothing left to do in it. Just in time for Gran Turismo 5…

I also finished off Mass Effect 2 shortly after my last post about it. There wasn’t really that much left to do at that point, just finishing off the loyalty missions and then off to the Omega 4 relay. The final mission worked out pretty well, requiring you to actually know your team, even if the final boss fight was a bit dumb. Still well worth it overall, and I’ll be looking forward to Mass Effect 3, where Liara better be more grateful about my remaining faithful to her!

I started Etrian Odyssey 3 on the DS, and it plays a lot like the first one so far, with a new sailing/fishing/exploring side game that haven’t done much with yet. I’m still only on the first floor though, and just about to gather up enough courage to go down to the next one.

And I also started a rather unusual game on the PSP: Zettai Hero Project: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman. It’s by the Disgaea guys and is kind of similar in certain ways, but different in a lot of others too. It’s turn based and you accumulate levels, but you only have yourself, you move one square at a time, your time in a dungeon is limited by an energy meter, items have a durability and wear out fairly quickly, enemy behaviour is somewhat more explicit about activation ranges and how they’ll react, you have a prinny wife… And of course, the story is Weird As Hell. It’s interesting and fun so far though, but I’m still only just barely out of the tutorial.

And in the MMO world, I did more of the Hallowe’en event quests, and am down to 11 quests left for Loremaster on my priest, but that’s about it. In EQ2 we did some more quests in the ‘Peacock Club’ quest line, but took a break last week and checked out a new zone, Pillar of Flame, picking up and completing some more quests there. We’re still level 60, but will probably begin leveling up again sometime soon.

By far I probably spent the most time in Minecraft, but that’s a whole separate topic…

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…

It’s a lot harder than I remember it being, though. Even on the easiest setting, AI cars would constantly be riding my tail right until the finish, making me vulnerable to small mistakes. And since I almost always start towards the back of the pack, working my way past all the AI cars inevitably feels like a game of bumper cars, only rarely emerging unscathed. It’s still fun, even if a bit more frustrating than I’d liked when I was hoping for a bit more of a relaxing cruise to victory…

I also popped into EQ2 for a bit. I’d almost forgotten that it was a double-xp weekend, and although I didn’t get any adventuring done, I did gain five tradeskill levels each on my provisioner and jewelcrafter. These bonus weekends are about the only time I work on tradeskills anymore, as it gets too grindy otherwise.

And speaking of MMOs, last night I loaded WoW for a little while, partly to test the RealID chat with a friend, to check the oracle eggs (nothing good yet again), and to do some new quests around Sen’Jin village related to the upcoming Cataclysm release. They weren’t particularly difficult, but they did grant some nice rewards like an illusion-granting token and a unique cloak graphic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Crash Time III: The hook of this one is that you play as a pair of detectives and chase down crooks in kinda-realistic police chases. Only ‘kinda’ though, since I’m not sure real detectives use robot drones that drive under the criminal’s car and blow it up, or cause horrific chain crashes… It’s better than I thought it would be, but the difficulty is a bit uneven. One of the first missions unlocked is unbeatable with the cars I have now — even accelerating flat-out, the crook can’t be caught up to and gets away.

Hearts of Iron III: Semper Fi: An expansion that supposedly fixes a lot of the problems with the original HoI3. Unfortunately the performance is really uneven, with a lot of sudden long pauses and jerky map scrolling. And some dumb stuff still seems to occur: Japan couldn’t even make it into northern China, it still seems to have trouble with making landings, etc.

Dark Void Zero: A retro-8bit-style platformer game with a jetpack. It’s pretty well-done, but damn, it’s hard. Enemy shots seem really hard to dodge while you’re using the jetpack, and the levels feel huge. I’m not even sure what to do to pass the first one yet, if I can even survive long enough.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to go back to an era that didn’t have analog triggers, and I found myself lurching all over the place, unsure of where the braking points were, and even the progressive and 1080i modes couldn’t really make the graphics bearable after all the recent HD racing games.

So, instead, I’ve been trying to progress in my alternate career path. I had two save games set up, one for purely A-spec racing (actual driving by me directly), and one for purely B-spec racing (using the director mode to control an AI driver). My goal with the B-spec save is to see just how far into the career mode I can get using only cars won from races, and not buying any. I was up to around 46% completion, but I started to run out of races I can still do. A huge number of the one-make races are out since the cars permitted aren’t available as rewards, and there are a few high-end races where getting a winning car build together is a bit tough.

To get a little farther, I loosened the rules a bit and allowed myself to manually run events that aren’t available in B-spec mode anyway, like license tests and the rally events. That let me do some extra one-make events, and I’m now at about 51%.