Archive for the ‘Shooters’ Category

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Yeah, Um…

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

It’s kinda been a while…

EQ2: Not much happened over the Christmas holidays, but since then our group has mostly been working in Zek, finishing off zone quests and venturing into Deathfist Citadel once so far, getting my mystic to level 42 in the process. We didn’t complete everything there, since we got stomped by the arena champion, but we’ll be back… We also stopped by the Enchanted Lands one week when not enough people were around, doing a bunch of the zone quests there, but it’s not part of our official schedule right now.

I worked on a bunch of tradeskills, especially over one weekend where there was a 40% xp bonus, and I’m up to level 42 jewelcrafting on my illusionist and level 41 alchemy on my mystic, with a few minor gains on the other lower alts as well. I started a provisioner as well, so I can make my own food and drink without raiding the guild’s stocks.

We also completed a few more HQs recently, including Hadden’s Earring and the dark elf mask. Now that we’ve gained a bunch of levels, more HQs are open to us, but we haven’t really started them yet.

The new expansion is out soon, but it looks like there’s absolutely nothing in it for characters around our level, so I can wait on it for a while yet. There’s a collector’s edition, but the bonuses are laughable for the $30 extra they want for it.

WoW: Still missing that last crocolisk on my warrior. But that’s not what’s been taking up all my time, as I’ve kinda pulled my old priest, my very first WoW character, out of retirement and transferred him to Borean Tundra, where some friends are.

He was still level 66 from when I’d last played him, and I quickly worked my way through the remaining Nagrand and Shadowmoon Valley quests (skipping Blade’s Edge and Netherstorm for now), got him to Northrend, and then went through Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra. He’s now level 75 and about halfway through Dragonblight.

I had to spend a bunch of gold getting him caught up on getting a flying mount, dual specs, missing skills, and alchemy (now up to 405), but now I’ve got some breathing room to build up some savings before I can get cold weather flying. I’m finally homed in Dalaran now, so I can more easily do the various dailies, at least.

I switched to a shadow spec for levelling up, and it’s fairly powerful indeed. I’ve set up the second spec as holy, but haven’t really gotten much practice doing actual healing yet. I should probably do some pickup groups just for practice, especially with the new Dungeon Finder, even if PUGs do tend to suck.

Borderlands: I haven’t played it in a while, but we’ve finished up in the first area and moved on the to Dahl Headlands, though we haven’t done much there yet. I might have to go back and farm Sledge a bit for loot, though.

Posted in EverQuest, MMOGs, PC, RPG, Shooters, Xbox | No Comments »

Lapsed

Monday, December 28th, 2009

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.

Posted in Action, EverQuest, MMOGs, PC, RPG, Racing, Shooters, Strategy, Xbox | No Comments »

I’m Not Dead Yet

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Ugh, I’ve been forgetting to update again, so in brief:

EQ2: Last Thursday our regular group popped into Befallen briefly but didn’t find much there, so we headed to Stormhold, explored it pretty thoroughly, and completed a handful of quests there, though some are still unfinished. On Friday I worked on the Heroes Festival quests, including a fairly easy collection, setting off some fireworks, and a long quest chain that took me through a few instance zones I hadn’t seen before, including Unrest and Karnor’s Castle, giving me the title of Dream Hero. Since this is probably a one-time-only thing for the 5th anniversary, I did it on almost all of my alts as well.

I also started working on the armour quests on my mystic, and grouped up with a couple other guild members to finish them off on the weekend. Since then I’ve been working on quests on my illusionist, holding him at level 25 and letting it go to AAs instead. I’ve mostly finished off Antonica but still have to do GFay. And I discovered I can sneak around the Zek zone and gather some materials for the next tier of crafting without getting into fights, but haven’t done anything with them yet.

WoW: There was a seasonal harvest bounty event in WoW as usual, and I finished off a couple more achievements, but didn’t get most of them. Not much else has happened there, really.

Serious Sam HD: This was finally released on Steam and I played through the first chapter of it. It’s a bit on the old side now, even with the updated graphics, but it’s still fun to get mobbed by a bunch of screaming, exploding, headless guys.

Posted in EverQuest, MMOGs, PC, RPG, Shooters, World of Warcraft | No Comments »

Stormtroopers Still Can’t Shoot

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

Almost forgot that I spent a bit of time playing the original Dark Forces, too, from that same Jedi Knight pack on Steam that I mentioned before. It’s a pretty competent shooter from the Doom era, though nothing all that special compared to current ones. I’ve only done the first two missions so far though, and I was a bit confused at first since apparently you can’t save mid-mission at all — you can only resume a game at the start of a mission.

Posted in PC, Shooters | No Comments »

Indecisive

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

I’ve also played a handful of other games lately, though not spending too much time in each.

I bought Need For Speed: Shift a few days ago, and played a few races into it. The NFS series kind of lost its appeal for me over the last few entries, but this one is a reinvention of the series along more realistic lines. The handling seemed a bit odd at first, but after adjusting the controller sensitivity with some settings recommended in a few forums, the control feels much better now. I’m still not really far enough into it to get a good feel for the game, though.

I put a few hours into Trackmania United today, first trying to get gold on a problematic solo track (Bay C3), and although I improved my time, I still didn’t get gold in the end. I also played multiplayer for a while, getting my rank back up into more respectable territory (started at around 660,000th, and ended around 350,000th).

And I also picked up the Jedi Knight pack released on Steam recently, and played through the first level of the first Jedi Knight game. Unfortunately I died before reaching the end of the level and hadn’t saved. So far it’s a fairly traditional FPS, as I don’t have any Jedi powers yet. The rather ancient 3D graphics make it a bit hard to stick with this one, though…

Posted in PC, Racing, Shooters | No Comments »

Deadly Rooms Of Redundancy

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

I finished off a few more quests in Howling Fjord in WoW last night, but nothing too exciting. I think I’m close to finishing off the HF area, so maybe I’ll at least get to go somewhere more interesting soon. I’ve also started to make more room in my packs for a second set of equipment, now that the recently patched-in equipment managed makes it easier to switch back and forth between tanking and DPS gear.

But I spent most of my time in another game I just bought, called DROD: The City Beneath. Despite the fantasy-like trappings, it’s actually a turn-based puzzle game, where you have to make sure you fight monsters, flip switches, use potions, etc. at just the right time and in the right order in order to get past each room. I’ve made it through the tutorial and a handful of rooms in the city’s library so far, none of which were very hard, but the game has a reputation for really cranking up the difficulty later on…

I also caved in to another bargain and bought the Alien Shooter collection on Steam. I only had time to try one of the games, Zombie Shooter, and it’s a kind-of-fun three-quarters shooter with RPG-ish upgrade options, kind of like a blend of Crusader and Shadowgrounds.

Posted in MMOGs, PC, Puzzles, RPG, Shooters, World of Warcraft | No Comments »

A Little Late To The Party

Monday, May 18th, 2009

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.

Posted in Action, MMOGs, PC, PS2, RPG, Shooters, World of Warcraft | No Comments »

The Zs Have It

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

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.

Posted in Action, PC, Puzzles, Shooters | No Comments »

Fun In Russia And Germany

Friday, March 13th, 2009

The Steam weekend sale coming up reminded me that I already bought Red Orchestra in a previous sale but never got around to trying it, so I fired it up and played around in practice mode for a little while. It definitely lives up to its hardcore reputation — maps are big, movement is slow, your durability is low, vehicles are unwieldy and unavailable to a lot of ‘classes’, there’s no crosshairs, and aiming is extremely inaccurate unless you use the iron sights, which often obscure a lot of your vision.

The practice mode kind of sucks though, since it only spawns six bots on each side, and you wind up running around not doing or seeing very much. I’ll have to give it a try on a big multiplayer server sometime, but didn’t have time tonight.

Instead, I started the next major game, Drakensang: The Dark Eye, an RPG based on a pen-and-paper game from Germany. It’s a fairly complex-looking system, with all sorts of skills and combat talents, but I started off with a fairly basic “metamage” template. I’m not sure what a metamage is, beyond being able to summon a skeleton and cast a frost attack to begin with.

So far I’ve just wandered around the starting area, picking up a whole bunch of quests but not yet getting any of them done, with the eventual goal of getting into this nearby city which is blocked off for now. Hey, that’s just how The Witcher started out…

It’s pretty competently-executed so far, with decent graphics and voice acting. The controls took a bit of getting used to, since it uses WASD but the left and right strafe instead of turn, and you have to right-click-and-hold to turn the camera. Not *that* unusual, but it’s been a while since I’ve played one like that.

Posted in PC, RPG, Shooters | No Comments »

Mixed Bag

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Tonight was a variety of things, starting off with Crystal Defenders, a Final Fantasy-themed tower defense game just released on XBLA. It looks fairly simple, but it’s harder than it looks, and I haven’t successfully completed a wave yet. That looks like it’s intentional though, as there’s only 6 maps in total, plus a hard variant of each. I’m not sure if it was really worth the money, but it’s still kinda fun.

Next up I was inspired by a forum post to play another Hinterland session. There have been a couple patches since I last played, but nothing revolutionary. I took an Outlaw on long/hardcore, which starts you off in a fame debt that you have to pay off within four days or lose, but that attempt was cut short by some rather hard-hitting monsters instead. I tried again and managed to win that time, though it took about four hours. I really had to be careful since my equipment and town growth was awful for a long time, but in the end things evened out.

And finally I gave Unreal Tournament 3 a whirl. It was cheap and I was curious about modern shooters, but I only had time to play through the tutorial match. There’s a ‘campaign’ mode to it, but I imagine it’ll just be a series of bot matches, much like previous versions and Quake 3… There’s a fast pace to it that I’m not sure I’m comfortable with yet.

Posted in PC, RPG, Shooters, Strategy, Xbox | No Comments »

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