Monthly Archives: November 2007

Is London Stable Yet?

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Another patch came out for Hellgate: London, so I gave it a brief whirl again. Unfortunately the most annoying problem for me still isn’t fixed; although I no longer get the “Requirements Not Met” message when deploying my drone, it’s still not equipping its weapons properly half the time, making me have to manually reset them.

It’s more stable now that I’ve turned the graphical options down, so I’m able to make some more progress in the storyline, at least. I set off to the Necropolis, which it turns out isn’t the end of the game, but is still a bit ‘special’ in that it’s one of the longer paths in the game. There’s a couple zones to get to it, and then five levels to the Necropolis itself, whereas most missions only sent you one to three zones away, so it took a while to complete. And then, afterwards, some quest guy sent me back to the third level of the Necropolis, requiring another long journey to and through it…

Completing the Necropolis quests opened up another hub where I’m supposed to complete some ‘trials’ next, so I’m guessing the end is still a ways away.

Ow, My Arm

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My Guitar Hero 3 bundle and copy of Guitar Hero 2 finally arrived today. You know how sometimes people can pick something up and discover they’re a natural at it without any prior exposure or practice?

Well, that’s not me. :P Even the medium difficulty in GH3 is kicking my ass so far. In order to proceed past the second tier, you have to defeat Tom Morello in a ‘boss battle’, and I’m stuck on that right now. I also went and tried out GH2 for a bit and it’s medium difficulty is definitely a bit easier. My main problems right now seem to be with parts that wildly jump between the frets, where I just can’t keep up and get out of sync, and long sections of quickly repeated notes, where I just can’t get the right rhythm.

I left the careers at the second tier in both, but unlocked a few of the bonus songs out of curiosity, including the infamous Jordan. I actually did better on it (88%/4 stars) than I did on Trogdor (80%/3 stars), though again this is just on medium. My highest score so far (around 118k) is actually from one of these bonus songs, specifically the Freezepop one. And I actually managed to get the ‘perfect song’ achievement in GH3, though admittedly from when I was first fooling around at the Easy level…

As for the guitar itself, it works pretty well, with none of the problems some other people have had about the detachable neck being loose and the frets sometimes not working. The only quirk is that I pretty much have to hold it vertically straight up to trigger star power, though that might be intentional.

And, as the title implies, my arms are already sore. I have to get into the habit of holding the frets properly; by default, I put too much pressure when pushing on it and my hand cramps up fairly quickly. I also still have to adjust the straps to hold it properly while standing, as proper rocking out does not involve sitting. And there’s already a slight bruise on my right arm from where it lies against the edge of the base…

Edit: Oh, and you can even follow along on my stats page at the official site.

It’s Okay, They’re Spheres, Not Balls

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Since there was still time to kill, the other big chunk of the evening was spent in Super Mario Galaxy, and although I’m not very far into it yet, it’s definitely a winner.

It continues the 3D platforming as seen in Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine, but with some important differences. Instead of the typical flat hills or vertical towers you normally expect, most of the action takes place on small planetoids, with the camera following Mario from above, with the occasional trip inside the planetoid where Mario runs around inside like it’s some kind of giant hamster ball. Gravity can vary wildly as you find yourself running up walls and jumping around edges to ‘fall’ on the other side, and it’s a bit disorienting at first, but you quickly get used to it.

There are multiple galaxies you can visit, each made up of a bunch of different planetoids, and each planetoid has a minor task you have to accomplish on it before you can rocket off to the next one in the series. Most of them are your traditional spherical planet, with different types of rocky/grassy/metallic/etc terrain, but there are also things like pirate ships and cylinders containing platforming sections that you can land on.

There’s not much control over which planetoids you visit, though. Unlike Mario 64, SMG is a lot more linear. Instead of having a bunch of different paintings you can choose from, galaxies are unlocked in a series by reaching star counts (so far, at least), and the stars in each galaxy can only be collected in a specific order, whereas in Mario 64 you could accidentally find or deliberately decide to go for a different star than you first selected.

The controls are pretty effective, with the nunchuk controlling movement and ducking, and the remote controlling jumping and attacks. You can defeat enemies both by jumping on them, as usual, or by shaking the remote and causing Mario to spin around and stun enemies. You can also use the remote to control a cursor that you use to collect ‘star bits’, which you can then also shoot back at the screen to stun enemies. There will probably be more advanced gymnastics required later on, and it’s been pretty easy so far, but I’m still fairly close to the start.

My Wii has been somewhat neglected lately, but SMG is the game that’s finally made me glad I picked one up.

Okay, That’s Enough Of The Balls

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As expected, I finally finished Switchball tonight. The last two stages had shorter par times than some of the previous stages, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were any easier, and it took me nearly an hour to finish the last one.

Of that last stage’s hour, probably 40 minutes were spent retrying just the very last checkpoint, which was yet another part where you started a second ball rolling and had to ‘babysit’ it as it rolled along on its own to prevent it from falling off at various points (the second-last stage had a couple parts like this too, but not nearly as hard). A combination of extreme length and tight timing at various points meant that the slightest error would cause you to fail, and so many retries were needed before I could pull off every step perfectly, especially when failing an early step prevents you from even being able to practice the later ones.

It’s done now though, and I’m not even going to try for the medal times, so my ball-rolling days are now at an end for the time being. Unless I pick up Beautiful Katamari…

These Balls Are Tiring

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I took another stab at finishing Switchball tonight, but only managed to make it through four of the remaining six stages before feeling like I’d had enough for the night. The difficulty is fairly high now, depending on things like precisely landing the air ball at multiple spots in a row, parts that make you race to keep up with some other triggered event, positioning crates perfectly and quickly (it’s really easy to get them jammed diagonally into a narrow passage, instead of straight on like you need), and really long sequences without a checkpoint.

The stages are getting really long, too. One had a bronze medal time of over 14 minutes, but with all the checkpoint retries I needed, it wound up taking me nearly 50 minutes to complete it. There’s no way I’m getting any of the medal achievements for this game.

Only two stages left to go now though, so hopefully it’ll only take one more night…

More Fun With Balls

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I was feeling a few pangs of guilt about all the games I still have unfinished, especially since I haven’t really finished any recently but have purchased several more since. So, I figured I’d better get back to some of them, and tonight I picked up where I left off in We Love Katamari and got a fair bit done.

(cut for looooongness)
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Here Feeshy, Feeshy…

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Not much of note today, as most of my time in WoW was spent working on raising my fishing skill, first by Ratchet and then over at Zoram Strand. I stopped once I hit 125 so I could use the Expert book I picked up in Booty Bay earlier.

I’ve heard that fishing is more profitable now, but my main goal at the moment is to use it to help raise my cooking skill, and with tonight’s catches I managed to get cooking from 70 up to 127.

And To Round Out The Day…

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Speaking of cleaning up quests, I popped onto WoW briefly and finished up some in the Stonetalon Mountains range. And picked up a few more, of course. I hate the quests that tell you to report to Soandso over on the other side of the world; if you take it, it clutters up your quest log for quite a while since you might not be heading there anytime soon, but if you don’t take it, you could forget about it, you might miss out on an unsharable chain quest, and have to go even farther out of your way to go back and get it.

And to kill a bit of time while waiting for other things to download, I finished a few more Switchball levels, and am now halfway through world 4. Timing is becoming a bit more important, but it’s still mostly puzzles, and my overall completion times continue to be nowhere near the times needed for medals. I don’t think I’ll have the time to go back and practice them enough to get medals, but it’s still pretty fun.

London’s Last Chance

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Today was actually spent mostly back in Hellgate: London again. I had planned to set it aside for a while, but after hearing about some other people’s experiences on forums, I gave it another shot after turning all of the graphics options down to around their ‘medium’ settings.

Amazingly enough, it did indeed improve stability quite a bit. Previously I was having trouble making it through three zones without crashing in order to reach a boss fight, but after the options change, I played in a good dozen or so zones without any stability problems. Unfortunately, of course, the change degraded the graphics a fair bit, making even the minimap appear a bit blurry.

I finished off the current act and cleared up a bunch of other quests, and now I’m supposed to head off to the Necropolis. Sounds…ominous…

The game still has a lot of rough edges, and there’s a beta patch available for their test server that includes a bunch of fixes for things like chat, the UI, the minigame, etc. I might wait for the final release of that patch before continuing.

Mmmm, Tubers…

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It was back to WoW for a bit tonight, as I first finished off some of the simpler quests around Stonetalon Mountains and then our regular group hooked up and we did Razorfen Kraul. I’m still too low for most of the quests in there though, so I could only do the escort and tubers ones.

Afterwards I then made it over to Booty Bay for the first time to turn in a quest there and at least get the flight path, and then it was back to the Barrens to head to Dustwallow Marsh to pick up the expert first aid manual.