Monthly Archives: February 2008

Music For The Messes

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So, with The Witcher on hold, I need a new primary game. But not tonight — tonight is for…music!

The DLC pack for Rock Band is pretty good this week. El Scorcho (Weezer) is a really easy song, but still pretty fun to play. I even got 100% on it, albeit still on Medium, but I rarely get 100% on anything. Why Do You Love Me (Garbage) is a pretty good song and a bit tougher, with actual chords, but I almost managed to 100% it if not for a screwup on the last half-dozen notes. Sex Type Thing (Stone Temple Pilots) is a classic, and the most challenging of the bunch, with more variety in transitions and power chords.

I also went back and beat my previous scores on a handful of songs like Outside, Ten Speed (Of God’s Blood and Burial), Pleasure (Pleasure), and Go With The Flow, though I can still only get four stars on that last one. Way too many long sets of repeated notes on which it’s easy to break the combo.

After that I spent a bit more time in Audiosurf, mainly in Sonic Youth songs, where I took some of the slower ones from Rather Ripped in order to get the Stainless achievement. Unfortunately, even though I’ve added a bunch of friends’ names, the friend score servers are down right now. Even when they’re working though, it doesn’t keep a very long list of the songs they’ve played, so it’s tough to try and find songs on which you can try to beat them.

Revenge Is Sweet

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I also took another crack at Culdcept Saga tonight and finally beat the first board, this time with just over 5000 magic versus her 2000. I pretty much did it the same way she did to me last time, too — I built up a well-defended square to level 4, and she landed on it twice, costing her a huge amount and forcing her to sell off a lot of her properties.

Luck still plays a huge role in these early boards, but hopefully it won’t be too long before I’ll have a more powerful card deck. I’ve seen recommendations that I should be playing some short ‘versus’ games as well just to build up my deck, rather than just sticking to the main campaign.

Surfin’ Sine Waves

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Today was the release day for Audiosurf, and at $9 I couldn’t resist checking it out.

It’s kind of like the various Tetris-ish block-drop games in that you collect blocks of the same colour in groups of three or more touching each other. But, the way you collect the blocks is by running a ship over a track with blocks scattered on it, and the shape of the track and placement of the blocks is generated based on the song you select (and any old MP3 will do). The pace of the blocks tries to match up with the beat, and the slope and twistiness of the track represent how intense or slow-paced the song is at that point.

It’s not a particularly deep game, but it can be fairly challenging. Although you can’t really ‘lose’ at it, you have to be quick and accurate in order to score well. You can also choose different ship types that affect how the game is played — with a ‘mono’ ship, you want to avoid gray blocks and only get the other single-coloured blocks, with a ‘pusher’ ship you can cause blocks to slide to the column on your left or right instead of the one you pick it up in, and so on.

If none of this makes any sense, you can probably just check out some Youtube videos of it in action to see how it plays.

Leaderboards are kept separately for each song, and so far I’m on top of several of them. Even if it’s only because I’m the only person to have played that particular song so far… I did about a dozen or so, including some of the included Orange Box soundtrack songs, some Interpol, and some Rush. I even did 2112 — yes, the full 20-minute version.

Sounds More Dangerous Than A Snowstorm

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The only major bit tonight was finally getting around to trying the Bladestorm demo on the 360, mainly just to free up some disk space. It was taking up a whopping 1.9 gigs of space, and I want at least 6-7 free before trying one of the HD movie rentals.

It’s reminiscent of Dynasty Warriors in that you fight large-scale battles on huge battlefields against numerous enemies, which isn’t all that surprising since it’s by the same studio. Instead of controlling a single legendary Chinese super-warrior though, you’re an unknown mercenary in the era of the 100 Years War between the English and French, and you control squads of other troops in battles since you’re rather ineffective on your own.

There’s some character-building to it, since your effectiveness over different types of squads (swordsmen, cavalry, archers, pikemen, etc.) depends on what books you’ve acquired and how you spend skill points within those books, though you don’t really see a lot of that in the demo.

The actual combat itself was pretty fun — if you take a cavalry squad. Whereas it’s exciting to take your squad of horses and charge and sweep them through enemy ranks, it’s somewhat less interesting to take a squad of swordsmen and watch them kind of get lost in the big blur of battle, and archers require a lot more coordination.

It’s an interesting game, but one I probably won’t have time for. Dynasty Warriors 6 will probably be the one I go to for my big battlefield carnage fix.

Oh Right, That 360 Thing

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A new DLC pack came out for GripShift today, so I figured I’d spend a bit more time on the 360 again. Unfortunately the GripShift pack is rather disappointing — there aren’t any new puzzles, the races that it adds aren’t the game’s main focus anyway, and the minigames are interesting for a bit but have no long-term appeal or even any real reward.

I also picked up Culdcept Saga today, which is kind of like Monopoly combined with Magic: The Gathering. I mentioned playing the demo before and I kinda-sorta liked it, but discussion on some forums piqued my interest even further. There’s some story surrounding it about my character selling himself into slavery for the good of his village and being confronted by some other people who babble on about cards and fate and such, but it’s really just an excuse to get to the next board and do battle.

Unfortunately, so far, I suck at it. I lost on the very first board, after getting a poor starting hand and first few draws (useless creatures that had no attack score, and useless spells meant for the late game), some bad choices on creature summons, and landing on the enemy’s only ultra-high-‘rent’ square and being unable to beat it, which forced me to sell off almost all of my properties.

Luck still plays a really huge role, especially this early on before I can even assemble my own decent deck, but at least there’s no penalty for losing a match and you even still gain some cards. Hopefully the next attempt will go better…

Procrastination Pays Off

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I was somewhat interested in both Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed, but hadn’t bought them yet since I’ve got too many others to play at the moment. Looks like that was a good decision anyway, since both of them are now coming to the PC too, with some enhancements (better inventory UI in Mass Effect, and some new investigation types in Assassin’s Creed).

Not that there’s anything wrong with the 360 versions, but I put together a fairly powerful PC less than a year ago, so I might as well get some use out of it… At the highest end, PCs will still get equal or better graphics, if for nothing else than higher native rendering resolutions.