Monthly Archives: July 2008

Next Up: Mother Goose

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No gaming yesterday, as my arms were still a bit sore, so there was a bit of catching up today.

The first episode of American McGee’s Grimm was released today, for free within the first 24 hours. It’s a good thing too, since I certainly wouldn’t pay for it. It claims to go for a more ‘mature’ retelling of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, but it comes off as taking the juvenile interpretation rather than an adult one; fart jokes abound. The gameplay is a slightly different take on the Katamari games, where you spread filth and taint the objects around you in an ever-growing sphere, gaining the ability to taint larger and larger objects the more you’ve already touched. It gets rather repetitive and is trivially easy, though.

Fortunately, it was canceled out by Geometry Wars 2, which is fantastic. It has six different modes now, all of which play very differently: in Deadline you have infinite lives, but have to score as highly as possible within a three minute time limit; in King you can only shoot from within protective bubbles which fade away after you enter them, forcing you to try and clear paths between them and run for it; Evolved is largely the same as the original game, with a few new enemy types and other minor differences; Pacifism takes your guns away and has you killing enemies indirectly with the explosion of passing through gates; Waves throws, well, waves of lined-up enemies at you, forcing you to blast holes in them to avoid getting overrun; and Sequence takes you through a series of battles set up in specific patterns. They have to be unlocked in order, but it didn’t take very long.

The other major difference is that the multiplier increases by picking up ‘geoms’ left behind by destroyed enemies, which makes you keep moving to pick them up, and the multiplier doesn’t reset when you die, so scores are higher overall than they were in the original. The achievements are somewhat saner now too, and I’ve actually managed to get a bunch of them already. And there’s a four-player multiplayer mode, though it’s local-only.

I may not be very good at it yet, but it’s a big improvement over the original and well worth it.

Didn’t Need To Study After All

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Since I’d done one of the five tests, I figured I’d finish off the rest of them in Hellgate today, and they were actually easier in Nightmare than I remember them being on the normal difficulty. Since I knocked them off fairly quickly, I also made my way to St. Paul station and parked there for the night. Now I just have to kill Sydonai, though he’s supposed to be nigh-impossible to kill solo in NM.

I also popped into rFactor to try a bit of karting on the Calgary track, since that’s what I’ll be doing in real life tomorrow as a company “team-building exercise.” Turns out that the Calgary track available for rFactor isn’t the one we’ll actually be going to, though. Oh well.

And I also played Audiosurf for a bit, since it had been a while and various improvements had been released in the meantime. The major ones were a built-in ‘radio station’ for downloading new music tracks to try, some tweaks to how tracks were generated (seems to be more side-to-side curves now), and the ability to customize the gameplay by embedding certain tags into the MP3. I didn’t get a chance to try the custom tags, but I did become the top ranked player on various songs. Of course, they were obscure enough ones that I was the *only* ranked player…

An Explosive Development

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I also kicked off Chapter 5 in Paper Mario: TTYD tonight, this time with a seafaring theme. Of course, our group was almost immediately shipwrecked and split up… It didn’t take long to find the others though, and after rescuing Bobbery, the Bob-omb navigator, he joined our party. As a bomb, I can now use him to open up cracked areas that I’d seen in other spots before, and he’ll undoubtedly be necessary for the rest of this chapter.

Now I have to figure out how to get into a cave where the alleged treasure is hidden…

Tests? Oh No, I Didn’t Study…

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Since I didn’t get around to it yesterday, I did the Necropolis in Hellgate: London today. It’s an annoying place because you have to go through two zones to get to it and it’s five levels deep, a longer stretch of zones than anywhere else in the game. And after completing it you get a quest to come back to one of the earlier levels. And it didn’t help that my first time through, way back in normal, the game was still unstable and crashing all the time.

But I knocked it off today and proceeded on to the ‘tests’ off of the Finsbury Square zone. I did the first test since it’s an easy one — grab a book before the ‘dark’ team and take it to the other side of the zone, easy when you have a large movement bonus on your equipment. The other tests might be a bit more annoying though, from what I remember of the first time I did them…

Still No Sign Of Druids

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And as if I hadn’t played enough of it this weekend, I popped into Hellgate: London to kill some time before bed. I wasn’t sure I’d have enough time to do the Necropolis, since it’s fairly long, so I just did the usual rounds in Stonehenge, which was a bit overdue anyway since I had a pile of essences saved up.

It turned out to be rather profitable, as I got a head from each of the four sections, hit level 50, gained three expertise ranks, and found four uniques. Not very useful uniques, but maybe the twinks will like them… I also redid the mods on my Voodoo Rifle, and it should kick even larger amounts of butt now, with higher damage, elemental attack ratings, a bigger splash area, and some phase attack strength.

Wait, Cars Can’t Drive On Ladders…

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While sorting some CDs away, I stumbled upon the Trackmania United disc and couldn’t resist firing it up for a bit of online play. My ladder ranking had fallen a lot since I hadn’t played in a while, but with the way the rankings work, I was gaining hundreds of ladder points per track. If I had kept playing, it wouldn’t have taken long to crack the 100,000 rank mark again. (That might not sound impressive until you note that there are now well over a million players on the rankings…)

And then it was back to Paper Mario: TTYD, where I did Chapter 4 all in one go. This one took place in Twilight Town, with the expected spooky theme and Boos all over the destination. Though I wasn’t expecting to see villagers being turned into pigs… Unfortunately not only do they make you run back and forth between the town and a steeple numerous times, but the plot twist (Mario’s name and body is stolen) essentially has you redoing everything you just did in the chapter all over again after the chapter has supposedly ended. Clever, perhaps, but annoying.

One interesting thing it did was that in order to get Mario’s name back, you had to guess the enemy’s name. But in order to prevent people from just plugging it in from a walkthrough, the enemy had also stolen a letter of the alphabet that you needed, so you had to go ‘rescue’ this letter before you could properly enter his name.

An Action-(RPG)-Packed Saturday

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In order to test out my drone’s new weapon, I played a bit more of Hellgate today. Well, more than a bit, as I wound up clearing out most of the quests in the Liverpool station, leaving only the Necropolis to go. The new weapon is a bit of a bust, though; the phasing attack doesn’t kick in as often as I’d like. That’s partly because the drone prefers to use the Wart’s Leg to attack while it’s tanking, so it doesn’t actually get off many phasing attacks. I need that Leg on it though, since that’s where most of its armour comes from. Oh well.

The Hellgate servers were down for a while for a restart, and during that time I also did a bit more Baal farming in Diablo 2. My HC necro gained three levels along the way, but it was otherwise uneventful.

Toys For Robots

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I finished off the new levels in the first N+ pack tonight. Again, most were fairly easy, but a few did give me a bit of trouble. Especially “Dances With Rockets” — I am apparently not good at being chased by large missiles. Hopefully it won’t be long before the other packs arrive.

I also spent a bit more time in Hellgate: London again, though this time I was looking for something specific. My drone has been using the same weapon for ages now, and the amount of damage it does isn’t really all that great. The drone’s job is mainly to tank though, and I deal all the real damage, so I thought it would be better for it to have a ‘utility’ weapon instead. I’m already hitting enemies with the Ignite effect with my weapon, but it would be useful to have the Phased effect as well, so I’ve been looking for a good weapon to do phased damage, with a strong phase attack rating.

After a bit of searching, I tried a couple, and I think for now I’m going to try using a ‘phase cannon’ grenade-launcher style weapon on my drone. The range is a bit short, but it has a very high phase attack strength and splash damage. The main problem now is fitting it into the rest of the drone’s equipment; after adding a couple skill points and some free stat points to the drone, I was able to squeeze it into its existing equipment, but the stat feed requirements are supposed to be overhauled in the (hopefully) upcoming 2.0 patch, so I may have to rearrange the equipment yet again. Fortunately, the patch will add a stat retrainer that will reset the drone’s stats too, so I can respend its stat points and avoid wasting any on unnecessary stats.

If 2.0 ever arrives…

Waiting For A Savior

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I did another 50 or so of the new N+ levels today, and they’re getting a bit tougher, but still nowhere near as hard as the base levels. It’s too bad that these new levels don’t have leaderboards and don’t count towards the achievements, though. I’ll also have to give the co-op levels a try sometime.

I also did a bit of shop-hopping in Hellgate: London, finding a nice Master Engineer 3 weapon for buffing and some weapon mods that might come in useful later on. I can’t really play properly since I haven’t reset my skills yet because I’m still waiting to spend them on the new skills which won’t be introduced until patch 2.0 which won’t be released until…who knows. Everything went to hell at Flagship just before 2.0 was going to be released, and it may be a while yet before things settle down and they can start working on the game again. They laid off all of the actual developers though, which certainly doesn’t help… But it looks like Namco might sweep in and save the day, after all the behind-the-scenes business finagling surely going on right now.

Ninja Needs Gold, Badly

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There was an N+ level pack released today, and fortunately they’re an easier set of levels, as I’d hit a difficulty wall in the standard set of single-player levels. And there are two more packs on the way, also pretty cheap, so it’s a good deal overall.

I also tried out the trial of 1942: Joint Strike, but was rather underwhelmed. You only get to try out a single mission, and it went straight from being relatively bland and easy to a nearly game-ending bullet hell as soon as I reached the first boss. Pass.