Category Archives: Specific Games/Series

Freaking Horse

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Before continuing on with Heretic, I took a slight detour to finish off another game instead: Yoshi’s Island DS. I hadn’t touched it in quite a while, but I only recently realized that there are only five worlds in it instead of the original’s six worlds, so I was closer to the end than I thought.

I only had to complete five more levels, but it took a bit longer than expected. Either the difficulty ramps up a huge amount in these later levels, or my platforming skills have waned a lot. I’d built up 87 extra lives by this point, but by the time I finished the game, it had fallen down to only 44 left. It felt like I’d spent forever redoing some parts, especially one in 5-7 (called “Superhard Acrobatics!”, appropriately enough) that involved annoyingly-placed piranha plants and dodging fire wheels while on moving platforms.

The final level was interesting in that it had five different paths you could take through it, depending on which baby type you selected. I tried all of them but wasn’t having much luck until I gave Wario’s a few tries, and eventually did it that way, since it was mainly based on puzzles rather than speed or precision. And then, ironically enough, the final boss fight was fairly easy, and I got it the first try.

Now, am I going to go back and get better scores in order to unlock the secret levels and bonus games? Hell no.

Hello Dragonforce My Old Friend

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And to cap off the night, I fiddled around in Guitar Hero 3 for a while. I hadn’t really played it since Rock Band came out, but there are still some songs in there that I like, so I gave them another whirl.

Also, just for kicks, I went back and redid some of the songs on Easy, trying to see if I could improve my score. I managed to FC a few more of them, and after 8 or 9 or so, I checked the leaderboards and I’d jumped from around ~83k’th place up to around 61k. On Easy albeit, but that’s probably as good as I’m ever going to do at any of these guitar games.

One thing that struck me though, was how cluttered GH3 feels compared to Rock Band. After playing RB for a while, it feels like the graphical effects in GH3 like the crackling lightning on the side of the fretboard and the note streak announcements just get in the way and distract too much.

The Accidental Levellist

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I had no intention of actually playing WoW tonight, and was just going to pop on to say hi to friends, but…you know how it goes. The Darkmoon Faire was in town and papa needed a new storage box.

It took a couple of hours to gather enough vibrant plumes to get the container, and in the process I managed to gain a level, even though I was hunting a bit below my level and wasn’t really watching my xp. Level 36 gets my warrior a couple more completely new skills, but these ones are specific to the berserker stance I picked up recently.

I’m going to have to sit down at some point and reevaluate both my hotkeys and look deeper into what skills go with which stance, as I haven’t used anything but the default stance so far and I’m not even sure what some of these newer ones really do.

Hello Medium My Old Friend

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I’m still trying to prepare for the transition to the Hard difficulty in Guitar Hero, so I’ve actually gone back to, uh, medium again. This time though, I’m taking some tips from various forums, and I’ll be playing the songs with just three fingers and not using my pinky at all. That should get me used to shifting my hand around and break me from mentally associating fret colours and specific fingers, which is critical for when the fifth fret is added and you’re forced to shift anyway.

I’m doing pretty well with it so far, and I’ve gone back and redone the first three tiers in GH2, five-starring all of them as well (though a couple took two attempts) and beating my old scores. Some parts that use blue notes heavily are actually easier now since I don’t have to strain my weak pinky to hit them, but quick G->B->G… transitions can be a bit of a pain since now I have to spread my fingers further.

I should also be learning how to alt-strum according to the advice, but it’s been difficult to try and learn both at the same time, so I think I’ll worry about that later. It’ll mainly be needed on the rapid note sections and just downstrumming is still good enough for now.

I also quickly popped into GH3 just for one thing: to finally get five stars on Raining Blood on Easy. It was the only song of the entire easy career that I didn’t five-star the first time through, and I wanted the achievement and unlocked guitar associated with five-starring everything. The song was still more difficult than its brethren, but I did manage to get a 3.04x multiplier on the first crack at it and the rewards are now mine.

It’ll probably be a while before I get the five-star-everything rewards on any of the harder careers, though…

I’ll Get To It Eventually…

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I procrastinated a bit more on moving to the Hard career of GH2 by playing a handful more of the download and bonus songs in GH3 tonight. I even finally broke the 200k score mark with that new German song, albeit I dropped down to Easy to do so; I only hit something like 195k on it on Medium. There are still a whole bunch of other bonus songs I haven’t even tried yet, but the motivation just isn’t there as much as it is for the more well-known songs.

Right now I seem to be having the most trouble with rapid descending and ascending scales, and rapidly alternating pairs of notes. For the former, I always seem to lose my spot in the sequence and don’t get the timing right, and for the latter I just can’t keep in sync with which one I’m supposed to be on at a given moment.

I think I’m getting better at hammer-ons and pull-offs at least, though I still need to find a good song for practicing them.

The Winter Doldrums II

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I haven’t had a lot of time for gaming the last few days, so there are only a few minor updates:

I haven’t started the Hard career in GH2 in earnest yet, but I have downloaded a few more of the new songs for GH3. The “We Three Kings” song is…different; it starts off as a recognizable interpretation of it, but then goes off into its own new thing. “Ernten Was Wir Säen” is kinda fun, and fairly long and dense with notes even at the Medium level.

Unfortunately, the star power activation on my guitar continues to get worse and worse, and now I have to tilt and shake it around a lot before it finally kicks in. When I have some free time after the holidays, I’m going to have to crack it open and see if it’s something that’s easy to fix.

There’s a new 0.7 patch for Hellgate: London, which finally fixes a lot of the more annoying minor bugs and adds a HoradrTransmogrifying Cube, and this is the condition in which they should have actually shipped the game. They’re falling behind on the new content though, and the December content looks like it’ll be delayed until January now. It better knock my socks off or I probably won’t bother to keep my subscription going any longer.

I also toyed around briefly with a Hardcore Elite character, which is the most difficult the game can get (larger numbers of more powerful monsters, and your character dies permanently). I took a Summoner so I would have a pet that would be able to tank for me and let me run away if things get too dangerous. It definitely changes the way you play, since you have to be a lot more cautious and aware of enemy abilities and special attributes, it shifts your equipment focus towards survivability rather than killing power, etc. He’s still only level 7 so far though.

And finally, I’m up to level 35 in WoW, finally got my Berserker stance (easier than expected since the challengers only attacked me one at a time, not in pairs like some comments said they would), and am working on some profession-related quests in order to advance further. I’ve got cooking components that I don’t want to mix because I’m already at the cap and wouldn’t gain any points until I finish this Gadgetzan quest. I also still need to do my Brutal Armor quest, though it needs pieces from places like RFK and by the time I get them I might not even need it anymore…

In Which Hard Turns Out To Be…Hard

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I figured I’d better keep up my pretend-guitar skills, so I finally got back to finishing off the Medium difficulty in Guitar Hero 3 today. It was actually easier than expected, as I passed the remaining songs without any failures and even beat Lou on the first try (though it was pretty close at the end).

I then went back and started the Hard career mode in GH2, since it’s supposed to be a bit easier than GH3’s hard mode and would be a gentler introduction to having to use the fifth fret. It’s still a pretty harsh jump though, and it took me about four tries just to pass Surrender in the first tier.

I did eventually pass the first tier, but I really need to practice shifting my fingers a lot more. Too often I’m losing track of where they are and pressing the wrong fret when I think it’s the right one.

The Winter Doldrums

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There hasn’t really been anything really meaty to report lately; work and other things have been distracting me enough that I’ve only gotten in scattered little bits of gaming here and there:

Arkadian Warriors and GripShift came out on XBLA this week. AW is kinda Diablo-ish, but simplified a lot, and I’ve already got a few other action RPGs to complete (the Champions of Norrath games, Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2, Sacred 2, etc.), so I’m not really interested in a stripped down version. I did buy GripShift though, even though I already have it on the PS3, since now I can play it on the LCD monitor and the XBLA version has a few more features (achievements, online multi).

I’ve completed a few more championships in PGR4, including a Major, but haven’t unlocked anything else yet. I’m saving up my Kudos for the Aston Martin car package right now, with just another 30,000 or so to go… The competition is getting a bit tougher, and I’ve had to restart some races multiple times now in cases where they got too far ahead and there was no chance of catching up. And I still hate the drift/star-collection events, since it’s something I still can’t pull off consistently.

I’ve also been picking away at WoW a bit, popping on briefly to complete a quest here and there, and gained a few more levels in the last couple weeks to take advantage of rest xp. I don’t really have the time to commit to it seriously right now though, so it’s pretty much something I just fall back on when I want to see some old friends and I’m too bored/lazy to arrange something else.

I’m Starting To Think Peach Likes Being Kidnapped

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Yes, it’s SMG time again. I finished off the cluster of galaxies I was in and it did indeed open up a ‘secret’ cluster, though it’s not much of a secret when you get it by just playing through the game normally… I also got to go back to the area you first start in, and completed the coin collection challenge there and gained the ability to fly in some areas. The only place I’ve noticed so far where it will let me is in the main galaxy selection hub, and so far all I’ve really found is a few extra 1up mushrooms.

Of the galaxies I did, of particular note was the Matter Splatter Galaxy, which is a weird one in that the terrain only exists as long as it’s either under a spotlight or has recently been touched by these bouncing lights. If a wall moves into the shadow, you’ll just fall off the map if you then try to go wall-jump off of it. At one point you take the spring powerup and the spotlight slowly moves up the screen, and you have to try to keep up with it. Easier said than done when you factor in the spring’s awkwardness and spring-blocking obstacles… It must have taken me a dozen attempts to finally pass just that one section.

At one point, I noticed that I had 31 lives (they’re certainly not scarce in SMG), and although I hadn’t planned on it yet, I figured I’d take a stab at the final Bowser fight while I had all those lives just in case I needed them. But I didn’t; it wasn’t really all that difficult in the end, with the only frustration coming from how far back it sometimes puts you when you die, making you redo certain easy parts repeatedly. Overall though, there were probably separate galaxy stars that were tougher than the final one.

I’ve still got 41 more stars to collect, and beating the game lets me do the purple comet challenges now. In the purple challenges you just have to collect 100 purple coins, but that’s harder than it sounds when a lot of the stages have some tricky platforming in them and you have to redo the whole thing if you die, not just continue on from the last checkpoint…

I’m not sure if I’ll get all of them, though. I need to collect them all to unlock the ability to play as Luigi, but then I have to recollect all 120 stars all over again as Luigi (who’s harder to control) if I want to unlock a special galaxy, but I don’t know if I have that much patience or time. Maybe I’ll just chip away at it bit by bit in brief, spare moments…