Category Archives: Specific Games/Series

Conan I Ain’t

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A bit more progress in the new WoW group tonight, finally hitting level 10 and opening up the all-important talent trees. Though I just realized that I actually forgot to spend my first point before logging off…

I don’t really know much about warriors other than that in general you choose between trading off DPS and damage absorption, so I’ll have to start studying the skill trees more closely. Since we’ll mostly be helping each other out, damage absorption isn’t as important at these low levels when there’s healing around, so it’ll probably be best to go flat-out DPS for now.

It’s still hard to get into the flow of how a warrior should act when I’m still gaining completely new skills, but I’m sure that’ll come soon enough. For now all I can really do is charge to start the fight, use the taunt-generating attack whenever I have the rage for it, and stun to try and interrupt spells. I keep forgetting to refresh the battle shout buff though, so I’ll have to try and focus on that some more.

I do wonder though, if this other warrior guy becomes a regular member, having two warriors might be a bit redundant. Perhaps a mage would be a better choice to complement the group…

You Can Never Escape

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Like trying to quit the mafia, WoW sank its claws back into me tonight as a group of us decided to try starting over again on a new server. The hardest part of the early game isn’t surviving though, it’s just getting everyone together in the same place…

I’m trying a warrior for the first time, though it’s too early to tell if I really like it or not. The power curve flattened out really quickly though, and by level 7 or 8 I was already having trouble with monsters only one level above me. Maybe I just need a better weapon, though.

Damn Hunters, Get Off The Road

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As I expected, I finished HL2:Ep2 fairly quickly tonight. The final battle was simultaneously one of the best and most frustrating battles ever in the HL series. Best because it’s something actually different from the typical ‘boss fight’, but also frustrating in (without spoiling too much) dealing with the car and the Hunters. I swear I had to quickload eight or nine times at one point because of the damn car’s handling.

Although the episode did improve a lot in its second half, the beginning was still fairly uninteresting, so it’s a fairly average episode overall. It took me about ten hours, so it was still reasonable value for its price, and I’ll still be interested in Ep3.

I still haven’t really checked out Team Fortress 2, but team-based multiplayer games like that require a bit more of a long-term time commitment than I want to give it right now. I don’t really have time to start anything new tonight, but the news that Beautiful Katamari came out yesterday reminded me that I still haven’t finished the second one, so perhaps I’ll start on that again tomorrow.

Death Race 2007

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I was starting to get concerned, but HL2:Ep2 definitely improved tonight, perhaps due to one major factor: running over things is fun. ;) Especially Hunters, which die in a single hit if you’re going fast enough, and it’s often easier than trying to take them down in a straight firefight.

There was one point at which Alyx and I got pinned down in a house and had to fend off multiple Hunters and Combine troops without the help of the car, and that was probably the best, most tense battle of the episode so far. The Hunters break into the house itself and will shred you to pieces unless you effectively use the hallways and stairs for cover.

The night ended by arriving at the place we’ve been seeking all along, and I’m probably pretty close to the end based on the achievement list. Speaking of which, I got a whole bunch more of them tonight since a lot of them depended on getting to certain parts of the story or having the car. Again, I wound up doing things I might not have bothered with before (stealing grenades, racing D0G, etc.) if not for the achievements.

But Does Freeman Have A Valid License?

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A bit more progress in HL2:Ep2 tonight, though I seem to be taking it a lot more slowly than most people, as I’ve only just gotten to the car after 5 hours in.

Not too much of note happened tonight; it was mostly just crawling through some mines and an industrial yard, fighting zombies/zombines, with a couple set piece battles that weren’t all that tough or interesting. In one I had to hold off waves of zombies while Alyx sniped them, and that took a few tries, but it was fairly easy once I figured out the trick. I’m hoping it picks up a bit now that I have the car.

I picked up a couple more achievements, one for one of the set pieces and the one I’d been working on for kills with thrown items, so now I can go back to using more conventional weapons for the rest of the episode and not having to try for tricky gravity gun kills. I definitely can’t get the grub achievement now though, and I’ve also missed the garden gnome needed for one of the more difficult achievements. If I want to get those, it’ll take another run through the episode. Which I was going to do anyway for the developer commentary nodes, but you can’t get achievements while in that mode, so I’d need a total of three runs through. I think those achievements can wait for a while…

Is There A Can Of Raid For Antlions?

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I got a bit further in HL2:Ep2 today, and it’s been nothing but antlions, antlions, and more antlions. Including a new variant, the acid antlion, and they’ve actually got a decent AI. They’ll try to stick to their strong long-range attack, hide behind obstacles when not firing, and try to sneak up on you if you retreat.

In the middle there was a defend-this-spot battle involving turrets, and it was simultaneously less and more frantic than a similar battle in the original HL2 (at Nova Prospekt). You only have two turrets to take care of this time, they don’t fall down so easily, and you’ve got backup from a couple other NPCs, but things get tense at the end when it’s difficult to avoid being overrun.

I also had a vortigaunt for a companion instead of Alyx for a while, and their shock attack is pretty powerful. After a while all the third-person pseudo-praise you get from him gets a bit discomfiting. “Ah, this seems like a situation for which the Freeman is uniquely suited!” “Um, yeah, thanks…again…”

I hope I’m done with antlions for the rest of the episode, as I’m kind of sick of them now and I’ve completed the web cache achievement and almost got the squish-all-grubs achievement (328 of 333). I’m getting close to that kills-with-thrown-objects achievement, too (26 of 30), which was tough to try for up to this point since there isn’t much to throw around with the grav gun inside the antlion nest.

I Wish My 360 Had Half A Life

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Well, I was going to play with Halo 3’s theater mode mode to get a screenshot of the Ghost collision I mentioned before, but my 360 has decided that tonight is a red ring night. Maybe it’ll be more cooperative tomorrow…

I fired up HL2:Ep2 (finally) instead, but didn’t get very far into it. About the only notable thing so far is encountering the new Hunter enemy, though I didn’t get to fight it. The Vortigaunt model has been completely redone, so they don’t look quite so bad next to the rest of the NPCs anymore.

The other big thing that’s new with Ep2 and the rest of the Orange Box is the introduction of ‘achievements’ to Steam, similar to the 360’s but without the point values. Trying to get achievements gives you a bit of extra challenge, extends the game a bit, and of course, lets you prove your bragging about your ‘leet skillz.’ It’s already changing how I approach Ep2 as I now first try to kill enemies with the gravity gun instead of conventional weapons, in order to try for the “kill 30 enemies with thrown objects” achievement.

I Didn’t Shoot You In The Back, It Was…Um…Him.

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HL2:Ep2 got stood up again in favor of an impromptu Halo 3 co-op session. Alyx is going to be so mad at me…

The co-op mode in Halo 3 is a ton of fun though, since you’re a stronger force, you don’t have to worry about checkpoint respawns as much, you can cover multiple vehicle roles (when you’re not running each other over), provide covering fire for each other, etc. Or accidentally crash into each other trying to jump Ghosts over the same ramp at the same time. ;) (I’m going to have to find that in the replay theatre…)

The only downside is that since you’re much stronger, the campaign speeds by that much quicker, making it feel even shorter. Rooms that I might have spent 10 minutes carefully clearing by myself can be blazed through in a couple minutes when you’ve got three people. Oh well, there’s still some more skulls to hunt down…

I finally got to play with the vehicles, but I’m not too impressed by the new ones so far, though I’m sure there are more that I haven’t seen or tried yet. The Ghost, my old standby from H2, is still great but less frequently available, and I still don’t like driving the Warthogs.

Otherwise, things went by in too much of a blur for anything else memorable to stand out. The other downside of co-op is that you’re not always the hero, so occasionally someone else gets all the glory while you were standing there admiring the texture on a rock. :) At some point down the road I’m going to have to replay it again by myself just so that it deliberately takes longer and I can focus on it battle by battle.

Ain’t Misbehavin’

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After testing it a bit further, my 360’s problems seem to have lessened a bit. I was able to play Forza 2 and Halo 3 for a few hours without any problems, and various XBLA games didn’t trigger anything, but it did freeze once more in the Flatout UC demo.

I’m still not sure how much I really trust it at this point, but all I can do is keep playing and see if it gets any worse. I really don’t want to have to send it back in again, especially for a non-reliably-reproducible problem.

And speaking of Halo 3, it looks like I might actually be able to do it on the Heroic difficulty, it’ll just take a lot more caution, sniping, and careful advancement, and I’ll have to use the less-favoured weapons more often since there’s not enough ammo of the better ones. I also got the first silver skull, though I’ll have to redo the level to get the first gold one there too.

Forza 2 still hasn’t fixed the Porsche/Pirelli money bug, which is good for me since there’s a new car pack out and I need some cash to buy those. I probably won’t really get back into it until new tracks come out though, and apparently at least one is in development and was shown at the TGS conference.

Welcome Back

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I finally got my 360 back today. Well, not the same one, they wound up sending me a refurbished unit that’s actually older than the one I sent in. Though it has a model of DVD drive in it that wasn’t available when it was first made, so who knows how much of the internals have been replaced. As long as it has the new heatsink (it appears to) and works fine, I’ll be happy. It’s venting more hot air than the old one did, which indicates that the heatsink is indeed successfully moving more heat out, as it’s supposed to.

I only completed one chapter of Halo 3 before realizing I’d already missed a skull or two so far, so I might just restart, since it didn’t take very long anyway. Some differences from Halo 2 are already apparent: the Arbiter accompanies you and can help out a lot; there’s already at least one new weapon type, a rapid-firing alien pistol with a slight arc to the projectiles; the HUD curves a bit, a la Metroid Prime; there are now ‘equipment’ items you can pick up and use, like bubble shields; the Brutes have been redesigned and haven’t been as annoying as they were in 2 so far; and Grunts seem to be a lot more chatty.

And, of course, it looks a ton better than 2 did even on the PC, mainly thanks to a new lighting model and higher res textures. Getting used to the console controls after using the keyboard+mouse for 2 didn’t take as long as expected, though I still don’t feel accurate enough. Being able to aim precisely with the mouse and get headshots a lot was nice, and with the gamepad it feels like I waste too much ammo ‘sweeping’ around or trying to aim precisely and just missing. Multiplayer is also supposed to be vastly improved in 3, though I’ll focus on completing the campaign first. Might do a lot of that in co-op mode, though.

Otherwise, I spent most of the evening checking other stuff I missed out on while it was in for repairs, including various demos. Beautiful Katamari was pretty much exactly like how the PS2 games play, just in high-def, no real surprise there. Sega Rally is a bit too arcade-ish for me, and I still have to finish DiRT (which is more my style), so I’ll pass on it. Crash Of The Titans might be interesting, but the demo didn’t have any kind of tutorial on the controls, so I have no idea if I was missing out on something critical. The bit I managed to get through didn’t really show enough variety, either. It goes on the ‘maybe’ pile.

And I got a few more levels done in Eets: Chowdown, until the sound suddenly disappeared on me and trying to return to the dashboard caused it to freeze. The guide still worked and sound was restored once I got back to the dashboard, so I guess it was just a bug in Eets.

Now I still have to figure out what other downloadables I’ve missed in the meantime…