Category Archives: Types

Time To Scratch My Rolling-Ball Itch

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Before work, I popped on my 360 to try out the trial version of Switchball, though the demo levels are little more than a basic tutorial and one ‘real’ level. There’s a lot more emphasis on environmental interaction (e.g., pushing crates into place) and less on getting the precisely right momentum and direction compared to Marble Blast Ultra.

Instead of picking up one-use powerups, you change your ball’s state at certain chargers to give you certain abilities. You usually need a specific ability to cross certain parts, so it doesn’t feel like you have as much freedom to try and use the abilities in unexpected ways.

The graphics are kinda nice, but I did notice significant screen tearing at certain points. I normally don’t mind too much, but it was pretty blatant at spots. I hope there’s a bit more variety and freedom in the full game, but it’s hard to tell from the trial. I’ll probably wind up buying the full thing anyway.

Who Patches The Patcher?

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I played a bit more Hellgate: London tonight, making it to Charing Cross Station. It’s been pretty much more-of-the-same so far, advancing through tunnels from zone to zone, killing ‘x’ number of a certain critter or activating ‘y’ of a certain item along the way in order to complete quests. There were some pretty frantic battles along the way though, especially when the tunnels opened up a bit and there were a flood of imps with ranged attacks, forcing you to seek cover. Loot has been plentiful, though I’m sticking mostly with my automatic rifle as my main weapon. The blasters require too much manual tapping of both mouse buttons, and the rocket launcher fires and reloads too slowly.

The biggest problem so far remains its relative bugginess, though. There was a small patch today to correct a minor problem, but after the patch was applied, restarting the game caused it to crash instantly every time I tried. A reboot eventually cleared it up, but upon selecting my character and entering a station, it froze a minute later. The /played time reported appears to bear no relation to time actually spent on the character, preventing me from even trying for the level-x-in-y-hours achievements. The framerate dips horribly at certain points in some stations, even though there’s nothing visually strenuous around.

There’s still a pretty decent game at its core, but damn, they really should have applied another six months or so of debugging and polishing…

These Tunnels Look Awfully Familiar…

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I didn’t spend too much time in WoW tonight, just enough to clear out some old grey quests that were partly done. I’m too obsessive to just abandon them, even though I probably should…

I spent a couple more hours in Hellgate: London, and after today’s patch it seems a bit more stable. It did hang on a blank screen immediately after the patch, but worked fine after that for the rest of the session.

I made it to the end of Act 1, defeating a few more bosses and entering a couple Hell portals. One boss I couldn’t actually kill, as he kept healing himself to full as soon as he was near death, but maybe I wasn’t meant to as the real mission was to place an item there and get out. I still have a lot of attribute and skill points saved up, as I was unsure of where to spend them, but I’ll have to decide soon as it’s becoming tougher to beat enemies with just the plain base stats and skills.

One downside of the random terrain generation is already becoming clear; there just isn’t much variety in some areas, and you’ll see the same kinds of basic rooms and connecting segments over and over again. It’s a common enough problem among all games I know of with random 3D terrain though, so it’s somewhat forgivable.

It’s Not D3, But It’ll Do

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Tonight was mostly spent playing Hellgate: London for a bit, as I finally got around to it several days after installing it. And yes, it is pretty much a 3D version of Diablo, which isn’t too surprising when you consider that a lot of the old lead people who worked on Diablo at Blizzard were working on this as well.

It feels a lot like an FPS when you first start playing, or at least it does for certain classes like the Engineer I created. You’re in a first person perspective, you have a gun, you shoot at enemies… It doesn’t take long before the Diablo elements start seeping through though — you can move the camera back fairly far to a third-person point-of-view, and aiming is more of a suggestion of what to target than a test of pixel-hunting accuracy, and you can miss enemies by a fair bit and still register a hit. Or miss, depending on your stats, and your damage is determined by your weapon, the damage type, enemy resistances, and so on. You’ll travel through randomly-generated dungeonstunnels, pick up loot after monstersdemons die, have to identify it to find out what random bonuses it has, juggle a grid-based inventory, create town portalsteleport points to jump back to the last townstation, meet people who give you questsmissions, etc. It should be sounding pretty familiar…

It has its rough edges, though. The interface felt extremely sluggish until I disabled DirectX10 support and went back to DX9. Interacting with things and people is based on radial menus that pop up when you hold down the mouse button, which takes a bit of getting used to. Network disconnects and crashes are rampant, having one or the other occur at least once every hour or so for me so far. The chat interface is awkward — its pane is too big to leave up all the time, so you usually leave it off and wind up forgetting about it.

And, of course, there’s the controversy over its subscription model, where various features that some people think should be free are reserved only for players who pay a monthly fee. It might be worth it for the new content, but I think I’m going to wait a while and see what the word-of-mouth is about whether it’s worth it or not. There are also posters with actual ads for real-world stuff like Dark Horse comics and movies in the stations, which annoy some people. I find I’m not minding the way they’re done here since they don’t break immersion too badly, but the whole ads in games issue is a whole other rant…

It’s still fundamentally a solid Diablo-style game, though, and I’m having a lot of fun with it so far. I just hope they get some of those wrinkles ironed out.

Yay For Demos

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Nothing too exciting in WoW last night, just some more levelling (22 now), and clearing out Barrens quests. Plus yet another new skill, an 8 second multi-target fear effect that might help with more chaotic battles.

I also got around to trying some of the 360 demos that I’d missed while my system was in for repairs or that were just released recently. Looney Tunes Acme Arsenal was just too bland and simplistic a platformer for me, but I’m probably not exactly the target audience either. Need For Speed: ProStreet felt rather average; it didn’t push me away like the nighttime setting and drift races of the Carbon demo did, but it didn’t really grab me either. The handling felt a bit strange in the speed challenge, and the ‘grip race’ was just a plain old 2-lap circuit race, though the physics do seem improved a bit when it comes to weight transfer.

On the XBLA side, Mutant Storm Empire is getting good reviews, but the dual-stick-shooter isn’t really my thing, and I’ve got a few of those already. Exit looks like it has potential, though; it’s got Prince of Persia-esque controls and platforming, but a lot more environmental interaction and puzzling.

I Finally Realized Where The Pointy End Goes

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Today was a big day for my warrior in WoW as he finally hit level 20 and picked up a bunch of important skills and quests, including Dual Wield, Retaliation, and quests for warrior-specific armour. I’m going to have to completely reorganize my hotkeys at this point, though…

We also did Wailing Caverns fairly successfully with just four people for most of the run, so we’ll be back there again soon enough. I’m still not really doing very well in a tanking role, as it’s tough to hold aggro even with the improved set of skills I’ve been gaining, and multi-monster fights are still fairly chaotic. It might be too early to really worry too much about it, but it’s still a big change from the kind of party mechanics I was used to in EQ, where party discipline and careful pulling were crucial to not getting killed.

Rock You Later, Alligator

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After one more failed attempt to grab the GH3 bundle, I gave up and just placed an order online. It’ll take a bit longer since they’re still backordered, but at least now all I have to do is wait and it’ll eventually just show up.

I also tossed in a standalone copy of GH2, and the 360 version has some GH1 tracks available as DLC, for something like over 160 songs total. I’ll have a bit of catching up to do…

So Much For Real-Time Updates

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I thought I’d grab a copy of Guitar Hero 3 today, but it looks like it’ll be as hard to get as GH2 was when it first came out. I checked six places around the Sunridge area after work, but none of them had it in stock, instead reassuring me that they’d have more copies “in a week or two.”

It was particularly frustrating because the Future Shop site showed it as being in stock, so I placed an order for it for in-store pickup as soon as I got to work, and I was supposed to get an email within three hours telling me it’s ready to be picked up. Seven hours later I finally got a response, telling me that my order was cancelled because they were out of stock. Even though their site still said they had some. It’s supposedly updated every hour, so if it was correct, I could have popped down over lunch and picked one up instead. Ugh.

Oh well, I can wait. People are still playing the previous GH games a lot, so the multiplayer community isn’t going to disappear after a week like it does in so many other games. So, instead, I bought a few other things I’d been meaning to get: the PS2->PS3 memory card adapter, Ratchet & Clank Future, The Witcher, and Hellgate: London. After all that transferring, organization, and installation, I didn’t have much time left for actual playing, though.

The memory card reader worked well enough for my 8MB card, but wouldn’t recognize the 32MB card at all. Not too surprising since it’s an unofficial third-party card, and Sony’s only ever officially supported 8MB cards, but it’s still disappointing. I just had to fire up the old PS2 and copy saves from the 32MB card to the 8MB in passes, which was made more annoying by the lack of a card format function, so every save had to be individually deleted to free up more space after each pass. Oh well, it’s a one-time thing, at least. I also got to try the system backup function on the PS3 afterwards, which is something I wish my 360 had.

Hellgate: London is a bit of a risk since the initial reviews are a bit mixed. The gameplay is supposed to be solid, but it’s a bit buggy at the moment, and the choice to make some fundamental features exclusive to the paid subscription players is a bit controversial. Even without having actually played it yet, the installer’s already annoying me — it asked for the registration key twice in a row, on completely different types of screens, for some reason, and then wouldn’t run until a Vista hotfix was installed. Here’s hoping that the gameplay really is great…

I was surprised to find The Witcher at the store at all, since it’s a lesser known title that isn’t even showing up in a lot of online stores here. It’s also a bit controversial since the North American release has been censored a bit, removing some nudity on playing cards that you can collect. It wasn’t really worth importing just for that though. And I’m sure there’ll be a fan patch to ‘fix’ it before too long…

It’s Certainly Not Barren Of Quests

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WoW tonight was spent pretty much just finishing off various minor quests in the Barrens. There’s still plenty of them to go though, as I’ve only really been doing the ones near Crossroads. I’m finally starting to find tin and silver deposits, so mining and blacksmithing are progressing pretty well, at least. And I hit level 18, but none of the skills at that level are particularly exciting. 20 will be the big one.

I let the 360 run some endurance races in Forza 2 with an AI driver just as a stress test, and it seems to be holding up well enough. With the PS3 having moved in, I’ll need to rearrange my gaming area a bit, though. The old PS2 was thin and flat, whereas all of the new systems are…not. And I’d like to give the 360 a bit more ventilation space — it had plenty before, but just in case…

And speaking of Forza 2, one of the first things I did with the returned 360 was buy the Twin Ring Motegi track, but it turns out that it doesn’t add any career races that use it, which is disappointing. It’ll really only be usable in arcade mode and multiplayer.

Everything Old Is New Again

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Tonight we ran through and did all of the quests in Ragefire Chasm. I remember doing them once before, but that was ages ago, so I’d forgotten most of the details. Hopefully it won’t be too long before we’re ready for Wailing Caverns, where the good loot starts to show up.

And now that I’ve chosen my professions, I’ve been doing so much mining that my character probably has copper poisoning now. There’s still a long way to go, though… I’m tempted to just sell the ore/bars and build up some cash, but then that just keeps me from building up my own skills.

I also hit level 16 and gained yet another new type of attack that I have to cram into my hotkeys somewhere. This one should be a fairly useful one though, as it guarantees I’ll grab aggro for at least six seconds. Hopefully that’ll help keep things off the healers, which I’ve been doing a miserable job of so far.