Smelting The Night Away

On the WoW front, I finally decided to take blacksmithing as my secondary profession, since as another group member pointed out, there are plenty of specialization possibilities down the road so it doesn’t really matter if multiple people have it.

And I finally got level 14 and got two more new skills, as if I wasn’t already running out of hotkeys as it is… I’m finding it difficult to care much about the skills with conditions like “can only be used after the opponent dodges” though, since there’s plenty enough occupying my attention already.

The Quest For No Quests

My warrior hit level 13 tonight, as I was running around cleaning up old newbie quests. Or at least trying to clean them up — for every quest I completed, it seemed like there were two more new ones to take on. Augh! I think I’m close to exhausting the ones in the Mulgore area though, and hopefully we’ll soon be grouping up and working on common quests more often.

I’ve also discovered that warriors have a lot more different attacks than I expected, and I’ve already run out of spaces on my main hotkey bar. They’re all useful in different situations, so I want them all available, but there just isn’t room. I think for now I’ll stick with a two-handed weapon though, so I won’t need to use the shield bash attack right away. I’ll probably have to switch back to it later on though, as a more reliable way of interrupting casting.

Conan I Ain’t

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

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.

Rolling, Rolling, Rolling…

I finally got back to We Love Katamari tonight and completed a handful more stages. Fortunately most of them at least had a slight thematic twist to them, even if it boiled down to the same old get-big-enough-within-the-time-limit.

The sumo and zoo levels only count certain types of items towards your total, but there’s plenty of them around. The gingerbread house level was more of a diversion than a real challenge, since everything’s right in one spot. The firefly level was really just a test of how efficiently you can cover areas, since there’s no size differences. And finally, I’m not even sure what the goal of the snow level was, since there’s no timer or size goal at all, so maybe it was just another diversion.

It shouldn’t take too much longer to finish it off, since it’s a fairly short game.

I’m Not Dead Yet

There hasn’t been much to report, as I haven’t had much time for games lately aside from a Picross DS puzzle or two here and there (on level 9 Free Mode now). I at least got the shipping box for the 360, so it’s on its way and hopefully the replacement won’t take too long.

Otherwise, I’ve just been keeping up with the regular old news and chit-chat. Beautiful Katamari is out now, but the reaction seems to be a bit mixed. A common complaint that comes up is that this version seems to be a lot harder than the previous two, doesn’t really add much new, and is fairly short for its new higher price point. There are some more levels on the way as DLC, but they’re not available in North America yet. I might pass on this one after all.

I fired up We Love Katamari and finished a few more stages in it, ending the night at the racetrack. A couple of the ones I did tonight were fairly traditional get-to-a-certain-size-in-X-minutes stages, which weren’t too difficult or interesting, but there were a few others that threw in a twist or two.

In one stage my katamari was on fire, and I had to get it big enough to roll up a stack of wood at the top of a hill. I failed this one a couple times because you have to a) avoid falling into water (which I didn’t), and b) keep rolling things up at a fast enough pace that your flame doesn’t run out of fuel, which I didn’t realize at first and failed once because of it. It’s tricky trying to judge the right time at which you think your katamari is big enough and well-fueled enough that you can make a run for the wood stack and risk not being able to light it and find more fuel fast enough.

Another stage had me rolling up planets I’d already created in an attempt to roll up the sun. It’s too early for that though, as I need a lot more planets and they’ll probably have to be a lot bigger before I can really attempt it. Fortunately it’s an optional stage anyway.

And finally there was the racetrack. The twist on this one is that your katamari is constantly moving very quickly, whether you like it or not, and you start right on the track itself, dodging through other race cars, horses, and other vehicles. It’s frantic, but not frustratingly so, and it doesn’t take long before you’re big enough to start picking up all those cars you were previously avoiding, stuff beside the track, in the pits, at the nearby docks, all while quickly zipping along. This is probably the best level so far, and a high point of the game for a lot of people on the forums.

Damn Hunters, Get Off The Road

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

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?

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…