Blogging the experience of gameplayhttp://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4983Diablo 3 is out! Surprisingly the servers handled all the traffic. We couldn't log on for about the first hour and a half because the servers were busy/full, but after that, no problems. Minor lag spikes here and there that quit after a couple hours. P and I logged on. He made a Monk and I made a Barbarian because I want to whirlwind everything..but no whirlwind until level 20! It's all good because I made it to 15 before I stopped, so not too much longer. We had been on for 5 minutes when Am and Ad made it through, and we all partied together for a good hour before P had to leave. Four-player is not hard at all. The difficulty scales, but I also saw that 4 was easier than 3, 3 easier than 2, and I suppose 2 probably easier than 1, but I haven't played alone yet. I don't think I used a single health potion until it was just me and Am. Things I like: Looks great, feels great, very high production value. It is weird playing a game, any game, where you can't manipulate the camera in any way. I find myself wanting to look at the environment but I can't. No matter, because what I can see is gorgeous, the lightning effects in particular. There is a surprising amount of depth to the combat. I thought it would just be all hack and slash, left-click left-click left-click, but lo and behold there is thinking involved! Okay, with 4-player, it was pretty mindless. We went on an utter rampage. But when it was just me and Am, we were pausing to strategize, to talk about skills and specs, etc. So this depth comes with very few buttons, but each button is highly customizable. You have your left and right mouse clicks, then hotkeys 1-4. Each of these inputs has like 4 skills that you learn as you level up. So left click has 4 skills, right click has 4 different skills, 1 has 4 different skills, etc. You can only bind 1 skill of the 4 to each button at any time, but you can change which skill that is very easily and (I think) in the midst of combat as long as the skill you want to move isn't on cooldown. Then each skill has like 5 runes you can augment the skill with, which you can also change at will. So, for any given button, you have 4 or so skills and 5 or so runes. That's like 20 combinations FOR EACH BUTTON. And you have 6 buttons. And there are 5 classes. One of these probably suits 99.99% of people's play styles. There are CC options, single-target options, AoE options, life leech options, knockback, + damage, cleaves, mobility options, a crazy amount of stuff. THEN on top of that you have your equipment! As a barbarian, do I want to focus on HP, strength, finding magic items, life leech, or all of the above? Do I want to be more defensive with a sword and shield or more offensive with a massive 2-handed weapon? There are so many combinations and so many situations within which to use them. I 'respecced' more than a few times in the few hours I played. For some reason I kept finding more powerful 1-handed weapons than 2-handed ones, so I spent the entire time with a sword and shield, which led me to more defensive combinations of skills and runes. Am says that though 2-handed weapons have roughly the same damage as 1-handed ones, they have a wider arc and hit more enemies to make up for it. I dunno about that, but I figure I'll try it out soon. I went all out with offensive abilities during 4-player, played around with different combinations when there were 3 of us, and hunkered down to a defensive AoE combination when it was just Am and I. He did the same. When it was Am and Ad and myself (they were both wizards), they decided one of them would go AoE and one single target. I find this huge range of options empowering, and it amazes me that by level 10 after just an hour or two, we are talking all this spec and strategy. Needless to say, the game is VERY easy to pick up and get into. You just kill kill kill and loot loot loot. Everything is streamlined. The only consumables are health potions. No scrolls of any kind. Everyone gets a town portal spell. You can teleport nearly anywhere instantly, including right next to any other player character in your game. There is a story, though I had no clue what was going on because Am and Ad were moving so quickly (they both played beta). It bothered me at first, but by the end I couldn't have cared less. The story is just the context for killing and looting. It could be about unicorns and cupcakes and I'd probably have just as much fun. That said, I am interested in it, especially since it's obvious so much work went into designing the world of Sanctuary, and I'd like to play alone or just with P at a slower pace sometime. Things I didn't like: As fun as killing and looting my way through Hell is, at the end of the day, that's all it is, and I've done it before. Sure, Diablo 3 is by far the best example of this type of game I've ever played, hands down, but this hack-and-slash type of game isn't what I want anymore. When I was a teenager, I played the shit out of Diablo and Diablo 2. I had a bunch of high level characters, I'd go on Mephisto runs and Baal runs. I knew how many Stones of Jordans anything else was worth. My brother was a 'scammer' and sold Diablo 2 items on eBay with his friends after school and I used to really enjoy watching them trick people out of their items...a bit mean, sure, but it was funny because people kept falling for it. Anyway, point being, this is another game you can find an excuse to play over and over because you can ALWAYS get better items. It never ends! I understood that to some extent when I quit playing Diablo 2 in my dorm room freshman year of college trying to acquire all of every set piece (my friend and I kept a tally). When I REALLY understood what it is to play a game that doesn't end was that final disenchantment with WoW last year, that had been building for some time, that I only couldn't stop bothering with because I had to raid and maintain relationships with guild people for work...not that I didn't like the guild people, but I just had to do it, and at some point I realized I could do that forever. Until some new genre comes along and (pretends like it) offers something new that doesn't end, I've no interest in maxing character levels and repeating the same content over and over. So on some level, yeah, this is disappointing because there's a certain magic when you can become so involved with a game so as to play it endlessly, and I'm...smart? wise? jaded? experienced?...enough to see through the smoke and mirrors. It kills some of the twinkly-eyed magic, but knowing how the tricks work doesn't depreciate their value. A great game is still a great game.dkirschnerTue, 15 May 2012 08:55:42 CDThttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4983&iddiary=9223http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4979Can't get into this one. I suppose I knew at some point, but just forgot that this game is an RTS. Console RTSes...not the best idea. But kudos for trying! It's not a bad game by any means. It's got cool looking 2D graphics. The game is presented as a story, with books 1, 2, 3, etc. Each book has several chapters. So far it's all been chapter 1 is a dialogue scene, chapter 2 is a battle, and chapter 3 is another dialogue scene. The characters in the dialogue scenes have these awesome living, breathing animations. If you watch them, their chests heave with breathing, their legs wobble a bit as they sway while speaking, their arms drift slightly like sea plants in a current as they gesture. It's really neat. The story is very Harry Potter-ish, or at least it seems that way from my limited knowledge of Harry Potter. You're a new student at a magic school and there's some intrigue and plot unfolding with the professors and other students and some magic seal and a demon in the basement. I wasn't real captivated by it. The gameplay is neat, and I think it's well done, but I just don't like it. RTSes just work 100 times better on PC than console. Grim Grimoire did a good job with the control scheme, but it STILL doesn't come close to the ease of managing units with keyboard and mouse. You can't select more than one type of unit at a time, there's no way to pick a few select units, there's no minimap you can click on to move your cursor quickly across the field, there's no real zoom to speak of, there are no hotkeys for using abilities or giving commands...the list goes on. If you want to give commands to multiple groups of allies, you have to select one, highlight the rest, give the command, move the cursor all the way across the map to where you want them to move, move the cursor back, select the next group, give the command, move the cursor to the other side of the map, move the cursor back...oh and then you need to select their special abilities and monitor your groups and build your units. Basically this game is spent moving the cursor across the map. And every stage is the same map! Each one is a basic square room that has more or less stairs, pillars and gaps. But it's all the same background, the same stairs, the same everything basically. As far as units and things go, there are four schools of magic you can learn and they are strong/weak against one another in a rock/paper/scissors relationship. Each school has 3 'grimoires' you can get. Each grimoire is essentially a building (like a barracks) that spawns one or two types of creatures for you to command. Each grimoire has 5 levels, which you must pay mana to upgrade. You make little workers that mine mana just like any RTS resource gatherer. Each level of a grimoire opens up another unit or some unit's ability. Pretty basic stuff. You can have as many grimoires in play as you want. Some of them complement each other, some of them you would build for specific units or skills. For example, the Chaos Nest grimoire builds Grimalkins and Dragons. Dragons are expensive hulking units that take up literally 1/4 of the screen and breath fire on everything, while Grimalkins can put enemies to sleep. I pretty much steamrolled levels until I quit the game once I got dragons because I figured you can build an army of dragons and grimalkin to terrorize and pacify everything and win pretty handily. I'm sure that isn't a viable long-term strategy but whatever. That's Grim Grimoire. I was through about 2/5 chapters in just a few hours' playtime, and I was playing it on the hardest difficulty...which is normal. Apparently you unlock hard once you beat it, but there are even two easier modes before normal. So yeah. Glad I checked it out because it's interesting, but just not my thing.dkirschnerWed, 09 May 2012 21:09:45 CDThttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4979&iddiary=9222http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4978Finished up Assassin's Creed 2 yesterday. Interesting game, worth playing for some of its cool ideas. I played AC 1 a couple years ago and found it also neat, but very very repetitive. AC 2 is a much better game with much more to do. If you played the Prince of Persia games for PS2, it's a lot like those too, and I suppose also sort of like Mirror's Edge for more reference. Lots of climbing up buildings and running over rooftops. One thing that struck me about AC 2 is that it's not really about being stealthy. I spent most of my time running full speed through city streets, weaving in and out of crowds, or jumping like a madman across rooftops. Rooftop archers and other guards didn't so much not notice me as they saw me a mile away and I ran at them until my dagger found their faces. They couldn't do too much to defend themselves. Sure, you can play it stealthy, but it got boring for me to do that all the time. The game has a neat mechanic for blending in with crowds that I very much enjoyed, and when I needed to use it, I did with great success. Also, the addition of hiring thieves, fighters, and courtesans to distract guards so you could go steal treasure was pretty fun. My first impressions of the game, however, were very much like the first, and it doesn't pick up for a while. You don't get to assassinate anyone or even get weapons until several hours in. But yeah, after the extensive hand-holding, you finally get to start running around and doing real missions. AC 2 has equipment you can buy at various shops, paintings, treasure maps, health potions, weapon poisons, smoke bombs, and all kinds of other things. It's awesome but I didn't use half of them. Like I ever even tried smoke bombs or poisons because I'd rather just stab stuff, and the menu to select different types of a weapon is annoying because it always defaults back to the default weapon of that type. So you hit up/right for different weapon types on the D-pad. So up is my wrist blade. If I want to select my poison, I have to hit R2, move a dial around and select poison. But if I want to switch back to my sword then back to poison, I have to do the annoying radial menu again to get back to poison. Every single time you want to switch to something besides your main weapons, you have to go through the radial menu, even if you were just there. My solution was to ignore it. All the cool stuff you get to do in the game is doled out over its entirety. This irked me for the most part too. Two examples: (1) you get a pistol near the end of the game. A PISTOL! What assassin doesn't want a pistol to snipe with? This one does. But I get it at the very end of the game where I hardly have time to play with it, and you only want me to use it in a few scripted sequences? I could have been sniping from rooftops the entire game. Lame. (2) 'super jump' - Yes, you get a super jump. Actually it's a leap technique you learn from the thieves' guild in like chapter 8 (out of 14 -- actually out of 12 because 12 and 13 are missing, which is another issue). The super jump lets you reach higher places on buildings by getting a little extra height in your reaches while climbing. This was so so so so stupid...but useful...at the same time. So I'd been trying to climb this tall tower forever. It was the only lookout point I hadn't gotten to in the city, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to scale it. I just couldn't find anywhere to jump up at some point, so I couldn't progress. It was really annoying and I kept trying to look for alternate angles, coming back to it after doing other missions, etc. Wellll, a couple hours later I did this section with the thieves' guild and they teach me how to climb better, which, you guessed it, lets me get up that tall church tower. Bullshit man. Why bother not letting you climb just a little higher for 3/4 of the game, and then giving you this giant tower to climb that you can't even climb until you do this mission, which you have no inkling that you would ever be able to reach any higher during climbs. It was just dumb. And then to make it worse, after that button was unlocked (push A while hanging to make an extended reach), like 1/2 the time I climbed after that when I just wanted to climb NORMALLY (also by holding A) it would read it as pushing A, which yeah I was doing but then holding it, and Ezio would leap up and fall back down. Constantly. It was so annoying and pointless. One of the best things about the game was your uncle's villa that served as your headquarters. You could upgrade its buildings, get discounts from merchants there, and generally pay for its upkeep. Then, you get to reap the rewards of your hard work there by taking profit from the coffers. The coffers filled up every hour and twenty minutes. I always like games where I get my own keep or something to maintain, like one of the Neverwinter Nights expansions. There were a lot of different types of collectibles in the game -- feathers, statuettes, assassin's seals, etc. There were also 300 treasure chests (wow!) that you could hunt for with money in them. I spent most of the game unlocking and doing everything on the map, but near the end realized I had more money than I would ever need, so much so, I calculated, that I probably didn't need to open a single treasure chest, which would have saved me a lot of time...but opening them was still fun. I haven't had as much fun going and collecting things in a game in a while, so I'm glad I liked running across rooftops and stabbing guards. I upgraded all my weapons and everything to the best available, and got the special set of armor, Altaire's armor, by completing all 6 of the assassin's tombs and getting those seals. Those were some of the most fun and challenging areas of the game, complete platforming challenges and very Prince of Persia-esque. They were huge tombs that you had to navigate your way around, and you had to be precise about it because one misstep and sometimes you were back to the beginning! AC has a cool story, complete with a database and conspiracy flowchart showing who you've killed and who is still around. The database was very cool. I haven't mentioned yet that this game is absolutely steeped in history from the time. I know nothing about 15th century Italy, and I can't say I learned a lot, but I read a lot of factoids about palaces and chapels and popes, and I found it compelling because the designers obviously cared about the historical aspect of the game. And of course, the cities and churches and other things were painstakingly recreated I'm sure. Lots of research went into this one. The descriptions in the database often had little jokes here and there, usually pointing out ironies of papal rule or making fun of the church's brutality back then. What else...oh, there's no death penalty. You just restart at a checkpoint. That plus the insane amount of health you get and the simplicity of fighting (X, X, X, X, X, X) means the game was REALLY easy and you could do stupid things like jump off the tallest building in the city and die and it didn't matter. Kind of lame, kind of cool. The hard parts of the game involved getting jumps just right and remaining invisible when you had to. But yeah, a failure sets you back about 30 seconds on average. And finally, since I was talking about endings earlier, the ending of this one is cool, but it comes pretty quickly. Meaning that you're assassinating some people in memory sequence 11 and then whoooooaaahahhahah hazy dreamy stuff happens and you're transported to memory sequence 14 to kill the main conspirator! What happened to 12 and 13?! I looked it up because I'm not a huge fan of gaps in my games. Guess what. DLC! Wow really, you mean I have to buy more to get story that should have been in this game? Awesome, thanks! This isn't 'extra' stuff that's missing. It's the stuff that happened between memory 11 and 14, the stuff that you figure should be there or else they would have just named the last two memories 11 and 12. Creative design or creative marketing? You decide. Either way, the 12...or 14..chapters of the game are lengthy enough without dragging. Overall enjoyable experience. Definitely better than AC 1. I have AC: Brotherhood sitting on my shelf as well, but I don't think I want to play it any time soon. And I just borrowed Arkham City from a friend, which will be similar to AC, so I'll probably hold off a bit on that one too. Maybe squeeze a couple other games and a little vacation in first. Good times. Oh, and Brotherhood has the multiplayer I've been excited to try out!dkirschnerMon, 07 May 2012 23:35:21 CDThttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4978&iddiary=9221http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4975I'm on the 4th Chapter now, and I just want to comment on a few things. - Ranged attacks are seriously OP for this game, especially for knights. I haven't played many sRPGs or tabletop games but the ranged attacks at this point are close to ridiculous. Ken is a spear-wielding PLDN right now and he is leveling up faster than anyone else because of his 2-unit range and incredibly fast speed compared to everyone else's. Not to mention the difference between the two major bosses I've faced - one was a Marionette and the other a General who uses a sword. I had a way tougher time with the Marionette simply because her (his?) spells were AoE spells that could take out anyone with one hit, whereas the General can be gangbanged by surrounding him Go-style with 8 or more units, and he can only fight back by attacking 1 unit with much less damage. ...and what was incredibly unfair was that I had to face the Marionette first. - How this compares to modern tactics games... in a way, not so much. I remember playing FFTactics and relying on Lancers and Holy Knights to inflict damage from afar as a way to kind of hit-and-run enemies. The only difference is that they're not as accessible as they were in Shining Force. The enemy obviously gets tough if their attacks affect multiple party members. The final bosses and enemies of this game really exploit this. -I honestly don't know. Maybe there's this hidden desire lingering about that wishes to at least damage scale these AoE/ranged attacks. And maybe I just have a problem with game balances that allows grinding and leveling up statistics. (This entry has been edited2 times. It was last edited on Thu, 03 May 2012 13:00:09.)dvicenteThu, 03 May 2012 12:53:36 CDThttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4975&iddiary=9220http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4945My son is a big fan of this game and is quite taken with the figures as well as what he can do with them.. While I haven't played the entire game I've enjoyed helping my son now and then and playing together. The game is mostly at the right level of difficulty although there are certain spikes when you reach boss challenges. The last fight is particularly gruesome... I was concerned about the business model and what the impact of not having all the characters would be. While paying the game with the starter characters only is definitely possible, it's undoubtedly an impoverished experience. There are tons of areas that are blocked off and it's quite evident you need more characters. On the plus side, there are some expansions that unlock new areas and these remain unlocked. So, a friend of my son brought his "thing" over and unlocked some areas that we can continue to enjoy. That was pretty cool... For now we've been focused on clearing up e different challenges and stuff, mostly I'm waiting for a sequel that would alow for furtheer use of the figures...jpWed, 02 May 2012 14:36:38 CDThttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4945&iddiary=9219http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4972Finished World of Goo just now. This game has some serious charm. I really didn't know what to expect when I began, just that I've been hearing about it for a few years now and it was some sort of cute puzzle game where you build structures out of goo balls. Didn't know how it worked or anything. Anyway, I very much enjoyed it. There are a bunch of different species of goo balls that you get throughout that have different properties. Like some you can light on fire and explode, others you can place in a structure and move them later, others stick to surfaces...one thing I liked is that the game doesn't hold your hand in explaining what all the goo balls do. Any instructions the game gives are these somewhat random and silly messages from 'the sign painter.' Sometimes they have to do with what you need to do in a level, and other times not. So you more or less figure out how each type of goo ball works, you pretty much explore the levels on your own by building to reveal more of the map on the larger levels, and you do a good deal of trial and error. In this sense then there were a lot of 'a-ha!' moments, like when I figured out what the pink balloon goo balls did, or when I figured out in the last level just now that I needed to build up, not out, and then cause the rickety upwards tower to fall just right with a balloon attached. The game makes you feel pretty clever at times. It was never too too hard, a good difficulty, except there was ONE level that I insist was a cheap trick. I remember vividly trying to move this big vertical bar out of the way of a big bomb so that the bomb would roll down and explode what I needed it to. I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to move the bar. Finally I googled it and the solution I never would have figured out. You had to toss a goo ball OFF THE SCREEN over the top of the bar to the other side where the bomb was, then make the goo ball slam against the bar from that side to knock it down. There wasn't any indication that (a) tossing goo balls offscreen was any kind of valid strategy; (b) using a goo ball to hit the bar was any kind of valid strategy; (c) any reason to believe that that strategy was possible, especially given the fact that it was totally a precision thing where even if you tried to toss a goo ball off screen, you have no idea how high the bar goes off the screen, and 90% of the goo balls you toss up don't come down where you need them, so it would seem like it wasn't working anyway. /rant I hated that level. Oh, and you NEVER have to toss anything off screen or hit anything with a goo ball in any level ever before or after that one. So as you meet your goal for each level, which is always moving x number of goo balls to the pipe at the end, any excess goo balls you save go to this sandbox level where you just try to build as tall a goo tower as you can. It's neat because it keeps an up-to-date world ranking of everyone who has the game and how tall their towers are. And it shows other players' towers' heights as little clouds with their name and the flag of the country they're from. So I had messed around with it earlier in the game and continued my tower today when I was stuck in the story. As you build, you always see other players' clouds above your tower so it kind of gives you an aim to reach for. At the bottom, you are in over 5,000,000th place for tallest tower. I got mine up to like 20 meters and went all the way up to like 30,000. After I beat the game, I went back to the tower and got it up over 30 meters and up to 1,000-something place. Pretty cool how it updates it like that! Then I got too gung-ho and started just building straight up and my tower crumbled :-( I'll probably reset it and see how high I can go at some point! I wonder if I can get below 1,000 or 500 even. I figure since I got somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 on my first try, I can dip into the triple digits. But when the tower fell, my ranking went back down to 5 million, so it's like who knows how many people have gotten it as high as mine and their towers just fell down. It's like half of those 5 million people could have been trying to get higher than just one more person, but toppled their tower in the process! Anyway, fun way to do leaderboards. Totally recommend this one. I think the game is also on iPad and some other devices besides PC and Wii too. Check it out!dkirschnerWed, 02 May 2012 00:29:23 CDThttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4972&iddiary=9218http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4960In theory I shouldn't enjoy this because it's rating was so low. However, I really did like one of the other Kingdom hearts games (I think it was one of the GBA ones?). The story is one confusing mess so far and the gameplay seems quite complicated with lots of different systems that interact and interrelate. The camera is also pretty bad - I'm always losing track of where I am (and where the enemies are) due to the camera. However, it all seems to come together somehow. I've slowly and surely been peeling back the game's systems (figuring out how they work and how to utilize them). My greatest praise so far? The game's designers weren't afraid to mix things up a lot. Quite a few of the game's worlds/areas feature interesting variations on the games core gameplay that keep things interesting. For example, in one the game becomes a "traditional" RPG while in another you can't attack or defend yourself, but must rely on AI companions to do that. My greatest gripe? I've found myself twice in a situation that required re-loading from an earlier save because I reached a fight/moment I was unable to beat. This was due in part to the configuration of my character: certain abilities are useless in boss battles, others aren't that effective, etc. You're not allowed to swap out things and make changes while you're in a fight, but sometimes you don't KNOW there's a fight about to occur and so I've twice found myself screwed over having to reload and replay significant parts of the game. Worth continuing to play? Absolutely. Do I now have a better understanding of the Kingdom Hears world/narrative. Absolutely not.jpMon, 30 Apr 2012 23:45:54 CDThttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4960&iddiary=9217http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4974I've finished the first 3 chapters of this game. It's definitely interesting and I'm having a hard time pinning down exactly what it is that I'm finding interesting. By interesting I think I actually mean a combination of awkward, thought-provoking, and melodramatic. It sounds like faint praise, but I don't mean it that way. The game's premise is that sometime in the near future, after the collapse of the world economy (and the US one along with it, together with all sorts of local problems), North Korea invades the US. You're a member of the resistance and the North Korean's aren't the friendliest of invaders. I guess the premise is sort of plausible? I mean it's actually quite implausible. The games super serious tone makes it all the harder for me to believe, actually. I mean, suspend my disbelief. It just seems to crazy... why would Korea want to invade the US in the first place? (there are closer places to aim for - with plenty of natural resources as well). I feel like the game is trying so hard to make this compelling. As you walk around you find "notes" (not sure if that's what they're actually called) that are basically snippets of news items (clippings, reports, etc.) both from the past (including our present) as well as the fictional future. They're actually quite interesting to read and they serve the role of filling in the blanks - try to explain how it came to be that North Korea rose in prominence (and how the US lost it). It's the right thing to do (from a design perspective) because that was actually the first think I wondered about... I hope they also address WHY Korea would want to invade the US in the first place (what are they after?). However, it still doesn't quite convince me. The game is actually set in a near future (year 2027 or so?) and there are a few sci-fi-ish elements (military robots and things) to remind you of this, but I guess the main problem is that the setting (so far it's suburban US) is simply to similar to CURRENT suburban US...which makes it harder for me to swallow the whole notion of the collapse of the world order that allowed Korea to rise. In other words, the setting is too familiar and recognizable and thus I'm less likely to go along with the premise of the game. It seems to incredible... If I had to think of Ts that needed crossing and Is that needed dotting, this game definitely covers that. There are certainly lots of staged scenes/events that are designed to help you think about what's happening, what it means, and how terrible the situation is. For example, early in the 1st mission you're riding a school bus (as a prisoner). Along the way you witness different acts of repression and brutality (included, presumably, to get you to empathize) such as a couple that is executed in front of the young child, and random detainees getting beaten up. The game actually does a good job of not presenting the resistance as the all-too-perfect good guys while showing how evil the occupiers are. For example, while attempting to escape you draw attention to a community that is leaving peacefully, The soldiers show up and all of a sudden everything gets shot up. Later in the game you witness a phosporous attack (think napalm) that sets enemy soldiers on fire. They scream and moan (as the die) with one NCP enjoying the suffering while another is clearly shocked (and asks that you put them out of their misery). On the bad guys side you come upon a mass gravesite with human bodies essentially being scooped into large pits (and then, in what is probably one of the most disturbing scenes I've witnessed in a game, you have to jump in amongst the bodies and cover yourself with one to hide). It doesn't quite work for me...but I'm definitely interested enough to continue playing. And yes, the shooting and so on is fun enough that I enjoy it.jpMon, 30 Apr 2012 23:38:06 CDThttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4974&iddiary=9216http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4977This was an awesome game. It throws you in a black forest with no instructions and no fanfare. You just have to explore and figure out what's going on. So when I started, I was like '...controls?' Then I was like, well it's a platformer, so let's try the arrows. Success. I did have to look up (it has a menu -- take THAT immersion!) how to interact with objects (CTRL) because I almost got mad at the beginning of the game because I couldn't figure out what to do because I didn't look for anything to drag because there had been no instructions for a drag button so I didn't even know I could drag. It made me think about what I take for granted when picking up a game, and also, unfortunately, how reliant I am on the game telling me what does what in the beginning. Limbo just throws you to the wolves, though thankfully these wolves only respond to one button and not 10. Once I didn't get mad and didn't feel like a failure after not knowing what to do within 2 minutes of beginning, I took in the background and the wonderful music and sounds. The picture fades around the edges and focuses near your character. The background also gets very hazy. The world is dreamlike, and I think it's a dream that the character is stuck in. By dreamlike, I mean nightmarish. The woods/factory/waterworks/air ducts are just death traps. I died probably 100 times, but the dying never interrupted anything. You respawn within 15 gameplay seconds of where you died like every time. Death isn't a punishment. It's a learning experience. Oftentimes, I'd just die because I didn't know what was coming. Then I'd know what was there and I wouldn't die next time. Like, sliding down a hill into a pit of spikes, but while sliding down I see a good spot to jump fly past. Ah, next time! And there really are a lot of ways to die -- spikes, impaled from every angle, impaled by spider leg, crushed by boulder/box/falling object, fall to your death, drown, smashed by blocks, shredded by buzzsaw...I very much enjoyed dying. The game's audio really works wonders to set the atmosphere alongside the visuals too. I was playing at first with headphones on and I could hear rain drops, flies buzzing, ambient forest sounds, etc. Very well done. I moved later to my TV, controller, and speakers, and while the game looked awesome on the big screen and felt better with a controller instead of a keyboard, the speakers didn't allow the same detail to reach my ears as headphones do. So I put the headphones back on but kept the TV and controller setup. I enjoyed the beginning of the game more than the end. The beginning has more humanoids, and the humanoids are disconcerting. They creeped me out and always were laying traps or shooting blow darts at me. Or there were corpses, and that big spider in the beginning. The second half of the game turned into more of a platformer with gravity mechanics, which while cool, took a lot of the intrigue out of it. I guess I enjoyed figuring out how all the mechanics worked, the boxes, the rising water in that level, the cogs in those levels...and by the end I'd seen them all, and gravity mechanics are pretty handily used to death these days. I felt that the last handful of chapters were the weakest. It was also completely anti-climactic. There's no explicit story. You just think whatever you think is going on. But still, in the beginning/middle there is a giant spider and a mosquito character and other humanoids. But the middle/end there is nothing. No bosses. No mystery. No nothing. Totally worth the few hours it'll take to play and the few bucks it'll cost to buy. More 2-D games should be unique and innovative like this one.dkirschnerMon, 30 Apr 2012 13:15:02 CDThttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4977&iddiary=9215http://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4973Finished Xenosaga 3...that's the entire series done. Started the first one exactly four months ago. What a great series! I was hoping the third one wouldn't end on some stupid cliffhanger for a 4th that never gets made, but it did a good job of not leaving 8000 threads hanging or promising anything specific in the future. The end did get a bit weird. There was a lot of Nietzsche in the end, started talking about will the way he did and not the way it's popularly talked about or the way X1 was talking about the will to power. So it turns out the master 'villain' plan was to use Zarathustra to begin eternal recurrence. I like this because the two bad guys in the end aren't necessarily bad. The world is going to end. Fact. They just want to go on and destroy it so it can start over. The 'good guys' simply don't want to destroy it now and start it over. They want to let it run its course and die for good in several tens of thousands of years because it's 'wrong' to cause everyone to suffer now. The weird thing is the way the..I can't say bad guys..I'll just say Wilhelm because that's the final one's name..the weird thing is the way Wilhelm talks about his desire for eternal recurrence. He doesn't mind sacrificing all life on the planet to begin the process of eternal recurrence. He thinks it's for the greatest good. It's utilitarian. It keeps things moving along. Shion and the party don't think that idea is for the greatest good. They reject the idea that the greatest good in the future means the suffering of everyone now. Its architects would have Zarathustra 'speak' on the basis of lies and suffering of others. Here is Nietzsche's anti-utilitarianism in Shion. Shion and the party, they're the ones who would like to live this life again, yet they're the ones who don't want it to recur. Wilhelm is the one who wants it to recur, but he doesn't want it to recur in the same way. That would mean that...Shion and the party's wills are powerful, whereas Wilhelm's isn't since he (and Kevin and the other Testaments) are looking to the other-world and escaping the present one. Yet both alternatives are ultimately selfish. Wilhelm's eternal recurrence because he wants to be God and oversee that, and Shion's because she is basically guaranteeing humanity's extinction in a few tens of thousands of years. On the other hand, she is saving everyone alive until then (though if eternal recurrence were set in motion, they'd come back again to live their lives anyway), and Wilhelm is guaranteeing everyone alive infinite life cycles. Hopefully they are happy with them. Ah but his plan didn't work, so it doesn't matter. Also, there's the whole bizarre story at the end with the re-awakening of Mary Magdalene...that shit was out of left field. And there was some cut scene with Jesus preaching to some folks, including Mary and Jeshua in the crowd. I have no idea what's the point of all that. The story then goes on presumably after the game with stuff to do about returning to Lost Jerusalem (Earth/Holy Land), so I figure this is some story about the search for the origin of [insert topic] in the Garden of Eden. Anyway. Ridiculously fleshed out and complicated sci-fi tale over 3 games. I'd happily read/watch/play more in this world. Gameplay wise, there was a bit of a difficulty spike about 3/4 of the way through. Enemies get smarter and start breaking you and boosting, resulting in genuine ass-kickings of all my asses a handful of times. This is what I learned at this point: Breaks are deadly. Avoid getting attacked from the rear, avoid letting 4 enemies attack in a row, and for the love of god, avoid getting broken especially when there are several enemies. They will (depending on their targeting protocol) often just pick one character and absolutely murder him/her. When it's 4 enemies vs 1 broken character (or 3), you have no chance. Worst moment of the game/storytime: Replaying the Durandal mission 3 times. I died the first two times on the LAST enemy before the save point. I got break/boost murdered each time. Break/boost murder is cheap as hell. If enemies get the jump on you in this game, you are screwed. They'll break all your characters in one round, then when you can't act for two more rounds, they will just boost and completely obliterate you. I mean they'll get like 12-15 turns before you get one, no exaggeration. Sucks. After the first death, I equipped break limit + items because I realized the 3 characters I was using had the 3 lowest break limits of everyone. So I fixed that thinking it would help with getting broken. It did, except I still got jumped right at the end and nothing I could do. So I pulled out my computer to find a walkthrough so I could just go straight to the items the third time through (because the Durandal residential area is a maze of doors), but there wasn't anything clear enough, so I did it yet again, the third time with music pumping in my headphones instead of battle noises from the game, which, after two hours of dying, get really irritating. The third time I went SO prepared into the end of the level (which is the beginning revisited) before the save point. I had traps, was completely healed, had boost stocked. Fingers crossed. I didn't even see the bastards who killed me first two times. Bosses also got a bit cheap at this point in the game. Some of them had straight up kill moves that would one-shot me. I forget what boss it was, but she had an attack that knocks everyone down to 666 HP, and another that hits for 666. She did them back to back at one point (knocked all my characters to 666 HP then immediately hit them all for 666 HP, wiping me clean). How the hell do I stop that? Then I fought Margulis the other day and he has an Anima Awakening move that hits for like 130,000 HP. My max HP on the most maxed out ES was about 75,000. How to defend against that? So, I think that first one (the 666 one) was just a crazy fluke. The Margulis fight, I died (obviously) and looked up what type of attack he does. It's a fire ether, so I bought 1/2 fire rings for everyone and 1/2 guard rings. So when he was going to do that move, I just guarded and it essentially made his damage go down by 1/4 so it really didn't hurt too bad if everyone was mostly topped off. But the stupid thing about that type of battle is you're forced to wade through it once and have a mandatory death, THEN assuming you are able to figure out what type of attacks they do and defend against them, you can win. If you don't know that it's an ether, you lose again. If you don't think to put on 1/2 guard, you lose again. It's just dumb to make you lose to 'learn' how to beat it. It's not like a quick little oops, game over. It's like a 'dammit, I spend 30 minutes on this battle and he cheap-shot killed me, now i have to do it over until I figure out that it's a fire ether attack.' I actually completed most of this one. I got most of the segment addresses, did a lot of the side quests...didn't kill either of the mega optional bosses...did get most everyone's ultimate weapons. I like that these were accessible to a 'casual' player in this game, as opposed to other games that make getting ultimate weapons super involved. I also did most of the Hakox puzzle game on my own... Hakox puzzle game -- First of all, this was like a free game alongside Xenosaga 3. With little indie puzzlers being all the rage these days, whoever came up with Hakox could sell it or something similar on Steam or something. People would eat it up for real. It is VERY good and entertaining and challenging and unique. It basically works like this: You need to guide your characters to the goal. Each level is a 3-D grid-based map with a lot of moving parts. Your characters come in several different colors, and you generally need to get each color character to their respective goals (yellow goes to yellow, blue to blue, etc.) Easy enough. So there are four types of button (gimmicks, the game calls them) on the map corresponding to the Playstation controller -- triangle, circle, square, and x. Depending on the map, the pushing the button will move the gimmick to an end point along a path you can see on the map. Releasing the button moves the gimmick back to its starting point. So for example, Shion is walking in a straight line to her goal, but there is a gap in the road. There's an X out to the side. Push X and the X gimmick moves to fill the gap. She walks over it and continues to the goal. So imagine that, but like times 10 on the harder levels. You have to time multiple characters of multiple colors to reach their goals simultaneously to get combo points, you have to use all four buttons at once (people online suggest using two controllers to manage the complexity or begging a friend to help). Also, you have to keep in mind where all the gimmicks are all the time. Moving one in the path of a character may cause the death of another character. Anyway, this idea could really be expanded on and made into something even better, though it works really well with a controller the way it is now! Here's the best example of a level on Youtube, although the user has got it down to a science so it's not too too exciting to watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn4un40TbsA I stopped right before this one, but this is apparently the #1 trouble level! And finally, X3 features a Coconut Monkey. I took pictures and need to email the folks at PC Gamer to let them know their mascot is here. Great series. Glad to finally (re)play it to completion.dkirschnerMon, 30 Apr 2012 12:54:37 CDThttp://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=4973&iddiary=9214