 |
|
May 5th, 2015 at 21:15:35 - Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories (PS2) |
I wish I had posted something about Disgaea 2 when I was playing it a few months ago. I had a long break and just sunk a lot of hours into it today because (gasp!) I had some free time. I'm about 25 hours deep total, on Episode 9. No idea how many episodes there are, but I feel like I might be 2/3 or so through the story.
I have *extremely* bizarre/fond memories of the first Disgaea. I was playing it while living in Athens after graduating from undergrad. I was working third shift at Target stocking health and beauty supplies. The stockroom was mine and I'd bring my ipod speakers in there and blast metal music all night long. I'd leave work usually around 6am, use a 2-for-1 waffle coupon at Waffle House, try my best to eat both waffles (I never managed), come home, sleep til the afternoon, get up and play Disaea until work. On my days off, I played Disgaea all night. I was really into the game. One of my former roommates from back then reminded me about it the other day because he's been talking up the last XCOM reboot and said "You used to play strategy games all the time. Remember Disgaea? You disappeared for like a month!" Ha. While the game is still awesome this time around, I'm not getting as deep into it.
I bet that last time, I had double the play time by Episode 9. This time, I've just been going through the story. I might have gone in the item world two or three times to poke around or level up a little bit, but I seem to be doing just fine. The game has a pretty natural leveling boost. For example, I've been getting far behind enemies in level. The last level I played, my characters were about 10 levels below the enemy on average (my 20 to their 30), which seems like a massive difference. But I still managed to win. When I get a good leveling match in, my characters boost a lot. Now I have several at 25, and the average is probably 22/23. I have this perceived need to level up between story missions, but it doesn't seem necessary...yet.
This series is so quirky. I love the characters. I do miss Laharl from the first game, but this game's protagonist is good too. Etna is back, her prinnies are back, and tonight I fought the Prism Rangers. They were in the last game too and are a spoof of the Power Rangers, except there are only 5 of them (not enough to complete the visible spectrum, as the joke goes, because they don't have enough friends). Other characters in this game include Axel, the Dark Hero, who is a washed up reality TV personality/musician. He and his film crew are out trying to shoot footage of him being a Dark Hero (winning fights), but something always goes wrong. Recently, he sort of joined my party, then ditched me in a tight spot. There is Overlord Zenon's daughter, who is the second protagonist, and her little toad butler friend, who reminds me of Sebastian from The Little Mermaid, French accent and all.
The premise of this game is that the Adell's (the protagonist) village has all been turned into demons, except him for some reason. They tried to summon Overlord Zenon for some reason, got cursed, and in trying to fix it, summoned his daughter instead. She is trying to get to him because she's never met him and Adell wants to get rid of the demon curse on his village and family. His family, including two siblings who join the party, is cute. Sooo, you go off on a wacky adventure. Tonight I did the Coliseum episodes, fought my way through the arena battles, confronted (fake?) Zenon, and fought my way out of the Coliseum back to my village.
The party decides the Zenon was a fake because Etna defeated him and the curse is still on the village. So I guess they're going to go find Etna and try to summon Zenon again. Next time!
add a comment  - read this GameLog  |
|
Apr 28th, 2015 at 13:54:34 - Anachronox (PC) |
I grabbed this off Steam thanks to one of PC Gamer’s intriguing lists. I can’t remember if it was the Top 100 PC Games of all time or the Best Old Games You’ve Never Played. Either way, I like RPGs, and they sold me on Anachronox. I booted it up last week and immediately liked the game’s tone. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s funny, with an odd mix of sarcasm, self-deprecation, and parody. I’ve been chuckling aloud. The seedy underworld of South Anachronox and the main character—a down-and-out PI who begins the game by being hurled out a window—lend to the film noir style.
Every NPC is named and has several lines of dialogue to share. These snippets are interesting enough. There seems to be a solid backstory, both on the grand scale and regarding Boots (the main character). Significant characters are voice acted well, and the score is sufficiently sci-fi.
On the downside, whatever universe there is in the game has been overshadowed 100 times over by the Mass Effects of the past decade. While I was playing, I was just thinking how quaint this notion of a big world to explore was. I read reviews from 2001 praising Anachronox’s “interactivity” and “immersion.” Yeah, not so much in 2015. It looks pretty bad and I disliked the mouse cursor. You can’t move and use the cursor at the same time. The mouse fills dual roles of moving the cursor and swinging the camera. You have to stop to move the cursor. If you want to click on something, you have to mouse over it first to see if it’s clickable. Sometimes this requires you positioning Boots perfectly in front of it to see if the mouse icon spins, signifying interactivity.
There are many visual bugs, mostly involving Boots moving. He stutters, he clips, he gets stuck in animation loops. There is a guide robot who is supposed to lead you around, but he never moves, even after you pay him. One time, an hour later, I found him in another part of the city. It beckoned me to follow, and I did, having forgotten where I’d asked it to escort me. Since South Anachronox is a giant labyrinth of sprawling multi-level tunnels, not having a robot guide sucked. It was a pain to walk through the drab environment.
Finally, the animations take for…ever…Combat is especially guilty of this. The combat seems neat, a turn-based JRPG-style system, but most of the time is spent standing there watching your battle gauge fill up. Then when you do attack, or the enemy attacks you, it’s a painfully slow animation. Painfully slow animations also occur when doing routine tasks like riding an elevator, exiting a room, or picking up an item.
I can’t take it!
Because the setting, story, and characters interest me, but not the gameplay, I am going to watch the official machinima instead. As far as I understand it, the devs cobbled together all the in-game cut scenes and some gameplay to tell the whole story in an hour. If the story is that good, then the machinima should be enjoyable!
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Apr 23rd, 2015 at 20:56:12 - Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft (PC) |
Ah, Hearthstone. I haven't updated about it in 7 months, and I should have! I actually switched computers a couple months ago (the hard drive on the laptop I've had since 2009 started hanging and it wasn't looking good) to my work laptop. I didn't know my password for this site, so I couldn't update anything, not that I had anything to update besides Hearthstone.
Since the last time I updated, I have:
- finished all the wings in Naxx, including all Heroic mode bosses except the last 3 or 4.
- gotten a ton of cards through a lot of good arena runs in the Goblins vs. Gnomes expansion
- sort of kept up with the Blackrock Mountain expansion. I am one week behind and should have gold for it early next week. Then it'll take me another couple weeks to get the final 700 gold for the final wing
- crafted my first card (a legendary, Archmage Antonidas, who puts a Fireball in your hand every time you cast a spell -- yikes!)
But by far the most awesome thing I did is "beat" the arena. I did this several months ago with a Paladin. I actually didn't know you could beat the arena, but I went 12-1. After my 12th win, it just gave me rewards, and I was like "huh?" Yeah, turns out you can't win more than 12! I wonder how many I could have won though! I've become pretty handy in the arena. I've hit 10 a few times, and had a bunch of runs over 7. I still probably average 5 or 6. The last two runs, for example, were abysmal 1-win runs. But I haven't played arena in a while due to saving and spending gold on Blackrock Mountain expansions.
I am fairly tired of arena now because you just keep getting Goblins vs. Gnomes cards, and I have most of the basic and rare ones. I just keep getting the same stuff over and over. For whatever money-grubbing reason, Blizzard won't let you choose to get classic decks. You have to get the new ones. I lack many more classic cards.
I've dabbled some more in constructed play too, not seriously trying to climb the ladder (I've managed rank 15), but just seeing what kinds of interesting decks I can make. I finally gave in and looked online at other people's decks for ideas, which has helped me out. I also realize that, at least by rank 15, pretty much everyone you play has a few of the same cards in their decks (Ragnaros...). It's really annoying. I've been playing Hearthstone now since last summer and I haven't managed to craft but one legendary. And sometimes I feel like I play a lot. People must play A LOT or spend money.
Anyway, right now some of my favorite decks to mess with are my paladin mech deck, my shaman murloc deck, my warrior deathrattle/Grim Patron deck, and my druid ramp deck.
My plans for the game are to keep on playing til I beat Blackrock Mountain, and then can it for a while and play other stuff instead, especially since I'll have the time. Hearthstone has been great during this busy semester for taking 30-minute breaks from working to have a few matches.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
|
Apr 23rd, 2015 at 20:22:35 - Gears of War 3 (360) |
On Sunday, my old friend P came over. He and his wife are in town from the Air Force life of living all over the world. I get to see him once every year or two. We used to game together back in high school and college, and I mail him my old Xbox games sometimes for him to play, but we never play together anymore.
It was especially awesome to sit on the couch next to him and plow through Locusts and Lambent because this is also the first time I've touched a game, aside from Hearthstone, for 3 months. This first semester of having a proper university teaching job has been intense, and on top of that, A and I have been moving the last few weeks, I've been out of town to one conference after another, I've been working steadily at my editing job, and I've gotten some sweet suit acting gigs, including being a featured white walker at local HBO Game of Thrones season premiere events in April here in Georgia. It's been a whirlwind of a semester that's left no time for gaming!
What made P and I's Gears experience even better is that we were killing it on Hardcore. We only had some serious trouble once, and that was on the boss fight where you split up to defend that one place from the lambent berzerker. I was outside the fort walls and P was up top providing cover. I kept on getting killed by the Hammer of Dawn, and as we restarted over and over again, we figured out that I could trigger the stalk spawns in order, that I needed to handle each stalk spawn one at a time and so that P could help out, that I needed to just avoid the berzerker when it spawned, and finally that I needed to run in through the gates as soon as the Hammer of Dawn cleared them the first time. My main problem was I kept waiting while trying to avoid the berzerker, and the Hammer of Dawn's second shot would kill me every time.
We made it through 3 acts (of 5) on Sunday, and I cut us off just as we got to Char, which I remember as being an intense place with Ash Man leaving traps for you, and also with the nuke victims frozen in ash in their moment of death. It was cool to re-experience the game for the first time again in years. It holds up well--not that I've played many AAA shooters since. My favorite part of that game is still Cole Train's sequence in the stadium. It's such a neat way to tell his history.
Finally, it was nice to play Gears with P because the last co-op game I'd been playing was Gauntlet with a different P (the usual co-op buddy P). I wasn't that impressed with Gauntlet, though I did just download it again today. You can see I'm gearing up for gaming soon...2 weeks til this semester is over.
add a comment - read this GameLog |
