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Aug 19th, 2012 at 22:32:16 - Kingdoms of Amalur (360) |
I don't think I've ever written this much on one game, but it's such a long one. After I finished it, I looked online to see what else you could do since you get to keep playing after you've beaten the main quest, and people were talking about spending 200 hours and stuff on KoA. Like they tried all three classes and the hybrids, crafted all the best weapons and armor for each class, found all the lorestones, did all the quests, etc. I think there are so many better (action)RPGs out there, I couldn't justify doing anything after the main quest that wasn't challenging. Unfortunately there aren't any special secret hard bosses, and I reached the level cap of 40 before beating the game which means nothing would ever be difficult (nothing was ever difficult in the first place either), so there really wasn't anything left for me to do.
Kingdoms of Amalur was a really solid experience. It didn't innovate anywhere. Just a jack-of-all-trades action RPG with what I think is an excellent story in an excellent universe. I've talked about how average every system in the game is in previous entries, and it stays that way to the end. For skills, I ended up maxing out or near-maxing out a bunch of them, and they simply aren't that useful. For the talent tree, I got all the sorcery spells maxed out, and then went into the might tree for some nifty bonus health and a cool berserk mode for when I dropped below 25% (which never happened, lol). So I ended up unlocking a couple levels of the warrior destiny for going through the might tree and a few levels of the battlemage destiny for having sorcery/might talents.
As far as the leveling goes, I've mentioned how unbalanced it is, your level/zone for example. Simply by doing quests, I outleveled all the zones. When I decided to quit doing side quests, the zones caught up a little bit, but even by skipping virtually all side quests in the Plains of Erathell and Klurikon and Alabastra, I STILL hit the level cap of 40 before the end! If someone could please explain to me how that should even be possible, I would love to hear it. What that says to me as a consumer is "Hey, we inflated the amount of content in this game so we can say it has 200 hours of gameplay, when really you'll hit the level cap and beat the game in 50. But do go around and needlessly do 100 more quests because they're there." And I swear, the entire zone of Detyr needs to be wiped from the game. The others were magnitudes more interesting. I really disagree with the people who called the story generic and forgettable. There is SO MUCH detail behind the Fae and much of their culture is very fleshed out. I feel these people didn't spend much time chatting with the NPCs, because that's where you really feel the depth of the lore. Again, EVERY NPC in the game says DIFFERENT things. It's amazing. Alternatively, people who degrade the story definitely have grounds to do so if Detyr is their main source because the gnome mining operations in the desert is such a played out thing in fantasy.
Turns out I was correct in predicting how the game would flow through Klurikon and Alabastra. You do indeed travel south through these zones with your powerful 4 or 5 super-allies to the heart of the Tuatha. It is much faster paced, less side quests (there is one more faction, which was a fun story to play through), less crap to explore. I do question how there are so many little camps of humans and good Fae in Tuatha lands. If they've had Mel Senshir under siege for 10 years and their army has been growing becoming more fierce, then I'm not sure I believe that there are so many human and Fae camps in Klurikon and Alabastra. I believe the Tuatha would have pretty much exterminated them all. But I guess you gotta have side quests. No, actually, you don't. It is possible to make an even more interesting main quest without 'fetch me 3 pineapples' or 'kill 8 garden snakes' or whatever variety, in order to use all the space and cool places in these zones.
Here's my biggest thing at the end though. This whole game is about your character being fateless. Everyone else is bound by fate. You, however, can actually change other peoples' fates since you don't have one and are free of it. So throughout the game, they play on this idea so you get some different outcomes by choosing one way or another for parts of the main quest and for faction quests. It's typically basic light side/dark side type stuff, but I always appreciate the effort. But at the end of the game when you have to go stop the God that Gadflow is summoning, you have no choice! You have to stop it! You can't say "I will ally myself with the evil god and herald the destruction of everything! Hahahahahaha!" WHY!? You've let me make some important choices throughout this game which is ABOUT changing fate and changing the world, yet you won't let me change the final outcome?! I mean, technically then you couldn't continue to play the game afterward because the world would be destroyed, but maybe then they could have just replaced all the NPCs with Tuatha or something. And I wouldn't mind it if they'd let me destroy the world and then put me back in the normal world after beating the game. Like, I can deal with that inconsistency. Anyway, sort of lame there.
And there you have it.
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Aug 17th, 2012 at 21:12:21 - Deus Ex (PC) |
I wrote a full entry for this last night but foolishly was careless typing it in the browser window and due to a browser hang-up accidentally clicked away without copying it to clipboard first. :-( Time to recreate...
Geez, I dunno about the original Deus Ex. I am sure this game would have been AWESOME to play when it came out, but that was then and this is now. I distinctly remember this CD-ROM in the general vicinity of my family computer circa 2000. My brother played it, but I never did. I clearly understand now why Deus Ex is consistently atop these 'best games of all time' lists, but I think, like with most older things, you would have had to have been playing it back then to put it on the list at all. With Human Revolution sitting installed and ready, I think I'll skip on ahead to the modern version. I intended to play Deus Ex for homage and continuity and all that, but I think I got the gist!
Deus Ex immediately struck me with its innovation. Even today, games in similar genres don't do or fail to do well what Deus Ex does. I'm thinking of the excellent skill system, the fully voiced dialogue, the multiple ways to complete missions, the multiple pathways weaving through each level, the fact that your actions (completion or failure of secondary missions, sequence of talking to people and doing things, pathway through the level) have consequences, and the fun electronics/hacking/lockpicking. NPCs will say different things to you, your end-of-mission report is different and your boss and co-workers actually comment on what you did or didn't do with opinions, and you get more or less skill points as a reward. One time I completed a level with nothing short of a shooting spree, and as a result, when it was time to restock at the armory before the next mission, the specialist there called me trigger happy and gave me multitools instead of ammunition and suggested I try to kill a few less people. Like, so many of today's games fail to have appropriate NPC responses to your actions. They're generic, or there's not even the possibility of multiple outcomes. Deus Ex wasn't the first stealth/shooter game out there or the first with multiple paths and voiced dialogue, but I see its influence in many modern games. It reminds me of Rainbow Six and Splinter Cell games, Bioshock, other games that focus on this computer hacking/electronics/lockpicking, even fantasy versions like Elder Scrolls games. And the music, wow, can you say Mass Effect?
So, many aspects of the game do hold up today,and even shine, but some are hilariously dated. The AI, for example, is like watching a movie that's so bad it's good. Sometimes when you shoot an enemy one time, he turns and runs (in a straight line). Enemies will run behind cover, then move to the center of the room and stand still. Enemies will run around you in circles not firing. Enemies have no communication skills. If you shoot an enemy in a room full of enemies, there is no guarantee the others will notice. If you walk up to an enemy, there is no guarantee he will notice. I can't tell you how many times I casually strolled up to a guard and shot him point blank...from the front. Enemies have terrible short-term memory. If you open fire, kill a few, blow up a box of TNT, and then go around the corner, the remaining enemies will forget all that within a few seconds. Out of sight out of mind.
Even though the enemies aren't challenging, the other option is: the stealth approach. Computers/electronics/lockpicking are skills you can invest points in. These seem very important because levels are littered with traps like laser grids, sentry robots and turret guns. If you can hack and stuff, you can turn off security, or even turn it against enemies. But this stuff is heavy throughout the levels. You can shoot up all the guards, but you sometimes face an insane corridor with a security camera, then two turret guns, then a laser grid armed with explosives, then another camera...and at the end, a locked door. Shit, no lockpicks! It's handy to always have some picks and multitools. The other challenging bit is navigation. There is no map in the modern standard sense. Some levels you get a static low-res map of the area, but your position isn't on it, there's rarely any point of interest marked, and you can't interact with the map at all besides open/close. After a while though, I came to enjoy the lack of a map because exploring is both fun and rewarding in Deus Ex. You get skill points for discovering new places, completing secondary objectives, and talking to some people. There are so many optional and hidden places/things in each level, and it's usually something interesting that you find, whether it's an ammo cache or a hobo shanty town or a secret meeting that nets a secondary objective if you spy on it. And for not having a map, the NPCs are very good about telling you where to go. They say 'find the warehouse a few blocks south of here' or 'my friend is in trouble in an alleyway northwest of the bar.'
Like I said, to get into a lot of these places, and to find other secrets and cool passage ways to help you navigate, you're going to need lockpicks and multitools. You'll also need an array of weaponry, healing, and other random types of items. Unfortunately the inventory is pretty small. I filled it up within an hour. There is money in the game, and I assumed that I was losing it by throwing away items due to space, but I never found anywhere to sell items, so maybe I was wrong. It seems money is only good for buying the odd bit of supplies or bribing NPCs for information. But like the map, after a while I didn't mind. I began keeping only that which I needed, which meant basically not trying to carry 5 guns. Ammo doesn't take up space, which is awesome. But when you loot enemies, it autoloots everything, so I was constantly having to get rid of the constant supply of knives and cigarettes and other crap they carry around.
Since there is so much inventory management, the game uses hotkeys for deleting and using items, and for many other menu functions. BUT, the hotkeys didn't work! That was annoying for sure. I think it's a Steam issue since it's an older game brought back to life. Sometimes original controls have problems. Another really annoying example is that F12 toggles your flashlight. F12 is also the Steam hotkey for screenshots. Deus Ex is a really dark game, so I constantly toggled the flashlight, which means Steam was constantly taking screenshots. I went into Deus Ex's options to change the flashlight hotkey, but I couldn't. According to the controls F12 doesn't do anything, and there was no option even for the flashlight. It's like it was hardwired to be F12, yet F12 supposedly was nothing.
And like I said, Deus Ex is inexplicably dark. The whole game takes place at night, so it's understandable that it is dark, but not DARK. I noticed some bad eye strain, and last night I even started getting nauseous, so I started taking pretty frequent breaks. I'd never played it for more than like an hour in a session until last night so it never got too bad. That's actually part of the reason I'm going to skip ahead to Human Revolution. I turned up the brightness rom 60-70, but that just washed it out and it looked terrible. Besides the darkness, the visuals are okay. Obviously they're really dated and look like crap relative to today's games, but it's fine. There's good use of camera angles and zoom during the dialogue scenes. They had lip synching and everything. Again, teenage David in 2000 would have been amazed by all this.
The last issue is the lack of autosave. I replayed big chunks of the first 2 levels due to lack of autosave. I'd wager I spent about 25% extra time on Deus Ex replaying bits because I'd die without saving. The game says it autosaves though. Whenever you move to a new area, it says 'loading' (the area) then 'saving' (presumably, my game). But that is false! I don't know if it's saving something else, or if there is supposed to be an autosave feature and it's another Steam issue, or something else. But yeah, that cost me a lot of time. Once I realized that it wasn't going to ever save for me, and I died enough to get annoyed that it was telling me it was saving and then not saving, and once I conditioned myself to quicksave before doing something dangerous, I got over the problem. But that's one of those things. Practically all games autosave these days and we take it for granted. On the bright side though, all those early instances of replaying levels showed me how flexible my choices were in how to go about completing missions because I got to try lots of different approaches in the first couple levels. I developed an early appreciation Deus Ex in this way.
That's about it. Definitely a cool game, and I hope that Deus Ex: Human Revolution is everything I like about Deus Ex and modernized with some new innovations for me to marvel at. Definitely worth spending some time with the original to get a feel for the series.
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Aug 16th, 2012 at 23:46:46 - Cut The Rope (Other) |
Retiring this log. Cut the Rope is a really cute little mobile game that I've been playing off and on for months. But I had to reset my phone and when I downloaded it again they had changed the free version to have a ton of ads that get in the way of buttons you need to press when changing levels and exiting the game. It is pretty annoying. So I'll find another phone game to take its place.
But it was a lot of fun. You have to feed candy to this little green monster named Om Nom. As the title suggests, the candy is attached to ropes and you have to cut the ropes in the right order and at the right times to successfully drop the candy in his mouth instead of missing his mouth. I can't really explain it. But there are bubbles that make the candy float, and air pumps where you can swing the candy, and some other environmental things you can do to move it around. But it's a physics puzzler, so the candy swings realistically on the ropes, so your cutting this or that rope at this or that timing and using the bubbles and air pumps and whatever correctly all matters. I like it better than some of these other similar-ish games like Angry Birds or Bag It because your success is less luck-based and more thought-based. If you think it through, you can do it. Anyway, maybe I'll pay the dollar and buy it sometime down the road, but with all the other similar quality freebies out there, I'd rather try some of those.
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Aug 15th, 2012 at 10:34:46 - Kingdoms of Amalur (360) |
As I raved in earlier entries, the first chunk of KoA had me mesmerized with the story and level of detail in the world. That lasted through most of the epic play sessions the first weekend. After playing KoA now for a bajillion hours it was dragging pretty horribly until the end of my last session before today renewed my hope. I thought about it and figured out what went so wrong in the mid-portion of the game (at least what I think was the mid-portion of the game), and it is this: the story derails through the entirety of the Detyr zone and only picks back up halfway through the Plains of Erathell. If you do the math, that's about half of the territory covered so far (~12/24 subzones, plus cities) where the events of the main storyline and even the faction quests are largely abandoned. The number of side quests and tasks ballooned in these zones relative to main/faction quests, and my character's life began to feel meaningless. Also, as ranted in the last entry, I realized my level was getting ahead of the game. Apparently by doing all the quests the game offers, you end up outleveling it by the 3rd zone, which is just bad. But like I said, I ended the session-before-last on a high note...
The first three zones are essentially friendly territory in the war against the Tuatha. They comprise a continent separated by sea from the eastern lands where the Tuatha have occupied. So up until this point you're following the story to the giant city of Rathir on the coast. The port city across the sea to the east is Mel Senshir, and its battered walls have been under siege by the Tuatha for 10 years. If the Tuatha take Mel Senshir, then they can sail in force to the western lands, to Rathir, and sweep across that continent and win their war.
The session-before-last, I picked up where I left off in Detyr, the pointless desert land filled with gnomish mining companies, and where nearly every quest has you going into one mine or another. After becoming frustrated with the never-ending brown of the landscape and the endless mine shafts, I made a few decisions: (1) finish Detyr and get to the Plains of Erathell as fast as possible (I was close to finished already and figured I'd close it out); (2) once in the Plains, focus on the main quest and the faction quests only, minimizing side quests and exploration and letting the main quests lead me around; (3) quit picking up so much junk to sell - only take magic items. These were all good ideas. I barely visited a couple subzones in Plains and didn't miss them at all. I got way more enjoyment focusing on the more interesting main and faction quests. These made the side quests pale by comparison, which made me worry less about ignoring farmers begging me to find their families and whatnot. And since I am filthy rich in the game, learning to ignore the majority of items has saved a lot of time sorting inventory and traveling to sell. The money thing, by the way, has gotten really out of hand. I have almost 3 million gold now with nothing to spend it on. So again, the mercantile skill turned out to be pointless...in addition to most of the others that are also pointless. ANYWAY, I made it my goal to plow through the Plains and get to Rathir, and at the end of my next-to-last session, I'd almost explored all of that city, leaving off with the excitement of knowing the next time I turned on the game I'd get to sail to Mel Senshir and plunge into the siege.
Today I started with the intention of setting sail, but remembered I had faction quests to finish, and I like those, so I started on them first, partly to make me anticipate Mel Senshir even more. And Oh My God I love these faction quests. I had the second-coolest experience of the game tonight (first was seeing Nyralim and that'll be real tough to beat). There are three factions, the Warsworn (Elder Scrolls fighters guild), Travelers (Elder Scrolls thieves guild), and Scholia Arcana (Elder Scrolls mages guild). Tonight I finished the Warsworn story arc and it was AWESOME. I don't want to ruin it in case someone here reads and plays, but there's a twist of fate at the end that is really badass and gives you the option to be unbelievably evil (or maybe you were manipulated). This had the first real consequences on the world of anything I've done in the game and I'll have to live with them until the end. Then I pursued the Travelers quests some more, and it looks like there's another cool twist right at the end. This one I definitely didn't see coming and I'm really looking forward to seeing what I can do about it next time.
Also looking forward, I did go to Mel Senshir but stopped short of leaving the gates. I HOPE, I really really hope, that the game's narrative pace quickens and it moves through this eastern continent quickly. Technically there really shouldn't be a whole bunch of side quests since it's occupied by the Tuatha, the enemy, and there aren't any allied settlements as far as I know since the Tuatha are laying siege to the only allied stronghold on the continent. I imagine I'll be traveling south to the Crystal Throne of the main Tuatha King guy or whatever with a band of other heroes I've met throughout the game. I expect a bunch of epic battles! I've already been prepped that the Witch King and his demon niskaru lord Balor are moving toward the siege and I'm to intercept them. Those two enemies are badasses that I've been hearing about half the game, so I'm really excited.
Other than hopes and dreams, my sorcerer is a super badass. I filled out the sorcery tree to the top for the spells, and am putting the rest of my points into the warrior tree to pick up some extra health and elemental resistance and this passive skill that increases my damage and health regen when I fall below 25% HP. The only downside is I won't unlock the final Sorcery fate card, but I'll live. I'd rather have more HP and that passive skill than all the sorcerer weapon skills because I rarely use weapons. My favorite spell is Meteor. It takes care of most groups of enemies in one shot and feels very overpowered. But luckily I've let the zones' levels catch back up to me by skipping a bunch of areas and ignoring tons of side quests. When I get into the eastern continent, I should be right on the high end of the level caps, which is acceptable to me. Oh also, I've maxed out and filled up a lot of my skills. I can make epic gems now with sagecrafting. Unfortunately I never use equipment with gem slots, but I need to look out for some worthy upgrades because I can make epic gems that give me +20% to all elemental damage. Holy crap. I'd love to stack those. Since the levels are higher in the eastern continents, I think the item levels should increase too and so maybe I'll get upgrades real fast.
And that is that. Onward and upward. Backward not forward. And spinning, spinning.
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