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May 20th, 2012 at 05:09:43 - Dead Space 2 (PC) |
Another excellent game, right up on par with the first one. There's really not much to say, especially if you know anything about the Dead Space games. It's like Dead Space 1, but...again. There are a couple new things, a couple new enemies, some anti-grav boots and more anti-grav flying sections that were cool. There were definitely more power nodes to upgrade weapons too. I mostly maxed out my suit, stasis, pulse rifle, and flame thrower. Last time I remember using the bolt thrower gun and the buzzsaw a lot. I changed it up this time and by the end was going with pulse rifle and flame thrower, with some javelin gun and line cutter tossed in for certain situations. The flame thrower was definitely my favorite.
The game is scary as hell and not an easy trip. It still masterfully lures you into rooms only to fill them with Necromorphs. A couple memorable moments include the elevator and the Ishimura. In the elevator sequence, you're riding up and up and up, and...queue giant enemies on the outside of the elevator! One after another, they bash windows and swing their claws at you, so you've got to dodge out of the way, shoot its weak points, turn to find the next one, and again and again, like 10 or 12 times. When I finally beat it my heart was racing and I realized I was gripping the mouse really tight. Seriously intense sequence. The other memorable moment is going back through the Ishimura, specifically the beginning. The Ishimura was the poor ship from the first game, and when I found out I had to go back in this game, oh man, I got anxious already. Then when you go in the Ishimura, it's just quiet. Just dead silent. There's hazard plastic up and it's obviously in the process of being cleaned and checked out to find out what went on last time, and it is SO SO SO creepy in there. And did I mention that it's silent? You go through rooms and corridors and nothing happens. You keep expecting something to happen but nothing will come for you. Then it gets a little less silent, and a little less, and still nothing happens. It's like 5 or 10 minutes of dread building up. I will probably remember that forever. There's stuff from the first game I still think about sometimes, like the asteroid blaster sequence where the gunshots form the drums to the soundtrack. That part was incredible. And of course the ending of DS1...the ending of DS references it. It's pretty funny and (spoiler) doesn't make you jump.
I love these games. These are two of my favorite survival horror games ever. I have a Wii one sitting around but haven't had the chance to play it. DS3? Please?
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May 20th, 2012 at 04:44:15 - Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana (PS2) |
I've been burning through games faster than I can think much about them. Just trying to get this massive list shrunk a bit. I could have skipped this one though. Oh well! It was fun enough, but nothing special. I thought it would have some neat item/crafting system but that part, which was one of its unique bits, was just lame. The other unique bit that I did like was that you get Mana (otherwordly spirit-type beings) on your journey, and when you get one, sometimes it comes with a skill, like the Earth mana you can summon as a stepping stone, one of the others gives you a barrier to protect you from fire and other things on the map that hurt you, and at the end you get one that lets you fly some, which actually kind of renders most of the others useless. Each dungeon and area is a navigable map with obstacles and things that you need to jump and use your mana skills to get around. There are items and treasure everywhere to get you to try and reach places.
I'll explain the item system briefly. So there are like 15 or so different types of mana (fire, earth, dark, light, etc., etc.). In order to get mana, you can extract it from enemies, and more often, from items in the environment. So if you use extract element on a rock, you get some stone mana. Each mana you can hold up to 99. Ok so there are the obvious things like rocks giving you stone mana or fire giving you fire mana. Then there are like 100 other items, like various foods and plants, that also give you different types. These items respawn every time you leave a map screen and come back, so you have infinite mana of most types, basically. You use this mana to create items, which you find recipes for throughout the game. So your basic healing potion takes some water mana. You've got to use a Mana (creature) with a water attribute to help you make the potion. Some mana are more efficient with whatever mana type (water Mana is more efficient with water mana than the spirit Mana is with water mana, and the fire Mana can't even use water mana).
Does this sound needlessly complicated? It is. I think it just adds steps to getting a damn healing potion! Why can't I just find a healing potion? Why do I have to extract mana first, then tell my Mana to use the mana to make the potions. And I can only have 9 of each item in my inventory? Come on! You have to constantly go through menus and make potions...it gets old.
Atelier Iris has item shops where you can synthesize items. This is part of its whole "alchemic RPG" theme. You can create items for sale in shops. I didn't see literally any benefit to doing this. I did it a handful of times in the beginning. Shopkeeps will tell you what they want and provide you a list of ingredients. Very quickly after the beginning, the ingredients required to make things are themselves things you need to synthesize first. So then when you do make something, which is usually just some other ingredient, you can actually deviate from the recipe to make a better quality version. So for example there might be like worm-infested apple, dry apple, apple, sweet apple, or apple pie. Right, different versions. These have some bearing on the outcome of the synthesized item, like how good it is or something. Each item has a % and if you look at the shop it will tell you what the 'hot items' are and why. So like, the worm-infested apple I made might be the hot item because it's 'wormy' or something. There are lots of weird 'reviews' of the synthesized items...deadly odor, sweet and sour, heavy, adult...etc. Random townspeople will then tell you like 'i love the bread crumbs at mojo's bakery. i make them a part of my daily routine. i love the bread crumbs because it is deadly odor.' Seriously. The NPC comments on the items I made were kind of funny because they were usually horribly out of context. Anyway, this whole item synthesis served no purpose whatsoever that I could tell and I quit doing it almost as soon as I started.
I also didn't bother with 'mana synthesis,' which is where you can augment your weapons with mana to add attack or defense or fire resist or whatever. I didn't do it mostly because I didn't know if I could remove the mana once I attached it, and also because you can't augment equipped weapons. So you have to unequip your weapon first, then augment it. One step too many to care!
So all these things I didn't care about. I could afford not to care because this was the easiest game I have played in forever. I didn't do hardly anything extra and I breezed through it. There was one boss that killed me twice I think. Otherwise, no deaths and generally didn't even come close. It helped too that you can switch in alternate characters during battle with no penalty and they get to act immediately. And you can switch characters out when they die. So basically I had 5 attackers instead of the 3 on the screen.
This game would have been much better if it were more difficult. They could have helped with with more interesting battles. The game tags itself as a 'strategic RPG,' but it is hardly strategic. It is very mindless. 99% of fights were 'x, x, x, x, dead.' Just plain attack all the time, even on bosses! The only reason I did anything else (besides a couple bosses) was (a) to hit more enemies at once since some characters' attacks (the useful characters) hit multiple enemies at once, and (b) to hit enemies immune to physical attacks. There were a lot of REALLY annoying enemies who were immune to physical attacks. Two of your characters attack with magic, and they are both weak, so you have to bring in one of your other characters and waste mana just to kill these stupid physical-immune creatures.
Oh man, and maybe the worst of all is that at the end of the game I was still fighting enemies from the beginning! And there are like 10 enemy types with like 4 variations each. The notorious 'Puni' enemies had so many different types and they all looked the same with a different color. My god, it was so stupid. So yea, like level 50 at the end of the game, and here comes an army of level 1 punis. Will I win?! Why is this a random battle?! And the game makes you travel over a horrendous world map all the time, so even if you're not in the difficult areas mysteriously encountering simple enemies, you're in early easy areas encountering the same simple enemies.
I really sound like I hate this game huh? It really wasn't that bad, just some annoying things. The story wasn't anything special. There were forced romances, a couple 'what, you're my SISTER?!' moments and other things typical of dull stories. The high point though was the silliness of it. I liked the game in that it didn't take itself seriously at all. The characters were enjoyable. There was a cat girl, and I expected to hate her, but she was actually cute. I especially ended up liking her voice. And there were a lot of little side missions/side stories involving shopkeeps and other townspeople that I enjoyed.
Yeah, anyway, glad to get it off my shelf, but too bad it wasn't better. I think when I heard it was focused on items and it was strategic, I was somehow thinking of a non-grid-based Disgaea. Not even close!
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May 15th, 2012 at 08:55:42 - Diablo III (PC) |
Diablo 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.
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May 9th, 2012 at 21:09:45 - Grim Grimoire (PS2) |
Can'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.
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