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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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Aug 8th, 2012 at 12:05:48 - Kingdoms of Amalur (360) |
A handful more things I've remembered/observed/done since last time...actually...they're all criticisms.
I was wondering about the potential monotony of the battles later on since I've now reached the top of the Sorcery skill tree in the early 20s. One thing that DEFINITELY will contribute to it, and that has been annoying for a long time already, is that you can only have 4 spells active at once. You map them to ABXY. But there's no equivalent of Shift+ABXY to get 4 more spells and there really should be. As a sorcerer, you learn your basic fire, ice and lightning spells almost immediately. Then pretty soon after you can learn heal and summon your ally. That's 5. I keep my ally mapped instead of healing since I can make and use practically infinite potions, and since my ally now leeches life for me. But now I have some mixed elemental spell and I'm about to learn a Meteor spell. That's 7 spells for 4 buttons. If you want to change ready spells, you have to go into your skill tree and manually change every time. Why did they do this? I have a simple solution: L3 or R3 brings up 'page 2' of your spells. Or L3 page 2 and R3 page 3 so you can have 12. They have a radial menu with like 8 slots too. They could have doubled that also with an L3 control. It's stupid. So now instead of using more variety with my sorcerer who is already lacking in variety and feeling a little stale, I actually WANT to stick with 4 spells because changing them is so tedious. Fail.
Another fail is the voice synchronization on the lorestones. Kingdoms has really nice voiceovers. The only problem with the voices is on the lorestones, which are these pillars you find scattered throughout the world that contain an interesting story or poem or something to listen to that tells you about some legendary hero or whatever. You click on the lorestone and it just reads to you, except the subtitles and the sound are totally off for all of them. I can't just listen to it because there are a bunch of fantasy names and places so I don't understand the nouns coming from it, and I can't read along because the voice is usually lines ahead of the text by the end. What I want to be able to do is listen/read/continue running at the same time, but if I want to get the lorestone story I have to stop what I'm doing and strain my ear to pick out what Kholgardarion the Munificient, Lord Herald of the Barathian Gogdlund Wastes is up to. I can't understand those words without reading them! A minor gripe, all things considered.
Another annoying thing is the sound of my protection shield's spheres. I have this constant shield on, the one I mentioned last time that distorts my view of landscapes and things. As you level it up, you get these 4 spheres orbiting you that damage enemies. They make a hefty noise when they hit enemies. Unfortunately, they hit everything else too, like walls, barrels, doors, and NPCs, so I CONSTANTLY hear PSSH PSSSH PPSSSH PSSSH PSSH PSHH when I'm running especially in towns or in dungeons through the narrow corridors, which is like half the time. It's gotten really irritating and I wish I could turn their sound off.
And one more fail is the zone levels. Like I said earlier, there are 5 like megazones with about 8 subzones each. I've almost completed 2/5. I got curious today and looked up what level enemies are in these zones and how Kingdoms handles enemy/player level. Turns out there is a min/max enemy level for each little zone, and once you enter the zone at your current level, the enemy levels are locked to match if it's within the zone's range. If you're higher than the zone's range, then enemy levels is at the zone's max and if you're lower then it's at the zone's min. Makes sense. Except that I'm just now at the max for this current zone, and thus the megazone since this is the last zone in the megazone. The problem is that the next megazone is the same level at it's end. But I already out-level the first 6 zones in the next megazone, so it's going to be really easy. Of course it makes me wonder what the hell is the point if there's no challenge. Story lines, okay, but still. What should I do? Should I play just to hear all the quests? Should I make a beeline straight for the end of the megazone to catch up with my level? Why would they design the game such that if you follow the quests and just take the ride, you out-level an ENTIRE ZONE before the midway point, rendering it practically useless? By the time I get to the end of that megazone, I'll out-level its end zones too. So I'll have played the entire megazone at least a few levels higher than its intended. That seems like pretty weak design to me. So if I play 4 megazones rather than 5, the game basically shrunk 20% because they designed it such that I'd out-level an entire megazone. Why?
I made some discoveries about the criminal acts in the game. First of all, the lockpicking skill is pointless. Lockpicking and wards range in difficulty from Very Easy to Very Hard. For lockpicking, very easy barely differs from very hard, and none of them are hard. There's like no point in even making the distinction and if you put skill points in lockpicking, they are wasted. Dispelling is another story and is challenging to pull off, which I appreciate. I understand it's really hard to do these mini-games well.
Secondly, I still don't understand why NPCs sit and watch you pick their locks without saying anything, but then get pissed and call the guards if you take what's in the unlocked container, unless you sit there for a minute in which case they seem to forget about you and you can steal. I have two stories about crimes.
The Mayor
I waltzed into the mayor's home unannounced, and was pleased to note my intrusion was not unwelcome. He and his swarthy guard were in the main room, the mayor rocking in a chair by a fire in the hearth. My Detect Hidden skill alerted me to a hidden room behind the fireplace. After making friendly conversation with the two men, I walked to this hidden door and opened it. Neither man said a word to me about opening this secret room. I spotted a large treasure chest inside and resolved to steal its contents from the mayor. But how?! Surely the mayor and his guard would be watching my every move like a hungry hawk. I walked into a corner of the secret room. The stealth detection indicators appeared over the two men's heads, and I remained crouched until the indicators went blank, signaling high time to get my theft on. I cleaned out that hidden room from floor to ceiling and strolled out, greeted only with a 'hello' from the guard and an unsolicited string of complaints about local ruffians from the mayor. I turned right toward the hallway and walked to a locked door, which also was in plain line of sight to the guard and the mayor. Do you know what I did next? Yes, I removed my trusty stack of 89 lockpicks and picked that Very Hard lock. That door led to the mayor's secret villa! He must have secretly wanted me to explore (and steal from) it because once again neither he nor his guard remarked about my behavior. And I lived rich and happily ever after. The end.
It was soon after this that I became bolder with my thievery since I was officially a millionaire in Amalur. The fine for stealing or pickpocketing being a mere $500-3000 or so, I could afford to be reckless. I began simply stealing quest items in open sight and pickpocketing NPCs from the front rather than the rear. I was still a millionaire, and better yet, the NPCs I'd wronged forgave my transgressions. Apparently the phrase 'criminal record' does not exist in Amalur.
The Armory
This afternoon while exploring the beautiful gnomish city of Adessa, the most fleshed out city in Amalur so far, I stumbled upon the armory. Imagine my surprise when, after traveling for 40 hours within Amalur, I was met with my very first 'Do Not Enter' sign. Finally, a place it was against the rules to enter, the equivalent of a lock that I wasn't allowed to pick! Of course I hastily entered the building, with no more than a 'what are you doing?!' from the guard outside. Inside, however, the peace was short-lived. Three gnome soldiers, Praetorians, kept watch over the armory. They verbally reminded me of my trespassing, but appeared willing to leave me alone had I not stolen from a chest. Well, that woke up every guard in the city. These gnomes must have developed walklie talkies to call for backup because once I dispatched the three initial Praetorians, another pair immediately rushed inside. Once I finished them, another pair, and another, and another, presumably forever. Since I cannot loot and fight at the same time, I had to save my nimble fingers for the small window of time between when one pair of guards died and the next pair attacked me. This way, I was able to loot the entire armory and dispatch 30 or so gnome fighters before fleeing the premises. Outside the armory, things were no better. It seems the entire city had turned against me! Every NPC swung her sword or cowered in fear. The UI constantly kept me updated of my crimes: "Crime Committed: Theft!" "Crime Committed: Assault!" "Crime Committed: Murder!" I thought I may be safe once outside the city walls, that if I left and returned, they would forget my crimes. So I left and traveled quickly to Sun Camp to fence my stolen goods. It turned out all the effort was for primarily weak items of little value and I escaped with no rare or set items. I wondered then, "Why was the armory so off-limits if there was nothing of value inside?" "No matter," I thought, "the most important thing now is to win back the hearts of the people in Adessa." Back I went, and I was still a villain, except this time a brave guard approached me and presented me with 3 options: Go to jail, Pay your fine ($116,000!), or Resist arrest. Although I was a millionaire, spending 10% of my net worth on fines for murdering 30 gnomes, ransacking their armory, and shoving down women and children in the streets as I madly fled did not seem the wisest choice.
So, having never been to jail, I decided to see what it was like. It turns out jail is a simple thing. They stripped me of my possessions, yet overlooked a single lockpick. I was presented with another choice in the form of a quest. I could use my single lockpick to escape the cell and then fight my way out of the dungeon, or I could go to sleep and serve my sentence at the cost of about 5% of my current experience points. I attempted to pick the lock, but my lockpick broke, so I had to sleep off my sentence. And I woke up a free man, missing only that 5% of my current level's experience. I speculate that had I any stolen goods, the guards would have confiscated them, but luckily I had just fenced everything at Sun Camp. I had all my money, all my clothes, and 200% of my street cred, having served hard time. I only regret not getting a prison tattoo during my stay.
So what have I learned from all this? Well, despite the still-nagging questions of "Why don't NPCs across Amalur care what I do except for looting the armory" and "Why are fines so cheap," I have learned that there is really no deterrent for bad behavior. Because there's no real penalty, and because I'm super rich (I AM the 1% yall), the entire system of crime in Kingdoms of Amalur is rendered meaningless.
I'm still having a lot of fun though!
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