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Apr 25th, 2011 at 13:48:05 - Mirror's Edge (PC) |
Alright alright, done with Mirror's Edge. Short game, didn't really like it at first, but definitely grew on me. I played two long sessions, 3 hours or so each. In the first half, I basically got used to the controls, the running, jumping and melee combat. I got used to the flow of running across rooftops, runner vision, and the cutscene story -> mission -> cutscene story -> mission format. Learning can be frustrating, but playing well is satisfying. In the second session, I played well. I beat up enemies with gusto and ran with finesse. I was also more adept at intuiting which direction to run. Also, I feel the level design was actually better in the second half and the missions were more exciting.
So what is Mirror's Edge? Mirror's Edge is dystopian parkour. You play as Faith, a runner, in a police state urban environment. Runners are subversive elements who relay political messages, illegal packages, etc. from place to place in the city, gliding on rooftops, using the urban environment to their mobile advantage. An up-and-coming politician was murdered, Faith's sister framed. Faith has to find out the circumstances of the murder, who really did it, clear her sister's name, put the killer to rest, and ultimately save her sis. The story was pretty cool, and mostly delivered in anime-style cut scenes dividing missions.
Levels involved Faith running from point A to point B, basically, then receiving instructions to get to point C, and so on, via Merc on a radio transmitter. Running is of course the main mechanic of the game and what sets it apart from anything else I've played. Now, it's not totally as original as it sounds because at its heart, it's just a platformer without puzzles. Reminded me very much of the Prince of Persia series. The difference, like I said, is the emphasis on running and 'flow.' There's flow in Prince of Persia and other platformers of course, but Mirror's Edge makes a big deal out of it by giving you 'runner vision,' which highlights important spots in the environment bright red. So as you're running to the edge of a building, you'll see a plank sticking out turn red, or a pipe on the side of the opposite building fade into red, meaning "Hey, go there." At first, I wasn't feeling this supposed flow very much, but as I played, I got a better feel for the controls. Say you have a big box in front of you. If you run right up to it and then jump, Faith will slowly pull herself up. If you come at the box with speed and time your jump, Faith will gracefully scale it. It's all about speed and timing. If you navigate in the best way, Faith's movements are quick and efficient, and it's really graceful. Despite how cool it can feel to get a hot streak of running, the mechanic is super basic and feels a little boring at times, saved though by the excitement of jumping across the tops of buildings at high speed. You basically hold W (forward run) and push space bar (jump/climb) over and over the whole game.
At the beginning of the game, I got frustrated at this one jump, literally right at the beginning, that almost made me quit immediately. There were a couple other relatively minor areas that were frustrating because I couldn't find the precision to make Faith do what I wanted her to do. In all the rest, I ended up working on the controls and getting the move down. But that first one, I think was just ridiculously punishing and a bad spot to locate it in first thing. There were some other sections later on where I was a little stuck as to where to go, and then figured it out, but the path wasn't anything I would have thought to do. Like "Oh, I can climb on this? I haven't had to do that before." There was another part where you have to do this running wall jump, but jump halfway because the space wasn't big enough for an actual wall jump. I couldn't figure it out for the life of me, so I went to a walkthrough, which noted that the tutorial, instructions, controls, nothing tells you this (and a couple other) move is possible, so I guess I was just supposed to magically figure it out. Ah yes, and there was a bug that caused the game to freeze. Luckily I was able to patch it away early.
I have two favorite things about Mirror's Edge. First is the general visual aesthetic. The game is whitewashed, bright, bright whites and pastels. I mentioned the red of runner vision. There is also yellow, blue, lime green, orange, and a couple others. It's really pretty and really cool-looking. The graphics themselves are really nice too. At one point I emerged onto a boat deck and saw the cityscape across the ocean. I went "whoa" out loud and looked for a minute. And since you're in a city scaling buildings, the game is vertical. You go up and down, up and down, instead of the typical side to side. A couple levels were practically nothing but finding your way up 8 or 9 stories of a building, and then maybe back down.
My other favorite thing was a specific sequence where you must jump on a train and avoid fans and support beams as it goes. Then you come to a low-hanging ceiling and have to jump trains, and avoid more stuff. It was just really intense and unexpected. There were other cool sequences too, notably anything involving chasing/being chased.
So, neat game. Loved the style, and the platforming was done pretty well. I'd like some more variety in acrobatics and a longer story because I felt like it was over as I was really getting the hang of it. I think a sequel to this game could be really great. The story totally leaves it open for one.
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Apr 22nd, 2011 at 12:57:24 - Amnesia: The Dark Descent (PC) |
Amnesia is an adventure/horror game. It has no UI besides a tiny little dot cursor that turns into a hand when you can interact with something. It is frightening. I have been thinking about it almost nonstop since I started it yesterday. I cannot play it for more than a couple hours without stopping. Yesterday, I played with headphones and dim lighting. The sound design is excellent. Today, my headphones battery died and I didn't have a replacement, so I cranked the speakers and turned the lights out. Much scarier. Tomorrow I will use headphones + darkness to play.
At the beginning of the game there is a message to the player. It says something like "Don't worry about which button is to shoot. Don't worry about when and where you can save your game. Just immerse yourself in the story and the environment. This game is best played with headphones and the lights out." You might think, ha-ha, such overconfidence! But no. They back it up with atmosphere, writing and gameplay. You shouldn't worry about which button is for shooting because there is no shooting. There are no weapons. You are being followed, perhaps hunted, by some monster/spirit thing that is after a mysterious Orb you took from a tomb. There are probably multiple Orbs. There is also a possibly immortal Baron in whose castle you wake up in, with no memory and no clues to your past other than a note telling your future self to make your way to the Inner Sanctum and kill Alexander, the Baron. His castle is claustrophobic, gothic, creaky, has more dead bodies than most castles, and also sports such amusing locales as Morgue, Storage, Cell Block IV, Guest Room (hey, that's me!), and Cistern.
As you make your way from one area to the next, you are stalked by this...I'll call it a spirit. You are stalked by this spirit. This spirit shambles toward you if it sees you. Once you see (or more likely hear) it, you need to turn off your lantern/get out of the light, and cower in a dark corner until it goes away. Don't look at it either because that raises your Sanity level. Yes, if you spend too much time in the dark, watching where the spirit is, or witnessing disturbing things (standing among corpses, witnessing torture/murder/surgery on live dogs/etc.) you slowly go insane. The screen bends and shimmers, roaches skitter on the ground and up the screen in a very cool effect, and you hear a shrill noise, among other things. To restore sanity, you need to get out of the darkness or make progress in a puzzle. I only went really insane one time so far, and it reduces you to a puddle on the floor, basically. You can crawl, but the room spins and it's very disorienting. You also have health. Health and sanity are represented by a heart and brain in various stages of damage on the inventory screen. You refill health with laudanum.
So back to this spirit. He is terrifying. Since you can't look at him for long, you hide in the corner a la Blair Witch Project and stop breathing in real life as you concentrate on hearing the thing walking and wheezing down the hall, into the room you're hiding in, and back out into the hall. Then you stand up, creep to the door and peer out, cautiously turn on your lantern, and hope he's gone. During these parts, I am glued to the screen. Two parts have been the most nerve-wracking. Number two was in the prison section of the castle. The spirit basically stalks you the entire area as you go from cell to cell trying to figure out the puzzle to exit the area. Every time you leave a room, you've got to make sure the spirit isn't coming around the next corner. I felt like I was in the lair of the minotaur. And by far the scariest experience, surpassing anything in my recent playthrough of Dead Space, was what I'll call the 'can't-touch-the-water' level. In this level, the spirit is in the water. If you touch the water, the spirit sprints to attack you. There are crates and barrels scattered in each room, and you basically need to pick up the smaller crates and move them to give yourself ground to move above the water as you progress toward each door. I think there were only three or four rooms to this. At the end of the first room was an iron door, the crank to which was at the beginning of the room. So turn the crank and high-tail it to beat the door slamming shut. The second room was the same thing except much less grounding and a crank right next to the door. The spirit follows you through all the rooms except, mercifully, the last, but I guarantee you that you will be freaking out when he follows you through that first door. I thought I was going to be safe, but no. See, you have to walk in the water. Can't avoid it. You can distract him by tossing boxes or body parts far away and then running, but those objects aren't usually closeby. So, you've got to say, like when it's raining and you're running from the car to shelter, "I'm going to get wet, but as least wet as I can manage. 3-2-1, run!" And as soon as you hit the water, "splash! splash! splash!" closing in fast behind you as you bolt to the next box. Oh yeah, and you're dead in just five or so hits, so it's serious.
I have been in the office alone playing this after hours and I've been yelling at the computer, obscenities when I get scared and just screaming a little. I yelled a couple times for Dead Space, but I'm going to say that Amnesia induces a greater sense of dread since you can't fight. Dead Space was more...I don't know. Disturbing terror? Bloody surprises? Fiendish nightmares? But its environment was crushing too. There was certainly dread and despair on that derelict vessel. This castle though, feels more claustrophobic. There's more a feeling of mystery and being hunted. I think because there's only one (as far as I know) enemy, plus the haunting presence of Alexander through diaries and the castle itself (which might as well be a character, or the embodiment of Alexander, or representative of his mind, or something). Dead Space had lots of enemies all the time, but they were for the most part more trivial than this one spirit. The game actually reminds me of Silent Hill 3 on PS2, which I specifically remember as terrifying, because that's the only game I've ever played before this where I really couldn't sit and play for long because I'd get so jittery. Just writing about Amnesia is making me feel nervous. Therefore...I shall stop.
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Apr 20th, 2011 at 08:21:39 - Just Cause 2 (PC) |
I finished Just Cause 2. My first thought upon completion: So short lah! I clocked just under 22 hours. Not short by itself, but considering Panau is freaking humongous, I thought there would be a lot more than 22 hours required to beat the game. There IS a lot more to do. I finished at 30.80%, so there's in fact roughly 2/3 of the non-requisite game to play. That's like 50 more hours, whoa. 50 more hours of aimless driving around blowing shit up, which would be the good part, and hunting pickups, which would be the bad part. Yes, there are 300 faction pickups alone. I think I got about 50. There are also the cash and weapon upgrade pickups. I'm not sure what % of those I got. I'm guessing no more than 30.80%. To get 100% in the game, basically I would have to start at a corner and methodically move from location of interest to location of interest, blowing up each piece of infrastructure and collecting each pickup, until I was done. It kind of sounds fun, but it'll get tedious way before 100%. But back to my point about it being a short game. There are only 7 story missions. Plenty of non-essential missions, but 7 story ones! They really could have put more in. The story itself was fun enough. In the end you find out it's just an America-backed regime change for a massive oil field, which Rico heroically (for the sake of humanity) nukes into oblivion with Baby Panay strapped to the rocket. It was a fun and funny game with a lot of pretty explosions and possibly the best graphics I've ever scene, landscapes and terrain at least. I'm very glad I chose to buy it and eventually play it.
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Apr 13th, 2011 at 08:05:00 - World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (PC) |
Just a bit of fun writing and an update about WoW...
Coming out of my anti-WoW funk of the last couple months, I've picked up raiding again with GW and am trying to get back into simple weekly arena matches for points with P and some other guildies. Our fury/disc combo is proving quite the beast. We stayed up until 3am before reset the other night getting our 5 wins. We went 4-0, then got this shaman/dk team that beat us twice in a row. Then our 5th win took 42 minutes. 42 minutes! It was against either ret/prot pally or warrior/prot pally. I can't remember because I killed the dps half in about 30 seconds. Then this prot paladin ran the two of us around for the other 41.5 minutes of the match until, thank god, we finally killed him. When the score screen came up, he and I had done some ludicrous amount of damage and P had done mega-healing. 42 minutes! I think my previous record was half that. I was going to be so pissed if we lost. I'm glad we stuck it out, and P made the nice call to stay on the bottom of Blade's Edge. Every time we went up onto the bridge, the paladin just beat on P. When we'd get him down below, P had more space to run, I had more space to stun, intercept, intervene, etc. The downside is the paladin had a bunch of pillars to LoS behind. He kept bubbling to bandage for some reason, instead of bubbling to heal. Anyway, it was insane. I'm glad for this 4.1 prot/ret word of glory nerf so that this prot paladin can no longer run around self-healing for 20k all the time.
So, arena is still fun. TB is still old and pretty boring, and I just do it occasionally for the best honor return, and have gotten back into doing BH, in which Fal won PvP gloves last week, my first BH drop in Cata. I haven't touched BGs in a while, and still haven't gotten around to doing a rated BG, although Nacht's resilience is good enough for the minimum requirement of the pugs I sometimes see, about 3k.
I have been intermittently leveling the hunter with Z, and we did some major BGing last time, which was fun! It's crazy leveling up new characters since with heirlooms and guild perks, I go 45% faster than normal. 45%! I do like 1/6 the quests in a zone, a couple BGs, a dungeon, and I'm leveled out into the next zone. I still haven't checked out the goblin or worgen yet, and I still haven't played through the new gnome and troll starting zones. I don't imagine it'll be too crazy new and exciting, but I almost feel obligated to experience it just because...it's an odd feeling. That, and I now have a character of every class over level 30, so I'm not going to seriously level any of the new races. I'd consider race changing if I had multiples at 85, but am not planning on leveling any more to 85 except this current hunter, which is a long-term project, and maybe a druid. Even then, I don't plan on playing the hunter once I hit 85. It's just a fun-to-level-with-a-friend character. Maybe when we hit 80, I'll switch to a druid and go 80-85 with a druid instead. Long-term plans!
Raiding, the good stuff. In my time off, the guild recruited a handful of new people, including several tank/healers and a couple dps, mostly to replace our two (main) tanks that gquit in the last couple months. Today we ran with two new paladin tanks. One of them seems more experienced than the other, but the less experienced one is eager to learn and seems nicer to raid with. Neither of them heal, which is good for me since my spot isn't compromised. We do have a new druid healer, who is pretty good and who I like. When I was just coming back 1-2 weeks ago, we would have 4-5 healers on. I have thus far avoiding having to dps too since I never even had a ret spec and just had unenchanted gear, some of which was pvp (is pvp!). I don't mind dpsing, but I haven't dpsed in cata yet. I've been holy about since the day I hit 85 except for some early PvP, so I'm not real confident about it and would only like to try on early bosses. So one of our two druid healers ends up dpsing since they each have decent dps sets. And it's good too since one is boomkin and the other kitty, so we have ranged and melee on call. I did enchant all my ret stuff today though, as well as create a ret spec, which I promptly changed back to pvp holy (but I know what one looks like now!) so that if I must play ret, I can wing it.
Healing is going phenomenally. I love holy paladins in cata. I am the same holy paladin with a couple extra aoe spells and a new instant spell. No longer am I 'the tank heals' keeping up two tanks with beacon, but I am more versatile. Healing assignments are less important in cata than wrath. Everyone just kind of heals whoever. That, and our three healers have been healing together for over a year, so we've become quite the unit. The raid bosses themselves are a lot of fun, with a lot of hectic moments and last-second kills. There's a lot to coordinate too. We were in a slump for some time, but last week we got two new bosses down. We're now 8/12, and even though we could be doing better, we are proud of ourselves. Last week we downed Chimeron and Conclave of Wind for the first times (1-shot Conclave!). The Chimeron kill was preceded one week earlier by a 1.5-hour-long wipefest wherein us healers were trying to learn the fight. Chimeron is totally a healer fight. You've got to keep everyone above 10k hp at all times because he spits slime on the raid that reduces hp to 1. If you're over 10k, the slime can't bring you below 1 due to this little robot running around the room that gives you a buff. If you get hit with the slime below 10k hp, then you die. Healing anyone after they're already over 10k is a massive waste of mana, except the off-tank, who takes the double attacks. So, it took us all a while to get the hang of how to coordinate our healing for the fight, but once we got it, we got it. When he gets to 20 or 25% hp, he enrages and enters a long survival/kite phase. You can't really kite him because he's fast, but everyone needs to pop survival cds and dps him down before he kills you one by one. In our kill, he was at about 400,000 with our two rogues left. They dpsd him down to about 150k when rogue A got hit twice and killed. We're all yelling in vent, cheering and going 'evasion! pop evasion! rogue tank!' The rogue gets Chimeron down to about 30k and gets hit down to 1hp! We're freaking out in Vent. The rogue's poisons are ticking away and he's still attacking. Rogue B pulled off a photo finish and took Chimeron to 0. It was incredible and I wish the whole thing had been recorded. I might have the Vent, but not the Fraps. We had a similar thing with Conclave, where we beat the encounter with 2 seconds left.
Monday we had an extra optional raid night to learn Nefarian, which started going pretty well after half an hour, at which point my internet failed us and we had to call raid because I couldn't stay online. I felt terrible and was pretty irritated because I wanted us all to learn the fight, and it was wholly my internet's fault that we had to stop. We'll get back in there though. I had the special job in phase one of healing with RF up to aggro the adds. We got the CC down. Priests were fearing them, mages frost novaing them in place. It was pretty nice by the time I started dcing. We had issues with one of those new tanks learning to turn onyxia, but he was getting it by the end. We pulled in the other new tank and he did it better from the start. I think we'll be able to kill him this week. Today we went into BoT and did Halfus (3rd or so attempt), Valiona & Theralion (1-shot, barely), and then did Conclave (45 minutes' worth, the first attempt of which we probably had them but I accidentally jumped off the ledge and caused a wipe). Tomorrow we go clear BWD, hopefully up to and including Nefarian. Friday we learn and kill Ascendant Council and work on Al'Akir. So, best case scenario probably involves a Nefarian and Ascendant Council kill this week. Worst case scenario is endless wiping on early bosses and never even seeing new ones (yuck). Assuming good attendance from good regulars, I'm leaning toward the scenario A. I think our number 1 problem is attendance. We're a casual guild, but we're a bunch of better-than-casual players, i.e., most of us were hardcore raiders at some point. So we all know we can do better, and we all want to, but we all have fun first hanging out, which is what I love about these people. So we don't mandate that people be on all the time, but that is something that definitely affects raid performance and progression. I'm trying to make it a point to be on our 3 days a week from now on whenever I can because I really want to see us succeed. Since I can pretty much work whenever I want, I feel this is a good opportunity to commit to something feasible and beneficial for me personally and for all of us as a group. I am excited for us. Here's to 10/12 this week!
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