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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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Apr 4th, 2011 at 11:13:07 - Just Cause 2 (PC) |
Last entry for a while since I'm getting back to work and found a game that will take a long, long time. So many little short ones in a row the last week or so. I never played the first Just Cause. It didn't appeal to me enough when it came out. Just Cause 2 didn't either, until it went on sale on Steam and I started reading reviews. What I remember reading is that the territory is massive, there are over-the-top explosions a-plenty, it doesn't take itself too seriously, you can fly, drive, parachute, base jump your way all over the fictional country, and there is a multi-purpose grappling gun for your creativity to put to work. All points true. JC2 is funnnnnn. The first time I played a few days ago, I spent like 2 or 3 hours just on the first mission, which was to ride shotgun escorting an NPC. It was a great introduction to the mechanics of crawling around a vehicle, jumping between and on top of vehicles, hijacking vehicles, blowing them up, and using the grappling hook. More on that later. But I died who-knows-how-many times, probably 20 or 30. I didn't care though. Funnnn.
My favorite thing? Explosions. The game looks incredible. Explosions are massive, ground-shaking balls of fire and steel. I played about 4 hours tonight, and spent at least half that time running wild through a port town, and my favorite part of the night was when I realized I could plant multiple remote detonation charges at once, and detonate them at the same time. I brought down 4 giant smoke stacks at once, and then two enormous cranes at once. So much destruction! I like running away, and detonating the charges as I look back over my shoulder. It's very action-movie-like. As are the speed challenges, solo races against the clock in either a plane or a car so far (helicopter and boat later too I bet). The game really is just a giant playground.
Why was I destroying smoke stacks? Well, first of all, the fictional Southeast Asian country of Panau is huge by video game world standards. There's been a political assassination and change of power. The old dictator was killed by his son, who now rules the island nation. Scattered around the map (hundreds of them, literally) are civilian towns, cities, and various military bases and communications arrays. You (Rico) are sent into the country to topple the new dictator. One way of doing that is to destroy infrastructure, which means blowing shit up. When you blow shit up, you get 'chaos' points. Earn chaos points to unlock story missions, faction missions (3 non-government factions are vying for territory and a bid at power), stronghold missions (which actually expand whatever faction's territory), and items from the black market (you can have weapons and vehicles airdropped to you for cash, and can insta-travel to anywhere you've previously been using the black market contact). You'll also get chaos points for completing missions and completing locations. Each point of interest in the country can be 'completed,' which means you've blown up all the government stuff (propaganda wagons, dictator statues, building equipment, weaponry, fuel tanks, power generators, gas stations, etc.) and found all the upgrades (weapon and armor upgrades to upgrade weapons and health).
All the locations I'd previously discovered were tiny compared to this port city. Each thing I found or blew up gave me 1-2% of the total. Huuuuge city! I'm stuck at 93%, but am pretty amazed I got that far. I don't go too far out of my way to explore all the towns and other locations, usually just ones that are on the way to a mission, but I couldn't resist this one once I saw how big it was. And yes, I spent somewhere between 2-3 hours blowing shit up, finding upgrades, assassinating generals, doing race missions, and running from government military. It was awesome.
JC2 is like GTA and all those in that causing mayhem doesn't go unnoticed. Since this is a military dictatorship, there are soldiers everywhere. They don't mess with you until you destroy something, start running over civilians, drive like a maniac, steal one of their vehicles, go into forbidden territory, the usual stuff. It's called 'heat' and works just like in GTA games I've played. More destruction = more heat = more/tougher military. I can get to level 3 right now, and they send out a chopper, which is easy enough to hide from given the verticality of the game. Evade for long enough, and your pursuers think they lost you and then you're free to roam again. Sometimes though the enemies are annoying and, even though I know they can't see me (like when I'm up inside a building), they'll start to lose interest and then one of them will yell like he sees me, and I'll get heat all over again. The solution is to move somewhere else, but really they shouldn't see me sometimes and they do. Nothing else in the game is unfair or stupid so far, which is good.
Getting around is fast and fun. I mentioned the grappling hook. Imagine how Spiderman leaps from building to building. It's just like that. You can grapple to about any surface anytime and zip to it. You've also got an instantly and repeatably deployable parachute. I figured this trick out today, if you grapple the ground ahead of you, deploy the chute, and then grapple the ground again, you'll swing past that grapple point on your chute, and repeat, for really fast travel. You can do this around city buildings and anywhere else too. I've gotten alright at doing it, and it's really fun. Grappling up buildings can be a pain when there are ledges. It can be hard to get over them. It can also be annoying trying to grapple around because things get in your way, like ledges and poles. Sometimes too the targeting can be difficult if there are multiple things and spots to grapple right next to each other. Just got to learn to be more precise.
Grappling isn't just for moving though! Grappling is for causing destruction. You can grapple enemies and yank them toward you. Grapple --> yank --> shoot is a good combination. So is grapple --> over the edge of a building. You can also grapple two things to one another, and this is where it gets really fun. So far I've come up with some neat ones.
Grapple:
-an enemy to a ceiling to string them up like a pinata.
-an exploding barrel above an enemy to the enemy so the barrel falls and explodes on their head.
-an chemical tank to an enemy, shoot the tank, watch it rocket away, dragging the enemy through the air with it before it explodes.
-an enemy to a moving vehicle.
-a moving vehicle to a moving vehicle, then blow out the tires of one, watch it veer and wreck, yanking the second one with it to a fiery death.
-a vehicle to a statue to pull it down!
-an enemy to an enemy, tossing them at one another.
-an enemy to a wall over a ledge and watch them fly through the air to smack into the side of another building.
-an enemy to a plane/helicopter
The list goes on. It is ridiculous how much fun it is to play around with. I want to try grappling like a car to a plane, or a person to a boat.
Panau is an interesting place for me, since it's in Southeast Asia and I'm in Southeast Asia. I never would have known it a couple years ago, but I can pick out basically where this is supposed to be based on the language(s) and the voice acting. There is a lot of Malay in the game, and some of the writing looks Thai. The voice acting sounds a mix of Minglish, Singlish, Indonesian/Indian/Chinese English. It's pretty cool, if a bit exaggerated. It sounds kinda like they got some real talent from here and then some non-locals trying to do some. So I'd say that Panau is most closely Malaysia or Indonesia. Really neat to see aspects of this part of the world more accurately represented than not, and featured in a highly successful game.
JC2 reminds me of GTA. That's my only real point of comparison, and I know it's quite different too. I have GTA 4, but I kind of don't think it could be better than this. It doesn't have a grappling gun. It also reminds me of what Far Cry 2 was supposed to be like, but I couldn't play FC2 because I couldn't fix the mouse lag and it was making me feel ill. Games seem to be getting massive though. FC2 was huge. GTA is always huge. The new Batman game, Arkham City is supposed to be something like this. I recently read the devs said there will be 5 times more space than Arkham Asylum. Wow. AA wasn't huge by any means, but 5 times what it was will be large. And then JC2, massive. And I'm sure there are plenty more I've never played with giant worlds to explore. Oblivion. Next Elder Scrolls game. Not to mention any MMO out there.
No more entries for a while. They flooded in this week. Will likely be playing this a long time to come. Good times.
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