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Dec 4th, 2010 at 02:17:54 - Batman: Arkham Asylum (PC) |
What a great game! All I knew before playing was that it got high review scores across the board, the fighting was supposed to be fun, and there was a detective mode where you could be stealthy. I played a demo that Daniel had on Xbox for about 10 minutes this summer, so when Steam had it on sale for $10, I pounced.
First of all, this is the best looking game I've ever played, hands down, especially the views of Arkham from up high. The graphics are mind-blowing and it's a year old. The style is great too, total Dark Knight stuff. The whole game's presentation is dark. It's very much the Batman of the last two movies and the first Tim Burton one that I watched about 50 times when I was a kid. Joker is the main bad guy in this one, and he's straight up sadistic. I found out watching the credits he was voiced by Mark Hamill. Joker gets himself arrested to hatch a plan to take over Arkham Asylum. He breaks out all the inmates and it's really great listening to him on the closed circuit prison TV taunting both Batman and his henchmen. Generally, Batman walks into a room with a handful of inmates and you've got to pick them all off. Joker is omniscient in the prison, watching everything. He'll say, after you kill an inmate, "Is someone missing?! Oh, I'm losing count," to which the other inmates respond by yelling at each other, finding the dead guy and getting terrified of being in the same room as the Batman. Joker's taunts are dynamic too. Say there are four inmates, he might say "Come on! There are four of you and only one of him!" Then you kill another one and he'll say, "You guys are supposed to be the criminals and murderers!" Get one left and he might say like "It looks like you're all alone with the bat! Hahaha! My money's on the bat!" And the inmates go from acting ballsy in groups to being scared of their shadow as their numbers dwindle. They'll slowly walk turning around every 5 seconds and talking to themselves. It's really neat to watch.
The other omniscient character is the Riddler, and I have no idea where he is or how he can talk to you. He's in charge of all the "extras" in the game. You can find hidden riddler clues, interview tapes featuring various of the famous inmates, these weird history of Arkham Island tablets with some old guy that I never figured out the point, and you can solve riddles. The Riddler will also taunt you, more at the beginning, but less as you find more of his secrets. Then he'll start claiming that you're cheating, you must be cheating, how did you find that one, and you must be looking on the internet. He's pretty amusing and I found it fun to cause him distress by completing his challenges. His challenges unlock bonuses like character art and biographies, which were cool to flesh out the world. Most of the extras required no real thought, just some looking around, and you're able to find more as you acquire new abilities. So most of them weren't about figuring much out, but recognizing a weak wall or a Riddler clue that you can either get to now or have to wait until you get a new gadget. The kind I did like though were these where you had to go into Detective mode (highlights clues and things you can interact with) to find big Riddler question marks, which were always split somewhere, so you might see the dot in one place and the top part of the ? in another, and you've got to find a vantage point to line them up. Those were the most challenging.
The fighting was supposed to be a big deal, and I think it's very fluid. Stringing together combos is very satisfying. There's a context sensitive counterattack move that often chains punches and kicks together. You can also throw enemies, use gadgets like your batarang, and stomp them when they're down. The game ends up pitting you against 8 or so enemies at a time, most of which are basic inmates with fists or steel pipes. Sometimes inmates will have a gun or knives or a cattle prod and those can be deadly if you don't play it right. I'm not a huge fan of these more free-form fighting systems. I really like the strategy turn-based stuff or shooters better than the action-y punching and kicking, but it was fun, and I got used to it. I never got past like an 18-point combo, which I feel like is low since there are achievements for all the way up to 40. General progression through a room can be more or less stealthy. I tended to prefer going stealth mode, zipping from gargoyles up high, dropping on enemies, stringing them up, doing stealth kills. The game does a great job making you feel like the stalking predator that Batman is. The scared inmates really help with this.
Boss battles tended to be both unique and easy. Since it's Batman, you never actually kill the villains, which I realized most of the way through and liked, and they tried to make the battles fun and interesting, but they all used the same mechanics over and over, that is, double-tapping to dive side to side to avoid things and fighting a ton of inmates while trying to kill the boss. The contexts were cool, but the actual doing of the fights were repetitive on the whole. My favorite sequences were definitely the Scarecrow ones. When Batman starts coughing, you know Scarecrow is near and you're about to be pulled into a nightmare with a 10-story tall Scarecrow trying to find you and break your mind. You have to run platformer-style through the levels avoiding his gaze and holding onto your sanity. Scarecrow's demise is so good too. It directly precedes my second-favorite boss fight.
One of my favorite things about this game was the dynamic environments and characters. The Asylum feels alive and it changes over the course of the night. First, over the course of the game, Batman's cape and suit get progressively more torn and ripped, complete with a cut on his face by the end. He might have even been growing stubble. As Joker's plan unfolds and he gets a tighter and tighter grip on the Asylum, you see his 'renovations' to it, including spray paint tags proclaiming "Joker Asylum," his giant visage that gets constructed over time at the entrance to the visitor's center, presents he leaves for you containing those chattering teeth of his, and just general destruction and dead guards who used to be alive. It's very neat. Then the huge one is when you have to stop Poison Ivy from taking over the island with her mutated plants and her plants literally destroy the place and change the landscape drastically. Incredibly cool.
Batman gets an easy recommendation from me. The last game I played that was anything like it was Bioshock, which was also amazing, and it's good to have found another type of action/stealth/whatever mash-up of genre.
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Nov 24th, 2010 at 08:39:56 - World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (PC) |
So, the Shattering happened in WoW the other day. I just logged on. Oh my. The world is different. Azeroth that has been Azeroth for 6 years is revamped. I see so many, uncountable really, changes. There are flight paths everywhere, Stormwind's towers are destroyed, the auction house moved closer to the bank, bigger bank, carpets in the bank, new bricks in the city, or new lighting effects that make them look new, a Hero's call board (whatever that is), guards flying over the city on gryphons, the canals flooded parts of the city, the daily fishing quest that is now in SW instead of Dalaran awards +fishing skill, there are new NPCs in various places, new banners outside the districts, the Park has been utterly destroyed and is now a ruin of burning ember and water flowing off a cliff from the canals, there's a new construction area where shipbuilders are working in the Docks, a giant barred mystery gate in the Docks, all kinds of other laborers working on what look like siege weapons, a big lake in the city, a massive cemetery, including the grave of the queen, an outdoor chapel area by the Cathedral, a new area with a pond, a farm, and the new druid trainer location where half of the Dwarven District used to be, a second bank in the Dwarven District, just a ton of new skins and graphical enhancements to about everything, a vastly different Stormwind castle with an impressive new entryway and statue of the King of Stormwind, a revamped battlemaster's room, a wing of the castle is totally gone, found an archaeology trainer and some portal to a place called Tol Barad...
And this is just one pass at one city in this entire world. I am stunned at the amount of detail and attention put into the Shattering. Everything looks different. Everything. I won't see all the changes for a long long time. I've spent so many days, weeks, months being in this world and I can't believe it's just all of a sudden different. It's really hard to wrap your head around, like if the city you live in or your campus just looked drastically different one day, maybe if it was the site of some disaster or a Christmas decoration makeover. Yeah. Just wow. There are new gnome and troll starting areas that I will definitely play through with one of the new race/class combos, and then when Cataclysm actually launches I'll play through the Worgen and Goblin starting zones, and take one to 85 eventually, a hunter or warlock. Incredible.
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Nov 21st, 2010 at 01:20:13 - Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (PC) |
After just a few days not playing, I dove straight back in after Far Cry 2 turned out to be a bad idea for me. I had a couple things I wanted to do on my Lore-Master. One was try a dungeon, which I didn't do yet because I'm kind of hesitant, not quite sure what it will be like, and I really want to enjoy it. I'll get on it soon. The second thing was level up my professions, one of which was a quest into the North Downs. I haven't bought that quest pack (595 or something Turbine points), but I did buy the Lone Lands one, on sale for 50 points, which I had on my character. Turns out you can travel freely through the zone even if you don't pay for it, and you can see the quests and interact with NPCs, but you just can't take their quests. Main story and profession quests are exempt, so I got my Master Journeyman Tailor quest, which I'll bother doing later. I just wanted to see if I could go get it. The monsters get significantly stronger halfway across the zone, jumping from the low-20s to the upper-20s.
I figured I'd go on and make another character since I want to try more classes and play through the other racial starting zones. I went on and did a Hobbit Minstrel, and I really like it, better than the lore-master at the moment because he can do more. The LM just does lots of debuffs, which I'm sure is totally useful for group play, but the M uses songs, ballads, and anthems as skills. Skills are on tiers, so you have to play like a tier 1 song before you can play a tier 2 song, then a tier 2 song before a tier 3 song, etc. It's pretty neat. So minstrels concentrate on buffing and healing instead of debuffing and damage. All the buffs though do damage, but there are no cast times, so you're constantly using an ability, whereas the lore-master had some slow casts that enemies easily prevented from being efficient. I feel like the minstrel definitely has better survivability. Even though the LM can stun and daze enemies to control many at a time, the minstrel has a fear to occupy one, can pretty much insta-kill another, and then since almost all abilities are instant ranged attacked, the minstrel is quite the kiter, especially with this 5% run speed pocket item I have. I was wary at first of making two ranged classes, but they play very differently. I narrowed down my third and final character to either an elven ranger or an elven or dwarven champion. I will probably go with the champion, who is your typical destroy-everything warrior because I always like playing dual-wielding melee classes, and I've already got 2 ranged ones. Plus, there's this elusive set of titles you get for reaching level 5/10/15/20 without dying and I think the heavy-armor pure damage champion would be good for that. I think my LM died at level 7 and the minstrel made it to 9. The LM was my fault for attempting a really difficult signature enemy and the minstrel was just dumb. I got killed by a regular bear like one level higher than me, which I could have prevented by healing myself but I just wasn't thinking. And that's the ONLY time the minstrel has died so far up to 15 on accident. The other couple deaths have been on purpose. Here's to 20 without dying!
So the minstrel hobbit, and presumably now all the races, have the same beginning story. They get tossed in a brigand's jail cell because they get captured in various ways, and they all escape with the help of Strider to rescue a Baggins who the enemy thought was Frodo with the Ring. Then you do the same set of tutorial quests to level 6 or 7 to try to save Archet, and then defend its destruction. After Archet, instead of staying in the burned out Archet like Men, you go back to the Shire, so I figure elves and dwarves go back to their respective places too and then have unique content through the introduction from 6 or 7 through about 15. Everyone winds up going through Bree between 10-15, and then from there can finish up Bree-land quests, Southern Downs, and then has to choose North Downs or Lone Lands to go from low-20s to past 30.
The Shire is a ton of fetch and errand quests, which like I said before, is forgivable because it makes sense. Hobbits aren't going to go around killing monsters in the Shire. It's the Shire. There are two huge quest chains, one where you become a mail runner and run packages literally all over the zone from town to town, and another where you deliver this woman's pies, then discover the berries in them are all bad, and then go and retrieve pies from every town and bring them back to her. It's a LOT of running. There are at least 10 little hobbit towns and I ran back and forth and back and forth between them all doing quests. It feels very much like what I imagine the Shire would be like. The hobbit NPCs are funny too. Some bicker, they're nosey and hungry, they like fireworks and food. One quest I did a few things to appease this ghost in a woman's library, and after nothing worked, she finally asked me to brave up and go inside, wherein you discover a squirrel behind the bookshelf. It was cute. I'm almost done with the zone, but before I play next, which will be an epic level 15-20+ session, I'm going to use my 24-hour horse gift because timing it on those last 5 levels before I can legitimately quest for a horse is a good point.
What else have I learned about this game? In looking back over the previous couple LOTRO entries, the game is still beautiful. I've taken about 40 screen shots, mostly of landscapes, and then of famous characters. At the beginning of the hobbit story, you actually encounter Frodo, Sam, and Perrin leaving the Shire! Then Frodo gets a bad feeling and they run off. Seconds later a Black Rider comes demanding to know where Baggins is, but he lied to you about his name, so you don't actually know it was him, and the Rider goes away. Then you get jumped on by bandits. Bad day, huh? The Black Riders look awesome and scary and like death incarnate, and the game does this cool being-watched-by-The-Eye perspective when you're afraid and full of dread and gloom in the presence of evil. It's intense to experience.
The sound is still good, but some of the Shire music is grating. There are some high flute notes that I don't like. I'll actually be glad to get away from that flute. I learned that you can MAKE music in the game, which is part of why I chose a minstrel. You can purchase instruments and get proficient with them, and actually write music in the game, and if you Google LOTRO music, it's basically got tab for you to play a lot of songs in-game. Seems pretty cool, and I'd like to try it out once I get some more bag space, which unfortunately by the way, is becoming an issue. LOTRO has lots of things I want to hold onto that take up space, especially crafting materials. This second character is a Tinker, which encompasses Jeweler, Prospector, and Cook. My other character is a...I don't remember, but...Oh yeah, Explorer, which is Tailor, Woodsman, and Prospector. I didn't really mean to have two prospectors, but it makes being a Jeweler easier since I can just mail over minerals and gems from the lore-master. I realize that professions really complement one another in this game. I guess it's like WoW's gathering/crafting dichotomy. In WoW, you'd be silly to have Jewelcrafting without Mining. Same thing here with Jeweler and Prospector. So between my two characters, I've also got Woodsman, which goes with Tailoring because Woodsman lets you make Tailor materials from leather. With Woodsman, you can also chop wood, but that's for like Woodworking or something, which I don't have anyway, so I'm not chopping anymore wood. That's one less type of node to stop and gather at when I'd rather be doing something else. Then Cooking I don't have a single point in yet. I'm pretty sure I need a Farmer to utilize cooking. I can use some fish from the fishing hobby, but I need other food too. So that third character I make, I need something with Farming, something else that works with metal, like a Weaponsmith, which would be cool for a Champion, and something else. I think there was a Farmer/Weaponsmith/Scholar path. Scholars are beneficial for everyone, and as far as I can tell, you just loot Scholar materials off humanoid bodies and find them in ruins. So that should make for 3 useful profession types on the 3 characters.
I did join a guild (Kinship) yesterday, so I finally get to see how that works. It seems pretty normal like a basic setup in any other MMO, except the guild has a HOUSE with vendors that give guild discounts! I haven't gone there yet, but I bought the reagents to fast travel there. I'm curious to see it. The guild seems really big, but I can't tell a number. At any time there seems to be around 20 people online, and lots of high level characters doing dungeons. I'll stick in it and get a feel for how the game allows guilds to be social and get things done together. Guilds have ranks (1-10), and this one is 10, which just means it's been around a long time and it has all guild benefits, like a house. I've pretty much figured out the looking for fellowship interface, but no one has talked to me through it and I'm too scared to start my own group for the low-20s dungeon since I don't know what I'm doing there. Oh, I also found out about trophies. You can kill rare monsters or fish rare fish, or do various other fancy things and go to a taxidermist to have them mount it on a plaque to put in your house. There are also home supply vendors and clothing vendors, where you can customize your house or wardrobe, all very cool. LOTRO lets you have 3 outfits: one is your fighting gear, and two cosmetic ones. The cosmetic ones don't even have to be in your bags to show off. It's very cool. There's also reputation with various factions, and I bought my first rep item today, a mail satchel, from some hobbit faction in Michel Delving. I can carry the satchel around. I just bought it because I could, but seems purely cosmetic.
That's LOTRO so far. Plan is to play the minstrel using the temporary horse until it goes away, and then set it aside until I have a good month to play it a lot, which will probably be at least a few months from now since Cataclysm is right around the corner and I'll be home for a month not playing anything.
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Nov 19th, 2010 at 22:26:21 - Far Cry 2 (PC) |
I had such high hopes for this game because the first Far Cry was amazing, but this one has nothing to do with the first one, and suffers a lot of game-stopping problems according to me. I installed it and started it up just fine, and the first 10 minutes of the game are breathtaking as you take a taxi ride through an African countryside that is just beautiful to look at as the driver tells you about the current war going on in the country. As soon as I got out of the taxi, whoa, nausea alert! I never feels nauseous playing games, never ever, so my super deductive abilities tell me something is going on with the game. First, the mouse has a lag, like move the mouse and it takes half a second for the cursor to catch up to the movement. It makes aiming, running, looking around, feel sluggish like your character might be drunk or something. It gets 5 times worse in menus so it's difficult to click on an option. This got dizzying real fast. I looked up the mouse issue first, found that a lot of people were having it and people said it felt like console shooter aiming, which I realize it does. Computer games are supposed to be totally smooth and responsive. I updated the drivers for my mouse, which didn't do anything. Other people suggested tweaking various graphics options, including using DirectX 9 instead of 10 (lame!). I tried all this and nothing really worked. Changing DirectX helped a little, but I still felt sick playing. Some people had a fix to go into some file and change some mouse sensitivity values, so I did that and it also helped a little, but still there is lag. So then I gave up and started looking for players getting dizzy playing and, surprise surprise, found a lot of people having problems, and they appear to stem from the fact that the FOV is off, which was supposedly fixed in a patch that I downloaded, but I swear it's not. I think they fixed a widescreen issue where the game was cutting off the top and bottom of the screen, but they didn't fix the thing where, when you're on a console, you're sitting farther from the screen so your focus is going to be at a different angle than sitting closer at a computer. So this is what was causing people to feel bad.
Anyway, no real fixes for everything combined. I can get the mouse a little better and can turn off widescreen altogether, but I can tell it's still not right, and that's too bad. The game itself seems like it could be really fun, but already I found a super annoying thing that I know will get to me. The enemies respawn really fast. If you completely destroy a guard post to get to a quest objective, do the objective, and come back, the whole guard post will be rebuilt and repopulated. It's stupid. So you can't go anywhere without constantly being shot at, having your vehicle blown up, having to get out and fight a few soldiers. This wouldn't be so bad but the mouse thing is still sluggish and so more I have to try and aim, the more sick I feel! And if you load a saved game, hey guess what, all the enemies are respawned! Did you save the game with almost no health at a guard post? Well have fun loading it back and dying immediately because the guard post is respawned. There's also a stupid concept implemented, safe houses. Safe houses are places you can save the game. Except you can quicksave the game anywhere. So why do you need safe houses to function as save spots? Oh right, you don't! How pointless. You can also stock up on weapons there, but I find weapons of all enemies so I haven't felt the need to go get specific weapons.
Like I said, despite the respawning enemies and a couple other things, and imagining there are no nausea issues due to bad console porting, there are some cool things. The game feels like GTA: Africa. The map is huge and there are a lot of points of interest, like communications towers, private residences, military headquarters, and so on. The only problem with that is literally everyone wants to kill you. Everyone hates your character, and I for one have no idea why since I just arrived in the country. How does everyone know me? Why does everyone want to kill me? I feel this isn't part of the story and certainly doesn't make sense. Maybe later in the game after I've gained some notoriety it will make more sense. So you basically take jeeps, trucks and hatchbacks and drive through the jungle from objective to objective, stopping where you please to look and wander and kill soldiers. Or, you are looking for diamonds, the game's currency. You have this cool PDA map that alerts you when you're near a diamond. You follow the tracker and voila, cash to buy guns and gun upgrades. There are over 200 diamond caches in the game, and I found about 20, so yeah, there's a lot of space. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of time will be spent driving from point A to point B, and again, if enemies didn't respawn at guard posts along the roads every few minutes, this would be more fun, because I enjoy driving through the forest, just not being shot at all the time and being shot at at guard posts that I obliterated a couple minutes ago. At least make it more realistic and have them respawn once per day or something.
There's also a buddy system, where you encounter other mercenaries such as yourself who give quests, offer alternative ways to complete story missions, and help you out in need. One time I was (almost) killed and a buddy just came out of nowhere and dragged me to safety, then helped me clear out someone's private residence. It was pretty cool. Apparently you get reputation with buddies and factions throughout the game maybe the more of their missions you do or the more you interact with them.
What else...Yeah, that's about it. This one's going back on eBay and I'll find something less painful to play. LOTRO is on hiatus because I don't have a mount, I don't want to buy one, and I want to start an alt, but they're releasing a giant patch that's updating the Elf and Dwarf starting zones in a week, so I'll wait for that and then make probably an Elf Champion. Should be fun. Maybe I'll go try the Left 4 Dead single player. Sounds like a good idea.
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