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Dec 12th, 2010 at 03:41:10 - World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (PC) |
Cataclysm is awesome. I had planned on not buying it until after winter break, but I ended up caught up in the fervor of release, and I was there when the servers all flipped. Patrick and I left work early to see it. One of James' employees took a WEEK of hard-earned vacation time for release. I'm sure there are far crazier stories.
It's hard to describe the mood of a virtual world on the eve of such an important event like an expansion release. Imagine a thousand players in several capital cities, all together, all are as excited as can be, talking, yelling, some just in game chat, some on VoIP with their friends and guilds, many having parties at their houses, riding elephants and dragons and motorcycles and flying carpets through the virtual cities, and all waiting, waiting for the server message that Cataclysm is now live. I was downright giddy. When the 3:00 server time passed without event, some people started calling doomsday. Some got even more excited that something unexpected would happen. Some logged off and went to bed. I couldn't get up from the computer. I had see what an expansion going live was like. The best way I can sum it up is like there was a mania on the servers.
As soon as Cataclysm went live, most people took off with their favorite level 80 character to the new zones, Vashj'ir and Mount Hyjal, to sprint the road to 85. Some people took off to master archaeology. Some took off to simply fly around the newly destroyed and refashioned old world. Some started new Goblin or Worgen characters to experienced the new starting areas and the entire rest of the revamped Azeroth. Some logged off and went to bed.
I went straight out to Hyjal with some guildies and me and every other player were cruelly reminded of life on a PvP server. On Boulderfist, the Horde outnumber the Alliance something stupid like 7:1, but this is the reason I enjoy playing Alliance here. I'm always outnumbered, which makes everything feel like more of an accomplishment. And it really is too, when you can successfully quest in an area with 10 Horde and live, avoiding being attacked, sticking with your friends, playing smart. I'm reminded of what I love about PvP servers. I've listened to a lot of people bitching in chat the last week about how it's so unfair and that Blizzard fails to make good server balance and that Horde are jerks and on and on. Most peoples' response is "you rolled on a PvP server. If you don't like it, transfer to PvE." The time immediately post expansion is the best for PvP servers because you're forced into close proximity with players from the other faction and it is damn exhilarating. I like knowing that I could be attacked any second. I like watching my back and feeling like I'm in a dangerous area. To me, that's the point of a PvP server. You can be attacked anywhere, any time, and you need to be ready. As such, I'm leveling my paladin with Patrick's warlock. Then for solo, I'm leveling my rogue. It would kind of suck to level anything alone and that couldn't go invisible. Suffice it to say, I've been having a blast playing with so many people.
I'm going to be sad once everyone's all 85 again and everyone's back to farming raids and people are more scarce out and about. I expect that will be more the case when I come back from break in a month. The road to 85 is a short one. The world first took 5 hours only, and our server first was within 18. I'm 100% confident I could level 80-85 in one day. For reference, I leveled my priest on a PvE server just to feel the difference from PvP. She was rested and I went from 80-81 in an hour and 15 minutes. So yeah, it's fast. The thing is though, I don't want to burn all my characters through because I don't want to be stuck at 85 farming forever. This is what I've come to realize over years of playing this game, and now after two expansion packs, having done the two end-game activities extensively. I don't want to raid the same instance over and over, and I don't want to run the same battlegrounds over and over. It gets old and it's a lot of time spent. When I think back at how much time I spent raiding this last expansion pack across four different characters, I realize a lot of that I didn't really want to be doing. I ended up doing a lot of raiding just to see things from another class's point of view, which really isn't necessary anymore because I've done it now. The same thing with PvP. I've done it. What am I going to do at 85 this expansion pack? I've no desire to do anything 'hardcore' ever again on more than one character. But this paragraph has taken a turn from its purpose...which is that all the endless raiding and farming makes the world a dead place because everyone is in instances chasing gear, something I'm tired of doing.
So what's left? My natural response is to say, well I'll pick one raiding character and then just play casually with the rest. It'll take some dedication to ONLY playing the one raid character because I tend to like to help my friends out when they need a character for this or that role in this or that dungeon or raid, but I don't want to wind up spending so much time doing the same thing slightly differently as I don't feel that the different experience is worth the time invested. I've got other games to play, work to do, places to go, people to hang out with, etc, etc. Basically, WoW ate a lot of time in the last year and a half especially that I should have reigned in. I recognize this looking back, and want to just streamline my play in the future.
To try to plan it out, I spent some time outlining who to level and what to do with them. Since leveling has turned out to take no time whatsoever (relatively), I'd like to bring up at least 3 characters to play around with at 85. The paladin will definitely be my raider. The rogue I definitely want to get good at PvP with. Then I had a choice between warrior, priest, and druid. The druid is at 70, so would have to go through Northrend again, which I won't do any time soon. I played with the other two some, and the priest is a good choice because she's ranged, and Patrick wants to play with her, but she needs a server and faction change, which costs $$ that I don't have. The warrior is tempting just because dual wielding 2-handed weapons is sick and you can turn yourself into a dragon that another player can mount if you're an alchemist, which she is. I already will have 2 melee classes and 1 of them that dual wields though, so I may pass. The key to reigning in play time is just figuring out what I need to do to play the game I want to play it and do the things I want to do in it, and then not ending up doing a ton extra. I can do it!
It's only been 5 days and I've been having a blast. I'm glad the new zones are so much fun. Vashj'ir in particular is very innovative. The whole zone is under water, which sounds like a bad idea, but they somehow made it awesome. This is immeasurably improved by the ability to ride a seahorse mount. PvPing underwater is a new experience too. They should totally make an underwater battleground. It reminds me of this game I played, Shattered Horizon, where you're in space and players can fly around you 360 degrees. Being under water is like that. If someone attacks you, the first thing you figure out is from where. Hyjal is cool too. Pacing of quests and quests themselves are improved and more fun, and the mini-stories that tie them together are more interesting than ever. The new archaeology skill is boring to do, but it's neat to piece together artifacts, and the curiosity I feel to see what I discover at higher levels will keep my interest for a while. The new dungeons are pretty fun, especially the Vortex one. There are some neat new boss battles, like this dragon who randomly speeds up or slows down the party as the 'winds' shift direction. I've been healing a few on the paladin, and healing is still really fun, made more so by several new paladin heals, which means I'm no longer just pushing 2 buttons all the way through an instance. I have to think a lot more about which spell I'm casting, on whom, and where I'm standing now. I like it a lot. I'm sad that all my ICC epics are getting replaced so quickly. All the time and effort people put into raiding the last content tier was fun in and of itself, but the tangible rewards are going to be almost all gone by 85. I think I've replaced about half my gear by 83. This reinforces for me that people who raid just for loot are somehow misguided. The loot goes away. The guilds and relationships don't (as much).
Guild levels are my favorite new thing. When you do quests and other things, you are rewarded with guild reputation, and this all goes toward a massive guild experience pool. Once the guild collectively gains enough experience, it levels up, and at each level, there are guild-wide perks. Most guilds are level 2 now, which means everyone in that guild gets a +5% bonus to experience for faster leveling. At level 3, it's +10% mount speed. Level 4 I think is +5% reputation gains for factions. And on and on to 25. It's a very cool system, and you get reputation with your guild that goes toward purchasing rewards that the guild as a whole unlocks through obtaining levels and guild achievements, which are like regular achievements, but gotten collectively, such as running dungeons as a guild or winning rated battlegrounds as a guild. It really promotes people working together and forming relationships in-game, but I could see how people who just enjoy playing alone could feel screwed out of rewards just because of play preference. Just join a guild and don't talk to anyone, I say. GW is almost level 3, probably will be by the time I play next. I do hope that it takes a reasonably long time to get to 25 and that guilds aren't 25 in just a few months. I think it should take like a year on average because it should be a really big deal for a guild to get achievements.
So, yes, Cataclysm is awesome. I've had my crazy amounts of play time for the past few days and now it's time to cut it out so I can finish the semester in style and then go hang out in the US for a month. I will see you again, Cataclysm, for another round at the end of January.
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Dec 5th, 2010 at 09:39:51 - Resident Evil 5 (PC) |
Resident Evil was short. The game clocked me just over 11 hours. Batman didn't have a clock but I'm pretty sure I got another 5 or so out of it, like 15-20 total. So two short but excellent games this week. I will never understand why people buy these at full price for like $50-$60. That's like paying $5 an hour to play. Unless you're a person who plays the same game over and over, unlocks every single thing (I finished Batman with 84% completion and RE5 with 25%!), or just has to have it now, why pay so much? Wait and grab it for $10 or less a year later. Batman's replay value is fairly limited as shown by my 84% in one playthrough. RE5 must count multiple plays toward 100% or something. It has a New Game + feature to start over with all your current equipment. I've got to play something that lasts longer next time, which will be approximately 1.5 months from now. I doubt I'll start anything new before then, just play around with some online games and go through some demos I have. Cataclysm comes out this week and I'll play some of that before I leave. It was fun to burn through these two this week though. I'm glad I got two good ones. They made for a good week of gaming.
So RE5 was an edge-of-your-seat action/shooter game. It really never lets up and I am not surprised I was able to sit and play it in two sessions because I was totally into it. The story after 5 RE games and countless little spinoffs was fairly straightforward in the standalone, but you can unlock backstory files and read some documents throughout the game, and man, there are just tons of characters and events and places spanning like 50 years of fiction. It's a lot. So luckily you don't need to know everything about RE to understand what's going on. They did a good job with story-telling. After 5+ games, you'd think they'd be good at it.
The boss battles were sufficiently epic and creative. One involved calling down a satellite laser beam to strike this giant mutated girlfriend of the bad guy who turned into a sea monster on a giant ship. Another one involved manning machine guns and rocket launchers. Another involved using a flamethrower to torch a monster. Another involved a little bit of stealth to cut power to lights and keep the boss in the dark so he couldn't dodge your bullets (and rockets). I very much enjoyed the bosses, and only kind of got stuck on one. Turns out I wasn't doing it very efficiently and ran out of ammo, but you couldn't finish without ammo. Some fights are very memorable.
RE5's regularly set up battles are great too. It generally starts with an enemy noticing you or you opening a door or gate or something that triggers it. The music picks up and enemies come swarming out of ceilings and doors with ever more deadly weapons. It's great because you can't just go crazy with your best gun. You've got to conserve your ammo by getting close to melee sometimes or using that weak gun over the strong one to save for a tough enemy. I usually loaded out with at least a shotgun and a sniper rifle, and I gave my sidekick a pistol and a machine gun. It worked pretty well as I good blast from up close and afar, and she handled the midrange. There's a nifty cover system that appears later in the game once the mutants get armed. Popping out to snipe is always fun.
RE had a surprising amount of puzzles, especially in this ruins level. They weren't too hard, but adding waves of enemies made them fun. The one I remember most involved mirrors focusing sunlight. You have to make your way through the labyrinthine level to find 3 pieces of a key to open the door to the next one, but there are all these sun mirrors that will regularly fry a section of the level. You've got to plan your running so you don't get caught in the sun beams. It wasn't so much a puzzle, but it was probably the most complex level in the game, and my favorite that I went through. I'd often walk into a giant room with multiple stories, ladders, crates, obstructions, and go "Yes, yes, yes" because it's like a mini-level. You know bad guys will come, you know you're going to have to take them all out while moving from point A to point B, finding goodies along the way, finding switches, lifts, doors, exploding barrels, and so on. Each little area was just exciting to play through.
I'm really glad, though I thought it would be lame at first, that it's co-op with the AI. The AI wasn't bad, no worse than the enemies. She kept up, sometimes led me ahead, followed orders without a problem, and was downright handy to have along! I usually hate sidekicks in games, but I was pleasantly surprised, and in fact, she made the game a lot better. I felt like I had a buddy playing with me. And you can do that online actually. You can play through an 'open' campaign where anyone can just jump in as the second character, or you can jump in someone else's. I'd play this with a friend, but don't care to with a stranger online. Shooting zombies together is a bonding activity.
What else...Ah yes, the only thing I didn't like about the game were some of the controls. The camera view was slightly awkward third-person off to the left side, and coupled with the camera swinging you around was a little uncomfortable at first. I did get used to it. What continued to suck was the context commands. I can deal with pushing F or V to run, duck, jump, etc. in action sequences. What I had trouble with was pushing A+D at the same time to do something. What I had even more trouble with, and what I don't know how made it in the game, was holding F+V to do action maneuvers. F+V? Really? So try this. Push F really fast to run! Now push A+D to dodge some rockets! Ok now quickly push F+V to climb! It's super awkward, especially while trying to WASD move at the same time. WASD and having to mash F+V on command is nigh impossible before doing it a hundred times. And you have about 2 seconds to mash the buttons before you die, and it doesn't always register that you pushed them either. V is also the command to tell your sidekick to come here, so F+V a lot of times turned into "Come over here!" *dies* Besides some control issues, I don't have any other gripes.
I'd totally recommend this game to anyone if you find it on sale for cheap. It's short and unless you have a tendency to replay games, there's not a lot to it. But it's incredibly polished, incredibly intense from start to finish, and just a ton of thrilling fun.
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Dec 4th, 2010 at 09:45:35 - Resident Evil 5 (PC) |
Resident Evil and Batman are a good combination to play together. I was so impressed with Batman that I was expecting relatively less from Resident Evil 5, but man, RE is pure adrenaline. I knew the series had strayed from the survival horror of its early days. RE4 was something like a zombie shooter, and this one seems to go further in that direction but somehow returns some anxiety of the earlier games. One level is all in a dark mine. The game itself is co-op with AI or with a friend/stranger on the internet. The mines are pitch black, so one character holds a lantern while the other takes the front. It's like in Doom 3 where you can either hold the flashlight or a gun. The sound in this game is excellent. The mines in particular, you hear the heavy breathing echoing through the shafts. The game is very immersive in part because of the sound effects, and also because of the level design. It's fairly linear and there are a ton of enemies. Action sequences have taken me over 20 minutes to do. Enemies will just stream and stream, and they drop enough ammo to keep you just barely going long enough. I think this game must have been tested and fine-tuned for a long time because the pacing is just perfectly intense.
The enemy AI seems to be stupid at times, like they'll just kind of stand in front of you, but it seems to work because when they stand there, I get scared that they're going to attack me. Usually it'll be like 3 or 4 of them in front and I turn and run, but the level designs are such that there are always limited places to run. The fights are all in small spaces. Enemies are definitely getting stronger and more resistant to my guns, which I finally decided to start upgrading. I'm around 1/3 of the way through the game and just now started upgrading. I didn't know really what all I could spend money on, and I didn't want to upgrade guns that I would replace naturally, so I glanced at a weapon list online and it turns out that you can unlock new guns from upgrading old ones. Upgrade away! Your partner AI isn't any smarter than the enemies. S/he is fairly conservative with ammo, is a smart healer, and never uses grenades. But s/he will also stand there or fire slowly even if an enemy is right in front of him/her. I wanted to play as the girl, but it defaulted to the guy. I guess you can only play the girl in multiplayer. Apparently the guy is from other RE games, but I don't really know the story or characters. This one also draws on the previous game(s), though maybe not RE 4 because I don't recognize anything here. The male character wants to find his old partner, and there's a part where he goes through some RE back story.
In contrast to Batman, the fights here make you think more, and the boss battles are much better and numerous. This game doesn't have all the personality that Batman has, but the story and the African setting are totally believable and suck me into what's going on because everything is just so polished and well presented. My favorite part so far is the jeep gunner sequence. Not unique or anything since a lot of games have gunner sequences, but this one was awesome and followed by a boss battle with what resembled a troll from the Lord of the Rings movies. The enemies aren't zombies by the way. It's about biological weapons and there's some mutant virus organism thingy that turns people into angry killing machines, kind of like 28 Days Later, but they're smarter and retain a bit more humanity.
The only question now is do I go on and finish the rest of the game tomorrow, or do I stretch it out a few more days?
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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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