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Jul 11th, 2010 at 22:06:39 - World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (PC) |
Yes, the gear obtained from a weekend of nonstop playing, say 30 hours or so, is sufficient to get an 80 raid ready. I've logged about that much time on Cass in the last month and a half and got myself accidentally into an ICC 25 and ICC 10 this weekend. The ICC 25 I was a replacement range DPS PuG and pulled 5-6k on bosses, and won some bracers. The ICC 10 was a guild run I got asked to help heal, again as a replacement after Marrowgar, because I was up sick in the middle of the night and couldn't sleep. I won some pants, replacing my T9.5s that I bought the day before for damn 75 triumph emblems, a huge waste of emblems that in retrospect I should have spent on epic gems. My GS is now just under 5000, which I find is actually plenty sufficient given the 25% buff to damage, healing and health currently in ICC. I raid healed all the way to Putricide, whom I haven't seen in like 3 months, and after wiping a few times, I left so someone more useful could come in and help the guild finish their night.
Raid healing with a holy priest is very different from tank healing with a paladin. Paladin heals involve: 1) beacon MT 2) spam flash of light on raid members and holy light when someone needs more 3) holy shock for a quick instant. Raid heals involve a LOT more paying attention. I have more spells and more people to watch out for. I always took it for granted that I only had to focus on tanks as a paladin because as a raid healer, I have to watch literally everyone, especially if the other healer is focusing tanks like I usually do. I found it really fun and enjoyed making use of all my AoE heals. One instance where a raid healer shines is on Stinky and Precious's Decimates when everyone's HP gets dropped to 10% and they continue taking damage. Timing a Prayer of Healing and watching your party's health jump up after decimate is a good feeling. That's what I think about raid healing, and maybe I can get in on a 10 ICC with the guild once a week for some fun.
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Jul 6th, 2010 at 10:47:55 - Prey (PC) |
Years ago, when I was all into Doom 3, I thought Prey was going to be the nest coolest thing in town. I never got around to buying it because, well, it was new and expensive. Last month, finally, its time to prove itself had come. My initial impression was positive. The native American focus in the story is definitely unique, and I hoped it wouldn't be cheesy. You begin the game in the reservation bar where your girlfriend works and your grandfather hangs out for some reason. You're tired of the reservation and want to leave, she wants to stay. Grandfather reminds you of your heritage. Normal conflicts in a unique setting. But then the aliens come and just throw this neat little story into disarray.
The three of you are beamed up into one of many alien ships. The design of the ships I found to be awesome. They are like cyber-organisms governed by god-like intelligence. The walls look like intestinal tracts, and the ship even has little waste openings where it either vomits or defecates on you as you walk by. Right from the beginning in the alien ship, things get crazy and you realize these are not nice creatures. Human screams and cries of terror, like seriously chilling ones, ring out around you as you come to next to your girlfriend in these transport restraint pods. You are being moved like sedated livestock through the ship for who-knows-what, but judging from the soundscape, it won't be a complimentary massage. No, this place is pain.
A strange alien of another type sabotages the machinery, freeing you, and you watch helplessly as your girlfriend calls out to you, moving towards her fate (which happens to be something special, just for you). At this point, you realize you have mysterious ally saboteurs on the ship and begin your adventure of sightseeing human suffering at the hands of the ship. It was really like watching torture, if I could imagine that. One spot features an endless line of people's transport pods being locked in place in front of a sinister wall. The wall turns out to be spikes and the people are crushed and impaled like by an iron maiden. Over and over. I watched until the people started repeating lines. It was sick. There are also humans throughout the ship who have gone mad and are pretty much not human anymore. I put some of them out of their misery, but felt bad after a while and stopped killing them. So that's the feel of the ship. As you move through the levels, you leave the impaled humans behind. There are huge areas of space ship mech battles with laser guns and the ability to pick up enemies and toss them 1000 feet to their deaths, big rocks you can dock on and jump around in low gravity, and some other cool places.
The gimmick of the game is the portals. These resemble to an extent the ones in Portal, which I was already familiar with, so in Prey they weren't too shocking. Prey's portals just send you to another locale in the ship that you can see through the portal. It's essentially like seeing a room that isn't physically adjacent to you. It's somewhere else and you can see your destination. Enemies like to come out of these portals. The one thing I liked that was pretty new was the gravity play. There are pads (targets?) on the ceiling sometimes, or elsewhere. When you shoot them, whatever wall that pad is on becomes the floor, so you can flip gravity. Obstacle? Look above you for a gravity pad, shoot it, walk past the obstacle on what was the ceiling, shoot it again, now you're on the other side of the obstacle. There are also these walkways that run up walls. When you move on a walkway, the walkway is always the floor. You're like suctioned to it. So if the walkway goes up a wall, you'll run up the wall. The game perspective flips to reorient it as if the walkway were the floor. It can be kind of nauseous, but it really neat, especially when you're dealing with enemies, gravity pads, portals, and walkways all at the same time. Disorienting and hectic are also accurate descriptors.
Levels are totally linear, and that's okay here because you're in a living ship, so it should be claustrophobic. The game shows you plenty of different places in the ship, so again, linear isn't bad for me in this case. I felt like I was exploring an alien world. Now, when you finally catch up with your girlfriend, you will be shocked. I know I was horrified at what was done to her. I was so horrified that I had to rewatch that cutscene over a few times just to think about it. Basically her upper half is surgically grafted onto this creature and she/it try to kill you. She's conscious the whole time, which is very sad, as she is obviously in a lot of pain and pleads for you to kill her. You are taunted along in the game by this supreme intelligence and it's at this point in the game I was really on board with finding it and killing it no matter what it wanted.
The last topic for this one is death. Since you're a Native American, you have a spirit guide, and you never really die, but only go to this spirit realm to replenish your health and spirit energy. In most games, death stops gameplay. In Prey, death is gameplay. You shoot these flying stingray looking things that restore you to life. On the one hand it's cool that death is fun and doesn't take you out of the game. On the other hand, death has no consequence, unless I suppose you really hate the death minigame. I mean, it doesn't matter if I die because there is no game over. I can try to play the whole game with my wrench if I want to and I'll never see a game over screen. It made me have very little self-preservation. I went in guns blazing everywhere. I'm not totally sure how I feel about this. I like the Prey system and dislike it at the same time. Your spirit companion also gives you overly helpful puzzle hints throughout the game and ensures that you are never lost or stuck. I found the puzzles to be very easily solved. But that's Prey in a nutshell, worth playing. I think it took me 10 or 12 hours.
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Jul 6th, 2010 at 09:48:00 - Rogue Galaxy (PS2) |
I'm always most excited to start a new game, to see what it's like. Those first impressions of games are like first dates. I get nervous and excited and I don't know how to act. I plan the occasion to make sure I have a couple hours to sink in to get to know it better. Rogue Galaxy was developed by Level-5, a Japanese indie that did the excellent Dark Cloud games and Dragon Quest VIII. So, this is my first entry writing about a game from the first time playing. All others I've recently played through and am writing to preserve memory and practice, or am currently playing off and on but started some time ago.
You are Jaster Rogue, and you live on a dangerous desert planet currently under control by a military supposedly protecting it from a more hostile force. There's a far removed war going on. Jaster is bored and wants to go to outer space. Not an unheard of set-up in fantasy/sci-fi land. But this game executes perfectly the introduction to the game. First of all, RPG protagonists have a tendency to have parental issues, and this drives them on some level, and often times makes them introverts. I'm glad that Jaster is talkative and interesting from the get-go. He was indeed abandoned to a church as an infant and raised by a kindly priest. Here's another strong point: It's been like 2 hours of game time and I am already invested in Jaster's life, his priest father figure, his new friends, his planet and town. Chalk this up to good story-telling and excellent presentation.
Your town is laid siege to by a giant monster, and as you run after it (headed for the residential district, oh no!), a mysterious fighter joins your side. He stays with you a while, impressed in out-of-range-of-Jaster-to-hear monologue, and gives you his sword before departing. Meanwhile, two members of a space pirate crew, inconspicuously named Simon (Scottish accent, sounds just like the dwarf in Halls of Stone in WoW), and a robot, Steve (mild British accent), are searching for the great bounty hunter, Desert Claw. It so happens that your mysterious companion was Desert Claw, and when the pirates see your sword, pronounce you their man, and drag you away with them. Of course, you want to go because you're tired of small-town life, you want to see space, and you quickly realize that Desert Claw was your companion, and not mentioning your inauthenticity may be your ticket to the space pirate life. But first you have to kill this giant monster.
This introduces the bounty system. Giant monsters such as this are worth X amount of points. Killing X number of regular monsters is also worth a lesser amount of points. The specific task shows up after you've encountered that specific regular monster. There is a bounty ranking from 1-100. You begin at 100. Desert Claw is 1. As you accumulate points, you can surpass the greatness of other bounty hunters, and it looks like you're rewarded at 50, 40, 30, 20, 10, 9, 8, etc. This is fun. I like being tasked to go kill tough monsters. The little ones, I don't know if I'll keep up with, because based on my first experiences with the first 6 or so bounties, some enemies are more rare than others, so killing, say, 30 of them, may take a while of running around. But then again, I also don't know the locations of different enemies, so I may encounter more of a missed type elsewhere or something. I've moved up to 95 by killing the giant monster and fulfilling two other lesser bounties.
The battle system is real-time, pauses when you open the menu, and seems fast paced. It reminds of a game like Kingdom Hearts, or what stuck with me from Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. You control one character of three at a time, and can switch between them if you like. The ones you aren't currently controlling will give you these context commands, "suggestions," for actions they wish to perform (use potion, cast a spell, etc.), and just press the correct button if you want them to do it, ignore them if you don't. You can run, jump, melee attack, or range attack, as well as pause to use abilities or items, swap equipment or characters. You can hit or toss objects in the field as well. Some enemies are shielded, and you have to hold X for a power attack to break the shield. Our boss, a giant dragonfly looking thing, was immune to attacks in certain places. I had to attack it in a certain sequence of spots before it became vulnerable, and even then I couldn't reach the open wound. One of my party members gave me a special gun (don't remember the name) that creates stepping stones you can use to get at hard to reach places. This will I'm sure be useful for finding treasure throughout the game. Anyway, it allowed me to climb on the dragonfly's back and kill it.
As you fight, your weapons level up in Skill and elemental attributes (fire, water, etc.). I'm not sure what skill does yet, except that I read in the manual that you get a frog who can eat two fully skilled up weapons to produce one stronger weapon. After the skill is maxed, the weapon will continue to level up elemental attributes. Characters have few stats and attributes, which makes for less definitions I have to memorize, and there aren't many status ailments, and most of them do the exact same thing. I would say this makes the game too simplistic, but there seems to be plenty of other things to focus on, such as the Revelation system. This is how you acquire skills. It's kind of like the skill grids from Final Fantasy X, XI,and XII (I think all 3), where you put points into a skill anywhere on this giant map to specialize in certain ability types. In Rogue Galaxy though, you put items in the grid, and once they go in, they can never come out. There may be one box, two boxes connected, or like 6 connected boxes which together represent one ability. All connected boxes must be filled with specific items to learn that ability. Further, each character appears to have a different revelation map. When you unlock a skill, all adjacent sets of connected boxes become available for you to fill in. It's neat. I've already learned a few skills on Jaster and two on Simon. I can imbue my weapon with lightning, cast a wind spell, or confuse enemies. I'm looking forward to unlocking more abilities.
So after killing the giant dragonfly monster, Simon and Steve tell you their boss wants you on their crew. Who is their boss? Why, a legendary sky pirate Jaster has dreamed of seeing forever. Before Jaster leaves, he returns to his priest/father to tell him. One reason this game is already so good story-wise is because of the animations of facial expression and interaction, and direction of scenes, not to mention voice acting. Jaster enters the church, the priest, Raul I just remembered, facing away from Jaster to an altar. Jaster looks uneasy, looks away, and begins to tell Raul he's leaving, contemplates it, then just tells Raul how grateful he is for Raul raising him and looking after him. Jaster turns to leave and makes it to the city gates before Raul has caught up with him. There ensues a very touching series of cut scenes with Raul saying he knew this day would come. They used to sit outside at night and look at the starts, Jaster as a child talking about going into space, thinking Raul is silly for not wanting to leave, Raul making comments about this planet being home, etc. Jaster is clearly guilty over his decision and Raul is sad to see him go, and you can feel the old man's loneliness setting in already. This kind of thing in games is generally cheesy and lame for me, but Rogue Galaxy just tells it right. I hope this is a sign of what's to come.
Jaster & Co. leave, there's an exciting CGI sequence/opening credits of a pack of hungry sand worms chasing Jaster and the pirates' space ship, which is a pirate ship, complete with skull and crossbone sails, with rockets for space travel, and a daring rescue of Jaster by a female character. I quit when I found a save point inside the pirate ship and will begin next time by exploring it. Other characters encountered so far are a one-eyed bounty hunter with an ego and a diabolical talking cat who is in charge of the ship while the captain is napping.
One more thing about the level of immersion due to the NPCs is that the NPCs all have names, each and every one of them, has a name above their head. I've already been able to remember what a couple specific people said and who they are in the story. Raul for example, when I remembered earlier in writing, was because the image of his name flashed in my mind. Also, each of the 100 bounty hunters has a name. I've caught a few good ones (Beauti Fulle, Pixel Shayder, and Don Perrigno) and I'm sure there are a lot more that I don't get.
For opening sequences, Rogue Galaxy gets a 10/10. There was also a very nice and timely series of tutorial windows that popped up all throughout this time during battles at the correct moments you needed them and there is a help menu accessible at all times out of battle. Very nice indeed.
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Jul 6th, 2010 at 04:20:44 - F.E.A.R. (PC) |
F.E.A.R. I was playing about the same time as Manhunt 2. I only bought FEAR because I heard it "redefined shooter horror" or something and, enjoying horror and shooter games, ate it up. I was disconcerted by the tag though (I've faced many disappointments and am critical of horror) and by the fact that Alma looks like the girl from The Ring.
My initial impressions were of a standard shooter. The cut scenes with Alma and Paxton Fettel weren't that exciting, and the story was too mysterious for me to care. Personally, I dislike super mysterious stories, especially ones that propose to be cleverer than they are. Give me something to care about besides the girl from The Ring. I saw that movie already. Make me think this game is doing something different than copy-catting Japanese horror remakes. I pressed on.
The most creepy aspect of the game turned out to be the environments, which was mostly miles and miles of office buildings. This is because I never knew when I would see Alma. See, she wasn't scary at the beginning, but she turns into a real presence. You see her in these slo-mo controllable cut scenes where she sets hallways ablaze as you run. You also see her victims scattered and lifeless throughout the levels, hear her speaking to you, etc. I could make decent guesses as to when the scary parts would happen, like when you get into an enclosed area or tight space, with lots of pipes. Even though the offices were massive, the more I saw of Alma and her fury, the more a sense of dread fell upon me playing, just knowing she was going to show up again. I'm not quite sure why she spooked me so much, but I know the more I saw her, the less I wanted to see her. And back to the larger environments, the lighting was nice and dim, the offices had a nice number of corpses and ransacked desks, and you usually heard enemies before you saw them.
About the AI, I'd heard all this and that, it was so advanced, they use group tactics, blah blah. I will say I think it's cool that they take cover, will flip desks, attempt to flank you, call out when you are flanking them, call for help, etc. I will also say that they posed a challenge to me. They posed a challenge to me until I discovered the total game-winning benefits of slo-mo. In FEAR, you have a superhuman power to slow down time. When you use this power, an energy bar slowly drains, and more slowly refills as you rest. In slo-mo, everything slows to a crawl, you included. I think this was ideally put in the game to help with difficult encounters, but it's easily usable for all encounters, and I had a blast popping out of my own cover to nail enemies. They could take cover and be clever all they wanted, but all I had to do was slo-mo, catch them with their heads up or moving, and they died. It was no contest. So I would have liked some middle ground, probably where I wasn't able to make such gratuitous use of slo-mo, which would have made the game a bit more challenging. Without slo-mo, the pace is frenetic and there are some serious firefights. I very much enjoyed the action.
99% of enemies are just soldiers with various types of gun. Special enemies are extremely rare until the very end of the game when those shadow creatures come after you. There were some of these wall-crawling guys, but maybe 5 in the whole game. I would have enjoyed more diversity. Level after office building level of army drones got a bit repetitive. So, by the end of the game, I realized I had enjoyed my experience, but even though there is obviously a expansions and a sequel (or 2?), I don't think I want to play anymore FEAR. I just don't care enough about the thin, thin story, my character's past and ties to Alma, or anything else in the game besides slo-mo.
And one final note, the phone messages that reveal story line are absolutely pointless. They don't reveal anything important or even interesting. I'm reminded of Doom 3 where the phone messages played a larger role in immersing you in the story of what happened. Other games have done it much better, and I feel these messages were tacked on in FEAR. The end.
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