Category Archives: Game Logs

Hacking, Slashing, and Blasting into Space

While still not gaming particularly heavily I’ve certainly had my nose in all kinds of different things lately.

First of all, I’ve been slowly blasting my way through Fallout 3 on PC. I knew I’d love this game from when it was first revealed, being a fan of both the original Fallout games and the Elder Scrolls series, and I was right. I was toying with the idea of doing some kind of a “Garn” like Let’s Play though probably scaled waaaayyyy back to quick journal entries or something but as my main inspiration for starting up Fallout 3 was to play something similar to Oblivion in between writing my blog updates I decided to forgo doing anything like that and just play the game at my own damn pace.

“Charon doing what he does best.”

My character started life as a chaotic good (or some approximation thereof) energy weapons loving, grenade chucking hacker and medic and so far I’m not regretting the choice, despite hating the hacking mini-game and having an ungodly huge stash of Small Guns ammunition stockpiled thanks to some major early game ammo shortage scares. I’m having a ton of fun with it and will probably play it again on 360 at some point in the future. I also can’t wait to dive into New Vegas though I’ll almost definitely play that one on console to fix up my achievement sickness. 😉

“All the ghouls love my Protectron’s Gaze!”

Hmm, what else? Inspired to do something more creative but not really having the time for an all out coding project I started playing around with the original Neverwinter Nights engine on my old laptop and eventually started to run back through the original campaign. It was hard for me to slog through this thing when it originally came out and I started hitting road bumps real early this time as well. I still think the old module creation toolset is pretty awesome but I more or less lost all inspiration to create something with it once I subjected myself to the campaign proper again.

I’m not sure what inspired it, other than maybe not having that much fun with NWN and having a copy of it lying around, but I then moved on to the original Dungeon Siege. So far it is part intriguing and part horrible. I like being able to lead my party around and have them fight automatically which feels kind of novel for this genre (somehow?) but not having any special abilities or much else to do other than navigating and popping potions me makes it a little boring after a while. Short play sessions have been mandatory so far. I’ll probably finish it one day since I had never played it before and I have definitely been getting some enjoyment out of it.

I was still feeling the hack and slash itch and with all of the Diablo 3 buzz going on in the last few months I figured I might purchase and run through the XBLA version of Torchlight. Theorycrafting with some build ideas I decided to simply try them out in Torchlight on PC since I already own it. Hours later and, yes, I still like the game quite a bit. I’ll probably still break down and buy the XBLA version of it soon. I wonder if Torchlight 2 will end up making it to console? The XBLA port of the first game was apparently ported quite masterfully.

“Like an old glove…”

After all of that I finally decided that, yeah, I really need to buy Diablo 3. I really wanted the collector’s edition but missed the original window and couldn’t find it anywhere on launch day so, feeling a bit defeated, I still haven’t go around to buying it. Instead I decided first to play through Diablo 2 once more to refresh myself on the story and whatnot. I honestly wanted to start with the first Diablo but I figured I’d save that for a review/retrospective sometime later.

Now, I’ve played through normal difficulty probably a dozen times with most classes and while never a crazy Diablo 2 addict I’ve certainly gone into higher difficulties and even played hardcore mode some. This time I picked a Paladin which I had played before but never gotten out of normal with. So far, despite having trouble adjusting to the brutal way 800×600 resolution looks on my flat panel, I’m enjoying the hell out of it. The creepy, dark tone and sense of isolation and despair the game sets is just perfect and, as influential as Diablo 2 was, still feels quite unique all these years later. Awesome. Now I’m absolutely salivating for Diablo 3.

“The look on their faces says it all.”

Finally, after hearing the Rebel FM crew (and others) talk about it on podcasts I grabbed Kerbal Space Program. Hours of fun, this. There’s nothing quite like building your own rocket and then laughing hysterically as you struggle to get the thing off of the ground without some marvelously epic disaster. The real challenge starts after you finally manage to build a decent rocket and then find yourself having to actually learn a thing or two about the real life science of space travel as you attempt to actually orbit the planet, change orbits and orbit the moon, and then finally make a successful moon landing. If you’re real ambitious you can even try getting your little Kerbalnauts back home in one piece.

This is definitely a game I’ll be dusting off every now and then to check out new version enhancements and give a spin. I’m loving where indie game development is right now…

Shadowvan Complexia

It’s been months since my last proper Game Log update and there’s good reason for that: I haven’t been gaming much!

I’ve continued to play some Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 online here and there until relatively recently. I think I finally reached that “eh, I’m good enough at this now…” stage of burn out which I also reached before max level in the previous two Modern Warfare games. Interestingly though, my load outs are fairly different. In MW2 I had developed a mean hyper-aggressive, hip-firing shotgun build and would even occasionally whip out a pretty effective sniping build on certain maps. In the original MW I had several assault rifle builds but one of my favorites was a hip-firing, fast reloading, high rate of fire sub-machine gun build. Coming full circle back to MW3 I found myself most effective with a pretty similar sub-machine gun build again. Great game, for what it is. Expect me to talk more about it (and probably more negatively about it) sometime when the future when I get around to playing through the single player campaign.

Oh yeah, I also briefly revisited my Minecraft addiction as well when a friend of mine put up a server… still a ton of fun! I didn’t do much cooperative building but I did carve out a little niche of my own and do plenty of exploring.

“I built this seriously huge canal before remembering that they changed the way water physics worked online and I couldn’t actually flood it properly. :/”

Star Wars: The Old Republic quickly came and went from my roster as well. Great game! I’ve definitely never felt so attached to my character or so drawn into the story of an MMORPG before, yet at the end of the day it is still a fairly cookie-cutter MMORPG and despite really enjoying it I decided that, at least for now, I would get more (and cheaper) enjoyment out of sticking with single-player titles. I’ve got such a huge backlog and tons of planned reviews for this blog and whatnot as it is, and with me spending so little time gaming lately, it just doesn’t seem worthwhile to invest so much time into yet another MMORPG. I do expect to return to this and finish out my main character’s story eventually, but for now… cancelled!

“I actually modeled my Sith Inquisitor after my old UO character.”

Speaking of my backlog, I just finished Shadow Complex on XBLA. Yes, I know this came out in 2009 and I’m massively late to the party (as usual) but wow, what a game! It’s no wonder so many people were raving over it at the time. For the uninitiated, the game takes the classic “metrovania” formula (probably an understatement: it is very much a direct rip-off of Super Metroid’s gameplay) and throws it into a slick, modern setting with a nice 3D engine to back it up. Don’t let the mention of it being 3D scare you – it’s still very much a 2D side scrolling platformer like the aforementioned Metroid and Castlevania games, though Chair did at least have the sensibility to use the more modern engine for things like in-engine cut-scenes and 2.5D environments. Let me explain the 2.5D thing: it means enemies can be in the background rather than only on the same plane as your character which may sound confusing but it generally works pretty well even with the occasional targeting oddities. It’s used pretty effectively, allowing for a lot more enemies on screen without cluttering things up and just greatly enhancing the perception of depth in the environment in general.

“If you can’t explore it, shoot it.”

While the 3D graphics are nice and the polished presentation much appreciated, probably what impressed me most were all of the tiny little updates to the Super Metroid formula. Just little things, like using a flashlight to see what objects and doors were accessible/useable with what items, color coding those same doors on your mini-map for later reference, highlighting the route to your next objective, etc. Perhaps some of those intelligent tweaks aren’t new to the genre, as other than playing the DS Castlevania games I really haven’t played anything like this recently, but they’re all here and all work exceptionally well. Some of the item and weapon additions were quite cool as well and despite the game always highlighting your next goal there could be a lot of flexibility in what paths and methods you used to reach it if you want to explore and use your imagination a bit. I’m quite thankful for all of this as I was a little concerned before I got started that this would be one giant, tedious slog through backtracking hell… but no, it’s very easy to keep track of where you have and haven’t been, what secrets you have and haven’t unlocked, etc. and it only gets more and more fun to play as you progress.

“Judo chop!”

Highly recommended if you were a fan of Super Metroid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or games of their ilk or, hell, even just a fan of 2D platformers in general. I definitely got my 15 bucks worth and I’ll probably play it again at some point in the future to go after more of the map secrets and challenges. Now if only they’d develop a new Metroid or Castlevania in this engine… *drool*

Paradise Burns!

After wrapping up Space Marine I started playing through Burnout Paradise on Xbox 360 which I had been interested in finally giving a shot for quite a while now. I’m not a huge racing fan but I Lovvveeeedddd Burnout 3: Takedown and Burnout Revenge on the original Xbox so I was really looking forward to Burnout Paradise. I tried the demo when the game was still relatively new but couldn’t really get into it too much. Still, I know that it can be hard to judge an open world game from its demo alone, so I ended up buying it anyway but shelving it while I played through some of my more anticipated games… since then it has been pretty buried in my backlog.

“Err. Yes, it’s a racing game…”

I admit that I might have missed the boat a little bit since all of my friends have long since put away their copies of Paradise meaning I wouldn’t get a great experience with the drop-in multiplayer nor all the fun to be had with the “Road Rules” score fights. Still, I hopped in, so long after the game has been heavily patched and supplemented with tons of DLC, and played through the core single-player experience. That is to say, doing races and events to unlock more cars and eventually getting to my final license as well as working to satisfy a few achievements and whatnot. The racing itself, at least after you start unlocking better cars, is the same old tight, fun, arcade racing that I love about Burnout. It took me a bit of time to get into it but once it clicked, I really found myself enjoying the hell out of it. The open world structure of Paradise doesn’t really add a whole lot to the game for me, in fact in many ways I think I would have rather had the old style tracks, and having to travel to find new events, make repairs, and swap cars is kind of a drag, but generally speaking it works quite well.

“Expect to rack up millions of dollars in property damage in your time in Paradise City.”

The removal of “Crash Mode” is sorely disappointing and the dismal “Showtime” mode is absolutely no replacement for its absence. Speaking of crashing, I wish take downs could lead to massive pile ups instead of only getting credit for the one car you take down first and then having the game more or less put you on autopilot (even leading you to avoid potential crashes yourself!) while it is showing you the wreckage. Relating to that, actually, my main complaint about the game is probably all of the oddities about the user experience – the way the music/radio system works, some of the odd little animations, cut-scenes, and screens the game forces you to watch all of the time, the map being almost useless, the fact that they had to patch in a “retry event” option and as a result it is in a semi-stupid place, etc.

Still, all this time later is it a good game? Definitely! I’m betting that if Criterion have taken some of the valuable lessons from Paradise to heart the next game in the Burnout series could very well be a total masterpiece!

(Oh, and while I didn’t absolutely hate it and some of the seemingly random music selections are pretty fun, I find the whole concept of “Crash FM” to be hilariously dumb. The more I think about it, the more absurd it is. Can’t someone from the FCC shut this shit down before DJ Atomica inspires yet another traffic related fatality? Christ!)

Per usual, screenshots totally stolen. Probably also from the PC version instead of the 360 version, I’d guess, but you get it. 😉