arne360

A weekly log of the games I’ve played accompanied by some random thoughts about them

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Lord of the Rings Online
Over the course of the day I managed to put in a few hours in LOTRO. I hit level 21 with my Lore-master doing quests, which included my first Fellowship party with one other person as we decimated Elite spiders in Minas Eriol for a quest. I think I saw my first Fellowship maneuver opportunity, but I wasn’t sure because I’ve never seen one. If it was, I totally wasted whatever it was I could do for epic win. I also have managed to accumulate over 1 gold in this time. After that I started doing low-level quests in Buckland and The Shire to hit 22 because everything else I have flagged is either to high of a level or requires a Fellowship to complete. It is nice that I can walk past a ton of level 10 mobs, right up to the item I have to retrieve as part of my quest, get it and walk right back out without a fight. With only about 9k XP left, I’ll probably hit 22 this week so I can spend some of my silver getting new Lore-master skills. Am I a nerd yet?

*****

Monday, August 18, 2008

Bionic Commando: Rearmed
Finally got a chance to try this out this week. I realized I had my NES copy of the game, but since my NES isn’t hooked up at the moment, I didn’t get any practice in before BC:R was released last week. I remember I used to be so smooth with swinging around with the bionic arm and getting through levels. I am definitely rusty. Most definitely. I defeated the first boss on my third try, that’s how sad it was. 16 minutes just to clear the level.

Lord of the Rings Online
More LOTRO. What I have become. Continued the easier quests to hit level 22 until I got greedy with a quest that required a Fellowship around level 18. Deep in the Old Forest, after a bunch of spiders, there was a big nasty Elite Haunted Barren-oak tree, with some bad tree root friends. I managed to get it down to about 24% before I died. The thing is, I was stupid. I only had one add that I could have kept indefinitely stunned or I could have kited the tree away a bit and maybe, just maybe I could have outlasted the Elite tree. Not going back to this until I am a higher level. Or with a Fellowship. Quit the session with 1.2k before level 21. All these low level quests are less than 200 XP each, so it’s slow going.

*****

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Lord of the Rings Online
Yes, more, more, more. Soon I’ll be treated for OCD. Or be found in an Internet cafe in Korea. Hit level 22 finishing one quest and defeating random things in the Old Forest. Picked up my one new Lore-master skill (Cracked Earth) which I’ve read is useful later on and completed the requirements to get the Apprentice level for Weaponsmith. I have a bunch of recipes for Scholar and Weaponsmith that require Journeyman level. So maybe soon, after some farming. I sold some stacks of crafting components at the auction house. I also gained two new class traits–Healer and Beast-lore. Too bad I only have one more free until level 27. Anyhow, I hit my goal so I can take a break on LOTRO for now. Just occurred to me tonight that I should have been taking screenshots to go with my updates.

*****

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Galaga Legions
Wow, this totally kicked my ass. This isn’t quite as tight or brilliant a remix as Pac-Man: Championship Edition was, but this is right up there regardless. The vintage, retro skin is where it’s at. Don’t even bother with the new or “standard” skin. Obviously I’m still struggling getting some of the game mechanics and patterns down so I can get better, but I do like the idea of side-pod guns that can you place in one of four cardinal directions whenever you want, even if they aren’t near you. This makes it feel like there is a rhythm towards clearing some of the stages because of how, where and when waves come at you. I know I’ll never get to the point where I can really maximize bonuses. Definitely going to keep playing this. I want to play more Pac-Man:Championship Edition now too.

*****

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty
Shamefully I’ve never played a Ratchet & Clank game, nor have I played the most recent iteration, Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. Therefore I felt a little dirty playing this episodic “sequel” of sorts–I’ll definitely have to myself the favor of grabbing the full title next week since what little I played so far was pretty fun.

Braid
I went back to Braid after a lengthy hiatus because I felt stuck and couldn’t figure out some of the puzzles. I’m still missing one puzzle piece in World 2 that I’m almost tempted to look up a solution for, but I won’t… yet. I solved the World 4-3 and then immediately got stuck and frustrated with trying to wrap my head around World 4-4 (”The Hunt”) so I gave up. Instead, I took a quick peek at World 5 and I was totally not ready for the shadow mechanics I encountered. Still managed to get a few puzzle pieces off of this one before I called it a night.

The highlight of the session was being completely stuck on World 4-3 thinking I had ruined my playthrough because I rewound too far when it turned out I had solved the puzzle by accident. One could say “eureka!” if one was old, which I am not, so I didn’t.

*****

Q.E.D.

FilePlanet opened the briefly subscribers-only stress test for Pirates of the Burning Sea to the public yesterday afternoon. It’s a 4 GB download AND there is a patch after that once you install. I say go download it and give it a try. I mean, who doesn’t like pirates right?

The stress test runs October 4 through October 7. Sign-up, get the download and registration key at FilePlanet.

See you on the high seas, matey!

Like many people I had to wait until Monday to play the BioShock demo that went up on Xbox LIVE Marketplace on Sunday, but when I finally got it booted up, the demo delivered in spades. The demo clearly starts at the opening of the game and it’s clearly the most logical place to start both from a story perspective, a gameplay perspective and so you can enjoy the water porn in full effect as you are dumped into the ocean. It only gets better from there.

While the area shown in the demo feels fairly closed and linear with seemingly only one direction to go next, the experience is absolutely immersive and there were a few jump in your seat moments. It was all just enough to get the heart pounding ready to push forward until it was all over after an incredibly suspenseful interlude. The end of the demo was followed by a short attract-style video that showed the different plasmid abilities and how to use them creatively in a game that just capped off how amazing BioShock had played throughout the demo.The demo and ending video perfectly served to increase my own anticipation for the release of the game next week. I wasn’t the only one as stories of the street date being broken by a retailer sent NeoGAF into a frenzy with folks calling stores and cooking up wonderful schemes to get other stores to break the street date so they could get their copy. Of course the story made the internet rounds, hitting up a number of blogs, before retailers got wise and they stopped sales. I didn’t manage to get a copy after calling all of one store. I can wait though.

Another cause for all the excitement was the art direction in BioShock. There have been many quality games released since the last holiday season and while I can’t say I’ve played them all, like The Darkness for example, there haven’t been many I feel that have the deliberate thought and creativity that Gears of War brought to the table. BioShock is indeed one of these rarified games, art deco objectivist roots and all. This is my impression mostly just from the demo. I think 2K Boston/Australia (née Irrational Games, if you haven’t been following current news) knows this quite well and despite the fact that they couldn’t put together an art book for the collectors edition of the game, they did a great service to their fans and put an electronic version of the art book up on their Bioshock site, The Cult of Rapture.

Can I also say that I’m totally in love with the design of that site? No idea why, but I am… it’s hot.

Call me crazy, but on Thursday, July 12, I trekked down to Santa Monica solely to attend the C3@E3 event that Microsoft was hosting for bloggers, community sites and community members. There were some people I had worked with in various ways over the past two years that were planning on attending the event and I knew I wouldn’t have another chance to see them anytime soon. This was underscored by the point that I would not be attending E3 this year either, so it just turned out to be a mandatory thing for me to do. Despite first thing in the morning flights and an overall lack of sleep on either end of the trip, it was more than well worth it. I was happy to run into everybody I have ever interacted with and all the Microsoft folks too. Somehow everybody managed to look conscious through the night.

It was very important for me to meet Shigeo Tatsumi, who was attending E3 and was at the community event. I have talked to Tatsumi-san on several occasions over the past two years, which is partly what led to our intermingling of foreign piñatas in our respective Viva Piñata gardens. Obviously this was the opportunity I would have to talk to him, but not really talk to him because I don’t speak Japanese and he doesn’t really speak English. Thanks to our great translator Jennifer we were able to speak briefly and I’d seriously like to learn Japanese so I could have a bit more of a conversation than we ended up having. I definitely look forward to talking to and meeting Tatsumi-san again in the future. Be sure to check out a video recap of the “C3@E3″ event as captured by Tatsumi-san and his videographer for their Xbox Japan community site.

After meeting with Tatsumi-san is where the whirlwind of meeting people and talking about anything and everything started. Another guy from Japan I was looking forward to meeting was CheapyD from CheapAssGamer. I laughed at his retelling of funny behind the scenes tidbits when he was doing on-air interviews with the BBC and Bloomberg. However, he hadn’t imported a bottle of Pepsi Ice Cucumber for me, so he unfortunately loses quite a few points right there. Spencer from Siliconera (and from Greenwich, where I grew up, go figure), Ben from Opposable Thumbs and I went over our thoughts about the press conferences earlier in the week. Let’s see, my memory is a bit fuzzy a week later, but I also said hello to Chris (the other Chris) from ShackNews, Charles from GamingNexus, Howard from Popcultureshock and Ron from Destructoid. I also ran into Flynn (Fruit Brute) and David (Tiny Dancer) from GayGamer.net, which recently celebrated the site’s first anniversary — you can read the recap of their first ever E3 here. I also ran into Cameron, who is a game designer at Krome and is working on the recently announced Viva Piñata Party Animals, which I was not able to check out due to a lack of ESA pass. James, community manager at Insomniac Games — speaking of whom you check out Major Nelson’s podcast for a great head-to-head between these two. Robert, community manager at Infinity Ward, was demoing the super hot Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but I didn’t get a chance to even check that out. The night wound down and most folks headed over to the Gamecock party down the street while I joined Flynn and David for one more stop before essentially not sleeping the remainder of the night before my flight.

I know I missed about a million people, so apologies for anybody I may have missed, but it was an amazing trip that was well worth it. I hope to see all of these folks and more at the next E3, wherever they decide to hold it.

Images courtesy of the “E3 - C3@E3 Community Party” Flickr photoset by Gamerscore blog.

One of the more interesting additions to The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar is the ability to enhance the appearance of your character by acquiring titles based on your heritage or great deeds that have been accomplished. As you travel around Eriador you will see a lot of characters who at least list their name and the name of their Fellowship is smaller text just underneath. In my experience, most characters will also have a title next to their name of their choosing. In the newbie areas most folks simply use their Heritage Titles to denote which particular region of their race their character hails from. As you go explore others will chose to use titles which relay particular accomplishments they are proud of. This is where my tale of woe for today comes from.

After not playing for a while, I decided to go back into the LOTRO world to see what else I can do solo with my poor old level 11 Loremaster. As I was investigating the brigands somewhere outside of Combe, I got a bit overzealous and the combined might of three brigands managed to incapacitate me. This was the first time in eleven levels this had happened and I was very sad — well as sad as you can be when you’re playing a fictional character in a game. This incapacitation ended my undefeated streak, which is one of the more coveted sets of titles you can acquire in the game. I even read on a message board somewhere that someone rerolled their character because their undefeated streak was ended earlier. I wouldn’t go so far as to do that with my fictional in-game namesake, but it kind of sucks just a little bit that I’ll never be “Indomitable,” “Unscathed” or “Undying” in LOTRO.

Oh well, maybe I’ll be less foolish with an alternate character even though it just doesn’t feel quite as fulfilling. Now isn’t that a silly feeling to have?