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!

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?

While I’m well aware that the developers in charge of World of Warcraft over at Blizzard have too much time on their hands — as this list of pop culture references woven into the MMO prove — some people clearly have even more time on their hands.

One particular individual, animpinabox, took the time to research and match up the dancing emotes for each individual World of Warcraft character and race to the originals it took inspiration from. They say they grabbed all the clips used for the comparison from YouTube, which is quite a feat in itself. The attention to detail by Blizzard is just… ridiculously astounding. And just plain ridiculous too.

Via Kotaku

This past week marked the official launch of The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. It’s not easy going up against the juggernaut that is World of Warcraft but I think LOTRO makes quite the valiant effort on many levels, the least of which is by adopting a similar UI and quest/play style. Of course, it helps to have a strong mythos already developed and, so far, it’s been fitting quite well for me — even repeating them multiple times since the public stress test, I’m actually reading the quests and trying to follow the story. For now at least.

Michael over at MMOG Nation took a couple looks at LOTRO both at launch and a week later and provided his impressions from the point of view of the seasoned MMO gamer (or so I presume). I originally caught his Launch Day impressions last week and based on his “What I Love/Like/Hate about LOTRO” lists I ended up writing Michael purely because of this comment:

The Classes. Sorry dr00ds. I just have never gotten behind classes that screw up the four legs of the D&D table. If I can’t look at a class in a fantasy MMOG and know whether it’s a Tank, Nuke, Healer, or Skills-monkey, I probably won’t play it. My primary character in WoW was a Paladin, and look where that got me.

I’ve always felt that I could understand the MMOs whose classes more closely aligned with those in AD&D than those who didn’t. Or maybe I’m just a huge nerd. This was something that made Final Fantasy XI easy for me to pick up as my first MMO, because the starting job classes — and even some of the advanced classes — still fell neatly into the base classes I first grew to learn during my pen and paper days. I still have a hard time equating these to the LOTRO classes and World of Warcraft. Both seem a bit more of a stretch than I’d like at times, but there’s not much I can do about that — and, no, I’m not playing DDO. I think the familiarity of the locales and storyline as Michael mentions at the end of his follow-up post a week later help overcome a lot of that “I’m lost” feeling I initially got when playing WoW — although thankfully that’s no longer an issue.

Simon Carless takes a look at infamous middle-man for MMO currency, items and characters, IGE, via an interview with Chief Operating Officer James Clarke. It’s a pretty interesting read with details like how IGE doesn’t actualy employ anyone directly farming gold or items, IGE’s interpretation of item and currency rights despite the individual games’ EULA or TOS stipulations and how, for the time being at least, they’re treating their recent acquisition of MMO community sites like Allakhazam, Thottbot and OGaming entirely seperate from their trading operations.

I’ve been active on Allakhazam’s FFXI forums for a while and news of the acquisition didn’t go over too well with some folks, but so far everything seems to be going as it normally has on there.

The current iteration of Xbox Live has really spoiled me in a couple of ways. On the original Xbox and Xbox Live, it was nice and important to know who on your friends list was online and what game they are playing. So of course with the Xbox 360 release, Xbox Live tells you that information and then lets you know what they are doing in the game: what level or map they are on, often what particular activity they are doing, status about their character/persona, the score of the (sports) game they are playing, or, like with Oblivion, their level and current health.

Which brings me to wish that Final Fantasy XI was able to pass along similar information. I’m guessing that, along with the fact that you couldn’t really award retroactive achievements, there might be some technical reason that stands in the way of reporting that type of information back to the dashboard or Xbox.com friends lists. The thing is with PlayOnline was that I knew whomever was online on their friends list was playing FFXI. Now when I see them on “PlayOnline Viewer” I want to know details! FFXI or, unlikely, TetraMaster? Why isn’t it the mysterious Final Fantasy XI entry/icon which only shows me as playing it the day I installed it. I also want to see what their character name is, what server they are on and what jobs and levels they have active at that moment. It just seems… to fit… and satiate my curiousity about people I didn’t know were playing MMOs/FFXI.