Endless Backlog

A whole lot of Fantasies being Finaled... that is horrible.

2012-01-30T07:57:00.005-05:00

That awkward title is because almost all my gaming over the last couple weeks has been 99% Final Fantasy related. I've played some other games like Bastion, and I'm currently working on Orcs Must Die! for the PC to break up the RPG-ness of it all, but for the most part 2012 has been the Year of the RPG for me. Orcs Must Die! was a game I picked up during the end of year Steam sale, and so far it's been a lot of fun. It's dungeon defense, but with an action component, since you are actively running around placing new traps and also attacking enemies physically while they run through your dungeon. I don't have a lot more I can say about it so far, since I'm all of 9 levels in. Everything else has been Final Fantasy.

Final Fantasy XIII is probably the one I've spent the most time on. I am still in Clapter 11, where it becomes more of an open world, although even when I say that I am referring to "a series of tunnels, but ones where I can backtrack". I think it just feels more open because of that backtracking option, and because not only do things respawn quickly, but I actually need to grind some to continue on. The regular encounters got way harder once I got here, and the bosses at this point are notably harder. Up until this point I think I died a total of 5 times-- and now, I might die 5 times on a trash fight. However, maybe it's exactly that toughness, but now I'm totally behind this game. I didn't exactly hate it before, but I kept thinking "how is this a game?" Now, it's beating my ass regularly, and I'm often running from fights to get to a safer area, bringing back memories of Everquest and running from giants because they could kill me in one hit.

Final Fantasy IV (my "Play at Work" selection) is coming along well. I'm now in the underworld area with the dwarves, and I recall that's roughly the halfway point, at least in the regular game. It's nice to play this and FFXIII at the same time, because they're both annoying in totally different ways that somehow the other game satisfies. FF13 always feels like I'm not in control most of the time, but FF4 feels like I'm exactly in control of every single thing my team does. As a counterpoint, FF4 is slow and plodding sometimes (especially in dungeons) and I'd want a more involved auto-attack option-- just like FF13 provides. FF13 has loads of spells and items, with stats and effects that are poorly documented sometimes (WTF is "Stagger Lock"?). FF4 is a traditional sort of game-- if a spell casts "Sleep", you know it puts a guy to sleep. Both games are turning out to be a lot of fun (not that I am surprised by FF4), even though they're very different games in the same genre.

Dirge of Cerberus : Final Fantasy VII is a completely different game in the series. If I thought FF7: Crisis Core was different, Dirge of Cerberus is "much more differenter". It's a shooter, but not an FPS, more of a clunky Syphon Filter or Metal Gear Solid. I'm 4 levels in, and playing on the Hard setting (as recommended by the game for "people with experience with shooters"), and other than dying to poor control schemes, I'm not having any real issues. You play as Vincent from FF7, and it takes place 3 years after the events of FF7. Vincent has guns and can occasionally transform into a werewolf-demon, which makes him an excellent candidate for an action game. However, you can tell that this game was not made by people who make other exceptional action games, because the controls and camera make part of this game feel more like a chore than fun. There are parts of the game where I've lost solely because I'm fumbling around trying to remember how to switch guns or reload. Despite those problems, the cinematics are damn good, and the story is interesting enough to keep me playing through this.

I need to take a break from the FF series after this I think.

Backlog+2 : Damn you Gamestop!

2012-01-25T19:42:00.001-05:00

Or I suppose my lack of self control... nah, I blame Gamestop. There's a Gamestop conveniently located right next to the Subway I eat lunch at every once and a while, and today I wandered into the Gamestop specifically to find Eternal Sonata. I don't know a lot about the game except that it's a JRPG and it was a game I've been looking at for a long time. Since I'm apparently hardcore into JRPGs again, I figured I should find a copy now while it's cheap used. I found that, but while I was there I figured I'd dig around the sad pile of PS2 and PSP games left there.

I found a beat up used copy of Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII. It's yet another game in the FF7 continuum, along with Crisis Core (which I beat earlier this month). It's also a shooter action game, which is unlike any of the other games in the series, and as a result I expect I will either find it easy like Crisis Core, or it will be impossibly hard and have miserable controls. I know it didn't get amazing reviews, but I figured since I've already put so much time and effort into the Final Fantasy series as of late, why the hell not grab it. At least it was cheap as well.

Completed - Bastion (PC)

2012-01-23T23:20:00.006-05:00

... and, beaten!

I got an hour to myself tonight to finish off the last remaining Proving Ground and then cleared the last level. I wrote a lot about the game earlier today, so there's not much else to say. This game really is one of the best games of last year. It's not hard, but if you turn on some of the idols, it can get pretty rough-- at least in the dream levels. After beating the game, you earn the right to play again with your weapons and upgrades already earned, and there's another dream level or something. I'm going to play this again at some point, and turn all the idols on and see how far I get.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 10 hours, 20 minutes
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 42% (10/24 Achievements)
Outside Help Used : None. You really won't need any.
Will I play this again? : Yes, at the very least I'd like to turn on all the idols and see if I can beat anything.

Titles aren't optional. Bastion post.

2012-01-23T08:18:00.003-05:00

Last night (after watching the Ravens give away their Superbowl chances), I finally had some time to myself to sit down and play about 3 hours of Bastion. In case (like me) you have been living on a rock where all you knew about Bastion was "it's that game with the Narrator, or something... right?", Bastion is a top down action game, like the older Zelda games, but with linear levels. You have two attack buttons, and you can select what weapons you want to use for each button. At first, you just have a hammer, but by the end of the game you'll have a fairly well-stocked arsenal of weapons, all of which you can choose to upgrade. The Narrator feature is actually worth all the mention it gets, because it is a nice bit of flair I don't think I've seen in any other game. Basically, while you play, there's a man who occasionally breaks in with commentary on what you're doing. The voice is perfect, reminding me of an old cowboy telling me a campfire story, while I eat from a warmed can of baked beans. That is possibly the lamest sentence I've written in the three years I've been doing this-- but it still is a true statement.

I'm close to the end, because it's a fairly short game. If you just do the main story levels, I don't think you'd have too many issues with difficulty either, and you could probably blow through the game in a couple hours. However, there is a good portion of "optional" content to play through, and I can't resist doing most if not all of it. First off, each weapon you'll find will unlock a Proving Ground-- a special level where you earn prizes based on your skills with those weapons. So far, these are the hardest things in the game-- at least they are to get 1st place. I'm sure if you wait until your weapons are fully upgraded they get much easier, but doing them as soon as they show up was pretty rough. The other optional content is a series of endurance challenges where you fight 20 waves of enemies in an arena-type dream. I have beaten all of them, but I can turn on a series of God Idols that you find/buy to make them much harder (enemies take more damage, enemies explode on death, etc.) and earn achievements and experience. I will at least try them full-on before I consider it finished.

I'm now sitting at what I believe is the last level, and the last unfinished proving ground. I should finish this up tonight, assuming I can get 30 minutes to myself.

Onto disc 3 of Final Fantasy XIII!

2012-01-21T14:30:00.003-05:00

Not a lot of updates during the week, because I spent it playing FFXIII to try and get to the fabled "open" area, and a little bit of Bastion. I haven't written much about Bastion, but it's another game that I waited to play despite loads of good reviews-- both professional and word of mouth from real people. It's great. I will write up more about it sometime, I know at least one person who reads this was considering picking it up during some sale, and I hadn't played it enough to really give him an answer on it. But, since that's only maybe 2 or 3 hours of the last week, let me get to FFXIII.

I finished all of disc 2 in the past week, a disc that (much like disc 1) was extremely linear and story-based. I know that's been a major complaint of this game, but I don't really mind it. Yes, it's a series of hallways that I fight on. I know that it's sort of restricting without an overworld map to tie the linear dungeons together, but at the same time I didn't really have to do any real grinding like I would have to in most JRPGs. Really, up until the end of the 2nd disc (chapter 10), I didn't even have too many hard fights. Fights that had gimmicks, sure (especially to earn the summons), but nothing that required me to go out and kill random enemies for hours. I suppose in some ways that I just played through 2 discs of tutorial to get to where I am now, but it was a pretty tutorial that actually did the job-- I feel really comfortable with the game at this point.

Everyone said "wait until about 30 hours in, then it opens up". This has actually been pretty true, I'm at 29 hours and 2 minutes, and I'm at the part that opens up. Story-wise, it feels a little out of place-- but it's already my favorite part of the game. It's a large over-world map section, with respawning monsters that I can see, and treasures over the map that you need to fight guys for, Missions you pick up to kill special spawns, and some giant monsters that wander around that are terrifying in scale to you. It's the best part of FF12, but in one area. I'm not 100% sure exactly how large the map is (I just got to it this morning), but I can see spending another 20 hours of so just in here killing marks for missions and leveling up my guys happily.

Completed - Ms. 'Splosion Man (Xbox 360)

2012-01-15T10:42:00.004-05:00

Now that my 360 is back up and running, I have a handful of games that I've already logged a good deal of time in. Assuming that I haven't totally forgotten what I'm doing in them, I should be able to clear some of these games out relatively quickly. Hopefully if I try and clear one or two of these partial games out each month, I should be able to have the time to also work on some of the longer games I've added.

The first of these games is Ms. 'Splosion Man, the sequel to 'Splosion Man, a game I finished in the first year of the Backlog. I didn't really talk about this game too much, because it's a straightforward 2d action game. Everything I said about 'Splosion Man could just be copied and pasted here, and it would be pretty much the same review. There are a few additions here and there, but they all seem to work the same (which is understandably going to be the case when you have two actions... move or explode). If anything I'd say that this game added so many things to the backgrounds of levels that it made it harder to see in parts. A good example is the levels where you jump on the moving crate destruction platforms, and each of the platforms is covered in crates that explode when you do. This made Ms. 'Sposion Man really hard to see if you have to jump immediately upon landing. Other than some cosmetic-based visual issues, I can't complain about any of the additions. This was a solid sequel to a solid game.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : Est. 10 hours
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 30% (60/200 Achievements)
Outside Help Used : None. Just lots of patience.
Will I play this again? : Yes. In theory I'd like to find all the Shoes, and there's always Hardcore and Multiplayer modes.

Onto Disc 2 of Final Fantasy XIII

2012-01-12T08:49:00.002-05:00

Last night I got through the rest of the first disc on FFXIII, and I think I've begun to accept the combat system for the most part. It makes sense to me if I look at it as a progression of an idea.

In most JRPGs, you would have a turn, and then you'd make a selection of what ability to use, and combat would just wait for your input. It worked, and I enjoy games that still do this-- but at the same time it's admittedly a little bit slow feeling, and is hard to make fights like this seem more action packed outside of your own imagination. So, modifications were made to make it more "interesting". Even in Final Fantasy IV, which I'm playing again now, each of the people in combat have their own action bar that allows some characters to attack more often than others, and will continue the combat going while you are looking at your combat options. There is a sense of urgency there that wasn't in the previous titles, but it still was "your dudes on one side, your opponents on the other". Tweaks happen here and there, but the next major change I noticed in the games was in FFXII.

In FFXII, all the battles are real-time, on the regular overworld map -- like in Zelda or any other action game. You no longer went to a separate combat screen. At the same time, you now don't really control anyone but your main character. Everyone else have to follow rules you have pre-designated ahead of time. At first I found this overwhelming, but after learning how it worked it made the combat much faster and more like how an MMO like World of Warcraft plays. If the overall idea was "make combat faster and more interesting", then I think FFXIII's changes make sense.

This time, you don't even have to input commands for the other people in your group ahead of time. They will make the "smartest" decision for the fight not only based on their abilities, but also based on what you have already learned about the enemy. If you know (based on using Libra or seemingly just from trial and error) that the gremlin you are fighting is weak to fire, and resistent to lightning -- your companions will attack them with fire-based abilities if they can, and will avoid lightning attacks. You switch their purpose mid-combat to meet the demands of the situation -- if you are taking a lot of damage, you can switch someone in your group to a healing function, and they will begin healing people who need it most. If you switch to a buffing role, they will start casting buffs to your party members in some sort of organized fashion. Your own character will also do this with the "autoattack" button, but I've found that picking my own attacks and setting off chains of attacks early really makes things more interesting for longer fights, and will manage to stagger enemies a little bit faster sometimes.

As a concept of making RPG combat more interesting and less monotonous, I can follow this train of thought. In the basic "input all members commands" turn based RPGs, you end up picking the same skills for people constantly. Yes, I could choose to cast a different spell other than "lightning" but that is my most efficient combat spell-- just for the sake of diversity it doesn't make sense that I would change it. Combat is this game, at least for non-boss fights, is FAST. Everyone does what you ask them to do, in a fairly efficient manner, and as long as you've selected the right roles at the right times, then a lot of combats end in a matter of seconds. The end result to me feels more like I'm picking football plays, and then playing as the QB while my team does what I've asked. I think I like that concept, at least enough to keep playing this to it's conclusion.

I don't think it's the best way to do this, and I'm pretty sure I'd rather have the game switch back to the more MMO-feel of FFXII. Still, I'm beginning to understand the combat a little more now, so it is feeling much less like "PRESS A, THE GAME". I suppose that quells most of my early fears.

iPhone has finally been replaced!

2012-01-10T09:01:00.004-05:00

I'm back to fully functioning, after replacing a hard drive, an Xbox 360, and now the iPhone. I realize that I've now paid roughly $1000 to get back to where I was, but all these things were necessities, and I conveniently received a bonus and some giftcards this Christmas that almost negate these costs. More than half of that cost was just on the iPhone, which I lost entirely by my own stupidity, but now I've learned. I turned on the phone locator, and will be constantly syncing my iPhone with my iTunes to make sure that I don't lose everything ever again.

This means that Final Fantasy Tactics will now be available for me to play again, however I will need to start over. There's 40 hours down the drain... I'll decide later if I'll count that 40 in my playtime on it. I think I should, because I did actually spend that time playing it, but I also think I'll catch back up in half that time this playthrough. It's not going to happen until I finish FFIV, which I am currently playing at work anyway. I did notice that since I lost my iPhone and now, Chronotrigger is now available on iOS... I'm going to hold off for now, since I have two games in line already, but if it goes on sale, I guarantee I will buy it immediately.

Completed - Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core (PSP)

2012-01-08T18:24:00.003-05:00

This was the first weekend of the NFL Playoffs, and as a result I didn't want to play anything on my good TV (so no more progress on FF13). Instead, since I didn't specifically care about any of the teams on Wild Card Weekend (is that a proper noun at this point?), I half-ass paid attention to them while I played the last 5 hours or so of Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core-- my current play at work selection. I knew I was near the end, because it had gotten too hard to play at work without constantly pausing the game and forgetting what I was doing mid-boss fights, which were getting increasingly longer. I decided it would just be time to plow through the rest.

FF7:CC is an action game, not a traditional turn-based RPG. I play a lot of action games, so I was able to clear the last few bosses with little to no trouble. I imagine if all I played was RPGs and then tried this I might have found it hard, but instead I think this was one of the easiest games on the Backlog. That isn't to say it wasn't fun, I think that if you split the game into halves, there was a good half, and a kind-of-boring-yet-sometimes-interesting second half.

The good half was the main story and the levels surrounding it. These levels were fairly long, and other than a few painfully boring mini-games you had to complete (the sniper gun one was awful), I thought they moved along well. This part of the game told the story leading up to Final Fantasy 7, so I was impressed that while I knew how it would end in the big picture, I still cared about Zach and was still driven to play through the story just to see what would happen. It's also pretty great that you got to see more of how Sephiroth became the enemy in 7, and didn't make it too sappy and melodramatic (well... not too badly at least).

The "meh" half was the "optional" missions. There are 300 short missions that you can take at any save point in the game, and they will reward you with new items and materia. At first, I didn't mind these, but after doing over 100 of them, I decided that I couldn't bear to go through the same 5-6 maps over and over killing random dudes. Did that mean I ended the game without the best items and missing some of the random-summons that you can earn? Sure... but it wasn't worth it to me. Like I said, I had no problem on the last couple hours of the game, every boss was attack, dodge, attack, dodge. Other than fully powered Blizzaga (ice damage) spells and defensive spells, I pretty much beat this game with my sword and a bag of potions-- but I definitely had fun doing it.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 26 hours, 39 minutes
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 35% (of the "optional" missions)
Outside Help Used : A small check on Gamefaqs because I am blind.
Will I play this again? : I'm not sure, it's definitely interesting, but I don't know if I can make myself do 100% of the optional missions, which I would have to do to make this worth playing again.

Completed - Cave Story+ (PC)

2012-01-06T23:15:00.002-05:00

First completed game of 2012!

I was finally able to just sit down for a couple hours tonight and finish Cave Story+, earning the "Normal" ending. I looked at what the "Good" ending would be, and it's done by finding certain items and skipping other items, allowing you to go to a new separate area at the end of the game that is supposed to be even harder. I would never have figured this out on my own, and I did beat the regular last boss (which was hard enough), so this is counted as beaten. Perhaps in the future I'll try for that Good ending, but perhaps I won't.

Without spoiling the ending for anyone who might want to play this, I will just say that this game had the KING of bullshit NES style end sequences, except at least I could save. FOUR boss fights, back to back, with no heals or saves in between. I don't know if I would have had the patience to keep working on this if I wasn't trying to finish this one by the end of the week. It's nice to play a game that is so unapologetic about beating my ass, since the RPGs I've been playing lately seem to just want me to beat them-- after 50+ hours. This game was fairly short -- you can apparently beat it in 2 hours-- but it's 2 hours of trying to make you miserable.

Ah, the "good old days"...

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 8 hours, 36 minutes
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 45% (34/76 Achievements)
Outside Help Used : None.
Will I play this again? : Yes. You can do a speedrun of it in like 2 hours, and I will try and get the "good" ending at some point.

"You're not having much luck with Final Fantasy lately."

2012-01-05T13:09:00.004-05:00

That's a quote from OMGJeremy, in response to a complaint I made about Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core being a bit repetitive and tedious in parts. I'm not going to disagree in general, I've been playing FF7:CC and Final Fantasy 13 lately, and my comments to him (and anyone else who will listen) have led people to believe that I'm not really enjoying them. These same people must think I'm the biggest idiot they know, since I keep buying these games despite bitching about how I find them to be in some way horrible. So, let me explain what I DO like (and a little of what I don't like) about the Final Fantasy games.

The first few Final Fantasy games are really why I even tried the other games in the series. The first Final Fantasy is nothing outstanding now, but when it was new it was the best console RPG I had ever played, and I played it non-stop. Final Fantasy IV (which would be the US part 2) was the first JRPG I played with pre-set characters, instead of an open create-a-party. As a result, it had the best story that I can remember. FFVI (US part 3) continued that trend, and was also amazing. These three games alone sold me on JRPGs as a kid, and along with the Lunar series and the Ultima series, it's really what led me to spend most of my early teen years of gaming playing RPGs.

Final Fantasy VII was the biggest RPG ever when it came out. The graphics at the time (original Playstation) were amazing, and the setting was interesting-- sort of a cyberpunk feel, but with standard fantasy cliche. I enjoyed it, but it was also the first Final Fantasy that I can recall where I felt that there was more watching the game than playing the game. Still, I liked it enough where I looked forward to part VIII. That's where I quit playing JRPGs. I hated it. I didn't even make it far. The setting was sort of lame, some sort of school where you learn to fight monsters by killing monsters for their magic, with girly looking characters, and a sword with trigger on it that still seems incredibly stupid. I will admit I didn't give it a fair chance, but that's where I stopped.

Then I played FFXII on a whim, and fell in love with them again. Since then, I've gone out and found pretty much all the games again except FFV and FFVI, and I'm pretty sure I can download FFVI for Wiiware or something when I get to that point. Even the bad ones (except 8 which I STILL haven't played enough to like) have something in them that I enjoy -- and I think I have figured out exactly what it is. The Final Fantasy games (and other JRPGs to be fair) just have a flavor of ridiculousness that I miss in some better playing RPGs (like Dragon Age or Skyrim). In both of those games, you will go out into the wild and kill skeletons, bandits, random animals, and a few other humanoid races. It's fun, but after a while you want something a little more fantastic. The Final Fantasy games deliver fantastic by the bushel.

It's a double edged (and most likely way too oversized) sword, however. Sure, it's cool that there are a larger selection of cool looking monsters to fight and weapons to find, but it's the same process that makes every character look like they belong in Cirque de Soleil. Everyone has spiky hair, tassles or other embellishments on their clothes that are not just silly looking, but would also be completely useless as armor. Every Final Fantasy becomes some ridiculous god-plot at some point-- some shlub merging with some magical spirit from eons past to become a giant killing machine that you need to stop, and you determine this has occurred through a series of long and increasingly hard-to-believe cutscenes. By the end of all of these games I could care less why I'm fighting a giant flying demon-machine-- I'm just happy that it's not ending like so many other games, with a dual-style swordfight against the comparatively realistic evil king / monster.

I like that these games at least try to do something new, even if it all feels sort of the same in the long run. All the FF games (after 7) are flashy spectacles with questionable plotlines and annoying characters, but at least they all try to tweak the formula. And, most importantly, there's no way I can guess how any of the games will really end (without getting it spoiled online), because by the end of each of the games I find myself completely unsure of why I was even in the space castle fighting off a half-angel / half-robot individual who was determined to crush me with boulders. So, even though most of these games have tedious leveling parts, I'm still driven to keep playing just to see what will happen, and watch the next flashy cutscene that is supposed to explain what is going on around me while I kill endless amounts of random monsters.

Sure, I'm probably going to end up disappointed in the logic behind all of it, but it will be fun to watch.

Final Fantasy XIII : Press 'A', the Game

2012-01-03T07:47:00.004-05:00

I'm now about 3 hours into FF13, and so far I think I've hit nothing except the A button in every single combat. I also, after 3 hours, have actually found what appears to be "the game" itself. Hopefully, I'll hit a few more buttons now.

I suppose for the people who haven't played FF13 or read anything about it (which also would have fit me a week ago), I should explain the newest combat and upgrading systems. Final Fantasy has pretty much overhauled everything in every game after 2, but since FF7 I think it's been a pretty major change each iteration of the system. In FF12, the game changed to a real-time combat system where you controlled one person and the rest of your team worked on pre-defined commands (that you defined) so that, for example, your healer would heal whoever was at 50% health automatically. It took me a little bit of getting used to, but I loved it. FF12 was also a wide-open game that reminded me of an MMO as far as the maps went.

FF13 returns back to FF10, so it's a series of tunnels with an involved story, and you fight in them. I have heard that the map opens back up, but right now it's very much a series of tunnels. The combat system is... possibly interesting, but probably terrible. You still only control 1 person out of your party, but instead of being a real-time free-moving open world combat thing like FF12 was, it's the standard JRPG combat scenario-- you get into combat and are sent to a separate screen where your team is shown on one section, and enemies on the other. But it's still sort of in real time, so if you don't act fast enough your main character will do nothing and get hit while the rest of your party does (from what I can tell) whatever they feel like.

To make the combat smoother (I guess), you can either pick each action like a standard RPG, or you can just hit A and it will automatically pick the best option for you. So... I just hit A a lot, and I won every fight. Not only that, on each fight you get a score based on completion time, from 1 star (bad) to 5 stars (awesome). I got 5 stars on every single fight so far after the first fight where I chose each command myself and fooled around-- and even on that fight I got 4 stars.

I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be fun, but so far it's an interactive movie with a story that also might be interesting, but is more likely to be convoluted and awful. Still, something is driving me to play through it, and I'm not willing to admit it might just be that it looks pretty and interesting. Not yet at least.

There is no way I'll finish Final Fantasy XIII in a week though, so I'm also focusing on a game that I should finish by the end of the upcoming weekend. I'm back to playing Cave Story+, a classic style sidescroller. I'm now currently shooting around a labyrinth that I was sent to as a curse, and the difficulty has definately increased from the beginning. It's nice to play a game that is this unforgiving, since so far FF13 might not even qualify as a game.

Backlog+3 : Final Fantasy 13, 4, and Deus Ex.

2012-01-02T12:00:00.002-05:00

I was unavailable to update this since Friday, because I had late Christmas with the in-laws all New Years Eve weekend. As a result, I've got 3 new additions to the Backlog. Amazingly enough, only one of these was a gift to me (which means I bought the other two like an idiot). The gift was Dues Ex : Human Revolution for PC. It was on sale on Steam, and my buddy Moday bought it for me. It got good reviews, and OMGJeremy recommended it, so I guess I'm happy to add it to the pile.

The games I bought myself were purchased with a gift card I received from my parents, but since I probably should have bought clothes I can't really count them as gifts technically. I bought Final Fantasy XIII for the 360, and Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection for the PSP. I'm not really sure why I felt I needed to buy these two games-- it's not like I didn't already have loads of games to playthrough. I can almost blame FFIV as my replacement Play-At-Work selection, except that I'm still playing through FF7: Crisis Core at work right now, and have a lot left to do in that game.

In any event, this pushes my starting number for 2012 to 43 games. I'm going to need to aim to complete a game a week just to make this even close to possible. I'm not even sure I can make that happen in this first week...

Backlog++ : Dawn of War 2 (PC)

2011-12-29T09:28:00.003-05:00

The Steam Sale strikes yet again! For roughly $20, I grabbed Dawn of War 2 and both the expansions. I couldn't resist... because if nothing else this blog has proven that I have little to no self-control.

Dawn of War 2 is a Real-Time Strategy game, but based in the world of Warhammer 40,000. As I have mentioned more than a few times, that is a background I am very familiar with, and find myself drawn to. I haven't played a lot of RTS games during the Backlog period, and that's because for the most part I don't enjoy them. Starcraft might be the last RTS I really spent a load of time on, and eventually all of those games devolve into rushes where the person who makes the fewest mistakes wins. It can be argued that this is exactly what makes these games competitive and interesting, but for me it gets boring fast.

I hadn't even played an RTS after Warcraft 3, until I found the original Dawn of War for cheap someplace and figured it might be a solid substitute for the tabletop game that I'll most likely never play again. It ended up being a far better game, based on the rules and backgrounds of WH40K, but with a much faster gameplay. While I never bothered with the multiplayer, I really liked the flavor and feel of the game.

I don't know much about Dawn of War 2, except that it got generally positive reviews and that I liked the original Dawn of War. I won't get a chance to play it until after New Year's Day (I have houseguests staying in my office / guestroom until then), but I'm looking forward to it. Only a few more days of this damnable Steam sale...

Backlog +3 : From Dust, and some crap I don't want

2011-12-27T08:58:00.002-05:00

Last night I finally went out and got a replacement for my failed Xbox 360. The deciding factor was that I will be doing the P90X yet again after the new year starts, and my old 360 was the only DVD player we had downstairs. That argument (along with my constant whining) convinced my wife that I should run out and get an Xbox immediately.

I bought the 250 gig 360 without a Kinect, because that was what was in stock in Target and that's where I had giftcards to use. I can find the Kinect online for cheaper than the $129 or whatever it costs, and I want the one that comes with Gunstringer if I get one, so not getting the $400 one with the Kinect is fine (for now...). Anyway, the Xbox came with two "Free" games, Fable III and Halo Reach. Both of these games are sequels to games I really could care less about. Fable II is still sitting on my backlog because I found it to be relatively mindless and boring, so I had no interest in Fable III. Halo has always been a series that I played because everyone swore by it, and while I've finished Halo 1,2, and 3, I find them to be sort of repetitive and boring, with levels full of multicolored versions of the same three guys. So, yay, I get to add two more games to the Backlog that I don't even like.

From Dust was bought on the increasingly painful daily Steam Sales, and while buying even one game is detrimental to the Backlog, every day I need to fight the urge to buy things because they're SO CHEAP. For example, I almost bought Batman : Arkham Asylum for $5, and Overlord II for $2.50. I didn't. I might someday regret that, but for now I've got 39 games staring me in the face. I've got my work cut out for me with Year 3 of the Backlog without them.

Backlog Year 2 ends.

2011-12-26T16:51:00.003-05:00

I started this blog after Christmas 2009, and for the year ending at Christmas 2010, I'd managed to beat 43/70 games. It's not what I set out to do (which would be 100% beaten), but it was still probably 42 more games than I had finished any other year in recent memory. At the end of last year, I put up my year end stats, and thought I would be able to beat the remaining 27 games on the backlog plus whatever new things I picked up in 2011.

Not even close.

Not only did I manage to not beat most of the remaining 27 games, but I purchased 26 new titles in 2011. As of Christmas Day 2011, I have beaten 17 games, and now have 36 in my remaining backlog. I have completed -9 games overall this year. That's not how it's supposed to work. I have my hourly stats, but again-- this only includes games I've beaten, not works in progress that have sizable time amounts on them such as Skyrim or the (still undefeated) Monster Hunter Tri.

2011 Played hours on Backlog : 428.25
2011 Played hours on World of Warcraft : 590
Total hours of gaming in 2011 : 1018.25
Average daily hours of gaming : 2.79 hours per day

This is not too drastically different from last year, except I've played about 2/3 of the amount of time less on the Backlog itself, and another 170 hours worth of WoW. Overall, I've spent about 30 less minutes per day gaming in 2011, but I think that's been drastically skewed by the last quarter of the year. From October to present, due to the birth of my son and the following period where I get no sleep or any free time, I've really only played Skyrim, Civ V, and a couple nights of WoW. Add in that I lost an iPhone with a 45+ hour game of Final Fantasy Tactics, and a fried 360 that is still not replaced, and there's a lot of partially finished games that were stopped prematurely.

Anyway, Year 3 of the Backlog will start soon, and I will be starting with 36 games staring at me in the face already, and a very tempting slate of daily Steam discounts I will need to fight. I see that Bulletstorm is only $4.99 today... oh boy. I'm doomed again.

Play at Work returns

2011-12-21T07:59:00.004-05:00

Since I lost my iPhone, I've had some major problems playing anything while at work. I was out of suitable RPGs on my handheld systems, and it would be hard to sneak a physical console into my office (although, since I have 2 monitors I would be able to make it look an awful lot like work... maybe that's a plan for 2012). As luck would have it, work had ended up being pretty busy over the last few months, but we're back sitting firmly in the slow period between Thanksgiving and the first week or so in January. Really, if our clients are all on vacation, we don't have much to do but look busy. I'm really good at that.

As a result, I was looking at my remaining DS/PSP games to see if I had anything that might work for short burst gaming while I am in my office waiting around for anything to happen. I have decided to try playing a Final Fantasy 7 : Crisis Core because it has enough slower exploration parts, and it pauses during the action scenes so that I won't miss anything when someone catches me not working and I have to hide the PSP for 30 minutes.

I bought Crisis Core well before the backlog started. I'm pretty sure I grabbed it for some trip to Maine or Florida, and it seemed like a no-brainer at the time. It's a Final Fantasy, in the same universe as FF7-- a game that was a little overrated, but at the same time was the last Final Fantasy I had even liked at that point in time. I played it for a total of two hours that trip, because I immediately didn't like it. It wasn't what I expected at all, and what it is I didn't have the patience then to really try to understand.

I should have done a little more research (or any research) beforehand, because while this is a Final Fantasy game, it's not a traditional one by any means. It's really a solo player (not party-based) action game with some RPG elements thrown in. To make it worse, it's Square Enix RPG elements, so it's not just leveling or equipment-- instead it has to be bizarre. In this case, all your leveling is done via a constantly spinning slot machine deal that sometimes makes you level materia, or yourself, or causes what would be a limit break (super strong attack), or gives you extra defense or immunity. I still don't understand why this is supposed to be a fun mechanic, but maybe it's the gambler in me, but I'm not completely angered by it. Random powerups at random times seems like the worst idea in gaming history, but here it sort of works-- or I just accept it.

So far, I've gotten farther in the last day or so than I have before. I think it's from playing so many sub-par games over the last 2 years, but I'm liking this game a lot more than the first time I tried it. I also went into it this time with more understanding of what I would be looking for, so that could be it as well. So far, I've just done a couple main story missions, and some optional quests. I remember there was a lot of optional feeling things to do last time I played this, so we'll see how long this holds my interest before things get busy enough at work that I have to stop obviously playing action games here.

Backlog++ : Dead Island (PC)

2011-12-20T07:13:00.002-05:00

Yet another yule log on the fires. Of backlog. Or an Endless fire? I don't know where I'm going with this, but the end result is that I have again fallen victim to my own lack of self-control and purchased Dead Island for myself because it was 50% off on Steam.

I remember when the trailers came out for this game, and while it did look like "oh man, not another zombie game", the promises of open world zombie survival missions was still tempting. When the game actually released, the reviews were good, but not great, and I pushed it off until it was a little bit cheaper. Well, $20 was too cheap to fight.

So far, I've just played the intro mission and then beat some zombies to death on the sand with a paddle. Then, I talked to a bunch of people and got some missions. This does appear to be GTA with a bunch of zombies. It's exactly what I expected. Sometimes that is a good thing.

Backlog+4 : Goddamn Steam Sales...

2011-12-12T10:08:00.002-05:00

Everyday in December leading up to Christmas, Steam is having some pretty insane deals on games. I can't resist some of these things, so since my last update I realize that I've impulse bought a handful of games. Sure, the total cost is around $20, but it's still 4 more games I've added on. I added :

Cave Story+ -- a 2d platformy game that looks like it would have fit in well in the TG-16 library. This screams that I should buy it. I did.

Borderlands -- A friend of mine online wanted to play a co-op game with me, and conveniently the "Get the game and all the expansions!" special was $7.50. No brainer.

Bastion -- If my xbox hadn't have died when it did, I'd have paid $15 for this months ago. Instead, I paid $4.99, and I didn't have to buy a new 360 (yet).

Orcs Must Die! -- Total impulse purchase, in retrospect I might not have needed this, but it was $3.74. $3.74!!! I still haven't even tried it.

Only another 13 days until Xmas, so let's see how many more games I can clog up my computer with. Steam is a dangerous friend to have, when you still have 30+ games you're trying to beat, and have increasingly less time available to play anything anyway...

Completed - Civilization V (PC)

2011-12-02T20:26:00.002-05:00

Lately I haven't had a lot of time to game, as is evident by this blog's lack of updates. This is because I now have a kid, and all my free time is apparently gone forever. I wasn't really going to post about it at all, but since the only people who read this know me-- I'm pretty sure that it's already public knowledge.

I've been off work as well for the last week and a half, and while I don't have much time to play anything (and can't play anything where I won't be able to pause the game or just stop playing in a moments notice), I have managed to find a game I can just leave on my PC and play a couple minutes here and there. It's also conveniently a game I can play with one hand while I'm holding a sleeping baby, and not really screw everything up (I've tried Skyrim, but I couldn't even work on blacksmithing).

So yeah, I finally played around with Civ V enough to figure out what I was doing wrong this whole time. It's a slow game. It's not a military strength game. I was treating it like an RTS, just building military units as fast as I can and charging at random cities. That is a guaranteed recipe for failure, I learned. Instead I had to really just slow down and think about things. This was a hard lesson to learn.

It took me a couple years, but I finally won a game tonight. I was India, and I won by outscoring the other empires in the year 2050. I was almost finished with a rocketship as well, but I would have needed another 10 or so turns. I'm not done playing this, by any means-- but now I've played it to a successful ending so I can count this one off the Backlog.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : I have no idea. Since reinstalling Steam and the hard drive failure, it says 15 hours. That's probably just this game.
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 14% (24/176 Achievements)
Outside Help Used : None.
Will I play this again? : Yes. To be honest, I can see only playing this for 2012 and still having lots left to do.

Well... that's a way to stop playing Skyrim.

2011-11-22T07:33:00.002-05:00

Hard drive failure. Fun. I should have a working computer again in the next day or so-- I can't wait indefinately like I have been for the 360. However, I'm afraid I've lost all my files, like the 20+ hour Skyrim save I've spent the last week working on. Oh well, if I have to start over, maybe I won't throw my upgrade points around like an asshole this time.

So, at this moment I have a broken Xbox 360, I have lost my iPhone, and now my computer will not boot. I'm almost afraid to play anything else. I don't even know if a DS can spontaneously combust-- but if it can, I bet it will happen while I'm playing Phantom Hourglass. Since that's one of my working systems, I have been playing that on and off over the last few days, and I'm now farther in it than I've ever made it before on a playthrough. Funfact : It isn't all that far. The world map (ocean map) is split into 4 sections, and I still only have the first two. However, after beating the Ghost Ship that I'm fairly certain my previous playthrough was stalled at, I'm now being sent to find the next piece of the map.

It feels good to get a little bit farther on this after owning it since it came out, but it's still not a game I particularly enjoy. I mean, it's a Zelda game, so it's got an innate set of features that I will undoubtedly enjoy. I can guarantee that there will be dungeons where I will find a weapon, and that weapon will undoubtedly be how I defeat the boss of that same dungeon. I will have a large map of secrets to find, possibly by moving a rock, or (as has been the case here) digging by a tree. All the things that define a Zelda game are here to assure me that is what I am, in fact, playing.

However, as the first DS Zelda game, it's really trying to use all the components of that system-- and as is the case with most gimmicky Nintendo gadgets, it works, but really doesn't actually add anything useful to the equation. I have to move around with the stylus touchscreen. Why can't I just move with the D-pad? It doesn't actually do anything to help the game, and when I have fine movements to make I would argue that it actually makes it worse. There have been a few parts where I had to yell, blow, or snap into the microphone to make things occur-- things that should just happen without forcing me to yell into a plastic rectangle and embarassing myself. This game makes full use of the Nintendo DS' odds and ends, but ultimately all those things just make me want to play a Zelda game not on the DS.

Periodic list of things I'm partially through, again.

2011-11-15T08:55:00.005-05:00

I haven't done this for a while, and just so I can keep track of this crap -- here's all the games I'm partially through. I'm going to just skip talking about any 360 games I'm midway through, since I don't have a working 360 to play them... yet. That will probably change soon. (FFTactics will not be mentioned, since the iPhone is gone long-term, and I'd prefer not to think about it again.)

Skyrim (PC) - It's the newest addition to the Backlog, and the one I spent the last post talking about. I just made it to a monastery on a mountain where I'm being taught how to yell. It's much more awesome than it sounds.

Bioshock (PC) - After grabbing it for $5 on a Steam sale, I have been playing this an hour or so at a time every couple days. It's yet another example of "Jeremy plays a game everyone loved-- about 3 years after they do."

Legend of Zelda : Phantom Hourglass (DS) - I've had this game since pre-Backlog, and I've started playing this about 6 times since. I always forget where I am, what I'm doing, and how to control everything with the touchscreen -- so I start over. I've just started my 7th restart, and hopefully I'll be able to follow through on this.

Amnesia : The Dark Descent (PC) - I bought this to have something creepy to play around Halloween, and I did get what I asked for. However, it really does need to be played in the dark with the sound way up, and I need to be alone. I don't get a lot of time truly alone. I will continue to play this one when I get the chance to truly appreciate it.

Monster Hunter Tri (Wii) - I actually made some progress on this since the previous Backlog list. I've gotten to the last tier of missions, and I think I'm actually relatively close to the end of the single player story mode. I might finally be done with this-- if I can force myself to play the Wii more.

I think this is what I will spend the next month and a half playing when I have a few minutes to myself. The only new game I really want is the new Zelda : The Skyward Sword game, but I think I can hold out for 2012 (or Christmas 2011... hint, hint) to grab that. I've got Skyrim to play.

"My weekend in Tamriel", by Jeremy P.

2011-11-13T10:33:00.003-05:00

Friday was Veterans Day, and so I had the day off. Conveniently, this was also the day that The Elder Scrolls V : Skyrim was released. I had originally planned on spending all day trying to finish up some other games in an effort to hold out on buying it, but I ended up at Target buying winter hats. Long (and boring) story short, I "accidentally" somehow ended up walking out with not only a winter hat that makes me look slightly penis-like, but my first-day copy of Skyrim for the PC. After installing and patching it, I got to play maybe an hour or so of Skyrim on Friday -- but it was enough to get me hooked already.

I made my character and played through the introductory section, which despite being a "learn to play" section was actually quite fun. I then headed for the nearest town and immediately noticed how much has been streamlined from Oblivion to make this game much less unwieldy. You no longer have to pick a pre-designed class -- simply level any skills and you will level. The crafting is also much easier to figure out, although you will need to venture into towns to actually make your items -- just head to the nearest blacksmith to upgrade your weapons and armor, or find an alchemists table to make potions. I am willing to give up the ability to make potions anywhere, if overall it's much easier to figure out what ingredients actually do. I really didn't get to do a whole lot on Friday other than skim the surface of everything.

Saturday was a much more fruitful day, since I was home alone for about 4 hours -- but other than going to get lunch and dinner, I managed to spend most of my time awake yesterday wandering around in the world of Tamriel. I know I've mentioned this several times, but this year has been "Jeremy P rediscovers the PC gaming for more than WoW", and this was probably the final step in that journey. Because my 360 is still kaput (and I'm not buying a PS3 until The Last Guardian releases), I decided to get this for the PC despite not really thinking my machine could handle it. Thankfully I was wrong. This game is running super smooth, with the exception of the occasional pauses in the overworld to load (which are pretty much mentioned in every review of this game, so at least it's not my machine). Honestly, I don't mind them, they are fairly infrequent, and have not happened to me at all in any dungeons / keeps / caves.

Speaking of dungeons, etc., much like in Oblivion, the dungeon atmosphere is where this game delivers everything I'd want in an action RPG. I've been sneaking through caverns trying to root out bandits, hitting them with a well-placed arrow from the darkness, and then pulling out my greatsword to finish off anyone who survives. I'm picking locks, setting off traps (the smart way-- most of the time), learning a few spells, finding treasures... This is pretty much exactly what I want in an RPG. Oblivion did this really well, but Skyrim so far has done everything a little bit better than the previous titles.

I've been playing some other things too... I suppose this means I should write a general "where I am" update again soon. But for now, I've got some dragons to kill.

Backlog++ : The Elder Scrolls V : Skyrim (PC)

2011-11-11T17:27:00.001-05:00

So I bought Skyrim today. I have no impulse control.

Backlog+2 : Bioshock & Bioshock 2 (PC)

2011-11-01T09:21:00.002-04:00

Steam had a pretty great sale for Halloween, and I grabbed both Bioshock 1 & 2 for PC for $5 each. Both of those games are ones that I knew I had to play eventually, and at that price, I couldn't resist. I don't know how many more games I will be adding this year to the Backlog, but I would bet that it's going to be as close to 0 as I can possibly make it.

In iPhone / Final Fantasy Tactics news -- I have decided not to get a new iPhone at the moment. I'd have to pay $599 for an iPhone 4 and even more for a 4S, or wait a year and a half until my 2 year plan is up to get one for the $99+ price range. I've hooked one of my old non-smart phones back up for now, and I might have an old Droid coming to me from a family member, but neither of those will be able to play Tactics. I need to decide -- in this situation, do I remove this game fully from the Backlog, or do I just put it on a permanent hold?

Final Fantasy Tragedy

2011-10-25T08:06:00.002-04:00

This past weekend, I ran (or to at the very least walked with conviction) the Tough Mudder at Wintergreen Resort, VA. I had tried and failed the Tough Mudder once before, and so this was my chance to redeem myself. I did complete it this time, and I don't feel quite as sore and ruined as I did last time either. The weekend would have been awesome if it wasn't for a disaster that is even worse than my current RROD situation with my 360.

I lost my iPhone.

This could have just been a minor inconvenience if I had done any of the following : Synced my iPhone with my computer anytime recently. Downloaded iOS5 so that all my stuff was saved to the cloud. Downloaded that "locate my phone" app. Purchased the replacement guarantee from Verizon.

I, of course, did none of these things-- so losing my phone means that I lost all my contact information, all those photos I took of my nutsack, and all my game saves. The games themselves can be re-downloaded for free, but the saves? Gone. This means the 40+ hours that I put into Tactics is completely gone. There is no chance of retreival. The rest of the things on there pale in comparison to this loss.

Backlog++ : Amnesia The Dark Descent (PC)

2011-10-18T08:10:00.003-04:00

It's two weeks until Halloween, and looking at the Backlog (and recalling that I still haven't replaced my 360), I don't have anything remotely Halloween-y to play. I've always liked the Silent Hill style psychological horror games more than the Resident Evil style in your face zombie action games, but I really have neither of those to play at the moment. After doing 20 seconds of online research, I have gotten loads of recommendations to try Amnesia : The Dark Descent for the PC. Conveniently, Steam has it for download. I know nothing about it, except that it has been reported to be "creepy". Now I just need to find a few hours alone in my house at night to get into it. Perhaps I will get to do some of that tonight.

I don't know if you've been watching American Horror Story, but I have. If you haven't been watching it, I highly recommend getting into it now. It's been reminding me of both Twin Peaks and the best Twin Peaks ripoff videogame/wondermess Deadly Premonition. Ever since I finished Deadly Premonition last year, I can't get it out of my head. It wasn't a good game in a direct sense. The controls were awkward, the side missions and optional content were poorly put together, and some of the gameplay concepts like "Real Time casual driving!" were absolutely mind-numbing. However, the storyline, characters, and just the general feeling of weirdness that filled this mundane little town-- all of it just keeps rolling around in my head. I think once I get my 360 back, I'm going to play that immediately.

Completed - Portal 2 (PC)

2011-10-16T12:10:00.002-04:00

That was quick, although since I posted about Portal 2 on Thursday morning, I've pretty much been home sick and quarantined in my office. It's pretty easy to focus your free time when you're just well enough to sit in a chair.

I finished the Story Mode single player game in just under 8 hours (which is about twice as long as the original took me). This game basically took the concepts of the original game and really took everything up a notch. You can make portals in some surfaces that allow you to warp around the room. There are buttons you must press to open doors or create stairs, and there are boxes you can lift around and use them to hold those buttons down. One thing that was added was three different colored oozes that will allow you to jump higher, run faster, or make walls portal-friendly that otherwise wouldn't allow you to make portals on them. From a mechanics point, this was a definite improvement on an already solid game.

The story itself this time was what really shined for me, and kept me coming back to the repetitive puzzles. That sounds like a complaint, but it's just the nature of any puzzle game. Normally I would play a couple puzzles, and then take a break, come back, do more puzzles... but in this game, I really wanted to see what would happen next. Sure, you're the only person around-- much like in the first game-- but the robots have a lot more personality, and you get to delve into the past of Aperture Science Company, which felt like it could have fit in perfectly in the Fallout 3 universe. Maybe I just like urban decay and modern-day ruins.

There is a separate co-op campaign that I would like to play through at some point, but that will require finding someone else who feels the same way and didn't already play it... so for now, this game is complete.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 7 hours, 30 minutes
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 31% (16/51 Achievements)
Outside Help Used : None.
Will I play this again? : I can't see playing the single player again, except MAYBE the challenge rooms. Co-op, however, would be worth playing.

Backlog++ : Portal 2 (PC)

2011-10-13T11:43:00.002-04:00

Since I bought Space Marine a few weeks ago, which required Steam to play, I have spent a lot of time on my PC. While I was playing Space Marine, I happened to notice how great the weekly Steam sales were. Most of these I've been able to avoid, but I saw that Portal 2 was on sale for $15 (50% off). I couldn't resist-- I loved the first Portal, beating it pre-Backlog (which is saying something). However, as is painfully obvious by now, I have purchase impulse control. While I have been able to avoid buying XBLA games this whole time that I have been without a working 360... Steam is constantly calling to me. It pops ads up that tell me what awesome games are on sale. Dangerous.

I added a Steam Sigbar to the top of the page a couple weeks ago as well, which seemed like a good idea at the time, although I have gotten some complaints that it's a little big. I'm looking at a reformat soon-- nothing too major, just something that looks slightly less ugly and has a much smaller title graphic. However, the Steam bar currently (as of 10/13/11 at 11:50am) shows that I've been playing The Binding of Isaac, which is a game that is not listed on the Backlog. I wasn't hiding any games that would qualify -- as you may recall there is a list of rules I follow for this thing, and while The Binding of Isaac is indeed a fun game, it does not meet the criteria. It has no real end-- it's a roguelike, so the levels are random, the bosses are random, and it has literally infinite replayability. I "beat" the game after a couple hours, but that won't stop me from playing it again and again.

Actually, I've got a handful of things on Steam via the Humble Indie Bundle (a collection of independant games that you paid "whatever you wanted for them") that may show up there from time to time as well. They are short action games, and most of them were picked up because it was a charity thing and again-- no impulse control. I also grabbed Blood Bowl for $8 so that I could play against my friend Tony, but it's a sports game at it's core, so it won't count via Rule #1.

Anyway, back to the point, I bought Portal 2. After playing it for an hour or so last night, it's wonderful, and well worth the $15 I paid for it.

Completed - Warhammer 40K : Space Marine (PC)

2011-10-05T17:15:00.002-04:00

It's been a long, dry month or so for completions-- actually, it's been exactly a month since I last finished a game. However, tonight I finished the single player mode of Warhammer 40K : Space Marine. It's the first shooter I've played in a long time, possibly since I forced myself through Halo 3, but it has definitely gotten me interested in Rage and other upcoming shooters I would have ignored before.

If you aren't into the whole Warhammer 40K universe, then I don't know if this game would be anything more than "every other 3d action shooter". I had to fight a nearly endless supply of orks and the forces of chaos over 17 levels of ruined city, using walls and boxes as cover and otherwise letting my guns and the occasional melee frenzy to solve all my problems. There are no puzzles. The levels aren't mazes as much as they are glorified tunnels. The end fight, while long and involved, quickly degenerated into a QTE. All in all, if this was called "Star Marine : I shoot Orcs!", I don't know how much attention I would have given it.

However, if you are into the Warhammer 40K universe, it's pretty solid. I used to play a lot of their tabletop mini games (and truth be told, if I knew other people who were still into it and had any sort of free time anymore-- I probably still would be), and I was always an Ork player. My friend Perry used to play Space Marines and Imperial Guard, and I always liked the Space Marine look and the darkness of their background, despite being "the good guys"-- in comparison, the Orks were like an extremely dangerous circus. This game really sucked me back into that time, and even if the game wasn't all that inventive, it's been a while since an action shooter held my interest at all.

This was the first real PC gaming I've done other than simple flash games or World of Warcraft in quite a long time, and looking at how Steam knocks things on sale constantly, I think it's the beginning of my rediscovery of my computer as a tool for more than Warcraft and/or porn.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 9 hours, per Steam
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 48% (24/50 Achievements)
Outside Help Used : None.
Will I play this again? : Totally. I really want to play PVP in this (although I expect it will be endless frustration), and will pick up any extra single player content that shows up.

I apparently spoke too soon...

2011-09-29T07:56:00.002-04:00

After I mentioned that I was only fighting Orks -- I'm now fighting against the forces of Chaos as well. Spoilers, I guess.

End of September, or close enough.

2011-09-28T07:43:00.002-04:00

I haven't posted often in the past few months, but I think that's due to not having a 360 or really much time to play anything. I bought some new furniture, and have loaded my past few months with every weekend trip imaginable while I can still leave without a load of guilt, but this is my gaming blog so none of that would have been worth posting here. Um... in World of Warcraft, my guild has more or less fallen apart, but the 10 man I'm in (that I'm pretty sure 100% of are in now or have been in previously) is finally making some progression in Firelands-- just Ragnaros left, and I'm 23/25 Embers towards the next phase in the legendary caster staff I am determined to complete before this expansion ends. So I've still had time for a little bit of that.

On the occasional weeknight when I get an hour or two to myself, I've been playing through the single player campaign of Warhammer 40K : Space Marine. So far, I really like it, but it's very much "shooter by numbers". For example, despite looking like an old ruined citadel (which is every Warhammer 40K game I've ever played), there have still been plenty of tunnels and hallways that I will run through while shooting everyone like in every shooter ever. I unlock new abilities every couple levels, despite being some sort of Sargeant with years of experience. I've also fought a nearly endless supply of orks who have two tactics : run at me yelling, or shooting at me from behind cover. Last night, I got to a level where I'm the gunner on an airship, shooting at orks with rockets strapped to their back (admittedly, a very orky way to travel).

However, I haven't played a standard shooter in a long time, and ignoring that all shooters boiled down are the same exact game, the flavor and atmosphere of this game is close to perfect. I should be running through a ruined and abandoned planet fighting orks with a chainsword. I want to feel like a one man kililng machine-- I am a Space Marine afterall. Really, my only hope / complaint is that so far I'm only fighting Orks. There's a wealth of other things to fight in the Warhammer 40k universe, like the forces of Chaos, Eldar, Tyranids, Necrons, even that Tau race that I know nothing about because they came out right as I stopped paying attention to the minis. I hope that there's more planned in this line, because I would buy all of them. I hope even more that it would be some sort of DLC that I can not pay $60 for. I haven't played any multiplayer yet, because I am a sissy and hate losing to 8 year olds.

Otherwise, I've had little to no time to play anything at home. However, I have 0.03 giveafux left at my job, so I've been playing Final Fantasy Tactics pretty much for half the day, every day, since I picked it up. At first I got a little overwhelmed with the options presented to me, especially since I don't have the patience for the interactive tutorial in the game. I spent an hour on it, and was only maybe 5% through it... so I just winged it and started out more or less blindly. After 20 hours of gameplay, I've finally started figuring out what jobs require previous jobs, and I have recruited a bunch of people that I don't really use, since my core party of 5 people is who I keep upgrading. I've also got about 6 chocobos that I can use, but again-- my actual party members are stronger, so why would I use them?

At this point, my main party is prety well rounded, but I still end up having some trouble in the story-progressing fights. The random encounters are simple enough most of the time (unless I get my black/time mage charmed, and he blasts apart my whole party), but then you get to the story missions and I get torn apart. I am enjoying the challenge, but sometimes it's frustrating to lose a battle at the last second because your debuff spells fail to hit the enemy time and time again. I think the solution is to go out and level more-- but since I didn't read the tutorial I'm not really sure. I completely see why the younger me didn't have the patience for this game when it was new, but now that I have time to focus on a slower game like this while I'm forced to sit at a desk, I can see that it's worth the praise it's recieved over the years.

Backlog++ : Warhammer 40K Space Marine

2011-09-15T07:18:00.002-04:00

Since my 360 is still down and out (and I'm not really sure when I'm going to feel like I should drop $400 on a new one-- with a Kinect that will sit unused forever), I've done something I haven't done in years. I have paid full price for a PC game that wasn't World of Warcraft. Sure, I have Civ V sitting on the Backlog, but that was a gift. A gift that I suck at. However, over the past few months I'd been looking at Space Marine, and after seeing mostly positive reviews and some intriguing gameplay videos of it-- I decided to break my "Action Games are for Consoles" rule and see what this expensive video card can do other than just fight electric dragons.

So far, I don't regret this purchase. After a little bit of video option juggling to figure out why certain things were flickering in the background, I got to spend about an hour last night pretty much smashing orcs in the face. It was exactly what I was hoping for. The introductory / tutorial level is actually fun, and short. It took maybe 15 minutes to get through, and after it was over I had a pretty good handle on the controls. During that whole 15 minutes I learned how to destroy a bunch of orcs with my combat knife, including the finishing moves that inexplicably heal you, and took out an orc warship single handedly. Now I'm on the second chapter, which is in a gothic looking ruined city, which is every single scenario of Warhammer 40K ever played by mankind.

I've been a fan of the Games Workshop properties forever (I still have boxes of unpainted minis to prove it), and this game seems to have captured the feel of those games while providing me with a fast action game. I liked the Dawn of War series, and as you may recall, last year I beat the PSP Warhammer 40K Squad Command game, but this is the first pure action game that I've played in their universe. So far, it's solid, and it's making me re-evaluate my stance against playing games on my computer. Well, that and having 360 withdrawal.

Backlog++ : Final Fantasy Tactics : The War of the Lions (iPhone)

2011-09-05T20:36:00.002-04:00

... and so I must immediately fill my iPhone with another game that will take me even longer to complete.

To be honest, this was the game I was looking for when I bought FF3, but Tactics hadn't actually come out yet. Now that I've finished FF3, I will move onto FFTactics as my current play at work title, and I've also got a 4 hour car ride each way to Atlantic City this weekend ,so I'll be playing a little of this on the way I'm sure too.

Completed - Final Fantasy III (iPhone)

2011-09-05T20:17:00.003-04:00

I haven't gotten a chance to play too much lately between trips out of town, losing power for a couple days to a hurricane, and my still RROD'd 360. In the little bit of time I've found to play anything, I was grinding a little bit in the last (extremely long) dungeon area of Final Fantasy III until I was finally able to narrowly beat the last boss. In fact, it might be the narrowest victory I've had in a long time. I had only one person in my party left standing, my Dark Knight, and he only had a couple hundred HPs left. I had one chance to attack before the next incoming attack was guaranteed to kill me. I got a critical hit, and the boss went down. It was pretty great, and I know I yelled out in relief afterwards in a room full of people who just thought I was checking my email again. I'm sure they just thought it was a really good email, like finding out that I'm HIV negative or something.

I need to disclose that I might have done something that maybe could be seen as cheating. During one of my numerous death marches to the final boss on this game, my iphone ran out of power enough where it just turned off until I could charge it. When this occurred, I noticed that when I came back in, the autosave feature put me right before the final boss fight, which I was previously horribly losing. I tested out my theory, and it turns out that if you are in the middle of a fight and turn your phone off, you will end up somewhere right before that fight started when you continue. I might have used this a handful of times on the last boss on the run where I beat her.

If this makes me a cheater, then I'll accept it, but I had my (probably flimsy) reasons for doing so. First off, from the point where you enter the last castle, fight 5 bosses and their own areas, and then fight the last boss, it takes about two hours of in-game time to get there. After losing to her a handful of times and making that journey each time, the idea that I could more or less "save" my progress by a shady iPhone trick got very tempting. So, I used it... probably 2 times on my attempts before I finally took her down, and by pretty much the narrowest margin possible. Cheater? Possibly... but if so I'm an honest cheater, if that makes any sense.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 35:59 on game save, but that doesn't include the 2 hour section before the last boss. Rounding up to 40 hours, but that's probably too low.
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : I have no idea how to average this. 84% of monsters encountered, 81% of chests opened, 0/23 master cards obtained.
Outside Help Used : None.
Will I play this again? : If I've learned nothing else during this Backlog blog, it's that I love a good JPRG every once and a while, and this being on iPhone will make this an easy option for flights / car rides / work.

Final Fantasy III update-- or maybe the first time I've really mentioned that I'm playing it.

2011-08-24T14:05:00.002-04:00

I haven't written a whole lot about Final Fantasy III, mainly because I haven't really updated this blog all that much, and because there wasn't a whole lot to say. It's an old-NES era RPG, so it's "wander through dungeons, kill stuff, gain levels, kill bigger stuff" for the most part. However, I'm close to the end of the game now, and after about 30 hours of this game I can finally say a little bit more about what I like about this game.

First off, this is actual Final Fantasy III, not the US Super Nintendo game (which is actually FF6)-- just to clarify if you don't understand why this doesn't match your memories of FF3 US. This FF3 didn't come out here until way later in some Final Fantasy compilations or something that I didn't play, and so it being on the iPhone perfectly matched my needs for a new RPG on the iPhone that I could play at work.

FF3 is the game int he series that introduced the Jobs feature, which I remembered from Final Fantasy Tactics (which coincidentally is also on the iPhone now and will probably be grabbed after I finish this). The short version of Jobs is that every character in the game starts as a blank slate, and as you progress through the game (collecting blessings from giant crystals), you will earn new Jobs. Jobs are essentially fighter types, caster types, or pretty much any standard fantasy RPG class like Bards or Rangers. Not only do you get to pick who a character is, but you can change them around as often as you'd like throughout the game. The more often you use a specific Job with a specific character, the better off that character is at that Job.

At the end of the game, I've unlocked all 23 Jobs (including the "hidden" Onion Knight) and I've played around with roughly half of them. At this point in the game, I'm using a Dragoon (aggressive fighter), Summoner (Final Fantasy staple), a Devout (healer), and a Dark Knight (aggressive fighter that can syphon his own life to damage all enemies). I'm at the last area in the game, and I really want to fool with the other classes. Much like the original Final Fantasy, I can see myself playing through this over and over with different classes, so I think I'm going to go ahead and plow through the last area. I've got a good deal of road trips and such coming up over the next couple months, so I'll definitely have time to do so.

I think I'm finally getting this now-- and it only took me a year.

2011-08-22T08:24:00.005-04:00

Back from a well-needed vacation with no games (except the iPhone), and so I return as well to Monster Hunter Tri.

I think I've finally understood some of the pieces of this game that I've sort of just written off as "you'll figure this out later" up until now. First off, combining items / tradeskills. Weapons and armor are made by the actual smith in town, but I really had only been using my combination skills to make health potions. I finally took the time to just start combining stuff in my item storage this past weekend and now I have something like 30 different recipes for not just a useful array of potions, but also some simple tools like bug-nets and pick-axes, and a series of bombs and traps to help make capturing monsters actually a concievable task again. Now I'm going back through all the old areas and really scavenging materials to see what else I can make. Sure, it's all available online if I really just wanted it spelled out-- but I actually enjoy finding this stuff out as I go.

Now that I understand combining a little more, I'm able to really appreciate my fleet and my farming areas, which formerly I just sort of ignored other than to grow herbs to mkae health potions. The fleet will go out and find items that I can sell for resource points (which are used to grow my village and farms) and occasionally some rare trade materials. The farms will grow plants or harvest bugs for me, so that I don't have to go out and manually farm herbs, mushrooms, honey, and a large array of other plants or bugs that I can use to make bombs and potions. Using the fleet and farms allows me to just run missions more without worrying about my stock of standard supplies.

I have also learned that going out into the free-roaming areas outside of town and killing the larger monsters is not only worth doing for their standard loots, but also because it's the only way I've found to get rare Trade materials to use with the visiting trade captain. The Rare Trades so far are better tools and recipes for weapons and armors, and also enhancements for my fleet / farms / companion. All of these things are way worth grabbing, and gives me even more of a reason to go free-hunting-- instead of just doing missions over and over.

As much as I miss having my 360 around right now, it's been during the previous RROD and this one that I've really focused on the Wii games I have left to beat. Since I might not be getting that new 360 for a little longer than I expected, maybe I'll finish up the last 4 games that I have left.

And we're back to a game I was playing a year ago...

2011-08-08T22:52:00.005-04:00

See, I did get to use it again.

Now that my 360 has shit the bed for the second time, I've only got the Wii hooked up to the large television, mainly because the PS2 looks absolutely horrible on a 1080p flatscreen. I only have a few games left to play on the Wii in general, and only one of them is partially finished -- one of the games I've been playing the longest, Monster Hunter Tri. Last time I played this, I had been stuck forever on the last 3-Star mission (Capture a Royal Ludroth-- and I suck at capturing) and the 4-star opener to kill a giant underwater fish that can shock and stun you, and in the water generally just destroys you (the Gobul). I had been stuck on these two levels since August of last year.

And today, after only two attempts, I completed both missions. I don't know if it was that I was being overly careful today since it had been so long since I really tried to play this game, but I killed the Gobul with less than a minute to spare, and on my last attempt before I was going to call it a day on this. After that rush, I attempted to capture the Royal Ludroth for shits and giggles, and did that one in one shot. I'm now sitting with a handful of 4-star missions to get started with, and a new environment has opened up to me-- the Tundra, which means I'll be freezing to death in no time.

I still feel like I'm missing a lot of the really in-depth stuff to this game, but I could say the same for every Final Fantasy game I've ever played... or truthfully, any game I've ever played. Either way, it was nice to make some progress on this one, so now I can get back to running away from monsters and barely finishing a whole new set of levels. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of me finally knocking this game off the Backlog.

Oh no, not again...

2011-08-06T14:39:00.002-04:00

I've been playing a lot of Mass Effect 2 over the last two days. It took a couple missions to really get into it again, but as of last night I was flying around to different planets and completing missions left and right. However, just as I was about to continue on the main plot of the game...

Fuck buckets.

For the second time, my XBox received the dreaded Red Ring of Death. As you might remember, this happened last July, and I sent the system back to Microsoft to fix. It lasted a year, and it's happened again. I think I'm going to just go buy a new one in the next month or so at this point. The newer XBoxes have more memory (my hard drive is already way full because it's like 16 gigs, as opposed to the new ones which are over 100), and I want a Kinect anyway, so I'll probably just buy the one that comes with that. It does mean I'll get to reuse that Mandatory Month of Wii graphic again possibly, and maybe I'll actually work on Monster Hunter Tri again.

Maybe.

Backlog++ : Mass Effect 2 (Xbox 360)

2011-07-31T13:26:00.002-04:00

I haven't posted a whole lot over the last couple weeks, mainly because my actual job has been even more insane than usual. Work has slowed down to a reasonable level of insanity again, so I'm able to start spending an hour or two actually playing something again, other than iPhone games for a few minutes while I'm hiding in the bathroom at work.

I needed something new, despite having just under 30 games in the unfinished status, and coincidentally there has been a lot of news lately about the new Star Wars MMO that Bioware is working on. My interest in the game has been relatively low up until now, mainly because while I still love Star Wars as far as the movies go, the idea of playing an MMO in their universe seems to be very limiting in what it will allow you to do. However, looking at the videos like this one, I can't help but regain a little bit of interest. I'm not saying I've been converted to a first day purchase just yet, but I'm also not completely disinterested in the game as a whole.

For the time being, this game reminded me that Bioware already has their own futuristic space series, the Mass Effect games, and the third game in the series is due out relatively soon. The original Mass Effect was one of the first XBox 360 games I bought, and I loved every minute of it-- even the "boring" planet exploration. I'm not sure why I didn't grab ME2 sooner, but I started it last night and so far, I'm already hooked. I imported my Mass Effect 1 character and finished the first few sections already. This will scratch my futuristic itch for a while, and hopefully breathe some life into this blog again.

Backlog++ : Final Fantasy III (iPhone) and Ms. Splosion Man (Xbox 360)

2011-07-14T08:11:00.003-04:00

I didn't want to buy anything for a while, but I had to pick these two games up, but for completely different reasons. Final Fantasy III is my newest "Play at work" game. While I really should be far too busy at work to actually play anything, my job is boring and monotonous and I find a turn-based RPG can really make the day fly by and stop me from wandering around the building looking for something to amuse me. After beating Chaos Rings a week ago, I've realized how much I've come to rely on it to pass away a few minutes here and there on the iPhone, and now that it's over I noticed that FF1-3 are available as remakes. Since I've never played FF3, I decided to grab it.

Ms. Splosion Man is the next OMGJeremy MAN Challenge. As you may recall, I have dominated the last two MAN Challenges (Super Meat Boy and Hard Corps Uprising), so I will be defending my title. Ms. Splosion Man is the sequel to 'Splosion Man-- a game I beat on year 1 of the backlog. So far, this is a solid sequel with more levels, harder pieces from the start, and nothing that I've seen so far that is a drastic change from the original. I'm not sure how many weeks we're giving ourselves for this challenge, but I will be working on this over the next couple weeks at least.

Completed - Chaos Rings (iPhone)

2011-07-11T07:45:00.001-04:00

I was in NYC all weekend for my nephew's 3rd birthday, which meant I had a lot of time to hide in a room to escape roughly ten 3 year olds who were hopped up on cupcakes, donuts, and fruit juices. During that time, I finally finished my 4th playthrough of Chaos Rings to get to the actual final boss. I died to him a good amount of times, so I had to go level up my guys a little bit on the way home. About 30 minutes before I got home, I finally took down the last guy and have crossed another game off the Backlog.

Chaos Rings is a simple RPG. There are obvious weapon and armor upgrades, and they are relatively sparse. Each new floor you unlock means there's probably an upgrade you can buy or find, but you'll have so much money laying around that you might as well just buy them. The fights are very simple for the most part, I pretty much did Dual attacks the whole way through, and other than bosses there is no other strategy needed. For most bosses it was "Wait for them to get an element weakness, then hit them with that element." There are 5 areas (the main 4 plus the post-ending area), and on every playthrough you go through the exact same areas, although in different orders. The last boss, while maintaining the Square-Enix tradition of being a half-hour long fight due to extra cinematics / discussions that you can't skip, was the only fight in the game that I would consider hard at all.

While it might seem that the paragraph above is a complaint, I think this game is designed pretty well for the purpose of being an iPhone "on the road" game. It's simple and fast enough that you can play a little bit on a bus ride or while waiting around for a dentist appointment or whatever. It's simplicity works well-- I don't have to really remember a lot about what I was doing, I was obviously just killing monsters and walking through the dungeon. I know they've put out a prequel, and a proper sequel is on the way, so I might pick those up at some point. I know that I loved having an RPG available on my iPhone to kill time at work, so now I'm looking for something else in the same vein.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 29:02, not including deaths to the last boss. Rounding conservatively to 30:00.
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 100% (per game summary screen). Optional bosses unbeaten.
Outside Help Used : None to beat the game, looked online for the optional boss info afterwards.
Will I play this again? : Unsure, but since it's an iPhone game and there's a good chance I'll have a lot of time sitting in cars or on planes or sitting at the DMV, I'll probably play this again.

Completed - Final Fantasy X (PS2)

2011-07-06T10:44:00.003-04:00

After one of the longest ending sequences in gaming history, I have finally defeated the last boss of Final Fantasy X. I had a pretty bare bones playthrough, with almost no optional content complete, but it still took well over 50 hours. Considering I bought this game used for like $10, I definitely got my moneys worth.

Before I played FFXII last year, my only impression of the Final Fantasy series after FF3 (US) was a bloated mess of cinematics with confusing gameplay that held no interest for me anymore. I had played FF7 and liked it enough (but didn't think it was quite as great as everyone else apparently did), and FF8 was terrible from what I recall. My roommate in the early 2000s was really into this game, but it seemed that every time that I saw him playing the game, it was nothing but cinematics and once and a while a fight. I never gave it a real shot, and I considered it another game I wouldn't be interested in. I'm really glad I gave this another chance, because it's ended up being far better than I expected. I don't think I like it as much as FFXII. The game is sort of linear up until the very end, there are a shitload of cinematics that you can't skip (which might be the worst thing ever-- especially when the later bosses all have like 5 minute intros you have to sit through each time), and I absolutely despised the way that weapon / armor upgrades are handled. But despite these faults, I found myself fully interested in the game (and even some of the characters) the entire time.

As I mentioned before, this game has the longest ending sequence I've ever seen in a game. There will be spoilers here, but since the game is 10 years old, I really doubt anyone cares. The whole story is about a group of people helping a summoner on her pilgrimage to different shrines to learn to summon increasingly powerful creatures so that she can stop Sin, a giant monster that shows up every decade or so and terrorizes the world. After the summoner calls forth the Final Summon spell to defeat Sin, there is an entity that will inhabit the form of the Summoned monster and turns it into the next Sin, and the cycle starts over again. For my purposes, the "end sequence" starts when you challenge Sin to battle. From this point on, you had to fight at least 6 different bosses (or forms of those bosses) to get to the actual final boss, who in this case is actually followed by a series of much easier (but time consuming) boss fights until finally you get to the end credits of the game. From the last save point to the very end of the game, on my successful run I spent over two hours to finish it. That seems a little bit excessive, but also felt incredibly rewarding, despite the story sort of falling apart at the end.

If nothing else is accomplished by this Backlog project, I've definitely fallen in love with JRPGs again, after many years of avoiding them like the plague. So I ask all 3 of the people who read this-- other than FF13 and Lost Odyssey, what Xbox 360 JRPGs are worth playing?

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 54:41 on my playthrough, but rounding up to 60 hours for deaths just against the last boss.
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : No idea. I only have the 5 main summons from the storyline, and I didn't beat any of the optional arena bosses.
Outside Help Used : I won't lie, I looked on Gamefaqs after dying to the last boss a couple times, but it just confirmed that I was on the right track.
Will I play this again? : Sure, I want to do all the optional quests, and maybe figure out why anyone would use Rikku or Kimahri regularly.

Nothing but RPGs makes for no posting

2011-06-21T11:28:00.002-04:00

All I've been playing since my last post is Final Fantasy X, Chaos Rings, and a little bit of Oblivion. It's probably a lot of time overall compared to previous weeks, but there's not a whole lot to actually say. "Sure did kill a lot of guys," I guess-- but that's not a very exciting post however, so I'll say a few things about Chaos Rings and FFX. All I can really say about Oblivion is "I killed a lot of guys", and this past week was spent dying in caves until I decided to watch TV.

Chaos Rings started out realy slow and simple, to the point where I had considered writing it off as a foolish impulse purchase. I get that you don't want a game to be too convoluted on the iPhone, just something that you can pick-up and play in bursts, but for the first hour or so, this was literally just "hit attack" over and over. That is not what I'm looking for in an RPG. However, after the introductory levels, I started getting the game a little bit more. It's still not an overly involved game, but the combat is a little more deeper than I thought originally.

As you defeat monsters and bosses, you will gain their Genes. You are allowed to attach up to 3 monster Genes to yourself. As you fight other monsters, those Genes will unlock new abilities-- such as the ability to heal yourself, element-based attacks and resistances, and special physical attacks that can stun or delay an enemy's action. Pretty standard stuff for RPGs, and the Gene system is how magic is used by your team in Chaos Rings. Once I got that down, the game became much more interesting. There are also a series of Puzzle Rooms in each level of the game-- pushing boxes around, teleporting panels, etc. The Puzzle Rooms would have been worth playing all by themselves, so as a mini-game included in here, it's a nice break in some of the monotonous fighting.

I thought I had beaten this already after about 7 hours, but it turns out to beat the actual final boss you will need to beat the game 3 more times playing as the other 3 teams. Since my first playthrough was 7 hours, and on repeat playthroughs you get to keep all your Genes, I will go ahead and beat it 3 more times. It's a pretty solid iPhone game, and is a great play-at-work option. I just "do a lot of texting" now.

I'm close to the end of the story in Final Fantasy X. I know there are loads of side-missions in any Final Fantasy, but since I bought this game for $10 used, and since I've still got quite a few games left, I'm just going to finish off the last boss and call it a day on this one. I don't like FFX as much as I liked XII, but FFX is a far better game than I recall it being. I still have FFIX and FFVII sitting in the retro backlog, and I'm really looking forward to cracking those open to see what I missed out on while I hated JRPGs. I expect I will still hate FFVIII.

My monthly post where I discuss what I'm partially through on, June 2011 Edition

2011-06-13T07:19:00.002-04:00

In an effort to refocus myself on games I have already started, I'm going to once again list what I am playing. Before you say "Jeremy, you do this every month and it never helps", you are wrong-- I did this last month and finished 2/3 of the games on the list. This will be a complete list of games I've started, however, so it will be longer, and I expect I will still only get 2 or 3 of them finished. Aim high. As an added bonus, I'm going to attempt to list them in the order of oldest playtime to newest, but that's probably only going to interest me.

Monster Hunter Tri (Wii) - I still look at this game now and then, but I'm still stuck on some underwater monster that I can't manage to beat. I should really start playing this a ocuple days a week, even if it's just to die on that guy over and over. I highly doubt this will be beaten this month, but it would be nice to at least down that underwater guy.

Trials HD (Xbox 360) - I don't mention this often, mainly because I don't want to write "Goddamn this is a hard game" or "This is just like Excitebike for adults!" over and over. At first I thought I would count Trials HD as beaten when I earned gold medals on everything, but then I got to the Hard levels. Some of them I am just glad I beat at all-- and looking at my friends leaderboards, nobody is getting golds on some of them. I have decided that once I beat every level at least once I will consider this beaten. I'm probably through 75% of the levels now, but the ones I have left are brutal.

Lemmings (PSP) - It's Lemmings on PSP. There are over 100 levels, and I'm done with maybe 30. I like the game, but I can't keep myself interested to play more than 1-2 levels at a time. It's a classic bathroom game, and since I poop on average once a day, I will have time to play this in the coming months... no need to rush it.

Fable II (Xbox 360) - Still think it's boring, but I'll finish it. Someday. If I could go back in time I would probably tell myself not to buy this game. I can't even say it's a bad game, it's just not a game I care for at all, which is weird since on paper I would think it's amazing.

Final Fantasy X (PS2) - Started playing this again yesterday, and I finally downed the boss I was stuck on. In one shot. I don't understand how I was stuck on him before, but it was probably because I didn't read the descriptions well enough where I was blatantly told what sort of attacks this boss uses. I might actually finish this one this month, although I'm only 26 hours into the game and I expect at least 2 times that from a Final Fantasy.

Hard Corps Uprising (Xbox 360) - Haven't touched it since the Man Challenge, I still want to beat this on Arcade mode though. That might be a foolish goal, but I'm able to get through level 5 / 8. Maybe the last 4 won't be impossible... yeah, I'm laughing reading that back, too.

Oblivion (Xbox 360) - I've made so much progress on this game compared to my last playthrough, it's frightening. I can't believe how wrongly I played this before. Currently I'm only at level 6, but I've closed an Oblivion gate, saved the heir to the throne, and am now working on getting back the King's amulet. Last time I played this I think I escaped a dungeon and then died to wolves repeatedly, for 30+ hours. This game is big enough I don't expect I'll finish it this month, and really I just need to make sure I beat it before 11/11/11, when Skyrim (the next game) comes out.

Bully (Xbox 360) - I sort of stopped playing this once LA Noire came out, but I still think it's one of the best Rockstar titles ever. I will finish this game this month, just need to pull myself off of Oblivion long enough to make that happen.

Chaos Rings (iPhone) - I played this a good deal while on the planes too/from Vegas this past week, and a little bit while I was in my room recovering from a hangover / loss of money. I've collected one ring, and am working on the second one now. It's a very simple game, one of the prettiest I've seen on the iPhone. Keeping in mind that I paid a whole $2.99 for it, I totally think it's worth it. If I would have paid $15 or whatever the former price was, not so sure.

So, bets on how many of these I finish this month? Even I will only guess 3.

Completed - Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)

2011-06-04T09:05:00.002-04:00

I'm heading out to Vegas tomorrow morning, and so I woke up this morning, unable to sleep like a child at Christmas (ok... or like me now at Christmas). Since I only had 10 stars left on Super Mario Galaxy, I decided it was a good morning to just power through the last few stars I was having a problem with. Most of them weren't too bad, with the exception of the Purple comet coin collection levels that unlock once you beat Bowser. Some of those were insanely hard, specifically the two moving platform levels (where if you missed one coin you'd have to lose a life and start over), and then I had major problems on the Toy world one where you only have to collect 100/150 coins, but they are on vanishing platforms you can only step on once, and slowly rotating platforms. That took me an hour alone, and I don't know if I could ever finish that again if I was forced to.

Now that I have all 120 stars, I had to beat a harder version of Bowser's last level / fight again, and now I've unlocked the ability to play as Luigi -- and recollect all 120 stars. I'm not particularly interested in that. I've played all the levels, seen what there is to see, and now it's time to move onto something else.

I can't really say much about this game that isn't obvious. It's a Mario game, and it's one of the best titles on the Wii. I don't know exactly why I finally got around to playing it in 2011, since I bought it when it came out 3 years ago... but I'm glad I did.

Now to get ready for Vegas.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 23 hours, 42 minutes.
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 100% with Mario
Outside Help Used : None.
Will I play this again? : Doubtful. It was a lot of fun, but I got all the stars.

Completed - LA Noire (Xbox 360)

2011-05-30T20:28:00.002-04:00

Today I was left home alone all day since I was off for Memorial Day and the wife had to work. I had a lot of things I should have been doing, but instead I woke up at 7am and pretty much sat in one position and powered through half of disc 2 and all of disc 3 to finish out LA Noire. At about noon I went outside to see if I would get off my lazy ass and possibly mow the lawn, but I deemed it "to hot for mowing" and fell back into the chair-- and pretty much didn't leave it until 7:30pm.

My opinion of LA Noire has swayed pretty wildly since I bought it. At first, I thought it was amazing, but a few boring cases (to learn the game I suppose) had my expectations lower to "eh, this will be alright". Then, you get sent to work on murder cases, and that's where the game truly shined in my opinion. I loved each of the murder cases, and was sort of let down when I got "promoted" into working vice. I think that's where the game really started feeling repetitive to me. Every case after the murders seemed to devolve into "go to crime scene, go to secondary scene and chase guy, go to third place and have a car chase, repeat". I didn't mind this really, all of those things were enjoyable, but it got to the point where I was just blowing through cases to try and get to a different piece of the story-- not actually enjoying the individual cases is sort of a bad thing if your whole game is working cases.

However, the overall story was interesting enough to keep me going, and the last 4 missions (well maybe not the actual last mission) were the reason I couldn't stop playing this game today. While the ending missions and the build-up to it was fairly well written and followable, the actual ending sort of blew. I don't necessarily know what they could have done better with it (since I've only thought about it for the last 15 minutes), but it doesn't really feel connected to anything else you did during the game. Still, it felt rewarding to finish the game, even though that last mission tried really hard to get me to hate it.

I don't think this was a bad game, but it wasn't as good as Red Dead Redemption, or as long. I've finished all the missions, and other than going around stealing vehicles and looking for hidden film reels, there's not much left to do outside of replaying full cases to try and perfect them. Right now, I'm not sure how much interest I have in doing it... but I'll put it aside for a bit and decide that in a month or so. I'd definitely be interested in what sort of DLC there is planned, but if it's just more 1 hour long cases, they better be cheap or I'll skip it.

I suppose my overall feeling for LA Noire is that Rockstar was really close to making a solid adventure style detective game, but adding in the open world pieces really seemed to detract from the game. I think it's an interesting concept to allow a player to fail the investigation and yet move onto the next, but I think it ended up making the game far too easy for most people. Either way, I'm not disappointed in the game overall, but I think it just missed the mark to being a great game.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 19 hours, 45 minutes.
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 73.1% (per the Statistics screen)
Outside Help Used : None.
Will I play this again? : Maybe. Part of me thinks I will pick this up occasionally to try and get perfect missions. Another part of me thinks I should trade it in.

LA Noire -- On Disc 2 and moving along...

2011-05-27T08:06:00.003-04:00

As is expected with any game with this much promotion ahead of time, LA Noire has received a little bit of critical press after release. As someone who spends a good portion of his workday flipping around looking at gaming sites, I have seen a few complaints that the game is too easy, that the world doesn't offer enough to do, and that it's not really that good a game underneath all that story and video. I was about to agree on all of these points, but last night I finally completed an investigation the right way.

First, let me address the point that I do agree with. There isn't nearly as much to do in the open world as there is in any other Rockstar game that I've played. There are random police events that you can do, and I recommend doing them as they're a nice short break from the slower, more involved Cases you are working. However, all of the police events that I've done so far involve people committing crimes, and you shooting them to solve all of them. I've only done like 15/40 of them so far, so maybe I just have bad luck, but all 15 of them have ended with me chasing a suspect and then shooting them. Other than those events, all you have to do in the main map is find extra cars for achievements, and there are film rolls or something collectable in the town. Otherwise, it's just realistic scenery to drive through on your way from crime sites and witness locations.

As far as the game being easy / not all that good, I have to disagree. The game CAN be easy. As far as I can tell so far, there is no way to truly fail an investigation outside of getting killed in a gunfight. You can fail every question and miss evidence, and you will "finish" the case. Perhaps you will imprison the wrong man. You could possibly not get a piece of evidence and never even meet the actual killer. You can put absolutely no effort into your cases and rush and you will keep moving through the ranks of the police department. This is exactly how I work in my real job.

However, last night I actually 5-Starred my first case. Like I said last week in my first thoughts post, after you finish a case you receive a 1-5 star ranking based on questions answered properly, evidence obtained, and how little damage you did to the city while you were conducting the investigation. On the first bunch of easier cases, I got a lot of 4-star rankings. As I've progressed, I've gotten a few 3 or 2-stars, but this past weekend I got a single star ranking on one of my cases. I don't think I could have done worse on the case. I'm pretty sure I arrested the wrong guy, and I probably ruined his child's life. Amazing detective work on my part. The thing is-- I was trying to do it right. I just got sloppy, and I missed some major questions. The head detective yelled at me, and I actually felt pretty bad about it.

So, I started this last case a day or so ago, and I made sure to scour the scenes for evidence. I didn't care if the music stopped, I kept looking for evidence. As I asked people questions, I would watch their reactions much more carefully, and checked my evidence constantly. I even used my "Intuition" points to provide some clues when asking questions to make sure my line of reasoning made sense. And for my efforts, I got as close to a perfect score as I have seen yet. This was the first advanced case where I really felt that I was investigating something, not just playing a game like an old Sierra point-and-click. It felt pretty good, and it reminded me what playing the game should feel like.

So, I don't think the game is easy, as long as you mean playing it well. I also don't think it's a bad game when you strip away all the flair. Keep in mind that I loved the Shenmue games, and I love point-and-click adventures. I think this game is trying to do more with the Rockstar brand than just make GTA in the 40s, and I appreciate what it's doing. And as far as a game that I can just relax and take my time really soaking in the flavor and story of the world, like a video game version of an HBO series, I don't think I've seen better.

I don't think I will consider this the best game of 2011, because I don't see any reason to play anything again once I 5-star it, but depending what sort of additional downloadable content is planned, I might change my mind on that.

Backlog++ : Chaos Rings (iPhone)

2011-05-20T10:15:00.004-04:00

Up until two days ago, I had a phone that served it's purposes of making phone calls and sending the occasional text messaging. It wasn't pretty, but it got the job done as well as I needed it done. It had some basic internet capabilities, but other than checking my mail slowly and answering a drunken bar trivia question, it was a completely useless addition to my phone. I didn't think I needed anything else... until my wife got an iPhone a few months ago. I've since watched her use the phone do to everything she would possibly need to do, from her phone. It got to the point where I couldn't resist, and now I have my own.

And you know what I've done on it? I've played a crapload of Words with Friends (fake scrabble). That's it. But man... it's awesome. I also have started looking at what other games are offered other than the standard Angry Birds type stuff (which is fun, but not Backlog-worthy), and I noticed that Squaresoft has released a bunch of the remastered Final Fantasy games, and has a series of iPhone (or just phone app) exclusives that look pretty damn great, Chaos Rings. The original is $3.99 right now, and it looked to be a good way to kill more time at work while I wait for people to play their turn in Words with Friends, so I grabbed it. It appears to be a full-fledged RPG with some sizable content, so I'm listing it on The Backlog.

I've only played this for around an hour, and it seems really straightforward so far. It's really pretty, and the sound is pretty damn impressive. I'm not sure if it gets very hard, or contains a whole lot of challenge... but for $4 it seems to be worth grabbing just to have something to do while I'm waiting around someplace, which seems to happen a lot these days.

LA Noire-- First Impressions

2011-05-18T07:33:00.002-04:00

LA Noire is one of the most interesting games I've played in a long time. It's not quite what I expected, but I intentionally tried not to read a whole lot about it ahead of time or watch any videos on it. I guess I was surprised with what still feels like a Rockstar game, and then how the actual game flies in the face of what you are provided with and your expectations based on the Rockstar name.

LA Noire is a detective game, which is obvious to anyone who has spent 30 seconds looking at it. However, it's a police detective game with (so far) a fairly linear case line, which I don't expect from Rockstar. This could completely change later on, but right now it's "finish one case, department gives you the next case". So far, I've completed the introductory missions that teach you how to scour crime scenes and other areas for evidence, how to interview witnesses, and the expected driving and gunplay sections of the game. I also completed my first "real case" as a detective, so I think I can safely form an opinion of the game at this point.

First, the stuff that was "expected Rockstar". I was impressed with the open-world city, which is very much in the Grand Theft Auto style. It's large, but easy to navigate, and the city is full of pedestrians and other drivers that you can drive into and smash with (as far as I've seen so far) very little consequences. The driving engine is the basic GTA model, although it seems to be slighly easier to control-- although that could just be that so far I've just driven police issue vehicles, which always controlled well in the GTA series. You're even allowed to carjack vehicles, except in this game you are taking them in the name of The Law, which I suppose makes it alright or something.

You will be using this open-world city to drive between crime scenes, witness interviews, and other locations attached to the crimes you will be investigating. While you are out, you will get radio calls to different breaking street crimes that you can choose to take. These are the random incidents that take place while you are out, and I've only done two of them so far and both were short, fun diversions from the main case I was working on. Both these short events and the driving sections of this game feel pulled right from the Grand Theft Auto world, except on the other side of the law for a change.

However, you won't get very far just driving around causing havok, so the meat and bones of this game is the investigations. You will be going to the crime scenes of these cases and literally walking around calmly searching around for clues as to what happened. Then, you will take the things you've learned and will interview witnesses / suspects to get more information or get a confession from them. Sometimes, you'll need to make other stops to solve these crimes-- like checking a serial number on a gun at the local gun shop, or driving to a victim's home to see why someone might have wanted them dead. These are fairly slow and methodical sections, and rely heavily on your personal ability to find the clues you needed earlier and-- most impressively-- to read the witness / suspects faces as you question them to determine whether or not they are lying. The amount of time spent on making the faces as realistic as possible is evident, and after a few misreads, I've gotten fairly good at figuring out when someone is lying. Well... most of the time.

When you've finished a case, you'll get a rating based on how many clues you found, how many times you guessed when an interviewee was lying or hiding something, and is negatively affected by how much damage you did tot he public while working that case. This means that during those driving sections that feel very GTA you have to drive safely. Needless to say, my first case had a notable deduction for all the cars, lampposts, and mailboxes I smashed up just flying around town. This was one of those things that flies in the face of the world we are provided with. Imagine having to drive through GTA while not hitting things... it's almost unfathomable. Yet, here I am, driving in 40's Los Angeles carefully looking around at intersections, and making sure to use my siren to clear my way when necessary. It's also a weird idea to be playing a Rockstar game where I'm on the right side of law enforcement, in a clear-cut fashion.

So far, this game has gotten excellent reviews from most places, and I haven't seen a bad one anywhere. It's something truly different from anything I've played in years (like Pheonix Wright meets GTA), and while investigating it actually feels close to the old graphic adventure games I played for years on the Amiga. It's not perfect-- sometimes there's a clue I missed that I would never think to find, or sometimes the piece of information I need to prove a lie is less than obvious to me, but overall I'm very impressed by what has happened so far, and can't wait to start my next case tonight.

Backlog++ : LA Noire (Xbox 360)

2011-05-17T12:06:00.002-04:00

Well, despite that the world is supposed to end next week, I ran out today to pick up LA Noire on it's release day. The way I see it, it's win-win. If the world does end, then no harm done -- what would I have done with that money anyway? And if it doesn't, then I get to play a detective game while I wait around to see what excuse the doomsayers will come up with for why the world did not end. I bet they forgot to carry the 4.

I've been pretty good about not buying stuff this year (compared to last year at least), but there are a few games that at the beginning of the year I declared "Must Have Titles". Dragon Age 2 was one of them, and LA Noire was the other. I don't know if there's anything else I will need to buy in the immediate future, although Portal 2 is pretty tempting. LA Noire was a need for a couple reasons. First, it's by Rockstar-- the makers of my favorite game of 2010, Red Dead Redemption. They really haven't made a horrific turd in quite a while, so I have high expectations from them on this game. The second reason is that there are almost no good Detective games out. There are some games out with elements of detective work in them, and I'm not going to count Phoenix Wright (although I probably should), but even Condemned 2 which I recently beat had some psuedo-detective work, but it was more or less a bonus points thing. This is not only solid detective work, but it's set in the 40's, offers a stellar looking black-and-white graphic option, and is getting some outstanding ratings.

It appears that until the world ends, I'll have my work cut out for me.

Completed - Etrian Odyssey III (DS)

2011-05-13T17:05:00.003-04:00

It's been over a month since I finished a game, but today I finished the game that has taken FFXII's title of Longest Game on the backlog. I just downed the last boss of Etrian Odyssey III, one of the hardest dungeon crawlers I've ever played, after over 100 hours of gameplay-- unfortunately the game doesn't keep real track of your hours, but I spent months playing this in large blocks to accomplish this.

I'm considering this game beaten, despite the following semi-annoying thing-- there are multiple endings to this game. There is the main "Armoroad" ending, which is what I earned. There is the "Deep City" ending, which is the same basic game, but with a different set of end fights. Finally there is the Real Ending, which seems to be a very convoluted thing that leads me down 5 additional extremely difficult dungeon levels to fight some ridiculous bosses. It's impossible to get the other endings on my current save, so I will have to start over to see the other endings. Sure -- my maps will stay saved, I believe any items for sale in the shop will remain available, and I know that the special new class (Shoguns) I unlocked will now be available from the start... but that's still a hell of a lot of work I'll have to do to see the other endings.

So, the way I look at it -- game followed a story, got to an endboss, and beat it. It took a lot of time, and I can honestly say I've gotten my moneys worth from this game for now. I will earn the Real Ending at some point... so this game will continue to be my "Play at Work" title when I have time. I also think it's one of the best dungeon crawler RPGs I've ever played, despite the deceptively kiddie looking enemies, this game was a relentless battle, up to the very end. If I stopped the Backlog project right now, I'd still consider it semi-successful just because I finished a game as large and involved as this.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : No clue. 100+ hours.
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 25% (1/3 Endings, including longer real ending)
Outside Help Used : None, until beaten.
Will I play this again? : Yes. I will someday get the Real ending, and grinding levels at work is far better than actually working.

Many pieces of small progress, but still nothing complete...

2011-05-11T08:19:00.004-04:00

Things are really busy outside of gaming right now, many of these things take a lot more time than I would have thought they should. However, I've found some time to work on a few games, and a couple of them are really close to done.

Etrian Odyssey III - I'm at the last boss of Etrian Odyssey III (my "play at work" game), finally, after who knows how many hours of play. I think I can safely say I've spent 100 hours on it, because I've spent many days here at work just grinding levels and making loot runs through the dungeon to get money and items to trade for better gear for my guys. The last month or so has been spent entirely on the 5th Stratum of the labyrinth, and I've located the last bosses and died to them a handful of times. This is going to be yet another fight where I'm only going to win by getting lucky and managing to confuse / negative status effect these guys long enough to take one of them out. I will have a lot to say on this once I'm done, and I'm fairly certain I'm not getting the "best" ending. After this much time, I don't think I care.

Super Mario Galaxy - Last night I decided I didn't need to get all the other stars before downing Bowser, and so I went to the last level and downed Bowser. I am almost ashamed to say this, but this is the first 3d Mario game I've completed. I never actually beat Mario 64, and I've never even played Mario Sunshine on the Gamecube, so I'm glad to say I've broken that streak and finished off one of these damn games. Still, not considering this one beaten until I have all 120 stars on Mario. Since I beat Bowser, I looked online just to see what other secrets I'd need to uncover. Apparently after I get all 120 stars with Mario, I unlock the ability to do it again with Luigi, and if I get 120 stars with him I can unlock the secret 121st star. I'm not going to require that I do that just to consider this beaten... just get all of Mario's 120 and I would have seen all the levels. I should get that done hopefully quickly.

Bully - I've played a good deal of this, and since I started I got through the first section of the game, and unlocked the city at large. However, much like any sandbox game, this is a dangerous point for me, because now I'm interested in running all over the map finding all the possible missions and (more specifically) running around collecting rubber bands and collectable cards. I normally find all the collectables in any game, but the last bunch are always the worst to find. One thing Bully did well was that you can earn the ability to put unfound collectables on your map by doing well in Geography classes. It actually made sense... and it made me feel like less of a douche for running back to take classes in a video game. Still loving this game, it's definitely one I should have played sooner.

So, it looks like I can complete two or possibly all three of these games in the next couple weeks, so I can pick up LA Noire and not feel too guilty.

Ok, April sort of sucked -- but now it's May!

2011-05-03T10:51:00.003-04:00

Admittedly, April was not the best of months as far as the Backlog is concerned. Things were played, progress was made, but really I beat Dragon Age 2 and then futzed around on a few Mario games and Oblivion. Outside of the Backlog, a lot got accomplished. I attempted (and failed) an 11.5 mile Ironman / obstacle course on a ski resort. I went to a handful of weddings. My bands got active again. But -- not a lot of gaming / blogging got done compared to the last year and a half. So, it's time to get back to (not) business.

While I am still working on Super Mario Galaxy (I'm at the point where I can go to the last levels, but I'd like to get 120 stars on this thing to "beat" it), and I finally downed The Lost Levels on Super Mario All-Stars, I needed to give my gaming a kick in the pants. This month I'm adding at least one game to the Backlog-- LA Noire, Rockstar's newest game-- so I'm starting another Rockstar game that was still sealed until last night. I've started playing Bully.

A few people have recommended Bully to me, and since Grand Theft Auto 3, Rockstar has been a pretty reliable developer as far as I'm concerned. All the GTAs have been at least good games, and Red Dead Revolver and Red Dead Redemption are two of my favorite games of all time. I'm only 3 hours into Bully, but I'm already hooked. Bully follows the story of Jimmy Hopkins and his arrival at Bullworth Academy, a boarding school where kids constantly pick on other kids. You'll be doing missions based around the activities of campus life, like stealing form lockers, pulling fire alarms, and raising your popularity with all the cliques in the school to become the new Big Man on Campus.

Bully is a "sandbox" game, much like the Grand Theft Autos, but starring high schoolers. Even at 3 hours, I think it's a much better game than the GTAs because of the limitations put on the game by both a smaller and more detailed map, and because it forces you to actually have a daily schedule. Every day in the game, you wake up at 8am, go to class at 9, finish school at 4, and then have from 4-8 to wander freely. After 8, it's curfew time, where you can stay out late and cause problems, but you'll constantly be on the lookout for school security who are looking for anyone still outside after 8. Classes are mini-games that will give you bonuses, for example if you pass Chemistry 1, you earn the ability to make firecrackers from your home chemistry set. You can skip class and do missions and such, but much like being out after curfew, it means security will be on the lookout for you so you need to sneak around.

This would seem like a kiddy game, except it's Rockstar. So-- just in the first few hours I've beaten up a whole bunch of kids, had a girl tell me about her cold sores after she made out with me, lit a bag of dog shit on fire and has faculty stamp it out (a classic of pretty much anyone's youth), and generally caused as much havok as possible.

This has been a good kickstart for gaming, because last night I was glued to the TV from when I got home from work until I went to bed. I'm still going to finish up these Mario games ASAP, but I'm going to try and make May make up for the lack of progress made in April.

It's still Mario Month!

2011-04-18T07:15:00.004-04:00

Pretty much right after I finished that last post about Mario Month, my month got really busy in everything except the gaming area, so I'm going to summarize the last two weeks with "I got to play a little bit". Nothing groundbreaking, no new purchases, and no new completions since last post, so I don't have a whole lot to catch up on.

I've played a little bit more Mario All-Stars and am now at level 8-1 of the Lost Levels. Some of these levels are insane-- for example, 7-3, where the entire level consists of jumping on springboards in the wind, flying screens to the right, and then landing on a small platform where you literally fall in from the top of the screen. It's been slow progress, mostly attributed to my immediate response to some of the levels-- angrily turning it off. But, I'm on the last World, and I should knock out Lost Levels in the next few days. SMB2 and 3 will be "Easy" finishes, I know I've beaten both of them numerous times.

I've also managed to log in a few more hours into Super Mario Galaxy, and I'm currently sitting at 20 stars. I've had this game since it game out, but I've never made it past the second set of levels where Mario can turn into a bee. I'm not sure exactly why I never could get into this, but I think I've overcome this hump on this playthrough. I'm sitting at a junk planet now, where part of the level forms as I run through it, like giant space Legos. It's definitely one of the better Wii titles, and hopefully I can knock out a few stars a day and clear this one off the Backlog finally.

Oblivion has also had a little progress, although I suppose in the scheme of things its a massive amount of progress. My previous character on this game, a pilgrim, was at around 40 hours of playtime and still hadn't managed to do anything of value. I just wandered around leveling and exploring, which is one of the awesome things about the Elder Scrolls games, but I hadn't managed to complete the first real dangerous quest-- to close the Gate of Oblivion at Kvatch. On this playthrough, I've closed that gate, rescued the city of Kvatch, and joined 3 different guilds and some sort of vampire hunting organization. This is all at around the 10 hour mark. I'm still going to do all that exploration I did before-- the easiest way is to actually walk between towns instead of using the instant travel-- but it's nice to actually see the story progress this time. I'm not going to finish this game anytime soon, but as a gradual play (to be finished before Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim releases), I'm looking forward to seeing how this progresses.

The rest of April should hopefully be less busy than the past two weeks, so let's see if I can at least make Mario Month an accurate designation.

April is Mario Month! (A month in which I play a little Mario, and a lot of Oblivion)

2011-04-06T09:12:00.005-04:00

Well, not exclusively Mario because I would stab myself, but I would like to at least beat Super Mario Galaxy (on the Wii), New Super Mario Bros. (on the DS), and Retro Challenge selection Super Mario All-Stars. I'm not sure why I've never managed to get into Galaxy, I've had it since it came out and I always get to the second area where you turn into a bee and lose interest. That's exactly as far as I am right now on this playthrough, so maybe I just need to power through this part. It's not a bad game at all, it's just never grabbed me. NSMB on the DS just isn't beaten because it's on the DS. I'm going out of town this weekend and have about 7 hours worth of car rides, so I'm going to only bring that with me. Maybe that will give me a good head start.

I've been playing Super Mario All-Starts (SNES version) since February. I beat the original Super Mario Bros with no warps after a couple days of trying, and I've been playing a little bit of Lost Levels here and there since. I got sidetracked with Dragon Age 2, but now I'm back to working on Lost Levels. I'm currently at 5-3, and while it's slow, painful progress, once I finish that, I know I'll kick SMB2 and SMB3 off in no time. Lost Levels is hands down the hardest game in the collection, and I'm really glad it saves after every level. If the original NES cart didn't allow that, I'm pretty sure I never would have had the patience to beat it. As it is, there are some levels that take over an hour of repeated attempts to find all the hidden blocks and paths on some of these levels. It's pretty ridiculous.

However, after a couple days of just playing various Mario games (and of course World of Warcraft), I realized I need something a little more involved. There's only so much platforming I can do in a day before I lose interest, apparently. So -- I decided to start my playthrough of Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion, a game that will likely take me months to complete. Partly I chose this because after Dragon Age 2, I realized I wanted to play another fantasy epic, and partly this is because the next game in the series, Skyrim, is due out at the end of the year and I really want to finish this one before that shows up.

I bought Oblivion when I bought my 360, and I loved the game a lot. However, I never managed to actually do anything. I had about 40 hours on my first playthrough, but due to my lack of focus on doing anything, I think I'm about as far as I was in that game as I am in my current game which is about 2.5 hours in. For example, after you get through the introductory escape sequence, you are outside and one of the nearby Inns has a side-mission to go into some cave and kill a witch. I never even managed to do that my first time, and yesterday after making my new character I just marched in there and destroyed her. I think it's that this time I actually paid attention to what I was doing when making my character -- I'm a Sorcerer, so I use heavy armor and destructive spells. Last playthrough I was a Pilgrim, which is essentially a Jack of No Trades, and I sucked horribly at everything except persuading merchants to lower their prices, and lockpicking. I was quite good at lockpicking.

Now I'm a destructive force, creeping through tunnels and caves and burning everything to death with fire or freezing them to death by touch. Even though I'm just starting it now, I'm already hooked on it. All I need to do is force myself to play a little bit of Mario in between what will likely be marathon sessions of Oblivion. That should be easy... right?

Completed - Dragon Age 2 (Xbox 360)

2011-04-01T21:31:00.003-04:00

Alright, there's going to be a lot of spoilers here, most likely. So, here's the short version of my thoughts on the game now that I'm done : It wasn't as good as Dragon Age : Origins, and the last third of the game is extremely sloppy. Still, if you liked the first Dragon Age and wanted more, this is better than Awakenings... although more broken as of right now.

Now I'm going to discuss the story elements and such, so if you are still playing through this or want to, stop reading here.

As a reminder, I made Hawke a male warrior (sword / shield) tank for this playthrough, which I know affects a few things off the bat-- like Bethany living while my worthless brother dies in the intro section. I actually managed to get all the optional party members this time, unlike the first game where I missed Sten and then he dies in a Darkspawn invasion or something. When I play this again, I'll definitely have to play a mage, maybe a rogue. In theory, I'll at least play each class one time just to see what I think of them. This playthrough, I actually scored the Romance achievement, with casual sex with Isabela the pirate girl, and having Merrill the elven mage move into my mansion for some weird interracial relations. There's no way to make that sound cool, I'm just mentioning it because I can.

Now that I've finished the whole game, I can totally see why people complained that the end section (Act III) is a letdown. The first act, while not "Epic" in scale or anything, is about getting Hawke introduced to Kirkwall and getting your party together. Act I ends with your trip into the Darkroads, where you get tricked by the party leader and locked in the depths, forced to fight your way out by dealing with a demon, and then killing other demons. I liked Act I a lot, it felt like an appropriate intro for your character and sets the stage for Hawke becoming a well known person in Kirkwall.

Act II starts three years after Act I ends (more or less) and now Hawke is a man about town. In my playthrough, my sister was taken to the Circle (think mage internment camp), and so I live in my big awesome mansion with my Mom. Act II is about Hawke becoming even more important to Kirkwall, and revolves around the Qunari people (horned musclemen who live their life by the Qun, an extreme behavioral / religious set of beliefs) who arrived in the city just before you did, and who now are getting restless with things. Act II will basically put you in the middle of the escalating conflict with them. In my playthrough, I killed the leader of the Qunari in a (very slow) one-on-one battle, and the other Qunari left the city to return back home. Act II felt very solid, and the entire section really came together nicely at the end.

Act III is three years after Act II, and is about the Circle and the Templars (armed religious guards to contain the Circle) and the escalating problems that occur when the Guard Captain of the Templars takes control of the city at the end of Act II. I felt this chapter was extremely sloppy in every way. I finally encountered all the bugs that people complained about. I had cutscenes play in places where they didn't really make sense. I had missions that I couldn't complete, one of which got as far as having the NPCs appear and then just stand in place forever. I also felt that the storyline just sort of fell apart here. I can see that the major blocks are in place, and it is a playable thing -- but it completely lacks the polish that the first two acts had, and it doesn't feel nearly as Epic as it should. This is the end of the game, and yet it felt like it just stops. Sure, there were some major mages vs. templars battles going on all around me, but it really felt like this was a minor conflict in the scheme of things-- and it shouldn't. Mages rebelling against Templar control is a major issue in the Dragon Age background, so this really was a big deal. I suppose that's a major storyline failure that it didn't seem like more than "a few fights".

Then the game just ends. I've saved Kirkwall (this time by allying with mages), and then I just vanished, apparently. The ending makes it feel like there's a lot more coming up in the Dragon Age overarching storyline, but either this is all leading to another Awakenings-style $40 expansion to this game, or it's leading to Dragon Age 3 coming out sooner-than-it-probably should. Either way, while I enjoyed beating the game and wasn't really disappointed overall, at the same time I was kind of let down that the game ends right there. At the very least there should have been some sort of closure with whatever happens to Kirkwall. I sort of left the city in a blazing shambles, and (at least on this playthrough) Anders might have destroyed the Chantry and set off essentially a civil war. This definitely felt like the last third of the game was rushed out, and that's a shame. The last Act is what stops this Good game from becoming a Great one.

I'll definitely pay attention to whatever is scheduled to follow this up, but if DA3 continues in this direction, I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to follow this series.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 39 hours
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 59% (665 / 1130 Achievements)
Outside Help Used : None.
Will I play this again? : Yes, although I'll wait a bit and see if they fix it for my next playthrough.

Dragon Age 2 - Second section cleared

2011-03-28T07:44:00.002-04:00

I haven't updated as much as I thought I would on Dragon Age 2, but I've been playing it a lot. I just don't have as much to talk about without totally ruining the story, which in my opinion is the driving force in this game. It's not the best RPG engine ever, and a lot of the fights can seem relatively mindless, but I am loving the story arc and I still am impressed at how fleshed out the Dragon Age world is. However, yesterday I finally finished the second Act of the game, so I suppose it's time for an update. There will be some minor sub-plot spoilers here, so there's your warning.

The second piece of the game is another 3 years after the first section. The way the story is presented is "a story within a story" where the story of Hawke's rise in Kirkwall is being told by Varric, the dwarf rogue who joins you at the beginning of the game. This allows for time to move forward pretty fluently with a "here's how the next 3 years went" cutscene. I'm not really sure how much my previous decisions have affected Kirkwall in this period, but things I did have definitely caused changes in the city. I'm interested in playing through again and making choices that would drastically affect where I'm at right now and see how much different things will be. I'm suspecting not much, but maybe I'll be surprised.

A good relatively non-story example of this is the Bone Pit. In the first Act of the game, I basically saved a mining colony from dragonlings. Then, I convinced the miners to come back in exchange for a share of the profits. In Act 2, there was a minor quest to deal with some thieves who have been attacking the ore shipments. In the little bit of Act 3 that I've played, I went back to the Bone Pit to see what disaster had befallen it. I'm not sure, but I think I can basically stop this series of events in Act 1. It will be interesting to see how I can force things to change on my "jerk" playthrough.

On a side note, I always plan on a jerk playthrough and never get far in it. I got maybe 2 hours into a jerk playthrough on the original Dragon Age... but I think I can get 4+ hours into this one.

Now I'm a few hours into the third section, again another 3 years after the end of part 2. Part 2 was far more involved than part 1 as far as feeling like I'm making changes to the landscape of the whole city, where part 1 really was about getting yourself out of the slums and becoming a hero. I've heard a lot of complaints about how part 3 is sort of a letdown after part 2, but from what I've seen so far, there's a major conflict I'm dealing with that seems to be important to the whole world, instead of just Kirkwall. I'll let you know what I think when I'm done. That post will probably be full of spoilers, I'm not sure any other way to really summarize this game.

Completed - Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 (Xbox 360)

2011-03-26T13:17:00.003-04:00

I decided last night that I was going to get up this morning and play Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 until I finished it, because I could tell it was a short game, and it's one that I don't need to bother slow-playing. So, I got up at 8 or so, made breakfast, and sat down to play. 4 hours later, the rest of the game has been finished, and I'm proud to say one of the achievements I earned was "Beat the game without jumping". It's what I set out to do, and it was done. I can't say I didn't accidentally jump (there was no way to turn off jumping, and it's the A button on the Xbox -- you know, the one right in the middle of everything and the one you use for menus), but if I did jump, I started the level over.

I didn't write about this one a whole lot, because all I can really say is "this is Bionic Commando. Again!" If you like Bionic Commando Rearmed, this is more of the same, but definitely easier. The bosses aren't really hard, and the addition of a scanning device that tells you what the weakpoints are means that anyone will get it down. The only boss that was really that tough at all was another Bionic that you fight in the labs, and he was only tough because it wasn't a gimmicky fight as much as it was "pay attention to the pattern, dodge flawlessly". And really, flawlessly is an overstatement (if not an outright lie), because the health regen item you get makes most fights just a matter of time instead of really trying to clearly beat the boss without mistakes.

I saw an article on Kotaku that showed the sales figures for this game and they're pretty abysmal. I'm not sure if it's because it came out at $15 and people decided it wasn't worth it, or if it was simply that the first Bionic Commando Rearmed scratched that itch and then some for most people. I can't say this is a step up from the first game, and if I had to pick one to recommend it would be the first one-- but this isn't a bad game, and I'm surprised it didn't do better. Then again, I'm the only person on my leaderboards for it, so perhaps I should have seen that coming. Either way, I liked it... although $15 does seem a little bit high for what amounts to a morning of fun. I mean, in gaming terms.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 6 estimated
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 35% (70 / 200 Achievements)
Outside Help Used : None really. I checked once to see what I was supposed to do to make it through a jump that seemed impossible, and got the answer "it's not impossible." So I was doing the right thing, but poorly. Still, I list this.
Will I play this again? : I played a little co-op and it was fun. Otherwise, probably not rushing back to it.

Rising Mode on Hard Corps Uprising finished -- game not yet completed. Unfortunately.

2011-03-22T09:41:00.004-04:00

Last night, I finally beat the last boss in Hard Corps Uprising's Rising Mode. I have upgraded my character to start with 10 lives and a 6 point life bar, and all my weapons start at level 2 or 3 when picked up, so I'm almost fully overpowered. But, even with all that crap, I beat the last guy on my last life, and near my last continue. He's probably one of the cheapest bosses I've ever fought. I'm going to detail the last 4 stages in the next few paragraphs, so there's your spoiler warning.

Stage 5 : After the "riding on a hoverboard" / cheap-death level that was level 4, level 5 is a back-to-basics Contra-style sidescroller. There's a stealth section where you can wear a box Metal-Gear-Solid style, but I've found it easier to just blast my way through the level, setting off alarms and generally treating it like Contra. There's a lot of hanging off ledges and instant kill-falls, but I find that to be far more acceptable than the crap that was level 4 and falling helicopters and crashing cars.

The midboss for level 5 is a giant robotic eye with rotating laser beams, and I can't get past him without dying. I managed to get to him once with a fully powered Machine Gun weapon, and that seemed doable, but otherwise you don't do enough damage to him to kill him that easily. With 10 lives though, this boss is no big deal. At the end of the level, you have to escort a scientist out of the building, which is as awful as it sounds, and then you will fight a robotic defense system with multiple sets of arms. This boss doesn't suck as bad as I thought he would, although it's a whole lot of dodging. After you destroy the arms, he's much simpler to kill, just dodging his bombs (instead of two arm weapons and his bombs) while you fire away.

Stage 6 : I love this level, it might be my favorite in the game. Stage 6 takes place entirely on moving trains in an underground subway. There's a bunch of jumping back and forth between trains which appear on the upper half and lower half of the screen, but otherwise this level was a good break from the mayhem of levels 4 and 5. The mid-boss for this one is a giant robot that runs after the train, shooting a giant laser (destroying the train you are on) and ripping off train cars and throwing them at you. He's got the easiest pattern to follow though, so now I can beat him with no damage. The end boss itself is a different matter, he's cheap again, one hit knocks you off the trains and to certain doom. However, here's what I learned after many deaths-- this is the only boss where Ripple Gun's reflect power really just straight-up owns. With a ripple gun you can shred this guy pretty quickly.

Stage 7 : Another side-scrolling level, this one has some annoying platform sections where you must jump up vertical sections while things just off the screen fire at you. One hit will knock you back, and probably to your death. Other than these sections, it's really not too bad until you get to the last boss section, which is really two bosses. First, the guy with the giant mech from the second level is back, and his section has multiple parts. First you run around after him while avoiding other troops and floors that will break under your weight. Then you fight him in his robot suit until he escapes, which was horrible. Then you fight the actual boss which is a giant spinning blob with regenerating arms that shits green goo everywhere. I have no idea how to beat this guy "correctly" yet, since I just died repeatedly while fighting it and eventually it died before I ran out of lives. It's not a very inventive way to win, but it got me to the last level. I've only beaten this guy once.

Stage 8 : This is it, the last stage of Hard Corps Uprising, and it's suprisingly beatable until the very last boss of the game. This level has you running through a series of airships, dodging not only enemy troops, but insta-kill walls that attempt to crush you and giant electrical beams. The first section has you on a flying bike again (like the midbosses of level 1), but thankfully this section is pretty quick and easy. After that, you're on foot the rest of the way. After navigating through the first 2/3 of the level, you have to fight a supercomputer on a rotating platform. This boss would be cake, except the rotating platform will move you far enough to the left or right where you'll fall off and instantly die. The last piece of the supercomputer is a giant spinning ball that you will need to shoot to reverse it's direction around the platform, and if it hits you? Dead. It's not too hard, but it's got some cheap death possibility. After you down that, you have a short platforming section, and you are at Tiberius -- the last boss.

Alright, this boss has three forms. The first is human form, and is actually one of the more tricky ones for me to get through without getting hit. He will shoot blue beams into the air that will fall downwards at you (that you can shoot), and then do one of two moves-- side-to-side charges that are easy to dodge, or leaping attacks that I can never manage to safely avoid all of. After you do enough damage to human form, he will mutate into a giant freakish monster that shoots fire at yoy, creates zombies, and jumps around causing aftershocks that will knock you off your feet. He's the easiest of the three forms, and I can now beat him without getting hit as long as I don't get impatient.

At this point on the first time through, I assumed I was done. You kill mutant form Tiberius and the ship falls apart and you grab your helicopter and fly off... but then you see Tiberius form fall, and it starts moving and grows wings. Crap. Now you fight Tiberius last form, which is even more massive than before-- oh and did I mention you have to fight him on a whole bunch of falling platforms? Yeah, it sucks, especially when his attacks are designed to smash, dissolve, or even eat the platforms you're standing on-- and of course if you fall you instantly die. After getting used to his attacks, I finally beat him on my last life. While he's slowly dying, your escape helicopter flies on the side of the screen and you have to jump to it before the platforms al fall off the screen. I missed it my first time getting that far, and died -- GAME OVER. After almost ripping apart my whole house in a fit of rage, I did it again and beat him and grabbed the chopper on my last life. Finally, it's over.

So now that I've beaten the game on Rising Mode, I still think I can beat this on arcade mode. I think if I can get through level 4 that level 5-6 should be "easy" enough to fumble through. I'm not sure on level 7. There are parts of it that are insane, like riding missiles up an elevator shaft. I don't know how I'll get past the level 7 boss either. Why did I decide I have to beat Arcade Mode again? Oh that's right... my stupid pride.

Completed - Condemed 2 : Bloodshot (Xbox 360)

2011-03-19T09:21:00.002-04:00

Last year I beat Condemned : Criminal Origins, a game that I thought started slow and then became one of the best horror titles I had played in a long time. Condemned 2 : Bloodshot was a major improvement on the first game in terms of gameplay, although the story completely veered off into Twilight Zone territory by the end. I decided I like the path the story took, but it took me a little bit of post-game reflection to decide that.

I didn't really talk too much about this game while I was playing it, mainly because I've been playing it in small bursts when I was able to play it loudly and in the dark, and because I was busy writing about Dragon Age 2 or some other shiny new thing. Condemned 2 again has you playing Ethan Thomas, the now disgraced, alcoholic, and possibly insane police detective from the original Condemned. The last year hasn't been kind to Ethan, but the streets in the city are getting more dangerous and out of hand again, and the police are looking to you to help. In your way are an army of crazed hobos again, along with the further clarification of the events of the first game-- oh and SKX (the killer from the first game) may not be dead after all.

Almost every aspect of the first game was improved upon. Hand-to-hand combat is now much tighter, allowing for easier combos and "finisher" style moves that allow you to slam an opponents head through a window or smash it into a wall. After every level, you can earn new abilities and get powerups, like a larger lifebar, the ability to sneak around guards, and a holster that allows you to stow a smaller firearm for emergencies. The levels are also in more varied settings, and I thought they were also easier to navigate without getting confused -- I thought the first Condemned's maps were repetitive in places, to the point where I'd get lost because I couldn't tell if I just left an area. The maps here don't seem to do that, and after the first couple missions, you'll get a good amount of scenery changes, not just "old abandoned building."

My only real complaint, and like I said before I have decided this isn't really a bad thing, is that the story itself changes from what the first game seemed to be about. A lot of the previous game's events are mentioned, and it ties in directly to this game, but not only is the overarching plot a conspiracy theorists wet dream, but it's also written to lead directly to a sequel that I hope we actually get. Sure, the immediate threat is over, but we've just opened up a can of worms that screams for more information. If it doesn't even materialize, this game was still worth playing-- but don't expect to fully understand what's going on even after the credits have rolled.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 12 estimated
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 13.5% (135 / 1000 Achievements)
Outside Help Used : None.
Will I play this again? : Yes, especially if a sequel comes out.

Dragon Age 2 - First section clear. So far, so good.

2011-03-16T07:05:00.002-04:00

I'm going to attempt to not ruin anything, but that said I'm going to talk about places I've been and people in my party. So, if you (like me) don't want to know anything about what is coming up, and have not been into the Deep Roads at all yet, then you might want to skip this post.

As I mentioned above, I cleared the Deep Roads portion of my quest, and that signifies the end of the first section of the history of the Champion of Kirkwall. Pretty much the whole first section can be summarized as "learn about the politics and physical layout of Kirkwall, and gather your party". I now have a party of : my character (Warrior - tank build), 2 rogues (one is ranged, one is daggers), 2 mages, and 2 warriors-- one of whom uses sword and shield, and one is a two-handed machine (you can still only use 4 at a time, and one is always Hawke). This is a pretty good group for keeping my possibilities open, and I really like most of my party members-- although I don't have anyone half as cool as Shale (freed golem) in the original DA. Yet.

It took me 17 hours to get through this section of the game, and my characters are level 12. The Deep Roads Expedition (which you more or less spend the whole first section of the game gearing up for, getting people to join, and earning money to finance) was the first part of the game that was actually "tough", and even then it's just two large fights that caused my any problems. While it's pretty hard to kill Hawke himself, my party of choice for this section was Hawke, Varric the ranged rogue (who you are forced to take for story reasons), Fenris the elven warrior (two-handed damage spec), and Merrill (wild elf mage). Fenris was a new addition to my regular party, previously I had been using 2 mages, and a rogue as my party, but that proved to be too squishy for a lot of fights. Fenris can take a good deal of damage as well as deal it, so I think he's a good replacement. The end fight in the deep roads was tough, and was one of the first fights that I had to actually think about placement and boss positioning to get my party through safely. It also takes FOREVER, and if you don't have a healer-- make sure to stock up on healing potions before leaving Kirkwall.

After leaving the Dark Roads, several years pass and you start the second section of the story. I like this mechanic of storytelling, because it allows my actions in the previous section to have some more weight. For example, one of your party members might have become the Captain of the Guards for Kirkwall based on if you did their quests the right way. I like that I get little rewards like that, as opposed to how the original Dragon Age waited until you finished the whole game to really show you how your decisions affected the other party members' lives. I'm looking forward to seeing how this continues so far.

My only real complaint so far is that a lot of "dungeon" areas are reused frequently. I went into a bunch of caves for the story, and all of them have the same layout. Sewer / underground areas in Kirkwall itself all follow the same design as well. They're all very much linear as well, which is sort of underwhelming-- and this is coming from a guy who plays World of Warcraft, land of thousands of the exact same cave. Especially since Dragon Age 2 is a fairly linear narrative with limited areas, I expected a little bit more variation in the maps. It's a minor complaint to be sure, but it's one I keep making in my mind while I play it.

On a general backlog note, my wife is going out of town for the next 10 days, so I'm a bachelor for the next week and a half. For a lot of guys this might mean that you'd be tearing up the town, going out to bars and hanging out with your "Superbuds" or something. Anyone who has been reading this by now knows that for me this means "Holy Crap, I'm going to waste the next 10 days on my Xbox-- I hope I don't forget to feed my dog next week". Maybe I'll knock out a bunch of the games I'm partially working on... or maybe I'll just make a new Warcraft character and make absolutely no progress on any of these games.

Oh wow, Rising Mode is going to be cake.

2011-03-14T09:03:00.002-04:00

Possibly cake that will repeatedly shoot me in the face, but cake nonetheless.

Aside from questing in Dragon Age 2 for most of the weekend, I finally tried out a few runs of Hard Corps Uprising's "Rising Mode" where you play through the game while earning points and unlocking upgrades. In just two attempts, I've gotten through level 4 and to the boss of level 5, and that was with minimal upgrades purchased. I can now see why people complained that this was an "Easy" Contra, because these people are treating Rising Mode as the actual game... not Arcade, which is balls hard.

Rising Mode is the same exact levels with the same strength enemies, but YOU have loads of upgrades that you earn. Arcade starts you with 2 extra lives, and a 3-point health bar, where in Rising Mode I still haven't unlocked all the upgrades and I am currently starting with 6 extra men and a 6-point health bar. The weapon upgrades are much faster in Rising Mode, as you can purchase upgrades that turn a weapon drop into it's upraded form instantly-- in Arcade, you have to upgrade shots by multiple pickups no matter what. I still wouldn't say this mode is baby easy yet, but I'm not even 50% upgraded and I'm crushing the first 3 levels.

Another notable difference with Rising Mode is that it saves your level completion progress. I can start at any level I've reached before, allowing me to really learn the chaos that is level 4 before I go back to it in Arcade mode. It's really a nice addition, because playing a game for an hour just to die horribly over and over at a new level is something I'm no longer used to. In modern gaming convention, I'd be saving every few minutes and after every miniboss, with unlimited attempts to do so. Saving after every level in Rising Mode is a good balance between making the game way too easy, and the complete beating Arcade mode's "Start at the beginning, duh".

I'm still going to beat Arcade mode before I consider this game Beaten though... I will probably regret this decision.

Completed - Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii)

2011-03-12T06:59:00.002-05:00

I had mentioned before that I had beaten the last boss of Donkey Kong Country Returns earlier this year, but we were still aiming to get all the "secret" temples unlocked and collect all the puzzle pieces. Last night, we finally did it! All 9 temples cleared, all puzzle pieces obtained, and we unlocked Mirror Mode-- the option to play each level backwards with just Donkey Kong (no Diddy, or his amazing jetpack, at all) with only one life and no items to use. I can't see that I'm going to rush to play that again, although that does sound a lot like a MAN Challenge...

I'd hate to show those guys up again so soon though.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : I'm going to estimate 25 hours, but that's a completely wild (and most likely low) guess.
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 100%, All 9 temples cleared.
Outside Help Used : Had to look up how to find 3 of the puzzle pieces, and after looking them up felt extremely dumb.
Will I play this again? : I'm sure at some point, yes. Much like New SMB Wii this one is worth having around for when neices / nephews visit.

OMGJeremy MAN Challenge #2 Results are Official.

2011-03-11T07:23:00.003-05:00

I won. [insert fanfare]

Click image (or this text Marty) to read it

As I thought, I did win this MAN Challenge as well, although Billy and I went back and forth for a while. I only got halfway through the game (to the boss at the end of level 4 out of 8), but now that the challenge is over, I can play the Uprising mode of this game where I can further upgrade my guys into full blown flesh tanks of destruction. Should be a good time.

Dragon Age 2 : Second day's thoughts.

2011-03-10T07:49:00.004-05:00

Another night of playing an hour-ish of Dragon Age 2 last night, I've made it past the intro section, and have made it to the first real city in the game. After getting accustomed to the new graphics and the speed increases of combat, going into the city of Kirkwell is like I walked back into the first game. There are merchants everywhere, random people you can talk to, and of course -- loads of quests, some completely optional, some are related to your companions, and the actual story-progressing ones. What this means is that last night I walked around talking to people and getting my bearings for the whole hour. I loved it, but my friend Marty will hate every second of it.

The clunky interface of Dragon Age has been changed, but I can't necessarily say it's been improved. Some things have been removed-- crafting is no longer done "by the player". Crafting, which in the original Dragon Age was one of the more awkward implementations of item generation that I'd seen, is now performed by craftsmen in the city for you-- providing you gather the materials and learn recipes for them. Essentially this still lets you hunt down rare recipes still if that's your thing (it's totally my thing), but you don't have to sacrifice useful skill points for the ability to actually get things made. I do like this change.

The boxed ability trees in the first game have been replaced by branching paths, giving the illusion of more streamlined upgrading options, but everyone has 5+ ability trees. Looking at the trees in detail, it appears that you can't even fill out most trees in order, and you will get more than enough points to pill out multiple trees. Really, it ends up being the same thing, but it does look prettier and does show more obvious connections between abilities than the old Skill Wall look of the last game. The skill page appears to have been removed, and the upgrades you would have gotten from it (tradeskills, trap detection, extra NPC tactics slots) all come organically while you level your companions.

You still have a limited inventory space, and you still need to buy backpacks to increase it. Inventory management is essentially unchanged, and still one thing I don't look forward to dealing with. Holding the L button will bring up your skills / items and pause combat, remaining the same as what I was used to before. You still enter things into your Journal as you fight new enemies and learn more about the world around you. Really, as far as gameplay is concerned, I can't see anyone who loved the previous games really having a lot to complain about. The game made some changes, but nothing has been mindblowing (or game-breaking) yet.

Maybe tonight I'll actually leave the town and get back to action, but I don't mind if I instead talk to a bunch of people and work on filling up my Journal more.

Dragon Age 2 : First hour done, and first impressions

2011-03-09T08:28:00.003-05:00

Last night I didn't get a lot of time to really play Dragon Age 2, but I did at least get to play the first full hour of content. I'm going to try and talk about basics of the game and not ruin the story on this one, but possible spoilers warning on this entire post if you (like me) want to know almost nothing about a game before you play it.

I love the presentation of the game so far. It still feels like the Dragon Age world, but everything is prettier. The darkspawn are still around, I have fought basic troops and a few ogres -- which are also far better looking. The faces and expressions of the characters are also far less unnatural looking, which is nice. It's got a smoother feel to conversations as well, at least so far. Your character actually talks out loud, which I heard some people bitch about-- but really, it makes it so much better in my opinion than the "silent" main character of the previous games. The game starts you out in the middle of an action sequence, avoiding the regular RPG pitfalls of "you are a regular dude doing some boring crap for 30 minutes before a dragon kills your mom and now you are a WARRIOR". I don't mind that sometimes, but some of the backstories to the previous Dragon Age were... underwhelming. This game has avoided that so far, and at the same time I don't feel like I'm walking around as an unbeatable fighting force. It's a good balance.

One thing to note is that your main character selection is limited to humans only. There are still dwarves and elves in the world, but your character is a human. This choice was most likely publicized before the game was released, but as I tried not to read too much about this game, I didn't know that. I don't think this is necessarily a bad idea, because it will allow the narrative to be a little more focused than DA2. For example, in the last game, I made a Dwarf Noble-- defaulted to be an exiled Dwarven prince. I was sent to die, and yet later on I returned to the dwarf capital and other than a few "I thought you were dead!", I was an exile just wandering around unmolested. It was sort of explained in-game, but it was a forced explanation. Limiting your character to a human with a universal backstory should make this easier to script realistically.

You have the same three base classes to pick from as the first game had -- Warrior, Rogue, or Mage. As I made my previous character a Warrior for the first playthrough, I did the same this time. I am Garreth (default name) - Human Warrior. After playing through the intro, which does a pretty good job of telling you how to play while not having you killing rats in a basement, you get to upload your file from a previous save. This is not to play the same character, as it's in a different part of the Dragon Age world, but instead will change some of the background flavor. I'm not 100% sure what this changes yet, but after I finish it, I'm going to have to go research exactly what changes. I'll let you know here what I notice as an obvious influence to my old Dwarf Warrior, Bron. It also has some default Histories to pick from, in case you haven't played Dragon Age or played it on another system.

The gameplay itself is thankfully still very much like Dragon Age-- but it seems way faster. Not like the game looks sped up, but it's the difference between watching an actual fist fight and watching a Bourne Identity fist fight. Combat is fast, full of quick attacks and -- as I noticed with the warrior -- many more open attacks that hit multiple people. Most of the things I've fought so far also have less health, but are more numerous, making even basic combat feel a little more like a scene from 300 as opposed to a slower D&D style fight that the first game had a lot of. I think this is so far a welcome change, but it has lead to some quick deaths of my support members so far that I didn't even see coming. I think that's more a reflection on my lack of attention to them, and less of a game-breaking issue.

I will be posting on this a lot more in the next few weeks, and if the rest of the game is as good as this first hour would imply, Bioware has definitely made a suitable sequel to the original Dragon Age.

Backlog++ : Dragon Age 2 (Xbox 360)

2011-03-08T07:08:00.004-05:00

It's finally here! The sequel to Dragon Age is sitting on my desk staring at me and asking me why I'm still sitting at work and not home playing it. Well, I still have a few more hours to kill here, and my rent isn't free. So, instead of dwelling on what I'm not doing, I will update on the process of the games I had mentioned 14 days ago. As you can tell from the lack of Completed entries, I have not managed to finish any of these games. This is not as depressing as you'd think, because I've made some real progress on a lot of these.

Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 - Ok, I actually haven't done any real work on this. That's what I get for mentioning it first on my "need to focus" post. Hey look, a shiny piece of string!

Hard Corps Uprising - I didn't beat it yet, but I did most likely win the MAN Challenge. As far as actual gameplay, I've gotten to the World 4 end boss in Arcade mode. I will try out Uprising (character upgrading) mode. I'm not 100% sure if Uprising or Arcade mode will be my "beaten" thing... but either way, I did play it and posted on it quite a bit. Expect the OMGJ summary tomorrow, assuming the other guys write their pieces.

Condemned 2 : Bloodshot - I played a few more levels of this -- up to level 8 right now. I should really write more on this game, but it's the sort of game where atmosphere is 90% of the game, and I don't really want to ruin the game for my friend Randy, who actually doesn't even read this. Anyway, level 8/11 -- I'm apparently going to break into a prison bus to interrogate someone. It will probably end poorly and I'll have to fight an army of bums. Again.

Final Fantasy X - Progress here slowed down because I'm not really playing as much WoW, but our raiding will start up again this Sunday, meaning I'll be on to fly around doing archaeology and not getting a staff again this weekend. Hooray. As far as the progress I did make, I'm still visiting temples. So... not much progress apparently.

Super Mario All-Stars - I haven't played this at all either, but I'm sure I'll plow through it in an afternoon soon. It's hard to want to play Mario when I have so many other things to play. Buying DA2 probably didn't help.

Donkey Kong Country Returns - This one was the one game I didn't really think I'd finish, but my wife and I have actually logged some time in on this one lately, so we're at Worlds 1-7, all KONG and pieces obtained. Only one world left to go, and we might do that tonight.

Etrian Odyssey III - I made some real progress on this as of late, but as it's my "play at work" title, and work has gotten crazy busy, I'm not really worried that I'm not a lot farther. I'm in the 4th stratum, and at the end fight-- which so far hasn't gone well. It's not as bad as my first runs at the splitting robot at the end of the 3rd Stratum though, so either I'm getting better at this, or I got lucky (even in loss) in my tries against this newest boss. Hopefully work will die soon and I can get back to it.

So, I have made progress on a lot of these games, it's a shame they're mostly going on hold while I play Dragon Age 2 for a while. Expect some updates on that exclusively for the next few weeks. Coming up this month -- my wife goes out of town for 10 days, so I try and finish off a lot of these games during that time period... but until then, I'll still try and focus on some of these older games a little bit each day. Maybe.

MAN Challenge update -- Guess who's on top again?

2011-03-03T08:07:00.004-05:00

(Hint : This person writes on this blog)

Give up? It's me. I'm back on top of the OMGJ scoreboard right now, with 19.5 million-ish to Billy's 18.6 millionish. We've been going back and forth since Monday, but as of this post I'm on top again. I've also managed to get a little bit farther in the Arcade version of the game (which is the only version we're playing for the Man Challenge). Not a lot farther, but I did beat the boss at the end of level 3. But first, I'm going to backtrack and start at the midboss of level 3.

Level 3 :

Monday I had described the first half of the level three pretty well. However, I sort of wrote off the last half because I had only played it a couple times and other than "HANG ON AND TRY NOT TO DIE", I didn't have an actual recollection of what happened. Now that I've done it a few more times, I've got a much better description of the second half of the level. It's still "HOLY CRAP" for the most part, but it's broken into a few sections.

Immediately after the boss, you have a few standard moments of "run to the right and shoot guys", and then the floor falls out and you will have to run from boulders down a series of caves, while shooting guys all over the place, and not running into flamethrowers. I have yet to get through this section without dying. However, there is an extra man powerup near the end of this section, so I have managed to only die once and get that man -- sort of ending it net 0, which I consider a win. You exit the boulder-chase sequence at a fairly standard bit of moving platform jumping-- in this case, sections of the wall will shoot out, and you will need to jump from wall to wall to wall to get to the next section of the wall. Once you get through that, you have another section with boulders, but this time they come at YOU and you either have to shoot them out of your way (which is nearly impossible with a standard gun) or jump over them. However, because this is a Contra game at heart, it can't be that easy -- so the ceiling is covered in spikes and is slowly lowering to the floor. There's one safe spot where you can hide from the ceiling crashing down, and then it's a mad dash to the end of this section-- and into an underground river where you ride around on a one-man raft, avoiding spikes and shooting grabber enemies until the river ends at a waterfall and you finally get to the endboss of the third world.

After a few times of playing this boss, I've finally got him figured out. Even with the default gun, there's really only one rough section-- unless you screw up the "on deck" section. I'll explain that in a second. The third level boss is the same giant robot you fought as the midboss, but he transforms into a gunboat. Gunboat has three phases from what I can tell, and only the third one seems to truly suck. First phase is in front of the boat, it fires easily jumped lazers and rockets you can shoot. After doing enough damage to the missile launching device, the boat will shoot forward and you jump onto the deck. This begins the second phase, which I call "The Dance". You will be shooting an orb on top of the ship, but the whole time you will have to jump over a flying spark and two slow moving orbs, which fly around in a figure 8. It's not hard once you really get down the patterns of the slow orbs, and if you do this right you should be able to take the ship down well below halfway before phase 3. Phase 3 sucks. The ship submerges, and begins shooting large missiles at you from off-screen. It also shoots smaller homing missiles from underwater. It's pretty chaotic, however, if you manage to survive it, you go back to Phase 1-2 and should be able to kill it during this round of The Dance. At the end, again as a final "screw you", you need to jump to the helicopter and leave before the ship explodes.

Here's how this boss get's ridiculously hard. If you screw up The Dance phase, you'll probably get knocked into the water, immediately switching to Phase 3 again. Phase 3 is horrible and eats lives, so if you fall enough times you're just asking to lose. Do yourself a favor and learn The Dance.

So after level 3, which was previously the hardest level in the game, get ready to die horrifically in level 4. Level 4 is a street level that so far has claimed all attempts to beat it. There are cars that slam into you, helicopters shooting bombs and missiles at you, little jumping robots, and then there are parts where all three happen at once and you throw your arms up in horror.

However, the most important thing to remember is that right now I'm leading scorer in the MAN Challenge. I only have to hold onto this title until Sunday...

OMGJ Man Challenge extended

2011-02-28T11:45:00.003-05:00

Due to all of us being busy with actual lives (even me), we have extended the second Man Challenge of Hard Corps Uprising for another week, to end on Sunday 3/6. This actually isn't a bad thing-- even though by the deadline I was leading on the scoreboard-- because we're all still on the third level, and there are eight. I read some previews and comments about the game from Contra "purists" (if such a thing exists) about how this game was too easy. I think these people had to be playing a different game than I am. I acknowledge that I'm not the best gamer on the planet, but I'm not terrible... this game is hard.

Let's look at a rundown of the first 2 (and a half or so) levels.

Level 1 :

The first level of the game is a desert which seems easy enough at first : run sideways, shoot guys. First mini-boss in level 1 is a base that looks like the original boss of NES Contra's first level, the fortress with large cannon. The new fortress is baby easy, especially if you have a Spread gun. Afterwards, more sideways running until you get to the first motorbike section where you get to fight the second mini-boss, a motorized drill-machine flamethrower combo. Died to this guy at first, but after the first run-through this guy is cake. After you finish off the flamethrower machien, you get to the actual boss, a Robotic Sandworm.

The Sandworm, while looking tough, is actually a pretty basic boss as long as you can dodge it's missiles. Otherwise, just blow apart the head (or kill the body for points first). However -- the level is not finished! You have to finish a harder version of the motorized drill machine from earlier, only now it will separate into two parts. I still can't beat this part without getting hit or dying regularly, although having a charged up Machine Gun definitely helps. At the end, as one final Screw You, you have to time a jump off your motorbike or die instantly.... that's fair. Assuming you made it this far, congratulations, welcome to level 2, which will find more ways to destroy you.

As far as a Contra level, this is pretty standard fare, but the motorbike sections make it seem super long.

Level 2 :

Now you're in the jungle, again not a groundbreaking new area in the world of Contras, but along with avoiding "standard troopers that run at you", we have to avoid exploding plants of various types, snipers that lay along virtually any platform area of the map, and robotic crocodiles-- some of which you will jump from mouth-to-mouth Pitfall Harry style. At first this level seemed daunting, but once I realized that the sniper shots can be stopped by shooting the sniper once, causing them to have to reaim, I was able to make it through this fairly regularly. Then we hit the midboss of this level, a bomb-dropping helicopter that will split in half and then ruin your day. I'm not regularly able to beat this guy without getting hit after it splits. I'm getting better at it, but there's one part where the helicopter halves both sit on the bottom sides of the screen and shoot blades at you. It should be easy to dodge, but somehow I manage to get hit every single time. Oh -- did I mention that half the ground here is robotic crocodile jumping? Yeah... fun.

So if you make it through that grinder, you thankfully get another bit of standard Contra action, going further into the jungle, hopping from ruin to ruin dodging attacks until you eventually get to the second boss, which is far more Guilty Gear than Contra in flair -- but still feels very much like it belongs. After a standard "Oh, it's you again -- let's fight!!" speech, you fight a Mech-unit that contains someone you used to be partners with, or fought years ago, or that you stole an ancient family secret from-- whatever the reason, this guy is a familiar face to you, and wants to fight in the middle of the jungle. At first, I couldn't figure this guy out. He charges around the bottom of the screen, he summons helper bots that fire at you, he shoots homing missiles, and eventually will perch on the sides of the map shooting a giant targetted laser at you. I did find a solid strategy to beat him finally though, and I'll give you a tip -- USE RIPPLE. You'll find a ripple gun after the helicopter (or maybe it's right before). Save it for this guy, I think it made him far easier. Onto level 3, where I've been stuck.

Level 3 :

This level shouldn't be as hard as it is, until the minboss at least... but there's enough things going on, that I manage to almost die way more than I'd like to admit. You'll be crawling through a series of caves, dodging not only standard enemies, but bats that shoot bouncing visible "sonic" bursts, exploding robots with go-go-gadget arms, boulders falling through the ceiling, and the obligatory "spinning blades of doom" that never stop anyone -- yet every single supervillain organization uses them. After you get through a short few areas, we get to fight the first mini-boss, a giant robotic asshole (not literally) with arm-lasers and fire orbs. After a few deaths, I noticed the pattern to it, and was (normally) able to avoid stuff while slowly picking away at the boss. However, when you double-jump, you will often grab onto the ceiling, which definitely has it's use in the fight -- but for me, it hinders far more than helps during the fight, and I died a good number of times to poorly timed ceiling drops. I eventually did beat him, and have not made it to the final boss on level 3 yet.

So that's where at least 2/3 of us are in this Man-Challenge, going back and forth between two of us for the lead. Right now I'm getting threats from Billy (who has retaken the lead), so I'm spending my evening seeing if I can finally clear this level and get back to the top.

RIP MyGamerCard.net

2011-02-25T09:15:00.003-05:00

From the first post on this blog, I've been able to put my XBox Live account information in the Sidebar of my blog via MyGamerCard.net. Well, this morning I noticed that it had changed to the image above. Going to the site reveals that due to server costs and Microsoft policies, the site has decided to shut down, and so I have removed the image from my Sidebar. I'm sad that this service is gone, but I'm glad it was available for the years that it existed. So, thanks, Morgon.

So now I need some help finding a replacement. I could just make an icon for my Gamer information for XBox Live, Steam, and hell maybe even my main WoW guy(?), but if there's already a service like MGC that will show what I've been playing and stuff, that would be preferred. So, all 5 people who read this... any other sites like MGC out there still?

Etrian Odyssey III -- Into the 4th Stratum, and a whole new world of pain begins

2011-02-24T10:16:00.004-05:00

It's been a few months since my last mention of Etrian Odyssey III other than just to say "I'm still working on it", and now that I've made some solid progress again it's time for a real update.

As I posted previously, I've finally beaten the boss at the end of the 3rd Stratum, which was a giant robotic golem that splits and rejoins constantly throughout the fight and was generally a giant pain in my ass. He had a charge-up attack that would kill almost anyone in my party in one hit, and if it happened to Bron (Monk-- healing class), it was a guaranteed wipe, no matter how long the fight took. I ended up leveling up my Wildling (animal summoner) to the point where I could summon a lion, and that proved to make everything a little better. Lions show up, and immediately fall asleep. But if something wakes them up, they erupt into a fury, causing damage and stun / paralyze status effects on most enemies. I got lucky with a string of paralyzes on the boss when he was split, and I was able to finish him off.

The 4th Stratum is filled with a series of gates that will close if you walk through them in certain directions, also forcing every other gate on the level to close at the same time. There are switches that raise the gates, but they aren't always in the most accessable places. It's also full of Old Ones, which are more or less mer-people with magical powers that they use to destroy me. So far on the 4th Stratum, I've really just been running around killing trash and gathering materials to sell to get the current best weapons / armor, but I've learned a few things in the last stratum that have made my exploring a bit easier. These may seem obvious, but whatever. I needed to figure them out :

1) Always bring HP and TP (magic) potions, and a couple reviving potions as well. Too many things will destroy you in one hit, and if it's your healer that died without a revive potion to bring him back, you're screwed.

2) Always have at least one Pole Stone / Ariadne Thread for when you get stuck trapped behind gates, or trapped by horrifyingly large monsters. Both of these items transport you to safety, and are well worth the 50 / 100g to not have to restart from your earlier save.

3) You bothered leveling a Wildling to summon pets -- SUMMON THEM OFTEN. I don't know exactly why I waited through 12 levels of dungeons to summon things regularly, but they make a massive difference. And this leads to the most important thing I've learned...

4) Status effects are awesome. Learn how to make them happen. I can't tell you how many times I've lived only because a monster was Confused and wasted a turn attacking another monster-- or at the very least just used a basic attack on me and not a party-wiping bite attack or something. If you have abilities that Stun, Paralyze, Bind, or otherwise cripple a mob, they make a massive difference in the outcome.

With these things in mind, I've made pretty short work of the 13th dungeon floor (1st in this Stratum), and have moved onto the 14th. I think I'm getting pretty good at this finally, although I can promise that there will be a monster here shortly that will remind me that I am unworthy... and it will probably happen before I leave this floor.

I must learn to focus yet again.

2011-02-22T09:30:00.003-05:00

It's almost the end of February, and so far I've finished one game, and added 6 games. This is the opposite of what I'm supposed to be doing. I've played a lot of games this month however, I just keep playing little bits and pieces of things and finishing none of them. It is progress, but not in any sort of usable way. Last year in order to fight this issue, I basically limited myself to one game per format -- still allowing for some back and forth, but still not allowing myself to play 3 Xbox games at once, which is what is happening now.

Instead of the one-per-format method, I'm just going to stop myself from playing anything else until I beat the games I've been working on, with an end date for all of the following games of 3/8/11. Coincidentally, this is the day Dragon Age 2 comes out, which is a need. Here's what I've been up to since the end of January, and what I want to finish by 3/8.

Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 (360) - I've beaten a whole 3 levels in this game, which is not much. I'm pretty sure I can power through this one in a couple days -- assuming I have the patience to keep at it. So far, this isn't quite as hard as the original Rearmed, but it's also not ridiculously easy.

Hard Corps Uprising (360) - I'm playing this for the man-challenge, and it's the newest addition to the Backlog. The challenge ends this Sunday, and so far I'm consistently getting to the end of level 2. It's hard, but again, not impossible-- so far at least.

Condemned 2 : Bloodshot (360) - I'm only on level 5 (out of 11), but I should be able to clear a level a night if I just make the time for it. I like playing this game when it's dark out and nobody else is home. That's harder to make happen than it sounds-- but when I can pull it off, this game can make me jumpy. That's hard to do at this point, but wandering through condemned buildings and hearing what might just be wind or a crazed homeless person with a bat... well, it can totally give me the creeps.

Final Fantasy X (PS2) - I don't know that it's even possible to finish this by 3/8, but I'm sure going to try. I'm about 14 hours into the game, but I really like it. I don't think I like the story all that much. It's far better than FFXII's almost non-existant story, but it's still really hokey. I am enjoying learning the ins-and-outs of each character, but so far this is a pretty easy RPG. Again -- only 14 hours in, I'm sure I'll retract that last statement in a few weeks.

(Retro Challenge) Super Mario All-Stars (SNES) - I'm done with the original SMB, and am now working on the Lost Levels. It's definitely harder than the original, but the way I see it, once I beat Lost Levels, I can beat Mario 2 and 3 in an afternoon. I really need to keep at this one, because I can easily see getting stonewalled by Lost Levels if I lose focus on it.

Honorable mentions (games I've been playing but don't really care if I finish by 3/8):

Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii) - I just started working on this again with my wife, and we've gotten the hidden temples cleared (with all puzzle pieces) on the first two worlds. Only 6 more to go, and then I'll get to the secret banana temple and the game will be beaten. I'm not holding this one to that end-date, but I list it because we're playing it and making progress again. The temples are pretty hard, and getting all the KONG letters and puzzle pieces on some of these levels is far harder than you'd think.

Etrian Odyssey III (DS) - I haven't mentioned this one in a long time, but it's my "Play at work" title right now. I finally made some real progress last week and beat the guardian (giant robot) at the end of the 3rd Stratum, and am now wandering through the 4th stratum, getting my ass beat by random trash fights. I haven't really played this as much as I'd like because work actually picked up some since the start of the year, and I'd like to keep this job for a while longer. Still, beating that giant robot was a month-long process... so we're getting somewhere, although at a (heavily armored) snail's pace.

So, if I can finish the top 5 games listed here by 3/8, I should be back on track to beat all the backlog games by the end of the year -- which is the whole point of this thing. March should be a good month for clearing out some of th longer / older titles. I will be left home alone (and "single") for 2 weeks, and as I have become quite the shut-in over the last couple years, I imagine I'll have quite a few late nights of "quality" Xbox time.

Backlog++ : Hard Corps Uprising (Xbox 360)

2011-02-20T13:02:00.003-05:00

I know I've already added way too many games on here this month, but this is the newest OMGJeremy Man Challenge title -- Hard Corps Uprising (aka -- the Contra that isn't called Contra). As you may recall, I was the winner of the previous Man Challenge, Super Meat Boy, so I'm aiming to keep my title with this one. The end-date of the Man Challenge is supposed to be this coming Sunday (a week from today), so I'll decide at the end of the week if I'm done with it or not.

I've only played the first level a few times, and so far I can see arguments for and against calling this a "Contra" game. It's definitely got a Contra feel to it, and that's without the constant homages to the series that I've already seen. Hell, the music that plays when you start the game is a metal version of the opening Contra tune. The first level has a miniboss that is essentially the first boss of the original Contra. You've got the standard Contra weapons -- Spread Shot, a Heat gun, the Machine gun. It really feels like someone mashed up the PS2 Contra titles (Shattered Soldier and Neo Contra) and then added some heavily anime styled graphics to it. It seems obvious its in the Contra bloodline, Konami is even the people putting it out.

However, I can also see not labeling it Contra as well. The anime graphics that I mentioned before are almost too goofy-- they're designed by Arc System Works (the Guilty Gear people), which is obvious from the first moment you play it. You also have a health bar, which is not a Contra staple. Also, while this is definitely not an easy game, it's doesn't seem Contra hard.

Whatever the game is called, if you like Contra-style 2d action games, this is great. My main complaint is that not only is it $15 on XBLA (which is apparently the new price point), but to unlock two of the four playable characters you need to pay $2.50 each. I know that "I don't have to buy them". I most likely will not buy them -- after all the differences in the characters is pretty minor... but I'm becoming to hate that first-day DLC is becoming all too common. It's one thing if it's free first-day downloaded stuff as a pre-order or early purchase incentive, but to sell me a game that is mostly completem "but you can buy the rest for $5 more today!", it just seems silly. Just give me the option to pay $20 at the get-go and give me everything.

Retro Backlog Challenge Update - Super Mario Bros. All-Stars progress

2011-02-18T07:31:00.003-05:00

I haven't talked about it much this month, but must like how Castlevania on the NES was my Retro Backlog Challenge game for January, I have been slowly playing Super Mario All-Stars for this month's challenge. Ignoring that I added the later two PS1 Final Fantasy games to that list, I still plan on focusing on one of these games each month (the Final Fantasy games are a slightly different beast that I will be tackling one at a time while I waste days of my life grinding on garbage in Azeroth).

Super Mario All-Stars consists of the 3 SMB games of the NES era, along with The Lost Levels (the japanese SMB2), all of them with enhanced graphics slightly less good than Super Mario World on the Super NES. So far, I've only spent time playing Super Mario Bros. and SMB - The Lost Levels. From what I can tell so far, The Lost Levels will be the hardest of the 4 games to beat. I'm still counting all 4 of these games as "1 game", because all of them are relatively short, and because I thought this challenge out poorly. As a side note, this is the exact same thing as the 25 year Anniversary SMB disc that's out in limited supply for the Wii, so if you really love Mario I recommend getting your hands on a copy of that disc now before it's gone for another 25 years.

The original NES Super Mario Bros. is a classic video game in every sense. Everyone who plays games at all knows who Mario is, he's the gaming icon. You can arguably give Mario credit for revitalizing the video game industry after the Atari-era video game crash of the early-80s. My own memories of the original Super Mario Bros are that it was nothing short of mindblowing, it was the game that changed everything. First off, Mario was one of the first games I played on the NES. Sure, I had played Duck Hunt and Gyromite, and I'm certain a handful of other games (many nights were spent at sleepovers playing Kung-Fu and Excitebike), but all of those games played like quarter-based arcade games. You had either a set amount of time or lives to play through short levels where the only real goal was score. Mario had all these "trappings" of the time, but it was massive. 8 worlds, with 4 levels per world, where each level could take you a few minutes to run through perfectly-- not to mention times you'd die over and over and over to squids and hammer brothers-- this game felt Epic at the time. [And yes Saz, I did just use Epic, but properly].

Playing it again 25 years later, SMB still holds up. I'm not a massive fan of the new graphics, but it doesn't affect the gameplay as far as I can tell. I'm pretty sure that's just a bit of nerd rage over nothing. It's still one of the tightest controlling games ever made, and that is something I've realized is far more important than graphics, story, or pretty much anything else in a game : Control is key. It's also a very short game by today's standards. If you knew what you were doing, even without using the warp zones you can get through this game in under an hour. That's how I'm playing it -- no warps. I managed to get through worlds 1-6 in the first sitting, with very little problem. It's good to see that 25 years of constant gaming has made me a little better at these sorts of things, but world 7 and 8 have definitely been a fight.

Thinking back, I'm pretty sure I can say I had played World 7 one time until now -- I mean, once you've learned you can jump from 1-2 to 4-1, and then 4-2 to World 8 via warps, why would you ever play the game any other way? (Unless you're a 30+ year old trying to flex your e-nuts, of course) World 8 however, is rough. It's where I've been sitting at since last weekend, and I've gotten to the point where I can get to 8-4 pretty consistently, and even get to the last section of 8-4 on 1-2 lives. But, there's where I keep hitting a wall. 8-4 is one of the castle levels, but instead of being straight-forward you have to jump through the correct series of pipes to get to the end. When you finally figure it out, you've then got to get past possibly one of the worst non-boss enemies in gaming -- a Hammer Brother, who I've easily lost 20 lives to. If you manage to get past him, you then get to Koopa who also throws hammers, breathes fire, and jumps around. I've gotten to Koopa a handful of times, but after you lose all your lives, you get sent back to 8-1 with 5 lives to start the whole world again.

My patience has grown in the last 25 years, but even now, once I get to Koopa and lost all my lives, it's time to turn off the SNES and give it another try in a few hours. It's a good thing I'm playing All-Stars, because at least that saves my progress World-by-world. If I had to start from 1-1 to 8-4 each time I got pissed and turned it off, I might have decided this Challenge was "stupid" or some other excuse that really meant "I failed."

Next time -- Super Mario Bros The Lost Levels, which from the get-go is harder than the first 6 worlds of the original. Flying squids, out of water... think about that.

The aftermath of the first Backlog binge of 2011

2011-02-14T08:52:00.005-05:00

I don't know what happened this past weekend. I think it's that I got paid on Friday and had some time to kill wandering through a few game stores and... ok, who am I kidding. I'm weak sometimes. I suppose for my personal and professional life that it's great that my horrifying behavior manifested itself this time in buying some old, cheap games as opposed to a Sheen-esque weekend of alcohol, porn stars, and a briefcase of cocaine, but the shame I feel is real none-the-less. I added 5 games to the backlog in one massive failure of my impulse control.

I have been thinking a lot about getting more JRPGs, since I only had one left in the Backlog (Lost Odyssey) before, and I also wanted something I could play on my PS2 while I wasted time in WoW flying around and farming Archaeology nodes mindlessly for hours to not get a staff and trinket (again). The games I had left on PS2 were all action games, and I wanted something more like FFXII, which was great to play while I was farming stuff in WoW last year. This led to my decision to pick up not only Final Fantasy X, but also FFVIII and FFIX. That's three long games to add to my Backlog (FFVIII and IX are going to be part of the Retro Backlog Challenge listing), but I was not finished yet. I also grabbed Bully : Scholarship Edition for the 360, and borrowed Ghostbusters : The Video Game from a friend because I've had at least 3 people recommend it to me. So that's five new things to beat, while I've beaten 1 game this month. Excellent.

So, for pretty much all weekend, I was up in my office unsuccessfully farming Archaeology on WoW and playing Final Fantasy X. I never really gave this game a shot before, even though it's 10 years old at this point, mainly because at some point between Final Fantasy VII and FFVIII, I completely got burned out on RPGs in any format. I did get excited about FFVIII ahead of time, but I played about 30 minutes of the game and had decided that it was the gaming equivalent of kissing a bunch of dudes, and I never played it again. At that point, I wrote off the entire Final Fantasy series as a bunch of games catering to people who cared more about a game looking pretty than actually being good games. FFXII made me rethink this decision, and so far FFX has been better than I expected-- but still a bit... goofy.

I'm at about 10 hours into FFX so far, which is about where I needed to be in FFXII to decide that I liked it. I really like the ability sphere, the method of increasing your characters powers, a lot more than I thought I would. Instead of getting experience that raises your character's level, hit points, magic points, etc., you instead earn orbs that you plug into a chart to get more HPs, Mana, abilities, to make your guy better. So far, it's fairly linear and obvious, but I can see further down the chain where I'll have to make some real decisions about what I really see each person specializing in. It's similar to the way you leveled in FFXII-- which was also one of the main things I liked about that game.

*Warning : spoilers of a 10 year old game incoming*

Storywise, I feel like I'm at the end of the introductory questing, and getting into the real meat and bones of the game. The world of FFX is sort of interesting, but at the same time completely ridiculous. It starts in some future world where your character is the Michael Jordan of the most popular sporting event, Blitzball, which is essentially an underwater mash-up of basketball and hockey. During a major Blitzball game, a creature named Sin shows up and trashes the city, in the process somehow sending you 1,000 years into the future. You wake up, and are trying to find your way back to your time while helping a collection of heroes from this part of the timeline defeat the very same Sin who sent you there, who has been tormenting the people of this world for the last 1,000 years or so. The world is post apocalyptic to the point where relics of your time are regarded as holy, and Blitzball is somehow still a major event for the people of this world.

I a lot of people complained about Blitzball being as prevalent, but wow. I had no idea exactly how much it would impact the game. You somehow end up joining the worst Blitzball team and (along with your real mission to hunt down and kill Sin) will be traveling around taking part in a tournament. Blitzball is woven into the very fabric of FFX, where it's not just an important sidegame, but one of your main party members uses a bunch of Blitzball moves as his attacks, including just beaning the enemy in the face with a ball. I haven't actually played a game of it yet, but I'm at the first tournament now, and will most likely be playing some of it whenever I get a chance to play again. I did play the tutorial, and it's not all that bad... but in general the fact that some sort of futuresport is essential to the storyline of this game is so amazingly stupid that I've wholly accepted it, and I don't feel as angry about it as I would have if the game was called Super Blitzball RPG Funtime.

Stay tuned for more updates on games that are older than most of the internet.

Donkey Kong Country Returns -- Beaten, but not yet Complete, and Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 fails to disappoint (me at least)

2011-02-07T07:40:00.005-05:00

Yesterday, right before leaving to watch the Superbowl, my wife and I finally beat the last boss of Donkey Kong Country Returns. I'm not considering this game beaten yet, because (unnecessary spoiler alert) there's obviously bonus levels of some sort, and we need to beat them all first to enter the Banana Temple that the game shows you after you beat the last boss. It's sort of sad that I expect bonus levels at this point from these games, it's not like DKC Returns was an easy game to get through. I think there's only a handful of levels that I collected KONG and got all the puzzle pieces. In fact, there are some levels that I might have gotten lucky getting 1 of 5 or more puzzle pieces just to narrowly beat one time. So -- I'm going to keep plugging away at it a level at a time finding all the secrets but have counted it as "Beaten" on my Backloggery page. I'll count it as beaten here once we get that extra temple area opened.

Aside from DKC Returns, I also got to try out Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 this weekend. I'm not really far in so far, but really, it's gotten sort of a bad rap from the reviews I read. If you liked the previous Bionic Commando Rearmed, there's no reason I can see you disliking this game. It's pretty much more of the same, with a few minor "enhancements", most notably the ability to jump (more on that shortly). Complaining about the game while saying you love the first is like saying you loved Mega Man, but hated Mega Man 3. It's basically the same game with some minor changes so that it wasn't the exact same game. It's still got some terrible jokes, it's still fairly unforgiving (at first), and it still feels like Bionic Commando. That's all I can really ask for.

So now I get to make a complete 180, and acknowledge a few of the complaints.

It is pretty easy so far. In the first level, you will find a poorly hidden powerup that causes your life to naturally regenerate. It's a pretty fast regeneration, and you still get the health regenerating bits from a lot of the enemies you will fight. So, unless you are trying to beat speedrun records, there's no real reason not to just take your time and stay at full-life constantly. Even the first boss allows you to more or less hide-and-heal for as long as you want. I don't have a major problem with this, you can technically turn off this powerup if you want to Hard Mode up the difficulty, but letting bosses give you breathing room seems weird. I won't lose any sleep over this complaint though.

I'm sort of torn on the jumping ability. It feels natural and fluid, and definitely makes getting around less of a pain in the ass, but at the same time you won't be able to play BCR2 without using the bionic arm for most of the game But still, it sort of feels like it's a concession to younger(?) or, at the risk of sounding even more like a fat elitist gamer nerd, casual gamers. However, that fat 13 year old raging inside of me is satiated because there is an Achievement to beat the game without jumping-- but there's no way to turn off jumping. I can't even remap the button to something I won't use, and instead it sits in the middle of my controller at A. So far it hasn't been a big deal, but when things get hectic I'm pretty sure I will hit that A button and then I will have to restart the level to get that achievement.

That will be annoying.

Completed - Castlevania : Dawn of Sorrow (DS)

2011-02-03T18:20:00.004-05:00

Finally finished knocking out the last boss of Castlevania : Dawn of Sorrow right before dinner tonight. The last boss was a giant 3-4 room high beast who summoned smaller mouth creatures who flew around taking off 1/5 of my life each time they hit me. After an afternoon of endless attempts at him, he finally fell apart, giving me the well-earned Good ending to the game. I know when I played this when I first bought it (pre-Backlog-- actually, I think it was one of my first DS games), I got the bad ending by killing Dario at the 80% mark and being completely oblivious to the visual cues on what to do. It's amazing what actually paying attention can do.

According to the game save, I spent 9 hours and 13 minutes. However, I know the save doesn't count times where you died over and over to bosses, and I know I spent at least an hour throwing myself against the last boss, so I'm rounding my time out here to a conservative 11 hours. I only got 98.7 castle completeness, but the remaining rooms are all "run around hitting walls like a crazy person" rooms, none of them are required to complete the game or are in obvious spots. I'm okay with not finding these rooms on my own, and just looking on Gamefaqs for their locations just to get that 100% seems pointless.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 11 Hours
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 98.7%, Good ending obtained
Outside Help Used : None.
Will I play this again? : You can play again as Julius, as well as play

Backlog++ : Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 (Xbox 360)

2011-02-03T09:06:00.003-05:00

Even though the few reviews I've seen weren't glowing on it, last night I downloaded the new retro-styled Bionic Commando Rearmed 2. I haven't actually played it yet, but I will be starting it as soon as I finish Castlevania : Dawn of Sorrow-- which will be soon.

The original Bionic Commando on the NES was one of those games I liked but found endlessly frustrating because you couldn't jump. You do get to move in a vertical direction, but the method of movement in that dimension were limited to what your bionic arm could grab onto and pull you up to, or gravity would take you in a less upward direction. It was also rather hard since a lot of the levels involved swinging from small platform to small platform, guaranteeing that you will miss a landing and fall to your death, causing a younger Jeremy to throw his controller in violent fits of rage. I did beat it though, killing Hitler in his helicopter, which everyone who owned an NES remembers if they remember this game at all.

A year or so ago, Capcom re-released the original Bionic Commando as a 2d side-scroller with updated graphics on Xbox Live Arcade, to coincide with the 3d rebirth of the series. Well, as I expected (despite never really playing the 3d version), the rebirth title flopped, and the 2d classic version ended up doing really well-- well enough to warrant it's own all-new sequel. However, probably because the 3d version that cost more money and took more time to develop tanked, the company that made both games, GRIN, has folded, so development has been given to FatShark (which contains many of GRIN's ex-employees). This time there has been a major game-changing addition to this game, aside from all-new levels : you not only use your arm to "jump" -- you can actually jump as well. I'll have to see if I think this is a boon to the game.

I think the sensible non-nerd-ragey part agrees that this can't be a bad thing. I'll let you guys know what I think as soon as I get started on it.

Sick days are gaming days.

2011-02-01T10:13:00.004-05:00

I spend the last few days sick and miserable, so I did what any 10 year old knows -- I sat around my house playing various games, with the added bonus of not feeling guilty for it. Most of the weekend was spent playing Warcraft, although I was not ready to raid on Sunday night. Due to the Superbowl being this weekend, we don't have a scheduled raid night for the next two weeks, so there's no reason I won't be geared by then. Yesterday, I focused mainly on Archeaology and finishing up the Lunar Festival acheivements, and I got my epic caster ring and the only Night Elf epic I have left is my trinket. The ring marked my 10th Rare item combine, so I have my new title and am now "Associate Professor Piddlywinks"... it's sad that I consider it one of the highlights of January.

Since most of farming archaeology is really "staring at my screen between flight points", I decided to spend that time instead focusing on Castlevania : Dawn of Sorrow. When I first played this game, which was before I started The Backlog, I got to about 80% completed and beat the boss I was supposed to fight, and the game ended and gave me a less-than-stellar ending. At the time I wasn't nearly as dedicated as I am now to really completing games, so it went back on the shelf for another day. I've gotten back to that point again, and I feel retarded for not figuring this out before.

[Minor spoiler alert] So let's say you are playing a game where you constantly gain new skills to unlock previously unavailable parts of your map. And let's say you just got an ability to jump inside of mirrors. And let's go one step further and say that the Boss fighting you in a room with a giant mirror in it. Let's add one more layer of obviousness, and say that inside this mirror is a giant demon glaring at you. Yeah, somehow I didn't figure this out before. I might have been drinking then. This time, I went into the obvious mirror and fought a flaming demon and got the game to continue. This leaves me with about 19% of the map left to explore to get a 100% "perfect" completion, which is what I'm striving for. I should be able to get that done tonight or tomorrow -- which is perfect because tomorrow I will be adding a game to this backlog. A retro-styled 2d game -- Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 to be exact.

My wife was home with me yesterday, so we got to spend a good chunk of the day playing Donkey Kong Country Returns as well. We're on the last few levels of World 7 right now, and while I'm loving this game for being so hard, I don't think I would have had the patience for this game before 2010. It's hard, and in a lot of ways cheap-hard. One of the worlds (I want to say world 4) was all minecarts and flying barrel levels. Minecarts are fairly self-explanatory -- you are in a minecart shooting down a track, and you need to jump at varying heights to avoid falling, hitting guys, and to collect the widgets in each level. I hate these, but they're nowhere near as painful as flying barrel levels. Flying barrel is that damn one-key helicopter flash game, but with an end. They're bad enough by yourself, but since every time you die in co-op you lose 2 lives (you and your partner share a vehicle), it's a guarantee that you're going to blow through all your lives just getting through the level. And the giant bat monster at the end of that one level? The very definition of infuriating. Still, this is an amazing game to play co-op, definitely the next step after Super Mario Bros Wii.

Speaking of Super Mario Bros., it's now February so I need to start my next Retro Backlog Challenge game -- and it's going to be Super Mario All-Stars. Let's see how much harder (or easier) these games have become in 20+ years.

The Piddlywinks Chronicles, Part VII -- Max level obtained! Now onto the rest of the game...

2011-01-26T09:39:00.002-05:00

Finally, after playing since Cataclysm launch date (12/7/10), I have taken Piddlywinks the goblin shadowpriest through levels 1-84, and I finally hit 85 yesterday afternoon. My path through the new areas of Cataclysm went Vashj'ir (underwater area with the nagas -- talked about it last time, loved it) from 80-82. Then I went to Deepholm from 82-84, which might be the best-put-together zone in the game. It's not the most exciting, but it smoothly pushes you around the zone via quests and seemed to fly by. As a bonus, it has the new shoulder enchant faction, Therazane (much like Sons of Hodir in WotLK were). From 84 until now I've been adventuring in Uldum, which I had heard pretty much nothing positive about, so I expected the worst. That might explain why I'm enjoying it fully.

I think Uldum is playing out to be the Sholozar of this expansion. I loved Sholozar, becuase it was fairly self-contained, there were multiple questlines (Nessingwary, the Oracles / Frenzyheart, and the scourge leaking in from Icecrown into Sholozar), and as a miner Sholozar was the place to go to fill your bags with ore. Uldum is the same so far. I've been flying around grabbing bags of Elementium and the occasional Pyrite node, doing ore-searching circuits around the zone in between quests. The quests also seem to have a few separate story archs -- the reclamation of the land by the Ramkahan "kitty cat people" and the misadventures of archaeologist Harrison Jones. I read a few complaints that the Harrison quests were too tongue-in-cheek and that the Schnottzies were fairly tasteless, but I'm currently playing a goblin who rides around on a self-made helicopter and wears boots that occasionally just explode. I'm not sure anything would be too ridiculous for me at this point. Schottzies being tasteless... well, I just have to assume those people have no sense of humor. It's an Indiana Jones parody, of course there will be Nazis.

So now that I'm 85, I need to get started gearing myself up for raiding. My regular raiding group was doing just fine without me, but I have a spot saved for me still and I intend on making it this Sunday. That gives me 5 days to get myself ready, and I have a good start on it already. Now if I can only get lucky on a few item drops and my archaeology...

Here's my guy at this point. I've got a good deal of work to do.

Hmmm... I'm betting there will be vampires. And probably some form of medusa head.

2011-01-25T07:38:00.004-05:00

Since my retro challenge this month was to beat the original NES Castlevania, I decided to go ahead and revisit the only other Castlevania game on The Backlog still which is Castlevania : Dawn of Sorrow for the DS. Might as well work on themes when it makes sense, so we can all look forward to the month where I play nothing but Sonic Adventure and hate myself.

Unlike the NES Castlevania and even Castlevania : The Dracula X Chronicles, Dawn of Sorrow is much like the most recent 2d Metroidvanias. Also, unlike both of those games, you aren't just a Belmont with a whip and some special items -- you play as Soma Cruz, apparently the reincarnated spirit of Dracula. Instead of running around with a whip, Soma uses standard action RPG items like swords, maces, spears, etc., and you can find new items and upgrade existing items during the course of the game. Soma's main ability is that he can sometimes absorb the soul of the monster he defeated, and these allow him to gain more impressive abilities -- like getting familiars to fight with him, throwing flaming axes, and giving him the abilities he will need to unlock previously unavailable areas.

I mentioned when I was playing both of the previous Castlevania games that I liked that both of them were more linear, pure reaction-based games, because I was sort of tired of Metroidvanias. I still stand by that in general, but I still like the idea of the slowly unlockable map. I also really like the soul absorption system here. As long as you can accept that you are the reincarnation of Dracula and sucking in souls is your business, it makes the unlockable abilities make sense. You're not just finding a magical staff hidden deep in a sewer -- you're killing a guy in the sewer who's soul lets you break walls of ice. Sure, that sounds stupid when you read it... but it works in this game.

This is a very pretty Castlevania, not that any of them are ugly (as long as we stay in the realm of 2d Castlevanias), with some giant boss fights and even some standard enemies who are almost screensized. The one bad thing this game has done so far is regain some of my interest in the multiplayer Castlevania for XBox Live. I was able to ignore if before... but if I could just find a few people to play it with me...

Completed - Retro Game Challenge (DS)

2011-01-20T17:07:00.002-05:00

I finally knocked out Retro Game Challenge, the oldest game on the Backlog in relation to how long I've been playing it. I'm not talking overall hours, but I was playing this game since well before I started the Challenge on Christmas 2009-- and finally it is beaten.

Retro Game Challenge is really 8 NES clones with a loose story tied around why you are playing them. The story is just a method to slowly introduce each game, and then give you skill challenges that teach you to play all of them. I explained this before, but that was last April so I'll quickly do it again. You start with Cosmic Gate (Galaga clone), and then gradually unlock the next 7 : Robot Ninja Haggle Man (A game reminiscent of the original Mario Bros-- not Super Mario Bros), Rally King (RC Pro-Am), Star Prince (Star Force / Gradius), Rally King SP (harder version of Rally King), Haggle Man 2 (also a harder version of the original), Guadia Quest (Dragon Warrior), and the best game in the collection Haggle Man 3.

After getting stuck for so long on Haggle Man 2, I was worried about having Haggle Man 3 coming up, but I really shouldn't have been. Haggle Man 3 is actually a really good game. It would have been short sold by itself, but add 3 or more full levels onto the game and it easily would be worth the standard $10 XBLA fee. Haggle Man 3 is a major advance in game style -- it goes from an arcade style score game and turns into a fairly well built Metroidvania with bosses and everything. I actually enjoyed playing every minute of this game, unlike Haggle Man 2 and the Rally King games. Everything else was at least playable.

There's apparently a sequel to this game that was released in Japan, but since this game really didn't do as well as was hoped (and the game show that it's loosely based on, Retro Game Master, never made it to the states), I don't expect to see it show up. However, if it did, it's a collection of 15 more games that I'm sure I'd pick up immediately... because I never learn.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : Estimated 30 hours
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 100%, All challenges beaten
Outside Help Used : None.
Will I play this again? : Probably not. All 8 games were fun enough, but only Haggleman 3 would be worth playing again at all.

The Piddlywinks Chronicles, Part VI -- I love the 80's

2011-01-20T11:21:00.003-05:00

Finally I have gotten this goblin to level 80, and am able to return to brand new content for me. Since last update, I was able to power through Northrend relatively quickly. I got through 72 staying completely within the Borean Tundra, then did maybe 1/3 of the Dragonblight quests before heading to the Grizzly Hills, which took me from 73 through 77. From there I sort of flew around Sholozar, the Storm Peaks, and Icecrown doing starter quests and finding Archaeology nodes (which are still fairly good XP) until I finally dinged to 80 on Monday night and heading back to Orgrimmar to start the 80s Cataclysm experience that everyone else started over a month ago.

Instead of heading to Hyjal, I took the ship out to Vashj'ir-- the mostly underwater zone. After getting our ship ruined by tentacles, Piddlywinks had to help save his horde companions from certain doom at the hands of the ever-present Nagas. Even at 80+, nagas are everywhere, although this time they're in a nice shade of green. I did get a pretty seahorse out of the deal, and I invaded some sort of giant shellfish creature, so that's cool too. Overall, Vashj'ir has been a positive experience. I've leveled twice so far, and expect I'll be close to 83 when I get to move onto whatever is next for me.

Someone asked me what I thought of the questing in Cataclysm vs the questing in Outland and Northrend. It's no secret that I really don't like Outland. I didn't like it when it was new, I still don't like it now, and it's not just because I think space ships in my fantasy is terrible (although I do). Outland is still organized like how pre-Northrend WoW was set up. There's a lot of collection quests, the quest nodes sort of flow freely, but there's a lot of busywork built into it, and there's a whole lot of unnecessary travel. Current WoW questlines are very much localized to the questgivers, and are organized in such a way that intiutively you will have all the quests you need in the Generic Underwater Naga Palace at the same time. You can more or less stay in there killing things and collecting shellbits or whatever, and then come out, turn it all in, and get moved onto your next questnode. So no matter what the flavor is, I like Cataclysm questing a lot more than I did from 60-70, although having a flying mount made that stuff a whole lot less obnoxious with Piddly.

Northrend on the other hand was set up beautifully. It felt like I was doing something for the story progression for the first time, mainly due to the introduction of zone phasing, which so far is heavily used in Cataclysm and the redesigned 1-60 zones that came out in the post-Cataclysm world. One of the best examples of this was Icecrown, where from the beginning you are helping the Argent Crusade (and later the Ebon Hand) in their advance into Icecrown and up to the stronghold of the Lich King. Sure, there were some phasing annoyances with things like getting people to be in the same phase to make sure summoning stones worked and getting people to help on quests occasionally, but it felt like we were moving things along. We weren't just killing 50 satyrs to collect their horns.

There has been a lot of phasing in Vashj'ir so far as well, and it continues this sort of design theory. I like that a lot. I enjoy feeling that what I'm doing is affecting the world, not just doing things in a static world that will never change. I think the questing in Vashj'ir has flowed really well between quest nodes, and I like the intermix of Alliance and Horde quest nodes. I love the look of the algae-overgrown and coral-covered night elf cities down here. So far, two thumbs up on this zone.

One thing I don't necessarily like (but is by no means a game-breaker) is that I have no "easy" way to go back to the mainland for training and there don't seem to be any forges or other tradeskilling places in this zone. I know I can technically just hearth out of Vashj'ir and go do all of that and come back, but in-game that seems to pull you out of the story and feel of the zone. I like that right now I'm semi-stranded in the middle of the ocean and I (together with the hordies I rescued early on) keep working our way through it with the help of the Earthen Ring, and I don't want to just hearth back to civilization because banking is inconvenient. Like I said, this is not a deal breaker-- I don't play WoW because of it's supreme sense of realism. It's just something I've noticed so far that I'm not a huge fan of, but I don't think I'd change this too much anyway if someone gave me the ability to do so.

I will post about the other new zones when I start working on them, but if everything else is as good as Vashj'ir, I'm looking forward to it.

Whoa, progress on Retro Game Challenge?

2011-01-16T17:41:00.002-05:00

It occurs to me now that labeling my classic console challenges "Retro Backlog Challenge" while playing a game called Retro Game Challenge was a foolish thing to do. I should have taken Mento's flaming X idea.

I'm in NYC this weekend visiting my sisters-in-law, meaning that I had a 4 hour car ride ahead of me. I decided that this would be the perfect time to just hammer away at Retro Game Challenge-- it's been the longest running game on my list, and I needed to just get back into it to clear it off the pile. It's been a long time since I've even mentioned my progress in this. Before today, I had completed 5 out of 8 games to finish the final challenge. I had Haggleman 2, Guadia Quest, and Haggleman 3 remaining. My previous progress on this game was halted because I can't seem to beat Haggleman 2. So, I decided to just move on to the game that should be the longest and biggest problem to beat -- the Dragon Warrior clone, Guadia Quest.

Well, 6 hours later, I took down the last boss of Guadia Quest, and bringing me one game closer to finally finishing this game. There's not a lot to say about Guadia Quest-- it does what it sets out to do, it's a more involved Dragon Warrior, but with a whole lot of flaws-- like not being able to see weapon stats when you are buying them, not listing what items and spells do unless you actually use them and write stuff down, and not having an overhead map, just to name three. RPGs have come a long way since the time frame Guadia Quest is parodying-- but this did remind me that for the OMGJeremy XBox Indie games article series I did pay for both Breath of Death VII and Cthulu Saves the World. Both those games are far better retro-themed RPGs, I think I will start playing them soon for real.

But for now, I'll keep hammering away at Haggleman 2. I just tried to beat it again and died and turned it off in frustration already. Hooray.

Completed - Limbo (Xbox 360)

2011-01-13T17:47:00.002-05:00

Limbo was one of the most recommended XBox Live games of 2010, and I didn't get it when it was new solely because of the Backlog. However, it went on sale for one day only for New Years Eve, so I couldn't resist anymore and grabbed it. I'm so glad I did.

Limbo is a side-scrolling action puzzler, very similar to Out of this World, Flashback, and Heart of Darkness. You are a boy running through a strange world for no apparent reason except to find other living people. You have two buttons - jump, and action. Action will flip switches and allows you to grab things and push/pull them. Using just this interface, you have to navigate your way through this weird black and white shadowy world. It's not a long game, but it was pure joy for me for the 3 hours it took to beat it. I love puzzle / adventure games, and this one was one of the best. For $10 (the sale price) or $15 (the regular one), you can't go wrong with Limbo if you want something to make you think and use your reflexes a little as well.

I'm definitely going to play this again a few times, I'm missing 5 achievements. 4 of them are hidden areas (I know I saw one of these and couldn't figure out what I was supposed to do to get there), and the last achievement is to finish the game in one sitting while dying less than 5 times. I think that now that I know what I'm doing, I could finish it in less than an hour. I will 100% this one. Please, make more things like this.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : Estimated 3 hours
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 75% (150/200 Achievements)
Outside Help Used : None.
Will I play this again? : Definitely. It's a short game, and I need to find those other achievements-- and play a 5 deaths or less game.

Backlog++ : Civilization V (PC)

2011-01-12T08:21:00.002-05:00

A big thanks to my friend Moday for sending me a Steam copy of Civilization V for Christmas, and I apologize for not saying thanks sooner. I saw the email for it, but since I didn't have a Steam account I assumed it was spam or some other such scam and ignored it. I was looking for an older email the other day, saw it again, and thought maybe I should just make sure it wasn't something real... well, it was. I now have a Steam account as well, which is probably dangerous for someone with no impulse control and active credit cards.

I haven't played (or attempted to play) a Civilization game since the original. My dad, who doesn't use the computer for much more than work and looking at pictures of his granddaughter, used to play the Civ games all the time and I never really got into them. It's not that I don't like them, but with so many other games to play I just didn't spend the time to learn to play any of them very well. I'm excited about getting into this one, but so far my attempts to play it have gone less than well.

I did the tutorials, but they are boring so I sort of just did what the directions said to do and finished them. They really aren't the most useful tutorials, so I just dove in and started a game which has taught me a lesson -- I'm still really bad at this game. I spent my first game building out my city and making a few military units, and I found the nearest independant city and attacked it. That city destroyed my units, leaving me with nothing but some workers and a settler, and then the United States diplomatically told me that I was a loser. I quit that game and will pretend it never occurred.

I'm not really sure how to consider this game "complete". I think the best way to do so is to dive in and figure out not only what I'm doing, but what I'll need to do to consider this sort of game beaten. At the very least, I'm going to learn how to play this game. I think I need to learn how to take my time again, because playing Civ V like Starcraft isn't going to get me anywhere.

Retro Challenge Complete - Castlevania (NES)

2011-01-09T08:55:00.005-05:00

Alright, my first Retro Backlog Challenge is complete! I have finally beaten Dracula on the original NES Castlevania. It only took me about 20 years, but I suppose for this challenge specifically I can say it took me a week.

My stopping point previously was usually Frankenstein and Igor -- the 4th Boss fight. As soon as I got there again I remembered why I was stuck there. During that fight, Frankenstein walks slowly across the ground while Igor hops around the room shooting fireballs and generally killing Simon Belmont in a few seconds. I figured out the key to the fight (really this whole game) this past week -- patience. After beating Frankenstein and Igor the first time yesterday morning, the rest of the game was a breeze up until I got to Dracula, which took me 2 hours of constant death.

It's not a surprise to me that the younger Jeremy couldn't finish this game. There are no save spots, no passwords, and a limited number of lives (which surprisingly isn't the standard anymore). You do get to continue, but when you run out of lives you continue from the beginning of the whole area you are currently in. Add in that each time you fall from a ledge you die instantly and that if you get hit by an enemy you get knocked back from things, and you get a solid 3 sections of frustration before you can get back to the boss you keep dying to before you can fight him again (and probably lose). It's hard to imagine that a game doesn't save your progress at all anymore, but this whole game can be beaten in 30 minutes.

It took me about 4 hours yesterday, but 3 hours and 40 minutes were spent entirely on the 5th and 6th area. The only game that even works this way anymore are shooters, and no shooter I've played has any enemies even remotely as annoying as those damn medusa heads and the hopping igors. I can't decide which one I like less.

Completed - God of War (PS2)

2011-01-07T22:12:00.003-05:00

The first game of the 2011 Backlog Challenge is complete, and it's God of War for the PS2. I didn't write a whole lot about God of War, mainly because it's a fairly mindless action game-- not a whole lot to say. You are Kratos, and your mission is to go to Athens and kill Ares, the God of War. Your main weapons for doing this are knives with chains attached to your wrist, but you will get different new powers on the way. It's nothing groundbreaking as far as gameplay, but it's all done very well and looks amazing on the PS2 hardware.

I liked it, but up until the last fight it was really easy. Admittedly I wasn't playing this on a mode more difficult than Normal on this playthrough, but really as long as you keep upgrading your main weapons, you can essentially button-mash your way through the game. That's not a major complaint -- sometimes it's nice when your only concern is hitting guys and rolling away from guys, but the difficulty goes through the roof on the last guy -- a 3 part fight that felt like it took me almost as long as the rest of the game.

I'd be interested in trying the next game. There's a lot of really cool imagery in this game, and it's hands down one of the best looking Playstation 2 games I've ever played. As a really nice bonus, once you beat the game you unlock a lot of behind the scenes stuff and a God Mode (so that I can really get my ass beat). Unlike a lot of behind the scenes stuff, I actually liked this-- a lot of level designs and enemy models that they didn't use, along with some really early prototype footage with explanation from the developer as to why they didn't use it. I like that sort of footage, as opposed to just watching an interview with a developer sitting in a chair. I don't know why anyone would watch those, but way too many games have them.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 9 hours, 15 minutes
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 100%
Outside Help Used : None.
Will I play this again? : Sure -- I'm going to eventually try this on God Mode and see how much harder it is.

The Piddlywinks Chronicles, Part V -- Into the Great White North(rend)

2011-01-07T08:07:00.003-05:00

Today marks one month since Cataclysm was released, which is also one month that I've been focusing on my goblin shadow priest, Piddlywinks. In one month, I have managed to get this goblin to level 72, get his main tradeskills (mining / engineering) up to 375+, get archaeology to 375+, and I didn't manage to get stopped by boredom in Outland like I did for my rogue. I'm currently back in Northrend, in the Borean Tundra to be precise, and unless something happens with my computer I should be able to blow through Northrend and finally be into the new 80+ content by next weekend. My goal is to be 85 and in starter raid gear by the end of January, and it's looking like I will be able to pull that off.

Last time we saw Piddlywinks, he was in Outland, which has remained unchanged since Wrath of the Lich King was released. I didn't really feel like writing anything about Outland since there was nothing new I could say about it. Since the last time I really tried to level a character through Outland, the main thing that changed is that you can now fly at 60. This makes a world of difference, because the zones in Outland seem massive compared to classic WoW or even most of Northrend. I don't know if that's really the case, but the quests are more spread out and don't flow as smoothly. As a result, being able to fly over random encounter fights while getting to the cave on the other side of the zone so that you can collect glowy mushrooms is a massive time-saver. Also, because they sped up the leveling process (or lowered the required experience or something) and because I'm using the heirlooms to level faster, I managed to only quest in Hellfire, Terrokar, and a little bit in Nagrand to make it from 58-68. That's leaving 4 zones completely untouched, so hopefully I won't find the need to do Loremaster later. Who am I kidding...

I think the other major factor in getting me through Outland is that I really feel that I understand the shadowpriest as a class. I've played a little bit of each class, and there's not really a "hard" class to play, especially just to level up, but there's a substantial difference in how I play when I really understand how the class works, as opposed to when I understand what my rotations should be. For example, last year during our raid cycle, there was a point where we determined we might need another tank. I had a druid at 70, so I set out to level her up and gear her quickly to tank for our regular 10 man. While feral tanking isn't hard, and I think I would have been good at tanking, we ended up finding a better tank.

So now I had to decide to go back to my hunter, or play this druid as a DPS class. Because I like having the utility to be a fill-in tank (or healer-- unfortunately for my raid), I decided to stay as the druid. I changed her other spec to Balance (chicken spec)-- mainly because I really liked looking like a big chicken, and because I wanted to fill roughly the same spot I was giving up with my hunter -- ranged DPS. I liked playing as the chicken, and I knew what I was supposed to do, but there was something that I was missing for the longest time where I wasn't really hitting the numbers I should be and I wasn't able to adapt to fights where I had to move often... really, I just wasn't as good a chicken as I was a hunter. Eventually I switched back to the hunter, and it just felt right. I understand the class. I know what I'm supposed to do, and playing it felt organic-- if I see a buff I can remove, I remove it. If I can trap something, I will trap it endlessly. I never really felt that comfortable with the druid that way. I was fine when it came to standing still and pushing buttons, but a lot of things I could do and didn't (what's hibernate again?) are marks of not knowing what I'm doing enough.

I don't feel that way with Piddly. I haven't run any instances, and I've never healed with him, but I have done a good amount of BGs while leveling, and I've won most of my open-world PVP fights. I know what all my abilities do, know where they are on my actionbars automatically, and I feel confident playing him. I think this is because I've done nothing but shadow since I started Piddly, and because I'm not really grinding. I'm taking my time in each zone. I'm fighting elites to see if I can. I try and fight groups so that I can get used to DoT-ting a bunch of guys at once. I'm not taking drinking breaks so that I can learn how to use my built-in mana regeneration abilities. I'm by no means an excellent shadow priest, but I think that I will be as good a shadow priest as I was a hunter, and possibly better. If I could only learn how to heal well, I'd be set.

Backlog++ : Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii)

2011-01-06T08:45:00.002-05:00

Last night I decided to trade in a bunch of old games that I finished last year and get something new. I was considering buying Mass Effect 2 or Fallout New Vegas, but ended up grabbing something that I could play with my wife, Donkey Kong Country Returns for the Wii. She and I managed to beat New Super Mario Bros. Wii last year with all the coins (even on that awful star world with all the fire flowers on the floor), and while we've tried Smash Bros. Brawl, a few 3d shooters, and pretty much any game I bought that has two-player support, we really haven't found a game that clicked. Until now.

DKC Returns is another 2d action platformer just like SMBWii was, but limited to two player support instead of four. Since there are only two of us (and I only have two remotes) this is not a big deal. Unlike SMBWii, you can't run into each other and bounce each other off cliffs. This was a huge issue in SMB-- not a complaint that it exists, just that it was an issue for us when we played (there may have been a few fights over it). Instead, DKC Returns allows you to run and jump freely around each other, but there's still a good amount of room for co-op disagreement. When you are in a minecart or on that rhino mount, both of you share control. Either player can make the mount jump, which means that we already have adapted a system of "You get this one" or "I'll take the cart this time." This approach has cut our partner fury level by 50%.

As far as this game on the Backlog, I am going to count it because it will take some time, even though its a game I won't be playing by myself much. I won't consider it beaten until we get all the levels complete with the KONG letters, and all the puzzle pieces collected. So far, this is another amazing retro-styled new game, and I love it. Keep these coming, Nintendo, and you've got at least one guaranteed sale.

Winter Games Uprising Part 4 up at OMGJ

2011-01-05T10:57:00.003-05:00

New article up at OMGJ with continuing coverage of the Indie Games channel on Xbox Live. Only one Uprising game was released this week, so instead I checked out some random games on the service. Please do yourself a favor and watch the youtube for Maids with Balloons at the end of the article. It's quite possibly the most embarassing game ever made by man.

Works-In-Progress for 2011

2011-01-03T10:05:00.006-05:00

So, now that we've washed our hands of last years completed games and have a trim 28 game Backlog staring at us, what games have I partially gotten through to start the year off? What games should be easy completions?

Monster Hunter Tri (Wii) - This was hands down the dumbest game I bought last year. I'm not saying that it's a bad game at all, but on the contrary it's actually a lot of fun and takes a lot more patience and skill than I expected. It's also a massive game, with some truly hard fights that take almost an hour of real time and often end in soul-crushing defeat. I'm currently stuck fighting a giant underwater fish thing that burrows under the ground, and I've been at this exact point for about 6 months. Hooray.

Condemned 2 : Bloodshot (360) - I just started this at the end of December, and I'm at the start of the 2nd level. I like playing this one in the dark and alone, so there's not too many options to get playtime in. I suppose I should get back on this soon since it gets dark at 5pm, and I'm normally alone until about 8pm-- where I'm able to turn up the volume and really immerse myself.

Fable II (360) - I'm going to have to just man up and beat this to knock it off the Backlog. I don't even like this game much... the side-quests stuff is ok, but it's basically Baby's First RPG, or Zelda for perverts. I've rescued / found two of the legendary heroes so far, and I'm pretty sure I can finish this quickly if I just buck up and play.

Trials HD (360) - I've finished all the Easy and Medium levels with at least silvers. I've gotten half the hard levels finished with silvers. This game is a lot of fun, but the difficult shoots up to insanity pretty quickly.

God of War (PS2) - Progress on this one sort of hit a wall when I started playing WoW again, but I'm going to start playing it again soon. Maybe tonight. This is a pretty, pretty game, and it's got a lot more to it than buttonmashing like I thought originally. I'm currently going out to a desert or something, I'm sure the mission is a thinly veiled quest to smash things in their faces. I'm good at that.

Etrian Odyssey III (DS) - I'm slowly making progress on this one, mainly because each floor of the labyrinth is a grind to earn money and experience. I'm still loving this though, it's definitely one of the best games I bought last year. I'm now down to floor 12, and almost out of the lava stratum. I'm sure there's an awful boss fight coming up though, and I'm going to completely get ruined. Hooray!

Retro Game Challenge (DS) - This game... this game. I'm still 5/8 games complete on this thing, but I admittedly haven't spent any time on it whatsoever since this past summer. I don't know why I suck so bad at Haggleman 2, but it's still my roadblock. If I beat no other games in 2011, I will finally take this asshole off the list.

Lemmings (PSP) - I like to play Lemmings on trips to the bathroom or when I'm on a plane or someplace where I can just sit down and focus. Much like every other Lemmings game, it starts out easy, and gets hard fast-- and the lack of a mouse interface does not make this any easier. I've beaten the first 20 mission block, and am somewhere in the middle of the second 20. There are 80 missions in the "classic" game, and then I want to say another 20 PSP specific levels. Lemmings isn't the sort of game I can play for hours tho, so it's a slow-player. Eventually this will fall.

Part of me (the sensible part) believes I should just focus on these games and get them off the Backlog quickly. Thankfully, I ignore my sensible parts... so look forward to me not mentioning any of these games again until June.

Let's start up the 2nd Year of Endless Backlog!

2011-01-01T17:42:00.006-05:00

Alright, after many hours of meditation (that strangely looks suspiciously like playing a lot of WoW), I have decided what I will be doing with the blog. I'm going to keep going with it like I did last year, starting with the remaining games of 2010, plus one new addition -- Limbo, an XBox Live Arcade game I bought last night because it was on sale for New Years Eve.

I have decided to take an idea left by Mento in my comments section earlier this week. I'm going to add some of my old, old console games (essentially anything that isn't the newest generation of systems and my PS2-- as I still lack a PS3) to this thing. However, I'm not going to throw them on the regular Backlog pile-- I will be creating a separate list for these games. Quite simply, these are older games that I've never managed to beat, either because they were too hard or I managed to acquire them well past the time when that console was relevant. All of them have a specific reason I'm adding them, and this will all be outlined in the Retro Backlog Challenge page.

I want to do some sort of redesign as well, but I like how this blog flows, and I definitely don't want to replace the simple current design with something that is distracting and overly busy. Whenever I get it up, feel free to tell me that it sucks.

And now, my week of Backlog vacation is over. Back to "work" I go.

Indie Games Winter Uprising, The Negative World up at OMGJeremy

2010-12-29T09:23:00.001-05:00

MARTY'S PERSONAL LINK

This week, none of the new Indie Game Winter Uprising titles were ready (there are three left), so instead I chose to review older games by these developers. If you liked the other indie game articles, this is more of the same. If you didn't... well, I think there's a comic or something on OMGJ that you might like. Or you could bake a cake.

The Piddlywinks Chronicles, Part IV -- To Outland!

2010-12-28T09:29:00.000-05:00

I finally ordered my new video card-- which should be in by New Years Eve, hopefully. Until then, I hooked up my old computer to play WoW, get my mail, and write crap that nobody wants to read. It plays WoW just enough to count as being playable, and it chugs in Orgrimmar or anyplace with a high number of active players, even with all the settings stuck on low. I was impressed at how good "low" settings still looks. Sure, the game is nowhere near as pretty as it will once I get my real computer back up and running, but it's far better looking than I expected.

While I'm on my gimped hardware, I've been working on getting Piddlywinks leveled up. I'm currently at level 58, with my Engineering at 300 and Mining at over 300, which is where I'd want to be for entering Outland. My Fishing, Cooking, and First Aid skills are all under 150, and Archaeology is just over 150. I don't need First Aid (I'm a priest), and while I will eventually get Fishing and Cooking up, I'm just not that motivated to do it now. One afternoon I'll just put on a movie or two and max fishing, giving me the materials to max cooking as well. Archaeology on the other hand, I've fully been working on. There's just so much travel involved, and like I said before, no real rewards for doing it while leveling other than the massive XP gains.

In my last update, I was just finishing up Desolace and heading into Feralas. I did all the quests in Feralas fairly quickly, and while there are a few new areas and horde camps there, Feralas is relatively unchanged from it's pre-Cataclysm state. I've always liked Feralas, partially because nobody goes there and there are caves of apes to fight, so I didn't mind doing it-- but it's not really a very interesting zone in general, and if you did it before I'd say you can safely skip it and do Duskwallow Marsh instead. However, from there I went to what might be the most drastically different zone as far as landscape -- 1000 Needles.

Wow. 1000 Needles was always a welcome stop for me before even if I just counted the racetrack quests, but now it's incredible. Now the whole zone has been flooded, but you'll still be able to find remnants of the prior state of the zone everywhere, especially if you dive down to the former surface. You'll be doing this a lot if you want an easy source of mithril nodes, but you'll also be doing this at the old racetrack area-- which is now the home of a goblin/gnome sail barge instead. As you may already be aware, I love anything that's remotely related to engineering-- and a giant floating piecemeal base is exactly that. Add in a constant war with pirates, and you've got my favorite area in WoW so far. On the western side of the zone, there's the war between the Grimtotem and the Taurens that is going on all over the zone. This makes more sense if you are into the lore of the game, but if you aren't then it's still a cool series of quests that leads you around, killing cowpeople for other cowpeople, and giving you a cool companion that actually fights things with you for a while. And of course, the Twilight Cultists are here now too, trying to unleash a massive elemental beast to destroy the whole zone. Really, this zone was amazingly fun, and I blew through it far too fast.

After 1000 Needles, I went to Tanaris. Tanaris is another one of the zones that didn't change all that much. They've added the entrance to Uldum (one of the post-80 zones), and the eastern side of the map is submerged now, but for the most part this is another zone with a bunch of disconnected collection quests. I think it was either this or Feralas that I was sent to at this point, and again I probably chose wrong, I would have done Feralas-- at least I could worked on my Furbolg rep or something. The positive part of this zone is that it's the first place in Kalimdor that my Archaeology actually found some troll artifacts. I know that they are more plentiful in the Eastern Kingdoms, and as soon as I can fly, I will be scouring that continent for artifacts as well. Hopefully the exp gains will not be diminished for that like they are for killing mobs after 60.

I got about halfway through UnGoro Crater (one of my previous favorites that is still very similar to it's former self) and hit 58. This is traditionally the level where you can start getting quests in Outland, and at the very least I have made that shift out there to get some BC-era items to replace the non-heirloom gear that I have. Just switching out the pants and wand with the starter quests there, I have gained about 1000 HPs. This would explain the major increase in difficulty in AV in the 55-59 bracket-- I think I might have been the only person not in BC-starter pieces. I've never been a fan of most of Outland, but I'm hoping that actually liking this character (unlike the last two I attempted Outland material with) will push me through this quickly, because I love Northrend, and I'll finally be able to do the new 80+ content for the first time.

My thoughts on the future of Endless Backlog

2010-12-28T07:47:00.000-05:00

Christmas has come and gone, the Backlog Challenge was failed, and now I am sitting back at work pondering my options on what to do. I actually got some responses, both here and elsewhere, in regards to what I should do with this thing. Thank you for the input so far. I think I'm down to really 4 options.

1) Do the exact same thing as last year. This is appealing, because I essentially just take what I have leftover from this year and keep going. The upside is that it's only 27 games right now-- there's a very good possibility I could actually complete this one. The downside is that it seems too easy, although looking at the games I have left and knowing about how my lack of self-control when it comes to purchases, I doubt that it's really going to be that easy.

2) Add older console games that I never finished but want to. I'm leaning towards this one, even though it will make my backlog explode. I've got a whole bunch of original Xbox, PS1, Dreamcast, and TG-16 games that I'd add. I've even got SNES and Genesis games I'd add to this. The positive thing here is that if I did this I would really feel like I've completed something. I still have never beaten half of the Oddworld games, and I have them just sitting here. I've never beaten Legendary Axe because it was deemed "too hard" by a much younger me. I would love to spend time trying to beat Rush N Attack on the NES because I've never even seen past level 3. I'm afraid this would push this thing to an unbelievable level of games though, and it would mean that the Backlog would no longer be set at "this year", but instead will be an ongoing and unending wall of frustration.

3) Go back and try and get 100% achievements on games that offer them. While I like the idea of getting 100% achievements, I can use Mega Man 9 as an example of why I will never do this. One of the achievements is "Invincible" which means beating the game without dying. I don't know that I will ever have the dedication or time to do that. Ever. Mega Man 9 is quite possibly the hardest game I beat in 2010, and I easily died over 100 times in the process. I probably died over 100 times on the Wily levels alone -- spiked walls/ceilings, endless pits, not to mention tough bosses... yeah, too many opportunities for cheap deaths for me to really do that one without losing my mind. Also, it means not working on most Wii, PS2, or really anything but Xbox games (unless I get a PS3 finally). Therefore, this is not a really viable option.

4) Discontinue this blog, and start a Tough Mudder training blog. This is essentially the same option as "quit writing", but I'm adding it because it was suggested. In case you are wondering why this was even mentioned, I am doing some sort of Superman 10 mile obstacle course thing in April 2011 because a bunch of my friends decided they wanted to do it. I thought it was sort of a joke, so I went along with it, and now here I am signed up for some sort of endurance challenge. I will be training from now until April for it, but writing "ran today, ate a carrot for dinner" is not really an amusing blog to write. I will not be doing that.

So really I'm down to picking Option 1 or 2. Keep going with the current unfinished games on the Backlog page right this moment, or adding a mountain of gaming history to this thing that will essentially doom me to working on it until I die. It seems obvious that I should pick Option 1... but there's something about Option 2 that taunts me.

It's Christmas! (Backlog end date is here!)

2010-12-25T15:28:00.004-05:00

Well, a year ago I started this challenge. I can't believe it's already been a year. When I started this, I had one simple goal -- beat everything I owned on the current systems before Christmas Day, 2010, to include any new games purchased in that window of time. I started out with 47 games, which was upped to 51 games within the first week when I realized I hadn't counted XBox Live Arcade games. Over the course of the past year, I added 19 more new purchases to my list. By Christmas morning, I had 70 games total that I was to have beaten to win the challenge. The result?

Well, I didn't even come close. I beat 43 games during the challenge, and that leaves me with 27 games unfinished-- a sound defeat to The Backlog. That's only a 61% success rate.

While this was indisputably a failure, I consider 43 games completed to be a small victory for myself-- without doing this challenge, I guarantee over 20 of these games would be sitting on the shelf, some of them still unopened. This doesn't just apply to the turds I polished off this year, but also to some games that were surprise hits -- Final Fantasy XII, Madworld, 'Splosion Man -- all games that I thoroughly enjoyed playing that I can guarantee I wouldn't have played this year without actually writing out which games I even had left. 43 games in 2010 is a huge improvement over the 5 or so I beat in 2009.

"But Jeremy, don't you have some sort of relatively statistic that you want to throw around?" Yes. Yes I do. Take a gander at this :

Total time spent on the Backlog Challenge in 2010 (beaten games only) : 711 hours
Time spent playing World of Warcraft during challenge period : 420 hours

I'm actually impressed with myself here. Not only did I play Warcraft for less than the Backlog time (while in a raiding guild, no less), but I really thought I cut my WoW time down this year, and I still managed to hit 400 hours. I must have easily hit 1000 hours in 2009 on Warcraft, I wish I would have kept track of this crap last year. Adding both the Backlog and WoW time together will show that I spent 1,131 hours from last Christmas until today playing games (and this is a low estimate, since it doesn't include all the time I spent playing Fable II, Monster Hunter Tri, Etrian Odyssey III, and any other game that ends the year "in-process").

This means that during 2010, I spent on average 3 hours and 6 minutes playing games every day-- and it still wasn't enough to beat 70 games.

So... what do I do with this blog now?

Indie Games Uprising Part III up at OMGJeremy

2010-12-22T09:11:00.002-05:00

HEY MARTY CLICK THIS LINK FOR THE ARTICLE

This is part 3 of most likely 4... the concept has actually gone over pretty well, so I'm going to keep going with these XBLIG or other indie game reviews, although probably not weekly.

Completed - Monkey Island 2 Special Edition (Xbox 360)

2010-12-19T09:04:00.003-05:00

Since my PC died, I decided that I wasn't quite frustrated enough, so I went to work on finally finishing Monkey Island 2 Special Edition. As I had been stuck on one area more or less since the game was out originally, I decided that I would use the in-game help option just to see if I was even on the right track (which I was). The help was something like "you should find the other map pieces". Ok, that's really an obvious "tip", like if my tip for Super Mario Bros. was "get to the end of each level alive". So I pressed it again, and got a slightly more refined clue like, "All the map pieces are on the three islands". Again... groan. 45 hints later, I was close to the hint I needed, which was to win the spitting contest -- that I had already been working on.

One more hint and it said "go to the bar on Scabb Island and see if the bartender has any drinks to enhance your spit." Keeping in mind that I had gone into every single building, I had been to that same bar and gotten drinks but none of them did anything other than make Guybrush say "eww." Then I mixed two together, and got a different drink. Oh. After getting that spit contest won, I managed to get through this part of the game rather quickly, and had little to no problem getting through the rest of the game -- with a little more help from the hint option, because at this point I was just angry that some of these solutions made little to no sense. Why can't I cut something open with a knife that I have? Oh, because I have to smash an old bottle against a tree first to get a sharp enough edge. Hello? I have a knife!

The ending definitely isn't what I expected. If it was a newer game, I'd have assumed I got the junk ending, but it's The Ending. It's not bad, necessarily... but it's not what I expected, that's all. I hope that this series of remakes continues with part 3, because I've got the original game sitting here that won't play on current computers, and I'd love to play it. Hint, hint.

COMPLETION STATS :

Hours to complete : 8 hours, 50 minutes
OCD Completeness Percent Achieved : 73% (145/200 Achievements)
Outside Help Used : None. (In-game help used -- too many to count)
Will I play this again? : Yes, once I've forgotten the puzzles and get way too lost again.