• Mirror’s Edge (already beaten – they weren’t kidding when they said this was a short game)
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
• Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones
• Prince of Persia (the new one)
• Crysis Maximum Edition
• Torchlight
• Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition

Backlog doubled, just like that :(

In any case, I’ve put a little time into Crysis, Torchlight and PoP Warrior Within. Crysis is pretty awesome so far – not only does it look nice, but there’s a fair amount of open-endedness in how you can approach enemy encounters. You can run in guns blazing, or you can choose to play Solid Snake and pick off enemies one-by-one. And of course with either approach there are different ways to go about it as well. So far I’m favouring a stealthy approach since it’s just a lot more fun.

I still don’t like PoP Warrior Within’s darker aesthetic, but the improvements to the combat system are appreciated. I wish they hadn’t added the ability to do the platforming tricks in battle, though; while trying to roll out of the way of one of the enemies the Prince decided that he needed to take a jump off a cliff instead. Bleh.

Mirror’s Edge was short, but it was pretty good. That said the combat is not the strong point of the game – I had the most fun when I was running around and actively trying to avoid combat. On top of that the time trial stages are pretty much exactly what I expected them to be – exercises in maintaining momentum and finding the best route to hit all the checkpoints – very old-school Sonic.

Torchlight is basically a single-player Diablo II clone with some elements from Diablo I chucked in – namely spell scrolls/books. I’m playing a Vanquisher on Hard, and it’s fairly entertaining in short bursts. Without online I can’t see myself playing this for extended periods of time, though.

Anywho, on to something a bit more topical.

I’ve been playing a fair bit of TF2 since the new patch hit, mainly because my primary class (Soldier) got updated. I’m kind of at a loss when it comes to understanding how Valve designs their updates – on the one hand the Soldier got a set of very useful, if a little buggy, items that added new ways of playing the class, but on the other hand the Demoman got completely shafted with a new sticky launcher that limits his offensive potential, and a pair of melee items that encourage them to run around and engage in melee clusterfuckery (and subsequently get gunned down by Scouts, shotgun-wielding Soldiers and Heavies).

I suppose the Demoman is already good enough that he doesn’t need any new weapons, but at the very least it means I have to deal with less sticky spam as idiot Demoman players run around with their swords and shields, trying to hack people’s heads off. It’s also proved to be a great way to improve my aim with the shotgun!

I wrote up some quick impressions of the new Soldier weapons on the TF2 forums, which I’m reproducing below:

The Direct Hit
This thing shoots rockets ridiculously fast – think Quake III rockets fast. That said, it has virtually no splash damage so awesome aim is pretty much a requirement. That said the faster rockets make airshotting a lot easier – so much so that I think the fact that it minicrits on midair opponents is a little overpowered. Particularly since the game treats anyone not standing on a solid surface as being in midair. So if someone walks off a ledge and you hit them with a rocket from the DH, you just got a 35% damage bonus.

The Buff Banner
I see a lot of people use this, but honestly I’d rather have my shotgun. The minicrit effect depends on you being in the Soldier’s general radius, which can be tricky if you’re trying to flank or sandwich the opponent.

The Gunboats
This is the fourth item that the two classes were competing for. It doesn’t have a corresponding achievement so the only way to get them are to hope for a random drop or to use the new crafting system (more on that in a bit). They’re quite nice, if you want to play roaming soldier – using these, my regular horizontal rocket jump only takes off 10HP. Losing the shotgun is a big deal though, so you’d better have really good aim with your rockets.

The Equalizer
This is a straight up upgrade over the shovel, but then again I don’t really care. It’s really handy for the roaming soldier – I actually played a round of ctf_well where I ran into the intel room, killed all the defenders with 40HP left, grabbed the intel, whipped out the Equalizer and sprinted all the way back to my base unchallenged.

As for the other parts of the update:

Crafting System
You can now combine your excess items to make new items (think Diablo II’s Horadric cube). This is pretty much how I got my Gunboats (although the first time my crafting failed and I got another Buff Banner, argh). The list of ‘recipes’ is located here: http://www.tf2items.com/crafting/blueprints.php
There are tons of people whining about how it takes so many items to craft new hats, but honestly I don’t really care too much about that stuff. Although it would be nice if the game would give me another hat already…

New Maps
cp_gorge is rather nice – Lots of open spaces so there’s less spam, and lots of flanking routes. I like it.
ctf_doublecross has a metric ton of alternate routes, making it possibly the first CTF map I’ve ever played that hasn’t ended in stalemate all the time. Quite a fun map, I have to say.

• Added some more titles to my backlog thanks to Steam holiday sales: Mirror’s Edge and the last two titles of the PoP trilogy (as well as the newest one).
• Immediately removed Mirror’s Edge from my backlog because I beat it in 3 days
• Removed Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword from my list after beating it over Thanksgiving weekend.

More significantly, I upgraded my PC pretty much as far as I think I can take it – swapped out my old Core 2 Duo E6750 for a Core 2 Quad Q9650, which is about as fast as I can take it without buying one of the ridiculously priced Core 2 Extreme models. More cores certainly make a huge difference in games like Left 4 Dead 2, and to a lesser extent in Team Fortress 2. I also replaced my 8800GTS 512 with a GTX275, which has helped with some of the more graphic intensive games that I’m still working through (like Lost Planet). I also needed a new power supply for the new card, so I grabbed a simple 650W Antec one.

Just those three parts set me back a fair amount, so much so that I think my next ‘upgrade’ will probably involve just building a new box so I can get in on all the awesome i5/i7 action.

That said, I’m tempted to download the Crysis demo again to see how well these new parts hold up.

First off, Megaman 9. Let’s start off with a disclaimer – I’m not a Mega Man fan. My experience with the franchise is limited to a few minutes with Megaman X and Megaman Zero 2. That said, MM9 has me somewhat dumbstruck. It’s not that it’s a 2D sidescroller (that isn’t an issue at all, and in fact is probably a good move to appeal to Megaman fans). What I take issue with is this:

Mega Man 9 eschews the style of the more recent PlayStation-era Mega Man 8 or even the SNES Mega Man 7, instead going all the way back to 8-bit visuals, imitating the style of the NES games. Series creator Keiji Inafune commented that old-school Mega Man games don’t “fit into the grandiose and expansive world that the consumer gaming industry has become, and so you have to make games that match the current expectations.” This helped determine the game’s direction as a retro-style downloadable title for the WiiWare service.

2D is one thing, but the last thing I expected Capcom to do was take a leaf out of SNK’s book and completely recycle old assets. Actually, even that comparision isn’t appropriate any more, seeing what SNK is doing with King of Fighters XII. Yes, the old Megaman games are revered as classics, but if anything they are loved because they were good games, not because they used art from the 8-bit era! All this seems to be is another cheap attempt to cash in on fan nostalgia (see Street Fighter IV) by completely missing the point of why people love these games in the first place.

If they’re going to put it on a modern console, why not go all out and make a game with state-of-the-art 2D graphics that still stays true to the Megaman legacy? Heaven knows.

On top of that, it looks like Konami saw the announcement and decided to one-up them with their announcement of Castlevania Judgement for the Wii. The game is (of all things) a 3D fighter with motion controls.

I don’t know why Konami thought that Castlevania was great fodder for a fighting game. The system snippets in the article suggest that the game will play exactly like the main games, with heart meters and sub-weapons, but in a 1-on-1 format, which sounds strange. Still, it may be doable. The main reason I’m panning this announcement is the fact that the game uses motion controls.

I cannot think of a single fighting game on the Wii that has benefited from motion controls. Bleach: Shattered Blade is a shallow waggle-fest. Guilty Gear XX Accent Core has motion controls but no-one with any sense will use them. And the flagship fighting game on the Wii, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, eschews them entirely. The precision and timing that such games demand from their players means that control is of paramount importance (which is why any fighting game player will always insist on using an arcade stick). After about 9 months of using the Wii, I can safely say that the Wii remote does not have the necessary control. Games like Sonic and the Secret Rings suffer because of this, particularly on the later levels where it demands split-second reaction from the player.

If Konami knows what they’re doing, they will provide a classic controller option.

There was also that Ubisoft announcement of that new Prince of Persia platformer for the DS which inexplicably uses a chibi art style, but I don’t really consider that to be on the same level as these two dumbfounding announcements (although I think it’s probably just as unimpressive at this point).

Games that have been knocked off the list due to completion:

• Psychonauts – I didn’t get all the scavenger hunt items, etc, but I was level 50 by the time I hit the final boss, and he didn’t give me much trouble.
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – Excellent game, but that final boss was far less challenging than the platforming area that led up to him.

Updated progress for the remaining items:

• Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition – No progress made. Haven’t touched my PS2 in a while, actually.
• Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition – Mission 5-2. @#%@ Regenerators.
• Zack & Wiki – No progress made. I don’t expect any will be made for a while, actually…
• Super Mario Galaxy – No progress made. That Luigi purple coin mission is really hard if you just bumrush it without any planning (like I tend to do)
• NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams – Finished the main story on both sides (not that it was hard, there being only 3 levels on each side and a common final level + boss fight). But I always try to play platformers to completion, so my next target is A-ranking everything. Yes, that includes that music mission in Memory Forest, a mission whose designer really needs to be shot.
• Advance Wars: Days of Ruin – I, uh, played a few more turns of mission 13. Still haven’t beaten it.
• Sonic Rush Adventure – I’ve been doing more time attack runs than Sol Emerald hunting, if you get my drift.

New entries on the list:

• Mass Effect – Level 20, just picked up Liara T’Soni. I’m playing as a Soldier, and will be going for a Paragon rating, like the goody-two-shoes that I am.
• Beyond Good & Evil – I actually haven’t gotten very far in this game because of a weird bug that causes my framerate to drop like a stone when I’m in the overworld. Just to remind you all, this is a 2003 game having problems running on a 2006 video card.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, one of the games on my backlog is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the 2003 reimagining of Jordan Mechner’s classic platformer. At the time, my completion rate was 65%; since then, I’ve reached 81% completion, and the game hasn’t lost its lustre yet…except for one problem which you might have been able to infer from my previous post – that the camera is incredibly dodgy.

Most of the time, when you’re running on walls, making death-defying leaps and swinging on poles, it works perfectly, and maintains the perfect angle for you to see what you’re getting yourself into. However, during combat, it takes an incredibly inconvenient angle, moving around jerkily, pivoting 180 degrees for no reason and generally behaving like a douche. This is a problem not only because camera orientation determines your control mapping, but also because it changes your field of view, meaning that I can’t see the huge guy with the scimitar just so slightly off screen who’s about to leap over and tear me a new one.

Exacerbating the problem in this particular case is the fact that you need to protect someone while on this elevator, someone whom the camera excels at keeping out of my field of vision. I don’t know what the general consensus on escort or protection missions in most games is, but based on my experience here and in Resident Evil 4, I would say that they need to take a flying leap off a bridge. The so-called “artificial intelligence” is terrible at keeping itself out of trouble, and in the case of Prince of Persia, said character’s inability to keep herself alive forces me to remain nearby, in a walled-off area of the elevator, eminently suitable for all the enemies to gang up and introduce me to their little friends, simultaneously.

The combat itself is functional, if rather bland, but the camera has proved to be the source of much of my frustration so far. I’m hoping it doesn’t end up putting me off completing the game altogether. ]]> http://www.sonictempest.net/2008/05/18/some-clarification-as-to-aforementioned-spastic-monkeys/feed/ 0 http://www.sonictempest.net/2008/05/15/this-post-brought-to-you-by-the-letters-o-t-and-l/ http://www.sonictempest.net/2008/05/15/this-post-brought-to-you-by-the-letters-o-t-and-l/#comments Fri, 16 May 2008 04:38:31 +0000 sonictempest http://www.sonictempest.net/2008/05/15/this-post-brought-to-you-by-the-letters-o-t-and-l/ GOD THE DAMN CAMERA IN SANDS OF TIME IS PISSING ME OFF

STOP CHANGING PERSPECTIVES LIKE A SPASTIC MONKEY DAMN YOU

AAAAAAARGH ]]> http://www.sonictempest.net/2008/05/15/this-post-brought-to-you-by-the-letters-o-t-and-l/feed/ 0 http://www.sonictempest.net/2008/05/05/the-list-of-doom/ http://www.sonictempest.net/2008/05/05/the-list-of-doom/#comments Mon, 05 May 2008 08:00:11 +0000 sonictempest http://www.sonictempest.net/?p=70 Some of you know that I have a pretty sizeable gaming backlog. A lot of it is games that I want to play but haven’t gotten around to buying yet (Metal Gear Solid: The Essential Collection is currently #1 on that list), but there’s also a pretty big backlog of stuff that I own but I haven’t gotten around to finishing yet:

• Psychonauts (I put some effort into beating it this past weekend, and finally reached the endgame…I had to skip a lot of optional stuff to do it though)
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (I’m at about 60% completion)
• Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition (level 15, right after beating Vergil for the second time)
• Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition (mission 3-1…which is proving to be annoyingly long. Oh, and I have almost no ammo left)
• Zack & Wiki (the last puzzle is so ridiculously hard)
• Super Mario Galaxy (technically I’ve ‘beaten’ this game already, but I need to get one…last…star!)
• NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams (2 levels in on each side)
• Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (I’m on mission 13 of the campaign but for some reason I can’t bring myself to finish it)
• Sonic Rush Adventure (Blaze’ last Sol Emerald is giving me trouble)

This is not a state of affairs that I’m particularly happy with, given that there are other high-profile releases coming up that I’d like to devote my time to…in particular Mass Effect drops at the end of the month, and the PC version of Devil May Cry 4 arrives next month.

So much gaming to do, so little time :(