Category: Gaming

Embracing the backlog

Posted on by Nimgimli

For many years I’ve been an “over-purchaser” of games. By that I mean I bought more games than I had time to play, and often pre-ordered them to boot. I’d pre-order a game months before launch and then when it finally launched I’d play it for a night and set it aside. Silly. I guess it was some kind of retail therapy for myself. Buying games was fun and I told myself I was supporting the developers (which was true but I’m not sure they all needed that money ahead of time).

Last fall we got the news that our health insurance was getting significantly more expensive, and that meant that our already stretched budget was going to get very tight indeed. I realized I was going to have to become MUCH more selective about buying games. I was really bummed.

I snagged quite a few games in Black Friday sales but haven’t bought anything since, as far as I can recall. And in the roughly two months since this budget crunch hit, I’ve kind of switched from seeing it as a burden to seeing it as a blessing.

I feel like I’m getting a lot more enjoyment out of games now that I see them as a kind of finite resource. When I was buying sometimes a few games a week, games were like a river. I scoop up some and have a taste but I was never going to consume them all so they seemed disposable and kind of devoid of value. There was always another coming so the game I was playing was only going to be on my radar for a few days.

Now I think of my games as a cornfield to be harvested. Still a big job, but if I stick with it eventually I might harvest all the goodness out of this field. (I guess today is metaphor day.) At the same time, each game has value because there’s not a constant flow of new titles coming in every week.

Because I don’t flit from game to game as frequently I feel like I get more from each one. What I get isn’t always good (see my bitching about Diablo 3’s story mode) but my understanding seems to always go deeper. I can articulate what I like and don’t like about each one and I feel like I have a more balanced view of every game I play. Even games I love have rough spots, and games I don’t like almost always have some nice bits tucked in there somewhere.

My backlog is enormous. I haven’t scratched the surface of my PS4 backlog yet, and then I have the Xbox One backlog which is nearly as big. And if somehow I get through that, there’s the PS2, PS3, PS Vita, Nintendo Wii and Nintendo 3DS backlogs. And then… Steam. Yes back in the day I was like so many others; when the big Steam sale hit I’d buy and buy and buy. I have 310 games in my Steam library. I’ve finished approximately 0 of them. Many of them I haven’t played at all.

This past weekend Sony was running a $5 Flash Sale. They had a bunch of games on sale for $5 (or less). I dutifully started looking over the list, figuring this is a great opportunity to score some deals. And there were a few games on the list I wanted to play someday. I even d/led a couple of demos. But then I thought about that backlog and the fact that if these games are on sale now, they’ll probably be on sale again in the future. No need to enlarge the backlog today. I didn’t buy anything.

I’m pretty proud of that. Instead of downloading 3 or 4 new games I’ve kept enjoying my current rotation of Shadow of Mordor, No Man’s Sky and Fairy Fencer F. I still want to go back to do some more Tomb Raider Trophies, then I have Watch Dogs 2, TitanFall 2, Final Fantasy XV, Battlefront 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare all vying for my attention.

Even More Mordor

Posted on by Nimgimli

This past weekend I spent a lot more time in Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. The more I play this game, the more I like it. I want you to play it too, if you haven’t, so I’m not going to spoil anything major, but in general terms here’s what I learned this weekend.

The basic concept here is that you’re a ranger, Talion, who is guarding the Black Gate. This happens, best I can put together, between the events of The Hobbit and those of Lord of the Rings. Sauron has returned to Mordor but hasn’t really started his war on Middle Earth yet. Talion gets killed but rather than staying dead he merges with a wraith.

In gameplay terms, this gives him some magic-ish abilities and explains why he can respawn after he gets killed.

I thought I was going to spend the game in the map area that is revealed early in the game (which was fine…it’s a big area) and that it would basically be just me and my wraith pal (and this isn’t just a nameless wraith, you learn who he is as the game goes on, I just don’t want to spoil).

But no, there’s more. This weekend I moved on to a whole new area, probably the same size as the initial map. This is a big game! The new area is a little more green than the space you spend the first parts of the game in. I also have met some other characters who’re on the same side as Talion.

Again I’m deliberately being vague. But it’s a bigger game than I thought it was and the story is more interesting too, at least for a Middle Earth nerd.

As Talion gets more upgrades and skills I feel like the game is getting easier. I remember when facing a single warchief was really dicey, but yesterday I took on three at once and eventually won. My biggest fear at this point are warchiefs that use ranged attacks since they can whittle down my health before I can clear out their minions to go at them.

I’m also spending a lot more time mounted, which is fun too. That’s gotten a lot easier too.

But easy doesn’t mean boring. It’s the kind of game that makes you feel powerful and skilled. But in order to keep you modest, the story missions spike the difficulty a bit so you’ll need to earn those. I’m finding the difficulty level to be about perfect.

Just a great game so far. A big game though. I think I’m something like 35% done with the story after all this time.

When does Shadow of Mordor 2 come out? I’m excited to play it, if it exists!

And of course as usual, I took no screenshots 🙁

Back to Mordor once again

Posted on by Nimgimli

After finishing Diablo 3 Story Mode so I could unlock Adventure Mode and do all the fun stuff that comes with it… I’d had enough of Diablo 3. I did poke my nose into the Diablo 1 rebuild and decided you can’t go home again. It’s cool that they did it but I can’t see spending a lot of time playing a deliberately janky (even if that’s authentic) game.

So after my nightly Let It Die run I fired up Shadow of Mordor. Took me a while to get the feel of the controls back and I’m still a little rusty, but after a while I was back to killing warchiefs.

I’ve talked before about the weird difficulty system in SoM. When you die (so when you fail) orc warchiefs grow in power (so the game gets harder). Well now I’m finding the converse is true to some extent. When you kill warchiefs they get replaced, often by lower level orcs. I was taking out random warchiefs pretty easily, though the “story mission” elite guys still gave me some issues.

I’m so glad I re-discovered this game a while back. I’ve gotten much farther than I ever have before and I’m really enjoying it. I’m playing on the PS4 Pro in the “4K” mode (which has a dynamic resolution that varies between 1728p to 2160p dynamic) and the game looks gorgeous in a dark, dismal kind of way.

(These images were shared via Twitter so have been down scaled because I forgot to copy them off the PS4.)

I can’t believe I bought the Game of the Year edition for $10. I’d almost feel guilty about it if I hadn’t already bought the GotY Edition for Xbox One (also for $10) and the standard edition at full price when it came out!

Diablo 3 story mode is an awful single player game

Posted on by Nimgimli

One of my gaming goals for this month is to finish the story mode of Diablo 3. I’m trying but my god is it a terrible game.

Now before my Diablo 3 loving readers come gunning for me, I’m talking specifically about the story mode that you have to clear before you can start doing Adventure Mode and Rifts and Seasons and stuff. In other words, all the stuff my friends love about the game is locked behind the requirement to finish story mode. I also am talking about playing single player mode today, long after launch. It may have been different when you played through it.

The issue here is mostly about balance. I guess this happened when they pulled the Auction House stuff out of the game and re-did the loot tables? In my game, played on Hard (and I realize in retrospect I should’ve turned up the difficulty) there has been virtually no challenge in the game because there’s so much good loot.

I haven’t made an effort to grind or anything (though I am something of a completionist) and when I got to the fight against Diablo in Act IV, just as an example, I literally just sat there with my thumb on the X button, talking to Angela while my character whittled down Diablo. The only ‘challenge’ was I had to keep in range of him. My gear gives me so much health regen that Diablo couldn’t hurt me.

When I first started playing my policy was to sell regular gear, salvage blue gear and stash yellow gear. Then I switched to selling regular and blue and salvaging yellow and stashing Legendary. By the time I got to Act V I’d stopped picking up anything that isn’t Legendary. My blacksmith has a ton of materials and I’ve never really had to use him. I have more gold than I know what to do with. Meanwhile sometimes a quest will give you a reward. The rewards are blue level items…that’s what was intended to be good loot at this stage, back at launch (I’m assuming). I’m so over-powered compared to these quest rewards.

Then there’re the NPCs. You get blacksmith, enchanter and jeweler well before you “meet” them in the story. I was totally confused when I met the enchanter in Act V after I’d been chatting with her since at least Act 3 in town.

The problem is that Diablo 3 combat is so simple that when it’s easy it becomes really tedious. Sometimes the screen will fill with a ton of enemies and it’ll be amusing just to watch stuff die, but running down hallways killing 3-5 enemies at a time is started to feel like work. I finally got to where I just run past things until I get a huge crowd then stop to kill everything.

I spent most of my gaming time this past weekend trying to finish Story Mode. I thought there were only IV acts and I was SO happy to kill Diablo. When Act V started, I almost sobbed. Even Angela was disappointed and she isn’t playing!!! Hopefully Act V is the end of it.

Now for all this griping, I do have hope. First of all, I’ve had fights in Act V that were an actual challenge. Times where I had to think and avoid attacks and even back off to heal. MUCH more fun than Acts I-IV were. And once I had character level 60 the loot seemed to kind of reboot. Now I’m getting gear as low quality as Blue stuff that is better than some of the legendary items I’m using. And I discovered there’s Green loot too. Who knew?

I really hope Adventure Mode is as fun as everyone says it is (and as fun as Act V is suggesting it might be) because Diablo 3 story mode is one of the worst games I’ve played in quite a long time. Mindless, tedious, boring… I can’t wait for it to be over. I see Trophies about completing Bounties. What’s a bounty? Maybe I’ll find out soon.

LET IT DIE low level combat

Posted on by Nimgimli

Created a new meat puppet and started leveling him. In this fight I was trying to get the Screamers (particularly the one with the fireworks launcher) to damage each other. Sorta worked.

LET IT DIE
http://ift.tt/2i0lATd

Fairy Fencer F moves back to Monday nights

Posted on by Nimgimli

With the holidays (and short work weeks) over, I decided to move Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force night back to Mondays. Having Tuesday and Thursday marked off for scheduled game nights felt a little constricting when I was hot on some other game.

Anyway last night culminated in a great battle. I guess the downside of turn-based JRPGs is that you can go a long time just grinding out rote battles where you’re more focused on being efficient than worried about any danger. Then all of a sudden, things change.

In this fight last night 5 of my 6 characters got KO’d very early. It happened so suddenly that my first thought was it was one of those unwinnable battles that JRPGs sometimes spring on you. But nope. My last man standing managed to get Tiara, who is my primary healer, back on her feet. The two of them went into defensive mode, chewing through supplies while they got themselves outside of the ‘1 hit until death’ zone, then Fang (my main DPS and as close to a tank as I have) battled the baddie while one by one Tiara got the rest back on their feet. I had to make sure everyone stayed spread out as much as possible because the boss had a potent AOE. I also learned the hard way that my AOE heals will HEAL THE BOSS if it is in range. I did that once and learned a hard lesson…then did it a second time through carelessness! Argh!

Harley was the last one back on her feet and I think it was fitting that she got in the killing blow. When the dust settled out packs were empty of potions, our magic was depleted and… the game didn’t offer up a save point or an easy way home. In fact it expected us to push on. Luckily I had a “Return Wing” that warps you out of and dungeon. We headed back to town, re-supplied and now we’re almost broke. I think we’ll have to do some grinding to replenish our wallets before we push on with the story.

But it was a really fun battle and re-ignited my enjoyment of the game. Apparently I’ve put about 20 hours into it so far. It’ll be months before I beat it at this rate!

In case you’re really bored, here’s the last few minutes of the battle. We were already on the rebound here, but I have the PS4 set to only record 5 minutes and even then it felt too long so I trimmed off some of the footage. Oh and yes, I do have a couple characters fighting in bath towels. Very practical, plenty of freedom of movement (and it’s appearance armor, only).

Let it Die is gross and fun and their marketing team got me

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve FINALLY started playing Let It Die, and it’s thanks to the marketing team at GungHu and/or Grasshopper. Here’s why.

This weekend they had some kind of event celebrating a million deaths or something. I don’t even know WHY, but I knew that logging in this weekend got you some awards. FREE STUFF? I’m in. But you didn’t just have to log in. You had to log in and enter the tower (ie actually play the game). When you returned to the Waiting Room, this little golden cart would come careening into your waiting room. Inside was something amazing! (Maybe.) But you couldn’t open it for 19 hours. That meant you had to log in again the next day to find out what you got, and as long as you were there why not head into the tower and then another golden cart shows up!

Hey it worked for me, I logged in every day this weekend.

This game is so gory and so gross. Normally not my thing at all, but the gameplay is fun enough that I could look past it. Mostly. The blood is so over-the-top that it doesn’t really bother me that much, but it’s stuff like my character chowing down on a live frog that is kind of off-putting. And then there are the looks I get from Angela when she walks past and sees my female character running around in what she calls the bootiest of booty shorts (characters start wearing almost nothing). I guess I should pick a male body next time.

I’m really glad its a free game as I never would have purchased it, but now I’m feeling like I should spend some money just to support the game. In the process of learning to play I’ve been doing some research on the game and I was really encouraged to see a good number of people saying the same thing: that they’ve been pleasantly surprised and have spent money not because they felt like they needed to, but because they wanted to support the developer.

I’m never going to be great at this game and I’m never going to get far into it. I got a character to level 12 before a gang caught and killed her. Luckily I’d seen somewhere that you should have a few fighters going at the same time so you don’t have to start from scratch. I pulled my level 8 fighter out the freezer and went in hunt of myself. I took an explosive mushroom that weakened my former self, so it was a pretty easy fight.

Apparently (I learned this after the fact) that means my level 12 body should be back in the freezer. I hope so! I’m still trying to learn the death system. When you die you can use an item you (mostly) buy with real money to resurrect. Or you can return to the Waiting Room and spend in-game currency to “Salvage” your body. I’m not sure what that does…I think it gets your items back but I’m not sure if it gets your body back. Or you can go find your former-self and kill it and get the body, but not the items, back that way.

Anyway, I’m having fun puttering in the game. I’ve only been as far as the 2nd floor! Who knows how far I’ll get. Possibly no farther than I’ve been. What keeps me going is that weapon mastery persists between bodies. So if I die and have to start again, I’m now kind of a badass with my fists thanks to the work prior bodies did. I also am finding blueprints that, once researched, lets me purchase gear which is a huge boost over running around in my undies with the new body.

Of course typical me, no screenshots, but here’s a super-short clip I saved for a friend after I encountered his character in my game:

I died in Diablo 3!

Posted on by Nimgimli

One of my gaming goals for this month is to finish the campaign in Diablo 3.

This morning I was playing and… I died! It has been SO LONG since I died in Diablo 3 that I didn’t really understand what was happening for a few seconds.

Then I felt a moment of euphoria… was Diablo 3 going to turn into an actual game instead of the mind-numbing busy-work it has been? You hold down a button and move around and collect loot until you have to go back and sell or smash it, then return for more. Seriously it has been incredibly tedious so far. I should have pushed the difficulty up I guess. I’m playing on Hard, I can’t imagine how mindless Normal must be.

Unfortunately the euphoria was short-lived as I realized that death really has no consequences. You can revive right where you died and aside from having to spend a handful of coins to repair your gear, there’s no harm done.

I’m not really hardcore enough for hardcore but I wish there were some setting in between. Something that give death some sting but not the pain of having to start fresh. I really miss the old Diablo games where you’d drop your gear and have to try to get it back. You’d have to have backup gear to help you recover from a death…it was really interesting.

Later I died a second time, but then res’d on the spot and kept going. What’s weird is that right now I seem to have two states: Full health and dead. In both cases it seemed like I was 1-shotted by a powerful enemy or something. It happened so fast I never really saw my health dropping.

But meh, push a button and stand up and keep grinding through mobs… YAWN.

I know the conventional wisdom here is to play MP and I’m sure that makes the game much different. For for solo players, Diablo 3 is a real snooze-fest so far. I’m hoping once I unlock Adventure Mode it’ll get more interesting.