Busy week and not much time to play, let alone write. I’ll come back to more MMO-focused topics soon, I’m sure. But for now, just a quick notification:
It wasn’t my cup of tea, but several other bloggers wrote very fondly about Bastion. If you had wanted to get it, but haven’t yet, now is a good time. Steam has it at a 50% discount for another 23 hours.
If you use google (and who doesn’t, at least for searching?), you’ll probably have noticed how, over the last couple of months, google has been rolling out what they claim is an improved redesign of their user interface. Point in case: the link to advanced search functions is now at the bottom of the page, instead of right next to the search button, because that makes a lot more sense… in somebody’s head.
Anyway, the only google app I use regularly is Google Reader, and that one got hit with the “improvement” hammer last night. I’m sure I could get used to it, but I’m sick of so-called improvements that reduce functionality and waste screen space with excessive bars and padding. (Btw, why is it that it’s always horizontal bars everywhere? Widescreen monitors have become popular in the last 5 years or so, and horizontal bars waste a lot of space. Why not use vertical ones? There’s always more than enough space in that dimension. Or is that only me?)
Therefore, I’m looking for a good replacement for Google Reader to read RSS feeds, and I ask my readers (yes, all 3 of you!) for suggestions. There are a couple of things to consider:
If you have any suggestions, shoot. Thanks in advance!
In the last two days, I played the remaining 4 episodes (the first being discussed here). My overall impression is still more or less the same. But I got some screenshots, and a couple of things to point out, and what better way to get rid of them than to put them in the form of a post. Since I’m on a four-day weekend at the moment, my original plan was to play one episode every night, but I liked it so much that I played it a lot more.
Maybe this is a good point to mention, for those that are allergic to it, that the rest of the post will contain spoilers, though I’ll try to keep it down.
In short, after the daring escape in 1931 in Episode 1, you (you being Marty) have a serious problem with your existence. It seems you got your dad in trouble, so in Episode 2, you go back a couple of hours in time 1931 to solve that. That leads to a lot of other problems, and you end up in an Orwellian 1986 Hill Valley in Episode 3. So, in Episode 4, you go back to 1931 yet again, at which point you have a bit of a fallout with Doc, which you have to deal with in Episode 5. Oh, and Episode 5 also has an alternative catastrophic 1931, because you inadvertently changed something in 1876, which you’ll also visit. Still with me? No? Great. That keeps spoiling at a minimum, and after all, isn’t that how time travel stories are supposed to if you don’t revisit them afterwards? Oh, and don’t even try to understand why Doc went to 1931 originally. You won’t until the very last scene. You’re welcome to guess throughout the game, though.
Episode 2 was quite funny again, with the 30ies appeal of prohibition, corrupt cops, and all those things. Episode 3, on the other hand, was probably my least favorite. The Orwellian Hill Valley felt depressing, and without Doc around, there were fewer fun dialogues. It had a couple of nice one-liners though.
Don't we all?
Hairdressers, always at the forefront of bad puns.
Orwellian 1986 Hill Valley, in a strange twist, has a thing for 30ies-style agitprop banners.
In Episode 4, the focus is back on the weirdest kinds of research again, as is the first part of Episode 5. You’ll get to know a couple of Doc’s early inventions, most of which rightfully never made it into everyday use. But that’s nothing a good researcher should be afraid of! I should put one of these lines on my office door.
My thoughts exactly... as long as my suit doesn't look like that afterwards.
Hill Valley Expo was merely a setback!
Overall, as I already said, I really enjoyed the games. On the other hand, I probably would’ve enjoyed them almost as much if they had been a movie of about the same length. The game part is somewhat weak, don’t expect any hard puzzles (one or two are frustrating, but that’s because they feel random). The scripting and voice acting is great though, and the characters are likable (except for those that aren’t supposed likable, which aren’t, obviously) and believable as much as a you could expect in a BTTF-style adventure. There are a couple of minor bugs and typos. It is kind of sad to see that somebody, for example, mixed up “your” and “you’re”. The grammar geek in me died a little.
Good thing this is an exception, and doesn't happen all the time.
There is also a very annoying bug in Episode 5 that cost me quite a bit of time. You have to solve a puzzle revolving around a cactus, and I didn’t realize what I had to do, because the game already displayed everything in place, when in fact it wasn’t. Sure enough, after I went through the motions and manually draped everything required around the cactus in the way the graphics already showed to me, the puzzle was solved. Things like this really should be caught by your QA. But oh well. At least there were no game-breaking dead ends.
If you can get the game on sale, and you liked Back To The Future, get it, no questions asked. At full price, it’s up to you whether you consider 15-or-so hours of game time worth it.
Final verdict: don't discard the game! Or if you do, at least recycle correctly.
As I said earlier this week, there was a Steam sale for Telltale’s BTTF game. I couldn’t resist and got it for 10€. After I played Episode 1 (of 5) last night, I can say it was worth it. The rest of the text will contain spoilers, but the game is so easy that you will probably see everything I’m going to talk about in a matter of 2-3 hours anyway.
The game starts with a scene that every BTTF fan will remember.
You disintegrated Einstein!
It took me a couple of minutes to get used to the models. They’re closely modeled after the film characters, but just that slight bit off. Oh, and don’t get me started on the walking animations. The voice action is spot-on, though (for the most part), and very enjoyable.
The story in Episode 1 is relatively straightforward, for a time traveling one. We start in 1986, where Doc’s stuff is getting auctioned off because he has gone missing (in 1885, if you remember the movies). Suddenly, the DeLorean appears in the parking lot, with nobody inside but Einstein, and a tape recorder telling you the newly added homing device has automatically brought the DeLorean back to 1986. A very smart idea, it makes sure that, if something happens to Doc, Marty can go back in time and rescue him.
Of course, the DeLorean time machine, being the fragile thing it is, forgot which time it departed from, so that’s the first thing to find out. Helps comes in the unlikely form of Vice Principal Strickland’s sister. Anyway, you find out you have to head to 1931, where Doc apparently was murdered by a mob for being a suspect in burning down Hill Valley’s speakeasy.
You run into a Tannen during your trip…
The Tannens, charming as ever... I think I'll stay up here for a bit.
… as well as Marty’s grandfather and Doc’s younger self, who is just starting his scientific career against the wishes of his father. (The scene where you listen to their argument while Doc gives you some hints of how to operate a complex alchemical setup is one of my favorites.)
Like the movies, the Episode ends in chase scene; you have to break Doc out of a police transporter.
This is a rescue, BTTF-style.
In the end, all ends well, or not so much… but that’s when we’re told that the story is “to be continued…”
It’s a fun little game. As I said, the animations are weak, and the character models need some getting used to, but the voice acting is great. 10€ was totally worth it (seeing how there’s four more episodes waiting). For fans of the series, even 25€ might be okay. You basically pay 5€ per episode, and it’ll give you a couple of nights of fun. Just don’t expect a lot of puzzle solving. They are all so easy that I didn’t get stuck once. It was more like an interactive movie at times. But the heydays of point-and-click adventures are long over, so I’ll take what I can get these days.
As an addendum to my WoW-related posts, especially the last one:
I can't add anything to that.
There’s been a lot of discussion about the silliness of WoW’s next expansion, or, more specifically, pandas. Spearheading the doomsayers, in a somewhat unlikely casting, Nils, who has been blogging almost nonstop about why he dislikes Mists of Pandaria. Some people support him, others oppose. At the center of the panda discussion seem to be two arguments “how can pandas not be silly?” vs. “How can they be sillier than gnomes?”
I agree, they aren’t. But I want to give a different point of view why I’m not a fan of pandas. That is a totally personal opinion, but maybe some people can relate.
Pandas are silly. Yes, gnomes are silly. Yes, space goats are silly, possibly even more. The point is: when I started playing, I didn’t like gnomes (incidentally, nobody did). When TBC was announced, I was furious about draenei. But at the time, I managed to live with it. It’s like a relationship. (Yes, dangerous comparison, yadda yadda, bear with me.) There’s always things you don’t like. Initially, you might not even realize them, ignore them, or glorify them. But even when they annoy you, you don’t immediately break up. You feel that those small annoyances are worth it overall. That works, to a certain point.
But then things start to cool down, and those annoyances start wearing on you. When your relationship ends, maybe not on the best terms ever, you might look back and wonder how you actually managed to live with all those small annoying things. And then you hear about her doing something stupid, and you go “wow, how COULD she?” And you might have a hell of a time slagging off with your friends. Over time, you’ll probably lose interest in that (you better do), but until then, it’s a valid strategy of coping with a breakup.
My MMO relationship with WoW is over, at least as an exclusive one. I have a lot of fun fooling around with other games at the moment. Maybe WoW will join their ranks again eventually. But most of the time, there’s a good reason not to “try again”. That’s for schmaltzy romance films.
Of course, Blizzard is not a girl. Blizzard is a company that wants money. They want me to come back, and many others like me, so you’d think they work for it. From the reactions I’ve read, they at least haven’t managed to amaze a lot of people who have been on the fence before. So that doesn’t look like a success.
The only reason why they wouldn’t want money from people like me, is if they assume they’ll get more money from other people not like me, and it’s a better deal overall. What Blizzard’s real business strategy is, we’ll probably never know. Whether it will be a success, time will tell.
Took me until just now to figure out that you can change souls on the fly, within a role, without any respecs, if you haven’t spent any points in it yet. That might be useful. Maybe. If only for looking at and learning about other roles’ spells while I’m standing around.
Took me a bit longer to get around to finish my series on Blizzcon’11 (after The Good, and The So-So). That’s mostly because I had little time to think about the points I liked least, and I wanted to give them some thought so I’d not be ranting without any substance.
I had a couple more points, but I cut it down to two which are most important to me, to give the post some more focus. Both of them have either-or problems, where I can see two possibilities of how they end up, and I like neither nor.
Talent choices in a game like WoW can be either meaningful, or interesting. If they’re meaningful, that means there is a difference in the choices. If there is a difference in choices, there will be a best option for each situation or spec. If there is a best option, choice stops being interesting.
I’ve seen people talk a lot about choices, but I have not seen anybody come up with a good idea how to make choices both meaningful and interesting. What I’ve seen at Blizzcon is a try to trade a bit of meaningful for interesting. I think they are on the best way achieve neither in the process.
Either this ends up badly tacked on, like EQ’s Legends of Norrath. I’m sure there are LoN players and I’m just not in the right community, but all I’ve ever seen is people getting their monthly free boosters for loot cards, which are generally some fluff item. Nothing against fluff items, they work fine in EQ. I’m not sure how well they’d work in today’s WoW, though. Housing is a great fluff sink. However, Blizzard might profit if they sell premium pets with better stats in their shop. Though that would probably annoy pet collectors.
Or this becomes an integral part of WoW. I’d rather not have a pet raid boss. Or, even worse, an extension of their announced quest model (“finishing a [daily] quest might give you a buff for the day”) where you better do 5 pet battles before the raid because it will give you a certain buff.
There’s a sale on Back To The Future: The Game until Friday. At 10€, I think I’ll bite. I love BTTF, and at that price… Even if it might only be a couple of hours of fun (I heard the puzzles are easy enough that it’s almost an interactive movie).
If anybody knows the games and can speak for or against them, pray tell.
My Rift subscription will lapse in a couple of days. That is, unless I resubscribe for another month. Which I will probably do. That said, I got time until Sunday to decide.
What I like about the game is the soul system. I see downsides to it (class identity being one), but the way I play Rift at the moment, it works out perfectly fine. 80% of my time, I spend doing dungeons and rifts, and the chance to switch on the fly between pyro damage, chloro healing, and archon support, is very helpful. The rest of the time is spent crafting and exploring. At the moment, this looks enough to me to warrant another month.
There are a couple of things I’m still not sold on. One of the is them leveling speed. It’s just too darn fast! Doing lots of rifts and dungeons means that I do little to no questing. I stopped when I reached the middle of Stonefield, because I was outleveling them. I’ve done about 2 quests in Scarlet Gorge. At the moment, I’m 35 and haven’t done a single quest in Scarwood (I’ve explored about half of the map there, though, while doing rifts). The leveling speed is high enough that I’m completely surpassing the story content. That’s compounded by the fact that the cap for rested XP seems to be very high – I leveled from 30 to 34 in a single day using rested XP, and I still had a bit left over.
The downside is that I had problems getting the story in the first place; completely skipping quests in zones doesn’t help that. Of course, you could argue that that’s my own damn fault – and I agree, to a certain degree. Then again, the current world event makes rifting a very tempting pastime; and since I still need 13 egg levels to get my raptor, I’ll continue. Speaking of the event, I very much assume that it was perfectly timed to coincide with the Steam sale, so you won’t see phase 3 or the conclusion before your free month runs out. I have to admit that looks like their trick will work with me.
Considering dungeoning, you get presents for running dungeons once a day, and if you skip days, you might end up with as many as 7 subsidized dungeon runs. Add that to the fact that playing heal or support solo is quite boring, and you see where I spend a lot of my time. The result is that I end up in a dungeon, with two quest givers in front that I might or might not have seen before, and that give me quests along the lines of “kill X, use Y at Z, and kill whatever appears when you do so”. If I have time to read the text at all; the rush-rush culture certainly has its followers in this game too. So I go off, killing some stuff, without any idea why that would be a good or bad idea. I sometimes don’t even know where that place is that I’m fighting in. I guess someone must’ve hit me over the head with a club, put me in a sack, and transported me to a dungeon far away, where, after waking up, I’d find 4 strangers that share a similar fate, but we soon realize that our muggers at least were nice enough to take group composition into account before they dumped us into this deadly trial. It’s almost like the Cube, MMO edition.
I guess the only solution to that problem is to roll another alt that will purely focus on story line exploration via world questing. There’s some irony in that, seeing how I had planned to roll an alt on the Guardian side to see what the story looks like from their position. Now I’ll need to roll a Defiant alt too, to find out what their story is, despite the fact I’m about halfway through the leveling with one.
One last problem is that the dungeon finder seems to hate me (joking, but still). On Sunday, I was put into Foul Cascade as DPS three times in a row, at level 33. The rest of the group also being reasonably high, it was a genuine snorefest. On Monday, having just hit 34, I ended up in King’s Breach. As a healer. With a level 34 tank. Who pulled like a madman. Oh my. I am very thankful for the level 40 support who helped out with healing now and then, or we would’ve had several wipes (I told him afterwards, I want to make sure support feels appreciated). Still, that makes your contribution feel inadequate.
I admit I could probably be a much better healer. I sometimes lose track of my target, especially when I have to target the tank for a direct heal, and then have to go back to a mob to DPS again. Also, I picked up the warlock talent the other day that gives you a chance for an instant cast (opportunity), and it’s still confusing me more than it helps. In the heat of battle, I often miss the fact that I just instant cast, and then just stand there twiddling my thumbs, waiting for a cast to finish that has long hit the target.
Anyway, that’s the second time I was thrown into a dungeon as a healer at the low end of the spectrum, with a similarly low level tank. That is a bit more challenge than I would like, to be honest. It makes me feel responsible for wasting everybody’s time in case we wipe. I wouldn’t mind with people I know, but with randoms, I get the feeling I have to perform, or else. It probably doesn’t help that I’m a chloromancer, either; I assume clerics can get away with being low level more easily. If one of my damage spells gets resisted, I don’t do any healing, and stuff can get hectic. And of course, there’s that annoying veil bug: if another mage in your group has Lifegiving Veil, it tends to overwrite your Lifebound Veil/Synthesis, and if you don’t notice in time, you end up with a tank-shaped puddle on the ground.
Anyway, the frustrations right now are small enough, and the novelty factor is still there, so I guess I’ll stay another month. And isn’t that all that Trion would be interested in anyway? So I guess they’re doing it right.