A Tip for Internet N00bs…

You need to realize that if you’re going to post a comment to someone’s blog then you’re IP is going to get tracked. And that IP can reveal some pretty interesting information about you and where you’re connecting from.

Prime example, it took me two seconds to find this information and I could dig deeper if I wanted to bother but I figure the post originated from a childish fanboi who didn’t like what I had to say about Mass Effect 2.

While I don’t really care much for political correctness, I do draw a line at ignorant racism.

The internet isn’t as anonymous as it seems.

Enjoy.

Borderlands – First Impression

I have to admit, the graphics throw me for a loop. My brain and eyes are arguing over whether it is two dimensional or three dimensional. That’s quite a trip! I really do like the style, it looks like I’m playing in a comic book which is neat – though not for everyone.

The gameplay is definitely shooter and the questing seems very low-grade RPG based – the typical go to X and get such or talk to so and so and a bunch of go to X and kill # of Ys. I’ll admit, I’m not too far into it yet but the quest and missions are don’t compare to Mass Effect but are more in line with what you might see in a MMO like World of Warcraft or EverQuest.

The big plus is the character advancement and the fact that you can carry that character over to multiplayer mode or the co-op mode.

Speaking of multiplayer and co-op, I haven’t tried these yet and I haven’t looked into them at all. What did you expect? It’s a first impression piece not a full blown review.

Character advancement follows the whole level system where you get more HPs as you level and every few levels you gain a skill point that opens up abilities or passive enhancements such as increase critical chances or damage. The first point always goes into the special ability for the character you picked (think EQ2’s AAXP) and all points after that can be placed into one of three trees (think Talents in WoW) which tend to focus on a more specific aspect of your ‘class’.

I started with Mordecai who is “the Hunter”. He uses a sniper rifle, pistol and sword when in close. His special ability is a hawk which will fly off and attack your enemies. I haven’t explored much beyond this character.

The HUD is pretty simple, if you’ve played a FPS you’ll be right at home with it. The layout makes sense and what you see is pretty obvious. The compass doubles as a radar, much like you’ve seen in games like Oblivion and Fallout 3, where you’ll see enemy blips, items, quest locations or other points of interest.

Overall, no complaints other that the simple questing. I’m hoping that might change some but I’m not holding my breath.

Good choice of theme songs, two of my favorites; No Heaven by DJ Champion which is used in their trailer and No Rest for the Wicked by Cage the Elephant used in their opening.

Would I recommend the game? I don’t think I’d go out of my way to do so just yet (I want more time to play it to see how I feel about it), but if you like the MMO-style questing and FPS action, you would probably have fun with it.

Meh…

Balance is a tough thing to strive for in life because it’s a moving target. Example?

Home stuff is going better, though the Big Little Ogre got into a bit of trouble over the last week with random stuff, some of which I don’t necessarily agree with. I have a short trip coming up to go off and visit my parents and brother out west, which will be good.

Work stuff is going, but it’s no longer as happy a place as it was. I recently got a fair sized raise and was ranked highly – the review itself was all compliments, well over a page and a half of them. So that is good but I still feel bleh about it.

It’s bad when you look at your salary and can’t help but think it’s like a big target on your back.

Game stuff is getting a little meh because of some upcoming changes to the regular team. We’re going to be losing our two best tanks for the next little while and the top most back up will be missing too (I think). Raiding is going to be a bit of a grey area or a worry. We’ll figure something out, but it’s a bit of a worry (I’ll see what happens tonight).

I also over played on Sunday. I dropped Skinning as a profession and switched that slot to Engineering. I then leveled it up to 450/450 in one day. It wasn’t too painful until I had to drop over 2000 gold on materials. I then dropped another 2100 gold on a Primordial Saronite so I could get the recipe for the epic arrows. And I went and gathered a few of the uncommon recipes, though I’m still short Jeeves.

Bottom line is… meh… what ever. I’ll survive.

DA:Origins, ME2 and WoW… Oh My!

I haven’t completed Dragon Age: Origins yet, but I swooped in, bought Mass Effect 2 and played it like a mad man.

I guess that confirms I’m starving for some good sci-fi (or non-medieval fantasy type)content. I’m even making a new Mass Effect character to play through the first one again so I can import it into Mass Effect 2.

That says something. If you know what it’s saying, let me know because I sure as hell don’t.

On the other hand, I don’t feel the, “meh, it’s medieval fantasy” feeling with WoW. I probably should be feeling that but I don’t.

I suspect it doesn’t feel like a medieval fantasy because the gameplay as a Hunter tends to be more active and I feel like I’m shooting things more than just whacking bad guys or healing people.

Star Trek Online is sci-fi but I feel no draw to that game. None.

Weird.

Mass Effect 2 – Review

A friend commented that I tend to be all hyped up about a game then the next post about it tends to be less positive. No reason to buck that trend.

Mass Effect 2 is a great game, but like all sequels, it just doesn’t live up to the first version. EA haters can chime in now if you want, but living up to what ME delivered was going to be an epic task.

Why?

It’s hard to beat a first time experience. Everything similar will just cause you to reflect on that first experience. With that in mind, it’s not a horrible game, it’s a great game but seemed to lack a little something the first one had.

Here are a few things I didn’t like about the game.

Static Character Looks

You get a few pieces that can make your armor look different, but not a whole lot different. Gone are the Light, Medium and Heavy Armor types. Granted the previous armor looks were simply texturing on the same models, it was still something a little more.

Yes, you can modify your armor a bit with some individual piece chances (legs, shoulders, arms, helmet), colors and patterns but your Squad members never change their armor and the only way you can get them to look different is by doing their side missions. Even then, it’s just swapping some colors.

Missions Too Short, Too Similar

This was the thing that really disappointed me. In some ways that’s a positive, like when you’re really enjoying a movie and it comes to an end – you just want more.

The missions all seemed very similar in pattern and short in length. I there were more missions involving your squad members than actually dealing with the enemy. I found that disappointing. It made the game feel like it was more about building a squad, gaining their loyalty and less about what was going on.

Don’t get me wrong, the squad members are interesting, but again, the missions to get them or to gain their loyal were all very short and straight forward. And they made up the majority of the game’s content. It felt a little more like Mass Recruiting than Mass Effect 2.

In ME the squad was built as you went through the missions based on the main story, you didn’t really have a grocery list to fill out.

The formula seemed to be: RP investigation, do some fighting, maybe a little more RP and then some fighting. This made areas were too transient and you never really felt like there was a lot to be done in an area outside of one or two action sequences.

You’d be hard pressed to find a mission in ME2 that felt as lengthy (in a good way) as the one in ME that involved chasing down the Asari Matriarch. That one was really good, lengthy and involved a good mix of exploration, RP to investigate and varied action in several different locations – including some time in the MAKO.

That was another aspect that was missing; no vehicle time. The addition of the time in the MAKO made ME have a little more varied mission play. Something I feel ME2 missed out on.

Exploration Lacks Enough Reward

I also felt exploration was a little unrewarding. For the number of planets you could find in the various systems you were limited to scanning them. Only a very small fragment of the ones you scan will lead to other missions and those missions were short – way too short. I didn’t really find any hidden gems like Wrex’s armor from ME.

There didn’t appear to be any ships in space you could discover, instead you either got mail saying there was a ship to help out or you found an outpost where a ship was mentioned.

While scanning a planet and firing a probe down to collect it was amusing the first couple of times, after awhile the only thing I was really looking for was an anomaly or Elemental Zero node.

On the bright side, if you’re going to play through a second time you can import your ME2 character and start with all the benefits you unlocked, including the level. Also, you get to start with a bonus power (selected from the ones you unlocked by performing the loyalty missions for squad members) as well as a ton of money and resources. That means less time spent scanning planets for resources.

Loading, Please Wait…

Another thing I found a little punishing was the whole loading screens thing. There was far too much loading.

I blame the consoles for that. I’ve got a dual core CPU with 8gb of RAM and some of the fastest HDs available (aside from slate). Nothing should take that long to load.

It got to the point that I’d actually plan out where I’d go on the Normandy simply because I knew I was going to face a couple of loading screens.

On the Normandy.

Come on! I shouldn’t have to load when going from one level of the ship to another! I mean, REALLY? I have to load up my room? It’s one room!

And the loading was pretty damn slow. Maybe I was just anxious to get playing, but for what was loaded up, it really didn’t seem to warrant the time spent loading.

Dumbed Down

I really don’t like that they removed a lot of the character advancement choices from the game. There used to be a good number of additional skills and abilities. A lot more choice in advancing your character and the squad members, but now you get so few options to pick from and nearly enough points to buy everything.

There might as well not be any choice at all – why not just assign these abilities automatically as you level?

Bugs

Remarkably, I didn’t run into any crashes – not a single one.

The only issue I had was the odd time my character would be stuck advancing up the Z-axis for no apparent reason. This happened two or three times and there was no easy way out. The first time was in a doorway so I thought I might have gotten stuck on the door close animation but the next time I saw it there wasn’t a door or so much as a rock in the way. I just stepped into a part in the path way and it started making me go straight up.

You Beat The Game… Right?

You can continue playing after you beat the game so as to finish exploring things or maybe clearing up some of the loyalty missions. The part I didn’t like about this is that most of the Squad still responded to you in a similar manner. Oh, each one congratulated you on doing what you did and took your side, but they said little else than that and went back into default mode.

The Good

Building a character was interesting. The opening sequence leads into it all pretty nicely. I was a little disappointed that you didn’t get a chance to customize the major decision points from the previous games – I’m not sure how many people kept their save games around. (I could see having to do this each time you create a new character being a little painful.)

I like the hacking and bypassing mini-games. It was a nifty little gimmick that was a break from picking chat or shooting stuff but not enough of that it got annoying. I have mixed feelings on how things continue as you’re trying to do this.

Despite my complaining about squad member related missions dominating the content, I did really like the squad members and their (limited) interactions with others. The interactions they had seemed to make sense (Tali/Legion and Miranda/Jack).

The game performed well (it better have for all the loading it did!) without any hiccups, hangs or crashes even when I was ALT-Tabbing out to check things and then back in.

The goals involved in several of the missions seemed different, which is probably part of what frustrated me. Some were neat and you never got a chance to do it again.

The voice acting was well done and the animations tied to them made sense and weren’t unbelievable active.

The combat was definitely fun, though I wish there was more of it and in more challenging fashions. Having to actually use the environment for more than cover would have been nice. There were opportunities, but none of the battles were overly complicated outside of the final one.

The end was interesting and definitely sets up for ME3.

Conclusion

It is a great game, but I can’t help but feel they cut out things to make allow for other things.

Looking back on this, it seems like a negative review but it isn’t. Those are the flaws of one of the most engrossing games I’ve played since I played the first one. I can’t help but feel my disappointment is summed up by there not being more.

MORE.

NOW!

Contagious Prankster…

I’ve always been a bit of a prankster. Always. I enjoy a good laugh and I enjoy company of people that can laugh at themselves as much as I can.

They make good targets.

Last night I had the Hunters of our allied raid team (unfortunately, we only have three hunters) join a secret channel. In this channel we take turns picking who will be our targets for Misdirection.

That’s right, three high DPS Hunters misdirecting their opening and continued threat to a target that is not the tank.

Before anyone gets upset, we only do this on trash and only until that person dies. We don’t change targets victims mid-fight and we don’t do it while fighting bosses. We also won’t target tanks (that’d be dumb) and likely will not target healers unless we have a good number to spare.

Some fun quotes we heard last night?

“OMG, I’m pulling so much threat!”
“I don’t know what happened there, the mobs just turned on me.”

I could be wrong but I think I heard someone exclaim that they didn’t even start attacking and they got agro.

I checked the logs posted today, it doesn’t imply who was the target of our Misdirections so I’ll spoil it but chances are, if they died to trash, Team Hunter made it happen.

If Dennis or Tim read this (I know Tim will) please don’t spoil it.

Target 1: Delnor on the Deathspeaker High Priest. (Click on Deaths tab to see where he’s taking some DoTs then suddenly BOOM! 14k because he has agro)

Target 2: Triumphforks who we got during the clearing of the main hub in Upper Spire. I’m not sure what the other two were doing, but I was MDing Volley threat to him so he’d take beating from multiple sources. (Click Deaths, Severed Essences)

Target 3: Shall remain unnamed because we were not successful in bringing this one down. Unfortunately, this target was more difficult due to the complexity of the encounters and… well, he’s OP dammit!

We were ambitious, going after Plate DPS types which are hard to get killed especially given how well our healers were doing and given their survival mechanisms. I debated getting the healers onboard but I think that wouldn’t be as much fun or as much of a challenge.

I’m also debating bringing the rogues in line with this, but I’m not sure. I suspect they’ll be our next targets.

A Little More Mass Effect 2…

I played a little more of Mass Effect 2, not a lot but some more. It’s pretty damn good.

I won’t spoil anything but it’s really cool to have Joker and the Normandy back after the original Normandy was blown up by – I’m assuming – the Collectors who are working for the Reapers.

Oops, did I spoil it?

I am a little disappointed you don’t get the band back together, but hey, you do get some new folks which keeps things interesting.

Does Miranda look familiar to anyone else? It was bothering me a bit while I was playing and then I realized… I’ve seen her on Chuck. It seems she also does the voice acting. I also recognized the voice of the Illusive Man. Here’s a list of voice actors in the game (wikipedia):

Actors Martin Sheen, Michael Dorn, Carrie-Anne Moss, Yvonne Strahovski, Tricia Helfer, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Adam Baldwin, Simon Templeman and Michael Hogan voice characters in the game. Keith David and Seth Green continue their roles in the series as David Anderson and Jeff “Joker” Moreau respectively.

Yvonne Strahovski and Tricia Helfer… rawr…

More info about changes:

1. Skill/Talent tree point assignment changes – they’ve streamlined it and I’m not sure I like it. I don’t hate it, but I liked having more choices that you had in Mass Effect.

All the abilities available seem more like active abilities with one passive ability that grants more health and damage or what ever benefit the class would use. Training into armor seems to be gone as is training into weapons, which is sort of disappointing (to me). From the sounds of it, a lot of people didn’t like having a lot of choice and worried too much about building bad characters.

Dumbasses.

2. Inventory and gearing systems – I’m still iffy about this. You can’t seem to equip your gear on the fly, instead you have to set up a casual look and then your ‘business attire’ – and by business, I mean armor.

On the positive, it looks like you will be able to mix and match armor parts instead of having a single complete suit that is sort of the same just different colors (exception seems to be the Blood Dragon armor which is a complete armor set, no customization).

Speaking of colors, you can customize your armor colors. I went with the Cerberus colors of black, white and yellow. I probably should be using the Blood Dragon armor because the stats are better, but I’m not sure I like how it looks. It meshes okay with what I feel is Mass Effect look, but not as well as the starting armor.

3. Normandy layout is a little different, but also sort of the same. You have a kitchen on board, separate quarters from what you used to have (those quarters are Miranda’s now), engineering and the hold are different looking and you have an administrative assistant who I’ve already busted several moves on with apparent success.

The load up for your team members is handled here in like in the previous Normandy, only the UI is different. I haven’t really figured it out yet, but I suspect that it will make more sense when I actually have other weapons or armor to switch squad members into. I’m not sure if you can customize their armor or colors, they might be stuck with what ever the stock look of the armor is.

4. You’re a hero working for what seems like a terrorist organization (operate in cells, few people know what the other cells are doing, you have one big mastermind behind it all that know one meets or knows) that isn’t well liked by alien races because this organization (Cerberus which is mentioned a little in the previous ME) is pro-Humanity. The distrust by alien races seems to be the main reason Shepperd is picked up by Cerberus (okay, he wasn’t really picked up so much as rebuilt) and I’m already starting to mend fences and build new bridges.

Talking to a lot of the crew members, you get a feel for what the organization is about and why people join it. The main one is that Cerberus takes action rather than debates over things like the Alliance/Council does.

This is an interesting twist on a hero role.

Overall, I’m loving it… more so than McDonald’s.

Grumpy…

A few grumpy things I thought I’d share:

Good grumpy music in my iPod playlist.

.. The Exies
.. Filter
.. Alice in Chains
.. Nine Inch Nails

Dwarves

Oh, my son had an urge to create a Dwarf named “Grumpy” in WoW the other day. Unfortunately, that name was taken as were the variations of it so we settled on, “Grumpers”.

Me

Yes, I am grumpy. Now fuck off.

UPDATE 3:45pm: I’m not feeling as grumpy now so…. fuck on.

Mass Effect 2 – First Impression

This really is a quick first impression. I think I had all of 30 minutes in game, I spent about 30 minutes prior to that downloading and installing the extra downloadable content.

Just a note, I’m a PC gamer so this is on the PC and I purchased the game via Steam which is also where I purchased Mass Effect from.

On start up there were some news in the main menu of the game explaining you could import your Mass Effect saves from the Configuration link in the ME2 Launcher. So I exited and fired that up.

The joy of Steam is that I don’t appear to have a typical install where everything gets dumped into ‘Program Files’. Instead it’s tucked away so my adventure in finding where my ME saved games were located began.

Apparently I picked incorrectly because when I started the game up again, it didn’t show any saved games for importing and I know I have at least two. One where I played the nice guy (I completed the game with this one) and the other where I was playing the asshole (which didn’t complete the game). UPDATE: I checked the local file system and discovered I only had the save games from the asshole character… which didn’t complete the game. That explains why the import didn’t work.

I’ll have to look into that some more another time.

Downloadable content cannot be installed while the game is going so I had to stop so I could install this items. For me, that was the Dragon Blood armor (thanks to Dragon Age: Origins pre-order) and two other things, one of which was about 400mb.

With it being about 12:40am, I decided I wouldn’t wait on the 400mb download or sort out the save game thing and I would just pop in and use the default instead.

Nifty starting cinematic (in-game stuff), some directed play (you effectively have to go from point A to B) and then some more waiting to actually shoot stuff. I’ll admit they incorporated building your character and setting his appearance in an interesting fashion. Once that was done, you jump right into things with the tutorial giving you some simple starting pointers as you work your way into and through some action.

So far the gameplay is very much the same. Your party works in a similar fashion. Guns shoot in much the same manner. You have biotics as in the previous game. The good stuff stayed good.

The addition I think they made is including ammo outside of upgrading weapon damage – which I don’t seem to remember in the previous version? I seem to remember the guns would overheat and having mods for the weapons to reduce the overheating issues. I could be wrong.

The clear changes they made were the addition of more resolution settings (1900×1200, thank you!) and tweaks to some of the mini-games for hacking. They also increased the quality of the graphics, leveraging a number of newer technologies – it looks a lot better than ME did.

I experienced two forms of hacking so far; one was hacking data pads and the other was overriding a lock. The two mini-games I played were a memory game (unlocking) and sort of running matching game (hacking systems).

In the previous version, both of these involved playing a mini-game where you had to move this pointer to the middle of a series of concentric circles, only there were barriers that did not make this so direct. Additionally there were moving barriers that would send you back to the outer ring if you bumped them. That was the min-game for hacking computers or opening locks.

In ME2 unlocking you have a number of circuits you have to override. Each circuit has two nodes with identical icons on them. You only see this icons when you mouse over them so you have to move the mouse over the nodes until you find a match, then pick the two nodes that match. You have to do that once per circuit and much like most memory games, the nodes you match get removed making things a little easier. Sort of cool and I have to admit I like how it reflects tearing a faceplate off a lock-pad and screwing around with the wires underneath.

For hacking, you’re presented with table that has three columns and several rows. The cells contain code snippets which you have to match to one given above. When you find a code snippet you hit enter and the next code snippet you need to find is shown so you have to find that one. You do that three times. The catch is that there are some blocked out nodes which prevent you from navigating through the code so you have to use your movement keys to get around those and pick off the code you want. There is an attempt counter and a timer, but I’m not sure how it works. I think you might have a number of attempts to get it within a given time, but I’m not sure on that. (i.e. if you run out of time, you lose an attempt and have to start over). Again, nifty and seems a little more like you’re actually involved in hacking code.

My only beef so far is that some parts of the game seem to be a little too focused on console controllers which is a little annoying, but not game breaking. The main thing that stood out was the Option menus. They seemed to have a mix of clickable items and items you needed to use the keyboard for – which is weird. List of resolutions? You could use the mouse. Inverting the Y Axis? You couldn’t use the mouse to flip this on or off. Like I said, not game breaking, just a little annoying.

That’s about all I have for now.

Divinity II and Single Player Games…

I picked this up almost a month ago and I’ve barely had any time to play it. So far I think I sunk maybe four hours into it, five at the most. And I lost almost two of those hours.

How?

Save games.

MMOs really spoil you as far as the whole “Save Game” thing goes. That’s right, I played for almost two hours without saving the game, then died only to discover the last autosave was about 1.5 hours ago.

The Ogre took over and I stopped there for a week or two. Come to think of it, I believe that was a bit of a turn off for me in DA:O. I lost some progress because I forgot to save the game – that might have taken the wind out of my sails.

I came back to it on the weekend where I managed to squeeze in about an hour or two, replaying some of the content I had done, but also deviating a bit and focusing on a different direction.

Single player game Devs listen up – make autosave options more obvious and allow for timed autosaves that don’t overwrite.

Overall, the game is fun. It plays like a console game for sure. Very click to attack, make chains (though it doesn’t really track these), use potions much like you did in Diablo, can dodge spells and other twitch base combat mechanics. The controls are quite simple and not overly complicated. If you’ve played a FPS type game it should be easy for you.

The combat animations seem decent and somewhat cumulative or at least there seems to be some build up or randomness to them – it’s not just Fred and Barney taking turns beating each other over the head. The graphics are quite decent too and it doesn’t seem to make a lot of use of bloom effects.

It feels like an Elder Scrolls game only with less loading and hitching. In fact, there weren’t a lot of loading screens outside of the cinematics and dialogs – where I can’t help but feel there are too many loads.

At one point you load on hitting a map point to see an in-game cinematic of a bloodied female wearing armor stagger over and collapse in front of you. You load again to get the dialog, which is really short. Load again as you get into another game mode, then shift again for a real cinematic, then load again for more cinematics (in-game) and then load again for a dialog. I might be exaggerating a little, but it certainly seemed somewhat painful.

The voice acting is decent though the animations to the voices seem a little overly active. Sound is good, I don’t pay a lot of attention to sound unless it is really annoying so the fact that I say it is ‘good’ means it fit with the game and didn’t stand out.

I find the dialogs somewhat typical, you get choices but it seems they would lead to the same sort of result, just presenting you with different reactions. I haven’t progressed far enough to find out if any of the tones you set carry forward. One complaint is that they don’t seem to lump more of the NPC dialog text into a panel. You typically get one line of text or sentence then need to click ‘continue’ for the next short bit. In some cases you do this a couple of times. Maybe this is due to translations or something, but it seems out of place to me.

The story so far is decent, laid out in a good manner and you get right into things. They tuck away some of the lore into books which you can find in game and read if you want; they seem pretty short with the largest one I found so far being two pages.

It has a level based mechanic with no real class system, instead it is more skill based so you could pick ‘warrior’ to start and shift it towards a caster type. The skills are categorized like you’d see classes, but you’re not limited to a given branch. Tooltips for attributes give you a sense of what they do while for the skills you can click on them and it will explain what they do in one panel while playing a video of what the ability does in the other panel which is neat. The game seems to have a decent amount of polish like that.

I’d recommend it if you like console-like single player RPG games.

Just be sure to map something to the Quicksave, by default no key is mapped to that.