Tag Archives: MMOs

Lightsabers and Labyrinths

I haven’t really sat down and attempted to complete anything new but I’ve definitely played some odds and ends on PC lately that I feel are worth a quick mention.

First, let me step back in time to something I forgot to mention several months ago which incidentally happens to me a lot with my blog – I randomly decide to pick something up for a few hours and put it back down without it ever earning a mention here. Anyway, I was feeling the MMORPG itch and since I hadn’t touched my old World of Warcraft account in quite a while I decided to make a brief incursion back into the galaxy of Star Wars: The Old Republic. You might recall when I mentioned the game originally that, despite being kind of a cookie cutter WoW clone in so many ways, I was actually quite fond of it and planned to go back. While I really wasn’t truly ready to return, having long since decided that this would be a game best played in all of its graphical glory after I build a new gaming rig, I still somehow ended up getting sucked back in.

“The perks of dogfighting in an asteroid field.”

I played my my Sith Inquisitor through a whole new planet and got my first taste of the on rails space combat which was surprisingly fun and appropriately Star Warsy. Most of all, the game is still mainly most satisfying because I like my character which is to say I like the way I imagine my character. Make no mistake, this is a twisted amalgamation of the imaginary image of him I have and my head the very wrote and scripted ways he behaves (no matter what choices I make) in his storyline dialogs and cut scenes. This is still very refreshing to me and gives me a much greater sense of attachment to my character than I’d normally have in an MMORPG, or even a lot of single player games.

I got so into it, in fact, that I ended up rolling some new characters in some other Sith Empire classes just to get an idea for the other characters and storylines at my disposal. I played a ruthless female bounty hunter pirate and a goodhearted but dutiful imperial agent somewhat based on the titular character from the Rogue Trooper comics and enjoyed the hell out of both. While I intend to stick it out with my Inquisitor (when I return to the game sometime later) I can definitely see why some people with far, faaarrrr more free time than I opt to level up each of the classes in the game.

“An audience with Nem’ro the Hutt.”

Moving on, I got a bit of an itch to play a classic hack and slash action RPG. I’m not quite sure what inspired this but I decided to warm up the original Torchlight. Although I got fairly close to the end (or bottom of the dungeon, as it were) in my first playthrough as a Vanquisher I had never actually beaten the game. You may recall from a 2012 blog post that I was considering replaying it on Xbox Live Arcade and actually played around with an Alchemist at the time to do a little theory crafting, so this time I went through on Hard mode with a brand new Alchemist. It was fairly fun, though I more or less breezed through the first two thirds of the game until I reached somewhat of a difficulty spike in which my character switched from an iron cannon of doom to a wee delicate glass cannon and I suddenly found myself relying quite heavily on my potion stores. I started to feel a bit burnt out by the repetition and lack of good loot upgrade options but forced myself through to the end anyway. While I still standby my words of immense praise for the game I’m definitely curious about whether or not the team at Runic managed to fix these issues with Torchlight 2.

“Ember Lightning and Ember Shield all day long!”

While the loot system (and the rest of the systems, really) are essentially refined versions of those from Diablo 2, I felt like I so rarely ever got loot that was actually better than what I had that it made the whole looting, identifying, and selling cycle more of a chore than anything else, and it isn’t like this was because I was already wading through the dungeon in some exceptionally awesome, epic gear or anything. One thing that isn’t lifted from Diablo 2 but rather Diablo is the mission and story structure. Torchlight takes place in one town, in one large, somewhat randomly generated dungeon, and has a simple main plot and even simpler side quests. Diablo made up for this by having an amazing and compelling atmosphere and while Torchlight’s isn’t bad by any means, it doesn’t really hold a candle to that of the Diablo series.

So, after beating Torchlight (the final boss was bullshit, by the way!) I dusted off my last playthrough of Diablo 2 which I had also started all the way over a year ago in 2012 in anticipation for Diablo 3. I have to say, the Paladin isn’t my favorite class and act 5 (the expansion act) isn’t my favorite act either, or perhaps the dreaded ARPG repetition is simply in full effect by then, who knows. Regardless, I flailed Baal to a fiery grave.

“Flinging flaming flails at foe’s frozen faces…”

While playing back through again my above statement about Diablo’s atmosphere was reinforced without question, and then some. I simply love the dark, serious, gritty feel of the world of Diablo and Diablo 2. The music and sound effects are particularly affecting – I ended up turning off the otherwise excellent music in Torchlight and listening to some podcasts and audiobooks while playing it but in Diablo 2? No chance! I’ve got to hear that eerie score and the those freaky ambient noises and sound effects! After this playthrough I’m now foaming at the mouth to finally load up Diablo 3, providing it stays true to those aspects of the series. My only hesitation besides the impending launch of the expansion pack is sending myself into some kind of horrible ARPG overdose but I don’t think I can resist, especially after the major pre-expansion pack patch that just dropped has renewed so much interest in the game again. Ugh!

Shadowvan Complexia

It’s been months since my last proper Game Log update and there’s good reason for that: I haven’t been gaming much!

I’ve continued to play some Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 online here and there until relatively recently. I think I finally reached that “eh, I’m good enough at this now…” stage of burn out which I also reached before max level in the previous two Modern Warfare games. Interestingly though, my load outs are fairly different. In MW2 I had developed a mean hyper-aggressive, hip-firing shotgun build and would even occasionally whip out a pretty effective sniping build on certain maps. In the original MW I had several assault rifle builds but one of my favorites was a hip-firing, fast reloading, high rate of fire sub-machine gun build. Coming full circle back to MW3 I found myself most effective with a pretty similar sub-machine gun build again. Great game, for what it is. Expect me to talk more about it (and probably more negatively about it) sometime when the future when I get around to playing through the single player campaign.

Oh yeah, I also briefly revisited my Minecraft addiction as well when a friend of mine put up a server… still a ton of fun! I didn’t do much cooperative building but I did carve out a little niche of my own and do plenty of exploring.

“I built this seriously huge canal before remembering that they changed the way water physics worked online and I couldn’t actually flood it properly. :/”

Star Wars: The Old Republic quickly came and went from my roster as well. Great game! I’ve definitely never felt so attached to my character or so drawn into the story of an MMORPG before, yet at the end of the day it is still a fairly cookie-cutter MMORPG and despite really enjoying it I decided that, at least for now, I would get more (and cheaper) enjoyment out of sticking with single-player titles. I’ve got such a huge backlog and tons of planned reviews for this blog and whatnot as it is, and with me spending so little time gaming lately, it just doesn’t seem worthwhile to invest so much time into yet another MMORPG. I do expect to return to this and finish out my main character’s story eventually, but for now… cancelled!

“I actually modeled my Sith Inquisitor after my old UO character.”

Speaking of my backlog, I just finished Shadow Complex on XBLA. Yes, I know this came out in 2009 and I’m massively late to the party (as usual) but wow, what a game! It’s no wonder so many people were raving over it at the time. For the uninitiated, the game takes the classic “metrovania” formula (probably an understatement: it is very much a direct rip-off of Super Metroid’s gameplay) and throws it into a slick, modern setting with a nice 3D engine to back it up. Don’t let the mention of it being 3D scare you – it’s still very much a 2D side scrolling platformer like the aforementioned Metroid and Castlevania games, though Chair did at least have the sensibility to use the more modern engine for things like in-engine cut-scenes and 2.5D environments. Let me explain the 2.5D thing: it means enemies can be in the background rather than only on the same plane as your character which may sound confusing but it generally works pretty well even with the occasional targeting oddities. It’s used pretty effectively, allowing for a lot more enemies on screen without cluttering things up and just greatly enhancing the perception of depth in the environment in general.

“If you can’t explore it, shoot it.”

While the 3D graphics are nice and the polished presentation much appreciated, probably what impressed me most were all of the tiny little updates to the Super Metroid formula. Just little things, like using a flashlight to see what objects and doors were accessible/useable with what items, color coding those same doors on your mini-map for later reference, highlighting the route to your next objective, etc. Perhaps some of those intelligent tweaks aren’t new to the genre, as other than playing the DS Castlevania games I really haven’t played anything like this recently, but they’re all here and all work exceptionally well. Some of the item and weapon additions were quite cool as well and despite the game always highlighting your next goal there could be a lot of flexibility in what paths and methods you used to reach it if you want to explore and use your imagination a bit. I’m quite thankful for all of this as I was a little concerned before I got started that this would be one giant, tedious slog through backtracking hell… but no, it’s very easy to keep track of where you have and haven’t been, what secrets you have and haven’t unlocked, etc. and it only gets more and more fun to play as you progress.

“Judo chop!”

Highly recommended if you were a fan of Super Metroid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or games of their ilk or, hell, even just a fan of 2D platformers in general. I definitely got my 15 bucks worth and I’ll probably play it again at some point in the future to go after more of the map secrets and challenges. Now if only they’d develop a new Metroid or Castlevania in this engine… *drool*

Mortal Komments!

I have some fond memories of the Mortal Kombat franchise starting from running into the arcade cabinet at a local grocery store of all places and admiring its cutting edge digitalized graphics and fantastic gore, quickly followed up by the obsessive, glowing buzz it gained from most of my then-8th grade compatriots. Soon after there was a lot of hanging out at local arcades as well as tracking down the various home console releases of the first two games with my friends. By the time Mortal Kombat 3 was released I had already developed a solid aversion to fighting games thanks largely to a mixture of the whole arcade/fighting game scene locally and my own lack of fighting game ability – really, most of my countless hours spent playing the console ports of MK 1 and 2 consisted of little more than me acting as a kind of moving punching bag for one of my much more skilled best friends. Great fun, that. (For the record I sucked at Street Fighter 2 as well. ;))

“”For a good time… don’t call Mileena.”

Still, I wasn’t being sarcastic about the fond memories. That was more than 15 years ago and I view those years in particular with a ton of nostalgia. So yeah, even if the MK games weren’t some of my favorites I still have a soft spot for them. I picked up the N64 port of MK 4 at some point, and I dabbled with some of the later games including Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. I can’t say I was greatly anticipating the 2011 Mortal Kombat but I was definitely intrigued by it. Fortunately unlike the last several MK releases this one had apparently actually lived up to its claims of returning to its roots and managed to become a better fighting game to boot by further diversifying and rebalancing its various characters.

I spent some quality time going through the story mode, some of the character ladders including the co-op ladders, and of course playing around in versus mode. Does it live up to the hype? Sure! If you never liked MK for its fighting system you might and I stress might be able to appreciate it a bit more now… but if it was the silly characters, over the top gore, dumb setting, or skimpy outfits you found objectionable then not much has changed – all of the stuff that appealed so strongly to my middle school peers and I is still intact if not even turned up a notch or two. The female character’s outfits are even more ridiculous, the gore… fatalities especially, even more gruesome. It’s the complete package. The biggest improvement there has got to be the story mode. I laughed along when I heard some of the podcasters I listened to scoffing at how many writers the game had credited well before its release but it actually does a surprising amount of fleshing out of the silly Mortal Kombat backstory. It essentially re-tells the plots of the first few games and the movie. It’s still dumb, sure, but unfair 2 vs. 1 matches and some annoying boss fights (suck it, Shao Kahn) aside it was great fun to play through.

“My main character – an Inquisitor Cleric.”

I’ve started winding down my WoW time lately for various reason and have instead started playing around with Rift. My brief synopsis: it has nice graphics, a cool class mechanic, and some other goodies but only really does one thing completely new to the genre: not suck. Well, let me explain… Rift’s mechanics are very much inspired by World of Warcraft (I’m being nice, guys) but unlike most of the MMOs that have come (and gone) since the success of WoW Rift actually not only barrows a ton of goodies from it but does so well. It’s very polished from the get go and the vast majority of little features and design tweaks that have helped WoW either become successful or stay successful over the years are already there. It’s so annoying to hop into a new MMO and come across problem after problem that have already been solved in other games. A lot of the time these are eventually patched out but… come on guys, why not just fix it from the fucking beginning? That’s Rift.

It’s about as good as you can expect from a WoW clone that aspires to be little more than a WoW clone. The setting and backstory are somewhat interesting but don’t appeal to me much personally but really, I’m almost totally done with this type of Everquest inspired theme-park MMORPG anyway, currently subscribing to the “if I want WoW, I’ll play WoW” mentality. I’ll still play around with Rift (and WoW) for a while but I doubt I’ll make any serious commitment to an MMORPG again until the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic… not that it is necessarily all that far off… nor may it do much to change the WoW formula itself, sadly. That said I’m very much interested in whatever Trion Worlds does next – they definitely seem to be an above average MMO developer so far.

“It might look like I’m winning but there’s about 500 more marines not in the shot…”

I’ve also wrapped up the adventure mode of the Xbox 360 version of Peggle Nights – no surprise there, it’s still great, simplistic pick up and play fun. Finally, I’ve been playing some Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Dark Crusade again, just dabbling with the Necrons in skirmish battles since I’ve been considering returning to playing tabletop 40k again and am learning towards putting together a Necron army. Thank god the table top game and Dawn of War’s RTS mechanics are nothing alike because I’ve yet to win a single damn game as the Necrons. 😕