Fus Ro Dah!

The beauty of neglecting to update your blog with any sort of consistency is that when something exciting happens there's no real drive to follow any thin veneer of consistency.

Skyrim:
Skyrim is rocking my world. Much like it's rocking the world of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of other people.

This image no doubt depicts a character in Skyrim having a friendly chat with an undead sorcerer. "Chatting" has lethal results when you talk in dragon speak. The player can learn to speak in dragon language and these "words of power" all have unique magic-like effects and where from slowing down time, or summoning animal companions to, my personal favorite, unrelenting force. This causes your character to project a powerful shockwave throwing anyone unfortunate enough to be in front of you while you scream nonsense words into the air. Ideally, the unfortunate enemy ( or friend, or horse, or bunny) will be standing on the edge of a massive cliff, but one can't always be so fortunate.
     Excluding the chronic poor choices of playing various MMOs, Oblivion (precursor to Skyrim) is the game that holds the title of Most Hours Played (in a single play through anyway), so I was eagerly awaiting the release of Skyrim. I queued up at my dubious local GameStore I looked upon dozens of crazies who came out to pick up a video game at midnight! Get a life! So I got my copy around 1 AM. And what a night I had!

Skyrim has delivered in every way I wanted to, and more-or-less no ways I didn't want it to. The previous Elder Scroll games were very micro-manage-y about how you built your character and you could "screw up" your character by poor choices leveling and allocating skills. Skyrim has simplified the system quite a bit. If I absolutely had to lob a criticism it would be that through their attempt to simplify the leveling system we lost some of my favorite skills, such as acrobatics (jumping really high) and athletics (running a long time and fast). And I'm not trying to convey this as some mythical "perfect game". It's buggy as hell. I've encountered some disappointing boss fights where what should have been an epic battle (with me dying alot) turned into the boss running around like a maniac, but refusing to actually attack me as I planted my sword into his head over and over again. All in all though, this has all the trappings of being a new favorite game for me.

The Last Imagining

Final Fantasy XIII on the whole was a travesty.

That being said, it did have some amazing aspects to it. The battle system was like nothing I've ever played before. They shed the micromanagement of your party that has always been inherent in a FF game. Instead of telling party member 2 to cast fire 3 and party member 1 to beat a baddy over the head with a sword, you directly control only the party leader. Even using the term "directly control" is a bit misleading. You can select each individual attack for the character to carry out, but the battles move so fast that that type of game play is a recipe for destruction. Instead, you find yourself constantly selecting the "Autobattle" option. This will make your character carry out the most effective attacks against an enemy. The strategy comes from assigning your party to "paradigm" roles. Like 'the guy who hits stuff' or 'healer' or 'magic-dude'. So the battle system I found to be really fun. Not really a "final Fantasy" battle system, but really fun and exciting none-the-less. The music was really awesome also.

Here's the bad. I did not give one single shit for the characters, who were the same tired old archetypes from every other FF game. The game was too long. I finished the game in about 60 hours. That's WITHOUT doing the tedious hours of super boring extras. It also takes roughly 20 hours before the game finally takes off the training wheels and lets you start playing the way you want to play. The game is also completely linear, but that's less of a complaint from me than it would have been 10 years ago. It's more of a statement of fact. But here is the complaint. The character progression takes the form of a "Crystarium" which is this game's version of the "Sphere Grid" or "License Board" from FF X or FF XII. The trouble with the crystarium is that it is almost completely linear for each character. You do have some modicum of customization,, but it's pretty much a cameo.

I could go on about Final Fantasy XIII, but I won't. I hit the major points, and that's all I care to go over.

Funny "I'm Back" themed title here

I haven't posted in 3 months. Whatever. That's all I'm going to say about that. Class + Laptop = writing a new post.

I've played the entirety of Final Fantasy XIII and Bastion since the last post. I also promised more details about Magika last time. Here are those details, probably much shorter than I originally intended because I just don't care anymore. Magika was a very unique game. I'm sure some one can say "no it's not it's just like ____" but I don't care. It's a funny game. Or rather, it's a game that tries to incorporate humor and it succeeds to a moderate extent. But yer a little wizard dude, excuse me, a non-gender specific wizard running around casting magics. You have 8-10 elements you combine to make spells. The game and concept are super-fun, but the game loses almost all credibility because of shoddy programming that makes the game run slow as hell. Additionally, I don't know if I've ever played a buggier game, with exception of possibly Fallout New Vegas which is also rife with bugs.

Thats all for now. Class is over.

Screw Up

I've been dropping the ball lately, hard. I'm gonna give a fast and dirty update on the games I've been playing, but I think I will give some of the bigger titles posts of their own shortly. Dragon Age: Haven't touched it. I'm getting close to what I perceive to be the end, but I'm got one last hump to get over. That hump is called "Going into another huge-ass town". I'm confident that will require having to do all the tedious walking around, gathering 10 new missions, talking to all the appropriate people to get those done blah blah blah. I'm even boring myself with this story.
The new stuff I've gotten is Final Fantasy XIII, Fallout: New Vegas, and Operation Darkness. Oh ho! But tose are just the XBox 360 titles! I've also acquired Magicka and Defense Grid on PC (thanks Steam). I highly recommend checking out Magicka, despite the performance problems that seem common to the game, and Defense Grid (but only if you like tower defense games). Apologies, I did not go into the usual amount of detail on this post, but I'm trying to get a post up really fast so I can go play Magicka. More details will be forthcoming.

Long Time Coming

     I haven't posted in a long time. It's because life got pretty hectic for awhile. Whatever. Games:
I've not played anything to speak of other than Dragon Age. The more I play it the better it gets. The most recent discovery I made was the Tactics customization. "Tactics" bascially means that the characters you don't directly control, instead of running around doing whatever they feel like in combat, are bound by rule sets. These are conditions like "When surrounded by 3 or more enemies:" do ability A or whatever. I ignored the option to customize all these things for over half the game simply because it's alot of information to process. There are at least 50 (probably over 100 actually) different choices you can make for the condition that will trigger a certain ability. In addition to that, you also have to have some idea of what each ability does for each character. I've got about 8 different characters, give or take, and each one has no less than 6 different abilities. You do the math and figure out that's alot of information to process.
     But now that I finally decided to mess with Tactics, it's a game-changer. All the characters now do things that make sense and combats have become a lot easier. When I play Dragon Age again, as I undoubtedly will, I will be sure to use tactics from the beginning that time. One final thought on DA then I'm done. The level of character customization in this game is incredible. It's exciting to me that two people could play through the game, choosing the same class like rogue or warrior or mage, and end up with completely different characters. With mage in particular there are so many different options and schools of magic that you can have a different game experience every time you play. Exciting!

Frustrating Ninjas!

***WARNING***THIS POST MAY CONTAIN MILD SPOILERS REGARDING NINJA GAIDEN II ***END WARNING***

     I finished Ninja Gaiden II yesterday. It's not something I was playing diligently, I would pick it up every once in a while. For the most part it lacked some of the ridiculous difficulty that the first game had. For the most part, I said. The last two levels were filled with somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 boss battles. The frustration come in two parts. Number one Ninja bass battles are Hard...usually. That is to be expected with this game though. The second, more frustrating, issue is that I thought I was fighting "The Last Boss" no less than 4 times. I could expound upon how irritating that bosses were, but I feel that would just be belaboring the point.
     I've been playing a little bit of Dragon Age, but I've stalled a little on that game. Dragon Age deserves it's own post, so I won't go into detail right now. I finished Gears of War since my last post and started Gears of War 2, but am taking my time with it. I really want to play both games' campaign as co-op, so I sent feelers out on the Fear the Boot forums for some people to help make that happen. I think playing that co-op will be a game-changer.

   















   
     Finally, every 3 - 4 years I try to play through Final Fantasy III (that's VI if you use the original Japanese numbering system) and I've gotten the itch to try it once again. I've never actually finished FF3/6, not because it is especially difficult, but because I hit a certain (optional) dungeon in the game that I really want to finish, and that dungeon (the Magic Tower, for those who have played it) is especially difficult. Since I always get hung up there, at the very end of the game, I've never actually beat it. But hey, 8th time's the charm.

Cogs of War

Real-life has been interrupting postings the last week. I'm updating because I've got a minute to spare, but I haven't advanced the cause of gaming too much recently. A few days ago I picked up the Gears of War pack that includes Gears 1 and 2 and much if not all downloadable content for Gears 2. I've played the single player campaign before, but I'm sending out some feelers to hopefully find a co-op partner to play with. The only other remarkable moment has been getting to play Last Night on Earth again. Always a treat.

 











I've been playing some multiplayer recently, because it's easy to pick up for a bit then put down. In most cases it's very easy to put down. Anyway, I'm not bragging about my "mad skilz" but I've gotten to the point that in most multiplayer matches I play (not game specific) I usually end up in the top 3-5 players in the match. Gears of War is the exception to this. I've got a couple theories, so get ready! #1- I'm just not good at Gears of War. This is possible, but it feels like an easy answer. I prefer theory #2: Each Gears match provides significantly less opportunity to hone your playing skills. Most multiplayer games allow for and are based around respawns. Some dude explodes your head with a sniper rifle, you wait about 8 seconds, then you're back in the fight to get said head exploded again...in seconds...by the same douche bag. Many of the Gears of War multiplayer games don't allow that. Once you die, you're dead for the match. Clearly, for many of the games that means, as a new player, you run out, get killed and you're done. Quite a 180 from games like Dead Space 2 or Halo where, if you're tenacious, or bad, enough, you can get killed again and again, racking up as many as (possibly) 20 deaths. So you have opportunity after opportunity to try to not die. I can't think of any verbose ending to this post, so I'll just end it abruptly here.

Aftermath

I waited a few days before posting anything new. I wanted to give myself time to let it sink in that the vast majority of my previous game collection is gone. It has. I don't miss it. I was holding on to a bunch of crap titles that I had finished and kept around because I told myself I'd go back and get those last few achievements. Or for the mythical time that I "got into" the multiplayer. Well no more. A game surfaces in my head every few days that I miss for about 5 minutes, then I'm over it.
     Now: Portal 2. It was great. Finished single and mutliplayer. It was short, but I was anticipating that. It was also really fun (also anticipated that), but I think the multiplayer was stronger than the single player game. Some downloadable content is supposed to be out "this summer", whenever that is. And best of all, it's going to be free. Don't believe me? Check Joystiq!
     When I was talking about Dragon Age I had not yet given the game a fair shake. It is awesome! I am more enthusiastic about Dragon Age then I am about Portal 2. It's so good, and so similar to Star Wars: KOTOR that it makes me think: if I had KOTOR on console instead of PC, maybe I'd actually finish the game, instead of finishing the first 8-10 hours and never picking it up again. Wow. I really need to go back to that game once Dragon Age is done.

I also picked up Star Craft 2 for PC. I've played 3-4 levels of it and am overwhelmed with my lack of an opinion. Not that it's bad. It's probably really great, but I'm not feeling the Real-Time Strategy right now.

Last, and certainly least, I started playing the free trial of Warhammer online. I'll describe the game like this: World of Warcraft. Same thing. If you've ever played WoW you know exactly what to expect. I'm not criticizing the game; I haven't played enough for that yet, but I've already been there. Done that.

Game Collection: Purged

I made a rather rash decision yesterday. I sold the vast majority of my game collection back to a local imperialist game-trading company. I got  a surprisingly large amount of store credit for everything and left with Portal 2, Dragon Age: Origins (Ultimate Edition), and a new controller cuz my 360 thumbstick has been twitchy for a long time. In this case "a long time" means "since I bought it. A word to the wise: sped the extra money and buy a new controller, don't buy used.

So far Portal 2 is really fun. Valve has built on the concept significantly so that it's not just a longer version of the first one and the story has taken some surprising (and fun) twists so far. I haven't touched multiplayer yet, but I hope to do some of it tomorrow. I don't really want to rant about it because there are probably a million and one sites that expound how great it is. I will probably write at about it at length once I've done some multiplayer and have finished the single player which seems like it is going to be pretty short. It's not like the first installment which you could only call a full game if you had the most jaded sense of humor, but I'm going to guess that it will clock in at around 10 hours for a full play-through.

Dragon Age seems pretty good for the hour or two I've played. However, I think I had some misconceptions about it before I got it. I expected to be playing a Mass Effect clone in a fantasy setting. I think it would be more appropriate to say that Dragon Age spans the gap between Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. On top of that, considering the game is less than 2 years old (according to google) the graphics look disappointingly dated. That may not be the case if I has an HDTV, but I'm playing it on a tube television. That's not really a complaint, it's just that Mass Effect looks so good that I was expecting the same caliber of quality throughout Dragon Age. But, like Portal 2, I'll probably have more to say once I put a little bit more time into it.

My friend bought Descent: Journeys in the Dark the other day. As you can see above, it's an extremely elaborate boardgame. We had a good time, but no one had played before so we played this very complex boardgame and tried to learn the rules (rule book is like 30 pages) at the same time. It was fun, but it took forever because no one knew the rules or the strategy. The game is like an adaptation of an old-school Dungeons and Dragons dungeon crawl. What that means is that one player runs the dungeon and wants to kill the adventurers. The other players control said adventurers, they work together and try to kill all the monsters in the dungeon and steal all their stuff (gold, potions, weapons, etc.). It's a good game, but I think the intense learning curve would turn off players who are not pretty intense gamers.

To conclude, my EVE online subscription expired. Will I be renewing it? Maybe, but Portal, Dragon Age, and Lost Odyssey to play, so the jury is still out on weather I will come back to EVE or not.

Infection

I've not posted in a week or so because I had to prepare for finals. Also, coincidentally, I haven't had much to say about gaming. Now that finals are over I bought and have been playing Prototype like it's my fucking job. I rented Prototype about a year ago and played through it super fast. I thought at the time that I played it so obsessively because it was a rental, and had to go back in 4-5 days. I realize now that I played through it so fast because it's addictive and incredible.
     I feel a little strange bit of guilt saying that its so great because it was a big deal when it came out. It shouldn't deserve the hype it got on it's release because it's little more than a Grand Theft Auto clone. A clone that has super powers. Don't misunderstand me though. I love this game. Activision essentially took their Spider Man 2 game, which was total crap, and over hauled it to make Prototype. Prototype is so derivative of other games (GTA and Spider-Man) that I feel like it should have no merits of it's own, but I cannot stop playing it. And this is after already playing the game to it's completion. Not to belabor the point, but Prototype has so much working against in my mind that the fact that I'm giving the game a virtual "Thumbs up" should communicate that this is an amazing game. A little short, but unadulterated fun!
     Other than that I want to blab on about a couple up coming games. This year is going to be a big one for games that make me excited like a little girl. Mass Effect 3 is supposed to be out near the end of the year! Some people poo-poo ME and ME2. Those people are fucking dumb-dumbs. If YOU didn't like ME or ME2 than I'm including you under the dumb-dumb umbrella. Mass Effect 2 might be my favorite game ever. And I'm putting that up against titans such as Chrono Trigger and Metal Gear Solid. Needless to say, I'm highly anticipating Mass Effect 3. Another big 'un is Skyrim: Elder Scrolls V. I only got into the Elder Scrolls series in the last 4-5 years. I played through the majority of Morrowind and loved it, I played the fuck out of Oblivion and it took Morrowind and kicked it in it's dated-graphics ass! I don't have anything more to say about it. Finally, a game that is already out: Portal 2. I want it so bad it hurts. If anyone reading this has $60 to spare send it to me immediately and I will buy Portal 2. I hope against hope that there will be a tie-in to Half Life 3 because ***SPOILER ALERT*** Half Life 2 Episode 2 had Aperture Science show up at the very end ***END SPOILER ALERT*** Regardless, I got to play a little bit of Portal 2 last week and it certainly delivered on the Awesome-ness. Rant Status: Over

Alan Woke

I just finished Alan Wake. It was really good. Despite that I will now critique it, as my nature demands I do with all things.
     The story kept me coming back to the game eagerly. The game play, however, got to be a touch redundant by the end. This could be because I played the game start-to-finish in about four days, though. The environments were cool and creepy. Unfortunately there were only about 4 different environments to enjoy: Scary Woods, Scary Abandoned Farm-ish Town, Not So Scary Building Interior, and...well...more Scary Woods.
     People who get their hackles up about ambiguous endings will probably (read: definitely) be frustrated by this game. I don't mind ambiguity too much. I'd prefer the writers hold my hand at the end explaining (but not over explaining) exactly what happened, but I can deal with it.
     Replay has become a huge concern for me. Had I bought it instead of renting I would get at least one of the two available DLCs. Beside the DLC I could see myself doing another play of Wake and then (realistically) trying it on hard then losing interest and not finishing it. That's a long way of saying I think the replayability is not so great.
     All of that being said, I really enjoyed Alan Wake and would recommend it to anyone that enjoys horror...and good things.
     I also met up (in game) with a new xbox friend from the Fear the Boot forums. We played a few levels of Lost Colony 2. Good times.

Wake up!

I've mentioned in previous posts that I don't do video game reviews. I'm not back peddling on that, but I do need to gush about a game I rented yesterday. This is not a review!
I just got around to renting Alan Wake for xbox. It is amazing. The closest comparison I can make is that it is similar to survival horror, but Alan Wake is less a traditional video game than it is an interactive story where you shoot stuff. The narrative format is similar to the most recent Alone in the Dark title which took the concept of an episodic television series and tried to apply that to a video game. Each "level" is presented as an episode, starting with a "Previously on ..." and while Alone in the Dark ended each episode literally with closing credits, Alan Wake simply gives you a "End of Episode" splash screen which plays some of the haunting music from it's soundtrack. Which is incredible by the way. The first episode ends with Roy Orbison's surprisingly appropriate and haunting "In Dreams". Alan Wake's "episodes" also (as far as I've played) end with a brief cinematic which ends with a televisionically predictable cliffhanger-like plot reveal. Don't misunderstand me, please, I'm not saying the plot of Alan Wake is predictable, I'm saying that in this style of narrative you usually anticipate an "oh shit!" moment at the end of the episode and Alan Wake does not fail to deliver.
     While the only thing that was truly interesting about Alone in the Dark was this tv-like format, Alan brings a lot more to the table. I am already hooked by the story, which seems heavily influenced by Stephen King stories. Alan Wake has a fantastic narrative, both in terms of the story being told and how the story is told. The game play is tight, killing the creepy baddies is gratifying, and the atmosphere is eerie. I like it, and I'll probably rant more on it once I finish it.

Intangible Loss

For starters I just got done playing a little bit of Blood Bowl. That game was clearly made for people who already understand the tabletop version. I resent that I now have a game I need to study up on just to play some single player. Once I fully understand the game I think it could be fun...ish. Team customization might be Blood Bowl's saving grace, depending on how much customization is possible, but I haven't checked it out yet because at this point I think most of it would be Greek to me.
     I haven't played a whole lot of Eve the last few days for a very specific reason. If you lose a combat your spaceship and all equipment gets destroyed. I think you can go back and loot your wrecked ship for some little trinkets that may have survived, but for the most part your baby is gone. In other MMOs like World of Warcraft if you get killed you run back to your corpse and respawn. There are some penalties for death, but they are pretty trivial. Eve has very unforgiving consequences for death. It's a game largely about resources and cold hard cash. I want to properly emphasize the gravity of losing the one thing that allows you to continue to gain resources. It is conceivably possible that, if you were a really terrible player, you could reach a point where you just lost your last ship and don't have enough money to buy one. CCP, the makers of Eve, most likely have some sort of fail safe built in, such as they give you a real crap ship if you get your last ship blown up, but my point is this (still), the penalty for death is very high. Not to sound like a crazy person, but although I'm talking about virtual possessions that, in the grand scheme of things, mean nothing whatsoever, there is a very real and frustrating sense of loss when this happens.
     Today was a day of demos. I downloaded the Dragon Age 2, Fatal Inertia, and some Gundam game demos. Fatal Inertia is a racing game similar to Wipeout or Star Wars Podracer or any number of other generic flying-cars with weapons racing game. I was sufficiently underwhelmed. Delete. Gundam was a disappointment also. A few tweaks and it might become a fantastic game, but it was clunky and slow. You pilot your big robot on a large battlefield with literally thousands of other big robots. You press X, X, X a lot, or maybe X, X, Y or X, Y, A if you're feeling a little wacky. Now repeat about 300 times. All it would take to turn this game from dull to incredible is 3 things. #1- speed up the gundam's action and movement. #2- make the generic combos flashier. #3- add more enemy variety. Gundam is a mech game. And by mech I mean giant robot. There are 2 different types of mech games as far as I can tell. There's strategic mech games like Chromehounds of Front Mission, and there are action mech games like Zone of the Enders and Armored Core. Action mech games are broken for me, perhaps forever. That's because I've already played the best one that exists and all others are now held to that standard, and always fall short. Zone of the Enders: 2nd Runner is the best action mech game. Period. The extremely tight controls and the free form combat that has your mech jumping across the screen lightning fast made for an incredibly fun and intuitive combat game. Anyone making a mech game needs to play the hell out of ZOE 2 and take liberal pages from that book.
     Finally, I played Dragon Age 2. I've never played 1, I've been curious because it looks like the fantasy version of the space opera Mass Effect. Mass Effect gets a bad rap from a lot of people. It's one of my favorite games. That's not to say that it is not problematic, but I think the good far out weighs the bad. Anyway. After played the DA 2 demo I Must go play Dragon Age. It seems like it is exactly what I expected and more. Now I am making the assumption that Dragon Age 1 and 2 are not too terribly different, and I'm inferring things from context that I didn't actually see in practice in the demo. But the combat system seems solid and easy to pick up and understand. You control 1 person primarily but can easily switch to full control of other people in your party. There appears to be character loyalty points and a good/evil point system. If Dragon Age is similar in scope to either Mass Effects this is a game I can get 100+ hours of fun out of.

For the sake of posting

I don't know if the trend has become apparent yet, but I am mostly posting about things that happened the day before. So what I blab on about today is usually in the context of what happened yesterday.
     True to form, here's what happened yesterday: Other than spending time at school yesterday I also did a little bit of leg work that I hope will boost my traffic a bit. I submitted myself to some search engines, I posted a link on the Fear the Boot forums, and I added myself to Digg and Stumble. I also tweaked the appearance of Blogsothoth Gaming to make it (hopefully) more user friendly.
     Fear the Boot is my second favorite pod cast. It's all about table-top RPGs (and a little bit more). Even if you're not into tabletop rpgs you could still enjoy the show, assuming you have a love (or at least tolerance) of nerd-stuff. My favorite podcast is Radiolab, an NPR podcast about science-y type stuff. I can't give a better description because words fail to do it justice, but if you listen to podcasts at all I highly recommend it.
     If you don't know what Stumble is than you've never been bored on the internet. Stumble is similar to digg in that it's content is selected and submitted by users with a similar sort of vote system to digg (if you don't know how digg works, ask google). But you install a toolbar, click a button and it brings up a psuedo-random page that can be some of the craziest things. Stumble has led me to some of the funniest things on the interwebs including my favorite flash game ever.
     Uh...anyway, this is supposed to be about games. I played some more Scott Pilgrim yesterday. I am upsettingly close to the end of the game. At least I think I am, I have only Ramona's 7th evil ex to defeat. But I found out something that makes me think it will keep some of it's re-playability. I started up with a different character, just for giggles, and found that the levels seem to change a little based on what character you choose, so maybe that'll be enough to keep me playing for awhile.
     Blood Bowl is making me more angry than it should considering I have yet to play the actual game. I decided yesterday that since the BB tutorial is kind of confusing I should read the manual first. I bought it on Steam, so I right clicked Blood Bowl and hit "Read the manual". It then directs me to the 80+ page rule book for the table-top version! Apparently it is based so closely on the table-top game that they share a rule book. I was not prepared to learn a complex table-top game's entire game system just to play a damn video game! I don't have a problem learning a tome of rules when I'm prepared to do so, but I was caught so off guard by this that I feel like I have to take some time and mentally prepare myself to learn how to play this video game! Am I being dramatic? Probably. But it's my blog, and it's about my innermost thoughts...about video games.
     To conclude, I've been reading a book on my new Kindle called This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities by Jim Rossignol. It's pretty good non-fiction. I'm only about 1/3 through but it seems to be about this guy arguing that video games can be good for people. I'm not writing a particularly stunning book review here, but I recommend checking it out. At very least read a review about it written by someone more verbose on the topic than myself.

Achievement Unlocked 0G- Posted to Blog

I have very complex feelings about something that is so potentially uninteresting as Achievements, or Trophies if you play PS3. Whoever came up with the idea of achievements is a genius. I get more out of games that have them, than games that don't. Not because achievements make a better game in anyway. But they add another layer to game play. But they're also a double edged sword for a couple reasons. Nothing can break the immersion of game play as much as a random ding in the middle of fighting baddies and an on-screen prompt for unlocking 10 G for completing the Face-Stomper Achievement. The idea tied up in achievements is the point system (gamer points I think they're called. Whatever) this is the dangerous part because it fans the flames of what has so often been a "Mine's bigger than your's" subculture. I've been getting into multiplayer games alot more in the last year or two, so I say this with a health dose of hypocrisy, but the competitive aspect of gaming has always been a big turn off for me. I would take a co-op game any day of the week over PVP. Co-op vs. PVP is a topic all it's own and deserves it's own post later, so for the sake of brevity I'll leave it at that.
     As I was saying, the gamer points further exacerbate the competitive aspect of gaming, which I don't care for.  And the achievements themselves can break some of the immersion of the game. When I get a new game the achievement list is often the first thing I look at, just to get an idea of what I'm "supposed" to be trying to do. A better option would be for me to sit down and play through the game and "worry" about the achievements for a subsequent play-through. But the thought of missing all those deliciously gratifying dings as I play compels me to look. But all that aside, the main reason I like achievements is that it allows me to play games an additional 2-3 more than I would have otherwise and still find something fun and interesting to do. Considering the fantastically high price of games today in conjunction with how frustratingly short the majority of games are I need the ability to play through the game multiple times just to get my moneys worth out of it.

What a horrible night to have a curse

I got a couple new games I've yet to mention. Just for clarity, almost 100% of the time when I say "new" I really mean "new to me".
     Anyway, I got Scott Pilgrim the game and Blood Bowl. Scott Pilgrim is an xbox live arcade game that is like the old arcade beat-'em ups. Similar to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or The Simpsons but your characters level up and get new skills. The game claims to be 8-bit, and it's soundtrack is certainly made with nintendo-era technology. But the graphics being truly 8-bit? I'm not buying it. They do a good job of making the graphics look like a throw back to 8-bit, but everything looks too clear for me to legitimately believe they didn't supe them up a bit.

I don't know. You tell me. 

     Anyway. I like SP the Game because it's just plain fun. My problem is that after about 3 hours of play I already made Scott max level. The upshot is that the better Scott gets the more fun it is, but I suspect after playing through each level ( 7 I assume ) once I think there might be quite a bit of fun fall off. 

     So Blood Bowl. I got it a few days ago on PC ( from Steam ), I've sat down and tried to run through the tutorial on 2 separate occasions but failed to make it all the way through. Not because it seems like a bad game, but it seems so complex. It's a football game based on Warhammer. I don't know enough about Warhammer to explain so look at the Warhammer wiki. But its basically a football game mixed with a tactical RPG. My impression thus far is that you pick a team made up of orcs, or humans, or undead things, or other fantasy races. You then play turn based football where instead of tackling or whatever, you pummel or kill people...or orcs. But the rules seem so complex that once I'm done writing this I'm going to look up the rules of the game. 

     Finally, the Eve honeymoon is over. I'm still playing it, but I'm past the fanatical overzealous period of an MMORPG during which the power of Eve compels you to play at all times. 

Uneventful

Yesterday. Not a whole lot to talk about. I had to meet up with my corporation members on eve and we ran through some PVP practice. That's player vs. player. It was extremely uneventful. So much so that it consumed all of my interest in eve for the day.
     I got Halo Wars in the mail too. I only played a little bit of it. I'd played it before as a rental. It's an xbox real time strategy game (RTS). All in all it was a pretty uneventful day, games wise that is.
      I did however start watching Naruto (anime) on Netflix and was pleasantly surprised to find that it's subtitled instead of the American dub. Not much of an update, I know.

That was a pun. I meant "catch up"

Friday: I played a bit more Dead Space 2. Single player this time. Since getting Dead Space 2 back I've now played enough of the single player game to re acclimated to the story. I'm also working on getting all of the weapon specific achievements, such as kill 50 enemies with the flamethrower or kill 20 enemies with deployed mines. Here's the thing, as I said before I've already played Dead Space 2 but I didn't have an objective opinion because I was riding the new-game high. Now I can say with confidence, Dead Space 2 is an incredible game. It is a vast improvement over the first game, and the steps Visceral Games took to make Isaac (the main character) more of a character than just the avatar you control worked really well.
     Eve update: I mined asteroids for ore yesterday. A lot. Mining ore in Eve is what seems to me to be the easiest way to make ISK (money) in the game. So I collected a crap ton of ore then refined it into alloys. Alloys are the prime ingredient used to manufacture ships and equipment. Finally, I put the alloy up on the market (auctions essentially) and some other player buys it up. Cha-ching.
     Hopefully I will be running a Call of Cthulhu game for some friends in 3 or 4 weeks. I'm currently putting together an adventure for the players to run. Obviously I don't want to post details about that in case they read this, but after the game is done I will be posting details about it. If you don't know what Call of Cthulhu is, it's a role-playing game similar to Dungeons & Dragons without the Elves and Dragons and shit. It is based on the writing of H. P. Lovecraft, an author from the early 1900 who is considered (by some, myself included) to be one of the greatest horror writers ever. I'll be postnig more general information about CoC periodically. I don't want to cause information overload.

Chaosium (Publisher of Call of Cthulhu)

A Little Ketchup

Played Last Night on Earth Thursday. That's the aforementioned zombie board game. 5 people played 1 person played the zombies and myself and 3 others played humans. The beauty of the game is that there's a number of scenarios with different objectives. This game we play a scenario where all the zombies enter the game from a central location and the heroes have to collect items to destroy the zombie spawn locations. Due to some rule over sights and a poorly described scenario outline the humans suffered defeat at the hands of the shambling horrors from beyond the grave. Boo.
     Also played a little bit of Dead Space multiplayer and was rewarded with two more rank increases. Also played a bit of Eve online. I picked up a few items I wanted to outfit my ship with for a PVP practice session with my corporation on Saturday. Trained some skills too, as always.

UPDATE: After reviewing my post I realized I did not do Last Night on Earth justice in terms of explanation. So here it goes. The scenario we played lasted 17 rounds. If the humans do not achieve their goal within the 17 allotted turns the zombie(s) win by default. The humans are tasked to searching the buildings which are along the perimeter of the game board. Along with finding weapons, items, and special abilities, the humans need to recover a total of 4 gas cans and something to lite a fire with. They must then enter a mansion set in the center of the board where all the zombies are coming from and use the gasoline to destroy the zombie spawning pits. The snafu on the part of Flying Frog (the game publishers) is that there are only a total of 3 gas cans. This means the intent is that the humans will heroically dash into the mansion deal with one pit then try to find more gas by searching or using abilities to reclaim discarded cards. We attempted to collect all the gas at once. A task that was literally impossible to do. On a related note the friend who has LNoE also has a game called Invasion From Outer Space which has a very similar rule set, but instead of zombies, you fight Martians. I'm pretty excited to play that as well.

Last Night on Earth
Invasion From Outer Space

One Small Step

I didn't do much as far as gaming goes yesterday. What I did do was go to bed early and get the first decent amount of sleep in like 2 weeks. I also started Blogsothoth Gaming.
     Much to my chagrin Eve online servers were down for the Incursion 1.4 update. After the tedious update process all I had the patience to do was go online update my character's appearance and add a few skills to my training queue. I changed my character because CPP, the creators of Eve, made me. They added some features like body piercings and tattoos. It was more of a chore than a treat because the character creator is so finely rendered that it runs slowly even on my fancy (relatively) new computer. The training queue previously mentioned is a daily task to perform because abilities in the game are improved via a queue of skills that upgrade in real time whether you are online or not. Thus, I was able to upgrade some skills while I slept the night away.
     I also played a bit of Dead Space 2 on 360. I'd lent it out to a friend for awhile. I've already finished the game but was midway through the ever popular second-play. I hate coming back to a game midway through after a long hiatus because of the inevitable disorientation. This was no exception. After about 20 minutes of play I got tired of being moderately stressed out by the "scary" game. So I did a bit of the multiplayer. I moved up from rank 7 to 9 and got bonus damage to the Spitter. Spitter is one of the monsters you can play in multiplayer. The Dead Space 2 multiplayer is interesting to me. You get 2 teams of people playing, humans vs. monsters(necromorphs). The humans have some objective to fulfill like assemble a bomb, or activate an escape route, etc. The necromorphs objective to to stop the humans from succeeding. So it's not just your standard death-match. But what's most alluring is that the necromorphs are pretty unique enemies and it's incumbent upon the players to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the 4 necromorphs you can choose from, and also learn the role in a party each one should hold. Inevitably people fail to play them as a team and everyone dies, but I like the idea at least.
     Today's agenda involves screwing around for a few hours (read: probably play Eve), go to school, then tonight I've got a date to play some Last Night on Earth with a friend. It's a zombie board game that partially bridges the gap between board games and role-playinig games. Read more here!

Awkward Beginnings

Hello and welcome to my first post. This post will cover topics such as: "Who the fuck are you?", "What's the point of Blogsothoth Gaming?", "Why would you do this?", and "Encourage comments". Why am I covering these topics? Because the internet told me to here.

Re: Who the fuck are you?
I am a college student in Michigan majoring in computer science and aspiring to be a programmer. I also like games...like alot. So much so, that it's the sole purpose of Blogsothoth Gaming. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I have dabbled in pen & paper role-playing games, but most of my gaming is on XBox 360 or PC.

Re: What's the point of Blogsothoth Gaming?
What's the point of anything really? The less thought-provoking answer is that I'll be keeping a semi-permanent record of the things I've "accomplished" in my various virtual existences.

Re: Why would you do this?
A multifaceted question. One reason is that it gives me something with a modicum of structure to do, and there are few things one can do that are more self-serving than blogging. Another reason is that it gives me a place to vent under the tenuous guise of writing about gaming. Finally, I'd like a place of my very own* to review all of my intangible gaming accomplishments. There are other reasons, but they're nobody's business but my own.

*powered by blogger.com

Re: Encourage comments
Please comment. I "want to foster an atmosphere of community and involvement for [my] readers" . Anyone posting comments in a way that I deem to be "inappropriate" will be dealt with accordingly, so play nice please.


As a preview of what's to come, here are some of the games I may be talking about in the posts to come:
Call of Cthulhu (role-playing game)
Eve online (PC MMORPG)
Halo Wars (XBox 360 real-time strategy)
Alien vs. Predator (360 first person shooter)
Crackdown 2 (360 sandbox style game)

As you may be able to tell, my finger is not on the proverbial pulse of new gaming. Reporting and reviewing brand new games is NOT the point of Blogsothoth Gaming. It's more about presenting my personal experience and opinions about the games I'm playing, what I've gotten out of them, and what I'm doing in them. Long post, I know, but it's an introduction.