Blarg!
It's been a rough (but not horrible) few days. I should finally be over the hump soon, at least.
Been tearing about in various games, with an emphasis on Diablo III and Final Fantasy V.
A highlight of current Diablo escapades was dealing with a huge mob of teddy bears that had the Molten and Mortar traits. It was fairly fun. actually, like letting the Small Soldiers from back in the day arm a pack of Beanie Babies. They're still not as scary as old-school Care Bears, though. Those crazies tore about and flashed people to death with weaponized good feelings and stuff. Taste the Rainbow, motherfucker!
Nor are they as hardcore as modern ponies.
>>
<<
I admit nothing.
Also, a bit more RPG = WTF in my life. Spoilers: The Big Bad in FFV is a scary Vader wanna be that's actually a damn tree. The Dwarves were right, the trees want to kill us all. Time to break out the flannels and chainsaws.
Screw modern JRPG bishie bullshit, Old Wan Willow as a Sith Lord is just damn awesome.
Showing posts with label Diablo 3. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Diablo 3. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Beware, I Live!
Gwahaha! You spambots thought you were rid of me! >:D
Been busy with the holiday drama at work. The customers have been decidedly more pleasant this time around, even accounting for the fact that I don't get to play with a chainsaw and slaughter trees in public. There are a few idiots in the bunch. Note to our customers: We are not Amazon, we are not Overstock dot com. There are things on the website that we do not have in physical stores. Spew your petulance at management; that's what they're paid for.
Been avoiding the XBox, mostly since I don't feel like being all social right now between shifts. No offence to my online buddies. You don't deserve work-induced vitriol, and all I really want to do is smash evil and set fire to their fortress. This phase will pass. The clarion call of trundling death has finally breached the miasma of meh I have going right now.
It got me thinking. I've done a good deal more smashing this year, and I want to share my thoughts. I believe that I've played more hours overall in the past two years than most of my post-teen life, as well as the most varied overall games.
Borderlands 2. Get off my plane and everybody gets a bullet. Honestly, shooters have never really enticed me until this came along. My brother loves the first two Medal of Honor games, and I have good memories of Battlefront 2 and Goldeneye from back in the day. But this monster lured me into something I never expected: pouring ridiculous amount of time and energy into lobbing almost enough dakka against advancing hordes of random sociopaths. The loot and leveling systems actually made me look forward to mashing right trigger and pwning bastitches like a boss. WE LOVE YOU MARCUS!
Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Dammit, Square Enix actually did it to me again. I think I an in the tiny minority that actually likes this damn game. The protagonist is the biggest whiny bitch this side of Advent Children Cloud for a good part of the game. The battles are badly unbalanced in one way or another. The soundtrack su-huh-ucks! But it's just plain fun somehow. Welcome to a JRPG where a paladin archetype doesn't suck mechanically. Welcome to a place where you can hang out with the anime cliche/fetish of your choice, and it works. Welcome to Bacchus D-79, a space elf Robocop that can summon killsats, mecha, and frickin BLACK HOLES. No Welcome to Sarah, though. You deserve to be left in ignominy forever, the only escape from which involves a vore furry dressed up like Bubsy.
Skyrim. Holy shit is this awesome. Tearing about being Nordic on my undead horse that is surprisingly nice and well-behaved. Killing random moronsand stripping their corpses bare as a warning to other tards. Going through dank dungeons toight undead viking wizards with Jedi powers! The only fit music for those fights is produced by Manowar, Setting the undead viking ninja wizards on fire with a sun-powered sword of +1138 Undead Ignition known as Dawnbreaker. Punching angry grizzly bears to death like a boss. Smashing dragons is fun, but somebody else did it better. I put this game down for the next two, but I will come back eventually, to snag the the +9001 Bow of Summoning Anti-Undead Killsats and kill a Dracula Wannabe.
World of Tanks. Wow, a freemium game I like and want to play. Tearing about in a WWII tank, making other tanks miserable, and building a stable of vehicles that would make the Top Gear guys go crazy (well, crazier). Showing people that Hetzers gonna Hetz, and that ramming stuff with a Stuart makes for hilarity. I've thrown way too much money at this thing, plus it;s a online game that makes me actually want to play with strangers. CoD can join Sarah.
Diablo 3. I. Don't. CARE. What other people say. This shit's awesomesauce. Another genre entry-drug for me. I've now discovered hack-and-slash RPG goodness, and it is beautiful. Whether it's smashing faces with a barbarian, going ninja crazytown with a monk, or bringing the dakka with a demon hunter, it just doesn't get old in Vanilla. Then frickin Reaper of Souls came, with more mooks to smash, an angel with a frickin Holy Avenger Rocket Launcher with a altfire Keen Vorpal Flamethower, and the Crusader. Holy crap. My build for this guy involves hammers. Lots of hammers. Enough hammers to run a thousand hardware stores. Oh, and the Crusader/Templar bromance is funny as hell and strangely endearing. Let's Smite Something Together.
Well, I need to go, I'm getting incoherent.
Been busy with the holiday drama at work. The customers have been decidedly more pleasant this time around, even accounting for the fact that I don't get to play with a chainsaw and slaughter trees in public. There are a few idiots in the bunch. Note to our customers: We are not Amazon, we are not Overstock dot com. There are things on the website that we do not have in physical stores. Spew your petulance at management; that's what they're paid for.
Been avoiding the XBox, mostly since I don't feel like being all social right now between shifts. No offence to my online buddies. You don't deserve work-induced vitriol, and all I really want to do is smash evil and set fire to their fortress. This phase will pass. The clarion call of trundling death has finally breached the miasma of meh I have going right now.
It got me thinking. I've done a good deal more smashing this year, and I want to share my thoughts. I believe that I've played more hours overall in the past two years than most of my post-teen life, as well as the most varied overall games.
Borderlands 2. Get off my plane and everybody gets a bullet. Honestly, shooters have never really enticed me until this came along. My brother loves the first two Medal of Honor games, and I have good memories of Battlefront 2 and Goldeneye from back in the day. But this monster lured me into something I never expected: pouring ridiculous amount of time and energy into lobbing almost enough dakka against advancing hordes of random sociopaths. The loot and leveling systems actually made me look forward to mashing right trigger and pwning bastitches like a boss. WE LOVE YOU MARCUS!
Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Dammit, Square Enix actually did it to me again. I think I an in the tiny minority that actually likes this damn game. The protagonist is the biggest whiny bitch this side of Advent Children Cloud for a good part of the game. The battles are badly unbalanced in one way or another. The soundtrack su-huh-ucks! But it's just plain fun somehow. Welcome to a JRPG where a paladin archetype doesn't suck mechanically. Welcome to a place where you can hang out with the anime cliche/fetish of your choice, and it works. Welcome to Bacchus D-79, a space elf Robocop that can summon killsats, mecha, and frickin BLACK HOLES. No Welcome to Sarah, though. You deserve to be left in ignominy forever, the only escape from which involves a vore furry dressed up like Bubsy.
Skyrim. Holy shit is this awesome. Tearing about being Nordic on my undead horse that is surprisingly nice and well-behaved. Killing random moronsand stripping their corpses bare as a warning to other tards. Going through dank dungeons toight undead viking wizards with Jedi powers! The only fit music for those fights is produced by Manowar, Setting the undead viking ninja wizards on fire with a sun-powered sword of +1138 Undead Ignition known as Dawnbreaker. Punching angry grizzly bears to death like a boss. Smashing dragons is fun, but somebody else did it better. I put this game down for the next two, but I will come back eventually, to snag the the +9001 Bow of Summoning Anti-Undead Killsats and kill a Dracula Wannabe.
World of Tanks. Wow, a freemium game I like and want to play. Tearing about in a WWII tank, making other tanks miserable, and building a stable of vehicles that would make the Top Gear guys go crazy (well, crazier). Showing people that Hetzers gonna Hetz, and that ramming stuff with a Stuart makes for hilarity. I've thrown way too much money at this thing, plus it;s a online game that makes me actually want to play with strangers. CoD can join Sarah.
Diablo 3. I. Don't. CARE. What other people say. This shit's awesomesauce. Another genre entry-drug for me. I've now discovered hack-and-slash RPG goodness, and it is beautiful. Whether it's smashing faces with a barbarian, going ninja crazytown with a monk, or bringing the dakka with a demon hunter, it just doesn't get old in Vanilla. Then frickin Reaper of Souls came, with more mooks to smash, an angel with a frickin Holy Avenger Rocket Launcher with a altfire Keen Vorpal Flamethower, and the Crusader. Holy crap. My build for this guy involves hammers. Lots of hammers. Enough hammers to run a thousand hardware stores. Oh, and the Crusader/Templar bromance is funny as hell and strangely endearing. Let's Smite Something Together.
Well, I need to go, I'm getting incoherent.
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Attention Trekkies!
This guy has declared that gagh is for pansies!
http://oskarpannier.com/en/monster-meal/
These guys eat land-roving electric eels.
Also check out the other comics here, this crap is the beast kind of nerdy funny: Nerdy, funny
truth.
In more zany news, I have an inexplicable urge to construct and use a catapult that lobs angry honey badgers at stuff. Also, RPG. Rocket Powered Grizzlies.
The Call of The Wild Ordnance.
http://oskarpannier.com/en/monster-meal/
These guys eat land-roving electric eels.
Also check out the other comics here, this crap is the beast kind of nerdy funny: Nerdy, funny
truth.
In more zany news, I have an inexplicable urge to construct and use a catapult that lobs angry honey badgers at stuff. Also, RPG. Rocket Powered Grizzlies.
The Call of The Wild Ordnance.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Game Economics
NOTE: This is not a Wreckonomics post.
Been tearing about in Adventure Mode on Diablo 3. They've added randomized dungeons chock-full (chock!) of shiny goodies, especially on the quite lootiful Torment Difficulty. Unlike Best Shooter Ever, they ramped up the difficulty but clearly remembered what this whole solo play concept is, and actually made the legendary drops more frequent but also more meaningful. Gearbox needs to take notes, especially since this is the big daddy of procedurally generated goodness.
Lootiful is my new favorite not-a-word now.
Unfortunately, they added a mechanic that I honesty am quite ambivalent about. There is a new secondary currency called Blood Shards. They're mysterious shiny bits of mystery, and since Scooby Doo isn't around, nobody really knows what the hell they really are. Their only function currently is for this 'gambling' mini-game. Pay X shards, get a loot drop. One might get better goodies doing this on the insano Torment 3-6 settings, but right now it's really just been a roundabout way to turn shards into crafting materials, which already grow off trees at these levels. Literally, tree demons drop this stuff.
It got me into thinking. Games have been trying to do secondary currencies since friggin forever, but they've very rarely done it right. Some examples, both good and bad:
Borderlands 2: Several secondaries, particularly Eridium, Torgue Tokens, and Seraph Crystals. Eridium started as the stuff for extra storage space and therefore useful, plus needed for access to the main bonus boss. Later on, you got more bonus bosses that require Eridium to access, plus whole extra things like chests that enhance results and redonculous gambling machines of goodness, keep the stuff relevant and useful. Tokens were used for specific vendors, mostly granting access to some nasty legendaries with minimum fuss, and were very easy to farm. Crystals...well they were also used for special DLC vendors, but you either burned ridiculous amounts of Eridium to get them, or fought bonus bosses at max difficulty. This requires a party to pull off, so frankly Best Shooter Ever dropped the ball for forced lone wolves like me there.
Final Fantasy VII: One secondary, GP. This stuff is pretty much putt-putt tickets for the Golden Saucer fun dome of terror. Spend cash on the games there, do good, get GP. Chocobo Racing (but not betting in CPU-only races) was very profitable for this stuff, especially for folks going for the Golden Chocobo. The real use for GP was the Battle Arena, which had it own secondary (tertiary?) system called battle points that vanished if you left the lobby (total bullshit). You got Cloud's level 4 limit break plus other nifty toys there. Overall, the whole thing was fairly well done, since it really just amounted to getting goodies from doing random fun stuff, without slurping up your cash supply.
Star Ocean: The Last Hope: One secondary, Fight Tokens. While I do feel this game gets a lot of undeserved hate for not being Final Fantasy (and I smell that not the FF7 remake a lot of RPG nuts want), it has some flaws, some stemming from being a Square B-list title, some just quirks gone wrong. One flaw is Fight Tokens. You get them from fighting in the battle arena, and spend them at one specific vendor for specific goodies, most of which only available from there. The flaw is that to get the stuff unique to this place, you need to either do Disgaea-style uber-grinding so you can afford them when they're useful as upgrades, or wait until the post game, then uber-grind the arena, but with less hassle. In either case, the rewards (from the shop itself) are very underwhelming, and really the stuff you get are only good for crafting, and arguably not much good for that. Glorified putt-putt tickets, given out for really boring grinding. Bleh.
SaGa Frontier 2: One secondary, Chips. I already covered this in the Wreckonomics article for the game. To wit: You turn most of your gear into chips, which you can either convert into Crowns (the primary currency), with better rates for higher amount of chips, or use them (plus crowns) to make nifty high-level gear. What you can make is dependent on your overall chip-stash size and in-game skill levels. You really don't have much choice about getting this stuff, which can be a pain since that means either whaling upon critters until your weapons break for chips or finding the very vendors that convert stuff directly into chips. The whole system really feeling like an attempt to both avoid the usual RPG lol-heug gold inflation problem and give a bit of magic-ey, crafty flavor. Okay overall, but kinda feels half-assed. Still not sure if right cheek or left cheek, though.
One final example, that doesn't really fit in.
Secret of Evermore: Instead of secondaries, we actually have four primary currencies: Claws, Jewels, Gold Coins, and Credits. All four are indigenous to one particular region of the game, and there are merchants that exchange one currency for another (typically in the listed order). Money was earned in the usual manner (i.e. killing stuff). This was actually very workable overall, and helped give some character and contributed to the whole idea of diversity the game was going for. Pretty well done, though I still can't figure out who decided individual jewels are crappier that gold coins in value. Maybe the money jewels are flawed, or really cubic zirconium or something. Other interesting economic features included a (limited time) trading bizzar where you could exchange one commodity for another, in hopes of various stat-bonus goodies, plus a token (spheres of annihilation if I remember correctly) usable in only one instance, in this case a cool undead ferryman doing business in the desert. Technically a secondary, but really just a macguffin.
Anyway, as you can see, secondary currencies in games are not a new thing, but really, it's very rare for a game to do them any better than "Meh." Hopefully Blizzard gets its crap together about it. Maybe use it as an in-game fee to actually trade legendaries between players (dammit Blizzard). Currency is only any good insofar as it actually being used and valued through use.
Been tearing about in Adventure Mode on Diablo 3. They've added randomized dungeons chock-full (chock!) of shiny goodies, especially on the quite lootiful Torment Difficulty. Unlike Best Shooter Ever, they ramped up the difficulty but clearly remembered what this whole solo play concept is, and actually made the legendary drops more frequent but also more meaningful. Gearbox needs to take notes, especially since this is the big daddy of procedurally generated goodness.
Lootiful is my new favorite not-a-word now.
Unfortunately, they added a mechanic that I honesty am quite ambivalent about. There is a new secondary currency called Blood Shards. They're mysterious shiny bits of mystery, and since Scooby Doo isn't around, nobody really knows what the hell they really are. Their only function currently is for this 'gambling' mini-game. Pay X shards, get a loot drop. One might get better goodies doing this on the insano Torment 3-6 settings, but right now it's really just been a roundabout way to turn shards into crafting materials, which already grow off trees at these levels. Literally, tree demons drop this stuff.
It got me into thinking. Games have been trying to do secondary currencies since friggin forever, but they've very rarely done it right. Some examples, both good and bad:
Borderlands 2: Several secondaries, particularly Eridium, Torgue Tokens, and Seraph Crystals. Eridium started as the stuff for extra storage space and therefore useful, plus needed for access to the main bonus boss. Later on, you got more bonus bosses that require Eridium to access, plus whole extra things like chests that enhance results and redonculous gambling machines of goodness, keep the stuff relevant and useful. Tokens were used for specific vendors, mostly granting access to some nasty legendaries with minimum fuss, and were very easy to farm. Crystals...well they were also used for special DLC vendors, but you either burned ridiculous amounts of Eridium to get them, or fought bonus bosses at max difficulty. This requires a party to pull off, so frankly Best Shooter Ever dropped the ball for forced lone wolves like me there.
Final Fantasy VII: One secondary, GP. This stuff is pretty much putt-putt tickets for the Golden Saucer fun dome of terror. Spend cash on the games there, do good, get GP. Chocobo Racing (but not betting in CPU-only races) was very profitable for this stuff, especially for folks going for the Golden Chocobo. The real use for GP was the Battle Arena, which had it own secondary (tertiary?) system called battle points that vanished if you left the lobby (total bullshit). You got Cloud's level 4 limit break plus other nifty toys there. Overall, the whole thing was fairly well done, since it really just amounted to getting goodies from doing random fun stuff, without slurping up your cash supply.
Star Ocean: The Last Hope: One secondary, Fight Tokens. While I do feel this game gets a lot of undeserved hate for not being Final Fantasy (and I smell that not the FF7 remake a lot of RPG nuts want), it has some flaws, some stemming from being a Square B-list title, some just quirks gone wrong. One flaw is Fight Tokens. You get them from fighting in the battle arena, and spend them at one specific vendor for specific goodies, most of which only available from there. The flaw is that to get the stuff unique to this place, you need to either do Disgaea-style uber-grinding so you can afford them when they're useful as upgrades, or wait until the post game, then uber-grind the arena, but with less hassle. In either case, the rewards (from the shop itself) are very underwhelming, and really the stuff you get are only good for crafting, and arguably not much good for that. Glorified putt-putt tickets, given out for really boring grinding. Bleh.
SaGa Frontier 2: One secondary, Chips. I already covered this in the Wreckonomics article for the game. To wit: You turn most of your gear into chips, which you can either convert into Crowns (the primary currency), with better rates for higher amount of chips, or use them (plus crowns) to make nifty high-level gear. What you can make is dependent on your overall chip-stash size and in-game skill levels. You really don't have much choice about getting this stuff, which can be a pain since that means either whaling upon critters until your weapons break for chips or finding the very vendors that convert stuff directly into chips. The whole system really feeling like an attempt to both avoid the usual RPG lol-heug gold inflation problem and give a bit of magic-ey, crafty flavor. Okay overall, but kinda feels half-assed. Still not sure if right cheek or left cheek, though.
One final example, that doesn't really fit in.
Secret of Evermore: Instead of secondaries, we actually have four primary currencies: Claws, Jewels, Gold Coins, and Credits. All four are indigenous to one particular region of the game, and there are merchants that exchange one currency for another (typically in the listed order). Money was earned in the usual manner (i.e. killing stuff). This was actually very workable overall, and helped give some character and contributed to the whole idea of diversity the game was going for. Pretty well done, though I still can't figure out who decided individual jewels are crappier that gold coins in value. Maybe the money jewels are flawed, or really cubic zirconium or something. Other interesting economic features included a (limited time) trading bizzar where you could exchange one commodity for another, in hopes of various stat-bonus goodies, plus a token (spheres of annihilation if I remember correctly) usable in only one instance, in this case a cool undead ferryman doing business in the desert. Technically a secondary, but really just a macguffin.
Anyway, as you can see, secondary currencies in games are not a new thing, but really, it's very rare for a game to do them any better than "Meh." Hopefully Blizzard gets its crap together about it. Maybe use it as an in-game fee to actually trade legendaries between players (dammit Blizzard). Currency is only any good insofar as it actually being used and valued through use.
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Brain Barf
So here we are again...
Still tearing about in Diablo III. My Crusader has proven to endure like a boss, vindicating my giving him the name Tankred. In funnier news, I wound up with a Puzzle Ring that didn't have horrible stats, so now my big grim do-gooder is being followed around by his loyal treasure goblin, Giggles McLootsalot.
A funny glitch happened, too. I was tearing around a graveyard, laying waste to zombies. One of the shambling dead got a hilariously funky death animation, where his head and body went in different directions, but the neck remained intact, resulting in a corpse with a neck at least 20-25 feet long slapping up against a wall. That's right, the Nephalem just kicked the shit out of an undead Mr. Fantastic.
Some quiet insanity has been percolating in my head, mostly with some of the weirder, darker bits, in mind. Even in a setting grim enough to warrant comparison to 40k (including massive pauldrons as a status symbol), who in their right mind makes a huge boiler room cavern thing full of bones from all sorts of creatures underneath their city? That is not how fossil fuel works. And why?
In less funny, but no less mockery, I read an old issue if Game Informer I had at work. This was from the glorious period where they had a damn sense of humor, and the funniest geek captions. One article was about the then-new release of the 360 version of World of Tanks. The guy writing it gave off this whole vibe of passive-aggressive apathy, whining about how dated the graphics work, but you got a chance to have "nuanced" shootouts. then he proceeded to prove a complete lack of fact-checking, misspelling the M3 Stuart and referencing a "German UC 2-pdr." The UC 2-pdr is a British vehicle. Both of these mistakes were in the same damned sentence.
But hell, the loser snidely stated he didn't care about the historical side at all, despite the simple fact that in-game, there isn't exactly a mountain of lore or even a database to root through. Almost everything is historically based, but to get more that a short blurb, you have to actually research things in the real world. Everything he said amounted to what felt like a bizarre hipster-esque complaint that he couldn't have killstreaks and teabaggings, so it didn't belong on consoles at all. Just not vapid enough for him, I guess. Thank God that it was not a full review with a score, and that nobody listened anyway, from the way things went for the game afterward.
Oh, and he whined about the kiddies getting on the mikes and using their paltry profanity prowess to cover their immaturity like it was specifically endemic to World of Tanks. Idiot.
The lesson here, kiddies, is that if you don't like a game, say you don't like it. There's plenty of games out there I've played and filled with indifference, some with even outright loathing; but I was intelligent about my criticism. Acting like an egocentric, self-important twit with a spoiled sense of entitlement and "I'm too smart for this crap, my audience is a bunch of morons" simply because you either didn't like something or felt like half-assing a job is something best left in the pits of Facebook and 4chan.
The sad part is that current GI issues are all pretty much nothing but this...bizarre mess. It's like a glimpse into an alternate universe were Yahtzee isn't allowed to swear like an angry sailor and stuck doing free-verse at nighttime coffee joints. All the honest hostility has been replaced with passive-aggressive hipster cattiness.
Not that us Philistines would get what they're whining about. Also, Philistines were actually a helluva lot more advanced than most people realized, so nyah.
Still tearing about in Diablo III. My Crusader has proven to endure like a boss, vindicating my giving him the name Tankred. In funnier news, I wound up with a Puzzle Ring that didn't have horrible stats, so now my big grim do-gooder is being followed around by his loyal treasure goblin, Giggles McLootsalot.
A funny glitch happened, too. I was tearing around a graveyard, laying waste to zombies. One of the shambling dead got a hilariously funky death animation, where his head and body went in different directions, but the neck remained intact, resulting in a corpse with a neck at least 20-25 feet long slapping up against a wall. That's right, the Nephalem just kicked the shit out of an undead Mr. Fantastic.
Some quiet insanity has been percolating in my head, mostly with some of the weirder, darker bits, in mind. Even in a setting grim enough to warrant comparison to 40k (including massive pauldrons as a status symbol), who in their right mind makes a huge boiler room cavern thing full of bones from all sorts of creatures underneath their city? That is not how fossil fuel works. And why?
In less funny, but no less mockery, I read an old issue if Game Informer I had at work. This was from the glorious period where they had a damn sense of humor, and the funniest geek captions. One article was about the then-new release of the 360 version of World of Tanks. The guy writing it gave off this whole vibe of passive-aggressive apathy, whining about how dated the graphics work, but you got a chance to have "nuanced" shootouts. then he proceeded to prove a complete lack of fact-checking, misspelling the M3 Stuart and referencing a "German UC 2-pdr." The UC 2-pdr is a British vehicle. Both of these mistakes were in the same damned sentence.
But hell, the loser snidely stated he didn't care about the historical side at all, despite the simple fact that in-game, there isn't exactly a mountain of lore or even a database to root through. Almost everything is historically based, but to get more that a short blurb, you have to actually research things in the real world. Everything he said amounted to what felt like a bizarre hipster-esque complaint that he couldn't have killstreaks and teabaggings, so it didn't belong on consoles at all. Just not vapid enough for him, I guess. Thank God that it was not a full review with a score, and that nobody listened anyway, from the way things went for the game afterward.
Oh, and he whined about the kiddies getting on the mikes and using their paltry profanity prowess to cover their immaturity like it was specifically endemic to World of Tanks. Idiot.
The lesson here, kiddies, is that if you don't like a game, say you don't like it. There's plenty of games out there I've played and filled with indifference, some with even outright loathing; but I was intelligent about my criticism. Acting like an egocentric, self-important twit with a spoiled sense of entitlement and "I'm too smart for this crap, my audience is a bunch of morons" simply because you either didn't like something or felt like half-assing a job is something best left in the pits of Facebook and 4chan.
The sad part is that current GI issues are all pretty much nothing but this...bizarre mess. It's like a glimpse into an alternate universe were Yahtzee isn't allowed to swear like an angry sailor and stuck doing free-verse at nighttime coffee joints. All the honest hostility has been replaced with passive-aggressive hipster cattiness.
Not that us Philistines would get what they're whining about. Also, Philistines were actually a helluva lot more advanced than most people realized, so nyah.
Friday, October 3, 2014
Diabolic Ramblings
Been tearing about on Diablo 3 some more. Cleaving a bloody swath through the hordes of wickedness and grabbing all the shinies doesn't really get old, to be honest.
Whether any of us admit it or not, a typical playstyle for just about everyone is smash-and-grab with capers. I still like having crafting along for the ride, especially since it's reliant on recycling excess goodies. Diablo is actually a good deal more upfront about the whole thing. Tristram's economy is based on looting dungeons, pillaging monsters, and robbing the dead. Even all the heroes and followers, who really come across as people that don't give a kobold's ass about filthy lucre, tear about and take everything that isn't nailed down. The scoundrel seems to be the only openly greedy one of the bunch.
By the way, the Crusader/Templar bromance the dialogue implies is fricking hilarious, but hell, closer to reality when it come to warrior types. Just no air guitar, please.
In other news, my thumbs kept mysteriously sliced open. Took two damn months to figure out my apparent subconscious emo tendencies were actually my belt developing some ever-so-slight burrs on the buckle. Wish the truth hadn't been so costly, though; tons of bandages and an out-of-print Videssos book all bloodied up now. Still better than finding a secret stash of Green Day and black candles hiding somewhere though. September's very over, so I'm awake now.
Whether any of us admit it or not, a typical playstyle for just about everyone is smash-and-grab with capers. I still like having crafting along for the ride, especially since it's reliant on recycling excess goodies. Diablo is actually a good deal more upfront about the whole thing. Tristram's economy is based on looting dungeons, pillaging monsters, and robbing the dead. Even all the heroes and followers, who really come across as people that don't give a kobold's ass about filthy lucre, tear about and take everything that isn't nailed down. The scoundrel seems to be the only openly greedy one of the bunch.
By the way, the Crusader/Templar bromance the dialogue implies is fricking hilarious, but hell, closer to reality when it come to warrior types. Just no air guitar, please.
In other news, my thumbs kept mysteriously sliced open. Took two damn months to figure out my apparent subconscious emo tendencies were actually my belt developing some ever-so-slight burrs on the buckle. Wish the truth hadn't been so costly, though; tons of bandages and an out-of-print Videssos book all bloodied up now. Still better than finding a secret stash of Green Day and black candles hiding somewhere though. September's very over, so I'm awake now.
Monday, September 29, 2014
Shiny Shiny Bitz
Hello again!
Been cheerfully tearing about on Diablo III again, since I went and nabbed Ultimate Evil Edition. When I stopped playing the vanilla version, I mostly figured I'd never really see better drops without hours upon hours of grinding away.
I was wrong.
Holy crap, did they ramp up the goodies in this thing. It's become an idyllic Fruitopia, rich in kickass stuff, and not-suck-ities. (Aside, autocorrect recognizes Fruitopia.) They add ridiculous extra difficulty levels, with tangibly better drop rates, and then made it so you see more bitz once you max out a character. Then they added random raid mechanics to get more bitz, then they added even more legendary stuff so you can have MOAR BITZ!!!1!one!
The forces of badness got a bit deeper, too, with a whole new subset of freaks known as Reapers. Since my dudes aren't a sheaf of wheat, the reapers got sow reaped they wish they not sow reaped. Bastards can go and reap some goats, far as my dudes are concerned. Wretched little goat reapers.
I plan to keep on with the mindless dungeon crawling for a while, and start working my way through with a Crusader (who looks so much like the Black Templar character from Damnation Crusade that he probably endures like a boss). My only real gripe is apparently a crafting system in place that got a lot deeper, then got kinda shallower soon thereafter. The crux is that they came up with oodles of unique crafting materials for legendary goodies, then decided to remove these things and simplify the recipes overall. I wouldn't care so much if the damn things didn't still drop. Now my inner crafting addict is getting all annoyed that there is cool stuff to make things with, but you can't make things with them.
Well, that just calls for that old saying: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't have sex with a unicorn.
Been cheerfully tearing about on Diablo III again, since I went and nabbed Ultimate Evil Edition. When I stopped playing the vanilla version, I mostly figured I'd never really see better drops without hours upon hours of grinding away.
I was wrong.
Holy crap, did they ramp up the goodies in this thing. It's become an idyllic Fruitopia, rich in kickass stuff, and not-suck-ities. (Aside, autocorrect recognizes Fruitopia.) They add ridiculous extra difficulty levels, with tangibly better drop rates, and then made it so you see more bitz once you max out a character. Then they added random raid mechanics to get more bitz, then they added even more legendary stuff so you can have MOAR BITZ!!!1!one!
The forces of badness got a bit deeper, too, with a whole new subset of freaks known as Reapers. Since my dudes aren't a sheaf of wheat, the reapers got sow reaped they wish they not sow reaped. Bastards can go and reap some goats, far as my dudes are concerned. Wretched little goat reapers.
I plan to keep on with the mindless dungeon crawling for a while, and start working my way through with a Crusader (who looks so much like the Black Templar character from Damnation Crusade that he probably endures like a boss). My only real gripe is apparently a crafting system in place that got a lot deeper, then got kinda shallower soon thereafter. The crux is that they came up with oodles of unique crafting materials for legendary goodies, then decided to remove these things and simplify the recipes overall. I wouldn't care so much if the damn things didn't still drop. Now my inner crafting addict is getting all annoyed that there is cool stuff to make things with, but you can't make things with them.
Well, that just calls for that old saying: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't have sex with a unicorn.
Sunday, November 3, 2013
Laying Siege To Houses
Hello The Twenty-Five People The Webernets Claim Read This:
(That's 26 more than I expected.)
I've been tearing about in the grim dungeons of Sanctuary and shooting up the denizens of Pandora for a good bit of time now. Whoever came up with procedurally generated loot deserves a statue. A really nerdy statue, made from melted and recast Red Bull cans, holding up a kickass gun and kickass melee weapon and the heads of Wizkids' Mage Knight killers piled up at their feet.
Some random observations I'd like to make about all this:
The legendary drops in Diablo III's console version are much more numerous than Borderlands 2; also typically a lot more useful. Tearing about and farming enough to require finding a agro-combine should result in more than one--ONE--legendary a month, especially when a number of these legendaries are situational or outright inferior to vanilla gear. Yes, they're supposed to be rare and special and make you feel like you accomplished something. But, honestly, I kinda have a job for mindless grinding for cash and maddeningly elusive rewards. I don't really need a game for that. And since I have a job, an honest full-time paying job, I don't have the time and inclination to spend 12 hours or more to get a nice +10/7/7 Submachine Gun of Burninating Morons to drop. So kudos to Blizzard's console team for giving me my fix more often. Maybe the drops in B2 will get a bit tweaked.
We need some more 'happy' RPGs these days. I like grim and gritty stuff too, and dark comedy has a very special and evil place in my li'l nerdy heart. But I miss some of the cheerful stuff that used to be churned out, and the colorful palettes and music. I grew up on things like Secret of Mana (and later Legend of Mana), Chrono Trigger, Star Ocean 2, SaGa Frontier 2, and Mario RP-Original-G. I had darker stuff around (Final Fantasy IV, VI, VII, and Tactics, Ogre Battle, Legend of Dragoon) and even the light-hearted games had some deep themes and grim sides. Hell, SaGa Frontier 2 was both quite light and kiddie in graphics and tone, but had some really gritty elements present, and there's always Chrono Cross for the Prettiest Dark Game Ever Award nominations. But these days it seems that games have gotten so damn grim overall that I keep expecting the Emperor's Holy Inquisition to show up and declare my dudes heretics and absolution can only be found in fighting the Flood at Thermopylae while wearing sackcloth made from tortured puppies and eating Pinkie's special cupcakes. Maybe I just picked the wrong damn console after all.
Dragon's Dogma is still frickin' awesome. Go play it.
Anyway, I need to wander off. Expect some more mad babbling in the days to come, plus my first real Wreckonomics post, where I'll be going on about the deepest Item Crafting System you've never used in Legend of Mana,
(That's 26 more than I expected.)
I've been tearing about in the grim dungeons of Sanctuary and shooting up the denizens of Pandora for a good bit of time now. Whoever came up with procedurally generated loot deserves a statue. A really nerdy statue, made from melted and recast Red Bull cans, holding up a kickass gun and kickass melee weapon and the heads of Wizkids' Mage Knight killers piled up at their feet.
Some random observations I'd like to make about all this:
The legendary drops in Diablo III's console version are much more numerous than Borderlands 2; also typically a lot more useful. Tearing about and farming enough to require finding a agro-combine should result in more than one--ONE--legendary a month, especially when a number of these legendaries are situational or outright inferior to vanilla gear. Yes, they're supposed to be rare and special and make you feel like you accomplished something. But, honestly, I kinda have a job for mindless grinding for cash and maddeningly elusive rewards. I don't really need a game for that. And since I have a job, an honest full-time paying job, I don't have the time and inclination to spend 12 hours or more to get a nice +10/7/7 Submachine Gun of Burninating Morons to drop. So kudos to Blizzard's console team for giving me my fix more often. Maybe the drops in B2 will get a bit tweaked.
We need some more 'happy' RPGs these days. I like grim and gritty stuff too, and dark comedy has a very special and evil place in my li'l nerdy heart. But I miss some of the cheerful stuff that used to be churned out, and the colorful palettes and music. I grew up on things like Secret of Mana (and later Legend of Mana), Chrono Trigger, Star Ocean 2, SaGa Frontier 2, and Mario RP-Original-G. I had darker stuff around (Final Fantasy IV, VI, VII, and Tactics, Ogre Battle, Legend of Dragoon) and even the light-hearted games had some deep themes and grim sides. Hell, SaGa Frontier 2 was both quite light and kiddie in graphics and tone, but had some really gritty elements present, and there's always Chrono Cross for the Prettiest Dark Game Ever Award nominations. But these days it seems that games have gotten so damn grim overall that I keep expecting the Emperor's Holy Inquisition to show up and declare my dudes heretics and absolution can only be found in fighting the Flood at Thermopylae while wearing sackcloth made from tortured puppies and eating Pinkie's special cupcakes. Maybe I just picked the wrong damn console after all.
Dragon's Dogma is still frickin' awesome. Go play it.
Anyway, I need to wander off. Expect some more mad babbling in the days to come, plus my first real Wreckonomics post, where I'll be going on about the deepest Item Crafting System you've never used in Legend of Mana,
Thursday, October 24, 2013
Diablo 3
So.
Thing's are heating up at work while the things are the house are cooling down (good for the power bill, yes). For those not in the now, I work in a all-year garden center in a major home improvement store. I will not provide many details, since I have little interest in creating a problem in my professional life with my inane fribblings; don't expect me to name names, ever.
However, I will say that we sell fresh Christmas Trees ever year, which is great because I get to use a chainsaw in public and be destructive with a crazy grin. The kids like to watch the Great Christmas Chainsaw Massacre! Don't worry, we have a lot of safety procedures in place, and I'm viciously obsessive about rules regarding sharp objects. The downside to all of this is that we have to tear down and rebuild part of the shop to accommodate things, and 'tis not fun.
But now is the time of year I can focus on things not work-related for a while. Right now I'm working out the engineering on a minor quasi-craft project, harassing the internet, and drowing my sorrows in Diablo 3.
Damn, that game is fun. I'm currently running a Demon Hunter, and frankly I think this is as close as we're gonna get to a Mordheim video game. I'm tearing about with an arsenal of whacky kickass devices designed to cleanse dungeons of demonic freaks and heretics, all the while looking for cash and gear to help me in my quest to hand out colonic arrowtherapy sessions to evildoers.
I've forgotten how much fun an old-style hack-n-slash RPG could really be; I haven't really played one like this since...well damn, Legend of friggin' Mana or Seiken Densetsu 3. I have done modern style ones, like the shooter variant paragon of pillage that is Borderlands 2 (all hail Salvador and Krieg!), and the somewhat more traditional Dragon's Dogma. But there's no substitute for a good old-school dungeon crawl.
Anyway, if you're looking for a good looting session and don't have an older console, go ahead and try this sucker out. It's not perfect, but it's as close to perfect as I've seen for a very long time.
Thing's are heating up at work while the things are the house are cooling down (good for the power bill, yes). For those not in the now, I work in a all-year garden center in a major home improvement store. I will not provide many details, since I have little interest in creating a problem in my professional life with my inane fribblings; don't expect me to name names, ever.
However, I will say that we sell fresh Christmas Trees ever year, which is great because I get to use a chainsaw in public and be destructive with a crazy grin. The kids like to watch the Great Christmas Chainsaw Massacre! Don't worry, we have a lot of safety procedures in place, and I'm viciously obsessive about rules regarding sharp objects. The downside to all of this is that we have to tear down and rebuild part of the shop to accommodate things, and 'tis not fun.
But now is the time of year I can focus on things not work-related for a while. Right now I'm working out the engineering on a minor quasi-craft project, harassing the internet, and drowing my sorrows in Diablo 3.
Damn, that game is fun. I'm currently running a Demon Hunter, and frankly I think this is as close as we're gonna get to a Mordheim video game. I'm tearing about with an arsenal of whacky kickass devices designed to cleanse dungeons of demonic freaks and heretics, all the while looking for cash and gear to help me in my quest to hand out colonic arrowtherapy sessions to evildoers.
I've forgotten how much fun an old-style hack-n-slash RPG could really be; I haven't really played one like this since...well damn, Legend of friggin' Mana or Seiken Densetsu 3. I have done modern style ones, like the shooter variant paragon of pillage that is Borderlands 2 (all hail Salvador and Krieg!), and the somewhat more traditional Dragon's Dogma. But there's no substitute for a good old-school dungeon crawl.
Anyway, if you're looking for a good looting session and don't have an older console, go ahead and try this sucker out. It's not perfect, but it's as close to perfect as I've seen for a very long time.
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