Baud Attitude

…yeah

So, I spent 18 hours, over 3 or 4 days, playing through Runic Games’ latest, “Torchlight”, which I am told is a quintessential Diablo clone from the makers of the original Diablo or something like that.

Anyway, I installed the original Diablo all of once, and played it for all of 15 minutes before uninstalling it, so I can’t really speak to that.

I have to admit that I got a good 15 hours of fun out of it.  The last 3 hours, well, they dragged, there’s no other way to put it.  My character was powerful enough that she could spam nukes through endless waves of monsters, and geared well enough that I wasn’t seeing any cool upgrades drop.  It turned into a slog-fest of “burn down a massive group of monsters, pick everything up, identify it all, put it all on Pochi the Cat, send Pochi off to sell it”

Eventually, however, I ground my way down to the last boss, blew him into little pieces, and Pochi and I took a well deserved break.

I have one tiny request for makers of Diablo clones, if people are going to carry on cloning it:

Please, for the love of god, implement a way to move using the keyboard, and a way to set it up so left-clicking is ONLY used to attack or manipulate.

Thank you.

It hasn’t been that long, really, since I decided that I should really start trying to play through some of the games that I’d piled up over the years of playing nothing but Everquest.

I say “decided”, but the reality is more that I realized I actually could finish some games; it was a mindset change from “I have too many games and will never play them” to “hey, if I just play through these, one at a time, eventually I’ll feel like I’m less buried”

I didn’t come to this epiphany by myself, mind you, it was thanks to a friend who pretty much forced me to sit down and play through Star Wars: Battlefront II, in co-op mode, sticking with the game even through the really nasty storming-the-blockade-runner level.

It made me realize a couple of things: 1, that game designers did actually design their games to be finished, but that 2, sometimes there’d be a really annoying bit and you’d just have to keep throwing yourself at it.

I’ve since come to realize that (1) doesn’t always hold true.  There are still some designers out there who design games so they’re hard to finish, so actually completing them is an accomplishment.

I have a couple of adjectives to describe designers like that, but I like to keep the language on this blog fairly polite so I won’t go into it.

Anyway.  Uh, Lara Croft.  Tomb Raider and the subject of many a geek fantasy since 1996 or so.  She was big in the mid-90s, hit some career downpoints in the late 90s, became almost completely irrelevant in the early 2000s, and then got a full-on makeover with Tomb Raider: Legend, which just happened to be one of the first games I played through after reaching the above epiphany.  It was actually the first game I completed on the Xbox 360, back in 2007, and I followed it up by playing through Tomb Raider: Anniversary, also in 2007, which was an eye-opener for me in that it was a PC game but one that used the Xbox controller and tried to be every bit as user friendly as a console title.

It was also blisteringly hard – it was the first game to send me to Youtube to look up hints on just how to beat certain boss fights.

Anyway, Legend and Anniversary formed the first two parts of a trilogy, with last year’s Tomb Raider Underworld making up the last bit – and after playing through the first two and enjoying them, I had to buy it.

Note: “buy”, not “play” – looking at my Amazon order history, I ordered it on December 1st of last year… and I then let it sit until Dec 23rd of this year, so almost 13 months, during which time I’ve seen it for as little as $7.49 on sale.

Oh, well.

Having now played it, I give it high marks for wrapping up the story from the first two games, in highly satisfactory fashion.  It also added some new moves to Lara’s repertoire of tomb-raiding moves, and actually took place, for the most part, IN TOMBS.  Moreover, it did away with both annoying QTEs (the bane of Tomb Raider: Legend) AND the sort of frustrating boss fights that pockmarked Anniversary; the result is that your enemy is, in most cases, the environment.  There are lots of assorted creatures that try to kill you, to be sure, but they rarely get in your way too much.

On the other hand, it was rather buggy in bits.  I managed to avoid triggering the set of conditions that actually result in a broken game, which was nice, but I did have several occasions where I’d walk onto a slight incline and Lara would suddenly die as if she’d fallen from a great height.

Also, the camera hates you and does everything it can to kill you.  And when I say “hates you”, I believe that the single-mindedness with which it obscures the precise viewing angle you absolutely need to see the only safe move is, in fact, a sign of emergent artificial intelligence, a malevolent and calculating proto-mind which knows only its desire for your destruction.

But that’s a minor quibble, really.

Oh, because I didn’t mention it before: between “World of Goo” and this, I played through “Mini Ninjas”, which was endearingly cute and generally enjoyable. It’s been written off as mostly a kid’s title, but this adult got a great deal of pleasure out of the attention paid to the environments and the streamlined (OK, OK, “button-mashing”) combat system.  Oddly enough that means that I’ve played through three Eidos games in the last few days, I think they’re rapidly becoming my New Favorite Publisher despite their widely-publicized review manipulating hijinks.

It’s my opinion that the absolute best time to have been an animation fan in America was the early 1990s.  Not only was anime starting to really take off, but Western animators were at the top of their game.  We got Animaniacs, Eek! the Cat, Talespin, Tiny Toon Adventures, Chip & Dale’s Rescue Rangers, and a little show called Batman: The Animated Series, which represents, even 17 years later, the best version of Batman and his supporting cast ever.

Now, to be honest, even when I was nursing a 15-title-a-week addiction at the local comics shop, I wasn’t really into the core Bat-books, so I can’t back my opinion up with any kind of authority.  I did buy some of the side titles – Robin, Catwoman, Nightwing – but the core books were always a bit meh to me, too prone to crossovers and seemingly unable to start and finish a story in the same title.

I did buy quite a few back-issues from the 1960s, mind you, though I was mostly going for camp.  If an issue had Bat-mite, Ace the Bat-hound, or Batwoman in it, I bought it.

For example:

…and I think we can all agree that these are probably not examples of “good” Batman comics.  🙂

But now that I’ve established that I am not really speaking from any kind of position of authority when I say that Batman: TAS was the Best Batman Ever, I am going to take another leap and say that Batman: Arkham Asylum was the Best Batman Videogame Ever, eclipsing the Genesis-era movie tie-in game which I previously believed represented the pinnacle of Batman-themed gaming.

I suspect I’m preaching to the choir here, though – if you’ve got any interest whatsoever in the character and keep up with the video game market, you’ve probably already played this, or at least played through the demo, and if you’ve done so and not been absolutely stunned by it I’m going to argue that you have No Soul.

If, however, you have not sampled this game yet, and you have any degree of interest in the doings of costumed nutjobs – and I’m throwing Bruce into this category without reservation, mind you – you should check it out.  It’s a very darkly-themed game, much more so than versions of the characters I’m familiar with, but I enjoyed it throughout.

…OK, so the very last boss fight was three kinds of lame, but that represents only a tiny tiny portion of the game and I think you should probably just try to forget it happened after you beat it.

As an aside, this was the first “Games for Windows: Live” title I’ve played – it was pretty neat to see Achievement messages pop up that showed up right along the achievements from Xbox 360 games.  Microsoft, much as I love to bash them, gets some points from me there.

…busting DID make me feel good.

I’ll explain.

A couple of months ago, I bought the PC version of “Ghostbuster” from Direct2Drive’s Halloween sale.  I’d heard it was a pretty short game, but it was $10 and the writeups I’d seen on the game made it sound very much worth playing.

It is, by the way.  I’ll get back to that.

It also has excellent controller support, which is handy because my gaming PC doesn’t have a keyboard hooked up to it usually.  I have a mouse connected to launch games and a 360 controller connected to play them.

Problem is, you can tell that this game was designed with the PS3 controller in mind, because the developers liked to make you use the left bumper AND the left trigger at the same time.  This is easy to do on a PS3 controller because of how it rests in your hands, but a 360 controller gets really uncomfortable if you’re holding it like a PS3 controller, especially if you settle in for a marathon play session.

Anyway, OW.

But back to the game.

I remember reading that the goal in making this game was to make something that was, for all intents and purposes, “Ghostbusters III”; that is, a sequel to the movie.

Sadly, it is a sequel to BOTH movies, but I will cut them some slack.  Ghostbusters II came out in 1989, and the world was a particularly tasteless place at the time; they were making a movie for the age.

They did one thing particularly right:  There’s no Louis.

By putting the player in the role of a “5th Ghostbuster”, they actually do pull off the effect they were aiming for; you can be in a scene watching the other four characters, and the writing is easily up-to-par with the movies.  You don’t feel like a fifth wheel, though: while you do have the other characters with you most of the time, they’re… well, competent but not brilliant at fighting.  They’ll help you, but you do most of the Cool Stuff.

In another immersion-enhancing move, they stole the HUD-less status indicator idea from Dead Space.  All of your important information is reflected in indicators on your Proton pack.

Between missions, you can roam the firehouse at will, which lets them stick in all kinds of neat touches.  Listening to Janine take phone calls is particularly fun.

I did have one bug related to this, though:  I had a mission end and put me back in the firehouse with a task of “go talk to this character you just rescued” – instead, I saved the game figuring that I’d come back and talk to her.

Instead, when I reloaded, it put me directly into the next combat mission, so I missed out on some story there.  You can replay some cutscenes from the menu, but not all of them, and not that one.

Minor quibble I guess, it wasn’t a game breaker by any means.

Playing it on the medium difficulty level, it took me just under 8 hours to play through.  It’s pretty tough on “medium” – I wound up having to redo several fights, and there’s one particular one near the end of the game that took me about 10 tries to get through.  Came close to my controller-throwing-tolerance level, there.

Anyway – it was fun AND it represents, in my mind, a redemption for the disappointment that was the second movie.  Shame it took them 20 years, but I guess some things just shouldn’t be rushed.

Oh, and a small milestone: This is, if I believe WordPress, my 500th post.  Not exactly daily updates… but, I think, not too bad.