Baud Attitude

I am told that there is an ancient enmity between people who consider themselves “jRPG fans” and people who consider themselves “cRPG fans”, which really only goes to show that people will bitch about anything.

I’m not about to get into the which-is-better thing, but empirically speaking, I guess I fall into the “jRPG fan” bucket.  I’ve played tons of console RPGs since I first got hooked back in the Genesis days, but Dungeon Siege is the first game I’ve completed that falls definitively into the “cRPG” genre.

Well, I did complete Ultima III back on the Atari 8-bit, but I cheated to do it.  I came close to finishing Ultima IV legitimately, but got hung up in the Abyss and never went back.

Being a cRPG, It’s got the create-your-own-hero thing going on, and you get to pick and choose your party members – you even have to pay most of them to join you.  Game designers do this sort of thing for extra realism, I guess.

Then, it’s got characters who aren’t buttonholed into any specific job: you can take a dwarf who’s clearly designed to be a melee fighter and turn him into an archer, or into a mage if you really want to put a hell of a lot of effort in to it, and all the gear in the game is usable by any character who has the requisite stats to wear it.

So after you spend hours and hours casting spells to make your dwarf a mage, you can then turn around and spend hours and hours grinding melee until he can wear plate armor, too.
In short, you have a lot of character customization options, should you really want to get in to them.

I didn’t do much of that.  As soon as I had half-a-dozen party members and a couple of mules, I pretty much gave them all jobs and let them go with it.

OK, so I made the dwarf into an archer and turned one nature mage into a combat mage, but eh, these weren’t big things.

The game does sacrifice some story logic for the sake of its openness.  For example, let’s take the sad case of Merik and Merik’s staff.

Warning: Light spoiler follows.

At the end of chapter 3 (of 9), you meet a mage named Merik, who is quite upset because some goblins have stolen his staff, and it’s going to be used to destroy the world or something if they can unlock its powers.

At the end of chapter 4 (of 9), you get his staff back.

What was rather amusing about this was that Merik’s staff had a required INT of 28, and Merik himself at this point only had an INT of 23.

So Merik couldn’t even use his own staff until, oh, chapter 6 or so.

This sort of thing dogged me throughout the game, in fact.  There’s a point, very near the end of the game, where you’re told:

“Hey, you’re the genuine article.  Go forth and save the world.  Here’s a shedload of ancient magical artifacts for your own personal use in saving the world.”

Unfortunately, only one of my six characters had stats high enough to use any of the ancient magical artifacts I was supposed to use to save the world, so they pretty much just went and saved the world with their old stuff.

At least I wasn’t penalized for doing so.

All told, it was a good time, particularly the last third or so of it where the action ratcheted up a notch or four.  It wasn’t a hugely long game, which was actually something I quite appreciate – I have a couple of games that, even though they’re reputedly AAA-class RPGs, they’re also known for taking 80+ hours to play through and I cringe at the thought of that (Okami, I’m looking at you).

Oh, and it has a really neat dragon:

Downsides:  The story is very patchy in the middle – in the start of the game, you pick up a bunch of books that you can read to get a sense of the world, and towards the end of the game you get lots of NPC interaction to tell you what’s going on, but there’s a middle bit where either there’s not much story or I missed the NPCs that would give me the quests where I could get more of the story.

That coincides with the dreaded Swamp Level.  It took a bit of mental fortitude to stick with the game through that part.

Oh, and yes, it has a Lava Level, but it’s quite nice looking and relatively short, so I didn’t mind it at all.

I called the Xbox service line tonight and was rewarded by an automated message telling me that my Xbox 360 had been “fixed” (read: replaced with another, refurbed, console) and was on its way back to me.

So that’s a good thing, but in the meantime…

I’m playing through both Quake, courtesy of the Dark Places engine, and Dungeon Siege, courtesy of $10 budget releases.

I’ve also got the Witcher on hold. I’ve been putting off playing it for nearly a year now – first, it was released with hideous loading times, then by the time they’d corrected that, the word was that they were considering releasing an updated version, so I’ve been waiting on that, and the updated version finally comes out Friday for those of us who bought the UK version because we wanted more skin.

So I ought to push that near the top of the stack.

Oh, and I found Doom3, used, for $4.99, and I’m betting that it should look pretty nice on the PC I built last February, and I bought the F.E.A.R. pack with the original game and the expansions because I hear it’s actually pretty damn good at creeping you out.

So, basic’ly, I have a hell of a lot of PC gaming to do.

But I’m still glad my Xbox is on its way home.

I finished Doom – well, at least, I finished the original episodes – on Friday night.  I’m not sure if you’re supposed to beat it in the way I did, which was to navigate myself so there was a Hell Knight between myself and the final boss.

This meant that, when the final boss shot at me, he hit the Hell Knight instead, and the two of them got into a bit of a squabble.

This kept them both busy while I burned the boss down with BFG9000 fire.

I’m going to file it under “brilliant strategic moves” and not “cheap exploits”, which is what it really feels like, but what the hell.

Anyway, the obvious next game to tackle was Quake.

I’m pretty sure I never beat Quake back when it was new.  I bought it when it came out, of course, because it was the Big New Thing, but this was also right after the Saturn and Playstation were released so I was pretty heavily into console games.  Specifically, I was heavily into buying console games and then not finishing them, but this also distracted me from finishing the PC games I was ignoring in favor of not finishing console games.

I did play an awful lot of multiplayer Quake over the LAN at work, after hours, so it’s not like I didn’t get any use out of it, just not the single player campaign.

Then Quake got put aside in favor of, I dunno, probably Final Fantasy VII or some other console RPG, and then I stopped playing games on the PC entirely, and then when I got back into PC gaming, it looked like absolute ass by comparison. Time has not treated early 3D titles well.

Anyway, people have spent an awful lot of time working on that whole “looks like ass” problem, so I decided that I’d give the single player game another go.

Like Doom, there are all sorts of replacement clients for Quake.  I eventually settled on Dark Places, which has lots of graphical tweaks and supports 1920×1200 resolution.

Dark Places is both an engine replacement and a mod, something I didn’t quite understand at first.  When I started playing it, I couldn’t figure out why I kept regenerating health, and why everything seemed to be dropping nail guns.

While I didn’t have really strong memories of the original game, these both seemed to be…different.

Quake doesn’t have health regeneration, at least not by default, and grunts (are they called grunts in Quake?) should be dropping shotguns instead.

Turns out, I was going a bit too far for what I wanted, which was a game that was as close to the original Quake experience as possible, just prettier.

Running the Dark Places engine WITHOUT dpmod, ripping the music tracks from the original game CD into OGG format, and adding the quake texture replacement pack, lighting, and new item models gave me just that.

Anyway, none of this has had anything to do with the title of this particular entry, so I’ll get to that now.

Back when I bought my PS3, I rented Heavenly Sword to play on it.  I credit a single Penny Arcade comic for giving me all the information necessary to beat the game, and the post talking about that can be found here.

Anyway, when I was looking up information on Quake texture packs and all that, I was reading posts on the quakeone forums, and a user named Baker had what I consider my new Ultimate Quick Strategy Guide as his signature.

I will reproduce this for your education:

Seeing this told two things:

1) I am going to meet a Big Red Guy.
2) To Seriously Inconvenience the Big Red Guy, I need to find some buttons.

These were rather handy things to know in advance, because when I finally DID run in to him, instead of wasting time trying to kill him with bullets, I ran around a bit asking myself helpful button-related questions like “If I were a button, where would I be?”, and wound up Seriously Inconveniencing the Big Red Guy in very short order.

That ended episode 1. Now I get to start episode 2.

Playing through Doom again has been a little odd.

It’s been 13 years since I last played it, and that, particularly considering the new look made possible by source ports and fan-updated textures and models, SHOULD mean that I don’t remember anything.  I mean, how long can a computer game stick with you?

Apparently, at least that long.

It’s not like I can breeze through the levels with my eyes closed, but I have occasional flashbacks: there are some rooms that I walk in to and immediately remember where the secret doors are, and there’s been a few instances of dodging crushing ceilings without knowing why I was doing it.

Oh, yes, and the very beginning of episode 3, where you have a pistol to kill a Cacodemon?  THAT I remembered. I love the first couple of levels in episode 3 for that, starving you of ammo and giving you just enough to fight your way to a little more, then letting you build up reserves slowly…  It’s great, a complete change-up that makes you play cautiously and strategically while you get yourself requipped.  Much abusing of save / reload during the process. 🙂

One thing I’m pretty sure was completely new was finding one of the secret levels.
It’s possible that I’ve done it before and forgotten, but taking an out-of-the way exit and getting dropped into a room with four Hell Knights, followed by a freakin’ ARMY of Cacodemons?  It was just a wee bit of a shock when it happened and I think I’d have remembered it.

Dungeon Siege was starting to frustrate me.

Not for the normal reason that games frustrate me, which is that they’re hard and I’m a wimp.

Honest!

It was more interface issues than anything else, really.

A couple of the frustrations were caused by running it at 1920×1200 resolution.  The game DOES run at that resolution, and I have to give the developers credit for it, but there are a couple of problems with it.

The first problem is that the game doesn’t adjust its aspect ratio to show you more on the left and right when you go widescreen.  Instead, it crops the screen at the top and bottom, which has the effect of a) always feeling uncomfortably zoomed in and b) having to fight the camera to show you things that you know SHOULD be visible, just slightly off the top of the screen.

The other problem is that stuff like your inventory screen and all the text in the game are rendered at a constant pixel size.  This means that fonts designed to be quite readable on a 1024×768 screen are, well, bloody tiny and hard to read on a modern display, and buttons and item icons are kind of hard to select because they’re also bloody tiny.

So, the first thing I did to relieve frustration was to knock the graphics back down all the way to 1024×768, and suddenly the game got, well, it’s fuzzier, because the scaling isn’t quite perfect when you’re talking an LCD display, but it’s also considerably more readable and I can see things I was missing before.

So that solved the display annoyances, but I was left with the control scheme.

Dungeon Siege has a painfully indirect control scheme.  If you want your party to move somewhere, you point at a place on the map and click the button to tell them to go there.  If you want to fight something, you point at the thing you want to fight and click it.  If you want them to open a box, you click the box, and so on.

Camera controls are also, by default, tied to the mouse, which makes for a lot of accidental view spinning and view correction.

The end result is a surprising amount of wrist cramping and mouse finger fatigue, because you’re constantly moving the mouse and clicking.  It’s worse than playing an FPS, because there’s no breaks in the clicking and you’re never just holding the mouse button down.

If the game had implemented keyboard controls for something as basic as movement, this wouldn’t be an issue, but it’s not flexible in that regard.  It’s really the epitome of “Look!  We’re not a console game! We’re a PC game, for real PC gamers!”

I managed to work around the camera issues by turning off the default camera movement and mapping camera controls to the d-pad on my Nostromo n50, then mapping most of the keyboard controls to buttons on the n50, and this worked out really quite well.  Didn’t fix the mouse finger fatigue problem though.

You in the back laughing, yes, I know “mouse finger fatigue” sounds like a silly thing to whine about.

Then I had, in quick succession, two flashes of inspiration.

The first: “Hey, I wonder if there are any programs out there that would let me use a gamepad as a mouse?”

The second: “Hey, I already have the software that came with my Logitech gamepad installed, I wonder if it does that?”

It was rather surprising, but gratifying, to launch said software and have it not only support emulating a mouse, but automatically detect Dungeon Siege and give me a set of predefined actions for the game.

Those guys at Logitech, they’re awfully sharp.

Anyway, using the gamepad is no substitute for the mouse when it comes to stuff like inventory management, because it really isn’t very precise, but for the purposes of moving my party around the game world, killing things, and looting them… it’s working just fine and my frustration level is WAY down.

Oh, and I ditched a dead-weight character and replaced her with a third packmule, and that’s helping too.

The dungeon I’m currently working through has, again, entirely too many spiders, but at least they’re frost spiders and for some reason I don’t mind white, snow-covered spiders nearly as much as green-and-black, ichor-covered spiders.