The Return of the Weekend Musical Break

Presented sans commentary.

 

The Monitor’s Back, Plus Free SOE Stuff.

Today FedEx delivered my 24″ widescreen LCD monitor, which had been sent out to Acer for repair. It’s all working splendidly, and as much as the huge CRT was a great boon to have gotten, I’m delighted to have my PC back at 100%.

I think this means it’s TF2 time.

Also, I notice that right now former StationPass members at least have some free time in Star Wars Galaxies and Pirates of the Burning Sea. I wish it were Vanguard or even EverQuest, but I will almost certainly stick my fingers into SWG again for a couple of hours.

 

Well, That Was Epic

I finished Mass Effect last night. I mentioned a little while back when I finished Portal how rare it is for me to stick with a game long enough to ‘finish’ it, and now I’ve done it twice.

To be fair, though, while Mass Effect is quite a bit longer than Portal, it’s not really all that long; I finished it up in about 15 hours, although I pursued only a few of the side quests and wasn’t playing on anything like hard mode. Still, I don’t imagine that even the most thorough playthrough would take more than 25 hours or so.

This is interesting to compare to Dragon Age (also a Bioware offering,) and its alleged 80+ hours of content because (while I haven’t played through to the end of DA,) Mass Effect seems to me to be considerably more polished, for the most part. The Mako gameplay and inventory system are well-documented as being half-baked, and there were some odd discrepancies between spoken dialogue and actual objectives in the quest log, but other than that I have very little to say about Mass Effect that’s negative – not that there weren’t a couple areas where I thought the game could have been better.

For one, ME is exactly the kind of game I was referring to a few podcasts ago when I talked about games that seem sandboxy but actually aren’t at all. In ME this is particularly pronounced; there’s a bunch of little one-off conversations you can have that result in XP, and there is certainly some territory to explore both in space and on the Citadel, but it’d be hard for me to regard spending a significant amount of time on these as anything other than time-wasting. Especially given the huge momentum of Mass Effect’s plot; I played a lot of the game with the attitude of “I don’t have time for this nonsense, I have to stop Saren!”

That said, I would love an MMO, which by its nature would tend to be more sandboxy (or would suck, and I mean you, Warhammer Online,) with this gameplay and in this setting. Shepard’s story was really compelling, but the ability to make my own character and decide his destiny for myself is really appealing. It’s possible that SWTOR will resemble that game.

All that having been said, I really enjoyed Mass Effect, and am now really looking forward to playing the sequel – although money issues prevent me from picking it up right this minute.

 

Status Report

I’ve been playing a little bit of Allods Online; with the wipe at the start of the new round of Closed Beta, I had to start over anyway (from about level 9,) so I’m checking things out from the League side this time, which has much more of a high fantasy feel (as opposed to the very Soviet Steampunk thing that the Empire has going on.)

The Fallen Earth client is installed and ready to start my trial. However, that’s on the back burner just this second, although I expect to get to it within a week or three.

The reason for this is that I’ve been playing Mass Effect. With the sequel having come out at just about the same time my PC got fixed, and with me also getting a taste for this kind of game by playing Dragon Age on the PS3, I’d been wanting to play it. I’m now about 12 hours into the game, and probably a third of the way through the game’s story, I figure, playing a Soldier and tending strongly towards Paragon actions. I’m following a fair number of the side quests, but I’m not being excessively completist about it. I’m very impressed with the game thus far – I even like the Mako gameplay, even though the controls (it must be admitted) are pretty crappy, because I get a huge-ass cannon to blow stuff up with.

Oh, and Asus shipped my monitor back to me. It should arrive on Friday according to FedEx, at which point we’ll see how it works; I’d much rather be playing on my widescreen LCD than on this huge, desk-hogging CRT.

 

A Facebook Reminder!

If you’re trying to friend me on Facebook (where I should be findable as Ardwulf,) make sure to mention that you’re coming in from the blog. I’ve taken to refusing friend requests from random people whose names I don’t recognize. If I’ve done this to you or removed you from friends for what appears to be no reason, send another request.

That is all.

 

Two Games Finished, After a Fashion

Last night, starting from the beginning and taking a little under 3 hours, I finished Portal. It’d been sitting around for a good long time waiting for me to play – and as we should all know by now, it’s a terrific game with a very satisfying ending. I know it’s short, but given my short attention span, for me to actually finish a game is rather a big deal.

I also installed Assassin’s Creed, which I’d picked up on Black Friday for $5 against the glorious day when my PC was back up and running. I know Assassin’s Creed is said to have had issues. I know the sequel is supposed to be better. But hey, $5.

That said, I shan’t be bothering with it again, and will be uninstalling it forthwith. Not only does it have a ham-handed and unnecessary framing device, but the dialogue is both clunky and unrepresentative of not only the action of the game, but of dialogue spoken in the preceding line. And most damningly, the control scheme for the PC port is a complete assbiscuit. I’d guess that it works better either on a console or with a console-style controller.

It looks terrific, and the actual gameplay seems like it’d be fairly cool if it weren’t being constantly interrupted by clumsy cut-scenes. And the Crusades are one of the historical periods in which I have a great interest (the Italian Renaissance not so much; thus my lesser interest in the sequel.) I may eventually pick it up for the PS3 and try it there, but with the PC iteration I am most assuredly not impressed.

 

Now Fully Functional

Exam prep proceeds apace; the workload for both of my classes is actually fairly heavy. This problem was exacerbated by my not getting the math textbook until the third week of class.

Anyway. Fallen Earth is ready to activate, but I want to wait until two things are finished before diving into it: Midterms and this year’s income taxes, which need to be complete in order to file for Federal student aid, meaning that I have to get them done fairly early this year instead of waiting until the last minute.

I still, inexplicably, am having trouble getting Audiosurf to run in fullscreen, and in a window it’s noticably less fun (I hate playing games in windowed mode.) This may be tied somehow to the different screen resolution I’m running at on the interim monitor; on the LCD this was not a problem. If so, it’s no biggie; I can just wait to play it until the LCD is back in my hands. Curious.

I’m playing Steam stuff comparatively heavily right now; meaning Team Fortess 2, mostly, but I’m also dabbling with Portal again; which I nearly finished on the laptop. But I figured I’d start over from scratch on the gaming PC for a superior experience. And I’m playing Mount & Blade. Which right now is confined to practice with the tutorials and the quick battles until I get the hang of fighting from horseback, which is a key skill in the game, and which I’m not all that good at when the targets are moving. Archery from horseback is particularly difficult (as you’d expect.)

For anyone who’s taken Latin, by the way, the vid below is about five times funnier than for those who haven’t.

 

Happy Happenings

This is actually the first blog post I’m writing at school, so I’ll keep it brief.

A friend gifted me with a 19″ CRT so I don’t have to be dependent on borrowing Mrs. Ardwulf’s monitor. Mine is in the post to Asus, but I don’t expect to get it back for at least a few weeks. Meanwhile, the CRT, while bulky, works just fine.

Meanwhile, I have been updating a bunch of different games, including DDO, Champions Online and WoW, although I have to plans to immediately return to the latter. I also installed the Fallen Earth client in preparation for playing a trial on that. Mostly I’ve been playing Mass Effect, with a little bit of Team Fortress 2. Oddly, I’m having trouble getting Audiosurf to run in fullscreen; maybe it’s unhappy with the resolution I’m running or something.

I have midterms on Friday and next Tuesday. I feel very comfortable where I’m at in Latin, not so much with Math. But I’m working on that tonight.

 

Ardwulf Returns… But Only Part Time

Well, my PC is fixed, sort of. The problem turned out to be the seating of the processor, which was of course my own fault. The box now runs fine, and I’m typing this post on it.

Unfortunately, my monitor appears to now be dead. D-E-D dead. I called Acer and put in a repair request; Monday I’ll ship it to Texas and hopefully get it back within 10 or so days in working order. In the meantime I have stolen Mrs. Ardwulf’s monitor. She’ll get it back whenever she needs her PC, of course, and I will be banished again to the accursed laptop.

This very evening, however, I have managed to play some Allods Online and Team Fortress 2. It’s good to be back, even if it’s not quite full-time just yet.

 

First Impressions: Allods Online

The subscription model is, in a way, a trap for players. As is having to pay for a retail box. If you paid $20, much less $40 for, say, the latest EverQuest II retail box, you’re likely to try to recoup that cost through play – you want to get your money’s worth out of it. Even for games for which the retail a box is optional or absent, you’re still in for (probably) $15. Every time I’ve shelled out cash, I’ve felt an unconscious obligation to get as much out of whatever game as I could.

On the other hand, games on a free-to-play model, or even which just offer free trials, are incredibly dependent on first impressions. Let’s take Aion for example, a title I was famously unsatisfied with after less than an hour playing, and which was summarily dismissed from my computer. Had I blindly bought the retail box, I’d have felt compelled… well, not to like it, necessarily, but to have at least dropped a dozen or two hours into it. A quick jaunt in the beta saved me from that orgy of masochism.

It used to be that free-to-play games were either Asian imports or targeted at youngsters. I personally have little interest even in high-quality kids’ games (as Wizard 101 is said to be,) and, like most western MMO players, think Asian MMOs almost universally suck. Even Runes of Magic, which has a lot to recommend it, doesn’t deliver for me – while I think it’s a fairly decent game on its own terms, it doesn’t feel like an MMO.

And so we come to Allods Online, a free-to-play game that’s not either a western convert (like DDO) or a Korean import. And having spent my first hour or so in the game, it does feel like an MMO.

To be sure, there’s a great deal I have not yet seen at level 4. I have no idea how the world is set up, nor do I yet know how its presumed microtransactions are going to work, or if they will become de facto mandatory in order to play satisfactorily, the killing blow to a free-to-play implementation. So it’s really early to make a call on it, but my first impressions, on which a free-to-play title depends so heavily, are very positive.

As we should all know by now, Allods Online is a lot like World of Warcraft; Mrs. Ardwulf, walking through the room in which I was playing, thought it was WoW. But while it does have roughly the same graphical sense as WoW, it struck me as being more similar in feel to Warhammer Online. Which is not, now that I think of it, an encouraging thought – but then, the flavor of WAR was really not among its problems.

I had some trouble getting the thing to run, which I think is very troubling – but then, it is beta after all, and not even closed beta. You would expect there to be issues, although I think a client that flatly refuses to work is well into unacceptable. It also runs terribly on the laptop; it’s playable until you get into combat, at which point the framerate slows to a crawl. But it runs great on Mrs. Ardwulf’s PC, and should certainly pose no challenge to mine (once it’s fixed,) and gameplay is very smooth.

Like I said, it’s early yet, and there’s plenty of room for Allods Online to disappoint me. But so far this game looks solid, the first free-to-play MMO, as far as I’m concerned, that feels like an MMO when I’m playing it, and not some kind of multiplayer RPG or some other hybrid, and certainly not like a Korean grinder.