July 2008 Archives

I took Gemma to LAX this morning, and came back. No event, but I do feel sad to say goodbye to her and Chai. After getting home at around 12, I tried to call my mom to see if she'd be home for dinner. Also tried calling my own cellphone once the line said all circuits were busy.

That's odd. So I checked Yahoo! news real quick. It appears that a 5.8 magnitude earthquake hit east of LA. That's... pretty much exactly where I am. Though I was probably on the freeway at the time.

Didn't feel a thing! Hope people're okay... and wondering now if the, "big one," is coming. Small earthquakes are good, though. They relieve tension in the earth and mitigate the possible extremity of a large earthquake.

Coming out Nov. 4, 2008, or so announced. By Valve-time, that means it's releasing on Nov. 5, 2008.

New redone designs for all the characters. I like them. They don't fit in with the gruff setting of the game so well anymore, and in fact look very cleaned up. Not gritty at all. But they're much more diverse as characters. Before, I thought I loved Left4Dead's characters when I really only liked Zoey because she was cute, and looked like she could kick.

Now, Zoey doesn't look quite so cool. Still pretty, but not like a spoiled-brat-turned-tomboy. However, the other three characters who used to be rather non-descript in my opinion have suddenly popped out in their own rights.

So my sister's getting married in two days. =)

It's gonna be exciting, and interesting for us. XD not to mention work getting things done. Today's going to be the dress rehearsal. Afterwards, we're having some kind of family dinner... all different sides who didn't much get along are pretty much gonna have to now. >.<

Good thing! The marriage is happening on Saturday.

Oh yeah, and the groom is a goofy gamer. Funny how that works, huh? XD He's amazing. Simply because he has my sister clutching a DS totally absorbed in PHOENIX WRIGHT. Anyone who can get my sister to play Phoenix Wright is okay in my books.

I'm playing on a role-play server on NWN. It's often got like, 30 people on at once, which is huuge and amazing! The world is really refined, as I've mentioned before. Even though 30 doesn't seem like a whole lot compared to MMOs with hundreds and thousands, the world is small enough that it doesn't feel so empty. In the main city of Cordor, I've often found parties amassing to set out into the wilds.

Everyone's really helpful there. Once in a while, there will be griefers, but they're far and few between. Eventually, they cross that line- and are killed in RP.

The rules aren't so strict like a hardcore D&D. Instead, it's a relaxed NWN-pace with several added elements in that deepen the experience.

Your character has to rest, eat and drink regularly (the console will measure your needs by percentages and will let you know if one of the three is getting low). Also, deities matter, especially for spell-casters. Money must be donated to keep the deities presence and strength available, but the deities presence affects all players who have that deity.

So, some deities that are more often chosen will be stronger than others. Also, the game has a very strong faux-console that has a great emote system. Instead of clumsily selecting emotes from a list, there are several built in that you simply type... such as, *laughs* or *bows*.

Crafting is expanded to include cooking and artisan craft. Also, your equipment's appearance is fully customisable. This is a great experience... I'm surprised to see that NWN has come all this way since its humble beginnings in 2002.

So. I've never been able to finish Neverwinter Nights 2. I bought the game on release day because the original NWN gave me one of the best RPG experiences I've ever had. NWN2, however, felt very clunky compared to the original and it didn't run well at all on the machine I had.

It's been around 2 to 3 years since then, and I recently upgraded, so I reinstalled NWN2 to give it a spin and see if I can complete the game this time around. I got to the titular city, but the game sort of grinded to a halt. It was an alright experience... the best part was probably dressing up my character (a very official and noble looking woman who walked around into the shadiest parts of town completely unarmed, yet grinning with confidence).

My NWN2 experience was completely and utterly sidetracked by Mass Effect. Now that it's been a while and I'm fairly done playing ME, I was left with not many choices to fulfill my RPG-hunger.

Tabletop D&D is probably the best in terms of potential, but is held back by large amounts of coordination required. Need to arrange, and everyone has to be wanting to play. There was NWN2, which was awaiting and Baldur's Gate, which is old as dirt.

I wasn't very thrilled with BG, and barely had any motivation to progress past the prologue. I booted it up, though, and played some -- the AD&D rules were very unfamiliar, so I mostly just ignored them. Once the game started in earnest, it was very engrossing! Then, out of the blue, I decided to reinstall Neverwinter Nights (I couldn't find my CDs -- they're probably at the Gamer House, so I had to torrent the whole set.. luckily, and good thing at that, I had my keys saved on BioWare's site).

I installed it, and played some Baldur's Gate while it downloaded the near 500MB patch. Then, the first thing I did was go online and look for a Role Play server. After six years, I found one that was huge! 32/75 players online... I've never seen anything like that before... on an RP game, even!

So I logged in, created a character and poked around. The quality of the mod on the server is amazing... the Aurora engine has been used to even greater extent than the Hordes of the Underdark expansion. I've barely just begun, but I'm looking forward to a great adventure ahead.

Just 10 minutes in that game reminded me of why I loved NWN so much to begin with. I uninstalled NWN2 immediately afterwards.

So, I jammed through Halo in the past two days out of sheer boredom. I've always been very anti-Halo because of how incredibly overrated the game is (same applies to Counter-Strike), and every experience I've had playing multiplayer Halo has always been the same frustration. The thumbstick/triggers interface is still vastly inferior to Keyboard/Mouse and Keyboard/Trackball for FPS. But that's not the topic of this post.

Despite any misgivings with Halo, I cannot deny that its intelligent property is very intriguing to me. Space marines, science fiction, and the idea of a beautiful world that floats as a ring in space is really cool. (Yes, Ringworld.) And so, I decided to try playing through Halo's single player campaign.

The story is good for an FPS. I put it around the same level as F.E.A.R. (which had 10 minutes of intriguing story buried in 7 hours of bland gameplay). Halo, likewise, as an interesting story, a neat character (in Cortana), and a pretty setting buried in hours of bland gameplay. The shooting action was solid -- and would've been solid fun for 10 minutes, but is wholly too repetitive to play for 5 hours.

The story begins as the starship Pillar of Autumn exits slipspace with an armada of the Covenant in pursuit. The human colony of Reach has been destroyed, and the Pillar of Autumn initiated a random slipspace jump to try drawing the enemy away from Earth. As the ship's captain, Keyes, begins to question how they were tracked, the ship's AI, Cortana, sarcastically berates him about how big of a signature they gave off while streaming through slipspace (an AI with an attitude-- how cool!). They inadvertently discover a ringworld in space as they're boarded by the enemy. The Master Chief is awoken and Cortana is disconnected from the ship ("*sigh* Yank me.") and inserted into the MC's helmet. The captain decides to try to crash land the Pillar of Autumn on the ringworld, Halo, so the MC and Cortana try to escape via dropship.

After escaping, the MC tries to gather up any remaining marines that survived from the Pillar. Cortana accesses the Covenant's "Battle Net", and finds out that Halo is some sort of weapon. Interest piqued in standard military fashion, Captain Keyes wants to know how they can use Halo against the Covenant, or keep them from gaining access to it.

MC follows the Covenant to the Silent Cartographer, a map of Halo's systems which show where the main control room of Halo is. Following that map, MC finds Halo's control room, and inserts Cortana inside. Once the AI connects to Halo, she starts panicking and, without any clear explanation, sends MC off to find and stop Captain Keyes, who is elsewhere also trying to find out how to activate Halo.

When the MC reaches Keyes' last known good position, he finds out that something else is alive on Halo. Keyes' squad was killed by The Flood, a parasitic species of bug-like things (think explosive headcrabs that come in hordes). The MC fights his way out of the complex, and is suddenly and randomly teleported away by a little robotic entity called 343 Guilty Spark.

Spark leads MC through a huge complex in Halo, forcing him to fight through hordes upon hordes of grindy Flood. Hordes. Grind. So much grind. Four times. Spark and the MC obtain the Index, which is the key to Halo's firing mechanism. After more horde-grind (four times), MC and the Spark almost activate Halo when Cortana suddenly pops up on the console, angry as hell at Guilty Spark, and at MC's incompetence. Cortana explains that while Halo is a weapon designed to kill the Flood, it does so by killing off the food that the Flood thrives on-- that is, all living, sentient beings.

Guilty Spark explains that Halo (called Installation 04), has an effective range of 210,000 lightyears, and that a network of Installations firing together will eradicate all sentient life in the galaxy. (I thought it was cool that they specifically mentioned Halo's blast radius. Threatening all life in the galaxy is now a very empty claim, but 210,000 lightyears? That means business.)

So, Cortana, now reunited with MC, set off to stop Guilty Spark from activating Halo. While combatting the Covenant army that has no idea what's going on. And the Flood. There are three pillars of ... energy-thingies on Halo that are somehow important to its firing. So Cortana has MC destroy those (grind.. grind grind... we're doing it to, "slow down Guilty Spark," but not really.) Then, decides that they can destroy Halo by detonating the Pillar of Autumn's ship drive.

However, they first need Captain Keyes' ID, because it's somehow necessary to initiate the auto-det sequence. Best moment in the game happens: Cortana notes that Halo has a teleportation grid that 343 Guilty Spark has been using to move around. She can use MC's suit power source to make it work once. She then teleports MC according to the coordinates of Keyes' transponder signal, which sends the MC into a Covenant ship... upside down.

He appears in mid-air and falls on his head. Cortana, in a sense of wonder, goes, "Oooh, I see! The coordinates need to be..." and the MC smacks his helmet (where Cortana is stored). Cortana replies, "Um. Right, sorry."

They find Keyes (after killing hordes of Flood and Covenant), who has been taken over by the Flood. The MC takes the neurochip he needs by punching into Keyes' face and ripping it out. They hijack a Banshee and fly to the Pillar's remains.

As the MC approaches on the Banshee, Cortana is panicking because the Banshee's engines are failing and it won't make it... she keeps telling MC to pull up, so he (being a jackass) doesn't, and nearly crashes the Banshee... except he jumps out and grabs the edge of the Pillar of Autumn just in time. Cortana notes, "... you did that on purpose, didn't you?"

If only there was more friendly banter like this between the MC and Cortana.

Kill stuff on the Pillar. Guilty Spark is there. Tries to stop MC, but only makes things more difficult. Autumn explodes, and the MC and Cortana escape on a ship. Halo is destroyed, a chunk of it breaking off and smashing into the other end. It's grand. The end.

There. If you read this post, then you've just experienced Halo.

Updated list of games I'm waiting for. Some items are new, most are still old.

Tomb Raider: Underworld - Christmas 2008

Dragon Age - 2008

Left 4 Dead - ???

Guild Wars 2 - ???

Starcraft 2 - ???

Diablo III - ???

Street Fighter 4 - July 2008, Q4 2008

After morning rehearsal (which lasted until 1:30), I went home, ate, and despite my drowsiness, decided to stop by Game Empire in Pasadena to check out the D&D 4e event that was going on there.

I wanted to get a taste of what other DMs are like, and how other people are experiencing D&D 4. Our gaming group tends to lean towards a very spartan interpretation of fantasy, and the switch from 3.5 to 4e has left us fumbling around quite a bit with the understanding of rules and intent, as well as balancing issues. Because many not-so-happy discussions have been had, I decided to get a fresh view and some different input.

The RPGA events were pre-release mini-campaigns with pregenerated characters. That bit was a small disappointment. There wasn't much role-playing going on, and it was essentially a dungeon crawl. The party got together and went mainly from fight to fight.

However, the dungeon crawl was very exciting... certainly, even though I was only watching from the peripheral, I found myself getting absorbed in the energy and the excitement coming from both the players and the DM. The tables were very casual, with people talking left and right (which is nice-- though I prefer drama and roleplaying, that would be difficult in a table filled with random players), often giving each other advice and being excited about what they could do.

Once in a while, when events occured, the DM would briefly act out the drama with gesticulations and sound effects. The DM spoke often, keeping the players informed and up-to-date about the events occuring, such as when an opponent appeared, or was beaten into a bloody state. All the rolls that occured were out in the open, with the DM and players asking back and forth whether or not a certain value was sufficient to hit through defenses.

One thing for sure, experience makes a large difference. The DMs were able to make snap judgments, and kept right up there with the players to make sure everything flowed. Rulebook references were only really made when players brought up small disagreements about specific rules. Otherwise, the DMs either knew the rules that applied to anything that was going on, made simple d20 checks, or allowed players to do what they wanted based on the DM's better judgment.

While the players didn't pretend to be their characters, they were very excited in the action. After all, every one was there to play. A critical success was met with cheers both from players and the DMs, and failures were commiserated. The DM kept the action exciting and fair, whether or not the players were winning or losing.

Because the tables were full, players that were down didn't put the party at a heavy disadvantage. They made their saves, and often a comrade would come and grant them healing surges, or heal them up outright.

All in all, I saw nothing about role-playing, but I did see that the combat in D&D 4e was very fast (with them going through 6 players, and enemies in about the same time it takes us to go through 3), and fun. It doesn't have to be bogged down into a slow tactics game. The stats of the pregenerated characters were strong, but moreover solid at level 1. +6 attack bonuses, and +4 to damage rolls.

I hope that I can learn some more, or apply this knowledge to our gaming session at home. It'd be nice to be able to throw down some quick, exciting encounters balanced with more serious and critical, tactical ones. In the end, I'm searching for a better, or great D&D experience. I hope to be able to play, or host one that's even more exciting than what I've seen today.

Today, I played some DOD:S with Josh, kind of messing around (the game runs so smooth on my computer now! I've been playing this game for probably 2 years, and I've finally gotten totally smooth, never-below-30fps framerates).

Little did I know that it'd be my last day playing DOD:S! ... well, not really. Valve's DOD:Source Beta, which was a test at porting DOD:S into the new Ep.2 Source engine is complete, and now has swallowed up the old Source1 DOD:S whole. >.<

Along with this change, they've made some updates to how the game plays... so, it'll be interesting. A bit odd to think that a game I've been playing fairly consistently for 2 years is now gone.