Achievements of the Week – The Legend of the Boar Edition

Posting this very early on this bright and sunny Friday as I’ll be spending it mostly moving, sweating, and moving and sweating at the same time. And who knows when we’ll have Internet again. Pray for Tara and I’s well-being as we leave the attic known as the Leaky Cauldron and head to the house in the woods, which she calls Godric’s Hollow and I call Grimmauld Place. Should be a crazy time…

Anyways, this week, I unlocked two Achievements with legend in their title and then sat idly on a boar for five minutes while checking my email. This is the very definition of excitement, I know.

From Fallout: New Vegas…

The Legend of the Star (20G): Completed The Legend of the Star.

Not going to say too much about this here as I am working on a big boy blog post, as this quest was a bit demanding, and I obviously didn’t ping this baby until my third character, wherein I really had to concentrate and pay attention to the fact that these Sunset Sarsaparilla star bottle caps were not gonna find themselves. Also, the quest’s reward is nothing great. Oi. Regardless, glad this one’s done as it was the last Achievements left for sidequests.

Caravan Master (30G): Won 30 games of Caravan.

Way back in June 2011, I wrote a rather informative blog post about how to play Caravan; you’d think, with that knowledge, that I’d have knocked this Achievement out a lot sooner than this. The problem is that the game got patched shortly after that, and the patch did things to Caravan. Cruel, nasty things. They made it so that opposing players could play cards such as kings, queens, and jacks against your own stacks, thus ruining your hard work to 26. The guy near Gun Runners was impossible, doing this every other turn. Fed up, I went back to my old staple of NCR ambassador Dennis Crocker, and while he occasionally messed up a stack of mine, it was less frequent. Six won games later, and there ya go.

Tara said,”Wham, bam, Caravan!” when I unlocked this. Love that dork.

From Nier…

The Book of Legend (20G): Grimoire Weiss joined your party.

All Aboared! (10G): You rode a boar for at least five minutes.

One of the early sidequests in Nier, given to you by some no-name villager, involves taking down a wild boar terrorizing…uh, sheep. Or people. It doesn’t matter. You just need to go kill a boar. After you do that, it seems other boars have heard of Nier’s horrible deed and are now tame around him, ready for riding. The Achievement’s descriptions says to ride the boar for five minutes, but I merely climbed on its back, put the controller down, checked what was up with Gmail and Twitter, peed, and came back to that oh-so-sweet pinging sound. All aboared indeed.

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And that’s it. Depending on our Internet status at the new house, there may or may not be an Achievements of the Week for next week. We’ll see.

Unlock any good ones lately, Grinding Down readers? Tell me in the comments below.

The Sims Social and simulating social spamming

As I’m wont to do, I’ve drifted away from many of the silly Facebook games I was into months ago, such as CityVille and Pet Society and even–gasp!—Chocobo’s Crystal Tower. In my mind, you can only click on things for so long, and I’ve never been into the social elements of social gaming, always feeling like I’m pestering my friends or spamming their newsfeeds. Which is odd then because I played a little bit of The Sims Social last night…and actually liked it. Guess others like it too since there’s over 10,000,000 monthly active players at the moment; Leigh Alexander probably not included in that count.

I’ve always enjoyed the gameplay of The Sims, taking the mundane tasks of daily life and turning them into something a wee bit more rewarding. Having a job, peeing, calling friends over for some TV and pizza…it’s all fun, and generally one wouldn’t think so. I mean, the social elements in games like Grand Theft Auto IV drove me absolutely batty, but that’s because the developers were trying to juggle too much at once. Here, it works…up until you accidentally set your Sim on fire or lose on your money in a bad spout of furniture purchasing. Which happens a lot for me. That’s been the biggest stresser and deterrent for me for The Sims franchise, the fact that you can work so hard making your house rock, your job awesome, and your circle of friends top-notch, and then can lose it all in a small kitchen fire.

Well, with The Sims Social, that fear is gone…seemingly. From what I can tell, your Sim can’t die. It can get unhappy and down and low on key meters like social, fun, and hygiene, but that’s okay. Just click around and visit some neighbors, and you’re back to sparkling goodness. And all the other elements of the The Sims is there, such as multiple tasks, traits, house construction, customization, and whatnot. Granted, everything is limited by a select amount of energy points used for actions, but it’s not too big of a hassle all in all. So far, spamming has been slight, and I’ve added my wife as a neighbor, but nobody else in my Facebook universe seems to be playing. No big deal. Like I said before, I’m not here for the social part of the browser-based game’s title. I’m here to click around and wear digital version of clothes I am wearing now and try to reconstruct my house into places I’ve actually lived in before, and I probably will for a little bit and then lose interest. Don’t be sad, Facebook. That’s just the way these things go. Here, have 1,000 simoleons!

JC Denton versus byzantine global conspiracies and time

Everyone was playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution last night, as well as tweeting some funny things about that East Coast earthquake. If anything, when the end of the world does come, it’s going to be freaking hilarious. Thank you, my fellow tweeters. But yeah, earthquakes. And Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Between all the positive reviews and extensive coverage at GiantBomb, I’m salivating.

Well, my copy is on the way, thanks to the generous Greg Noe, and it should hopefully arrive by weekend time so that I can sneak and augment and take notes like a cyberpunk pro after moving a hundred boxes and heavy furniture. Will be doing a first-hour review, as well as some random musings here at Grinding Down. Until then, there’s always…Deus Ex: The Conspiracy. Y’know, that PlayStation 2 port of the 2000 PC classic, featuring horrible load times, awful model animation, and strange sounds when you walk across grass. Yes, it’s true. I have a copy. See:

If you’re curious, my hand has the following augmentations: extra glow, resistance to radiation,+2 damage, and death chop.

I’ve played the opening of Deus Ex: The Conspiracy at least three or four times since purchasing it for a sweet $8.99 way back in the day, and there’s a good reason for that: many paths. For me, the Liberty Island mission is what sums up the Deus Ex experience (Deus Experience?) the best, with a ton of options and variety. Your goal is to locate and interrogate the NSF commander, most likely atop the Statue of Liberty. You can go in guns blazing, you can sneak around the back, or you can kind of do both. And then once you’re inside the Statue of Liberty, there’s even more things you can do. The game is always asking you to decide, sometimes on the fly. Like, this time around, I used my crossbow with tranquilizer darts to sneak around the back to the docks, climb my way up to the statue’s base itself, and creep on in; unfortunately, I set off a gas grenade, alerting two guards to my position, and had to switch from non-lethal tactics to oh-so-lethal. I could’ve reloaded a save file, but it’s a better experience to just roll with things.

I always end up trying for stealth…for as long as it’s possible. Sometimes, when the going gets rough, I have to shoot it out, which is not fun because the game’s shooting mechanics are iffy. It’s a more rewarding experience to lockpick doors, hack security cameras, and crouch around corners. There seems to be a point where I stop playing though, and that is right after the LaGuardia Airport mission. Can’t really pinpoint why that happens, but it does. You’re supposed to head off to Hong Kong, but instead find out your brother Paul (hey, that’s me!) is in trouble, and off you go to Hell’s Kitchen. Despite me trying to save me, I lose interest here. Or something more shiny distracts me.

More than likely, this time around, I’ll stop playing Deus Ex: The Conspiracy the moment my copy of Deus Ex: Human Revolution arrives, and that’s okay. It was a nice refresher of what I like about the franchise, as well as what I hope gets an upgrade in the new prequel from Eidos Montreal.

About time I got my slime on with Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker

I finally got to play a bit of Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker last night despite purchasing the game a couple weeks ago. That seems to happen a lot with Nintendo DS titles for me. I buy them…and then don’t play them for a bit. I think it’s because I’m less excited to play my portable gaming device when in my own home, as I consider it more of a traveling thing, a road-side companion, a portal that helps pass time. Also, DQM: J was an impulse buy, something I picked up while waiting for Bullet to get an oil change; it’s not like I’ve been dying to try it out, just figured it would be interesting to see how it compared against its forefather, the mighty Pokémon franchise.

From what I’ve seen so far, there’s more visible depth in DQM: J than, say, Pokémon White. The key word is visible. We’ve all heard about the crazy amount of stats and breeding spreadsheets and EV madness and so on for those pocket monsters, but a good majority of that is behind the curtain. You have to go online and read. For DQM: J, it’s all right there. Stats, weapons, learning abilities, and what’s next for your mischievous mole or platypunk. There’s even a monster synthesis option, allowing you to fuse two monsters together in hopes of creating a better fighter. I like that, even if there’s not much I can do yet with my two-monster team. Hopefully things really open up after Infant Isle, and I can focus on grinding my team into something truly monstrous.

Also, while I love the classic sounds and elements from many of the Dragon Quest games…do they constantly need to get reused over and over? Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime, Dragon Quest IX, Dragon Quest Wars, this –they all sound exactly the same. Granted, catchy tunes and soundbits, but not after the eightieth time. Save for the level up tune. That one always warms my cockles.

Anyways, I took notes of my first half-hour playing DQM: J. You’ll be able to read what kind of crazy adventures I got into with our young monster trainer Hodor over at The First Hour. Um , soonish. Just gotta, uh, type up my hand-written notes–scribbles, truly–and clean up the review. Not to get too spoilery, but the last two minutes are basically me channeling Darth Vader. Yup. Until then, goo luck scouting those slimes!

Can’t escape smiling at this Ludum Dare game called BATHOS

If it wasn’t for Notch, I would have never even known about this crazy thing that recently took charge, known to indie game developers worldwide as the Ludum Dare. Basically, participants develop games from scratch in a single weekend–that’s 48 hours, okay–based on a theme suggested by community. This time around the theme is escape. Browsing through the 500+ finished entries is a bit daunting; some of them really do look great, and others…well, not so much. Unfortunately, a good chunk of them blur together.

The first submission I clicked on to check out was BATHOS by Johan Peitz, mostly because it looked like a SCUMM title, and those experiences always pull at my heartstrings. Seriously, there’s a Maniac Mansion vibe here. I’m super pleased to announce that the very first Ludum Dare title I’ve tried…is a winner! Well, in my book. I’m sure Notch’s entry is stellar too, but I haven’t attempted it yet, considering I barely understand Minecraft still, and I’ve been playing that for several weeks now. Anyways…

In BATHOS, the player wakes up in a supervised prison cell, naturally wanting to escape. The door is locked, but he quickly discovers many keys in his tiny, depressing cell room. Surely one of them will work on the door. And that’s it. Find the right key and get out of there. It sounds simple, but it took me about fifteen minutes on my lunch break to figure out, and the solution is delightful, obvious, turning this little indie bit of Flash wizardry into something truly charming. The graphics are clean and unobtrusive, and the game controls smoothly. There’s only so much our pixelated hero can do, but it all works. Picking up keys that don’t work and flinging them under your bed never felt so good.

One of the definitions for bathos is “an anticlimax,” and yes, Johan Peitz’s take on solitude, yearning, and escape most certainly is that. However, it might be the first time something so ludicrous has made me smile.

You can play BATHOS in your web browser by clicking this very sentence. Or, if you’re looking to download it for Windows/OSX/Linux, go here…just don’t read any of the comments below otherwise you’ll spoil a perfectly genuine gaming experience. And remember, this was created in under 48 hours. To me, that’s mighty impressive–and gives me hope that maybe one day I could make a videogame, too.

Achievements of the Week – The Medal to the Pedal Edition

I was kind of hoping that by voicing my Achievements goals last week that I’d be more aware of them and into, y’know, getting things done. Alas, this was another mindtrip of a week, and I spent a good amount of it in a serious funk, a place where concentration is unwanted. Games with stories and things to constantly pay attention to were not my speed currently, and all I kind of was capable of doing was button mashing and going through the motions. Let’s take a trip down Memory Lane and recall what I wanted to get done this week:

My goals for this upcoming week are to beat Bastion, grind LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean to completion, and maybe give the extremely silly Nier a few more minutes of my time.

So, did I do any of that? Nope. Instead, I played a lot of Street Fighter IV.

From Street Fighter IV…

Medal Hunter (10G): Collect 500 Medals.

Medals Gets! (30G): Collect all Medal types.

The Road to Battle (10G): Play 100 Xbox LIVE battles. (Ranked match or player match)

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I’ve never been great at fighting games, and I think that’s because I try to hard to learn combos and special moves instead of relying on good ol’ cheap tactics, like sweeping kicks and cornering opponents to death. In the Tekken franchise, I just wanted to learn all the special throw moves, as I thought the animations for them was awesome. Especially when watching a giant bear hug an old man to death.

Throws are less important in Street Fighter IV, as quick combos and projectiles and ultra combo finishes are the name of the game. I’m not amazing at these things, except projectiles, but throwing Hadoken after Hadoken after Hadoken is tiring. So earning medals after each match was a slow grind, as I would only get two to three per fight, given that I constantly got low grades. Out of the 100 Xbox LIVE battles played, I’ve won around 34. Not a terribly impressive amount.

But yeah, Street Fighter IV. Seems like the only Achievements left that I could probably unlock involve playing more online battles. The trial, survival, and challenge modes are brutal and hard, unless you cheat with Zangief’s Lariat move, which I have been doing, little by little, but it’s gonna take some time. Will let y’all know when I’ve collected 1,000 medals and played 200 Xbox LIVE battles. Probably will happen some time next year.

Not gonna bother trying to voice any Achievements goals this time around. Pretty sure it’s gonna be another crappy week. Just K.O. me now, please.

New screenshots for LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7 are magical

We know, Umbridge. We totally know. But do you hate these new screenshots of LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7? Me thinks no.

And I don’t hate them either. In fact, I think they are quite magical, really showing off just how far these LEGO games have come in terms of quality and polish. The lighting effects in the room where Dumbledore and Harry are searching for Professor Slughorn are simply stunning.

Unfortunately, I kind of keep forgetting this game comes out this year. Soon, I think. Late fall or just before the holidays hit. Maybe the blame could fall on the fact that the theatrical series is now over and done, and I was none-too-pleased with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two, confident that it lacked emotion and soul and was just there to end things, not resonate with a core audience. I mean, we’ve seen Hagrid cry over a hippogriff and a spider, and yet when it comes time to shed waterworks over The Boy Who Lived…well, they are strangely not there. He’s a soaking mess in the book, but not the film. Unexplainable. But I digress…

I’m very much looking forward to the coverage of the last book in LEGO form, and no, I’m not a fan of camping. It’s just that…well, I exhausted a lot of time exploring Hogwarts in LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4, and I know that castle in and out, up and down, diagonally and all around. Maybe the only person who knows it better is Peeves, but you can ask him that yourself. I can only pray that we don’t have to do all that over for years 5 and 6, re-learning spells we already learned back when kids at this school still wore robes. Places of interest I’m stoked for include Grimmauld Place (not the house Tara and I are moving into next month), Godric’s Hollow, and the Ministry of Magic. Years 1-4 did a great job of making the castle an ever-evolving hub world, but that doesn’t mean the same trick needs repeating.

That said, I think the above shot is irrefutable proof that Traveller’s Tales can make any villain–no matter how cruel, how sadistic, how villainous–truly adorable. Hem-hem!

A great videogame is not coming for A Game of Thrones

Evidently, there’s a videogame in the works for A Game of Thrones. This should be cause for excitement and celebration, as the series is riding a great high currently, blowing up bookstores and flatscreens with its epicness and sexy beards. Alas, if you want a game version of Westeros and its politics, I suggest going with the card game or board game version. Heck, feel free to print out my ASoIaF drawings and make them attack each other with your imagination. Do it. Because A Game of Thrones: Genesis from Cyanide Studio does not look promising.

Which sucks, because lore-wise, the game is digging deep, taking place before the events in A Game of Thrones and exploring the time of Aegon the Conquerer. This, of course, even means bringing in dragons and Robert’s Rebellion and other great historical happenings from the good ol’ days of Westeros, of which much is talked about in the books. Maybe even some insight into Lyanna. Who knows. Well, I won’t. Cause I’m not going to play A Game of Thrones: Genesis, not willingly at least.

It looks pretty crappy. The rooftops in this screenshot remind me of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and that was nine, almost ten years ago. Surely we’ve come farther than this. Granted, it’s an RTS game, meaning that for most of the battles and main gameplay, the camera is zoomed out to get a better view of the battlefield and where units are, but still…the graphics are not knocking me back. Everything is clunky and separate, as if the layers are showing. And I promise y’all, I’m not a graphics whore. I just need them to look good enough to not notice the ugly seams, flat textures, and lack of refining. Because Cyanide is obviously going for a more realistic look and failing. Any other style, even a Borderlands look, would have worked better.

Kind of want to see this little game fly…right out the Moon Door!

Originally, I didn’t think the whole A Game of Thrones RPG video from College Humor was all that good. It kind of plays on the same cliches and ideas that these videos cull from. Take something popular, boil it down to Final Fantasy era mechanics and look, add some obvious jokes, and watch the views roll in. But now…I’ll take it. Seven hells, I’ll take it!

Angry Birds should really be called Murdered Pigs

Yesterday, I played Angry Birds for the very first time. It was bound to happen. You can only avoid these things for so long; it’s kind of like how everyone eventually joins a social media site, no matter how vocal they are about hating those sorts of things; granted, every website these days integrates some kind of social media element in it, and then you’re there, stuck, updating your status, liking posts, and adding “friends” you’d never consider friends if you bumped into them while out shopping for books or something. Um…yeah. What was I saying? Oh, right: ill-tempered fowl.

While it’s been pretty easy to ignore almost all games on Facebook thanks to some settings tinkering and the fact that I really don’t hang out there as much as before, a host of new clickfest titles debuted this week at Google+, a website that I originally called “like Facebook, but without the games.” Guess I can’t say that anymore. What is nice though is that the games section is totally separate from the main feed of the site, so I don’t have to see how many points Joe Hoeblow got on level 9-154 of Murdered Pigs as I’m trying to see what people are really up to. That said, don’t you want to be my friend on Google+?

For those that don’t know, Angry Birds is a physics-based game of tossing birds via slingshots at rather innocent-looking pigs, trying to kill them all. I think there’s a storyline here. Something about the pigs stealing these birds’ eggs, which doesn’t really make sense when you consider that pigs don’t often climb trees. You toss the birds and gain points for how effectively you murder these pigs, as well as how few birds it takes to do so. I played up to 1-15 of Poached Eggs, the first episode, without a hitch, just sort of floating along. At 1-15, a new type of bird is introduced: a tiny blue bird which, when clicked again while in mid-air, splits into three birds. Very cool. Sadly, the game itself neglected to tell me this. I guess it did try with an unclear image while waiting for the level to load, but nothing ever specifically stated that these birds had a secret power, one vital to solving the upcoming level. I only learned this key strategy skill by accident after trying to beat 1-15 for the nineteenth time.

At no point did I ever get the sense that these birds are angry. If anything, they seem cracked out of their tiny  bird brains, shrilling in glee as they are hurled at stone walls and piles of wood, tossed to their death so systematically. All for the murdering of pigs, purported to have stolen eggs. A pig steals, a pig dies. What? I mean, things weren’t even this harsh in 16th century medieval times. Severe cases of theft back then could be punishable by flogging or the cutting off of one or both ears or a hand. And yeah, death by hanging. But surely that’s better than death by bird to the face.

It’s an okay little game. I just don’t get the logic of it all, but that’s the writer in me. Pigs and birds have no famous (or infamous) connection in nature. Might as well toss pineapples at polar bears. I’ll probably continue to play here and there as I find a moment of gaming emptiness, but I can’t really imagine myself going the distance here and seeing all 250+ levels to the end. That kind of grind is for the birds…

BONUS UNUSED BLOG POST PHOTO:

George Stobbart is dirty, makes me laugh

The other week, Tara and I spent most of the afternoon moving stuff into our new place. Since I got out of work earlier than she did, I arrived at Grimmauld Place first, did what I had to do, and had a good hour or so to kill until she arrived. Thank goodness I never go anywhere without my Nintendo DS 3DS!

It’s been some time since I played Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (first half-hour review here), and I had a hankering for something other than my usual go-to titles (Dragon Quest IX, Pokemon White, Let’s Golf! 3D, or Scrabble). I couldn’t quite remember where I had stopped plot-wise, but I do remember that I had just finally broken free from the restraints of only exploring Paris, arriving in Ireland outside a pub and schmoozing with the locals about a ruined castle–that’s also haunted. Oooooh. I did not actually enter the pub back when I saved the game for the last time, which was around the six-hour mark, so it was a great re-starting point, entering a bar with lots of people to talk with and lots of new items to pick up. Eventually, George learns a heap of new information and leads, and we’re back to Paris to see what Nico’s up to. Mostly spoilers.

Back to George, and the game decides to suddenly get really funny. I mean, it’s been decently funny from the get-go, but when George infiltrates the hospital and has to pretend to be a competent doctor amongst an array of incompetents….it goes to a whole new level. Exhausting dialogue options has never been so humorous.

Plus, this little bit of inner dialogue happens later on in a church:

Sorry for the shoddy camera work. I had to resort to using Photobooth on my Mac, holding my 3DS up at an angle I can only describe as awkwardly decent. If you can’t make out the text, George is talking about the firm buttocks of young ladies. In a church. Ya dirty boy.

I’m kind of stuck on a tripod puzzle at the moment, and it’s basically “steal a tripod,” which is not as easy as it sounds. While online looking for better screenshots of the above moment of glory, I discovered that Ireland is like only the second place out of six or seven locations that George and Nico will be visiting during their search for shadowy Templars secrets and killer mimes. And I’ve played for six-plus hours so far. This is a long game. I hope to finish it soon, but if I continue to only nip away at it in bite-size increments…it might take a good while. Hmm. So long as George continues to voice his dirty thoughts, I’ll make a more of an effort then.