All my greatest critics in the Mojave Wasteland think I’m a hack

Still working my way through Fallout: New Vegas – Dead Money. I’ve realized one reason why this DLC is so dang slow, and that is because, if you’re playing anything like I am, you are sneaking all over the Villa, careful to scan every square of ground for traps, careful to hear that terrible beeping, careful to not end up taking on two or more Ghost People at once by yourself. I can’t ever really imagine moving fast through this one, and I even know what to expect (at least for the first half of things), but I will forever err to the side of caution.

Anyways, thanks to some locked doors and unfriendly turret systems, I was able to get this little pinger:

Hack the Mojave (15G): Hacked 25 terminals.

Woo, science! Actually, nah to that. I never tag science as a skill, and only did it because, just like in Fallout 3, knew there would be an Achievement tied to it. And thank goodness this one wasn’t just a carbon copy of the Achievement in the former game. That was called Data Miner and required the player to hack 50 terminals. Fifty…I swear I don’t even think that many exist in the Mojave Wasteland (and Sierra Madre section). It really felt like slim pickings in terms of hacking computers. At least the science skill came in handy a few more times during my playthrough, but otherwise…it’s not very exciting. And I kind of wished Obsidian had updated the minigame for hacking a terminal; it’s too easy to just save before you hack in case you mess up, and obviously they don’t love it immensely otherwise there would’ve been a whole ton more throughout our travels.

Well, in the end, that’s another Achievement done for Fallout: New Vegas. Now to, uh, simultaneously confront and trap a certain someone in a certain something. Maybe the science skill will help me again? Maybe, baby.

Games Completed in 2011, #9 – Torchlight

Back in the day, ranging somewhere between my senior year of high school and my sophomore year of college, I played a lot of Diablo and Diablo II. However, I never beat either game, and constantly restarted new characters. My absolute favorite aspect of these now legendary dungeon-crawlers was organizing my inventory. See, Diablo and Diablo II strived for a more realistic inventory system, meaning if you couldn’t fit it in your bag with your dozen of other goodies, well…you’re not taking it with you. Simple as that. Here, let me show you:

Oh man. That image is beyond delicious. It’s like a puzzle minigame!

Anyways, I mention this because Torchlight, despite being heavily influenced by its Diablo big brothers, does not support this kind of inventory. At least not in the XBLA version. PC players get to enjoy this deliciousness:

Instead, us Xbox 360 doods get lists. Lists after lists after lists. Many of which are unreadable. And that makes it difficult to even determine if your character is fully armed. Oh boy.

What’s the story? Well, it all revolves around a mysterious ore called Ember, which is the essence of magic, as well as the keystone in alchemy. Deep below the small excuse for a town called Torchlight, miners dig, searching for the coveted ore. However, these miners quickly discover that there’s more below Torchlight than shiny, special rocks: a dangerous labyrinth of caverns and ruined civilizations, brimming with monstrous creatures. Evil begins to surface, and a champion is needed. Players can pick between three classes–Destroyer, Alchemist, or Vanquisher–and then begin slaughtering evil enemies, collecting loot, defeating bosses, and progressing further below the town. It’s a pretty typical storyline, with 100% shallow characters; in fact, the most creative character exists only to hand out sidequests, and yes, I’m talking about Trill-Bot 4000, that one-man band/aspiring bard/robot. Why can’t I have him as a pet?!

Like its Diablo brothers, Torchlight‘s greatest appeal is its loot. Killing special enemies drops a ton of gear, most of which will need identifying scrolls to truly get, and it’s an addicting thing. Grabbing loot, selling loot, grabbing loot, harboring unwearable loot for later–it’s truly what drove me forward, the promise of an even better staff for my Alchemist. What’s also nice is that, much like Dragon Quest IX, you can see everything your character is wearing or wielding, which gives reason for trying out a lot of odd gear. The graphics are colorful and cartoony, taking a page from World of Warcraft, and they seem right at place in Torchlight‘s less than serious world.

And now let’s discuss what I passionately disliked about Torchlight. We’ll start small. Whenever your pet loses all its health, it will flee from battle until it heals itself. You know this is happening because the voiceover dude goes, “Your pet is fleeing.” He says it even flatter than I’ve typed it. The problem is, sometimes your party is surrounded by enemies, meaning your pet is fleeing from one group to another, and the voiceover guy will just not shut up. “Your pet is fleeing,” he says, and then nine seconds later he says it again. Oh, is it? WELL, FLEE ALREADY THEN! GO AWAY! Sheesh.

I also discovered a sharp increase in difficulty from the Black Palace (levels 31-34) to when you have to fight the final boss in the Lair of Ordak (level 35). Playing on Normal difficulty, I have never died until then, and rarely had to use health potions as my Alchemist knew a Heal All spell which did the job just fine. However, towards the end, I found myself guzzling bottles of red faster than probably possible.

Lastly, my biggest gripe about Torchlight is its love for tiny text. Most of the dialogue between characters is readable, but when a weapon or special piece of gear comes jam-packed with abilities, the text drops to really tiny, making it hard to figure out what is what. Does that armor require my defense skill to be 27 or 29? It gets even worse if you try to compare it with another piece of armor in your inventory. I ended up selling most of my gear because I couldn’t read what it did. At the top left corner of all items is either a green dot, a red dot, or both. Green means it is greatly better than what you’re currently using; red is worse; and green plus red means it’s a mix of both. I used this as my guideline on what to wear, what to sell. A shame really, as I know I missed out on a lot of strong purple-colored loot.

Hate tiny text, too? Good news for you then! I’m working on an article about it for The First Hour. Stay tuned, fellow blind people.

So, is Torchlight worth getting on consoles? I’d say no. It’s a good game, but better suited for a mouse and keyboard, as well as a screen mere centimeters from your face.

March 2011’s flotsam and jetsam

It seems like, at least a few times every year, I am a little overwhelmed with multiple games at once and little time to play ’em to their fullest. Such is March 2011 then, a month where I’m playing three to four new titles, as well as working on older games or miscellaneous purchases. Throw into the fight the fact that I’m also scrambling to get Supertown minicomics drawn and printed for MoCCA 2011, and well, yeah, there’s a lot to juggle. Here’s kind of a short rundown on what I’m currently playing:

Torchlight (XBLA)

Right. Diablo II on a console, but much more cartoony and fast. I’m digging it, and normally by now I’d have written up some early impressions of the title, but the truth is that I’m almost at the end, meaning all my big boy thoughts will have to wait for the final review. Still, I like a lot of it except for one big caveat–the tiny font size. And when a game stands on a mechanic such as loot, being able to read and compare magical spears is vital. I’m pretty sure I’ve sold a lot of excellent gear simply because I couldn’t read what it did or its requirements for wielding.

Pokémon White (Nintendo DS)

Only have two gym badges so far, but that’s okay. It’s not a race, no matter what my rivals say. I like finding a good team of ‘mon and then training them to be, roughly, around the same levels. Right now I’m rocking Victini, Snivy, Timburr, and Audino, and the other two spots haven’t been truly filled yet. I’m giving that trash bag Pokémon a chance though since many others probably won’t. Its Sludge move is pretty good. But man, oh man…it’s a trash bag?

Radiant Historia (Nintendo DS)

I was stuck for awhile in this one, unsure of which timeline node to jump back to, but Greg Noe steered me in the right direction. Now I’m working my way through the Closed Mine in hopes of learning a sword dancing move from somebody to help Stocke progress with a circus act in the alternate timeline. Yeah, it can be a bit confusing. Still, the combat is fantastic. Really do need to schedule more time with this one.

Fallout: New Vegas – Dead Money (Xbox 360)

Having now beaten this game twice, my second character, an evil woman named Zelda that loved hitting enemies with s-weapons only–sticks and shovels and sledges–was perfect for attempting the DLC add-on again. My first fly with Dead Money didn’t go very well. But it’s going much smoother now that I can handle the Ghost People more effectively, as well as heal better from radiated food. Just finished gathering Dog, Dean, and the mute. Now to get each of them where they need to be…

Penumbra Overture (Mac)

Started this on a whim, and have only played a wee bit of it, but I dig its mood and atmosphere and the way opening a drawer feels. Seriously. It feels good, true, like I’m actually doing it myself and not with a mouse. I would have loved to see this technique used more in games like Fallout, as it makes searching a room actually feel like searching. There’s a special kind of warmth that comes from opening countless empty drawers and then opening one to find batteries there, yours for the taking.

FlingSmash (Nintendo Wii)

Every week, usually Friday, sometimes Saturday night, Tara and I go visit her brother to play some videogames. We call it “games night,” and we focus mainly on all things Wii (but I swear to teach him Munchkin before too long). Wii Sports Resorts is so much fun with a good group, but two players had to share one remote, and I got tired of this after several weeks. So I purchased FlingSmash, which is basically a Wii MotionPlus controller ($40) with a game thrown in for good measure ($10). The game is just an excuse to shake the remote around, but I hope to examine it more closely soon.

::deep exhale::

Whew. Too many games. There’s the possibility that I’m not even writing about more.

Also, a friendly reminder that by the end of this month I’ll also be picking up Monster Tale and a Nintendo 3DS…so yeah, more to come. Woe is me? Naaaaaaaaaah.

How to catch Victini

Victini is a legendary Psychic/Fire rodent-like Pokémon in Pokémon White/Black. It’s also a pain in the 8-bit butt to catch. Here’s a little step-by-step guide to getting victory on your side.

STEP ONE – DOWNLOADING the Liberty Pass

Select MYSTERY GIFT from the main menu screen. Then select RECEIVE GIFT and tap YES. Select GET VIA NINTENDO WFC and tap YES. If your settings are in order, a connection will be made, and a new screen should declare that you can pick up the Liberty Pass at your local Pokémart.

STEP TWO – RECEIVING THE LIBERTY PASS

Head to the closet Pokémart and speak to the deliveryman in blue. He’ll hand over the Liberty Pass to you, and now would be an excellent time to save your progress.

STEP THREE – GO TO THE LIBERTY GARDEN

After earning two gym badges, you’ll be able to cross a huge bridge and reach Castelia City. Once in the city, head all the way to the left without going down any streets or alleys, and you’ll hit Liberty Pier. Take the boat here to the very not-garden-like-at-all garden and get ready to fight some Team Plasma grunts; they have Victini cornered in tower’s basement. Once you’ve defeated all three grunts, you can challenge Victini to a battle.

STEP FOUR – CATCH VICTINI

Not as easy as it sounds. Speak to Victini to begin a battle with it. The legendary Pokémon is level 15, knows some good fire moves, and can be a little tough to wear down to a teeny, tiny fraction of health. Once you have it there, be prepared to throw a lot of Pokéballs. A lot. I went through at least twenty-plus: Heal Balls, normal Pokéballs, Great Balls, and several Nest Balls. Just keep throwing them and it’ll eventually happen, I promise. Or you can try to put Victini to sleep or paralyze it, which my Pokémon team could not do.

If Victini faints, exit the room and re-enter to try again. And don’t forget that the officer at the top of the steps can heal your Pokémon for you.

Best of luck, Trainers!

—

The adorable artwork headlining this post comes from DeviantArt user Aonik.

Chop their heads off with Munchkin Axe Cop

Don’t worry, I just double-checked, too: it’s March 11, not April 1.

Anyways, big announcement time from Steve Jackson Games as they have just thrown into the limelight their very first licensed Munchkin game. It’s Munchkin Axe Cop, based on that hilarious webcomic series that exploded on the Internet last year. Written by Malachai Nicolle (age 5) and drawn by his older brother Ethan Nicolle (age 29), Axe Cop has all the workings for a Munchkin game: it’s random, it’s erratic, it’s funny, it’s beyond belief, and it’s all about fighting enemies with whatever one can. I’m still a littled bewildered over this, but also curious to see it pan out. Munchkin Axe Cop will be a third quarter release.

This gives me hope that maybe one day, my very own webcomic (Supertown–please go read it!) could be turned into a Munchkin core set. I just need to fill it in more with crazy adorable characters…

Pokémon White/Black strategy for earning easy EXP

I know I’m not the first to stumble upon this easy EXP-earning strategy for Pokémon White/Black, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to share it with y’all nonetheless. I’ve been falling back on it each time I reach a new location, as the Pokémon there are most often several levels higher than my team.

Right, well, in all Pokémon games, grass is where the wild pocket monsters are most often at. The Generation V games have added a new addition though: shaking grass. Occasionally, a small patch of grass will shake, and if you run into it you’ll encounter a rarer Pokémon, specifically Audino, a hearing Pokémon with high HP and a lot of pink to it; you can catch one if you want, but I suggest making them faint more because they yield a ton of EXP, ranging from 200 to 700 depending on their levels. Seeking these out by running back and forth in front–not in–of a grass section will help you raise your Pokémon extremely fast. They aren’t tricky to defeat as two of Audino’s moves will, 9 times out of 10, fail because he/she is using them incorrectly (Helping Hand and Refresh). What a n00b!

I did catch a female Audino and nicknamed her Audrey; surprisingly, she’s a powerhouse, with a high amount of hit points and DoubleSlap (more like QuadrupleSlap, am I right?!), but I don’t know how much longer I’ll use her. Normal Pokémon can only get a trainer so far after all. Audino certainly helps make grinding more bearable, as well as faster, and I do know that other rarer Pokémon can be found in a similar fashion in dust clouds and water ripples.

Hope this helps! I’m gonna be taking down plenty more Audinos before I try to make it through the Pinwheel Forest unscathed.

Munchkin Zombies wants brains, and I want to help them eat brains

Munchkin Zombies is debuting at PAX East this weekend, which is very exciting for two reasons: 1) the sooner it debuts there, the closer we zomb-crawl towards a retail release and 2) it’s the first core set in many moons since Munchkin Booty back in 2008 and early musings of it seem to indicate that it is above and beyond a traditional core set. This is great because, while traditional Munchkin gameplay is fine and fun, I was worried that we’d just get that with a zombie skin (ewww gross). That does not seem to be the case. For instance, instead of players playing as Munchkins, we’re actually in control of the zombies and can acquire different mojo that will tell us how we ultimately became part of undead society. Here, take a look at some sample preview cards:

Either way, I’m excited about this despite my wishy-washy feelings towards the zombie epidemic spreading across all media as of late. Guess I can credit that to John Kovalic‘s adorable and hilarious take on the undead. And there’s already an expansion set to drop this fall, along with more themed booster packs for Halloween and Christmas. That’s cool, that’s cool, but first things first: braaaaaaains…

Prepare for trouble, Pokémon fans, and make it double with White/Black

I bought Pokémon White this past Sunday, the day it was released, and it was much more than an impulse buy. Much, much more. There’s a story to it all, but it’s very sad, and I don’t think I can type it up just yet–or even explain in a way to make sense outside of the clusterstorm that is my processing of life and all that jazz–but yeah, I went out and bought the newest Pokémon game without really completing the previous one enough (HeartGold).

And so far, it’s good and all, but a bit too much like HeartGold in terms of the first hour or so. You start out as a fatherless trainer (boy or girl) who picks one of three special Pokémon to call their own. Once that is decided, it’s off to collect ’em all, conquer gym leaders, and stop an evil corporation from doing something justifiably evil. It doesn’t feel very different except for the battles, which are nicely streamlined and presented with much more pizzazz (not to be confused with pizza). I am pretty stoked about the seasonal changes and what that will do; right now it’s autumn in-game, with some nice leaves blowing in the wind action.

Right, here’s my team of five, all at various levels:

Pretty adorable designs, but I am a little tired of battling Patrats. Are they the new Rattata? I surely hope not. Yeah, the minute I saw Snivy, I had to have him–he’s too smug to be left in the distance. As for his name and Lillipup’s name, well…they seemed fitting. “Are you going to name every Pokémon after Harry Potter characters?” my wife asked over my shoulder. No. Not all. But maybe 75% heh heh.

Still waiting to catch a sixth Pokémon. I personally don’t like using doubles of any pocket monster, even if they are different genders or have unique abilities. I was hoping to add Victini to the party right away, but it seems like I can’t acquire it (genderless Pokémon!) until I’ve collected two gym badges and reached a specific city. Wah. Thankfully, I found a free WiFi access point during my lunch break and downloaded the Liberty Pass, so I’m ready to go.

But yeah, Pokémon White. I’m playing it, as well as looking forward to the game opening up more.

All Achievements Achieved – Fallout 3

Gee, that didn’t take long, right? I mean, I only got my first Achievement in Fallout 3 on October 14, 2009…and my final one last night. Let’s not actually count those days up. Instead, let’s talk about why it took me so long to unlock everything Fallout 3 had to offer Achievement-wise because none of the 72 ding-pings are terribly difficult to get–they just require time and, sadly, online guides.

For the longest while, I had unlocked just about everything but five Achievements: the four for playing as a neutral karma player, and the one for finding 100 steel ingots in The Pitt DLC. Again, nothing terribly difficult, but very time-consuming, especially when more and more new games were coming out. Did I really want to play Fallout 3, a game I really do enjoy and love despite its clunkiness, for a third freakin’ time? Well, no. So I didn’t go at it with the same ferocity as previous playthroughs, playing only a little bit at a time. Neutral karma is a juggling act, and not as easy to maintain as straight good or evil, constantly requiring me to realign my character as I inched closer to those magical Achievement levels of 8, 14, 20, and 30. Actually, not for 30. I got the Achievement for level 30 neutral karma another way, one I’m not proud of.

Moving on…I found myself many hours later with only one to go: the dreaded Mill Worker. This requires the player to locate and turn in 100 steel ingots to Everett, the Mill’s foreman and a lazy one at that. Sounds easy, but it’s not. The 100 steel ingots are scattered across a decent sized map brimming with trogs and wildmen, and one can quickly become confused as to how many they’ve collected and where they’ve already looked. I’ve tried twice before during playthroughs one and two, but was unsuccessful. This time, however, I had a strategy: I wouldn’t trade in any ingots until I had them all.

You’re required to turn in 10 as part of a quest, meaning I needed to have 90 in my inventory to truly know I had found them all. This also meant opening up 90 lb of space, since each ingot weighs 1 lb. I dropped a bunch of armor and set off to find those lucky pieces of steel. It didn’t take long to find 85 of them, but then I was at a lost for the remaining five. Didn’t I already look there? Would I have to go back through the whole map, corner by corner, space by space? Ah, no. These five were right under my nose; well, to be more precise, right behind a fence. After I found them all, I went back to Everett, turned them in 10 by 10, got rewarded with prizes I didn’t care about, and unlocked this:

Mill Worker (20G): Found All 100 Steel Ingots

Then I put the auto-ax against Everett’s face and gave him a haircut.

And that’s that. Have a ★, Fallout 3. You earned it.

Don’t see the point of Microsoft Points

I ran out real quick during my lunch break today to spend money on “money” to buy Torchlight with next week. Talking about the Xbox 360’s version of Space Bucks here, their Microsoft Points, which I still find to be a stupid process altogether. Why can’t we just charge the actual game price to a credit card rather than figure out how many MPs to deduct from our allotment?

So, today I spent $20.00 on 1600 MPs. Torchlight is marked to cost 1200 MPs, which in real terms is around $15.00. And that sucks because now I’ll be left with 400 MPs, an amount that can rarely get you a decent downloadable game except for when DLC add-ons goes on sale. I hate spending money like this; sure, I will eventually use the points on something, but right now, it comes across as a waste. Again, I repeat myself: why can’t games cost what they cost, and let the customer pay that amount via Paypal or a credit card or, if they are so inclined, Space Bucks?

And of course, you can’t just purchase 1200 MPs. No, no, that would make everything far too simple.

Options are a good thing, Microsoft head-honchos. I promise.

So, anyone know of anything worth getting for 400 MPs? Not the Pac-Man game that’s currently on sale.

P.S. Right now, without adding the 1600 MPs I just bought, I have a strangely odd amount of 10 MPs in my account. See how bizarre this process is? Bizarre and without a point.