aka What R U Playing, or Doing.
Big list of things that I have been dabbling with follows:
This blog blows the mind. Lots of crunchy articles about game design, ethics, philosophy, temperament theory and much much more. To think I only found it because of this post about nine types of gamers Personally, I don't think he's got even a handful of them down, but I found the summaries of the other possible classifications of gameplay quite delicious, especially Caillois’ patterns of play.
Took leave on Friday too. What the hell, I needed to claim a day for working on Vesak Day, and the upcoming next two weeks are a go-to-work-holiday because I'm on a long extended course (culminating in a non-related but fun Video Games Live concert. Mwahaha.) Not much room for days off there. So I pretty much turned this week into a nonworking week except for today and Saturday. Whee!
LOTRO progress has steadied out. I methodically went through a bunch of Eregion quests, and got about halfway through to the next level. Another one or two hours and I should be level 48? Or was it 49? Har, I can't remember.
FFXI progress has been slow, but progressive and 'fun' in an oldschool exploration sense. I went through the first city area - Port Bastok - talking to all the NPCs there, collecting a bunch of quests in the log (none of which look doable until I gain a bunch more levels and/or randomly stumble onto some mysterious mob in a hidden area doing something completely nonintuitive that was vaguely hinted in the one-liner quest intro and probably requires me to download a strategy guide, dang it at some point.)
I did the same thing to the next city area, the Bastok Metalworks, and was about halfway through the Bastok Markets when I lost the will to continue. FFXI resembles its Japanese RPG roots a lot more than a typical Western MMO, so a lot of the NPC interaction is vague hints and story parceling in dribbles, rather than a complete "exclamation point/quest text/quest objective" sort of thing.
Having learned about 2.5 city areas to the point of relatively confident navigation, I decided to save the other parts (more Markets, Residential District, South Gate or whatnot) for another time.
I jauntily proceeded to the next lowbie area, the Zeruhn Mines, now armed with a map bought from one of the vendors in Port Bastok. It made navigation a LOT more doable. Two goals: kill a bunch of things to level a little and get a change of pace in combat, and work on Story Mission 1 for Bastok, aka go all the way into the mines to pick up a message from an NPC and go all the way back to the Metalworks to deliver it. This time, I finally found the NPC instead of wandering in circles, and in between killing of monsters, stumbled across the keypress that brought up in-game configuration options. (Oooh! *cue brief flash of learning accomplishment*)
All done with the gamepad too, so you could say that I am learning a new control scheme as I go along. Gave up retracing my steps during the same session, so I logged. I am starting to feel encouraged about taking on (or trying out) games like these in small parcels. Segments of time that would probably be too long for anyone keen on achieving endgame progress, but good enough for me to blog about.
Call of Duty: World at War is significantly more playable on the second level of difficulty. There are less grenades being slung at me every second, and I seem to have the space of a few more breaths before they explode, allowing me to flee more effectively. Either that, or I am getting overparanoid about the grenade indicator. Survival rate has gone up to 75% less deaths than before. Was about four level maps (and two bonus maps) away from finishing the game.
The main narrative across maps is not very good. It is exceedingly disjointed, veering between the two POVs (a Russian fighting Germans, and an American fighting Japanese) with little connection. There's probably only a tenuous chronological reason for arranging the maps in the way they are.
Scenario-wise, each map is quite a self-contained, if short, immersive experience and fairly enjoyable in the Call of Duty vein. Quite a number of people have complaints about how this CoD game treats morality issues. There are a number of scenes of casual executions and so on, possibly needless ones, some argue.
Me, I'm okay with it. It's like any other cinematic experience, it's aiming for some kind of effect, even if they caricature some things in the process. I certainly don't think that the world of Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row exists in reality, it is over the top in some aspects while allowing you to experience being a 'gangsta.' In the same way, I certainly would not think that every Japanese in real life is an evil booby-trapping tricksome 'Tojo' just because a scenario in a game portrays them that way.
In fact, if you want to be anally politically correct about authenicity and fair portrayal of war, I'd suspect that most FPSes are lying terribly about how many bullets and how many enemies come at a single soldier. Most of war is lots of interminable waiting, moving from here to there lugging heavy objects, utterly cold, wet and miserable and now and then, a screaming firefight you can't avoid, doing your utmost not to get killed and certainly not racking up a killcount in the hundreds, headshotting the enemy. It would make a terrible game though.
So for what it's worth, I enjoyed the scenarios which portrayed war brutality (on both sides, imo, if you're not looking through rose-colored white-skinned glasses).
The first chapter began by putting my character in the eyewitness position of watching Japanese soldiers burn my fellow comrade with a cigar and slit his throat. Five seconds later, the tables are turned as my rescuing American marines jump on my almost-murderer and cut -his- throat out. I then grab a rifle and spend the rest of that time shooting scores of Japanese - who also lay vicious booby traps and trick ambushes for 'our side' to even out the NPC bodycount.
As far as I remember from my Singaporean and Asia-centred WWII history lessons, the Japanese in WWII were, as a whole, -notorious- for cunning strategies and basically 'fighting dirty' to the point of severely damaging Westerner morale. So facing the whole gamut of tricks in a bunch of maps as one character is just cinematic compressed time, y'know? Not very probable in real life, but it's the immersive experience and storytelling effect we're going for here.
Faced with all this morale-sapping occurences, plus a brutally tough trench warfare scenario where suicidal kamikaze Banzai-screaming soldiers are hurling themselves at you in order to take you with them, it's interesting when you, the player, have a chance to turn the tables. What will your reaction be? Do you take the moral high ground...in a war?
Me, I took the easy way out. Not sure what that says about me, if it's that my min-maxing efficiency mentality at work, or if I was just roleplaying/immersing into the role of a soldier hardened by trauma, but once I got a flamethrower in my hands, I was merrily flame-broiling the opposition as they screamed and flailed around, their kamikaze charge defeated by being on fire.
Not that it was EASY doing it. Japanese dug into bunkers would shoot you merrily from a distance as you were lugging a heavy flamethrower with insufficient reach. Woe betide them if I actually got near enough to spew fuel into their hideout though. Snipers in coconut trees would drill me full of holes, necessitating me exchanging the flamethrower for a long-range rifle to snipe them in return. But boy, was it great when one coconut tree was actually within reach of the flamethrower - it went up in a boiling napalm-like whoosh.
Ditto the Russian story. The character I was playing was actually left for dead (twice) and pretty much hunted down like a rat through a burning building after successfully sniping an enemy German general. When the tables turned, there was a story conflict between a hardbitten sergeant who wanted to execute captive Germans and a newbie private still hanging on to his morals. Your choice as to who you wanted to support. Me, I chose to play the "war is hell" story theme (too much Warhammer 40K perhaps) and headshot them.
Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core is one of the games I have been clocking up significant progress on. I picked it up for the PSP at $40 and it's renewed my interest in portables as a good way to get my game on while in transit.
Final Fantasy III for the DS has proved its oldschool lethality. I hadn't found a proper save point yet, only quicksaving when I had to turn the portable off. One bad unexpected fight later, my two PCs were slaughtered without a chance to even run away and I found the quicksave had erased itself. Damn, should have found out how to save my freaking game sooner.
Culpa Innata is a weird adventure game I picked up during a Steam sale. It reminds me a bit of Longest Journey (with a more personally intriguing setting.) I narrowly ran into a bit of dejavu aggravation when my avatar got stuck on a pixel and refused to move, but fortunately, a quicktravel option got me out of that buggy scenario. Someday I might play TLJ again, but I have to say, the inadverdent 'forgot-an-item-yer-screwed' bug left a bad taste in my mouth.
Anyhow, Culpa Innata is set in the future, in a society that has taken 'science' and the 'selfish gene' to its logical extremes. Greed and selfishness is a virtue, non-defective genes to be strived for, and it's a weird parallel inversion of a simultaneous dystopia/utopia. And then, there's a murder in the Rogue States, and you, a fine upstanding member of the New World Union have to find out more, because this was a murder of a NWU citizen.
Workin' on it. I dislike nearly no captioning of regular examination text (all voiced), but the major cutscene discussions with NPCs are all thankfully captioned. The PDA mechanic is interesting, as it brings up an always-available-on-right-click representation of a wearable computer that all NWU citizens have, you manage inventory, quicktravel and other things with it.
Games I want to start sampling in the near future: Sam and Max season 1 chapter 6, the original Splinter Cell stealth FPS, more Guild Wars, and I have these insane urges to go try out Vanguard (what, another group-required MMO while I'm still learning FFXI?), mebbe EQII (sure y'right), Neo Steam (already downloaded the F2P trial, may as well get off my ass and putz for a while), the Hunter (some F2P hunting game that looks really really gorgeous, even if the stalking mechanic reminds me a bit of a Tale in the Desert frog hunting) and dunno what else.
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