Archive for July, 2009

Fable II is fun!

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Mostly because there is some seriously messed up shit you can do in it!

Here’s some fun stuff!

1. Shower your wife with gifts, get her into bed, sex her up a little, and get her preggers. Then, fart in front of the baby (in a misguided attempt to amuse it), making her burst into tears, and you to leap from the upstairs window of the family home, onto the street below, and dash off to fight bandits.

2. When said baby is a child, she’ll decide to go off on an adventure in a cave filled with Hobbes (Goblins, basically). She wants to be a hero just like you.

-snuggles Child- Oh Annette, you silly child. You’re never going to actually earn your fathers love, no matter how much you achieve, so you might as well resign yourself to that fact and stop trying. You’re scaring your mother to death!

-blasts the heads off some Hobbes whilst escaping the cave- See, sweetie? Daddy is a master sniper. And you aren’t. Don’t go chasing Hobbes!

3. Resurrect some floozy from the first Fable in Zombie form after collecting her body parts, much to Stop’s delight. While kind of creepy, just look at those thighs!

In all seriousness though, I avoided Fable II for a while since I had been so disappointed with the first one, but I’ve really enjoyed it. Far superior to the first.

Slight change of direction…

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

This blog is now about gaming in general.

What? It’s my domain, I can do what I want! –raspberry-

Hopefully there will still be WoW posts, but I need to rant about other games occasionally, too, and don’t want to use my RL blog for that purpose.

So, I’d like to talk about Too Human in this post.

Ok, so by this point, it’s been out for almost an entire year. I had been quite looking forward to the the game before release, but given it received mixed reviews and I was strapped for cash, I gave it a miss. Yes, reviews aren’t everything, but when you’re not making much money, you can only afford to buy the best.

Now that it’s been out for quite some time, the price has plummeted accordingly. I managed to nab it and Fable II as part of 2 for £30 deal after deciding to treat myself since I’ve had way too frickin’ much overtime for the past couple weeks and I was out of stuff to do when not working.

The story is absolutely fantastic.  It’s kind of surprising just how well the blend of Norse mythology and futuristic technology works. Going into the game with knowledge of the old Norse tales adds a good level of depth to it. I liked how they worked even minor things into it. For example, in the manual, they call Idunn’s cybernetic enhancements (which grant the Aesir immortality) the “golden apples of Idunn.” The “real” Aesir are somewhat unique amongst gods in that they were not naturally immortal – instead, one of their number, Idunn, cultivated golden apples which helped the Aesir maintain their immortality.

But the gameplay? Jeez, that really cheesed me off. Firstly, I found the controls very, very clunky. If you wanted to execute powerful finishers, you have to smash both analogue sticks in the direction you want to attack. This is actually slightly more difficult than it sounds for any directions other than forward, and aerial finishers are kinda hard to pull off at the end of a chain of normal swings.

Then there are just some really awful enemies. In the second and third stages, there are large mantis like enemies. Unless I missed something, there’s almost no way to avoid their attacks beyond attacking from afar with a Rifle. I was playing a Champion class, the strength of which lies in aerial attacks and pistols. Those bastards were tough.

The final thing is just how awful my luck with loot was. To regain health, you have to rely on health orbs dropped by defeated opponents. I found that when I was missing only a sliver of health, loads of the things would drop, but if I was low on health and dying of poison, nothing. This was hugely frustrating, especially given when you die, you have to sit through quite a lengthy scene where a Valkyrie comes to spirit you away.

Apart from that, the combat can be fun when you get into it. Something I loved was that one of the three melee weapon classes in the game was staves. It’s kinda rare for staves to actually be used for hitting things in games. Usually they just sit pretty and give stats. Thus, I mostly used staves on that play through. Also, the special abilites were a lot of fun. For example, by building up points from fighting, you’d gain combat levels, up to a maximum of three, used to cast “Ruiners.” With one combat level, mine was a fairly small explosion, with two, Baldur does an impressive backflip before charging at the foe as a fiery raven, and the third summons massive explosions over a truly huge area. Win!

Certainly isn’t a game worth the £40 it cost on release, but for £15, it was an absolute steal. Now I just need to wait ages for the sequel – dying to see how the story continues (though I have a vague idea.)

No more raiding?

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

You may have noticed a distinct lack of updates to the blog recently. I’ve really not been playing WoW much. I’m at that stage where all I really want to do in it is raid or do stuff with friends, but life hasn’t been co-operating recently.

I usually end up having shifts coincide with raid nights, and this week, I’m working almost every day. Hopefully, that will continue, since I really need the money. In addition, I’m starting University in two months, after a lazy year, and have no intention of playing WoW seriously whilst at University. So, basically, my raiding career is over.

When it comes to doing stuff with friends, I enjoy even things like leveling Horde alts, but alas, Kazura gets really bored of that really fast!

I’m not quite done with WoW though – I’m still eagerly awaiting 3.2, so I can level my druid. Really looking forward to new forms, and then trying my hand at tanking. Hopefully the patch hits within the next month, so that I’ve got a month to level the Druid and play about with tanking before I quit WoW.

There will certainly be some more posts when that happens, so this blog isn’t dead yet*. And when this one dies, maybe University antics will provide good fodder for an RL blog? I’ve kind of been neglecting it, but I think I’ll start posting to it again.

*It might not even die. It’s quite likely I’ll revive my WoW account over holidays, or even keep it active if Kazura and Yuanjia still play, for the occasional hour of silliness. Certainly wouldn’t write the blog off entirely, yet…