MRAAKTAGON – Page 62

Finished a game- Torchlight 2

Ah a rare thing, actually finishing a game…I finally beat TL2 on elite (not hardcore) vanilla. It took over 60 hours with a single character to win it… that was with just a bit of help from sensless with a couple of items that I could only use at the end of the game. Elite was very very difficult– I died about 500 times and probably could have died a lot more but just wanted to get it done. I know I could have farmed at lower difficulties or with other characters, but this was about being almost pure with Elite– going through the whole game from start to finish with nearly zero help. I finished the game at level 52 and I can say that most of my gear was about 10 levels lower, so I definitely hadn’t farmed up enough to really run the end game comfortably.

The next time I go through I can farm up with a higher level character and pass items down, potions, spells, everything because the elite hair on the chest has been grown…

The build
I used a berserker and focused on Shadow Dash/Wolfstrike with Frenzy Mastery and Blood Hunger as primary skills. All of this is for survivability rather than damage output. Essentially she would heal whenever she landed a critical and could shadow dash for insta heal and escape when she got in trouble. The key path is to stay on the edge of a mob and use your normal attacks to build your frenzy meter since when you are frenzied it’s all (well almost all) criticals. Once frenzied, you can stand toe to toe with any boss that cannot one shot you (which aren’t many!). For my primary weapon, I used a large mace that I placed the rift ember in (+10 Mana steal on hit) for max amount of DPS for my AOE’s (Wolfstrike/Shadow Dash) and then switched to two rather lackluster claw weapons when I was frenzied for any bosses– increasing my attack speed by triple or more. I just could never find any better claws by the time I finished the game.

In addition to the skills above, the berserker extra pet (via Wolf Shad) was huge and I maxed points whenever I could. The summon gives damage output increases, attacks stuff itself for mass damage and heals you when it does damage. I would say it’s the best skill in the game. However, I have this feeling that there was an XP drop when wolf was on the screen…like very little XP at all.

There’s a lot more to explore with the berserker, but I won’t be doing it on Elite unless it’s my Hardcore character who is the sole survivor of our early days hardcore elite group. With him I use very different tactics (sword and shield and a lot less gung ho). The end bosses of TL2 look extremely difficult on Hardcore elite so the farm up will be necessary. If I was to do it again, I would have started on Normal, finished the game and then passed items up to a character on Veteran who then passed items up to a character on Elite. This is tough to do on Hardcore since, well, your characters get croaked.

Aphex Twin Oct 2012

I got to play YOMI!

I’ve had my eye on YOMI, a card game that emulates video game fighting games in paper form for awhile now. I initially assumed there was no way anyone could make an actual fun game out of this. From experience as I’ve tried two of them from the olden days (Video Fighter [below] and Heavy Gear) as well as the goo,d but too simple, Brawl.

videofighter — Circa 1994- do you remember it? Likely not.

YOMI is available to play online and I gave that a go and it was just OK, it piqued my interest further, but I didn’t think it was all that great from playing the online version, which is exactly the same as the card game except you can’t read the cards. You can technically read them, they just aren’t the focus of the game enough compared to when they’re in your hand. This is huge detriment for a new player because I can say after playing the physical game that YOMI is absolutely superb at pulling off what it’s trying to do and it’s not well represented in the online version since the cards are small and not in your face. So if you are going to give it a try, I would recommend playing with pieces of paper first.

The core mechanic, well it’s just rock paper scissors between Throw, Attack and Block/Dodge. Seems simple? It’s crazy complicated. The rock paper scissors part is just the most basic mechanic. You play a single card each turn. Based on what you played and your opponent has played you can possibly play more cards to combo, extra defense, etc. and this is where the game gets crazy and the rock paper scissors mind game turns into a mechanic that works brilliantly instead of putting you to sleep as it should. Each character deck that I’ve seen (played about 6 of them) plays very differently. Some characters are good throwers, some rush down with tons of small attacks and combos and others set you up for a big hit the whole match. After just a few plays, one notices the huge depth of the game.

Hand management is huge, card flow is huge, and knowing when and where to lay down your big combos is something that will take hundreds of games to master. I am simply shocked that someone was able to pull this off and do it so brilliantly.

yomiTrog As a game, once you have a single deck of one character, you can play– forever. That character likely will never get any other cards you can buy (unless there is a team fight expansion that changes out cards) so if you just want one character to play, your cost of entry is 12$ and never anything else. You could enter a tournament and win and be a champion with just that 12$ spend as YOMI is not about buying up cards and making decks like Netrunner or Shadowfist then playing, it’s about learning a character completely, just like a fighting game on the boob tube.

I’m not a huge fan of the art– it looks sort of like knockoff anime to me rather than the real deal, which Video Fighter and Heavy gear also had issues with. The overarching brand is ‘fantasy strike’ so it seems like the characters in the game are in some sort of Lodoss War style world. And a Panda? I guess… again, a minor quibble, especially since many of the characters are really awesome looking— they’re just not Last Blade 2 awesome.

Those of you physically near me, trust that you will be coerced into playing despite your hatred of fighting games.

More Talisman news – an official FAN expansion!

Awesome. The guy from Talisman Island put together a real expansion along with Fantasy Flight. This is a must buy. Deals with having Pandora’s box in the middle if you all remember that from 2nd edition (the ending where you draw spells and adventure cards and cast them on other players until they die).

Check it out here.

I noticed reading the Talisman Island posts that 2013 marks the 30th year of Talisman’s existence. Woah. I wish I had started playing this in the 80’s, but it was always just sitting there on the shelf (next to Dungeon Quest) and I never bought it, then of course college happened and it ended up nearly ALL we played for a couple years there.

D&D announced for Summer 2014

We’ve been seeing D&D Next stuff for a few years now and I would describe what I’ve seen (and what Matt has described) as ‘meh.’ In the light of the glow that Pathfinder has taken on in the last two years it’s going to be tough for WOTC to compete with Pathfinder on an even level–and do we need another PNP D&D? It looks like WOTC may think PNP is not enough based on the following:

“Players will be immersed in rich storytelling experiences across multiple gaming platforms as they face off against the most fearsome monster of all time.”

I would argue that we already have a D&D Next that’s not built to compete with Pathfinder, but fits far better into the adult PNP style of play– but that’s a post for another day.

New Talisman Expansion!

You’d think after all my posts on this blog about Talisman expansions over the years I’d get sick of them or sick of Talisman. NO SIR. While the Dragon expansion was a bit much for me, I’ve picked up everything else (Dragons changes the game very drastically while everything else integrates into the main game together) and am HUNGRY FOR MORE. The City expansion we’ve only just started to explore and it’s fucking great. No more stacks of gold lying around for no reason– spend them to win the game in the City.

FF is delving into Arabian myth with the new one called Firelands and it looks pretty awesome— though like Dragons, it seems like it changes the game quite a bit by eating up spaces on the board. The four characters are the Warlord (like the Gladiator), the Jin Blooded (spellcaster), the Dervish (can’t tell) and a fourth one that looks like a female spellcaster of some type. This will be heating up the winter months it looks like.

Xmas Vacation 2013!

Well it’s starting a day later than I thought, and I’ve got a bunch of work to do over the course of the week, but I can pretend that it’s Xmas vacation and that I’m de jure off work at least. I won’t have to sit on the bus and listen do a guy pretend to be on the phone and talk real loud to a pretend person about saving him a seat at the gambling table and then talking about their rendezvous location while stating loudly things like “four just got off on 21st street” nor will I have to sit through forty minutes of a ‘sermon’ about how white people are going to hell and are disgusting from some nutter in the back of the bus while I’m trying to read– also implying we’re privileged people not noticing that all of us are ON THE BUS TO WORK.

So what the hell am I going to do? First, no one else is off this week that I hang with so there’s going to be some waiting there. I will probably write some lengthy nonsense here on this terrible blog for one. I may try to dig up all the woodenmen.org files and FTP them to this site for perusal. I’ve had a ‘blog’ since 1996: long before someone came up with that fucking stupid name for someone’s mental masturbation on the internet. I remember hearing that for the first time in about 2001– I knew what the term was of course from READING it, but I never thought I’d hear anyone actually say it out loud. It was at some conference for marketing agencies that were on their last gasp trying to get a second wind populated by people that were unfortunately at an age where they didn’t feel the need to care about technology much (take for example a VP at a company that has everyone do everything for them except negotiation with other people with their same title) . A middle aged woman got up and started talking about the blogosphere– just generally about it with no clue how to monetize it or what it could be for business or marketing. All the time I’m thinking holy shit these people can’t even put 2 and 2 together: what am I doing here?

But I digress. My completely superficial goals for the vacation are to play some sort of PNP RPG, get a game in of Bolt Action and/or Warhammer Fantasy Battle, finish Torchlight on ELITE (not hardcore Elite), get as far as I can in Dark Souls (I just finished Sen’s Fortress and am getting close to the terrible two in Andor Londo) and try to paint some beastmen. I haven’t made a painting post for about a year or so but I have made progress! I finished my Bestigor and am working through a huge pile of Ungor. Once I have 30 I’ve enough for my mage bunker and can move on to either my Cygor or my Minotaurs.

I’m looking forward to Xmas day because I got the kids CUBE QUEST and that’s going to be the gift of the year I think. Of course it will be a catastrophic mess of cubes but over time, the flicking will become more and more precise until crokinole players’ assholes start to occlude across the entirety of Canadia.

Oh and read some comics. I’m trying NOT to read LOEG: Black Dossier again but it’s tough. Incredible book– just so much in there to read and reread. I will likely bust out some Groo to cure that though.

Planetary Annihilation – delayed release (for good reason)

I’ve made some kickstarter mistakes before and will do so in the future, no doubt. Planetary Annihilation, from the alpha access, has been one of the poster children for me of a Kickstarter that offered almost too much potential for awesomeness that there was no real way they could deliver. So far they didn’t (which shouldn’t be expected in this early stage of dev) and likely they won’t. RTS games are very difficult to make. Even in the genre’s heyday there were very few contenders for the best and a few experienced developers that made horrific stinkers. While Total Annihilation was great, it turned out to be a fluke as TA: Kingdoms was awful and Supreme Commander didn’t capture the magic that TA did at all. It’s no wonder Planetary Annihilation’s alpha was so bad (and should never have been released to the public). Their decision now to use the famous id Software phrase “When it’s done” in regards to the game’s release I applaud, but I really think after what the alpha shows, there is no hope for this game to be any more than a minor blip in the history of RTS games, and certainly not worth playing for more than a couple days at most. Unique concept, poorly executed from a design standpoint is the crux of what the reviews will be.

Look at the tone change in the latest Kickstarter update:
>>>
That means Planetary Annihilation will launch when we feel confident about its level of polish and the amount of awesome we can jam into it. We don’t have a hard date moving forward. However, we do expect it to be feature-complete in early 2014.

“We are extremely happy at what we’ve been able to accomplish with the game so far, but we want to take some additional time to make sure we are releasing the best game we can,” said Jon Mavor CTO of Uber Entertainment.

“I want to thank everyone who kickstarted and pre-ordered the game again because without you this game wouldn’t have became a reality.”
>>>

Look what’s happening above. Typically you have a kickstarter message coming from a team member speaking directly to the kickstarter group– a direct communication without it being a press release sent out to gaming or business publications to publish AS THEIR OWN MESSAGE. What UBER did above was make it SEEM like it was from a team member, but then they quoted another team member within the same message like an official press release–this is a very very strange level of professional PR work for a kickstarter. Why not have the message direct from Jon Mavor? It’s as if at this point instead of the actual developers that we ‘paid’ to make the game speaking to us, the kickstarter people, we now have some sort of PR intermediary that is going around capturing quotes (or writing them for approval) within Uber to create what amounts to a professional press release–not to game mags, but to US. If the releases started off that way, I guess that would be normal, but the message above makes me think something changed very drastically at Uber in terms of what they want the kickstarter people to know. And I think that’s the realization that the game they are making currently sucks and “will never match their teaser videos.”

This is case in point of being wary of big, lauded kickstarters– they make so much money sometimes over what they are asking that something must happen to the developers and designers– that they think their game IDEA (since at the kickstarter time for most of these it’s not a reality) is goldplated by virtue of the amount of dollars they got– and this is indicative of what the final product will be. Grant you the idea for PA is great, but the execution and design decisions will have to be flawless to compete even with Company of Heroes 2 let alone Starcraft 2.

Lastly, I think the developers of this game bowed to pressure to put SOMETHING out after the kickstarter– and I believe kickstarter people exert a lot of pressure on studios to show stuff LONG before they are ready for it, and long before they SHOULD show it when they are starting from scratch, which is what PA’s team is doing. The studios focus their attention on pleasing the kickstarter people with shiny stuff when they need to be hidden away in a cave making a good game. I honestly believe they cast some design decisions in stone FAR to early when they should have been extremely willing to leave them on the cutting room floor if the game’s quality required it. While it’s because of us that this game is being made, it may be because of us that this game is impossible now to make well..hence we get the PR talk now instead of direct team communication.

Morning Myth

7-Man Eclipse

We didn’t get the simutaneous rules quite right (at all) but it worked out in the end and was a great time. We ranged around 20 minutes per turn except for a couple turns, which for this many players + combats, is really great. I’d like to see ANY other 4X space board game with 7 players get it done with this level of satisfaction in such a short time.

One thing I guess I would like to see in Eclipse is some better diplomacy, different game objectives– like you don’t know what the game’s objective is when you start whether it’s kill ancients, take other people’s home worlds, etc. VP cards based on actions would be cool– and it would not be a crazy extension from the VP tokens they have (that you really only spend resources for at this point). Again, this would sort of merge in some of the great stuff from NEXUS OPS.

Looking forward to the next game of this, as always.