I live again!

The first night of summer classes went okay. I’m taking Pre-trial Criminal Procedure and Patent/Trade Secret Law. My evenings/afternoons for the next 2 months are going to be full of law and headaches.

And weekends and daytimes too (for the next week and a half until the law review write-on ends).

Three more of my Diablo III hardcore characters have died; another barbarian (who made it to level 51 and nearly finished nightmare before I fat fingered my way to death) and two demon hunters (one at 48 in Act III nightmare to a pack of annoying elite monsters, and another at 24 in Act III normal to a pack of annoying monsters’ exploding corpses). Somehow I’ve managed to turn into a mainly hardcore player; in Diablo II, I strictly played softcore. I think it’s the shared stash and gold; banking good items is so much easier when you don’t have to switch between characters or get a mod (to share stashes between offline characters). Thanks to my disproportionate time spent on hardcore mode, I’ve now got 6x the gold there that I do on softcore.

I didn’t post for Memorial Day. I’d like to say that was by design, but it wasn’t. Borepatch has a great post, and Mark Tatulli’s Liō strip for yesterday was pretty good, as well.

Swiss Army Knife maker Victorinox is making a bunch of Upotte-inspired knives (Upotte, if you recall, Weer’d mentioned a few months ago, and is about a bunch of anthropomorphized rifles attending a school for girls. Really.).

Ys Origin comes out on Steam this week for $20. Once things calm down, I may have to get it (assuming I don’t just wait for one of those inevitable Steam sales).

For some reason, the Army is banning polymer magazines. Which seems crazy, since they’re light and awesome. All of my mags are polymer!

Namco is teasing the next Tales of game. No subtitle yet, just some vague question about whether or not you’re prepared to break the world on behalf of a girl.

Ever wonder what those electronics instructions actually say?

The Penny Arcade Report takes a look at XCOM: Enemy Unknown (AKA the good upcoming XCOM game). I’m seriously going to have to give up sleep for all these games, what with law school. Especially once this comes out.

This guy has NFI how taxation, social security, or anything else works. Especially in a country with demographic decline issues.

And now that my browser is relatively empty, I can actually tell what webpages I’m reading.

Your help with this episode of Tab Clearing for Diablo III Addicts™ has been greatly appreciated, dear reader.

At the risk of sounding like a paid shill*

Ys: The Oath in Felghana is on Steam for $15. If you like old-school action games where you either learn the boss patterns or you get destroyed, you should check it out. Especially since if it does well, it could pave the way for more of Falcom’s catalog to come out via Steam.

I’m not buying it** (though I am sorely tempted); I have the original Japanese PC release, the Japanese PSP release, and the US PSN release. I don’t need to buy it a fourth time.

If you like great action and great music, you owe it to yourself to give it a shot.

*Which I’m not; I don’t work for Valve, XSEED Games, or Falcom. If you buy Ys: The Oath in Felghana off Steam, I won’t see a cent.

**Though I will buy the Steam release of Ys Origin; it uses the Felghana engine and is supposed to be the best in the series.

Genesis Beyond the Beginning

Ah, Falcom. You manage to come up with the most ridiculous sounding track titles.

After beating Ys: The Oath in Felghana again, I thought I might as well look around on youtube for some more good Falcom music, and came across this track from Ys Origin.

And from gameplay and soundtrack clips, I’m definitely going to have to find a copy of this somewhere. It uses the Ys VI and Felghana engine, and is supposed to be even better than Felghana.

Also, I had no good ideas for a post today, so I figured why not go with the old game soundtrack filler post standby.

Livin’ la (PS) Vita loca?

Vita game-wise, I have Tales of Innocence R and Uncharted: Golden Abyss. I also bought a couple Vita-compatible PSP games off the US PSN (Ys: The Oath in Felghana and Ys Seven), and I’ve put in some time on each of them. I’m a ways into ToIR, a couple chapters into UGA, and almost to the end of Oath (aside from making sure Ys Seven worked, I haven’t played it), and the PS Vita is great.

Unfortunately, the screenshot functionality doesn’t work on PSP games, only on Vita games (at this point, anyway; maybe Sony will patch it so it works later). Uncharted looks better on the system than it does in the screenshots (damn compression!), but ToIR looks about the same. The analog sticks are great, and far better than the slider the PSP had. Even the d-pad is much improved.

Uncharted falls prey to the same problems most first-party games on new, innovative hardware do; it uses the touch screen, rear touch panel, and gyro controls in gimmicky ways when they’re not really necessary. I should be able to navigate the menu without using the touch screen if I want; balancing with gyro controls as you walk over logs was stupid in Uncharted 1, let alone here (and was rightly absent in UC2 and 3); and having to tap the ammo indicator to reload instead of a button is unintuitive. That said, a couple of the uses of the Vita’s capabilities are actually good: coarse aiming with the analog stick coupled with fine aiming via gryo controls makes targeting enemies a breeze, and using the rear touch pad to control zoom on the sniper rifle is very quick.

The touch screen is barely used in Tales of Innocence R; you can assign each party member a spell to cast when you tap their portrait during battle. Other than that, it’s only used when saving/loading (which appears to be a Vita system-level requirement, like the PSP save/load system). I’m inclined to believe Namco was working on this “reimagination” for the PSP, and just switched tracks when Vita development was feasible.

I’ll play through these games before I get any new Vita software (probably, at least). Until Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention, Gravity Rush, Ys: Woodland of Celceta, and possibly Zero no Kiseki: Evolution come out, I’m not interested in much.

Which basically gives me a month (until Disgaea 3), and then another month or two (until Gravity Rush), and then however long for those other games. Unless other games pique my interest in the meantime, anyway (Thanks to the launch 3G bundle deal, I’ll get Super Stardust Delta for free in another 3-4 weeks).

All in all, I’m pleased with the Vita launch; there are plenty of games in plenty of genres, and while most are worth at least playing the demo, some are actually even good!

 

 

Diablo III Beta impressions

Well, I’ve played through the beta with four of the five character classes, so I’ve got a solid enough basis to gather my thoughts.

First off, the required internet connection is pretty annoying. I haven’t decided if it’s a dealbreaker or not, though; the game itself is good enough that I’m leaning towards not. Of course, this means that even if you’re playing in single player mode, if Blizzard’s servers are down (say, for maintenance) you won’t be able to play.

The level cap for the beta is set at 13, and everyone is restricted to Act I; the final boss is the Skeleton King (the final boss of the beta, that is; whether the Skeleton King is the final boss of Act I, I have no idea). This is high enough that you can unlock 2 (0f 4) extra skill slots, and 1 (of 3) passive skill slot.

Unlike Diablo II, there is no skill tree; each class has 3 categories of skills (for the Witch Doctor, it’s Physical Realm, Spirit Realm, and Command); each skill in each category is learned at a certain level. However, the player may only have 6 active skills at a time; these six can be chosen from any of the three categories, and can be of any required level. The player can change skills out at any time (though this does trigger a 30 second cooldown on the skill chosen, so that you don’t try swapping abilities in and out during battle). The passive skills are similar, only their effect is constant (instead of triggered, like attack spells are). The skills default to the right and left mouse button, and 1-4 on the keyboard (5 is set as the health potion button).

The inventory system has also changed since Diablo II; instead of every item having its own grid size, everything fits in either 1 slot or 2 vertical slots; this makes inventory management far less of a headache. Like D2, D3 has a stash; it works like the bank in World of Warcraft. You start with a couple rows, and can upgrade it 2 rows at a time until you have a full page; once you’ve got the first page, it looks like you can continue buying additional pages (at least 2 more right now). Unlike Diablo II, the stash is shared amongst all characters on the same account; if you get a great fist weapon on your Demon Hunter, you can just stick it in the stash, switch to your Monk, and get it out of the stash (this is also how the shared stash in Torchlight worked). This is a great improvement; I know in D2 some people had multiple copies of the game and would dual box on Battle.net to make swapping items between characters possible. Aside from being needlessly expensive, this could also make you lose your items (if the server crashed during character swaps, for example).

The graphics are greatly upgraded; that’s not surprising, since Diablo II was sprite-based and came out in 2000. Diablo III is more modern, and in addition to the overhead isometric view, you can also zoom in for a much closer view of your character and its immediate surroundings. This is handy for taking screenshots, but not so useful the rest of the time; it really hampers your field of view.

The character classes are almost all new; the only returning class is Diablo II’s Barbarian. The Monk plays like a hybrid Assassin/Paladin; it’s focused on melee combat, but has mantras that function much like D2′s Paladin auras (they provide passive bonuses to the Monk and other party members while they are active, and only one can be active at a time). The Demon Hunter is a ranged physical damage class that mainly uses crossbows; its abilities are geared towards staying mobile and out of the range of melee. The Wizard plays a lot like the Sorceress; it gets old standby spells like frost nova and ice armor, and one of its passives slows any creature hit by any spell. The Witch Doctor is reminiscent of D2′s Necromancer, but with less of a focus on summoning a gigantic army of the undead.

I enjoyed the beta; I’ve only played the single player campaign so far, but I’ll post more once I’ve tried out the co-op multiplayer (and once I’ve taken more/better screenshots).

Palace of Destruction

Finals week is come, and most of my nonsense is confined to twitter (for the time being).

Don’t be surprised if I tend to post more OST selections this week, since I’m listening to a lot of music while studying (and not being distracted by the internet, I swear).

And because instrumental music seems better for studying than vocal music, I’ve delved once more into my Falcom game soundtrack trove.

Today’s track: Palace of Destruction, which plays (I think?) in the first shrine/temple Adol explores in the first game.

The Ys I & II Chronicles arrangement is excellent, but SSH‘s* might be even better:

*SSH, for Saitama Saishuu Heiki (埼玉最終兵器), the ultimate weapon of Saitama, a doujin music group..

Ifrit

I never could figure out Vagrant Story.

I’ve tried playing through it three or four times, but after getting a ways into the city of Lea Monde, I couldn’t do enough damage to kill anything. Part of this is due to the weird “Risk” system, where the more damage Ashley Riot (the protagonist and member of the Valendia Knights of the Peace) does (or takes), the less damage he does. You can string together long combo attacks, and by the end, each hit is doing one point of damage; when enemies have hundreds of HP, this makes battles a bit tedious.

I understand that a big part of the game is reforging weapons; each monster type is supposed to be weak to a certain kind of damage, and if you adjust your weapons accordingly, you should be able to more effectively kill them. I never figured out how to get that to work properly, I guess.

The art direction should be familiar to anyone who’s played Final Fantasy XII, and is obliquely referenced in several of the more recent Final Fantasy Tactics games; Yasumi Matsuno, Vagrant Story’s director, later went on to work on those games as well.

Dispossession

I haven’t played it yet (hopefully I’ll have put some time in by the end of the week), but Nier is that rare beast in today’s console gaming market: an original property!

When games cost millions of dollars to develop, produce, and market, coming up with a new IP is a big risk; it received mediocre reviews, but apparently sold well enough that Square Enix is considering a sequel.

I figured for $20, it was worth a gamble; the NYT claims that it resembles the Legend of Zelda series, only targeted more towards adults instead of children.

If it’s half as good as Zelda, it’s definitely worth $20.

I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire

Fallout 3, Bethesda’s revival of the classic post-nuclear-holocaust RPG borrows quite a bit from their Elder Scrolls game style, and less from the turn-based gameplay Black Isle Studios built the first two games in the series around.

After creating the main character, and playing through a short orientation section (set in the character’s childhood and adolescence), the game jumps forward to his (or her) late teens, when the player must leave the Vault in search of his father.

The Fallout games are all very much in the style of what everyone in the 50s believed a nuclear-powered future would be like, from the pulp sci-fi style rayguns to Robby the Robot style robots to Cold War style propaganda and posters.

Unlike the first two games, which were set in California, Fallout 3 is set in the ruins of and around Washington, D.C. (dubbed the Capitol Wasteland). While wandering around, sometimes the player will come across radios, and can listen to this song by The Ink Spots:

Supernal Epic

Today’s selection is from another game I’ve yet to finish, Infinite Undiscovery.

The protagonist, Capell, is mistaken for the leader of a liberation force and broken out of prison; his uncanny resemblance to their leader gets him drafted into their quest to cut the chains binding the moon. Or something.

From the introduction, I wasn’t really clear on what exactly was going on. If drugs weren’t so highly regulated in Japan, I’d expect some hallucinogens were involved in the sales pitch (not just regulated by law, either; when famous people are caught doing drugs, they and everything they’re involved with gets tossed down the memory hole a la L’arc-en-Ciel’s sakura).

“Yeah, man. The moon has these chains on it, and we should totally cut the chains. That would be epic!”

Anyway, it’s an action-RPG; the player controls Capell in real time, and the other party members are controlled by AI. The game was decently received; my main gripe with the couple hours I played through was that the voice acting was awful, and there was no way to revert it back to Japanese dialog.

Like many tri-Ace games, Infinite Undiscovery’s soundtrack was composed by Motoi Sakuraba. He wastes no time in getting down to sweeping, epic music; today’s track plays during the opening cinematic.