[Vanguard] Return to Telos

One day, John came up to me and said “Let’s go back to Vanguard!”. About time we went back -.-, so I grabbed my installation CD and installed that 18GB worth of stuff. Good thing I just reformatted my hard disk.

I’m going to kill whoever changed my password. How come it seems that everytime I return to a Sony-related MMO, I have to go through their customer service. The last time was the double billing incident for EQ progression server. This time, apparently, someone changed my password to…wtf computer1234? No way I made that pass. And wtf my email is 1173096485387? No wonder I couldn’t receive the ‘Forget my password’ function.

Time to patch it up. Hopefully it can run on this labtop. It run well under minimal last time, I wonder if I can bring it up to medium this time.

[Game] Mass Effect – I will destroy you!

I have been playing tons of Mass Effect lately, like, tons. My weekdays just went by so swiftly everytime. On my com, I’m randomly trying to play back old city building games (Sierra ones, not EA ones). Caesar IV was performing so damn badly on my com I deleted it. Didn’t like it anyway.

Mass Effect was very enjoyable for me. Every party member has their own character development, combat was FPS-like, thus making it fairly enjoyable, voice acting was good, content/lore was acceptable, a bit of romance, character deaths. Too bad the main storyline only lasts for around 10 hours. Sidequests are barely tolerable though. Actually they are good as long as you get into the buildings, but outdoors is a no-no for me. Mav was spot on, vehicular combat is a fucking bitch. Getting down to shoot is a better choice, espacially considering that you get more exp that way combat from destroying stuffs from your vehicle.

I would really really love if planets are less mountainous. Some are okay, but there are a few which I have to pull my hairs out. Travelling and bouncing around my Mako is irritating enough, don’t need to make it worse. And the camera. God, why they do this to my eyes?

Obivously, I wish there were more conversation between party members. And I wish choosing paragon/renegade actually has a meaning, not just dialog and random people hating you or dying. I guess I shouldn’t expect much, since paragon/renegade isn’t as dratically difference as compared to light/dark side in KOTOR. Plus, I wish being paragon/renegade would grant you special bonuses like in KOTOR, intead of just letting you add more points to charm/intimidate etc.

I kinda liked their character growth system but it could’ve been better. Soldiers seemed like complete shit as compared to what the other classes can do. Only good thing about Soldier is that you don’t have to suffer problems like choosing what skills to add to, since you don’t have much anyway. Only good thing about Soldier is to unlock the Assult Rifle acheivement.
Lore is good. Most of them havedamn blatant Warhammer 40k references.

Just look at Tali’s people, the quarian as compared to Eldars:

Create bad stuff that will drive their race to extinction? Check

Doesn’t live on planets, ie live on ships? Flotila? Craftworld? hmm

Pilgrimage? Hmm sounds like Rangers!

I wouldn’t want to compare the Protheans and Reapers to Necrons and the old race in 40k which I can’t remember.

The story is good enough for me. It’s better than IWD’s. Then again IWD has shit for story. But at least it has the ‘omg so that’s what they are for’ factor. I find the reaper’s reason to the slaying of only advance beings…lame. “Why you do dis?!” “Arg you won’t understand lar, tell you also no use.” >.

I expect many many things in ME2. If they do the same to ME2 as they did to KOTOR2, I expect it to be very long.

And I don’t want planetary travel anymore please…I’d rather do 15 more Citadel quests than to go to 15 different planets.

[Game] Brawl and moar

I have been touching on Super Smash Bros Brawl on ZH’s Wii these few weeks. It’s incredibly fun, and I feel that this game might make it on the competitive stage, although I shouldn’t be the one to judge that since I didn’t play SSB: Melee in the first place. There seemed to be many complains by the Smash World community about Brawl, mainly because they felt the competitve level of the game has toned down to a crawl. The creator
of SSB series, Sakurai, states that he’s trying to “make losers and winners feel happy” (summerized), so the community interprets it (probably correctly) as “I don’t want SSB to be hardcore competitive like a SF2″.

I do feel that Sakurai managed to accomplish that though I’ve never actually played Melee to make a comparision and make a judgement. I had a blast playing 4 FFA with all items on. Items are goddamn fun, fun because they are damn random and some of them are very creative (eg football). Stages are well designed too. I mean, only Nintendo can come up with such unique stages. I liked the Sonic stage, mainly because I totally recognize it from the first Sonic game I played about 15 years ago when I was just a small boy. Nostalgia is fuck awesome. Too bad I don’t think I ever completed the game. Good thing I still have my 16-bit sega in my uncle’s house …I hope -.-

There are many characters in the game, featuring characters from games like Fire Emblem (Marth, Ike), Kirby, Sonic, Legend of Zelda, Pokemon, Metal Gear (Snake), and of course, Mario Bros themselves. There is no doubt that this game has their fair share of tiers. Characters like Pit is arguably better than Wario, but from what many people feel, the game is more balanced than it was in Melee. They are only afraid that the ultimate strategy in brawl, in the end, is to camp and wait instead of advancing and chasing down an opponent. In short, many feel that this game will favor people with no ‘O’ffence. A thread has been created suggesting to do a ‘Heavy Brawl’, which is to increase the gravity of the game, since Brawl is very much slower (and more floaty) as compared to Melee (from what I experienced within 10mins of Melee long ago).

Well, my group of friends playing Brawl isn’t really at that level of expertise yet, so I don’t really care or feel what they felt. Right now, we are just playing the game for fun, and slowly exploring the details the game engine and the characters.

I’m awaiting the next Brawl get together. I hope my arms heal up then (seems to take a long time to heal, 4th day and itjust got worse).

[to be edited with links]