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Late Night Typing 2

By Capum15 July 1, 2010 1 Comments

I say late night, but it's actually Early morning. Hmm. Anyway, might as well get straight into it.

Fable 2

So with the disc replaced like, a day or two after the last blog, I ventured into Fable 2. About time, I reckon.

Again, 360, no personal screenshots.

I've played the crap out of this game in the past month. Seriously, my main character owns practically every building in Albion and has roughly 8 million to toss around. Plus, I got Knothole island so I'm rolling with a Master Katana with four augments on it. Luck and Life makes me deal more damage while taking less and giving me health for every hit on an enemy. Luck and Skill gives me even more damage with less being taken. Lucky Charm does the same. Finally, It's Not Luck gives me more damage, take less, and I earn 50 gold for each kill. My ranged weapon is Hals Rifle, the MA5 Assault Rifle from Halo. No, seriously. Has one augment which is another Luck and Life. Basically, as long as I hit something, I won't die. I'm full good/pure, and I'm rocking the whole Knothole Island Armor set which looks pretty awesome despite my initial thoughts of it. Oh, and I slept in the Fairfax Castle bed which gives me regenerating health. I'm fucking Thor here, I call on undead spirits to distract my foes while I charge up a giant "Fuck You" AoE lightning spell. Hell, the last few fights I got hit four or so times and didn't even see my health bar go down.

Anyway, game play. It's fable. You have three ways to attack, Melee, Ranged and Will. Melee's mapped to X, Ranged to Y and Will to B. Hit one of those and watch things die. Alright, the combat is deeper than mashing, but you can get by with mashing if you get an augment that refills health with each hit. I wasn't much of a Melee or ranged fighter, mostly focusing on Will (magic) attacks to get by. There's also the whole economy thing to see too. Each area has an economy, and what state it is in will effect what the prices of houses is, how much stuff in stores cost, and how much you get paid for a job. There are three jobs you can do: Blacksmith work, Wood Cutting, and being a Bartender. I've personally never done wood cutting, but I've heard that it's a lot of work for little reward, so I never bothered with it.

Blacksmithing...oh god, Blacksmithing. Tedious as all hell, and it can piss me off to boot. So there's this curved bar that appears in the upper section of the screen, on it are two things. One is the "Hit Zone", and the other is the "Hit Reticule". The Hit Zone changes position on the bar on each successful hit, and when it appears it gets steadily smaller. The Hit Reticule moves across the bar back and forth, getting faster as you progress in job levels and gold multipliers. It takes five successful hits to make a sword, then you do it again. Each successful sword bumps up the Gold multiplier by one as well as the successful chain number. Fifteen is the maximum gold multiplier, but you can get the chain up to whatever you manage. There's five levels to it, and to get to the next you have to earn a certain amount of gold. Getting a high multiplier obviously makes getting that amount way easier, but if you mess up once, bam, back to 0. The one thing I hate most about it is the fact that it's the only job open at the beginning of the game. Bartending is incredibly easier but comes up last. The hit zone is located on the right and never moves, it's kinda big and allows for some margin of error. The reticule moves left-to-right and you have to hit it when it gets into the green. If hit too soon, you make a crappy beer, if hit too late, you spill some. Anyway, I got up to level 4 and hit a groove. Hard. I got around 250 chain (again, sadly, with only a 15 gold multi). Made tons of money and got way more than needed to get to level 5 (max).

Anyway, back to fighting. You get experience points that you can spend in three main areas: Strength, Skill or Will. Strength and Skill have three sub-sections and Will has...nine? Anyway, under Strength: Brutal Styles. With each level, you learn more combat maneuvers. Physique, which makes you hit harder (and makes your character more buff). And Toughness, which increases your health bar. Skill has: Dexterous Styles, again, lets you learn more combat stuff. Accuracy, makes you hit harder (and makes you taller). Lastly is Speed, which increases reload time and how fast you swing your melee weapon. Third is Skill, which is the Magic of the Fable universe. This time around, the amount of Skill powers has decreased by a lot, but each has two versions - Targeted (One Enemy) or Area Of Effect. I'm not going to list all of them, but my two favorites are Shock (lightning) and Summon Undead (summons spirits of whatever you just killed, if none, summons crappy spirits). There are five levels to each spell. Hold the right trigger and you bring up a small menu, which you can use the D-pad to choose what spells to use. Since they're all mapped to the B button, they're placed in tiers. So, for instance, you can tab B to summon two crappy undead to get the enemies attention off you, hold B until you fill up a tier 3 Time Control spell, slow down time, then hold B to charge up a level 5 Shock to blast the living hell out of whatever dares to cross you.

A few last notes, you can, like in the previous game, buy property and use them to earn money every five minutes. Buy a shop, or buy and rent a house, and every five minutes you get some cash. It wouldn't seem like much, but you don't even have to play the game to get that money. It still earns you money even if your 360 is off. If you want, you can set your 360 back to 2005, continue and save, then bump it to 2025 and get all that beautiful back pay. If you want something a little less cheat-y, you can just start a new character, do jobs until you get some good property that gives you about 200 or so income, then go back to your main/first hero and continue on. When you go back to the new hero, you should get a bit of money. I also haven't done that Snowglobe one (See The Future) yet, so I still have that to look forward to. Anyway, it's really dang fun, and Knothole Island turns you into THOR, NORSE GOD OF THUNDER!

Command And Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

I finally got around to playing Tiberium Wars. Bought it off of Steam. It's awesome, and the special effects make me giddy. It's Command and Conquer. GDI and NOD are still

"And he cried in a loud voice, 'Lazarus, come forth!' And Lazarus did arise from the grave"

at each others' throats. Kind of. GDI's intelligence has downgraded the NOD threat level, believing that after Kane's death in the second tiberium war and NODs subsequent in-fighting and loss of new recruits that they aren't much of a threat anymore. You know how that goes. Even if you've never played it, you fucking know how that goes. All of GDI's High Command, as well as multiple World Leaders are on the Space Station Philadelphia. And GDI's anti missile system (A-SAT Defense System) is located in one location, and on the fucking ground due to budget concerns. They could've put it in space and everything would be all nice and safe, but due to it costing, you know, money, "no" was the appropriate answer. Even though there have been two Tiberium Wars, both of which ended when Kane died. First time Kane was incinerated by the fucking Ion Cannon. The second time he was impaled by some other important dude.

Anyway, so yeah, the predictable happens. The A-SAT control center is attacked by who? Yes, the "not a threat anymore" Brotherhood of NOD. The entire system is brought down with one building (the GDI really cared about saving money). Then Kane, being the immortal chess master that he is, presses a button. Sending a nuke straight into the belly of the Philadelphia, taking out the entirety of GDI High Com, along with those world leaders.

The GDI news reported it as an accident, even though the video showed a ground-based fireball impacting the station.

Then of course, Kane interrupts the news broadcast with a speech, and thus begins the Third Tiberium War. Long story short, NOD attacks the hell out of GDI Blue Zones for a while before GDI managed to mount a resistance. Eventually, GDI returns to Sarajevo where Kane has rebuilt his Temple of Nod. Figured out after a good while, Kane has built a weapon of mass destruction, one involving Tiberium. A Liquid Tiberium Bomb, the blast of which would be over 200 Megatons and would instantly detonate any Tiberium deposit within it's reach, no matter the state. Yellow zones are neigh-inhospitable due to immense Tiberium infestation. Thousands of acres of Tiberium. Not to mention Red Zones, completely overrun by the crystal. And Sarajevo is smack dab in the middle of a Yellow Zone. Anyway, after some anti-ion cannon structures are destroyed, the new Acting Director of GDI tells you to use the Ion Cannon on the temple, which possibly contains the LT Bomb. You do, it does, and a huge explosion utterly rapes the entire area, killing everything and everyone within a rather large radius. What about Kane, who was thought to be in the Temple? He has to be dead. Or, you know, it could be like the other two times where he's alive because he's more intelligent than every human put together (You can't kill the Messiah, why doesn't anyone learn this is beyond me). Why was the bomb there in the first place? He couldn't find a large enough detonator, so he let the GDI use the Ion Cannon as the detonator. And why did he do this? He knew it would lead the Scrin to begin harvesting Tiberium. He planned to use their portals for "ascension". In the Nod campaign, you eventually "ally" with GDI to fight the Scrin, because everyone thinks Kane is dead. Obviously none of them were around during the last wars. Anyway, he comes back and is pissed that the "new leader" is allied with GDI, so he tells you that he knows it wasn't your doing, and wants you to kill the current GDI forces your helping. Alright, that's way too much story.

Beautiful VFX. Love the Ion Cannon.

Anyway, gameplay is normal fare. Collect resources, build an army those resources, use the army to complete objectives with the occasional off-map power. I really can't go into detail because it's more or less every RTS you've ever played. There's not that much you can do with the RTS formula, you can only tweak it so much until it becomes a different beast all together (premise of CnC4 is...not very attractive to me). I've played tons of it, and that's about the last thing I can say about Tiberium Wars. Fun game. Ion Cannon looks beautiful in-game.

Miscellaneous Games and stuff.

Me overlooking a town getting hit by artillery. Killed quite a few dudes with it.

I played some Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 since it went on sale for $2.50. So far so good. I also finally got Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 on the PC. 2 was like, $10.20. I got L4D1 at the same time, then subsequently got mad at myself when it went on super-sale yesterday. They're both still really fun, though some of the people online on 2 are...assholes. I played with a friend and we ended up playing a private game with bots because of that. First time, the asshole killed all of us at the end of Dead Center before finishing the game himself. And then one yesterday, we were on a Finale (the one with the mansion and you have to wait for a boat), we wiped out three times. We were giving it another go, then a crowd mobbed me and a spitter spat at me. I ended up incapacitated since I couldn't move. Anyway, this guy playing Coach lifts me back up and we start going, then some asshole playing Nick starts shooting me for no fucking reason. He wouldn't give up either. I tried to ignore it but he kept at it, and eventually me, my friend and the other guy just left. So both of us are done, at least for a few days, with Left 4 Dead. I really wish you could block peoples profiles the way you can on 360. At least I didn't see the option to.

I also grabbed Shatter since it was $2.50 as well. Haven't played it yet though. That's really all that I've played that I can remember. I wonder what the next batch of sales will be. Like usual, this was done on almost no sleep, so there's probably spelling errors here and there. Anywho, that's it for now.

"Get some sleep!" - Dave Attell (man, I loved Insomniac).

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