You know how I said I would help you with your werewolf problem? Well you know I got to this castle and this dragon appeared and completely owned me, like four times. Not only that but I don’t seem to be able to persuade anyone of anything at the moment. So I’m going to go and deliver some messages and see if I can’t get some crowd control and tanking going on. Then I’ll see if I can’t help you with that disease that you said is going to kill your people in a couple of days.
Dragon Age has that annoying flaw of many Bioware games where the appearance of an open world is superficial and the narrative flow and sense of urgency is entirely secondary to the “game” aspect and therefore immersion is utterly wrecked.
PC Gamer this month came with Age of Conan on the disk. Magic I thought, I’ll install the client and give the endless trial a go. OMG! What a mess. I have Funcom account from the old Anarchy Online trial. Can I use that for Conan? No, can I use the same account name? No. Surely a pre-existing registration should make things easier?
Having created a new account and linked it to the old one I find out that the client is apparently not a free trial client but a full client, please uninstall and reinstall? That client downloaded 2G of data. If it goes I doubt it is going to come back quite frankly.
Oh well, never mind. What about that Warhammer Endless Trial? Oh, if you have a full Warhammer Europe account then you can’t associate it with a trial key.
Crazy. If you’ve ever played with us before, please don’t both trying to do it again.
I got Uncharted 2 for Christmas and while admiring the flashback structure of the opening of the game the sucky console combat was a bit of a blocker for me for quite a while. However at the point that you are climbing the ruined hotel the experience was something else.
The game really felt like playing an action film, only a few cronky control moments over jumps detracted from the experience. The train sequence was equally cinematic but technically I loved the fact that there is so much variety in the scenery and that the transitions (bar the train tunnel) are so subtle. It’s an amazing feat of engineering.
With the release of Mass Effect 2 I thought I should try and finish Mass Effect. I decided to buy the game on Steam and was quite impressed to discover that it could find my retail saves and load them. Rather than the rather generic Cpt. Shepherd my character is female, red hair, green eyes and a hip-hop shaved eyebrow that always makes me laugh in the closeups.
I hadn’t got very far through the game at it turns out. Still mimbling around the Citadel. The game actually sucked me in when I discovered that actually I could freely fly round space and investigate things. I was pleasantly surprised; I had been expecting a Knights of the Old Republic style experience.
Driving around planets in the buggy was also quite entertaining although frustrating as the exit vehicle button doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere (it’s Q on my machine).
It felt deliciously scary, slipping once again into the murky world of Stalker. The barking in the distance, the careful examination of approaching figures through the gun sights. The click of the Geiger counter.
I’ve only got as far as the Stalker camp in the grounded ship, even so I did manage to spend a couple of seconds suspiciously surveying croaking frogs.
So after a clean Windows 7 install (firstly unintentional, second time intentional) I have been seeing how has a sensible saved games policy and who has stuff I’m prepared to play again just to get back to where I was.
Firstly, and it shocked me, Windows Live for Games did actually save all my Dawn of War II details. Finally I get some value out of the service I was ambushed into joining.
Dragon Age merely required a directory copy from my old user directory but it did then require an age to download and install the DLC that was associated with the save game.
Machinarium was a scrub and no files to be found. Apparently it saves games in the Windows Registry. Ahem, yes, that makes… no sense whatsoever.
It also seems that I hadn’t saved my Torchlight game after the Cloud update so I had to restart, fortunately I hadn’t got that far.
So all in all I am very much in favour of being able to hook up games to a Cloud service to retrieve save game data. The question is: who do you trust to do that for you?
I have been trying to complete Dark Carnival in Single Player but it’s frustratingly hard. The bots don’t use thrown weapons or shot trap objects. I’ve managed to get far enough that the helicopter appears, however it wasn’t clear how to get onto the copter and I was swarmed to death.
I know it’s meant to be a multiplayer game but it would be nice if the game was a bit more playable offline as well.
I really wanted to play Left For Dead 2 last night. So coming home I fire up the PC, let Steam do some updating and then, bam!, a blue screen. Not uncommon, so I restart and then try to restart Steam. Then the problems begin…
Steam will not compete its update because the downloaded file is missing. Downloading the latest version from the website fails to repair the existing install so the only option is to uninstall Steam before reloading it.
Now when I uninstall Steam I will obviously be asked if I want to retain my downloaded data files or not. So one uninstall later I am 150Gb lighter in the hard drive but I can install the new version of Steam.
If the games saved their data to my User directory I might even have retained my save games.
Thanks Steam! Thanks Windows!
Now to start downloading those games again…
I decided to return to Champions for a bit on the weekend but found myself dying three times in succession. Combat is really confusing in the game and now the tutorial is a distant memory I am really struggling. I am also at the point where you are having to group and there weren’t that many people around when I logged in.
This puzzle really ruined my enjoyment of the game for a while. Partly the number of locations you have to traverse to get the various bits and pieces is too big but also there is no real logic to winning the game.
As the computer goes first, technically it should never lose. I had to read some advice on a forum about using a chequerboard pattern (basically trying to form a loose grid of x shapes) before I could get past it. Sure enough if you use the pattern and you play long enough and block any three in a row lines it forms the AI starts making some mistakes that allow to get five in a row.
It’s a shame because so much of this game is beautifully formed.
