13 October, 2008

Keepalive: GTA San Andreas, TGS, Titan Quest, No More Heroes

I think I've got enough GTA in me to last a while now. I was bored enough with the regular game that I started taking trucker missions. That's bored, people.

It's also the double edged sword of being a completist. The drive to see everything sometimes keeps me playing (sometimes too much), but it also burns me out sometimes. I guess that makes it a triple edged sword?

The Tokyo Game Show was last week. From my vantage point, nothing happened. Yeah, technically Microsoft announced a new Halo game, but I stopped caring at Halo 2, and the Japanese audience they showed it to never cared about Halo to begin with.

They like Monster Hunter, so much so that there were hour long lines to demo the new version, on press only days. I can only imagine how long the line got when they let the public in.

For my part, there's been lots of monster hunting... in Titan Quest. I didn't realize you were supposed to play the expansion from the beginning. I'd been missing out on many graphical and game mechanic updates, not the least of which is a storage container to let me hold items for others without cluttering up my own inventory. It's very nice.

Our first group outing was last night. There were four of us. We killed lots of stuff. Well, they killed lots of stuff. I healed and occasionally shot a few shots from my staff (which steals enemy energy to give me more healsauce). The monsters have a lot more hit points in multiplayer, so if you're not built for doing damage, it takes forever to kill something. But that's not a bad thing.

Everyone gets their moment to shine. I managed to save group members with heals many times, including one time when we basically fought an entire enemy camp at once. It was a good thing I poured virtually every skill point I had into decreasing the cooldown of the healing spell. And the dream mage, who also does a bit less damage, has auras which reduce the damage we take and add fire damage to our attacks. He also saved me with some well timed crowd control, putting some bad guys to sleep who were about to clobber me. It was fun.

Last but not least, I've been playing No More Heroes. It's a deliberately kooky action game for the Wii. I bought it a long time ago, but it took buying a nicer battery charger for me to actually want to mess with the rechargeable batteries to play the thing. I don't like wireless controllers. The lack of cord is not worth the hassle of batteries. Then again, I don't have pets and children around to trip over them, injuring themselves and breaking things.

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