written on Wednesday, May 27, 2009
I think I'm mostly done with Killing Floor single player. I've got level three in every perk except Firebug and Commando. Those perks are a pain to level and the level four (never mind five) perk requirements are insane. I saw a guy who after one week had level five Firebug. There's no way he did that legitimately. I've already discussed how grinding entered the FPS space, most notably with CoD4. But since these games aren't MMOs, there's no one to care about cheating. They've already got all the money they're going to get out of you.
There is a lot of achievement cheating in the FPS space. I see maps like Perkbuilder in the map list for Killing Floor. I've never actually gone to watch achievement farming in progress because it sounds super dull. Monsters spawn in a pit and you shoot them. In a bizarre way, I kind of respect it. They're sacrificing short term fun for longer term gain. But then they go and act like it makes them better people somehow. No. You can kill monsters better because you cheated. That's not worthy of respect. Then again, I'm not really able to respect developers who get the grind to reward ratio as wrong as Killing Floor either.
Someone on the PA boards suggested that there should have been 10 or more levels of perks so that it wouldn't be ages between seeing one. I still think the requirements for maxing them should be lower, but that would have helped. Then again, it could have been worse.
Right now most of the people in my Steam friends list are idling (just leaving their computers on) in Team Fortress 2 because Valve added unlockables that just randomly happen, completely unrelated to gameplay. Just stand around, and you get useless accessories (hats and maybe watches) to slightly customize your character. I guess Valve was feeling some pressure from EA's Battlefield Heroes, which is a free to play, simplified version of Battlefield 1942 that makes its money by selling you hats and outfits to customize your character. Plus TF2 was on sale for $10 over the weekend.
I don't know. I just know I play games to have fun or, in the case Space Invaders Extreme, to get my ass handed to me. Seriously. I started over, easy path all the way. I'm still stymied. Maybe I need to be focusing on the UFOs and getting Fever Mode more often. Maybe I need a bigger screen so that I have some idea what killed me. Maybe I just need to suck less. I don't know.
I keep dinking with Plants Vs Zombies. Mostly I play survival mode to try and unlock all the possible plants for my Zen Garden. I've got most of the day and night types. So far the kelp is the only water type I seem to get, which is pointless. I should stop. But I probably won't for a while yet. I've grown my wisdom tree to 150 feet. And I've got enough money that I could grow it to 200, but that may be the worst grind of all, because there is no indication that that will ever pay off. I should probably just check out a FAQ, see that there are no more goals I care about, and move on.
We started Lego Batman co-op last week. It's boring and lame. We have more fun horsing around, making fun of how boring the puzzles are, and making up politically incorrect names for the special suits Batman and Robin have to wear to get past the puzzles. Terror Suit Batman (who drops bombs) and Maid Service Robin (who vacuums up Lego parts) will surely have exploits that are the stuff of legend. If I had a camcorder, I'd be sorely tempted to YouTube that crap.
I'm finally pricing external hard drives to back up all my stuff so I can reformat and free up some disk space. Eventually that should lead into me being able to start my Blood video walkthrough. A quick Google search turned up instructions to get Build Engine games running under XP. So that's promising.
Heheh. Shadow Warrior.
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