Keepalive: The Witcher, Alien vs Predator, King's Bounty, Torchlight, Shattered Steel

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, January 21, 2010

I haven't been good about taking screen shots. My apologies.

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I've tried to get back into The Witcher. There's a slow patch right after the tutorial area, and the game's been crashing. I read that I needed a particular version of the .NET framework, and it's appeared to help, but I haven't played enough to be confident.

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In anticipation of the upcoming Alien vs Predator game, the original was sold for $5 on Steam. It's amazing what passed for great games back then. The objectives and navigation are horrific. Death comes instantly and there's no checkpoint system. I often ignore video game stories, but the "story" in AvP is so meager and bad that even I was forced to take notice. The idea that this game came out two years after Half-Life hurts my brain.

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I decided to give King's Bounty a quick look. It's so much Heroes of Might and Magic that it's hard to see any other influence. And I never found those games very interesting. I could see the strategies. I could learn. But victory never felt special. I was beating simple AI by bringing the right units or just having more of them. I've heard the game gets very silly later on. We'll see.

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Listening to podcasts is Torchlight time. My game has finally recovered from the use of a dungeon scroll. The shops sell scrolls which take you to bonus dungeons. My bonus dungeon was well above my level. As a result, when I went back to the main quest, it felt pretty pointless as monsters weren't giving much XP or dropping any worthwhile loot because I was too high level for them. But even now that I've caught up, the loot seems seriously lacking. I'm level 20 and I'm having a hard time finding weapons better than my level 12 gear. But I'm just using it as virtual knitting, so it doesn't matter if my loot lust has waned.

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I gave Shattered Steel a spin on the old 2001 PC. Once patched, it plays fine. It's really bizarre to see that this game from 1996 supported multiple kinds of 3D. When wasn't 3D the next big thing in gaming?

I think I'll take a week off from walkthroughs before I start it up in earnest. It's good to recharge the batteries and give folks a little time to miss you once in a while.