The Clan of the Cave Bague

This is the fourth platform I’ve played FF1 on – others being SNES, PS1 and GBA. I have to say, the iPhone version is easily the best. It seems to be a straight port of the very pretty PSP version but with the added advantage of well thought out touch controls. And it’s only a fiver – considerably less than I paid for the other versions.

‘hang on’, you cry. ‘why are you playing a game you’ve already completed?’

Because it’s awesome and it’s on my phone

So, gabled Garland and I’m heading north on a crystal hunt.

OK, so I sneaked a wee go while Tristan was playing Team Fortress 2. So, having woken up in a Goomba hut, I proceeded to go looking for Grampa Goomba, fell off a building, found a hammer in a bush, thumped some blocks, thumped more Goombas, then finally met the King Goomba and thumped him too. Then I saved.

So I’m attempting to finish some games that kinda fell by the wayside after The Great Falling Out Of ‘09, and Paper Mario came top of the list. One thing I discovered along the way is that Wii Virtual Console purchases aren’t tied to your Nintendo account, they’re tied to the hardware. This means that, shiny new Wii or not, any VC purchases you’ve made need to be purchased again. Nintendo, bless them, did say that if your hardware dies at any time (even out of warranty) they’ll transfer all the purchases over for you. Seems a bit primitive for this day and age, but anyway – I digress.

So, I managed to play about 15 minutes of this last night, but that was just enough time to see that cad, Bowser, kidnapping Princess Peach – AGAIN! Honestly, the man / turtle / thing really needs to get a girlfriend.

Ok, so after spending a while playing World Of Walkcraft and watching it effectively kill the MMO, I was surprised at my interest being rekindled by the introduction of an MMO based in the Star Trek universe. So I gave it a go. I’ve only played for a few hours so far, but here’s my thoughts:

My character is currently a Lieutenant 4th Class of a little starship called the USS Enlightenment. Right there is where the game differs from all other MMOs. You have a character which you have to level up, equip, train and so on. So far so good. You also have to do the same for your ship and your bridge team. Each player in the system is in fact a little squad.  My ‘primary’ character is actually a Science Officer and I have (so far) two bridge crew – an Engineering Officer and a Tactical Officer.

Each officer type is subclassed, providing your standard ranged DPS, healers, debuffers, facemelters etc through the types of technology they’re skilled in. This largely applies to ground based combat. For space combat, different officer skills come into play – expertise in rapid power adjustment, ability to co-ordinate photon torpedo scatters, that kind of thing.

As a result of this, a ground mission involving multiple players can seem very large scale as each player is assisted by an away team comprising chosen members of their bridge crew and one or more security officers.

That’s the basic player / party mechanic, but what do you do? Well, let’s take a couple of random missions. I accepted two – firstly to do a routine patrol of four star systems and, secondly, to escort a Vulcan historian to a temple. So, I beam onto my little ship, request clearance, and warp to sector space. This puts my little ship on a digital representation of the whole sector of space, with lots of systems at different heights / depths above the galactic plane. You really get a feel for the vastness of the game universe at this point. Pull up a star map, and warp to the first location on my patrol.

Approaching the first location, I get a distress signal from a freighter and enter the system to help out. I find the freighter soon enough, crippled in an asteroid field and under attack from Orion Attack ships. I take care of the ships easily enough – by keeping broadside to them, I can hit with both front and rear phaser banks, taking down the shields rapidly. A couple of photon torpedoes later and they’re gone.

Scanning the freighter reveals that the crew are around but so are some Orion boarders. The ship is venting plasma and appears to have multiple leaks. So, I put together an away team and beam down to the ship. I’m taking my tactical guy to do damage, myself doing ranged DPS and my engineer doing buffs and explosives. Oh, and a couple of ill-fated red shirts.

In the freighter, it quickly becomes apparent that the crew are unconscious and the place is crawling with bad guys. I fight my way through them, shutting down a couple of plasma leaks on the way. Quick tricorder scan revealed that the warp core was about to go foom, so headed to egineering. Found the freighter captain there with a couple of guys trying to stabilise it. The captain asked me to get them clear of the warp core while he tried to stabilise and get them off the ship. So, fought my way through more beaming-in Orions with the crew in tow, collected as many survivors as possible and got clear of the ship before it went foom.

Sadly, once back on board the Enlightenment, an Orion battlecruiser had turned up. This ship is considerably bigger than I’m equipped to handle, so a quick call to Starfleet was required. Managed to hold them off for a few minutes by some clever shield powerboosting until the cavalry arrived in the form of a couple of Galaxy class starships and a few extra players. Bad guys defeated, crew rescued, time to move on to the next hop of the patrol.

A quick one, this – miners are on strike and a bit of diplomacy is needed. This one was a fun, talky, mission so I’m not gonna spoil it.

Back to the next patrol hop and it appears we have a major Klingon invasion going on in this system – there are half a dozen player ships in the area and a team is quickly formed. There’s a range of Klingon attack ship, Bird of Prey, and battle cruisers, and the fight is seriously tough. A few of the players, initially at least, seemed to be thinking in a ‘planar’ way, but once they got the hang of the 3D combat, the sky lit up like a Pink Floyd concert. Phasertastic!

And that’s all I’m gonna right for now cos I’m knackered!

Ok, so it’s been a while since I’ve done any kind of game diary post but that’s largely because I haven’t been playing anything except Left4Dead and Counterstrike and I don’t think any of you really want to read a post that just says ‘BOOM! Headshot!’.

Then Dragon Age came along and, well, it’s a bit good. It’s been tagged as the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate and I can see where they got that idea. It’s party-based, full of things to gank, and heaving with numerous side-quests. It’s kinda like WoW but without the tedious grinding, irritating social aspects, and monthly subscription.

It is also brimming with truly epic events that make you feel like you’re involved in a much greater storyline. Oh, and it has zombies. Who ganked me last night. Girr!

Hasn’t been much point in updating my Game Diary of late as I’ve not really been playing very many games, with the exception of PSU.

I’m a long-standing fan of the Phantasy Star series and managed to run up a bit of a monster phone bill playing the DreamCast incarnation. The 360 version is just more of the same, and that’s a good thing. I haven’t actually ventured online with it yet, because for the first time, PSU provides a fairly lengthy offline compaign.

OK, so it’s not the prettiest game in the platform and suffers from the odd bit of inexcusable slowdown, but hey – it’s Phantasy Star – it would be ACE in ASCII.

Well, it’s been out a good couple of years now, but I’ve finally finished Half-Life 2 – and it was completely awesome, if incomprehensible. I still have no idea what any of it was about, but I had a lot of fun not knowing.

High Points:

1. Pitched battles with Striders in the streets – I hadn’t found the infinite rocket launcher ammo supply crate, so had to do it with what I could scavange. Very intense.
2. Rampaging through Nova Prospekt with an army of Antlions helping out.
3. The gravity gun becoming an uber-powerful singularity gun in the last chapter.

All in all, an awesome game.

God, I love this game. My main character (on Karak Izor, if anyone’s interested) is a Black Orc called Barukadur (I think the spelling is correct). He behaves the way a Black Orc should and basically thumps anything that gets in the way and is quite happy to change routes to make sure things get in the way if they’re stunties.

Anyway, I’ve found the whole setting to be so wholly immersive that my playstyle has moved from ‘thoughtful and strategic WoW style’ to ‘behave like a black orc’. For example, having just ganked a specific dwarf for a quest, I had to leave the area. In order to leave the area, I had to pass through a group of dwarves. The WoW player in me was still working out the route that would draw aggro from the fewest dwarves when the Black Orc part of my brain kicked in and charged straight at the nearest one, and then ran around the whole area pulling them all at once and then, with a train of eight or nine dwarves one level higher than me all chasing, stopped turned, WAAAAAAGHed and beat the crap out of the whole lot of them

Of course, I could have been back at the base a lot quicker if I hadn’t just picked a twenty minute fight for no good reason. But I’m an Orc! It’s what I do!

As I said. I love this game.

Starcraft / Broodwars.

It’s got me again.

Frederic Chopin lies on his deathbed dreaming his final dream. And for some peculiar reason, he’s dreaming about cutesy Anime characters fighting monsters and trying to save the world from the taxman!

If this is an indication of where RPGs are going, then I’m a very happy bunny. The storytelling is beautiful, as is the presentation. The audio is rich, the voice acting (with the possible exception of the terminally irritating Polka) is spot on, and the combat mechanic is both innovate and solid.

Ok, so I’ve barely done the prelude – I have two seperate parties at the moment, but as both have just decided to head to Castle Forte, I suspect I’m going to have one larger party very soon.

And – hooray! At each major interlude, it unlocks one of Chopin’s piano pieces which can be listened to outwith the game. Not that I don’t already have them on other media, but – well – if it brings his music to a new audience, then that can only be a good thing. Personally, I’m hoping the second movement of Piano Concerto #1 makes an appearance, but I think it may just be unaccompanied works.