Askgar

As per usual, again I won’t be repeating my facebook games as there is only one way to say “I played this game”.

DDO

I decided to drop into DDO and see how things were getting on, check out some of the  festival events again and also check to see if any of the items I’ve picked up over time are worth anything.  It turned out that I have another couple of items that are worth reasonably large amounts of gold but, due to a mistake in the system, my account is marked as free when it should be premium and as such I can only list 1 item on the AH at a time.  I stuck one of the items up and will do the other whenever I remember to check.

As well as putting an item on the AH I also joined up with another guild member and we ended up doing a few quests, mostly on hard mode and mainly for rep.  This was good fun although it does make me realise that voice chat does make things easier in this game.

Brutal Legend

I picked this game up a couple of weeks ago along with Borderlands for £20 and part of me wishes I’d picked it up sooner.  It is a very fun game, a little repetative although with enough variety (at least for me) to stop it from becoming boring.

I had just started on what I consider the second 1/2 of the game (people who have played the game will understand what I mean but I won’t say anything to prevent spoilers.  I completed a few missions today and got nearer to the end (it feels like there are only a couple of missions left now), as well as doing my usual, complete all of the side missions when they become available.  I still have a lot of other side bits to do (collectable type tasks) but because these aren’t easily finable on the map I am likely to leave these and find a guide or map somewhere to get these later on.

One final thing to mention about Brutal Legend is the soundtrack and cast of the game, most of the characters in game are modelled on heavy metal “stars”, such as Ozzy Osbourne and Lemmy, and has Jack Black voicing, and essentially starring as the main character.  The soundtrack is also “metal” with, according to wikipedia, more than one hundred metal songs, these really do fit the game world very well, and my favourite piece of music had to be the first “defend the bus” mission which played “Through the Fire and Flames” by Dragonforce, it really suited the mission well.

Anyway, thats the end of my game playing for day 6, look out tomorrow for the final part of “blog-a-day”.

As per usual I won’t repeat my facebook games, they’ve been the same as usual.

DDO

After spending almost an hour trying to get my new laptop to work with mumble, a problem which seems to be related to trying to use a microphone with the new laptop which I cannot seem to fix easily, I gave up and got out my old laptop, which works fine.

Tonight I started out by having one of our guild members try running me around the travelers egg hunt to get the “ultimate” reward, we did one dry run, which didn’t go great because I didn’t have the buffs, then we made 2 real attempts, in which both times I forgot a couple of parts and got to the end with only rank 4.  Both of these got me some mediocre gifts and so we stopped there and met up with the rest of the group (11 of us).

We split into 2 groups, a 6 and a 5, and first tried Gwylan’s Stand.  This was a mixed mission with lots of traps, various enemier, and various parts.  It was all going well until we went to a chest which was protected by traps that could not be disabled, the traps one shot a number of us, and there went 1/2 of our party.  We had occasional other deaths as we went along but it wasn’t too bad, most were when we over aggroed and we usually recovered well.  Our ranger was in full on sniper mode, killing some things well before the melee characters could get near.

After this we moved onto Stormcleave Outpost, this mission contained a lage number of giants but much more dangerously one of our party bought an iron defender.  This doesn’t sound like a problem but when we were fighting on a pipe bridge the defender dumped down grease and 2 of us slid off the bridge uncontrollably, into a pit of 7 or 8 scorpions.  Once we’d done that the mission went pretty uneventfully, we killed loads of trolls, minotaurs and giants, and when we came accross kobalds I had somewhat of a red mist and one hit all of them.

After these two missions we went to the tavern for some brawling (free for all PvP), I was eager to test out my newest setup on one of our members (who actually bought/crafted me the weapon) and given me lots of advice.  It turns out that 1 on 1 it tends to be a pretty even fight, if I get knocked over then I spam lay on hands until I get up and it casts (hopefully) healing me up before I die.  Other than that I just use all of my skills (tripping, power attack, divine sacrafice) until, hopefully, they will fall over.  If they run then I chase after them swinging my sword, hopefully attacks will connect and they will go down.

The only problem that I, and everyone else had, was our wizard who could throw out fireballs that would deal 200 damage in an AoE, even with my resist fire spell on it was still doing 180 damage, enough to kill me twice over.  At one point we got 5 of us together and had the wizard throw a fireball, 3 went down and 2 were on low health, even with a lay on hands and a few attacks on him I still got killed with a 200 damage fireball.

Just before logging off I insisted on having another try at the egg collecting so off we went again, being buffed up and running off with my last token… only to realise that I didn’t have featherfall on and failed early on.  We tried to recover but it didn’t happen.  At this point I was determined so I went to the store and spent 80 points on 5 more attempts.  First try, fully buffed and featherfalled this time and I… fell off the wrong place, so my guide adapted the route and we ran around a different way and completed it with the ultimate gift.  I used my blessing that I had been given free and got a rod of teleportation.  It doesn’t seem to be that useful for me but at the end of the day it only cost me 80 points and I still have 4 more attempts for some time.

Thanks everyone for the game and appologies for the late post, but we finished at 12.30am and I didn’t really have time to finish the post.

Tonight I hope for a few different games, maybe some PS3 and possibly some DDO as well.

Well, I missed 2 days but that was mainly because I got a new laptop on wednesday and spent time setting it up.  On both days I played the usual facebook games (see days 1 and 2) and I also logged into DDO on Day 4.

DDO

I only really logged into DDO to see how it looked but ended up deciding to go an do a mission.  I took advantage of the new casual difficulty mode and completed a level 7 (my level) mission on my own.  It was quite fun, other than missing one box and having to go back and find it at the end, and it was just the right difficulty for me, I never died but came close a couple of times, there were traps and lots of bosses and some areas with a large number of enemies but only once did I feel overwhelmed, and that was when I ran into a room without paying attention.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll remember to post at the end of day 5, you can look forward to a writeup of DDO night and ermmm, thats probably it.

Had a less than pleasent day today, and a bad internet connection at the pub I’m staying in doesn’t help, so a very short one today.

Guild Wars

Tuesday comes and it is time for Guild Wars with the Tuesday Noob Club, unfortunately because of my terrible internet connection when I was able to be in Guild Wars my pings often were above 10k ms and as such, unplayable.  It also didn’t help that my voice connection was so flakey that people could barely hear me, and vice-versa.

The only thing I did in game today was to purchase a Celestial Tiger for someone in the guild who had asked me to get them one, I got it cheaper than expected so all was good… except the bad connection that is.

Facebook

I described the games I play on facebook yesterday and there is little point in me saying the same things again.  I did notice that one of the members of my “raid group” in Ghost Trappers had left, so I now need to recruit a new member, but other than that nothing changed.

Hopefully I will have a more interesting post tomorrow but I wouldn’t recommend anyone getting their hopes up.

Today I’ve played a total of 6 “games”, I’ll go through them in the order I played each one.

Mirror’s Edge

The first game I played today, I started playing this last week after having purchased it VERY cheap on steam a while ago and finally getting it downloaded.

Mirror’s Edge is a very interesting game, mainly based on free running but with occasional chases from armed “blues” and occasionally a helicopter.  The free running itself is fun, but having to do this while being chased is often frustrating, one slip and you’re dead.  During today’s session I had a particularly nasty section where I was being constantly ambushed by “blues”, it took me 10+ attempts to complete this and I very nearly gave up.  I eventually completed it then got stuck on a section where I lost a large amount of progress after falling off a crane.  I gave up at this point and moved onto my next game for today due mainly to frustration…

Evil Genius

Similarly to Mirror’s Edge I purchased this a while ago from steam during one of their infamous sales.

I played a little of this game and found it a little fun, but rather confusing.  I get the feeling that I need to sink a bit more time into the game and get the hang of it a bit more, it seemed very slow and didn’t keep my attention for very long.

Super Laser Racer

I discovered this on steam and decided to give the demo a quick try.  It is a simplistic racing game, a bit like a 2D version of Wipeout, with the graphics style of Geometry Wars.  It kept me amused for about 5 minutes but seemed very shallow and as such I decided to remove the demo and will not be purchasing the game.

Mouse Hunt and Ghost Trappers

The final three games I played today are all Facebook games, with these 2 falling into the category of “passive” games.  I will cover these in more detail in the future, however the basic premise is you set up the game and then every X minutes (often between 10 and 15) you can do an action (in this case hunt a mouse/ghost).

I often play these in the background while doing other things, although never while working I must add, and they only require attention every 10-20 minutes, with no real consequence if I forget for an hour or 2 (or 12).

There was no notable progress made in either of the games today, with me being a couple of weeks away from the next upgrade in Ghost Trappers and trying to build up stockpiles of gold in Mouse Hunt so I can go hunting for one of the most powerful mice in the game (the Acolyte).

Castle Age

The final game for today is Castle Age, this is of the “Mafia Wars” style, you spend a certain amount of energy to undertake a “quest”, which gives you XP and money.  Each level you gain points to spend on skills, and the money can be spent on new weapons, armour, “soldiers” and land.  Castle Age includes some more advanced features, more commonly seen in MMOs, such as raiding and epic monsters, requiring teamwork to kill.

I helped out on someones raid today, and did a few quests to level up, however nothing notable really happened.  I will post a more detailed analysis of Castle Age at some point as well as the “passive” games detailed about.

Tomorrow I will continue my week of blogging, detailing what I do, and possibly posting a small analysis of anything I come across.

I an attempt to kick start blogging again this week I plan on writing one blog post each day.  Unless I come up with anything special to say these will simply be a list of what I played that day, and a slight analysis of some elements of it.

Oh, and for anyone following this who notices me “fall behind” (no post by 11pm for example), feel free to prompt me on twitter (@askgar), or any other way you know.

I’ll hopefully have the first post up in the next couple of hours and I hope to keep this up for the week, I doubt it will continue past that but hopefully it will get me back into blogging and there will be some more frequent updates in future.