Author: Jeremy Voss

Musician, wanna-be writer, suburban husband and father. I'll occasionally tweet from @couchshouts. You can find me on XBL, PSN and Steam as JervoNYC.

inferno and beyond

Is it OK that I’m dwelling solely on Diablo 3 these days?  I don’t know whether it’s worse to be repetitive, or to simply not post at all.

I beat Hell last night and got about 10 minutes into Inferno before going to bed.  I’m tempted to replay Hell’s Act 4 again, though, because I’d inadvertently signed off literally one checkpoint before going into the final boss the previous night, and so when I killed Diablo the loot was, to put it kindly, underwhelming.  The quality of stuff you get when you’ve got 5 stacks of Nephalem Valor (heretofore “5NV”) can’t be denied, even if the vast majority of it remains unusable – but I’d also replay Act 4 with 5NV if only to scrounge up more gold, which can add up pretty goddamned quickly.

I’ve softened my stance on the Auction House.  I was previously angered that the AH was more or less a necessity in order to make any significant progress; instead, now I’m thinking of it as a different kind of in-game vendor.  Which is basically what it is.  I think my total playtime is around 64 hours  – I think the last time I picked up an in-game loot drop that was worth holding onto was about 30 hours ago.   The stuff I’ve found on the AH is profoundly more powerful, and can be very reasonably priced.  All I do now during runs is sell, sell, salvage, sell.  And I’ve more or less given up on making anything with the Blacksmith – he’s been far more miss than hit when it comes to making something with Monk-appropriate stats, and it’s too expensive to experiment.   (Likewise, I’d love to craft more of the super-high-end gems, but those require so much gold that it’s possibly more cost efficient to look for them on the AH.)

Once I finish Inferno, I’m not entirely sure I’ll keep playing.  Blizzard themselves have admitted that the end-game is, in its current state, a bit underwhelming:

We recognize that the item hunt is just not enough for a long-term sustainable end-game. There are still tons of people playing every day and week, and playing a lot, but eventually they’re going to run out of stuff to do (if they haven’t already). Killing enemies and finding items is a lot of fun, and we think we have a lot of the systems surrounding that right, or at least on the right path with a few corrections and tweaks. But honestly Diablo III is not World of Warcraft. We aren’t going to be able to pump out tons of new systems and content every couple months. There needs to be something else that keeps people engaged, and we know it’s not there right now.

We’re working toward 1.0.4, which we’re really trying to pack with as many fixes and changes we can to help you guys out (and we’ll have a bunch of articles posted with all the details as we get closer), and we’re of course working on 1.1 with PvP arenas. I think both those patches will do a lot to give people things to do, and get them excited about playing, but they’re not going to be a real end-game solution, at least not what we would expect out of a proper end-game. We have some ideas for progression systems, but honestly it’s a huge feature if we want to try to do it right, and not something we could envision being possible until well after 1.1 which it itself still a ways out.

(That’s as far as I read in the thread, by the way – the Diablo 3 forums are filled with perhaps the most horrible, vile people on Earth.)

 

idiocy in action

Let me explain.

I’ve said repeatedly that my normal approach to playing RPGs is to play as a Barbarian/Tank/melee fighter.  When I started Diablo 3, however, I decided to switch it up and try the Monk class – it seemed to be an interesting mix of melee combat with support magic.  And for a long time – probably right up to beating the game on Nightmare difficulty – everything was going fine.

Sort of.  Towards the beginning of the Nightmare run, I – for reasons yet unknown – switched from fist weapons to two-handed staffs and daibos.  I was hitting much harder, but also a bit slower, but I felt the trade-off was worth it.

And then I started playing Hell difficulty, and was getting the shit kicked out of me by elite mobs.  It got to the point where, like I said in the last post, I started up two new characters just to avoid having to go back and deal with what I clearly couldn’t deal with.  And then I bought a legendary two-handed weapon (and some better armor) in the auction house and decided to replay Act 1 of Hell, and things started to go a little better – not much, but I wasn’t dying all the time.

My 2nd run of Act 1 of Hell was a goddamned cakewalk compared to Act II, though – I was still getting crushed left and right, and I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong.

And then I suddenly remembered that I was playing my Monk like a Barbarian.

I quickly bought some insanely powerful one-handed weapons in the auction house, switched up my skills (more specifically, I got rid of Mystic Ally and put Seven-Sided Strike back in) and started ripping the shit out of everything.  I basically re-ran Act II and got through the first third of Act III dying only once, hitting Level 60 in the process.

Fuck and yes.

* * *

Now, here’s the thing.  I didn’t even open up the Auction House until I started Hell difficulty, but there was absolutely no way I could survive more than 10 minutes of Act 1 of Hell without going to the Auction House.  I’ve forgotten how many hours I’ve put into the game, but I’m sure it’s somewhere between 60-80 hours, and in that time, I’ve had to throw away (or salvage) about 98% of all the loot I’ve picked up.  I’ve taken the Forge guy and the Gem guy up to their maximum levels, but the Forge guy is wildly inconsistent with the stuff he makes for me – I almost always have to junk it because it’s got the wrong specs.  (The Gem guy, on the other hand, is absurdly cheap – until the last three levels of construction, where it costs 30K + Tomes of Secrets (which I’ve only found on the Auction House) just to make 1 gem.)

I kinda think that’s insane.  That in 60-80+ hours, I’ve only been able to use maybe 2% of the stuff I’ve picked up.   That the only possible way I could continue to succeed in the game is to use the Auction House, where I’m seeing stuff that is so absurdly better than the stuff I’d seen in-game that I wonder if I’m playing a different game entirely.  I mean, I don’t mind spending the gold – it would’ve gone to an in-game vendor (although the stuff they sell is pretty terrible, too), but it’s just a little bit nuts that the usable drop rates are so stingy.

(Of course, now that I’ve hit level 60 and had my first experience with the Nephalem Valor buff – and picked up some serious loot in the process – maybe now I’m seeing where all the stuff in the auction house comes from.  I still haven’t had a need for any of the loot I’ve picked up, but at least I can get some decent resale value for it – or, alternately, I can salvage it for my Forge guy.  I might just alternate runs going forward – I’ll fill up my inventory once to sell, and then fill it up again to salvage.  And if I find something useful, well, hooray for me.)

summertime blues (and yellows)

I haven’t felt much of an urge to write lately, and that’s mostly because I haven’t really been doing all that much, game-wise, beyond Diablo 3.  And what, ultimately, is there to say about Diablo 3, anyway?  I’ve gotten to the point where I’m playing it with the sound off and Spotify on, because the act of clicking mindlessly through levels you’ve already been in a dozen times requires a different sort of aural stimulation.

My monk just hit level 57 last night.  It was not an easy road.  After finishing the game on Nightmare with relative ease, I immediately restarted the game on Hell, and found myself dying repeatedly, constantly, by those elite molten mobs with jail/freeze abilities and those goddamned fucking arcane sentry laser beams, which are the bane of my goddamned existence.  I struggled mightily to finish Act 1, found that Act 2 was even harder, and decided to take a little break.

I started up 2 new characters – a Demon Hunter (who’s now at level 12 or so) and a Barbarian (level 5 or 6), just to see the differences.  I may have said this before – normally, when I play any sort of RPG, I tend to pick the Barbarian/Tank character, but for whatever reason I picked a Monk in D3, and after messing with those two other classes, I still feel that for the most part I made the right choice – the Monk is quick and agile, has useful healing abilities, and has some very effective magic spells.

Here’s my current Monk build (I think this is right):

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/monk#WeXijS!YcU!ccYYcY

Anyway, after getting bored with Normal difficulty, I decided to get back to the Monk.  I went to the Auction House and picked up a pretty amazing weapon, and restarted Act 1.  And whaddya know, suddenly I was kicking the shit out of everything and everyone.  I don’t know if it’s the new weapon, or that I restarted Act 1 at level 56 instead of level 54, but whatever it is, I’m plowing through it with great aplomb.  (I think I’ve only died once so far, actually, and that was due to a lost internet connection.)

——–

Beyond that, there’s not a tremendous amount to report…

  • I’m not nearly as addicted to Pocket Planes as I’d thought I’d be, although it’s still a suitable distraction on the subway…
  • The Xbox and PS3 have been collecting dust, for the most part – I did rent Dirt Showdown, which was sort-of fun (although in order to do multiplayer I would’ve need to buy an online pass, which I wasn’t really inclined to do), and I also rented last year’s Vanquish solely because the guys on the Giant Bombcast were gushing over it – it didn’t do that much for me, I’m afraid.
  • I downloaded Cthulhu Saves the World  last night for my iPad (though I haven’t yet had a chance to mess with it); and then I saw that Cthulhu: The Wasted Land was available for free – I’d heard some decent things about it.  So at least my iPad is full-up with Lovecraftian goodness.
  • Also downloaded Magic 2013 for the iPad, although I’ve never played Magic in my life.  My wife has, though, and she watched over my shoulder as I tried the tutorial.  It’s a beautiful-looking game, but it’s also very complicated, and I ended up bailing on the tutorial because our dinner had arrived, and I don’t know that I’ll get back to it.  (It was a free download, though, so I didn’t necessarily lose anything beyond some hard drive space.)

Subway Gamer: airplane edition

I’m leaving tomorrow for a mini-vacation – a wedding followed by 2.5 days in Orlando – and since I’m not the best air traveler in the world (though I’ve gotten much better), I’ve been stocking up on iOS diversions to help keep my anxiety in check.  Likewise, there’s bound to be some downtime during this trip, so I’ll need some stuff to keep me occupied.

Here, then, is a quick rundown of what I’ll be checking out over the next few days:

Pocket Planes:  Nimblebit’s followup to the insanely addicting Tiny Tower arrived late last night, and I’ve become arguably even more hooked on PP than I was on TT.  Instead of building an endless skyscraper, you are gradually building an airline.  Right now, I’ve got 5 or 6 planes ferrying people and cargo along a narrow corridor in the Northeastern US (on my iPhone, at least – my iPad game is starting out in South America), and soon I’ll be buying airports in the Midwest and beyond.  It’s engaging, it’s non-stressful, it’s got the same charming 8-bit art style that TT had, and it’s FREE – and not in that annoying way where it’s technically free but you have to shell out real $$ in order to actually get anywhere.  Free, Universal

Temple Run: Brave:  Imangi’s follow-up to its mega-hit Temple Run, now with Pixar branding for its forthcoming film.  It is pretty much the exact same game as the original, except with better graphics and an “archery mini-game” which really just requires you to tap on archery targets as you run past them.   It’s a little awkward, but it does mix things up a bit.  $.99, Universal

Air Mail:  A truly gorgeous 3D flying/exploration game, reminiscent of Crimson Skies (but without the combat, at least so far).  It’s a little aimless at times, but it’s also one of the best-looking games on the new iPad.  $4.99, Universal

Defender Chronicles 2:  I’m not much for tower defense games, but this has been getting great reviews… $2.99, Universal

And of course, lots of 8-Bit Ninja, Spellsword and Fairway Solitaire.

E3 2012: final thoughts

Before I get into E3, I suppose I should explain last week’s unexpected (and unintentional) silence here.  During the first half of the week, my office’s internet was totally screwed up, and it was impossible to post.  During the second half of the week, however, I was beset by a particularly vicious head cold, and the last goddamned thing I wanted to do was think about putting words together that described bright lights and loud noises.

Indeed, about the only thing I did get up to during my weekend of death was to plow through Diablo 3 on Nightmare difficulty, which I managed to finish Sunday evening, just in time for Mad Men.  My monk, Lolily, is now at level 51, and I’ve sunk just over 39 hours into the game.   I must confess that right before I started Act 4, I did buy an incredibly powerful weapon in the auction house – not with real money, though, just in-game currency, which I’d been hoarding for no particular reason.  (To this point, the only times I’ve spent any gold in-game is when I’ve either had to fix my equipment or when I’ve trained my blacksmith and my jeweler, both of whom were as high as they could be until I unlocked Hell difficulty, where Tomes of Crafting began to drop.)  This was done partly because (a) I wasn’t looting anything particularly good up to that point, which was frustrating, and (b) I was getting a little tired of the game and wanted to plow through to the end.  The weapon I bought had a buyout price of 50,000G, which was fine enough with me; it boosted both my Vitality and Damage stats over 1000 points over my current weapon, which is something that’s hard to say no to.   I thought that it might break the game a little for me, but the truth is that my internet connection is still wonky, and so there were a number of times where the game just straight-up froze (thus resulting in death by an unsween swarm), and still other times where the game’s stuttering performance meant that the teleporting enemies who could also freeze me in place pretty much had their way with me at all times.   This is all to say that while I have an incredibly powerful weapon now – a weapon that I’m not sure I’ll need to replace – I still have my regular, non-spiffy armor, which just barely gets the job done; I still die from time to time.

Anyway.

It’s hard for me to comment on this year’s E3, being that my means of intake were generally limited to Giant Bomb’s absurdly long 4-hour podcasts and 20-minute video recaps of each day’s activities.   Every press outlet more or less covered the same ground, and being that my head was swimming in mucous, I could pretty much only handle one source at a time.  (This is why I am still a part-time blogger and not a professional journalist.)   I’d scan my Google Reader every hour or so, see that there were 70 articles about the same thing, and then I’d sneeze a dozen times and then close my eyes.

Still, even with my limited information and access, the general theme of the press at large  all seemed to agree on some variation of the theme that this E3 was dumb, unnecessary, uninspiring, fundamentally broken, etc.  There are several pretty obvious reasons for this, though, and I suspect that 2013’s events are going to be much, much different.

  1. It’s been said for a while now – we’re at the end of this console cycle, and developers/publishers are very reluctant to show off new IP this late in the game.  The fact that we saw as much new IP as we did (The Last of Us, Watch Dogs, Beyond) was pretty amazing, especially since all three of those games look really, really promising.
  2.  E3 doesn’t quite mean the same thing that it did a few years ago.  Back in the day, it was THE ONLY event that mattered; the internet didn’t leak quite so quickly as it does now; video streaming was ugly and impractical; the discerning gamer basically just read lots of stories and looked at tons of screenshots.  Now, though, it’s simply one event of seemingly dozens – PAX and PAX EAST seem to be just as important, and then there’s CES and Tokyo and Germany and all the rest.  Meanwhile, the internet’s caught up and so now we have high-quality video streams and commercial-free live TV feeds of keynote speeches and there’s all this HYPE and POMP; it’s just caught up at the wrong time, is all.  I guarantee that when Microsoft and Sony announce their new consoles at next spring’s 2013, we’ll forget all about this little bump in the road.

I still haven’t seen Sony’s keynote, so I can’t comment on it (other than that I keep hearing that they said pretty much nothing about the Vita, which is a big, big mistake).  I saw bits and pieces of Microsoft’s keynote – it wasn’t the horrible embarrassment that some people called it, though it certainly was a bit underwhelming.  SmartGlass seems like a way to keep a step ahead of the WiiU – as someone who is fiercely addicted to his iPad, I certainly plan on putting it through its paces – but it’s not a game-changer.  The games they announced were, more or less, more of the same; I think it’s fair to say that Microsoft’s first-party lineup leaves a lot to be desired, at least when compared to Sony.  I did end up watching Nintendo’s keynote (since I was home, sick), and I’m not sure I know what I saw.  There seemed to be genuine animosity between Reggie and the poor bastard who had 5 minutes to talk about the 3DS, and that guy’s 3DS spiel spent more time talking about how little time he had to talk instead of actually talking about things that mattered.  I don’t know that it’s fair for me to talk about Nintendo, anyway; they clearly don’t care about me, and I stopped giving a shit about their first-party IP a long time ago.  (I gave my Wii to my mother-in-law with zero regrets; indeed, when she expressed interest in getting one for herself, I suddenly saw a golden opportunity to get rid of the thing.)  Still, though, I was ready to be wowed by the WiiU, especially given my vulnerable state, and I was completely and utterly underwhelmed.  Nintendoland?  Really?  A shittier version of Playstation Home?  Fantastic, well done.

Highlights of the show include:

  • South Park RPG
  • The Last of Us (Uncharted post-apocalypse)
  • Beyond (Heavy Rain 2.0)
  • Criterion:  Need For Speed Most Wanted reboot
  • Tomb Raider
  • Star Wars 1313 (everyone seems to say that this is a next-gen game)
  • Watch Dogs
  • Lego City: Undercover (if this is a WiiU exclusive, I will be bummed)

Other notable games that I have knee-jerk, ill-informed opinions of:

  • Halo 4 (at least they’re trying something new – and the graphics look great)
  • new Gears of War (developed by People Can Fly)
  • Forza Horizon (what is this?  some sort of DiRT clone?)
  • new God of War (meh)
  • Elder Scrolls Online (this seems to be the consensus winner for Most Disappointing of E3)
  • Far Cry 3 (didn’t see the trailer since it’s NSFW, but I don’t care)
  • Crysis 3 (didn’t see the trailer since I don’t care)
  • Assassin’s Creed 3 (hoping for the best)
  • Splinter Cell reboot (looks a lot like Assassin’s Creed: Future Soldier)

Did anyone see Borderlands 2?  That’s a big title for me for later this year, and I’m not sure I read anything about it, although that’s certainly something I could fix with a quick Google search, although I’m not going to.  Maybe they’re focusing on the final push to the finish and didn’t show at all?  (Bioshock Infinite wasn’t there at the show, either, as far as I know.)

Here’s what I was hoping to learn at this year’s E3:

  • a release date for GTA5  (none given)
  • some sort of acknowledgement that The Last Guardian isn’t dead. (sort-of acknowledged)
  • a solid holiday release schedule for the Vita (if there was one, I missed it)
  • a solid holiday release schedule for the 3DS (see above)

We’re clearly in for a much stronger 2013 than I was anticipating, so that’s something to get excited about.

In the meantime, I will continue to click the shit out of monsters in Diablo 3.  I think I may need a new mouse, actually…

E3:2012 keynote impressions

[It appears that the office internet seems to be functioning somewhat normally today!]

Normally, E3 is an exciting time; a glorious week where I spend every free moment frantically refreshing Google Reader and doing the arcane mental calculus required to make sure I have enough money saved up to buy all the things that need to be bought.

(*apologies to Hyperbole and a Half)

But I’ve been saying for a while that I had pretty low expectations for this year’s E3; I never thought it was going to be all that exciting.  Most developers are seemingly reluctant to release new and exciting IP this close to the end of the current generation, and the console developers themselves can’t really reinvent the wheel at their keynotes at this stage of the cycle, either.  Nintendo has the WiiU to push; that’s really about it, as far as hardware.

Even so, it’s hard not to be totally underwhelmed by this year’s keynotes.  I was really hoping Sony would be able to sell me a Vita; did they even mention the Vita, beyond COD:BLOPS2 and AssCreed3?  Likewise, Nintendo went to great lengths to say that they could only spend about 5 minutes on the 3Ds during their presentation, and most of the 3DS section was spent apologizing for their lack of presentation time, rather than maximizing what they had.   Microsoft’s “SmartGlass” thing sounds intriguing, but it also seems mostly like a way to render the WiiU’s new tablet controller irrelevant; and in any event, the only big exclusive stuff they have coming out this year is the usual – Halo 4, Gears, and whatever that Forza Horizon thing turns out to be.

If anything, I do have to give Sony a lot of credit for not totally giving up on new IP – I’m really intrigued by Beyond and The Last of Us, both of which have been picking up a lot of positive buzz.  (Not as sold on the new God of War game, though.)

In the meantime, I’ve been thoroughly devoted to Diablo 3.  It does seem to be running smoother!  My monk is now at the beginning of Act 3,  either Level 46 or 47, and thoroughly decked out and dealing much damage.

I can’t be certain that my office’s internet hasn’t totally crashed, so I’m going to cut it short here.  Look for a CouchCast coming up later this week, though, wherein Gred and I will continue to whine and moan about what we’ve learned about this year’s E3 purely through hearsay and Twitter gossip.

of lag and right-clicking

[The internet at my day job has been pretty much broken all week; this is the first time since Tuesday that I’ve been able to load up the “Add New Post” page without everything crashing.  If this post feels a little rushed, just know that I was trying to cram in everything I wanted to say within the short window I’ve been given.]

In keeping with this post’s preface, here’s the short version:

1.  I beat Diablo 3 on Normal earlier this week; my level 32 Monk got through the end in a little over 18 hours.

2.  I went on a little bit of an iOS binge/bender last week, as lots of companies were offering Memorial Day sales that were too good to pass up.  I’m almost embarrassed to admit how much I picked up, considering how broke I’ve been.  (The TouchArcade app is a marvelous tool, by the way – it does a great job of letting you know if stuff you want is on sale.)

[Internet still seems to be working, so let me try and expand a little bit.]

re: Diablo 3:  Yeah, so, hmm.   Everyone seems to agree that the game doesn’t really start to get good until you start on Nightmare mode, which is (a) true, perhaps, and (b) a ridiculous supposition on Blizzard’s part that you’re going to invest 16-20 hours before you even get to the good stuff.  Especially since the single-player experience – well, my experience, at least – has been totally screwed up by lag and latency and random server disconnects.

Like I said above, I finished the single-player campaign on Normal in around 18 hours, and in that time I probably only died 3 or 4 times, but at least 2 of those deaths came at the expense of sudden server latency/lag issues, where the game would freeze for 10 seconds and then dozens of enemies would be standing over my dead body.  I never lost all that much progress, but since every dungeon is randomly generated, I’d have to re-play the entire map again once I regained a connection, and this started to get a bit annoying.

After beating the final boss – an experience  so underwhelming that I initially thought I’d done something wrong – I immediately started up again on Nightmare, and even though I only played for 20 minutes or so, there was a noticeable difference in both enemy toughness and the quality of dropped loot.   Again – everyone keeps saying that Nightmare is where Diablo 3 really becomes an experience instead of just mindless left- and right-clicking – you have to think about strategy and tactics a little more, and your build becomes something to seriously consider, rather than something to experiment with.  I suppose that’s true, although I still found myself clicking furiously; perhaps there was a slight uptick in clicks-per-second.

The lag is goddamned intolerable, that’s all there is to it.  Or maybe it’s my computer, although I refuse to believe it’s my computer.  I’ve tried the game on both my super-PC and my regular-strength MacBook Pro.  The PC can run at insanely high specs, and it has a wired connection with the router, but it’s laggy and stuttery (as it was in the beta).  The MacBook has to run things at lower resolutions and with bells & whistles turned down, and it’s wi-fi only, and yet while it’s true that it’s not as stuttery , the whole game feels like it’s running through water, or maybe it’s just capped at 20fps or something.   The point is, I have not yet had the silky-smooth experience that I really ought to be having – the experience that I had with, let’s say, Torchlight.

More than the lag, though – I really do wish the story and the characters were more interesting.  Not that they have to be, because honestly who cares, but it would’ve been nice to see the same level of care on the story that there clearly is in (mostly) everything else.   It’d enhance the experience just enough to actually keep you invested in why you’re right-clicking 1000x per minute, and not simply just because that pleasure loop of clicking/equipping is so addicting.

Anyway.  As we’re still in the release calender doldrums, I expect I’ll be playing Nightmare quite a bit, and I might experiment with other classes.  As it is, the Monk was a bit of a surprise for me; in every RPG I’ve ever played, I’ve pretty much always gravitated towards the Barbarian/Warrior/Tank class, but the Monk was quite enjoyable.  I might give the Witch Doctor a try;  a friend brought his Witch Doctor into a co-op game with me and it was pretty far out.  (Speaking of which, should you care to look me up, my battle tag is JervoNYC#1540.)

 

further thoughts on Max and Diablo

Gotta say – it’s really nice to be playing real games again.

I ended up finishing Max Payne 3 in one 12-hour sitting on Thursday, and then dabbled in enough of the multiplayer to unlock a few new modes, although I haven’t messed with those yet.

Patrick Klepek, on the most recent Giant Bombcast, said something that’s stuck with me for the last few days, the general idea of which is that he liked the game a lot but wasn’t sure if it was special, the way that GTA or Red Dead was.  I’ve been wondering the same thing myself.  I kinda wish I hadn’t finished it in only one sitting, that instead of powering through it in one day that I finished the campaign over the course of a dew days or a week.  The thing is, the game is exquisitely paced and it’s very hard to put down, and when you’re stuck at home feeling shitty, and there’s nothing else you’d rather do (especially since the Diablo 3 servers are still crap), why wouldn’t you keep playing?

You know what it reminded me of, even though the two franchises couldn’t have less in common?  Uncharted 2/3.  Bear with me here.   The thing that struck me the most in those two Uncharted games was the art direction’s astonishing attention to detail – every single nook and cranny of every single area looked different and unique and lived in, with very few obvious shortcuts.  Lots of games repeat themselves – walls will have repeating textures, buildings on opposite ends of the city/country/galaxy will have similar floorplans, and every enemy you kill might as well be a clone of the one before.   Not so in Uncharted, and not so in Max Payne 3.  Every chapter had its own unique look and feel and rhythm, and while Max might not look as jaw-droppingly beautiful as Uncharted, it’s still pretty damned close.*

Another thing that Max and Uncharted have in common is that there are thousands of enemies, and a lot of those enemies require a LOT of bullets in order to die.  At least in Max’s case, though, having him kill that many people doesn’t cause as much of a weird disconnect, the way it does with Nathan Drake.  Nathan is a charming, adventurous, personable guy who happens to kill hundreds of people during the course of his journey.  Max, on the other hand, is a man who has been through more terrible shit than pretty much any man alive, a man who can only function in this fucked-up world though the total and constant obliteration of his senses through whisky and pills.   According to my Social Club stats, I’ve killed over 1600 enemies during my campaign (and a few runs through one level of Arcade Mode), and Max is a character who feels the weight of every single kill, even if they all deserved what they got.

I only finished the game on Easy Mode.  Which is kind of bullshit – I still died a lot.  As far as I could tell, the only real difference between Easy and Normal is the aiming (i.e., Hard Lock or Soft Lock) – and there wasn’t much of a difference there.  I may end up playing through the campaign at least one more time, all the way on Normal, just to find all the hidden secrets and collectibles (of which there are many, and which scratches a favorite itch).  And I do plan on playing the multiplayer a bit more, too – it’s a lot of fun.  I’d really like to see some co-op modes eventually – if there are any announced, that might just be enough for me to buy the Season Pass.  (If I remember correctly, Red Dead got some co-op modes a few months into its DLC schedule; maybe there’ll be something similar here.)

*        *        *

I’ve continued to plow ahead in Diablo 3 – my lady monk is now level 15, I think – and the game is enjoyable when the lag isn’t killing the experience.  I’ve only been booted off the server once, but I’d say 80% of my playtime has been under some sort of lag duress, and it’s annoying as hell.  (I did end up installing it on my MacBook Pro, and the experience is roughly the same – my MacBook isn’t quite as powerful as my PC, so it runs a little bit slower anyway, but the lag was still an issue.)

It’s weird; I never played the original games, but I played a bunch of their descendants – Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance, Titan Quest, and Torchlight, to name a few.  I’m a fan of the genre, if not of the genuine article.  There’s something weirdly intimidating about Diablo 3 for me; maybe it’s just that the dungeons have long paths and I never know if I’m going in the right direction.  (Which is sort of the point, right?)

I guess I’m still mostly annoyed at the lag.  As much as I suppose I understand Blizzard’s reasoning behind having an always-online structure, I still find it baffling that I’m experiencing so much lag in a single-player-only experience.  It’s ridiculous.  And while it does seem to be improving with each passing day, it’s still not as good as it should be.

I seem to be running out of steam; that’s it for today, then.

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* When I think about Rockstar games – which I do, quite a lot – I don’t necessarily think of them as a graphics powerhouse, the way I do with a studio like Naughty Dog or Epic, but I must admit that both Red Dead and Max Payne 3 are near the top of my list of this generation’s best-looking games.

3 is a magic number

It’s been very quiet here since the last podcast; honestly, there’s not been a hell of a lot to talk about.  If I were a professional games writer, I’d find stuff to post, but I’m pretty sure that those of you who find your way to this corner of the internet aren’t looking for hot scoops.

I’ve been in a rut, basically.  The initial wave of iPad euphoria has subsided, and I’m no longer buying every game that comes out.  (Well, I did buy Lost Winds 2 yesterday, but haven’t played more than the first 20 seconds of it.)   There are plenty of good-looking distractions to be found in the App Store, to be sure, but I am craving a meal, not a snack.  Or maybe I’m just waiting for the iOS ports of Walking Dead and Botanicula to show up.

In the meantime, I’d been kinda tooling around with my backlog.  Finally finished Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, which was a bit dumb.  I mean, it had been dumb for quite some time – I think I ultimately spent over 30 hours in there – but towards the end I just wanted to finish the final boss and be done with it.  I still have at least 20 side quests to finish but I do.  not.  give a shit.  The narrative – to the extent there is one – was boring and uninspired and in any event I couldn’t skip past it quickly enough.   I kinda feel bad for 38 Studios, who are going through some pretty serious money problems; wait a minute, what am I saying?  I hate Curt Schilling.  I feel bad for the non-Curt Schilling people of that company, let’s put it that way.

And I also decided to give up on Tiger Woods 13.  There used to be a time when the Tiger games could easily fill the slow months of the release calendar, but not so much these days.  I appreciate that they’re still making adjustments to the controls, but I can’t help getting annoyed when my perfectly lined-up putt curves away because of some arbitrary stat math.

And yeah, I guess I was also one of the million people who ended up buying Minecraft on XBLA, even though I’d never played the PC version – indeed, I never wanted to play the PC version.  That much freedom is intimidating to me; I have no idea what to do.  (This is is also why the Hitman games tended to scare the hell out of me, too.)  I spent an hour or two with it last weekend; I was pleasantly surprised at how accessible it was, but I’m still not sure I’m going to do very much with it.

This is all to say that yesterday’s releases of Max Payne 3 and Diablo 3 were big fucking deals for me, and I’d guess that if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably either at work, or just taking a break from playing those games.

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I fired up Max Payne 3 first.  I don’t recall how long I played for; I know I finished the first two chapters.

Gut reactions:

  • It’s probably the best-looking game Rockstar’s ever made, especially with regards to the lighting engine – everything is super-crisp and colorful.  This is also probably the best use of that Euphoria physics/rag doll system first seen in GTA4 and later used to marvelous effect in Red Dead Redemption – when you kill people, man, you fuck them up.
  • It’s really remarkable how well they’ve managed to both keep the game feeling fresh while, at the same time, staying true to the iconic features of the original games – the pills-as-powerups, the bullet-time, the noir.  A lot of this has to do with Rockstar’s incredible confidence in its cut-scenes.  Ever since GTA4, those mid-mission story beats started becoming real treats to watch – the dialogue’s always been great (if a little heavy-handed at times), but the scenes themselves became very cinematic – the camera was always in an interesting place, the motion-capture work was expressive and clear, and the characters themselves were engaging and entertaining.  I never found myself impatient and wanting to skip past a scene, the way I do with almost every other game out there.  Anyway, my point is that when the cutscene is over and Max is back in my hands, it still feels like the original games did – even though it’s got a lot of new technology behind the scenes.
  • If there’s one thing that’s a little off to me, it’s that I’m playing this game on the Xbox360.  I played the first two games on the PC, and the mouse and keyboard always felt intuitive and easy to use.  I also played the ports of those games on the Xbox, and the shift to the controller never felt quite right.  That not-quite-right feeling shows up here as well, which is somewhat of a bummer.  Bullet-time – the defining feature of this franchise – is activated by pushing in the right thumbstick, which is not at all intuitive and, if anything, makes it more of a pain in the ass to use.  On the PC, bullet-time was both super fun to watch and useful from a strategic perspective, but here I find myself using it just because I want to see it, not because I need it.
  • Haven’t yet touched the multiplayer, although it looks interesting.  Will try to give that a good look over the next few days, in between breaks from the campaign.

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As for Diablo 3… well, honestly?  I’m a little bummed.  I played for around 5 minutes last night – long enough to see that the weird latency/lag issues that I had in the beta a few weeks ago were still present in the retail release.  This is especially weird since my PC uses a wired connection to my router.  I haven’t yet tried tweaking the graphics settings – I wasn’t sure if this was a CPU issue or a lag issue – but I know that other people are experiencing similar problems.

I’m debating whether or not to install it on my MacBook Pro; the Mac is mainly for music and writing, and I’m a little afraid of
installing such a distraction onto that machine.  But, then again, if it runs better there…

No matter.  My plan is to focus on Max Payne 3 for the time being, and then, hopefully by this time next week, Blizzard will have solved some of these issues and the experience will be smoother.

CouchCast: 042712

Here it is: Episode 2!  Jervo and Gred engage in a free-wheeling conversation regarding Mass Effect 3 (still!), Fez, Trials Evolution, hitting the difficulty wall, the current state of the Vita, the future of iOS, games we’re looking forward to, and games we’re kinda not playing anymore!

 

CouchCast Episode 2