The Circus – PONIES

Last Updated on Thursday, 16 May 2013 11:55 Written by Kadomi Thursday, 16 May 2013 02:00

I think today is going to be an Erasure day. I loved that album, sure did. I am so 80s. As mentioned yesterday, we had free tickets to the Circus Roncalli, one of the contemporary circuses à la Cirque Du Soleil. They had a beautiful location right by the river in the park in Düsseldorf.

The entrance to the circus

The show lasted 2.5 hours, plus a 15 minute break, and despite my bum aching quite severely on the hard benches (free tickets didn’t get us plush velvet seats in the front, bugger), it was a fantastic show I would highly recommend to anyone who happens to be in Germany and in a town where they perform. Not that it’s very likely for most readers, but… My personal highlight was a group called Opening, trapeze artists from Kiev who all have giant mohawks. They were absolutely incredible.

Those were some power mohawks, I tell ya.

Roncalli doesn’t have any wild animals. It’s mostly artistic elements broken up by comedic moments. My SO, who is a giant pony-lover, had seen ponies in the flyer, so was all excited when after the break there was sawdust in the ring. And then we got this:

They were also incredible. I mean, really. I don’t get excited about ponies but…

Good times.

Wednesday is for LFR

I recently recruited my friend Fi and her husband to my guild. I am totally to blame for them playing WoW in the first place, as I gave them WoW as a wedding present in…2005, I think. Time flies. The two of them have never raided and I lured them to the dark side. Fi is now finally ready for raids, and so yesterday was the big moment. But I wasn’t there to hold her hand through it, so I did LFR with her to explain the differences between LFR and normal, Heart of Fear being the target raid. From all I heard she did fine, but sounded like a bundle of anxious nerves after the raid when I came home. I feel slightly guilty now because I feel responsible for her. Have you ever recruited someone to try raiding and then they hated it or did not like it as much as you expected?

I only did the first part of ToT on Yata, so today I have to do parts 2 and 4 for another shot at shoulders. Grrr, shoulders. I will be halfway through Revered with Shado-Pan Assault, so I know there will be shoulders in my future, but I want shoulders now! I hope queue times will be okay today. They’re terrific on Wednesdays, EU reset day, 5-10 minutes even as DPS.

Today shall also be the push to get the priest to Outland, but I need to get my pet battle team ready for Outland as well!

Thoughts on raiding difficulty

Earlier this week I linked to Zellviren’s post about how normal raiding is too punitive. I am now reading the summary of an interview that the Convert to Raid podcast did with Ion Hazzikostas, the Lead Encounter Designer. I am heartened that Blizzard is recognizing that the current raid model is not quite fitting the bill for more casual guilds. My quote of choice: ‘There is a group of players that wants to do group raiding, but they aren’t well served by the current difficulty choices. This would include the friends and family type guilds that don’t remove players because they aren’t performing at their best. In Wrath of the Lich King, 10 player normal difficulty raiding served these players well, but there is now a gap between Raid Finder and Normal difficulty.’ Unfortunately he then went on that they need to keep 25-man and 10-man difficulty similar, which is not so heartening. At least he admitted that the tuning going from Jin’rokh to Horridon is a disaster is not as smooth as it could have been.

I am not unhappy with our raids, because despite the multitude of wipes, we’re having a good time in fun company, much like Spinks describes in her latest blog post. I just wish the difficulty progression was more like going through ICC or Ulduar, with a ramp-up, without running smack into a mountain-side.

Board game updates

I got a ton of recommendations here and on Twitter yesterday, so now I have a bucket list of games for us to try. For anyone that’s also interested, here are the recommendations I received:

• Race for the Galaxy
• Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer
• Escape: The Curse of the Temple
• Kingsburg
• 7 Wonders
• Arkham Horror
• Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries

That should keep us busy for a while! I might try to go to the Spieliothek for some of those. It’s basically a library for board games where you can rent them for a very small monthly fee. As some of the more opulent board games can be quite pricey, it’s definitely worth a trip. I’ll keep you guys posted how boardgame progress is going.

Steam game of the week

I finally settled down on a choice what to play and went with The Longest Journey. An oldschool point-and-click adventure by Ragnar Tornquist, the mind behind The Secret World. So far I can say that the story and the characters are fantastic. Honestly, wonderful characters. You control April Ryan who lives in the 24th century, in a metropolis called Newport. She’s an art student jobbing in a cafe, plagued by particularly vivid nightmares. Around her, strange things happen, and there’s the mysterious Cortez, who seems to know more about what is troubling her. There are many conversations, and the characters are all very interesting. I have a fondness for the lesbian landlord of April’s, unsurprisingly.

It is however a game from the year 2000, and runs in a small resolution which on my screen means I get a tiny window in the corner of my screen. I will have to look into fixing that, because that’s no way to play. I mean, I don’t want fullscreen, the pixels would be an eyesore. Also, it’s a point-and-click adventure game. I suck at those. I am not ashamed mentioning I frequently have to use a walkthrough. I am currently in chapter 2 and have to get into a movie theatre. I got stuck and went to a walkthrough, figuring out I need items from April’s job and from the subway tracks. I didn’t spot anything in the subway station earlier, and it never occurred to me that I would have to go to other non-related locations to pick up items. Sigh. I hope I am not the only person in the world who enjoys adventure games and yet sucks at them.

[Steam Review] L.A. Noire

Last Updated on Sunday, 20 January 2013 10:59 Written by Kadomi Saturday, 19 January 2013 06:01

Steam has changed the way of PC gaming, how gamers acquire and play games. I am fully convinced of that. Maybe it has not replaced store purchases completely, but I know that everytime Steam does one of its seasonal big sales, most notably around Christmas and in summer, many of my digital friends flock to buy just about every big game that’s on sale. It’s that impulse purchase that I cannot stop (much to my SO’s regret). It’s led to me having a quite sizable list of games of which I completed maybe…2 games. This year will be different. I will play every game that I bought, for at least an hour, and if I like what I am seeing, I will strive to complete it.

First game on my list is L.A. Noire. I bought it in the last summer sale, and played it once. On my old computer, it had incredibly choppy performance, and the first car ride had me so frustrated I gave up on it. Then WoW was down one weekend in December, and I decided to go back to it. New computer meant no more choppy play, and I have to say that this is a very good choice that I made.

L.A. Noire is the closest to an old point and click adventure an action game will ever come to. It clearly has many action elements, and is all 3D with some sandbox elements, but at the heart of the game are the cases, the investigations, and the interviews with suspects that make this game so interesting to play. L.A. Noire is set in Los Angeles post-war, beginning in 1946. The main protagonist is Cole Phelps, a patrol cop who was sent home from the war early, and who is now trying to be the best cop possible. He sees the world in black and white, and he definitely is a career guy. When he gets the chance to assist with a homicide case he takes it. The Patrol Desk cases mostly serve as a tutorial for the game and set the scene. You learn how to investigate crime scenes, which is pretty straightforward. The default setting will give you an acoustic warning if there’s evidence. Some of them are red herrings, things that won’t help, but some aren’t. I also set it up that you get a looking glass symbol when there’s evidence. Apparently if you use an XBox controller, it vibrates as warning, which seems a lot more intuitive than the ‘pling’ sound you get. If you find enough evidence, there should be hints leading you on in the case. As long as you’re still on the patrol desk, you have to drive to all locations yourself, which I found tedious. Driving with WASD is awkward and I didn’t enjoy that part much. Once you move on in the game, you can have your partner drive you to the locations, which takes you there straight, instead of having to drive through the very realistic streets of L.A. yourself. I think I once drove around for 15 minutes before I finally made it, as the city is just that big, and according to sources is very realistic for the time.

Other game elements are more on the action side. There are car chases, or chases on foot, big shootouts, or fistfights. As I mentioned above, the car part is really not that great, IMHO, and so I was very happy that there’s a switch if you fail an action sequence three times, it will just move you on as if you had been successful, without impacting your case rating. I had to use that a couple of times. Then there are the interviews. You will often have to interview witnesses, suspects and the like. The special motion capturing that the game uses creates frighteningly realistic faces. When you see pictures of Aaron Staaton, you seriously believe it’s Cole Phelps you are looking at. Interviews are mostly driven by Cole himself. As player, it is your task to look at how the interviewed person responds, and to choose Truth, Doubt or Lie. It’s pretty obvious in most cases to see if someone is not telling the full truth. Shifty eyes, facial tics, restlessness, not looking you straight in the eye. It’s harder to discern if Doubt or Lie is correct. If you choose Lie, you need to have hard evidence backing up your story, and if you pick the wrong evidence, the case might slip from your grasp. Ultimately, you always make an arrest, but you don’t always get to feel good about it. The better you do at finding evidence and conducting the interviews, the better your case rating. Nothing screams fail as a measly 1 star showing you pretty much effed it up.

Is this Cole Phelps in Mad Men?

Or Aaron Staton in L.A. Noire? You tell me!

Cole Phelps is a rising star, and moves from the patrol desk to Traffic, and then later even Homicide, the Golden Boy of the L.A. Police Department. I know some people consider Homicide the weakest of the desks he works for, but for me, it was when the game really had me in its grip. Most cases are gruesome, and full of mature themes, particularly the homicide cases. The game does not shy away from the seedy side of human nature at all. There’s rape, even male rape, necrophilia, a pedophile, and a dark swamp of corruption and abuse. On the homicide desk, I first got the feeling that the price of success is too high, that feeling that someone is playing you and you keep making successful, and yet false arrests. The final case of the homicide desk is quite brilliant, a quest for clues through major landmarks in L.A. If there is one complaint I have, it’s the homicide cases are maybe a bit too disconnected from the main story arc of the game.

Every desk Cole Phelps works at finds him with a different partner, and they’re all quite memorable. From good stand-up guy Stephen Bekowski to drunkard Rusty Galloway or the sleazeball Roy Earle, they’re all very well-acted and quite memorable. You’ll run into your former partners again throughout the game, and I felt quite connected. They’re good. I probably liked Hershel Biggs the best.

The cases are framed by the backstory of Cole Phelps in the war in Japan, his rivalry with Jack Kelso, a fellow marine, and his growing interest in a German Jazz singer at one of the clubs in Los Angeles. Cole’s backstory eventually mingles with his current cases when he starts investigating drug trafficking of stolen morphine from the war. It’s all connected, and the finale of the game left me as bitter and disillusioned as Cole Phelps might have felt in the end. If you enjoyed L.A. Confidential, or Chinatown, I think you would enjoy the story of this game.

I managed to complete L.A. Noire in 35 hours, because I like to take things slow, but I think most people should manage to squeeze out a good, solid 30 hours of gameplay out of it. Longer if you drive yourself, hah! At the last Steam sale, it cost about 5-7 Euro, and for that, it’s a steal. If you are interested in crime stories, get this game. It’s damn good.

My final rating: 5 stars out of 5

Torchlight 2, the better Diablo?

Last Updated on Tuesday, 29 May 2012 11:19 Written by Kadomi Tuesday, 29 May 2012 02:30

Hah, got your attention with that one, didn’t I? I’ll be honest upfront: I can’t tell you if TL2 will be the better Diablo. A short story: I got into the TL2 beta weekend last week, the beta lasted from Saturday to Tuesday. I played TL2 for about an hour on Sunday and found out the hard way that Print Screen does jack all. Screenshots are bound to F6. Why, Runic Games, why? In any case, from that hour of playtime, I have zero screenshots. But that was cool, because I still had til Tuesday.

Monday morning, I decided to quickly finish my first playthrough of Diablo 3 on normal. I finally made it through to the Lord of Terror himself. Ate dust, tried again aaaaaand….BOOM! With a loud bang and the smell of silicone, my computer turned itself off. Took me most of the week to replace the dead power supply, and by that time the TL2 beta was over. So instead of giving you a very detailed look at the beta, you’ll have to do with my rushed first impression.

I enjoyed the original Torchlight quite a bit. It was pretty much a one on one copy of Diablo, just with a different art style, less locales and a really crappy story. It made up for that with fun gameplay and the addition of innovation in the form of your pet companion that can return to town and sell all your shit for you. It was single-player only. Torchlight 2 seems to offer more of the same, but this time you get single-player, LAN and Internet multiplayer. The last two bits should make the heart of every oldschool Diablo LAN player sing. In the beta, you only had the option to use Internet play. It didn’t look quite as elegant as Diablo 3′s multiplayer. Inside a lobby, you can see all open games, and to play you create your own game. You can set the amount of maximum players for the game, and password protect it. Which I suppose is nice, no friends coming in to stomp your game if you haven’t told them the password yet.

Torchlight 2 is a game on a budget, and so the movie sequence at the start was fairly unexciting. In Torchlight, you killed Ordrak underneath the town of Torchlight, which supposedly brought an end to the corruption of the mines. Of course that didn’t work, as someone managed to steal the essence of power from Ordrak, destroyed the town of Torchlight and is now creating havoc everywhere he goes. It is up to the hero to stop this mysterious person. Yeah, so the story? Doesn’t feel much better than in the first part.

But what about the gameplay? In the first Torchlight, you were indoors at all times, first in mine levels, then in lush old ruins, etc. until you got to the final baddie at the bottom level. In Torchlight 2 you actually get to travel outdoors. In my hour of gametime, I got to level 7. The scenery is all green mountains and rivers, with temple ruins thrown in. On the way to the main quest, I ran into a sidequest temple. Areas you can enter are clearly marked as to what level they are intended for. I pretty much had to do the sidequest, because I wasn’t high enough level to move on to the next zone for the main quest. The graphics are very cartoony, and there’s no marked difference or jump in quality from the first game. You definitely have to enjoy the cartoon approach.

One of my favorite features from the first game is back: the companion pet. You can still feed the companions fish from pools to change them, they still sell stuff for you but this time around, you can also have them shop for you! Out of Identify or Town Portal scrolls? Need more health potions? Your pet will take care of that for you. Very handy.

As far as classes go, none of the classes from the original game made it back. We now have Engineer (melee with steampunk gadgets), Outlander (guns and magic), Berserker (melee with animal powers) and the Embermage (all magic, all the time). I played Outlander and went all dual-wielding pew-pew without being forced to wear stiletto heels. Take that, Demon Hunters! From the start, I felt the difficulty curve much more reminiscent of the original Diablos. Health regenerated ultra-slow, and I actually had to start chugging potions. No cooldown on those, so it’s back to chain-chugging like back in the good ol’ days. In the temple ruins, I ran into two champion mobs, and to me they felt like bosses in Diablo 3. You definitely had to be on your toes, and the fights required thought. And that before I even hit level 7.

The female versions of the four TL2 classes

Character progression is done via skill trees, just like in Diablo 2 and the original Torchlight. Everytime you level you have to assign attributes for your character, and can assign a point in one of the three trees per class. Of course this means the return of various different builds, which was one of the features that gave D2 so much longevity. I remember reading skill guides for the various classes in Diablo 2. There were specialized sites out there to publish guides. But I’ll be honest again: I prefer D3′s much more lightweight system. It gives me flexibility to tailor my character to an encounter, without having to brood over me having misspent my points somewhere. In D3 you get a new power when you level, in Torchlight I often felt I dumped points into an ability without feeling any real impact to the change. It isn’t fun for me. In the end, the cookie cutter builds will win anyhow.

Torchlight 2 overall feels like a very colorful, improved version of Torchlight, which has always been a derivative of Diablo 2. It just feels very oldschool. You still need scrolls of Identify and Town Portals to use those abilities, which probably means that you can tactically use Town Portals in combat again. In the first Torchlight, I had to cheese the final fight like that to be able to kill Ordrak. If you are a retro gamer, then you should find great delight in what Torchlight 2 is offering. It’s a colorful dungeon crawler with outdoor areas and fun gameplay. It’s not really offering any kind of innovation to the genre. It’s as if time stood still. Which some will herald as awesome, and some might be disappointed about it.

TL2 will release an editor at a later time, and people will be able to write their own mods. That’s very interesting, and could give TL2 real longevity. Longevity is something I ultimately feel D3 won’t have, at least not compared to D2. People seem to be tiring of it already, and the auction house seems to be part of that issue. TL2 might not have this problem at all.

For 20 bucks, it’s a steal, so any fan of the genre should pick it up. That’s a lot of gameplay value for little money. Or you could pick up the original Torchlight for even less money, to see if you like the colorful brand of the game. You’ll never come as close to playing Diablo 2 in a modern setting again.

If you would like to see a couple more bloggers talk about the Torchlight 2 beta, here are some more views:

• Pete at Dragonchasers thinks TL2 is the sequel to D2 that D3 isn’t.
• Arb from Arbitrary Genius about her beta impressions
• Paeroka from Nerdy Bookahs feels it’s more Torchlight 1.5 than 2 but generally liked the beta
• Jim from the Gaming Nook liked the beta as well, finding the loot more interesting (I agree!) and wonders why he would pay 60 bucks for D3 when TL2 will only be 20.

So, did any of you play the beta, and are you planning on buying the game? Is Diablo 3 still holding up for you, or did it give you a taste for other similar games?