Daily Review: Diablo, Skyrim, and Monster Hunter

Daily Review: Diablo, Skyrim, and Monster Hunter

Going to be a bit of an odd daily review, since I've been playing three games...and its been a few weeks since my last posting. Mostly due to work and weird schedules, but also due to the fact that I've basically been playing the same three games, and really have nothing new to say about them each day.

Most of the time, I'm playing:

System: PSP
Currently: Up to 6 star village, still need to clear some 5 star.

The game is still great, I marvel at how different having a different full set of armor makes combat feel, and how easy it is to swap between various sets and weapons without ever getting locked in. You have so much storage space you never feel you -have- to get rid of armor to make room. Every hunt still feels like a new challenge, so much so that I do research on the wiki's before trying it, mostly to preserve my sanity of a half hour quest that ends in me croaking and gaining nothing. It is a very stressful game still, the quests never become easy even if you go down ranks to farm so old materials. I can not imagine playing this on the bus, though I may try on occasion when I come back from my morning classes. (Either that or a long walk to muse about my tabletop game). The only oddity I noticed is that often you will meet for the first time a new monster....yay, new armor set! And then immediately you'll get a quest to kill the offshoot version, which gives the same kind of armor from its pieces, just slightly better. Weird design choice, but doesn't really hurt the game itself. Some of them are true variations, so its not always bad (Garuga, while being basically a palette swap of a Yuan-Kut-Ku, has wildly different weapons and armor from its body parts). Still, its stressful enough that sometimes I need to play something more relaxing and easy:

System: PC
Currently: Actually finished Inferno, so Completed! Still playing of course.

Which I can't say is necessarily easy, I kinda died my way through the last bits of inferno then did a group for Diablo himself. I've gone back to Act 1 with the new Monster Power feature they added to farm gear. Always nice to have the 'shiny thing drops and fun times' mechanic to relax too, but it is a bit of a guilty pleasure now. Really not a game you'll ever finish, just get slightly better gear, and I know I should be playing other things in my spare time. Still, its easy to load up, do a quick run for the new keys for the uberbosses, and hop off and head to work. Much less of a large block of my time.

And when my wife is not on the PS3 and I get the urge to:

System: PS3
Currently: Completed a long time ago, trying a hardcore character for a 'Master' run.

I love this game, unabashedly. It has its flaws in some rather buggy parts, but I just can't get enough of playing it or watching my wife play it (and squeal and hand me the controller when she sees spiders). Still, I completed it a while back, and I don't consider the harder difficulties true difficulties, they just add more hp and damage to the monsters. That's it. So instead to have another reason to play, I decided to try playing a hardcore character. No reloads, if you die you stop playing the character. Otherwise playing the game normally and avoiding abusing bugs. Makes it actually rather stressful, because when that dragon drops down and snaps at you, that might be the end of things right there. Playing a Khajiit thief/archer, with a sword/shield for backup when bandits come swinging. My first hardcore died around level 11 to 'not noticing the second giant'.

Post-Move Quick Fixes

So yeah, moving really puts a kink in your gaming schedule. It's also really hard to play enough of one game to come up with a full post for any one in particular. To get back in the habit, here's some quick fixes for what I've been playing:

 

Man, I really want to like this game, mostly because of its status as a classic, but its getting really hard to keep playing this and even finish it with how bad its getting at times. I've never had to check a FAQ for an FPS game before, but I have to do it near constantly with this one. One moment, you're supposed to avoid a mined area, and the next a guy with a shotgun near one means 'clear it out'. There is almost no intuitive 'you should go here next' going on, and choosing wrong could either waste supplies (some of which you -need- to keep going), or get you some more depending on your luck. The movement is still slippery, and yet at the same time I keep getting caught up in corners. To top it all off, the game itself uses a weird memory load procedure, and thus my playtime is entirely limited to when it starts to get jerky, then I have to either quit out and reload, or just stop for the night. The bugs are really getting bad, I'm at a point where you need to cross in front of a sniper, so obviously you're supposed to toss a grenade up into his nest (his netting for some reason is bullet proof). Except A) Gordon tosses like a girl and its near impossible to get any distance on the grenades, and B) A total of 8 grenades went in, didn't explode due to some bug. This is about where I stopped.

This is almost entirely a guilty pleasure now, considering how long I have to get to 'complete' status and how random any progression is. Still very fun and challenging though. Trying to get through the challenge mode so I can have some more options in the main game. As with all rogue-likes though, I feel bad playing them because it is never definite progress. Means the game is truly fun though.

I actually beat this game a long time ago, but 'beaten' for it is only beating the Elite 4 the first time, and there's so much more to do. Over the past two weeks, I basically beat all the Kanto Gym Leaders, beat Red (the hardest match in the game), and re-challenged the Elite 4. That leaves re-challenging the gym leaders, which is a pain due to them only being available to get their numbers at a certain time...then you can only challenge them again at another time. I may just sit for an evening and screw around with the DS clock so I can finish it. Other than that, need to snag all the legendaries and I can call this complete.

To this games credit, its a near perfect mobile game experience. You can pick it up, complete one or two missions, save, put it back down, and when you next pick it back up you really don't have to remember where you were. I'll do a larger one on this one later because there's far more to cover, but essentially they improved on everything from the first game, removed a lot of the annoyances, and made the class system more intriguing (and way less broken). Still some small little quibbles, but I've been enjoying it. Mostly doing sidequests, I -think- I'm almost finished with the story, based on the quest list.

I actually try not to mention this one, and I'm kinda avoiding doing a full review since so much has already been said and its constantly changing still. I do have to say though, I love this game. There are minor quibbles, but I do truly enjoy booting it up, killing some monsters, having shinies drop (even if they end up not being upgrades), then logging out without any requirements to log back in. I put it down for a month or two, picked it back up recently, and had no problems swinging back in. I think its going to be a 'pick up at patch to see whats new' for most people though.