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A Gaming Diary
Animal Crossing: Wild World
Jan 21st
I play this every day. A lot.
I just don’t write about it because, well, it’s Animal Crossing. I pick my fruit, say hello to everyone, go to Teacozy to see p’anther and her friends, invite p’anther back to Venture for tea.
It’s not very exciting. But it’s very,,,, comfy.
Guild Wars: Factions – Free Weekend
Jan 21st
Well, Guild Wars is having a free preview weekend of the Factions expansion. Or something. I’m not exactly sure. I just saw the word ‘free’ really, so I thought I’d give it a go.
I went through the training, thinking the game was a bit too fast for my liking, but got through all the fights easily enough. After training, found myself in a big open area with loads of other actual human being people. Ran around randomly until someone invited me into a team. I accepted. When we had a full team, we leapt into a mission and died within about ten seconds.
After which the leader left and – gulp! – the game promoted me to be leader of the party. Someone else asked to join, so I let them jump in and sent us to a random fight. One person never turned up for some reason, so it was only three of us. We died within ten seconds.
After that, our party was down to two people, but two more soon joined. Someone recommended an easy fight we could do. So I chose that one and all four of us turned up and… we died within ten seconds.
I decided it was time to quit.
The whole thing was absolutely baffling and the fights run so fast I found it impossible to keep up. I guess it’s designed for people who’ve played the original and know what they’re doing. It is an expansion, after all.
Darwinia Demo
Jan 20th
Wow.
That was unexpected.
I downloaded the first demo when it first came out and hated the interface, so couldn’t work with the game at all. Saw all the reviews (even Kieron Gillen’s infamous Eurogamer review) and ignored them.
But I knew they’d made a new demo and I saw it in the Steam menu today, so i thought I’d download it. Was about to go to bed when I noticed it was ready to play. Stupidly, I booted it up.
The graphics look beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous, much more so than I remember. I really can’t stress how good it is. The interface has been sorted. I still have a few issues with how you look around the level, but nothing major. The gesture system for creating units has gone – and I don’t mourn its loss. What we have now is a beautiful game with huge amounts of personality that’s great fun to play.
And it’s only about a tenner to download? Well, I didn’t run straight upstairs to get my debit card when I finished the demo, but it’s definitely been put on my list.
And now, about ninety minutes late, it’s time for bed.
Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast
Jan 20th
Well, it now looks about 24% prettier and 72% smoother and the stress test averaged 67.8 frames per second.
Somewhat more importantly, it’s still ten minutes of pure gaming goodness.
Rather like the demo of the original Half-Life which was a concentrated shot of pure excellence and better than the full game.
(Oh, and, yes, I played a lot of Animal Crossing this evening, too.)
3D Mark 05
Jan 20th
With my 9800 Pro and anti-virus software on (forgot to disable it) I got 2667 3DMarks.
After swapping in my 6800GT I ran the test in the same conditions (i.e. AVG running) and got 4911 3DMarks.
Shrug. Meaningless statistics are my friend. (But only 84.6% of the time.)
The GT’s a lot quieter, too, but I’m assuming that’s because the fan is currently dust-free. That won’t last.
I could try a game, I suppose, as that’s what it’s for, but I’ve not played Animal Crossing yet today and Mythbusters, House and – cough – Desperate Housewives are sitting on TiVo. In this Mythbusters they’re going to talk to plants!
World of Warcraft
Jan 20th
Well, last started off with all everything bad about WoW in one handy ten-minute package. After the queue the game wouldn’t load properly. Everyone was an ‘unknown entity’, I couldn’t see my own chat in the chat window, my character never appeared. The usual, basically. So I wiped all the cache files and that sorted it out. I was in an orc settlement in the depths of the woods, so I ran around for five minutes trying to find the person in charge of public transport. Eventually ran into her and flew back to The Crossroads. I’m level twenty right now, so decided to try the Stonetalon Mountains for a bit of fighin’ and questin’. Walked to them and had been over the border in contested territory for about twelve seconds when a high level human bastard killed me in a couple of hits. Which was followed by possibly the longest corpse run of my life.
So, there I was, wondering why the hell I ever liked this game. But, you know, the graphics are lovely and everything’s full of personality and I have a pet spider called Donkey. There’s all that. And because I was in contested territory I really like I was adventuring, it was tense and I crept around near, but not on, the path, trying to remain hidden from view as best as possible. It reminded me why PvP servers are best.
Then my old friend Gerplex ran across the world to find me, so we stood in the forest and chatted and emoted for a few minutes.
I continued on into the depths of the mountains and found the loggers I needed to kill. So I did. Fifteen of them, slaughtered. I ran back to the person who’d given me the quest, got my XP and logged off because it was time for Animal Crossing.
Better than FFXI? Yes.
World of Warcraft
Jan 19th
So, time and a router reboot seemed to help sort out my downloading problem and I got the patch down in an hour or so.
Restarted WoW, which then decided to download another (thankfully smaller) patch.
Restarted WoW again, which then decided to download yet another patch.
And now I’m finally up to date… and my server’s full so I’m in a queue to play.
Remind me why I voted this my game of 2005 and my seventh favourite game of all time…
Final Fantasy IV
Jan 19th
Hmm, this is tricky. Tricky, tricky, tricky.
You see, there are these Yellow Jelly monsters that appear in groups of four. They don’t do much damage, but they can only be hurt by magical attacks. There’s only one person in my party who can do that sort of magic and she’s only got a limited number of magic points to spend.
Normally in a Final Fantasy I’d stock up on Ether, which recovers magic points, and we’d be all set. But there’s only one town I can get to this early in the game and it doesn’t sell Ether.
So I’m getting so far into the dungeon and these slimes appear and I’m all out of magic and there’s nothing I can see to do but turn off the Micro and try again. There doesn’t even seem to be any way to run away from a battle. That might be possible with a long button press, or something, but I’ll have to wait until this evening and check the manual to find that out.
Still, makes the bus journey fly by. Nearly missed my stop because of some pesky goblins this morning.
World of Warcraft
Jan 19th
Last night I got homesick and decided to just turn on WoW and have a potter about before my sub ran out.
So I booted up the PC… and found I’d have to download a 316MB patch before doing so. I used to have problems with Torrent type stuff, but I sorted those out. Well, I thought I had. The Blizzard Downloader complained about not being able to connect to the tracker. And then, later, that I was behind a firewall. So I set up the firewall and port forwarding on the router, even though the downloader used to work just fine.
Then I did a trace route and it seems there might have been a routing problem in Telia.net. Maybe. I’m never sure if tracert problems always show real problems or whether it shows problems with tracing the route.
Anyway, I tried again this morning and I’m still getting time outs when running tracert and the Blizzard Downloader is still complaining.
I hate PCs.
(I know I could trying downloading the patch from a mirror, but I’ve had so many Torrent problems in the past I wanted to check this is working okay.)
Animal Crossing: Wild World
Jan 18th
Well, Nook was buying turnips for 122b just now so I took the safe option and sold up. I could have held on for a bigger profit, but I didn’t think it was worth the stress.
Lily from Smyrna has moved today now that Robin has finally left. She says “lmnop” at the end of each sentence, which is… different.
Planted a few more fruit trees, this time in old apple spots. I think I’m going to make the east side of the river an apple-free zone, but I’ll check there is at least one apple tree on the west side beforehand. I don’t want my local fruit to become extinct.
