TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Author: TallGuyCalif

  • Trying out Nier for PS3

    A friend loaned me Nier for PS3 since he had just achieved all the trophies and liked the game. Since I love RPGs, he suggested I check it out.

    I have mixed feelings about Nier. I think I could really like it, but it didn’t grab me so hard in the first hour or so that I need to keep playing. So I probably won’t, since I have so many other things to play that I know I really like.

    The story in Nier seems compelling. It starts in a dystopian future where the world is crumbling. There, you fight a bunch of ethereal monsters while rapidly gaining levels and abilities while trying to protect your sick daughter. Then, somehow (and I would hope this would be explained later in the game), you fast forward to a medieval future where you are a peasant/hunter trying to protect your sick daughter. And all the fancy abilities you had when fighting earlier: gone. Back to a simple sword. Presumably, you will learn the abilities as you level.

    As Yahtzee says in his very entertaining review, the villagers are pretty useless, so you need to kill things for them, do their shopping, etc., as you level and gain abilities and money. This wouldn’t be so bad but the guy runs sort of awkwardly, which I didn’t like. Every stop was a skidding stop, which is silly. The controls are ok, but not as natural and fluid as some games.

    The game is visually attractive, but not amazingly so. The characters are well done, as usual with Square Enix, but the landscape and animals are fairly simple and cartoonish. In the first mission, you need to kill some sheep that look like child drawings of sheep. Perhaps it’s an “artistic style.” Or not.

    So Nier has a lot going for it, but not enough to draw me away from LOTRO and Portal 2 and Dragon Age 2 and all the other great games that I haven’t finished…

  • Trying out Age of Conan MMORPG

    I downloaded and have played just a bit of Age of Conan, just to try it out. I don’t actually need a new game to play at the moment, but I had been told that Age of Conan (AoC) was a nifty free-to-play MMORPG. AoC is certainly prettier than Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), and is very similar, so took almost no effort to start playing.

    I decided to play a Priest, a class that has one-hand weapon attacks and spells. The only spell I have at the moment is a Smite spell, but that is quite powerful, though easy to interrupt. As I gained in level, I earned points that could be put towards various abilities, like running, jumping, healing, and most importantly, concentration, so I could cast spells without being interrupted so often.

    The game starts with a shipwreck and you being marooned on a beach. The player needs to fight to rescue a girl that cheers as we kill things, but is otherwise not helpful during the fights, and get to the city. It took an hour of so to fully explore the starting area, kill everything, and get to the city. I nearly died a couple of times, but managed to survive.

    The game is a bit racier than LOTRO, with skimpy outfits (and yes, my dude looked nasty in a thong), lots of blood, and violent conversational options. For mature audiences, it seems like it could be lots of fun, though the story so far isn’t nearly as compelling as that of LOTRO.

    If you’re looking for a fun, free-to-play game, check out Age of Conan. It seems like it will be quite engaging.

  • Burnout Paradise sale on PSN

    PSN has a sale on Burnout Paradise for PS3 along with some addons for $7.99. Not sure when it ends, but I like Burnout Paradise enough that I bought it. If you don’t have Burnout Paradise, check it out – good fun!

  • Take a look at ggamdori’s Uncharted 3 beta multiplayer movies

    My friend ggamdori has posted a number of movies showing the Uncharted 3 beta multiplayer game features.

    Take a look at his YouTube page. I will link to one of his popular videos below, but take a look at all of them!

    Uncharted 3 looks like good fun!

  • My Latest LOTRO News

    It has been a while since I posted any LOTRO news, and my video upload project is stalled because I’ve been busy.

    Most of my characters have left Thirst for Power, which couldn’t seem to gain critical mass in terms of having enough active members online at any time. Most of the kin members jumped to Exiles, which is an active kinship with many high-level members and a pretty fun group.

    My main character, Tallborn, is now level 59 and has done some missions in Moria and lots of instances, like the Grand Staircase (in order to get Moria Medallions to get awesome armor). I’m working through the Epic story missions, but they are a bit tedious and have lots of FedEx quests. I should not have waited so long to do them, because I don’t get much experience from them at my level.

    Several of my characters got fancy new Spring Festival horses, which are not faster than normal horses, nor cheaper, but have better decorations (saddles and gear). To get them, we had to win races and earn tokens, in addition to paying for the horse. While in Moria, you need to ride a goat, but outside, I like my festival horse.

    I can’t emphasize enough what a compelling game Lord of the Rings Online is. It supports solo and fellowship play, excellent crafting, skirmishes, and more. If you have any interest in role playing games, swords and sorcery, or the Lord of the Rings, give it a shot. You’ll have fun!

  • LOTRO Middle Earth Tour Part 2: Needlehole to Michel Delving

    This video continues my Middle Earth tour in LOTRO. I start at the entrance to the Shire from Ered Luin (see the first video) and the ride to Waymeet and Michel Delving, ending at the Mathom House.

    This video was captured using the Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle using an HDMI connection. While the sound was set to the HDMI connection, it apparently was not recorded, so this video is also without sound.

  • LOTRO Middle Earth Tour Part 1: Ered Luin

    This is the start of my tour of Middle Earth as envisioned by The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). LOTRO is such a huge game that I thought it would be worthwhile to show people how amazing it is. I decided I would ride from end to end and post the video, but I will do it in segments, because it may become boring and I don’t have access to all areas yet (at least not without being killed quickly).

    I’m also experimenting with capture approaches. My GTX280 video card failed, and in the process of diagnosing that, I built myself a new Sandy Bridge Core-i7 rig with 8GB of RAM and a GTX570, all in a nice red mini-ATX case. Unfortunately, the new GTX570 doesn’t have component video out, so I can’t use the Hauppauge HDPVR to capture anymore, at least not directly. The video below was captured using the HDPVR, but after the HDMI signal fr0m the computer was converted to component by a Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle. Why not use the Shuttle to capture directly? Well, the software is a little unforgiving (ok, horrible) and when I did this video, I didn’t have it figured out. I did use the Shuttle to capture the second part of the tour, but have so far been unable to get it to finish uploading to YouTube (it’s failing for the 3rd time as I write this).

    Unfortunately, just as I was experimenting with video capture, I was experimenting with audio capture. While the audio capture approach I used here worked in tests, it failed in real life, so this video doesn’t have sound. This is a shame, because LOTRO music is great. The soundtrack is varied and generally excellent – one of the best game soundtracks out there.

    This video shows me leaving Thorin’s Hall on my goat (you need a goat to ride in Moria, but you can ride it elsewhere and it is as fast as a normal horse) and riding past Gondamon, through Duillond, then into the Shire gate. Sadly, it’s at night, so the colors are muted, but LOTRO has a great night sky, which I show off a bit during the ride.

  • Enjoying Dragon Age II

    I posted before that Dragon Age II is pretty good, but I am enjoying it more and more each time I play it. I still haven’t found a powerful over-arching plot, but the side quests and personal quests for your companions are very good and compelling.

    As I said before, the combat is quicker and flashier, which is a nice improvement. I thought the combat in Dragon Age Origins was quite good, but this is more fun in my opinion. I haven’t had to do much handholding for my companions in battle, like I did in DA:O. They seem to pick reasonable targets and the default rules are pretty good. In DA:O, I had to adjust the behavior rules a lot. Perhaps as my characters level, I’ll need to do the same in DA II.

    The family Mabari war hound is an interesting addition to the game. The first time I played DA:O, I didn’t get the dog, and I assume the same is true for many players. Here, they give the main character (Hawke) the ability to summon the hound, almost as a spell. The dog does not count as a party member and does not seem to be controllable, but attacks targets and acts like a tank autonomously. For some reason, I was sure the dog would stay with the party once summoned, but as I was playing yesterday, I noticed that the dog stayed in the same area and didn’t follow along. This means dismissing the dog and resummoning it during battle, which is a bit of a pain.

    I still highly recommend Dragon Age II to RPG fans. It’s been a great game so far.

  • Dragon Age II is great (plus PC failure)

    I got Dragon Age II on release day and it is great. It isn’t quite as compelling as the original, which I simply couldn’t stop playing, but it is still very fun.

    DA II is clearly much more aimed at console users than PC users, so the top-down view is gone – instead, the camera is closer to a 3rd person perspective. In addition, inventory management and skills are way dumbed down. This is a shame for those of us that love digging into RPGs, but probably makes it more accessible to casual gamers, which is likely where the money is.

    The graphics look quite good on my 2560×1440 monitor driven by a GTX280 graphics card. The bummer is that the automatic configuration decided I could use 4x antialiasing, which made the game stutter quite a bit. I turned AA off and the game runs quite well. The game looks better than DA:O, but there are still a few issues. As usual, the face textures look great, as we’ve seen in Mass Effect II, but the clothing and some other textures were apparently done in crayon and look pretty lousy. There is a high-resolution texture pack linked in this forum post, but I didn’t install it yet for the reasons I discuss below.

    Loading new areas is slow in DA II, but perhaps a bit better than in DA:O (and remember the horrible memory leak in DA:O that made loads really slow after a while). The fighting is a little faster and more action-oriented, again dumbing it down a bit and making it less strategic, but shinier and perhaps more fun. The spells and effects look better and most spells are quicker to cast than before.

    The game has different paths to choose in both conversations and actions, all of which affect how much people like you and may change future game events. So far, I’ve been playing a goody-goody mage and choosing all the nice answers. I may play again sometime as a rogue and choose the smart-ass answers. I don’t really like playing evil characters, so I probably won’t bother with that.

    Overall, DA II is great fun so far and seems stable enough that I’d recommend people with even a passing interest in RPGs should try it!

    I’ve been having very strange PC troubles lately that seem to be hardware related, particularly my graphics card, but it is unclear exactly what is happening. It seems that right upon login, my screen either goes black or fills with a color or pattern and the system stops responding. I think it is as Windows Aero is starting. It happens on my normal account and a virgin account I have for troubleshooting. The crazy thing is that powering off and back on sometimes fixes it. I’ve updated drivers and everything else, to no avail. It is getting worse, however, sometimes taking 5 or more power cycles to get working. And once it is working, it stays working until the next power-down (not reboot – that’s okay).

    So to solve this puzzling problem, I’ve ordered parts to make a nice Sandy Bridge i7 system with a GTX570, so it should be a significant upgrade in both CPU and GPU performance. Then I will install the hi-res texture pack for Dragon Age II.

  • Dragon Age II Demo is Fun!

    I played the Dragon Age II demo today and it was pretty awesome. In the demo, I chose to play a rogue, which meant either dual-wielding blades or bow and arrow. I chose the blades.

    There are essentially 3 parts to the demo. In the first, you and a mage are fighting lots or darkspawn. This is a memory of one of your soon-to-be compatriots. Then you are with your family and escaping the burning of Lothering by the darkspawn. This leads to the formation of your party of 4 (soon to be 3), where you end up at the earlier scene, though with a bit more help. A surprise shows up to save your butt, and then there is a jump to a later scene where you have an indoor fight.

    The demo is sometimes difficult, and I had to do the troll battles a couple of times, because the entire party kept getting wiped out. The graphics were good and the effects excellent. The backstab ability of the rogue is especially cool!

    The demo portends good things for the not-soon-enough release of the game. Looking forward to it!