TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Category: Games I Like

  • Elden Ring: Malenia is done, but I’m not proud of it

    In Elden Ring, you can summon another player to help in most boss fights. I tried many times, probably hundreds to battle Malenia, claimed to be the hardest boss, and never succeeded. Many times, I summoned helpful players, only to die when my spells attracted Malenia’s attention and she whacked me with her special “waterfowl” move that I’ve only avoided a few times. Other times, she’d smack down the helper, then kill me as I threw spell after spell her way. Doing it by myself with the Black Knife Tiche ash, I could regularly get to the 2nd phase, but Malenia would kill Tiche right before or right after the transition, then I didn’t last too long without someone else taking the aggro.

    On Reddit, a player named “Let me solo her” has become a famous hero for being able to help players and defeat Malenia. I happened to run into his summon sign last night, and I am amazing by his ability, not just to damage her, but also to avoid her nasty attacks. Near the end of the fight, he made a callout to me, so I fired the spell I’d been saving in case I needed to help, so presumably I participated. The video shows “Let me solo her” making use of his great skill and me running around trying not to die. Don’t watch me, watch him!

  • Elden Ring: My Battle with Dragon Lord Placidusax

    This is my successful fight against this optional boss. Multiplayer is not permitted for this one, but I was able to summon Tiche. The path to this somewhat hidden battle is shown at the start of the video. I skipped the cutscene for time, but it is worth watching when you enter this fight.

  • Finished Horizon Zero Dawn DLC and loved it!

    Though I bought the Horizon Zero Dawn DLC Frozen Wilds as soon as it came out, I didn’t play it, because the drive in the PS4 Pro failed (there’s a subject for another post sometime!). I absolutely loved Horizon Zero Dawn, so much so that it was the first game I ever earned a Platinum Trophy for. On a PS4 Pro with a 4K HDR TV, it looks spectacular and is super fun to play.

    The Frozen Wilds DLC is a great addition. While the area is much smaller than the full game’s map, it is still huge with tons to do. The story is pretty compelling, too, though I was in no hurry to complete it. I did all the side quests I could and completely levelled up before entering the path to the final story missions.

    One of the amazing things with the Frozen Wilds is that they made it a challenge, even for those of us that finished the main game. At the end of Horizon Zero Dawn, you can solve a few puzzles to get a really nifty armor set that has a shield that regenerates over time. With this armor, I could take down a Thunderjaw without losing any health. Yet the devs found a way to nullify the huge advantage of the armor in the DLC (at least sometimes). Also, the new machine enemies are pretty great and can be quite a challenge. That damn final boss fight was so challenging that I nearly smashed my controller – the thing just didn’t let up attacking me during the fight. I felt a serious sense of accomplishment after that!

    Having been to the real-world places in the main game and in the DLC, I really enjoyed seeing sights I knew and loved, even if they are rusting or destroyed in the game world. The game’s setting and environment is top notch and worth the price of admission alone. The gameplay is also great fun – I loved pretty much every aspect of it. The story, while maybe somewhat stolen from mediocre science fiction, offered surprises and was quite compelling. All the little goodies left around the world told a very human story of the people around before…

    Horizon Zero Dawn is pretty unique in how it makes me feel. By the end of the story, my Aloy was quite the badass, yet I still felt anxious wherever I went, because the machines were always watching and I didn’t want them to attack me. It felt right that I wasn’t able to walk anywhere with impunity in this harsh, but beautiful world.

    If you haven’t played Horizon Zero Dawn, I highly recommend it. It is a reason to buy a PS4 if you don’t have one. And if you have a 4K HDR TV, get a PS4 Pro to play this beautiful game.

  • Scattered Gaming: Monster Hunter World, LOTRO, Destiny 2

    I picked up Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) again after nearly a year of just logging in to pay my housing maintenance. I bought the Mordor expansion and figured I’d better get through it. Plus the buzz on the new Mirkwood/Laketown areas is that they look great (hopefully they’re fun, too). When I took my break, I had done most of the pre-battle Minas Tirith quests and was heading into the hills to help the Riders from Rohan and the Druedain. I picked back up in the middle of the Druedain camp doing fetch quests for them. Go kill 10 things, come all the way back to camp, then go kill 10 more and figure out why they’re there. This kind of tedious fetch quest needs to die. LOTRO is the only game I still play that pulls crap like that. Star Trek Online and Elder Scrolls Online are much more enlightened. Even LOTRO has become a little enlightened, since some quests can be turned in from anywhere, but most of them require tedious travel back to the quest giver.

    Since I’m in the mode of bitching about LOTRO, let’s talk lag, stutters, and warsteeds. I have a pretty decent machine (i7 and GTX 970), am running LOTRO from an SSD, and yet it still stutters quite a lot when I’m riding the warsteed. Even worse is the lag and rubber-banding. The responsiveness of even my light warsteed is terrible when travelling (it isn’t as bad in battle, and I mostly enjoy mounted combat). I’ve had cases where I’ve been riding along the clear road, then suddenly the combat music starts playing, even though there are no enemies around me, then a short while later, my warsteed will backtrack to some earlier point then race forward, missing a curve and barreling into a bunch of enemies. So the servers projected where I was going, but the game engine was lagging behind, so I was steering to what I saw, not what the server saw. Pretty frustrating. And all the while, the link meter on the screen shows no packet loss and less than 100ms delay.

    Complaints over: I do love the world LOTRO has created from Tolkien’s vision and it is mostly fun, so I’m enjoying playing it.

    I’m also enjoying Monster Hunter World quite a lot. While I complained earlier about the lightweight plot, it was pretty good in the end, and the combat is good fun, as is the diversity in monsters and the unique challenge with each. I’ve been grinding away to get great armor and weapons and have fairly good stuff (4 of 5 armor items are rarity 8, plus 2 rarity 8 weapons) now, but need more! I’ve been using the light bowgun, as it seems to me the best way to avoid trouble is to not get too close to it. On the other hand, I’m thinking of trying a sword and shield or other melee weapon just for fun. Or even an insect glaive, just for the challenge.

    Finally, I felt obligated to participate the final Destiny 2 Faction Rally of this season. The gunplay and many other aspects of D2 are so great that I enjoyed it, but I still feel like I’m banging my head against a wall. Maybe the new “go fast” patch will make it fun again, but we’ll see.

    So my gaming has been all over the place, but I’m having fun, so that’s OK…

  • I’m playing Skyrim again, and it is because of Skyrim VR

    After not playing Skyrim for years, I’m back at it and having a great time, and it is all because of Skyrim VR. I bought Skyrim VR for my PSVR and think it is great fun (see previous comments about it)! After playing a good few hours of it, I realized that Skyrim VR is absolutely the best way to experience Skyrim, but it isn’t the best way to actually play Skyrim.

    What the heck do I mean by that kind of crazy statement? Well, in Skyrim VR, the experience is top notch. Aiming and looking are perfect, and the visceral feeling of being there is completely engrossing. But, you’re playing with a scuba mask on your face, which gets uncomfortable after hours and hours. The scuba mask, err… VR headset, also interferes with some important things while playing Skyrim: you can’t see the wiki or game guide to help with the puzzles or some of the less-clear quests and choices. Having to remove the VR headset to check the wiki on an iPad is annoying (this could be solved by adding a context-sensitive lookup/hint capability in-game – and I know I can open a browser within the VR environment, but that’s unwieldy). The other thing the VR headset eliminates is snacking and drinking, which may be good for us slightly overweight gamers, but is annoying nonetheless.

    So my thorough enjoyment of the first few hours of Skyrim VR prompted me to get Skyrim Special Edition working on my PC. I had bought all the DLCs for the original Skyrim, but stopped playing before they came out (I finished the main campaign, though). Then, because I bought it on Steam, I got Skyrim SE for free (which is still one of the coolest moves in the game industry, so thanks Bethesda and Valve). Now I’ve got my character storming through the Dawnguard quest line after finishing the Dragonborn DLC and having a great time. Since I’m on the PC, I’m using a few mods to: (1) keep my follower alive – I’m sick of having to reload after my follower gets killed, and (2) let me carry more weight, since I’m a loot-hound and want pick up anything worthwhile and sell it. Skyrim VR rekindled my love for Skyrim!

    If you have a VR headset, I strongly recommend Skyrim VR – it is amazing. And Skyrim in general is such a lot of fun, so I’m glad I came back to it.

  • I really wasn’t going to buy Destiny 2 for PC…

    I played Destiny and Destiny 2 on PS4, but as we know, the console versions of Destiny 2 have been pretty much abandoned by disgruntled players. Lots of YouTubers have switched to the PC version and sung its praises, particularly with the weapon behavior, but even that it makes you feel more powerful in the Crucible (PVP matches). The fact that console Destiny 2 prices have dropped like a rock, while the PC version’s prices remained steady helped boost the conclusion that the PC version is good, thus high demand still, while the poor console versions were not flying off the shelves.

    I downloaded the trial version of Destiny 2 last night and liked it. It looks quite good on my 3440×1440 wide-screen monitor driven by a GTX 970. The mouse control is precise and accurate, so even hand cannons are worthwhile now. Overall, it was good. But I haven’t played a WASD-control scheme PC shooter in ages. Even when I do play PC shooters, I use a controller. All the damn buttons needed by Destiny 2 are somewhat annoying, but the mouse clicking may be the thing that really drove me nuts. My hand has barely recovered from playing Diablo 3 on PC a few years ago, but now Destiny 2 needs lots of clicking. Even worse, aiming down sights requires holding a right click. After playing for a couple hours, my right-click finger could feel it.

    Sure, I know I could hook up a controller, but then it’d be much like the PS4 version, so I wouldn’t get the benefit of the smooth mouse aiming. I may try that sometime, but it seems a waste.

    So this morning, I decided that I wouldn’t buy Destiny 2 for PC, because I didn’t want to pay so much and have to deal with a control scheme that may induce carpal tunnel or some other repetitive stress injury. And then Amazon put the damn thing on sale for $26… So I bought it.

    See you in Destiny 2 PC, I suppose.

  • Skyrim VR is better than it looks!

    Well, there’s a backhanded compliment if I’ve ever written one. The implication is that Skyrim VR doesn’t look good, but as a game, it is better than it looks. Yep, that’s exactly right. It looks surprisingly bad on my PS4 Pro and PSVR system. Like 640×480 bad. Well, maybe 1024×768 bad. Everything is jaggy, seemingly with low polygon count and low-res textures. The lighting is pretty bad too, with horrible shadows obscuring faces, for example. It’s also really cool and I highly recommend it.

    I played (and loved) Skyrim on PC with a few mods to make it look even better, but even vanilla Skyrim from ages ago when it was released looks better than Skyrim VR. It looks like they must have needed to dumb down the graphics so it would work on the original PS4. It really does look like it is running on a low-spec machine at 1024×768 resolution. That is, until you realize that the world revolves around you smoothly as you move your head.

    As a VR gameplay experience, Skyrim VR is excellent. The VR headset tracking is perfect, and the control scheme I’m using (using the Dualshock 4 rather than dual Move controllers) is intuitive and outstanding. I haven’t played too far, but because of the VR view, I felt much more connected to the gameplay than playing normal Skyrim. I’m using the Dualshock 4 controller scheme because it makes movement simple and doesn’t require lots of flailing around in my limited space to swing weapons. I will try the Move controller mode sometime so I can figure out which I prefer. The right stick on the Dualshock controller is normally the camera control, but you’d think that would work poorly with headset tracking and induce nausea. It is still camera control, but it does a quick rotation of maybe 45 degrees, so all finer look/aim is done with the headset tracking. This makes gameplay easy, because turning around just requires a few taps on the right stick rather than turning my body and head around or however else it could be done. I applaud the control scheme that I’ve used so far.

    The game is just like I remember it, but aiming is precise and looking around is very immersive. If you have a PSVR and any fond memories of Skyrim, get Skyrim VR – so far, it is very cool!

    My only concern is that I will really miss the mod that prevents my follower from being permanently killed. Since they’re so stupid and just run into battle without any thought to their own welfare, things could get ugly.

  • Destiny 2 Beta Observation: We’re Weak!

    I played the Destiny 2 Beta a bit more last night and my observation is that we Guardians are weaker than we were in Destiny. Our guns are weaker, our abilities are less powerful, and our grenades are downright paltry.

    I created a Hunter last night and played with both the Arcstrider and Gunslinger abilities. Both are good, and the Hunter was indeed more agile and able to avoid (or get into) trouble than the Warlock and Titan I created the night before. It was when I used the Golden Gun super ability that I realized that we’ve been nerfed. It used to be that Golden Gun would kill any red bar enemy. Well, I shot and hit a Cabal Gladiator (which are admittedly pretty tough) and needed a second shot to finish him off. Then I started playing with grenades. It used to be, if you lobbed a grenade into a mob of red-bar enemies, some would die. Now, they all get hurt some, but fewer or none die outright. Sure, it varies by grenade type, but they sure seem weaker.

    I think this is a strategy by Bungie – they’ve said they want to make the game harder, and by weakening us, that’s one way to do it.

    I enjoyed playing the Destiny 2 beta, but it doesn’t seem to be holding as much interest as I thought it would. After dinner last night, I created my Hunter, then did the first mission and the strike. When I started, almost my entire PSN friends list was playing Destiny 2 beta. When I was done, I was the only one. Most of the others were still logged into PSN, but were playing other games, including the original Destiny. I will likely play some more Destiny 2 beta Crucible before the beta ends, but the limited content makes it not overly compelling to play for too long.

  • Destiny 2 Beta guns and abilities – different, but good

    Having only played the Destiny 2 beta for a couple of hours last night, I found that I like the changes that I saw to guns and abilities, and for the few that I didn’t like, I can live with them.

    Guns

    There are still 3 gun slots, and 3 ammo types, just as before. The top gun slot is for kinetic damage primaries, essentially as before, but some new types are added, including SMGs (which are terrible, at least the ones I have). The second slot is also for primary-type weapons, but these have burn damage (solar, arc, void). So auto-rifles and hand cannons with burns are common now, and green ammo is plentiful and you can carry a lot. The third slot is for your big guns, which now includes shotguns, grenade launchers, fusion rifles, and rocket launchers, all of which use purple ammo. Since purple ammo is hard to come by in the Crucible, we won’t be having lots of shotgunners, as we did in the early days of Destiny (well, until recently when they nerfed the green ammo). I have yet to see a sniper rifle, so don’t know where or if they fit in.

    They’ve gotten rid of Sunsinger Warlocks, which is somewhat OK. Sure they were handy for Nightfalls and for cheesing the bridge to Crota (until they patched that), but the ability to revive was held in reserve until needed, thus Sunsingers didn’t contribute orbs to others, because we didn’t use our super ability unless we had to.

    The new ability each class has is interesting. I’ve only experienced it with Titan and Warlock, but Titans can make a little shield quite often, which can be handy, while Warlocks make a healing zone, also nice. This is activated by holding the circle button on PS4, and so far, seems more useful in PVE rather than PVP. As we all get used to it, I’m sure we’ll get good at these abilities.

    Overall, the changes aren’t so significant that the game feels unnatural, but they do take a little getting used to.

  • The Destiny 2 Beta is good, but shows an annoying mechanic

    The Destiny 2 Beta performed very well for me last night, with none of the problems I saw on Reddit or Twitter while I was at work impatiently waiting to get home to play. I didn’t get disconnected once, and all the activities provided worked just fine. Since I’m on PS4 and preordered, the beta opened up for me yesterday. I hope the Xbox One players that can start today have a similarly good experience.

    The first character I created was a Titan, and I played both Sentinel and Striker in various activities. I also created a Warlock, and played a bit with that. I’ll make another post later about the abilities of the classes. The gameplay was very comfortable, yet new, as the gun configuration is different from Destiny 1, as are the abilities. For the most part, though, it was easy to play and felt right.

    The bad news is that Bungie has figured out how to make their engine draw big moving, rotating equipment, and they love using it. In both the mission and the strike, they have huge rotating machines that are meant to be puzzles, but they’re just annoying. In the mission, the rotating cooling rods are insta-death, while the strike has huge rock crushing arms that are just as good at crushing Guardians. While they don’t insta-kill, they do stun and are tricky to avoid. In any case, I still don’t know how to get to the strike’s final boss, because I was busy with the puzzle and got pulled along. So this does not bode well if they’re going to over-use this new, annoying mechanic.