Yesterday I mentioned some of the awesomely fun powers the player has in Saints Row IV. Well today, I have a video showing it. This also gives me a chance to try out NVIDIA’s excellent new ShadowPlay feature.
In the video below, my character (I don’t normally play female characters, but SR4 allows you to change genders and looks nearly at will, so this is what the POTUS looked like at that moment) did a bit of jumping, gliding, running, and killing people. One of the powers is to have an aura of flame which lights bystanders on fire, but not other Saints. It apparently also imbues bullets with fire, but I didn’t use it much, so can’t say for sure.
My game was running at my monitor’s resolution of 2560×1440, yet NVIDIA’s ShadowPlay scaled it behind the scenes to make a 1920×1080 H.264 video without any apparent burden on my CPU or the graphics in the game. I’ve used FRAPS before, but this achieves much greater compression and less system impact. I think it’s a great thing that NVIDIA has given those of us that use their graphics cards.
I finished Saints Row IV and the DLC Enter the Dominatrix on my PC and liked it a lot. Enter the Dominatrix ended up being fairly amusing and had some cute flashbacks to Saints Row 3. Overall, the game had lots of humor, tremendous swearing, and fun.
Since the majority of the game happens in a simulation (it would be a major spoiler for me to tell you why), you get all sorts of abilities beyond just shooting and blowing stuff up. For example, you can run super fast, jump super high and glide across town, shoot ice or fire blasts, use telekinesis to throw enemies, and more. I used the word “super” in that last sentence twice, because this game really makes you feel like a superhero more than any other game I’ve played. You’re not an invulnerable man (or woman) of steel, but a badass that can cause great mayhem, but still be injured or die if you don’t take care. It’s a delightful way to play and lots of fun.
In addition to the superpowers, there are some terrifically fun weapons, including the bounce rifle (rounds hit multiple enemies), the black hole gun, and the dubstep gun (enemies dance before they blow up – awesome!). The grenades of SR3 are gone, but not missed too much. Of course, the giant dildo bats are back, but there are even more fun melee weapons, though perhaps none more amusing than beating the baddies with a huge dong, but I tended to stick with the laser sword (a non-infringing homage to light sabers, I presume).
While SR4 didn’t have Burt Reynolds, it did have fun cameos that I won’t spoil here. In general, the voice acting was good and the banter with your homies was great fun! Some of the characters and enemies must have been from SR2 and maybe even the original Saints Row, neither of which I’ve played, so I didn’t know the references, though those missions were still fun.
The sex/romance scenes are a hoot compared to the serious and drawn out ones of the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series. For example (and kids need to stop reading right here), when the player selects the button to “romance Kinzie,” a cutscene plays in which the player says “Hey Kinzie, wanna fuck?” Kinzie then slugs the player, then says “Let’s go!” and jumps on to kiss the player and both fall to the floor. That’s it – no stupid bed scene where you’re still wearing your armor as your partner lays there in underwear simulating sex. So while SR4 is cruder than others, it isn’t as stupidly teenage fantasy sex-oriented.
So overall, SR4 is great. While I finished it on PC (at least until the next DLC), I have it on PS3 too in case I can do co-op mode with friends. Great fun!
I was somewhat out of gaming action for medical reasons for more than a month. During that time, I was pretty much unable to use keyboard and mouse to play games. I was, however, able to use my Xbox 360 controller for Windows to play games that supported it. And that led me to discover how poor the support for game controllers is in many of the games I enjoy.
One of my favorite games, Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), doesn’t support game controllers, so I was out of LOTRO for a month or so. Sure, I logged in occasionally to check mail, but couldn’t play it even a little bit. But TallGuy, you say, MMOs and controllers don’t mix. Well, there you’re wrong.
My other favorite MMO, Star Trek Online (STO), has native support for game controllers. Even more importantly, it has a fully programmable binding mechanism that lets me customize button combinations, so I can use the triggers as modifiers (think Shift or Control) for the few face buttons. Therefore, I can easily get to 2 rows of the skill bar without touching a keyboard or mouse. I can fly my ship or move my captain with one stick, move the camera with the other, crouch, run, shoot, and do pretty much everything I need with an Xbox controller.
Games like Diablo III and Torchlight II didn’t support the game controller, of course. But the PS3 version of Diablo III shows that it is entirely possible to convert a clicky game into a controller game. The PS3 version is great – my wife and I have lots of fun playing it. She’s a wizard, so can nuke the enemies from a distance, while I’m a healing tank (monk) to take the pressure off her. And a lot less chance of getting carpal tunnel on the PS3 version.
Very sadly, Sins of a Solar Empire can’t be played with a game controller. Nothing would have been better than to conquer the Sins universe many times during my convalescence, but it was not to be.
A thoughtful friend gave me a nifty game, Evoland. It is pretty cool and supports game controllers very well. If you want to experience the evolution of RPGs over many years, give it a shot. I spent a good few hours with it.
The laptop computer I was using wasn’t overly great (thanks to HP for abandoning it and not releasing modern drivers, since it is an i7 quad core with an AMD 6770 GPU), so it can’t run graphics intensive games like Skyrim or Borderlands 2 or Batman Arkham City well, so I didn’t use those, even though they work with game controllers.
Instead, I gave up on the PC and finished Halo 4 on Xbox 360 and then finished Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood on the PS3. I enjoyed both, but I especially loved AssCreed because of exploring Rome and its historical buildings.
So, my point is that PC games should have better game controller support. Keyboards are fiddly and not appropriate for all games (sure, for a shooter, I’d prefer keyboard and mouse any day), and there may be people that have some limitations or are bedridden that would be better off with a controller.
What the heck?!? My Lore Master, who is a completionist and has done pretty much every solo and most small fellowship quests in LOTRO, didn’t see it. My Hunter and Warden also went through Great River, but were rushing to Rohan and didn’t do all the quests, so they didn’t see it either.
Last night, after my wimpy Minstrel became Friend of the Eagles (if you’ve done the quests, you know what I mean), he was given a letter that recalled him to Stangard to start a whole quest line, involving Sithric, treason in the Eorlsmead Tower, and more. I was utterly shocked that I’d never seen this quest before, but I was wondering what that tower was there for. Admittedly, my Lore Master ran through Great River right when it came out, so perhaps the quest line wasn’t in place yet, but I was floored!
Of course, it was given to me at the secret place where the eagles were based, which apparently everyone must know about, because I was sent there originally by a guy at the camp north of the Cuthstan, then a guard from Stangard came to deliver a letter while I was in the cave rescuing an eagle. So that’s a little silly – the secret is out…
This new (to me) quest line is good – I enjoyed it and I especially enjoyed putting Sithric in his place. I am at a loss about the tower, though. I showed there was treason there, so I expected to be sent by Stanric to clear it out or at least set them straight, but nothing of the sort happened. Maybe I missed that too?
Finally, a question: My Minstrel seems pretty wimpy for level 74. His Will is good, and Fate is OK, but his morale is only about 4,000. That’s even less than my Lore Master was at that level by quite a bit. Before I go off deeding to get Vitality traits, I wonder what a level 74 Mini’s morale should be? Please either tweet to me or use the contact page (you don’t need to put in a real email address).
I finished playing the fun BioShock Infinite last week and am finally getting a change to post about it.
First of all, the game is fun, which isn’t a surprise, since almost every other reviewer said the same thing. The skyhook travel system is great fun, but don’t mistake this game for an open world. It is a very linear game in which the skyhook rails loop back to the area you are currently exploring/shooting to bits. The combat is satisfying, with both gunplay and magic powers called “vigors.”
Sadly, you only get 2 weapons at a time, so ammo management is very important. In the tower defense-like section near the end, I ran out of ammo for both my weapons and would have had to scramble to find another gun if the fight went on any longer.
The graphics are generally excellent, except for flower bushes and other plants. Take a look at this video and see how poorly done they are. Even LOTRO does better than that!
While we’re complaining, the checkpoint system stinks. Really badly! Unlike good PC games that let you save wherever you are so you can quit and go to dinner, BioShock Infinite’s checkpoints were often 10 or 15 minutes apart, so if you don’t want to lose all that progress, you’d better hoof it to the next unmarked checkpoint. Luckily, dying doesn’t set you back that far. In fact, dying costs you a bit of money and brings the enemies back to full health (though the dead ones stay dead), so it isn’t a bad mechanism.
Your companion throughout much of the game, Elizabeth, the girl you are sent to “rescue/capture,” is a delight. She never gets in the way, tends to have good things to say, always keeps up, and keeps giving you money, health potions, and salts (to power the vigors) as needed. She’s terrifically done and should be a model for future game companions.
So the game is linear, but we get to make choices, right? Like in BioShock where we could choose to harvest Adam from the Little Sisters or to save them, right? No, here we play things pretty straight, and the few choices we make don’t have a huge good vs. evil impact. In fact, as far as I can tell, the ending is the same, no matter what we did.
And that ending…
Spoiler alert. Stop reading right now if you don’t want to know the ending and what my thoughts were. Now! Stop!
The buildup to the ending is pretty cool and set the stage for what the eventual ending was. After a battle, Booker DeWitt was to be baptized to be absolved of his sins (and apparently he had lots of them from the battle against Indians). In one timeline, Booker didn’t accept the baptism and decided to live with his sins and became a Pinkerton guy and was eventually sent to the cloud city of Columbia to rescue Elizabeth (his daughter, it turned out). In another timeline, he took the baptism and became the Prophet Samuel Comstock and build the cloud city of Columbia, and, since he was sterile by then, kidnapped Elizabeth (Anna) from Booker in the other timeline with fancy machines that could bridge the two.
So the solution is that a bunch of Elizabeths from different timelines got together and killed DeWitt by drowning him, thus preventing him from becoming Comstock and causing all the evil.
My thought as my character was being drowned by his daughters was “haven’t I seen this before?” Yes, at the end of BioShock 2, the protagonist is killed by his daughter and other Little Sisters. C’mon, not that again! Do the developers feel some sort of guilt and think their daughters should kill them? What gives?
I was also disappointed that not much was done with the heavily publicized racism aspect in the game. Racism is very present and is obviously depicted as evil, yet Booker doesn’t seem to have any racist tendencies, and his views on racism, if any, don’t affect the outcome in any way. Things are a little too scripted, and it would have been interesting to have the racism affect the player more than just showing it to him.
So overall a fun game and well worth playing, but it isn’t quite as great as many reviewers say.
My LOTRO kinship, Thirst for Power, has had a long, interesting lifespan with serious ups and downs, and is now down for the count. I am the only regular player that has been on for weeks. Sure there are one or two others that leave alts in the kinship, but no playtime logged except for me.
I was recruited into T4P when my Lore-Master was still hanging around Combe and Staddle by a very nice guy who helped me a lot, but declared he had an addition to the game and quit cold turkey, never to be seen again. I met a number of friends in the kinship and we played together for years. Some were a little flaky and jumped out of the kinship, then back in, the back out, etc. A core group of us played through thick and thin, building our characters as we went. Then there was a mass exodus fromT4P to another kinship whose name I forget. Almost all of us went, because it was a big, happening kinship with a charismatic, fun leader and a diverse set of players.
Meanwhile, the old T4P leader had been offline for so long that the game offered leadership to one of my buddies who left one alt in T4P. I put an alt there, so I was 2nd in command. And then our new kinship’s leader decided he was bored of the game and disbanded the kinship. So it was lucky that we could fall back to T4P. We rebuilt T4P with most of the old members and many new ones and had great times in Dunland and the end game instances around Isengard.
Then came Great River. We all raced through Great River and started doing the Limlight Gorge stuff, when many of our top-level members decided it got boring and simply stopped logging in. We survived with just a few members until Rohan came along and added great new content, but the damage was done. With just a few of us, we weren’t able to get groups together to do the end-game instances. Finally, my last friend in the kinship decided she needed a more active place and jumped to the kinship of one of the other ones that was in T4P when I first joined and was with us for a long time, but eventually left to join a raiding kinship. I have recruited a few people into the kinship, but they see how dead it is and either stop logging in or just leave.
T4P has maxed out lifespan and a nice kin house, so I will likely keep it with some lowbie alt running it, but I may look into joining active kinships for my characters when they get near 85. My LM, who is 85, would be a good choice, but nobody wants a lousy LM in the end game instances and raids. I’m working on getting my Hunter, Warden, and Minstrel to 85, because at least they will be needed by others. In the meanwhile, T4P is a member of an alliance, so I can help others and join groups fairly easily.
But it is a shame to see Thirst for Power fade away.
Today’s mounted daily mission video (and this is the last for a while, so you can relax and stop being bored by me) is the one given at Snowbourne, a large city in the south west of the playable area of Eastern Rohan. This is my favorite of the mounted missions because we need to kill more enemies (16 vs. 6 or 10 in the others) and the enemies are a little wimpier, so I can often kill them in one shot, which makes a wimpy Lore Master feel kinda studly. The video is less than 3 minutes.
Like the daily mounted mission from Harwick, this mission involves taking on mounted enemies while being on your war-steed. In this case, however, some of the enemies have about 5 times the morale (hit points) as the normal ones here and in Harwick. In this playthrough, I avoided those guys, but I’ve had to fight them in the past and they take a while sometimes to kill (and once, I think 2 of them ganged up on me and defeated me). The video is a little more stuttery than I’m used to, and I wonder if having FRAPS capturing the action slowed the game a little. It did smooth out, but the game was a little jerky at the first encounter, and I think that is visible in the movie. This was a quick mission and took less than 2 minutes.
In our continuing quest to travel to the ends of Middle Earth (at least without area transitions), we now leave the moron sons of Elrond and head to Rivendell to meet up with Lord Elrond in his library. We don’t take a hidden passage that Peter Jackson decided was appropriate for The Hobbit movie, but instead take the normal route. We ride from Thorenhad to Rivendell, still in the Trollshaws. We cross the Ford of the Bruinen and head up a steep trail to the High Moors, then down into Imladris. We enter the Last Homely House and visit Elrond in his Library.
The music in Imladris is some of the most pleasant in the the game, and the game has lots of moving music. The scenery is pretty good, and the water isn’t too bad. The biggest problem with Rivendell is that everything is too spread out to make it a useful home base for crafters. The changes to Bree recently have made Bree a great location for crafting, with vaults, fields, workbenches, forges, and ovens all in close proximity. The only better place that I can think of is Galtrev, which adds representatives from all the crafting guilds to a room off the crafting hall (so that’s why everyone should buy the Return to Galtrev skill when you become Kindred with Dunlanders, except, of course, Wardens and Hunters who can get their port skills earlier).
Also in LOTRO news, I picked up one of the new Teal Fireworks Steeds for my Champion yesterday. It was a new addition to the Anniversary rewards, and since I had last year’s one, which was still available, I figured I’d better get this one. Its colors are teal and purple, so it’s pretty effeminate, but my champ is a manly elf, so he feels perfectly comfortable riding a girly horse, at least until he gets to Rivendell, where the bored elves will tease him endlessly, until he thumps them…