TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Category: Videos

  • Enjoyed BioShock Infinite, but ending was too familiar

    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.

     

  • LOTRO: Snowbourne Mounted Daily

    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.

     

  • LOTRO: Eaworth Mounted Daily

    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.

     

  • LOTRO Tour 11: Thorenhad to Rivendell

    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…

     

  • LOTRO: Harwick Mounted Daily

    Rather than bore you with more of the Middle Earth tour, I’ll post an example of a daily mission given out in Harwick. This mission is one of those given as part of the overall goal of rebuilding the destroyed town of Hytbold. Each mission earns 5 tokens that can be used to rebuild some part of the town (each component takes 5, 10, or 25 tokens).

    This mission is being posted as an example of the mounted combat that came as part of the Riders of Rohan expansion to the game. I love the mounted combat, but make no claims of being particularly good at it, though I’m certainly getting faster at doing these missions. The whole video is less than 3 minutes.

     

  • LOTRO Tour 10: Ost Guruth to Thorenhad

    Continuing the tour of the vast Middle Earth as presented in LOTRO, we ride from Ost Guruth in the Lone Lands to Thorenhad in the Trollshaws. We stop by Bilbo’s stone trolls and then end with the sons of Elrond. Unlike games like Skyrim and Star Trek Online, where most of the terrain is accessible, in LOTRO, there are very clear boundaries that channel the player along certain paths. On the way to the stone trolls, I took a wrong path through a bunch of live trolls (but too low-level to attack me) and ended up back near the road. I needed to use the map to find my way to the stone trolls, since I haven’t played much in the Trollshaws lately.

    I end up at Thorenhad, where the moron spawn of Elrond hang out. I call them that, because in the Ford of Bruinen skirmish, one or the other brother needlessly attacks a couple of baddies that position themselves in an obvious, but out of the way, spot. This always happens at the most inopportune time, like when many other baddies are attacking, so if you don’t have a healer on your side, it could be bad, since you lose if one of the Elrond spawn dies.

    I did the path on my war-steed since they are faster even than the rented horse rides between stable masters.

     

  • Zen Pinball recorded with Hauppauge HD PVR 2

    Note: I’m truly horrified that I didn’t spell Hauppauge right in either the title or the article. And I knew better… Sorry Hauppauge!

    I bought the Hauppauge HD PVR 2 Gaming Edition when it was on sale at Amazon a week or so ago, and finally got a chance to hook it up yesterday. As a test, I recorded the excellent Zen Pinball running on my PS3. This video shows one of the Avengers tables, which look and sound great. I am not a very practiced player, so the game is over mercifully quickly for those of you that watch the video.

    The HD PVR 2 is a nice step up from the old HD PVR that I had before. With that one, I had to switch cables and do all sorts of annoying and tedious things to set it up for either XBox360 or PS3. The new one can have both attached at the same time, which is very nice. The biggest bummer is the lack of an easy way to switch between inputs without going into the software running on the PC. I also may return my unit, because it seems to have a cosmetic flaw: only half the unit lights up when it is in standby mode, so apparently some of the LEDs must not be working. Overall, the video quality seems good, so if you want to record your PS3 or XBox360, this seems to be the unit to get.

     

  • LOTRO Tour 9: Lone Lands

    In this video tour, we cross the Lone Lands from the Forsaken Inn to Ost Guruth, but in a roundabout way. The path takes us to the summit of Weathertop where the Hobbits encountered the Nazgul, then down a shortcut and back to the road. We encounter wargs, spiders, half-orcs, and more on the way to Ost Guruth.

     

  • LOTRO Tour 8: Bree to the Forsaken Inn

    Here I paid for a fast horse from the south gate of Bree to the Forsaken Inn at the start of the Lone Lands. Upon leaving South Chetwood, we can see the Midgewater Marshes, then the entrance to the Bree player housing area, and finally arriving at the Forsaken Inn, which clearly has seen better days.

     

  • Fable III Missing Child mission

    I’m enjoying Fable III a lot. To some extent, it is a slightly dumbed-down Fable II, but so far, it is extremely well done, and the voice acting is superb (John Cleese, Ben Kingsley, Bernard Hill, Simon Pegg, and more)! I have only played a few hours, so haven’t done any flirting or marriage or anything, but I’m enjoying the triple thread of magic, guns, and swords.

    The video shows a mission where I needed to rescue a missing child. Once I found her, I needed to hold her hand to bring her back to her mother (with several attacks on the way). It turns out that the hand holding dynamic is used throughout the game to escort people, even adults of the same gender, so get used to it!