TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Tag: PC

  • My Love/Hate Relationship with Borderlands 2

    Having played and thoroughly enjoyed Borderlands 2 when it first came out, I bought the Season Pass, but let the game languish as I played a few other games, had health issues that totally ruined my gaming ability for a while, and kept up with my Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) and Star Trek Online (STO) playing.

    A few days ago, however, while waiting for the new STO and LOTRO updates coming this week, I jumped back in to play the Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep DLC. In this DLC, you and your NPC friends from the original Borderlands are playing a dice-based RPG similar to, but not infringing on the copyright of, Dungeons and Dragons. Of course, that means the player gets put into this fantasy world. And while you still have all your guns and grenades and powers, the enemies are using swords and arrows, though with deadly precision.

    The area in the DLC is quite challenging because of the various monster types. Some, like tree-based creatures are easy – just use fire, as are knights and others that fire works on. The damn skeletons are the problem. They are immune to nearly everything other than explosive damage and I just don’t have a good, accurate gun that deals explosive damage. But it’s a puzzle set for us by the developer to figure out how to overcome some of these tough enemies.

    That leads to my problem with the game. When you die, you reappear at a nearby respawn point, which is fine. But if you need to quit the game because it is way past bedtime, I will have to restart the area and all the monsters will have respawned. This concern was so great that I was trying to rush through a quest last night before bed, yet kept making mistakes and dying. I never did succeed, so I went to bed furious!

    Now, in the calm of morning, I can dispassionately look back at the game and not be quite so mad at it. Last night, I was sure I was going to drop the game again and go on to other games I’ve been waiting to play. Especially with the new STO and LOTRO content plus my PS4 will arrive on Friday, I’ll have plenty to do. But now that I’m not as furious, I will perhaps give Borderlands 2 another shot. When I’m calm and collected and have time to finish…

  • Saints Row IV Powers Video using NVIDIA ShadowPlay

    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.

     

  • Finished Saints Row IV and Liked It

    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!

  • 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.

     

  • The slow, sad death of a LOTRO kinship

    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.

  • 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.