Five Things From Friday 10: Doing This Again Edition

1. Hinterland has quit working completely for me, I henceforth revoke my earlier recommendation for this game.

2. A pretty good gaming weekend, I picked up two achievements that have long eluded me (one in Gears of War 2, one in Heavy Weapon) and beat Lock's Quest

3. I mentioned previously that I was playing Ratchet: Deadlocked. I must say it's increadingly hard to "go back" to old games, especially when they're on my small office tv instead of my gigantic living room tv.

4. I am blogging a lot tonight, but it's probably more interesting what I'm not doing -- I'm not playing Dawn of War 2. My video card is too old and it will be a little while before I get a new one, and I'd like to get a new monitor at the same time.

5. Video card-wise, I'm going to go with my first ever nVidia card, and pick up either a GTX 260 or GTX 280. Monitor-wise, I'm going to get my first ever LCD, hopefully a nice little 26" number from Asus.

How to get the "Cannon Happy" achievement in Heavy Weapon

According to the achievement text you need to "Finish 11 levels without nukes or reinforcements". So you just need to get through 11 levels without dying or using nukes, easy, right?

This is another weird achievement that it took me forever to get. If you look around on forums you'll find how to get this but it is not clearly described (and definitely not clear from the achievement text), so here goes :

1. For some reason you need to play through level _12_, not just level 11.
2. You might be able to restart between matches, but it seems to work best if you play through in a single sitting.
3. Play through each level (easier said than done, right?) without dying or using nukes. If you do either, press start and go back to the main menu and continue from the same level.

That's how I got this achievement for myself. Yeeha!

How to solo the Gears of War 2 "Hoard the Horde" Achievement-

AKA "How to solo Horde Mode"

"Hoard the Horde" is the achievement for making it through 50 rounds of Horde mode in Gears of War 2. I kept trying to get it online but never got past level 39. It finally occurred to me that I could solo the last 11 levels which I did over the past few days.

Things You Need Before You Start

1. XBox Live Gold Subscription - I don't think you can get the achivement playing locally
2. A lot of progress in Horde mode already - Soloing is very, very slow, but in private matches you can start from the highest level you've seen. Starting from level 39 took a good long while, if you start from 29 (or 1) it will take you forever.

Achievements This Guide Will Not Help You Get

This only applies to one map -- Day One. You can't use this to get the Combustible or Flashback map pack Horde achievements.

How to get started

1. Start a private Xbox Live Horde Match
2. There's an option to pick your starting level, start on the highest level you can
3. Pick "Casual" difficulty
3. Pick the Day One map
4. Pick the Lancer

Once You Start

Roadie-run to the area above the Arcade, picking up extra ammo on the way (the area above the Arcade is where the Sniper Rifle and Torque Bow spawn). Vault over the barrier up top and you'll be in a little hidey-hole. Once you've done this, congratulations -- you're mostly (but not completely) invulnerable to enemy fire!

What do you do at the Hidey Hole

1. Wait
2. Shoot anything that gets near you on the platform
3. Wait Some More

So I'll Be Waiting A Lot?

Yes, it took me twenty to thirty minutes to do each wave.

Things That Can Kill You

1. Anything if you run out of ammo and have to leave your cover.
2. Anything if you poke out of cover for too long
3. Kantus: if they can hit you with a grenade
4. Regular Horde: if they vault into your hidey hole and melee/shoot you to death (this is why you have the lancer)
5. Grinders I: if they are up on the platform they can kill you in (literally) about a half second if you are poking out of cover. Blind-fire is your friend here.
6. Grinders II: if they spawn in exactly the wrong place they can shoot into your cover from the back, you may have to move around (to the street side of the cover) so they can't hit you
7. Boomers: if they get too close they'll start shooting into the hole
8. Theron Guards: not sure if the Torque Bow can one-shot you, but it will damage you if it hits the wall near you.
9. Bloodmounts: if they vault over the barrier

Weapons

1. Regular Pistol: You'll want to use this to shoot big bad guys in the head in later levels when ammo is dear.
2. Lancer: Leave 100 rounds for the end of the wave as you might have to go "hunting". Also nice if you know you have a saw-able locust hiding around the corner.
3. Shotgun: I'll generally only have this for the first round after I start playing. Great for killing guys up with you on the platform, great for blind firing.
4. Grenades: I didn't use grenades, but I'm not a fan in general.
5. Sniper: Spawns right outside your cover on alternating rounds. My usual second weapon after the shotgun runs out of ammo. Especially useful for speeding up the match when a lot of normal-sized locust spawn and take cover in dumb places.
6. Torque Bow: Spawns right outside your cover on alternating rounds. I'm not a huge fan but it saved my Carmined behind on level fifty when I was out of ammo. Poke your head out of cover for a little while to check for enemy fire before you commit to going for this.
7. Shield: you'll want to plant one in front of your cover on bloodmount levels (10/20/30/40/50).
8. Mulcher: occasionally I'd grab one at the end of the level, but you can't get it back into your cover
9. Other: everything will be brought up to you sooner or later, so grab whatever your heart desires

End of Round / In Between Rounds

Often when there are only two or three enemies left they will no longer come after you. Regular locust especially will often hide in the arcade at the end of the round. Be careful if there are two, they can kill you pretty quick. Often if you run around on the edge of the platform above them (on the staircase side) they'll run out, but sometimes you'll have to go and kill them. Stay in cover as you approach.

After the next wave starts (or you have everybody bleeding out) run down and get more ammo, you'll probably get shot on the way back, but I've never been killed doing this.

Before you pick up the sniper/torque bow

Poke out of cover for a little while to see what shoots at you.

Don't Get Flanked

Guys will often start shooting from you in the alley below when there's another guy on the platform who'll run at you when your back is turned.

My Fun At Level Fifty

I definitely ran out of ammo with a Mauler and a Grinder waiting at my planted shield. The Grinder kept getting behind the Mauler, so one time when he did this I jumped out to grab some Torque Bow rounds. The Mauler beaned me and knocked me down, but I barely managed to get back over the barrier (and into cover) before the Mauler got clear and opened up on me again.

Oh yeah, and a bloodmount squeezed past (over?) my shield, and I got lucky and was able to kill him before he hopped over to kill me.

Lock's Quest is Cool

I finished Lock's Quest on the DS this morning. It's hard to nail to a genre, although I guess I would call it action/tower defense, with a steampunk/fantasy setting.

Throughout the game, you'll generally start out in a build mode, where you build fortifications like walls, turrets, mines, and "helpers". Then there's a combat mode, where you run around and attack enemies and repair your fortifications.

You'll be repairing your fortifications because, unlike in most other tower defense games, enemies will attack and destroy your towers. That's a nice wrinkle but it makes the game much less tower-defensey. You won't be building a string of twenty towers because enemies will just stop and attack the first one until they destroy it or are killed.

Each build-and-combat counts as one day, and there are 100 total days. You don't have to build new fortifications every day as you'll often spend at least a few days (if not a week) on each new map.

There's a good amount of variety in the missions. On top of the different maps, you'll often face different enemies or have different objectives when you stay on the same map. Most days you need to hold out until a timer elapses, but sometimes you'll have different objectives, like killing a boss or capturing some supplies.

The building is fun but the action is only so-so. You'll find an enemy, click on them, and then have to do something with the touchpad to do extra damange, like quickly turn a gear four times, or touch a number of targets in order. It's palatable but you don't really get good combat upgrades throughout the game.

Lock's Quest also had a number of "helpers" that complimented your regular towers by repairing the regular towers, detecting invisible units, or increasing the range or damage of the regular towers.

The game was a good difficulty -- hard enough to make you think, easy enough that you were never doing things a dozen (or even a half-dozen) times trying to get right.

Other than the so-so action sequences, my other complaint is the same complaint I have for all tower defense games -- it's hard to know how effective your towers are. You may know that four different towers and the mines you have laid out can stop the bad guys, but you have no idea which towers and mines are the most effective.

The game came out last September and it's now selling (new) for only about twenty bucks. I'd definitely recommend it at that price.

What I've been playing

I've been a little quiet lately ...

Ratchet: Deadlocked

This was the fourth Ratchet game for the PS2, albeit without Clank. It takes the arena matches of the previous games and makes that the entire game. I don't know how I feel about it yet.

Probably my least favorite thing is going back to the PS2 controller. Not only do I like the 360 controller better, I'm definitely missing that "batteries-included" heft of a wireless controller. I'm a fan of the hefty controller -- if you ever saw a gaming mouse that included customizable weights and wondered, "what kind of idiot weights his mouse" -- now you know.

Lock's Quest

Action/Tower Defense, I guess? This is a DS game, I didn't like it at first, but it's growing on me. I cheated looking online, and figured out I'm only around 11 "days" from the end (you use the same map/defenses for multiple days aka missions). I'll write something more complete when I'm done.

Heavy Weapon

This was one of my first XBLA games when I bought the 360. It's a PopCap game you can play on PC or 360 (though I recommend the 360 version). I'm playing again because I really want "Cannon Happy", which is the only achievement that still eludes me after almost two years. My wife and I actually played through the whole game last night together. This is another game that took me like ten days to play through on my own and two hours to play through with my wife.

Hinterland Part Two

If it were Gaming Peacetime I'd probably spend at least another few weeks playing Hinterland. This is Gaming War, however, so I'm probably going to be putting it down for a while.

I like the game (and recommend it, even) but I probably have more bad to say about it than good. Partly because I'm a negative person, but mostly because I'm not very good at describing why I like things.

So, the (short) good : I like playing Hinterland. There is a lot of neat strategy in the city building, and you are really well-rewarded when you build something. It's fun to slowly take over the map, and there are enough different things to do to keep interested over the course of a game. The combat is not great, but it's fun enough.

There is a lot of variety in the different game modes. The quick, easy modes are actually quick and easy, so unlike the other grand strategy game I play occasionally (Galactic Civilizations and the sequel) I have actually beat the game. You can get defeated pretty quickly in the harder modes, and it's fun to get back in the old roguelike naming ways of yore ("I never expected Boatwarrior IX to die! What am I going to name my next warrior?"). There are requests from the king that can ask you to capture a certain type of area, and if you turn on the "fog of war" (or whatever it is called) you'll have to run around to find the right kind of area, and that's fun.

The faults? Well, they are many ...

My biggest is that I got a weird bug where the game wouldn't load correctly and pressing buttons did nothing. The only solution I could find was rebooting my computer, but the next time I played and then tried to save/reload or create a new character I had the same issue. I checked the tech forums and the suggestion from Tilted Mill was (I kid you not) ... defragment your hard drive and make sure you have at least 20 free gigs of space on your main drive. I defragment for No Game.

Like every empire building game I seem to play there are problems with pacing and the endgame. The game is difficult and strategic at the beginning, but once you conquer, say, 30% of the game map you start to become too powerful to lose. Yet earlier on, one bad mistake can be devastating even in easy modes.

The combat is only so-so -- it's fun to create, equip, and level your party, but there isn't much to combat itself. You click on enemies to attack them. The only strategic part of the battle is trying to make sure you only pull one guy at a time if they are too powerful. (As a long time MMORPG player I've had more than my fill of pulling). The only combat interaction (other than clicking to attack) is occasionally using potions on your party.

The interface is hazy in a number of ways. Areas you can clear have difficulty levels that are indicated on the map, but it's sometimes hard to tell between, say, a "difficulty 4" and a "difficulty 7", which can be a huge difference if you are level 4 or 5. It's not really clear if you have successfully clicked on enemies to start combat. And there's no good way to make your party retreat if you've bitten off more than you can chew.

It's really the kind of game you play and think, "Wow, that was a fun game, but I can't wait to play the sequel where they fix all the unfun stuff." But despite the faults I still think it was worth my twenty bucks.

If any of you guys play let me know, I'd love to write a couple nerdy gameplay-strategy posts or two ;)

Hinterland is Fun

Bought Hinterland the other night, which nearly brings to an end my mad 2009 game-buying spree, at least until I can find Ninjatown and DoW 2 comes out.

Hinterland is a light action RPG with city-building elements. It's made by Tilted Mill (Don Quixote?). The game sounded like a lot of fun before I purchased it, but I didn't have much fun when I started playing it.

That's the first stage of Hinterland -- it feels clunky and it seems like they dropped a lot of game quality on the floor by skimping on interface. You keep playing "just to check it out."

The second stage of Hinterland involves more "checking out". You might say something to yourself like, "it's my duty to future generations to evaluate this game."

The third stage of Hinterland is where I'm at. I like to call this stage "I HAVE NO TIME FOR EATING OR USING THE BATHROOM, ONLY HINTERLAND".

Some Thoughts on Dual Spec

Tobold wrote about Dual Specs the other day.

I still stick by my criticism of WoW's dual spec system as it has been announced. Allowing players to easily switch specs whenever they want only solves half of the single-spec problem. Sure, a tank could theoretically have a tanking spec and a DPS spec. Or he could find that his raiding guild asks him to have two different tanking specs for different encounters. It's everything bad about the current system, except that you get to maintain two guild-ordered specs instead of one.

Tobold, in the link above, anticipates this situation as well, and mentions several situations where he recently thought "wow, it would help a lot to have two specs in the raid."

You want to give players freedom to choose a spec without forcing them to subject that choice to the whims of guild and group players. So why not let the situation and location determine the spec, instead of the player?

I think players should be given three specs. The existing spec will become the "Open World" spec. If you are crusing around Azeroth or wherever, you are using your existing, base spec.

However, once you are sufficient level (a little high so as not to overwhelm lower level players) you should be able unlock different specs for when you enter a PvE instance or a PvP instance (or zone). So a warrior would still have the guild-ordered PvE spec for raiding, but would be free to use the open world and PvP specs however they wanted.

Otherwise it will all end in tears. The Priest forums will still be filled with spec complaints, only this time they will be, "I can't believe my guild makes me have two different healing specs, how am I supposed to farm?"

Also, I'd like to address an argument I often see, that DPS players (unlike healers and tanks) are fine with one spec. Maybe things have changed since I was a raiding lock in the early days of TBC, but back then there was absolutely a big difference between a good raiding spec and a good PvP or farming spec. In PvP and farming, demo was the best spec hands-down. In raiding it was affliction or death.

Dawn of War: Soulstorm

The game only loads for me with all the graphics turned all the way down. I tried to turn them up (any of them) and the game just crashes. Yeeha.

I'm hoping to get a new video card next week, so hopefully I'll have better luck then.

Also, GO STEELERS!