I’m Playing Runescape Again

So, recently I’ve picked Runescape up again. It’s a really easy game to multitask in since a lot of the game is grindy.

Runescape is a much maligned game due to how grindy it is, but there are three incredibly great things about it. First, I find many of the quests to be incredibly well-designed. Whereas most quests MMORPGs are merely “pick-up object, bring here”, “kill stuff, bring here”, etc., Runescape’s quests tend to be have many more puzzle and riddle elements. In addition, they have a highly well-put together quest UI that reminds the players of where they are in the quest, clues to lead them onto the next part of the quest, etc. In addition, the text can be quite witty with a great deal of pop culture that I find rather funny.

Second, Jagex regularly releases new material every week, or every other week. They stay in contact with their players and keep them in the loop with developer blog posts. This keeps players playing the game.

Third, I like how I can quit Runescape easily and then pick it up just as easily several months later. I often play Runescape for 1 or 2 months at a time, stop for about 4 to 6 months, and then pick it up again later. This allows time for new material to show up so it always feels like I’m playing a new game.

Anyway… so… yeah, I usually have Runescape running in the background, doing some kind of monotonous tasks like fishing. In this way, I can accumulate money and kind of skip most of the grindy bits that most people complain about and then actively play it when I want to do some combat or quest. I started playing Runescape in eighth grade and stopped regularly playing in junior year of high school. I then started intermittently playing in senior year and I’ve continued up until now.

So… yeah, that’s about it for today. Sorry for those who are expecting more updates, but I’ve got exams coming up.

Oh, and I’ve also got the podcast started up. I’ll probably post something up later at some point.

Small Triumphs

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this or not, but I’ve found a long lost toy.

Many years ago, in the summer before I started high school, I was bored and looking for computer games to play on my dad’s laptop. Since I was young and not yet aware of torrents, I looked for free demos. One of these demos was to an old-school, party-based, tile-based western CRPG the likes of which do not often appear on modern computers. I played a little bit of it but it was a bit too difficult for me, so then I deleted without much of a thought.

Several years later in high school, I had a hankering to play such a game again. I don’t know why, but I wanted to, so I went looking for this game on forums and on Google, but alas, no luck. Over the years, I have periodically tried to find this game again. It wasn’t until tonight that I’ve found what I was looking for. I was instantly suffused with an electric feeling of rediscovery. I can’t believe that I found it, and I’m very excited to begin playing it. I’ve heard that it doesn’t work on Vista, but hopefully I can finangle it so that it works.

In any case, these are the pictures I took over the last couple days. The first is the Escapist, a video game review site by a British-born Australian-based game reviewer in a trilby hat who narrates scathing reviews, a nice alternative to the cock-sucking manner most modern game review sites take. The second is the a screenshot of the Wikipedia page for Blades of Exile, the game that I’ve spent the last 5 years looking for.

What It’s Like to be a Vampire

So recently, I’ve been playing a game called “Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines”. It’s a Western CRPG based off of the pen-and-paper RPG game “Vampire: The Masquerade” from the World of Darkness created by White Wolf Games (which btw, I would love to play… either that or the updated “Vampire: Requiem”). I’ve had the game since the latter half of high school, but I just never got around to playing it because of the ridiculous number of bugs that plagued that game and slowed it to a standstill. Last week, I found an updated version of it online with fan patches and whatnot that fixed most of the problems, so although I have to push down the effects to the minimum, it runs on my computer at around 20-30 fps, which is good enough.

So anyway, as you might’ve guessed from the title, you play a Vampire, or as the game characters say, one of the “Kindred”. There are several different vampire clans you can play as: Brujah, Gangrel, Malkavian, Nosferatu, Toreador, Tremere, and Ventrue. Vampires from each clan act differently and have different powers and stuff. For example, Gangrel have a power called Protean which allows them to shapeshift various parts of their until they reach an ultimate “War Form”. Malkavian are insane, and their dialog options reflect their insanity, as well as a number of hallucinations that only a player playing as Malkavian would see. The Nosferatu are terribly disfigured by their transformation (called “Embrace” in the game) and cannot be seen in public, lest they break the Masquerade, which is a basically a set of rules meant to conceal vampire society from the human world.

So… I’ve been this game for quite a while, and I’ve gotta admit, it’s pretty damn fun. It’s a bit different from most JPRGs. For one, you don’t gain experience from killing people, so sometimes it’s more advantageous to sneak around or use dialog or diplomacy to get your way. I feel that it’s a far more intelligent game than most others that I’ve seen. Most of the voice acting is pretty good, with a few exceptions, and the witty dialog makes the cut scenes entertaining. Roleplaying a Vampire is pretty badass too. There are a couple games that make me feelings of badassery; Splinter Cell is one, and this game is another one. It’s… quite nice. I like it.

However, I do have a couple gripes. Even though the game is almost 5 years old now, I still can’t quite run it perfectly on my computer. I’d like it to be running at 30 fps all the time, but that only happens when I’m inside buildings where the draw distance is significantly cut down. More often than not, there is a bit of stutter, and although I’m pretty sure I can eliminate it by doing some fancy shit to the game files, I don’t feel like I should have to do work to make the game run properly. Secondly, the combat feels incredibly stilted. There are guns in the game, but most of them are practically useless against Vampires. So far, I’ve only got a .38 revolver, and it does jack shit against Vampires. It’s decent enough against humans though, but I could just as easily pummel the puny humans down with my gigantic Vampire fists. I hear shotguns are more useful though, so I’m looking forward to getting a decent one and shooting some enemy Vamps in the face. Because that’s always awesome. So far in the early parts of the game, the melee combat is definitely more effective, but the only thing that you can do is execute the same 3-move combo or a sneak attack if you can get to them. I would’ve liked the option of opening up more combos when you get more skilled at melee combat… but oh well. Nothing I can really do there. The dialog system is also a bit annoying because sometimes you’ll come to a point of repeated dialog and you can’t skip through it.

But other than that. the game is pretty kickass. You can’t really go wrong with Vampires. Unless you’re “Twilight”. In which case you can go very, very wrong.

Super Fun Looking Games

I found two new IPs, “Bayonetta” and “Infinite Space”, being developed by an independent Japanese video game company called Platinum Games. Platinum Games originated from a merger of two games companies, one of which was Clover Studio, the makers of the graphically-interesting games “Okami” and “Viewtiful Joe”. Clover Studio was funded by Capcom but was dissolved in 2006-2007. It’s founders then merged with another company called ODD Incoporated in 2007 to create Platinum Games, which now has a 4 game deal with Sega.

Anyway, Platinum Games recently released a deliciously violent Wii game called “MadWorld” with an awesome black-and-white art style. It’s AWESOME.

Platinum Games is about to release a new RPG game on the DS called Infinite Space, where you control and customize a starship and a crew. It’s coming on in Japan this summer with a NA release sometime later this year. There’s a series of anime short films that had been released periodically to promote the product, and I’m trying to find them now. I’m hoping to get the game when it comes out, because it gels so well with my science-fiction loving mind. The other game is an action game for the Xbox 360 and the PS3 called “Bayonetta”. It’s been developed by the Kamiya Hideki, the creator of the “Devil May Cry” games. Anyway, the titular main character has fucking GUNS in her high-heels.

I still don’t know too much about the gameplay, but if the Devil May Cry games were great so I’m expecting this to awesome as well. And the high-heeled gun shoes looked pretty awesome too.