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26
Feb
Pest Toast
Dumped into character with minimum choice about who you are. You don’t get through X years without developing a personality, this quest cannot feasibly shape everything about you.
This leads to the character knowing stuff that I don’t. (Elves and humans have a different God. Crops up in a conversation but I dunno if I’m just being a dick by bringing this up or if it’s common knowledge)
Have to make ridiculous leaps in logic to continue the game choices down a certain path, no motivation is given in the conversation to help you figure out why an event occured and whether it’s a good idea. (Setting Sten free. You know you should as he’s a party member but he gives you no reason to help him)
Despite being fully grown your character will become 100x stronger/smarter/wiser in the course of a 2 week adventure. Items too heavy to weild before suddenly become lighter than air.
You also have no problem carrying around 100 items that you can’t wear/wield one of but cannot carry any more if you are already carrying 100 gemstones.
Standing and hacking away at an enemy is the best method of attack and trading sword gashes is par for the course. Gaping wounds are simply a minor inconvenience easily solved by drinking a potion/applying a bandage.
Dying is final, unless you’re a main character, in which case you simply wake up from being dead once the fighting is finished.
Walking into somebodies home, picking a locked chest in front of them and emptying the container of all their worldy possesions is not only acceptable, but positively encouraged.
Guards will watch you pick locks and loot a rooms contents in a palace without batting an eyelid. Often they’ll see you off with a cheery farewell.
Animals often carry gold and items in addition to their usual fur attire.
Despite enemies having awesome weapons or armour when attacking you, when you search them they’ll at best have a butter knife and some soiled underpants.
The economy is based on a system that is completely broken but nobody has noticed.
Bioware conventions
There will be a pre-main quest where your companion dies immediately.
You will encounter a mentor who is later killed.
You will find a warrior to offest any weaknesses in your main character, as the game is designed to be played as a warrior. No balance for other characters.
You will encounter an evil love interest who only likes you more when sacrificing little girls to demons or torturing puppies. No moral scale or motivation to be ‘evil’ for some reason.
You will encounter a good love interest who requires you to be nice to everyone and go on a ton of sidequests.
You will start quest that turns out to be more complicated than initially seems and you have to do a further quest to complete. You can never go ask someone for help who is able to give it there and then.
Although main quest is time sensitive there still plenty of time to spend days wandering the countryside and helping kittens stuck in trees.
Each of your party’s character’s motivations only extend to the couple of hours that it takes to do their side-quest.
Game Problems
Useless AI instructions.
After 10 hours of play I feel like I’ve played for 2 and watched for 8.
Forced into areas so small that enemies close you down in less than 3 seconds so can’t be a ranged character. Most enemies don’t even show up until you’re upon them/load area.
Areas are highlighted that are not important “yet”.
Auto-save is not smart enough to save in each new area you enter. No reason not to save on the fly every area change and can lead to huge frustrations when you’ve done non-quest specific tasks for a while and then are randomly killed by bandits.
The D20 mechanics it’s grown up on are archaic for modern video game RPGs. Randomly missing in a fight means the character would not have lasted this long anyway.
So Saturday night is the Wales vs. Australia rugby match and my Aussie flatmates go to the local Walkabout to watch it. I’d rather cut off a testicle than go to the Walkabout so I stayed at home. This was about 4pm.
At about 11pm one of my flatmates (J) and our unofficial 4th housemate (K – she only lives a couple of streets over) come stumbling in, completely trollied with KFC. After they mumble incoherently at me for a bit I deduce they’ve been thrown out of the pub (a first for a Walkabout I think) and are drunk.
After about 10 minutes my other flatmate (M) stumbles in, takes 2 bits of KFC and immediately vomits before passing out face down in the living room. Also as part of this arrival K’s boyfriend (KB) comes in and starts violently wrestling with J, resulting in her going face first into the armchair (and leaving a pretty good bruise round the inside of her lips the next day).
At this point it’s all a bit much for me so I retire to my room.
About 20 minutes later I hear what sounds like a window smash. I listen for a few minutes but the music continues and there’s no screaming so I assume they’ve managed to upend the small table with everybodies drink on it. Things quiet down after a few minutes and I assume they’ve calmed down or even that K and KB have gone home.
10 minutes after the smash I hear a knock at the door and initial thoughts are J has gone to the off license or even walked K and KB home and forgotten her keys, alternatively I’m expecting the neighbours about the music. So I nip downstairs to let her in or apologise to the neighbours and open the door to 2 paramedics! They ask me if I called an ambulance and I tell them I don’t think so, but let me check.
Wandering into the living room I’m confronted by a bit of carnage. J is rocking herself in the corner like Rainman’s less intelligent cousin, there’s blood all over the floor and KB has the oven mit strapped to his wrist which is dripping blood everywhere.
I usher in the paramedics telling them they’ve got the right place and while they attend to KB I check that J is alright. As I offer soothing words and confirm she’s alright the paramedic not busy strapping up KB asks me over the table if I was talking to the dog. Well… :p
At this point the police turn up being fairly accusatory towards KB asking why he punched a window. Not having been in attendance I don’t offer an explanation straight away, but as it becomes apparent that there’s no sense to be had in the room I explain the earlier wrestling and that it was likely a continuation of that that’s ended badly. They all pack up after a couple of minutes and KB is rushed to the hospital.
J is immediately up suggesting we continue to drink but I soon send her to bed, after finding out where the mop and bucket is (women’s work, why would I know?) and begin cleaning up. The problem with blood is as soon as you add water all you have is more blood, so after about an hour of mopping and sopping up blood with kitchen roll the kitchen no longer looks like a crime scene. Of course I took photos before hand. It’s times like this that the iPhone’s 2MP camera doesn’t do it justice.
Of course now we have a gaping hole where the window was and while the back garden is completely enclosed I’d hate for burglars to get in just for lack of watching it, so I set up camp to sleep in the living room. Luckily I did because for some reason the iron was on which would have involved unwinding the cable, moving the sideboard and plugging it in. What was going on last night?!
At about 4am J wanders down looking for her phone, which I provide and then as we chat I bring up that you know it’s a good night when the police and ambulance are called. She stares at me blankly and it soon becomes apparent she has no recollection of last night’s activities, much beyond 6pm actually. So I explain what happened and she wanders off to bed.
Later M comes down and had no idea about the night before’s shenanigans so I briefly fill her in and show her the pics.
As more of the story comes to light the next day it seems as if my assumptions about the drunken wrestling were correct, but after slicing up his arm KB didn’t notice and proceeded to punch out the rest of the window slicing up his other hand in the process. Quite how you don’t notice slicing your wrist so badly it severs the tendons and cuts the artery I don’t know, but after losing a litre of blood and passing out it was a good few hours of surgery to put him back together.
You wanna see it? …
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Nice.
After finding out the Dreamcast is 10 years old and posting the best Dreamcast zombie games I’m just going to write down almost every game I played on Dreamcast, and yes most of these will be rubbish but my rose-tinted glasses are telling me otherwise.
4 Wheel Thunder
4×4 Evolution
Bangai-O
Code Veronica
Blue Stinger (this was almost certainly rubbish)
Burning Justice Academy 2
Caesars Palace 2000
Carrier
ChuChu Rocket!
Crazy Taxi
D2 (I never played it and appreciate that it was totally different to D on PS1 but I’m putting it in anyway)
Dance Dance Revolution
Daytona USA 2001
Dead or Alive 2
Dino Crisis (poor man’s Resident Evil)
Draconus: Cult of the Wyrm (Pretty sure this was god awful as well)
Evil Dead: Hail to the King
F355 Challenge: Passione Rossa (This was brilliant and ridiculously hard)
Fighting Vipers 2 (I’m not sure if I played it or not :s)
Grandia II (still no Grandia I)
Headhunter (This was the nuts)
Hidden & Dangerous (this was hard as chuff too)
The House of the Dead 2
Hydro Thunder (quality)
Ikaruga (get it on XBLA)
Jet Grind Radio (awesome!)
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (this got me into the series)
Maken X (forgot about this too. Made me feel sick. Forefather to red steel?)
Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes (another one to get on XBLA, though they’ve given you all characters from the start)
MDK2 (don’t think I ever managed to complete it)
Metropolis Street Racer (yessssssss!!!)
Mortal Kombat Gold
Mr. Driller (great!)
NBA Showtime: NBA on NBC
The Next Tetris: Online Edition (maybe rose-tinted but I think this was actually the only decent… no, wait, I’m thinking of the N64 version)
Omikron: The Nomad Soul (David Bowie, I never got it)
Phantasy Star Online (a glimpse at things to come)
Power Stone (was decent)
Quake III Arena (played this a lot)
Re-Volt (ha ha, brilliant)
Rez (XBLA it up)
Samba de Amigo (Damn! This was brilliant)
Sega Bass Fishing (Strangely addictive)
Shadow Man (Can’t remember if I got this on N64 or Dreamcast)
Shenmue
Shenmue II (Almost crying they’re not bringin out part 3. Literally have tears in my eyes)
Silver (this was decent actually)
Skies of Arcadia (Brilliant)
Slave Zero (pretty sure this was shit)
Sonic Adventure (never ‘got’ it)
Soulcalibur (brilliant)
Spawn: In the Demon’s Hand (loved this)
Starlancer (brilliant)
Stupid Invaders (oh, totally forgot about this)
Super Magnetic Neo (I owned this, it was shit)
Sword of the Berserk: Guts’ Rage (pretty sure thsi was shit)
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 (quality)
Toy Commander (pretty guff I think)
TrickStyle (oh yeah)
Virtua Tennis
Wetrix Plus
Ah, memories.
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