What I'm Playing: Team Fortress 2

The WAR update for the game that came out a couple weeks ago effectively killed my playtime down to only five hours in the last two weeks. Before that, it had enjoyed a long stretch of 10-20 hours a week, only being broken up by Dragon Age.

There are two main issues that I had with the update. The first is the classes. I absolutely loathe the playstyles of both demomen and soldiers, my two least played classes. Spamming projectiles on the cart and around corners doesn't take much in the way of skill. So of course, the new update makes everyone choose the classes to play with, leaving teams of sometimes 10 soldiers and demomen combined. I know this will balance out again, as I have already seen it steadily waning, but until it gets back to the old breakdowns, I end up frustrated more often than not.

The second issue is in regards to achievements. I like achievements that you get by going on a lucky streak or just doing what you are supposed to a bunch of times. I absolutely loathe achievements that make me change my playstyle, like taunt kills and taunting after kills. Let me just focus on killing and be pleasantly surprised as a window occassionally pops up saying "Achievement Unlocked: Yada Yada." It wouldn't be so annoying if the easiest way to get the new weapons was through the milestones. You can get to the first milestone pretty quickly, but end up having to change playstyles to get to the last one.

TF2 will continue to be on the backburner for at least a little while longer.

What I'm Playing: Portal

In a continuation of what I've been playing, we arrive at Portal. I saw this game on the steam holiday sale for $5 and jumped on the bandwagon. While the game overall is good, I am glad I didn't spend anymore money on it.

The game does a good job of getting players slowly adjusted to the game mechanics, introducing them one at a time. The puzzles were overall pretty easy to complete, requiring only minimal retries with no need of searching for outside help. I liked the fact that even the jumps that required placing a new portal in mid-jump were decently easy to pull off. Nothing gets me madder than having to do a jump twenty times in a row to get it just right.

The storyline, while minimal, was just intriguing enough to keep me interested. The frosted glass windows high above left me feeling like someone was always above watching, even though in reality there wasn't. Glados provided comical voice overs, as I really enjoyed the ones involving the companion cube and it talking to you.

The light combat, with the turrets in the android training course, was just dangerous enough to keep you on your toes. The easiest way to beat them being portal in behind and kick them over was a little disappointing. This is counter balanced by the ability to get them to kill each other which was a fun way to do it.

The game only lasted about three hours for me, another two added on by playing through again with developer commentary on. This is the main reason for me not wanting to spend more than five bucks on the game. Hopefully Portal 2 will include a longer game and possibly some multiplayer co-op.

What I'm Playing: L4D2

I figured I would start a series of posts chronicling what I've been playing for the last couple of weeks. The short is a decent number of games, but nothing too in depth. I'll start with one I received for Christmas, Left 4 Dead 2.

Team-Based Gameplay

Not having played the original other than a demo, I can't comment on whether it was too soon after the first or if enough of an upgrade. I can only say that I've been having an overall good time with it. My main complaint with the game (which is also a positive depending on the time) is the over reliance of team based gameplay. I have no problems playing on teams having participated in CAL matches and a tournament for Battlefield 2, but random pick-up teams leaves you wondering what kind of game you are in for.

I have had plenty of great games where the team was clicking and people were communicating and we would end up steamrolling on Versus or Scavenge. But I've had plenty more experiences with utterly horrible teams that wouldn't talk and wouldn't even work together, having one member go running off ahead of the group and leaving us to fend off the four infected players. This leaves a Jekyll and Hyde effect as the good teams were some of the most fun I've ever had in a co-op game while the bad ones have left me rage quitting in frustration.

Levels

The levels in the game are really a mixed bag. Some are just god awful to play through even when you are a good team. The bridge and plantation come to mind in this regard. Fighting a non-ending stream of zombies for a couple minutes straight with no break just gets on my nerves. The best round of plantation I had was when the gate glitched and immediately opened after talking on the radio for the second time, letting us escape to the boat, ignoring the whole climax of the battle.

For the bad ones, there are some definite winners. Hard Rain comes to mind for the interesting storm mechanic. Fumbling around in the howling wind and pouring rain was quite exhilarating and improved an otherwise drab level design. Also, I like the daylight levels as opposed to the screenshots of the mostly nighttime first game. Something about broad daylight gets me more interested.

Weapons

I can't imagine having to play through the campaigns without melee weapons as you would have to in the original. Being surrounded by enemies is easy to clear away with a couple swings of a baseball bat or machete, rather than spinning around shooting with a shotgun or assault rifle. Heck, probably a fifth to a quarter of my kills are with melee weapons.

Overall

Overall, I would recommend this game to people, though I find myself slowly getting to the point of playing when I see friends on. Maybe I just have a lower tolerance for stupid than most, but the bad teammates can kill a round a for me.

Fallen Earth Free Trial

So I decided to give Fallen Earth a shot with their new trial key promotion. I am currently downloading the client, which is taking forever. The 400 some MB installer went quick, but the patcher is taking a long time to download. An hour and a half in and I have only downloaded about 3K files with 41K (or 4.1gb) to go. Any ideas on why it is so slow, perhaps a lot of people downloading it due to the trial? Normally I get about 1MB/sec download here at school, but it is much less with the patcher.

Update: Stopping and starting it a couple of times managed to increase the speed, no longer 3 days to download.

Allods Online

I know I haven't updated much recently, but that's because I doubt you want to hear the exploits from the only game I'm really playing at the moment, Team Fortress 2. The Demoman vs. Soldier update comes out tomorrow and of course, those are my two least played classes. I'll play them to get most of the achievements, but will probably be right back to my usual rotation of pyro, scout, medic, and heavy.

Now back to the titular topic, Allods Online. I had been hearing some good things about it in the blogosphere recently and thought I would finally give it a shot. I finally got a beta key two days ago and went merrily about downloading the game. Since it is in beta, I didn't have to worry about the micro-transaction business model that I despise the implementation of in most current F2P MMOs. After a quick download, maybe 40mins tops, I installed and went to the character creation screen. There was little to no background information on the two sides from what I could see, so I ended up just picking the evil looking side.

From there, there were a bunch of classes that fit into the typical fantasy archetypes, paladins, mages, rogues and the like. Loving to go into battle in full on plate mail, I chose a paladin-esque character and went on to the game, where the disappointment began quickly. The graphics, even though I am not typically a graphics whore, were downright atrocious even maxed out on my system. The visuals were fuzzy and downright low quality. In 2009, even decent looking graphics are commonplace, not the shoddy ones presented in this game.

Quests were almost exactly like World of Warcraft, go to the person with an exclamation point, ignore the wall of quest text presented, and commence killing. Perhaps I'm just spoiled with single-player rpgs and the promise of full voice overs in TOR but it did nothing to draw me into the storyline, whatever it may have been. One particularly bad intro quest saw me firing a cannon til I hit the enemy ship. The only problem was that I had no control over the aim so I had to just keep clicking before it decided to hit it.

That takes us to the combat side of things, a pretty standard affair. I didn't like the lack of an auto-attack, or at least one I couldn't find. You right click on an enemy to lock on and then have to run up to him and spam one to do your basic attack. Combined with some mediocre class abilities, the battles were forgettable at best. The ability cooldown was so fast that I rarely even had to use the basic attack in any of the early battles.

So, from the general tone of this review, you can probably tell that the game was off my hard drive about 3/4 of an hour after installing it. I get a feeling early on about how I'm going like games and I could tell there was no point in going on.