Late on Monday, I finished up Prototype. The game itself is an open-world platformer similar in style to Infamous. The player takes on the role of Alex Mercer--an amnesiac who wakes up in a morgue--trying to figure out what happened to him and why nearly everyone in Manhattan is trying to kill him.

The game makes use of a relatively standard platformer upgrade system. Completing sidequests, killing enemies, and finding various collectables earn you EP which can be used to buy new powers. Completing main quest missions unlocks new powers for purchase in addition to the standard EP rewards.

Mercer's powers proper are based entirely on him manipulating his body in strange ways--growing claws, turning his fists into giant mauls, etc. To that end, the standard way of regaining health is to grab a person and "consume" them. Doing so involves Mercer character physically absorbing (and thereby killing) the person absorbed. This consumption mechanic ends up being key to gameplay in several forms. Firstly, Mercer can switch between two disguises: his standard "Mercer" form and the form of the last person that he consumed. Since Mercer is often pitted against military personnel, consuming a military person and using their form provides substantial benefit.

Further, the consume mechanic also has an influence on the plot due to its non-gameplay powers. Most notably, Mercer gains the knowledge and memories of the people he consumes. Due to this, the main plot of the game is often concerned with finding people who know Mercer's history and essentially eating them. This mechanic also drives the major subquest called the "Web of Intrigue" which is concerned with finding random people on the streets of Manhattan and eating them so as to find out more information about the game's backstory and the ongoing operations of the military in the city.

The consume mechanic also bends back yet again into the upgrade system. Most powers can simply be purchased using EP, but some can only be obtained by consuming people with certain knowledge. All of the skills of this form are related to using things other than the powers inherent to Mercer--driving military vehicles, being more efficient with guns, etc. In addition, all of the people with the requisite knowledge are military personnel sequestered inside of the various bases constructed around Manhattan. This leads to a sort of minigame wherein you must find the base commander, consume him, sneak into the base under a false identity, and then find and consume the person (or people) inside with the appropriate knowledge. This is honestly one of the most interesting parts of the game because it pulls together many of the game's more novel elements.

Gameplay wise, Mercer moves about the city mostly by running up buildings and then gliding around. Unfortunately, the building climbing is infuriatingly impercise at low speeds or over narrow objects. There are several collectables situated at the top of antennas atop tall buildings that I collected before I obtained the ability to fly helicopters. Had I known about this, I would have simply waited rather than becoming frustrated. This poor control also becomes troublesome in the various "movement" sidequests. One in particular (Point to Point) took me hours to do successfully.

The combat is also rather weak. Mercer is somewhat fragile and prone to be knocked over. Additionally, he has little in the way on inherent ranged attacks. This led to me using combat vehicles whenever possible due to the fact that they have seperate health bars and have damage output well in excess of what the player can nominally do with weapons. For instance, the tank can take down a helicopter in a single show whereas Mercer on foot only has a shot if there is something large nearby that can be thrown at the heli.

Overall, I found the game fun despite its weaknesses. I also enjoyed the story enough to keep moving through it without feeling compelled to simply get it beaten. I wish that I, as a player, had more impact on the outcome of the game. Given the open world nature of it, such things seem almost the norm, but Prototype gives a fixed plot influenced only by the player's progress.

Prototype: 1

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The final day of Gamex was, as usual, the lightest. I began the day with the Mega Dominion tournament. I ended up making it to the second round (of three total), but was crushed by a series of bad draws. The person that I roomed with for the convention, however, managed to get second place in the tournament by using screwy strategies which messed up the more conventional plans that the other players used.

After packing up, I spent a couple of hours in the auction. I got several very good deals there, even though I didn't buy nearly as much as last con. I picked up a sealed copy of Power Grid for $24; a sealed copy of Fluxx 3.1 for $4; and a first edition Shadowrun book for $1. I also picked up some nifty dungeon building tiles at the dealer's room though they weren't really a deal.

My last game for the day was Shadow Hunters. My team ended up losing, but only just. It all came down to a single d4 roll and I didn't roll high enough.

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There are some benefits to living in LA. For instance, today I became aware of the fact that the Haruhi Movie is going to have a US theatrical release. It turns out that the dub premeire is going to be less than an hour for my apartment, so I have purchased a ticket. I would have rather gone to the subtitled showings in San Francisco, but it is hard to justify that much travel for a movie.

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I began Sunday of Gamex with a 9am game of Arkham Horror, a cooperative boardgame. Unfortunately, the person running the game was not terribly familiar with it and only one of the eight players had actually played it before. We ended up winning (and I got the second place ribbon for it), but it wasn't entirely clear if we were playing correctly.

After Arkham, I had a game of Paranoia XP. Our troubleshooter team was assigned to join a newly formed organizational group. Due to some strange incident, a new organization--the DCOD--had formed and our team had been sent to staff it. Apparently, they were assigning new clearances based on the order that teams arrived in, and due to my quick action, I ended up being assigned to Green clearance (the highest I've ever been assigned in any game) with the rest of my group being assigned to level Yellow. We then had to go get outfitted for a mission at an armory that had recently changed from army to DCOD hands, but were waylaid by a low level army officer who didn't seem to appreciate the new change in power structure. After trying negotiation and one of our troublemakers getting a foot-wide hole blown from his chest, I chose to hit him in the back of the head with a fire extinguisher. Of course, this being Paranoia, he came back rather quickly to visit us again and ended up in another firefight and getting his body scarred by one of our team shooting him with a laser weapon which was used to permanently burn the logo of the DCOD into things. Apparently things include bodies.

The second firefight with the army officer ended up causing enough damage to the armory that we were forced to flee with whatever equipment we could carry. A few moments after fleeing, the building promptly exploded after we directed a nearby Red/Infrared unit to secure it (I put in a commendation for their team).

We then headed off to the Multilevel Transit Hub and Shopping Funsperience which was where our assigned mission was to take place. At about that time, I was subjected to an impromptu attack from several of my fellow troubleshooters. One of them had stabbed me in the shoulder with a truth serum syringe while and then they began asking me if I was a mutant, when I (of course) denied it and had my nose grow Pinocchio-style, two began attacking me. One eventually injured himself with a piece of issued equipment (rocket boots breaking both legs and the hip) and blew himself up with a grenade. The one who had actually injected me with truth serum teleported away--proving that it was he, not I, who was a Commie Mutant Traitor--when I ordered the nearby Red/Infrared squad to capture him. I somehow managed to survive the attack and ended up with the non-traitorous members of the party. Unfortunately, due to a database synchronization error (probably resulting from traitor sabotage) we were temporarily detained on suspect of having fraudulent identification. Luckily, the misunderstanding was cleared up without bloodshed and we were soon called off to deal with a biochemical contamination on the lowest level of the building.

At the bottom of the level, we found our Red/Infrared team having an argument with a group of Reds. Our team was attempting to convince the Reds that they needed to get into a room so that they could deal with the contamination. After comparing the readings our Red/Infrared team was getting with the apparent status as given by the group of Reds, I asked Friend Computer to send an additional set of scanning equipment to clarify the error. Friend Computer decided to resolve the situation by destroying all faulty equipment. By using the camera-mounted laser, it destroyed our scanning bot and also killed the opposing group of Reds. Problem solved.

Not long after this, we breached the room releasing a flow of some sort of contaminant that had apparently been building up underneath the Multilevel Transit Hub and Shopping Funsperience. The release unfortunately flooded a nearby reactor, setting off a sizable explosion, but most of our team managed to survive.

Incidentally, this was the first Paranoia game in which I survived from beginning to end without losing a single clone. Of course, I was assigned to reactor shield duty afterwords due to a computer glitch caused by one of my teammates blowing up a large section of the Multilevel Transit Hub and Shopping Funsperience. Apparently, they had been an agent of Purge--the secret society bent on destroying the Computer.


I next had signed up for another RPGA game. This game was actually one of the best that I played due to the player mix. Everyone playing was very familiar with the system and with their characters, so the game went quite quickly. In fact, despite starting late (a chronic problem with the RPGA games due to disorganization), we managed to finish in under 3 hours.

Incidentally, one of the people at the game apparently runs a podcast which has recordings of games that he plays in. He recorded our game, so I expect it to show up online eventually. This game also had the GM from the Friday night game that I thought was so good in it as a player.


Since my RPGA game finished early, I wandered over to see what was going on in the board gaming room. I arrived just in time to play in the Race for the Galaxy tournament. I ended up being mostly crushed in the first round, so I joined a sponsored game of The Stars are Right.

The Stars are Right is a tile pushing game with a Lovecraftian theme. I ended up coming in second, but that got me little more than a ribbon.

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The second day of Gamex began a bit later than usual. I decided to give the Power Grid tournament a try. I'd only ever played one other game of it in the past, but it is rather fun. I ended up making it to the final table, but came in third place. Unfortunately, that carries no dealer dollars, but does come with a ribbon.

My next game was Phase 10. I haven't actually played the game in about a decade, and I was mainly only playing to fill a small gap in my schedule. I got lousy cards and played poorly and was thus out in the first round.

After a late lunch, I played in the Dominion (all expansion) tournament. I did surprisingly well in the tournament, making it through two rounds to be at the final table, but ended up coming in third again (to the same person who got first against me in Power Grid). Honestly, I got fairly lucky in the first round by playing against newbie players and in the second round managed to completely destroy the other players decks very early by filling them with curses.


My final event for the day was a Call of Cthulhu game. The premise of the game was that we were a set of federal investigatory agents from various agents. An agency was set up to investigate fringe cases and all of us had been assigned to it (probably due to the fact that we were troublemakers of some kind). We were sent from our base office in Virginia to Fresnoa, CA to investigate a sudden rash of strange reports from the city: someone had reported that the cats had become intelligent, there were alien sightings, crop circles had appeared, an artificial intelligence was supposedly trying to take over the internet, time travellers were apparently showing up, and someone might have rebuild Tesla's earthquake machine.

The players decided, for whatever reason, that we were going to layover for an evening in Las Vegas. During that time, one of the players ran into an old lady visiting from Fresno. After talking with her for a bit, the old lady pulled the pin out of a grenade and dropped it at her feet as a test of her "luck". The player managed to get around a corner before the grenade went off, but the little old lady did not and neither did a large number of other people in the room.

After the requisite terrorism investigation was begun by people from agencies which weren't filled with rejects, our little group continued on to Fresno with our own investigation. Once we got there, we began to slowly go about investigation each of the various individual leads from the incidents that had been investigated.

We began by investigating the crop circles, then moved to the intelligent cats, the time travellers, and the tesla machine. Over the course of the investigation, we found that people were beginning to come into amazing luck--some due to their cats telling them what to do and some due to the time travellers facilitating insider trading. We also found an incredible surge in gun purchasing over the course of the previous few week to the tune of the this period having higher firearm sales than the entirety of the previous year. We found cats who seemed to say (via their owners and the creative use of calendars) that "something" was going to happen on the 6th of June, just after midnight. Lastly, we found that the tesla machine was actually a recreation of a wireless power transmission system that had apparently been stolen from its creator some time earlier.

Our last investigation was into the AI. Once there, we discovered that the AI had instructed a person to go out and fetch the Tesla device (someone else apparently did the stealing and left it for the one we were interviewing) and leave it in a field. It had apparently been configured to run on nuclear power and was "reflecting" the time travellers, preventing them frorm coming to our time to destroy it. This same "reflecting" was causing the crop circle patterns to appear as a side effect. The AI asked us what we intended to do, and, given the parameters that we'd been given by our superiors, I told it that we were supposed to investigate the occurances in Fresno and write a report on our findings. The machine happily dumped out a 400+ page report through the nearby laser printer which provided a coherent story, but coincidentally left out anything about the AI itself.

Our party then began a discussion about possible courses of action. I advocated the following strategy: go to Vegas for the rest of the week, mail the report out on the 5th (the current day was the 2nd), let whatever comes, come. The remainder of the party decided to instead go destory the Tesla device so that the AI didn't take over the world and enslave humanity. After finding it and hitting it with a car, the sky darkened by the appearance of the time travellers who set off a world-wide EMP (presumably to kill the AI), leaving the world set back by several decades at least.

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The first day of this year's Gamex was surprisingly uninteresting. There were no board games or RPGs that interested me particularly, so I instead spent the night playing a pair of RPGA games. The first game was relatively straightforward as far as plot and judging went: a sick young elf girl needed medicine and we as "a group of 4 to 6 adventurers" needed to take her to the nearby outcast elf tribe to get her healed. The GM basically ran everything by the book and so we did normal skill challenges (Insight to find the answer and the top people in each area roll) and had three encounters. It was interesting in that we found a nice weapon during the game (Vicious Longbow +2) that my character used for the duration of the module. However, due to the way that the Living Forgotten Realms rules work and although I got to keep the weapon at the end of the module, I couldn't use it in the second game that evening due to the fact that you can't use an item if you are more than four levels below the magic item's level. I ended that module at level 2 (and about 200 XP from level 3) and the longbow was a level 7 weapon.

The second game was somewhat more interesting due to the GM. The combination of the module itself and the GM who was running it led to a more roleplay-heavy session. Of course, my character isn't really built for doing social things (since, being a Ranger, I don't have charisma as a primary or secondary stat). Nevertheless, it was still a very interesting and enjoyable game and rather different from most RPGA games that I've played. This module was also polite enough to give me the XP necessary to reach level 3, so I'll be able to use that nice longbow in future fights.



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I generally don't do much with Facebook. I have an account to which I will add just about anyone that I've ever known as a "friend", my account is set up to read in my public LJ posts as "Notes", and I have basic biographical information contained therein. To me, this doesn't represent a privacy threat any higher than any other place where I have a public persona.

When I got my new phone, I set up the Facebook application that came with it mainly out of curiosity. It turns out to mostly be full of stupid crap, but I do periodically respond to things people post when I feel the inclination. Yesterday, I did so in a snarky response to someone from highschool. It was at this time that I became aware of an interesting feature of Facebook.

When you post a comment to a public post, the fact of that comment becomes part of your public activity feed and is shown to your friends. In fact, this means that one of your friends can see the original post even if they aren't in the appropriate friend graph of the original poster, so long as the privacy settings on the original post are public enough. It seems that what this means is that it would be possible to create an arbitrarily long series of comments to an original post as each new poster widens the "social radius" to which that post is available. For a sufficiently interesting commentable post, it seems completely reasonable to believe that a post could be commented on by someone who is three or four degrees of seperation from even knowing the original poster.

In my particular case above, I posted a comment about something someone I knew from highschool said and it was responded to by someone that I knew from college. The original poster and the ultimate commenter were not friends and, in fact, had never met. Is this a useful feature? I think that is something that hasn't yet been determined.

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On Monday, I finished my playthrough of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. This game is not to my taste, so it quickly became a "rush to the end" rather than an experience that I at least attempted to find some joy in.

I had originally purchased the game because it had been well reviewed and I believed (incorrectly) that it was a 3D platformer. It turns out that the game is actually much more of a racing game. Essentially, the game gives you a system for building custom vehicles from parts (rather similar to the Gummi Ships from Kingdom Hearts) and then has you complete various challenges using them in one of a half-dozen themed areas. Unfortunately, these challenges are uniformly timing-based with a large number of them being races. I generally don't care for racing games and having a series that had been, until now, a platformer series do a bait and switch was unexpected.

Additionally, the game seems out of place in time. There is no voice acting to be found anywhere in the game. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but they instead have Nintendo 64 era screeching noises play whenever a character has text on the screen. This led to me ceasing to read any text or watch any cutscene about 30% of the way through the game. "Press Y to Skip" became my mantra. Since every "challenge" gives a one sentence description of what you need on the vehicle choice menu, I chose to read that instead of listening to the horrible noises the characters tried to inflict through my speakers.

Of course, since the game doesn't have standard vehicles, that means it has a sort of generic control system that is supposed to cover all of the vehicle types available. This ends up mostly being frustrating since all of the controls feel off somehow. The frustration is made even greater if you actually try to use any weapons since the game provides no on-screen targeting and the geometries involved are rarely clear especially when the game decides to try to help by auto-aiming. Oh, and if your vehicle ever gets flipped, it is usually just easier to restart the challenge. It may have a button for resolving this, but it has a bad tendency to damage your vehicle in the process or get you stuck on any nearby outcropping available.

The game seems to make a lot of references back to previous games, mostly for humor. Since I perhaps played no more than 2 hours put together of all previous Banjo-Kazooie games, this is mostly lost to me.

Here, I think the comparison should be against the first Ratchet and Clank Future game (Tools of Destruction). It carried most of the same baggage that Banjo-Kazooie did--a long series of games, a humorous style, updates for a new generation system, released at a similar time--but Tools of Destruction revived my interest in the platformer genre and managed to be interesting and engaging without relying so heaviliy on backstory that a new player was unable to connect. This game will probably prevent my from buying another Rare. I think at this point, I've played almost all of their XBox 360 offerings (Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero, Viva Pinata, and this with only the second Viva Pinata and their XBLA offering being missing) and haven't found a single one compelling. Maybe they'll return to their SNES and N64 glory days, but I'm not going to hold my breath.


Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts: 0

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So, my PS3's hard drive has filled up. I attempted to play a new game and was happily told that the disk was full. Since Sony did make a few good design decisions, it turns out that I can simply buy a new laptop-style SATA drive and swap the disks using only a screwdriver and an easily removable cover. I found a 500 GB drive on Newegg for $75 that at least one person in the review thread had already used in a PS3, so I picked it up. Once it arrives, I'll have a 12.5x increase in storage.

Of course, before I do that, I first need to backup the old disk. Again, Sony has happily provided a utility to back up the old disk to a USB mass storage device. I have a USB/eSATA drive that had basically gone out of use since I picked up a high-capacity flash stick. The drive in it had previously been used on one of the various Linux boxes floating around, so I formatted it FAT32 and tried to do the backup. The PS3, however, refused to recognize it.

It turns out that the PS3 requires that the partition both be formatted FAT32 (a listed requirement) and also be properly marked as such in the parition table (an undocumented requirement). I know 0x0C (W95 FAT32 LBA) works, but 0x83 (Linux) doesn't. I suspect other partition type labels may also work, but am disinterested in trying. Nevertheless, this may be relevant if you intend to swap out your disks.

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While on my trip last week, I finally finished God of War: Chains of Olympus. When I bought my PSP back before Jason-2 launched (June 2008), I got two games: Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core and God of War: Chains of Olympus. I beat Crisis Core around the time Jason-2 launched. Since then, Chains of Olympus has been in my PSP. In total, that means that it took my nearly a year and a half to finally finish it.

Chains of Olympus is a prequel to the first God of War game and it shows. Kratos is being sent around to do the gods errands all while being given the finger by said gods, much like in the first game. It includes (yet again) him dying and clawing back up from underworld. Only counting the God of War games that I've played, I think that makes at least 4 times that he's come back from there...

The gameplay is quite similar to the other God of War games, but is somewhat hampered by the PSP's lack of buttons. This is especially evident in the fact that dodging requires a two button combination (R+X) when it is probably the most commonly repeated action aside from attacking. Magic is similarly hampered by requiring a button combination, but that rarely was an issue for me given the few times that I actually bothered to cast magic.

Most of the game is actually rather easy. Although enemies are rather tough and do decent damage, I was able to survive most fights by just tanking through them and then picking up one of the incredibly common healing chests. The final boss, however, dramatically changes the paradigm. Its attacks do on the order of a quarter of a fully-expanded health bar and can't be blocked, only dodged. This brings the control flaws back into the foreground and made the final fight quite frustrating. It also didn't help that there was a two-minute-long, unskippable cutscene between the last checkpoint and the actual final fight.

Honestly, I don't remember all that much about the game. Given the piecemeal way that I went through it over something like 18 months, it is hard to remember anything more than the vaguest memories about the earlier bits. In fact, I think this unremarkability may be something core to the game. Since it happens before the first game but after the main character is given all of his nifty superpowers, there isn't much that can be done without requiring it to either all be forgotten or not mattering at all. Such is the fate of most prequels, I think.

I don't think this game is important even to hardcore fans of the series. It isn't bad--the gameplay is solid enough and the plot doesn't have any glaring holes--but it isn't that good either. I think this is the sort of game that the word mediocre is destined to describe.

God of War: Chains of Olympus: 0

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Two weekends ago, I played through Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time. For those unfamiliar with the series, they're rather quirky platformers with a humor slant and little need for realism.

I gushed about the previous one, and the sequel is quite good in its own right. The game follows most of the recent platformer tropes: weapons that level up when used, a dozen different types of collectables, jumping puzzles on rails, etc. The game does branch out a bit from the standard fair by adding some interesting things by making use of time-travel based puzzles. These show up in the form of rooms where you can record a sequence of moves for a "shadow" and then work in cooperation with the shadow to get through the room. Although this particular type of puzzle has shown up in a few flash games, this is the first time that I've seen it carried out in 3D in a modern platformer.

I found the game enjoyable enough that I decided to defeat it. I had mostly completed the task by the end of my first playthrough, but getting all of the trophies required a second playthrough anyway (basically there was a trophy for beating the game a second time) and I got the remaining trophy that I needed in the post-game of my second playthrough.

I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that the Ratchet and Clank series is one of the top-tier Playstation-exclusive titles. Although it may not be as angry and violent as say God of War or Resistance, it provides one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences that I've had lately. It definitely helps that the game makes a strong point of not taking itself too seriously and provides continual humor value without compromising on gameplay.


Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time: 1!

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So Xander apparently gets random DVDs in the main periodically. One DVD that he got was called Stingram Sam. Xander described it to me as "a cowboy musical in space" and frankly, it is approximately as brilliant as it sounds.

Stingray Sam is presented as six episodes of about 10 minutes each. Personally, it was episode two which sold me. Luckily, the first two episodes are available online for viewing.



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A month or so ago, I got a random IM from Seabass telling me that not owning Deadly Premonition despite owning an XBox 360 was me doing a huge disservice to myself. I googled the game, as one does, and quickly found two wildly conflicting reviews: Destructiod gave it a 10/10 while IGN gave it a 2/10. Since the game was only $20 (apparently it was released as a "budget" title"), I added it to my Amazon cart and ended up picking it up a few weeks later when I had a super-saver capable cart.

I think Deadly Premonition was the answer to a question: "What would Silent Hill be like if you set it in a GTA-style open world?". The game begins in a relatively straightforward way for the genre. Francis York Morgan, protagonist and FBI profiler, and his apparently imaginary friend Zach are headed toward a small town where a young woman has been murdered. Something appears in the road causing him to swerve off and crash leading to the game's first "Other World" scenario. He's soon solving puzzles and fighting strange creatures.

As soon as you clear the "Other World", however, you end up in the town of Greenvale. Once there, you can drive around the city, perform side quests like helping the grocer rearrange the stock room, talk to your imaginary friend about the movies that you like, eat breakfast with the kindly old lady at your hotel and other such things. Of course, there is still that little murder investigation to carry out.

The game itself is rather fun and the plot was interesting enough to keep me playing. It is very easy to see why people might but put off with it, however: the game has graphical quality more on par with the previous generation of consoles; the controls are very rough and lack the polish that a commercial release should have; the dialog is rather campy; you often have to drive from one end of the map to the other which takes damn near forever; dialog windows during conversation and item pickups are so slow as to be interminable. Any of these could be a deal breaker for some people.

I would say that the game is important if not necessarily good. The game points at the horizon and says that a horror game can be scary without startling us every few minutes. It says that a horror game can use humor without losing its edge. Most importantly, the game shows that a horror game doesn't have to take itself seriously in order to deal with its story in a serious way. Unfortunately, it also shows us that being truly great does require getting the fundamentals down: shoddy controls and graphics that would have been just barely passable a decade ago bring down the game.

For fans of the horror genre and for people who care about its evolution, the game is required reading. For everyone else, if they want to know what kind of game can lead to an 8 point swing between two relatively respected publications' reviews, it might be interesting. Otherwise, I'd give it a pass.

Deadly Premonition: 0

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I routinely play a Dungeons and Dragons variant called Warlock. It is somewhat derived from pre-first edition stuff and has a somewhat different slant from most traditional DandD stuff. Although the discussion of such differences could easily fill an entire post, instead I'm going to talk about an experience from last night's game. I run two characters in this game: a thief specializing in bows and a mage who mostly does fire magic.

In this system, there is a rather large set of spells. As with most variants of DandD, there is an Invisibility spell. Also like most variants of DandD, it is mostly useless. Most enemies who you would want to not be seen by can see invisible anyway making the spell a useless useful spell. There is, however, another higher level spell called Indetectibility. This spell grants all the same benefits of inivisibility, but can only be pierced by someone using Detect Life. Although Detect Life is common among the undead, it is quite uncommon elsewhere. Given the long duration of Indetectibility (until dispelled or the character commits a hostile action) and the high utility, I researched the spell and have been having the character routinely have the spell up at all times when adventuring.

So far, I've had a couple of instances of the spell failing me. Once, we ran into some pseudo undead (apparently inspired by the Necrons). Most couldn't see me, but I'd been scouting ahead behind enemy lines while fighting types were engaging some of theirs and almost got caught. Luckily, our side broke their lines before any of them could engage me. A later time, in another player's universe, I ended up inside an enemy cone spell that caused instant death and failed my saving through. This left me dead and indetectible, though eventually the party figured it out and carpet bombed the room with dispel magic until they found my corpse to raise me.

Both of these previous instances were troublesome, but neither of them were especially unexpected. Last night, however, another of the players ran who hadn't been around much since I started doing this constant indetectibility plan. We ended up doing a quest where we went into a Norse-mythology themed area. After making our way there, we basically did a sort of "prove our worth" battle against some trolls and after succeeding were given the opportunity to challenge some of the "Valhallans" while some of the lower Norse Gods looked on for amusement. Essentially, it was an exhibition match. Before the match, there was some feasting and healing from our previous encounter, and one of the god NPCs told me mage (who was still indetectible) that fighting while indetectible was very dishonorable. I thanked the NPC for their advice, but explained that I liked staying alive and that being indetectible was generally helpful in that regard.

So then there was fighting. The opposing side had a few magic casters as did we, but during the initial phase of combat, something unfortunate happened. Apparently, one of the gods had cursed my mage by placing a marker over her location and making it so that she was incapable of saving against magical effects (generally in this system, saving against magic prevents non-damaging effects from working or halves the damage of spells). Combat began by my mage then taking two lighting bolts and being at more or less the center of a Sensory Deprivation spell. Essentially, for using a strategy that has been used against our own party repeatedly, I was punished severely by the night's GM.

Due to these effects, my mage--one of the highest level characters in the party--did a grand total of one point of damage over the course of the entire encounter. Since I was forced to use a Dispel Magic to get out of the effect that I was in, I was unable to cast any sort of damage dealing spells to help the party (mages must wait six phases between castings but movement, melee, and archery can happen every phase). We survived the encounter, barely, but with a much greater expendature of resources and with only two of ten PCs standing. The entire thing left a bad taste in my mouth.

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Being a multi-platform owner, I get certain advantages. One of these advantages is the ability to play the platform-exclusive titles for each system. Most recently, this meant that I played through Uncharted 2: Among Thieves--a PS3 exclusive released a few months ago. I actually finished the game on Sunday, but after looking at the trophy list ended up deciding to take a shot at the Platinum Trophy which ended up requiring me to beat the game on the two highest difficulties. I finished the second of those runs last night.

For those who missed it the first time around, the Uncharted series centers around Nathan Drake, a self-reported descendent of Sir Francis Drake and something akin to a treasure hunter by trade. This time around, he has been pulled into a scheme to find Marco Polo's lost ships and the treasure that was presumably within them. As with most things in Drake's life, this quickly degenerates into people shooting at him and buildings collapsing while he is in or on them.

Gameplay wise, it is very similar to the first Uncharted. It seems to use mostly the same engine which, despite the intervening time, is still very impressive. The gameplay is mostly of two forms: Prince of Persia style platforming and cover-based gunfighting sequences. I think this iteration of the series manages to blend the two styles of play somewhat better than the former in that it makes use of the platforming mechanic to create interesting encounters. For example, at one point, you are forced to carry out a gunfight while hanging off a telephone pole and scrambling around the various signs on it to maintain your cover. At another point, your entry into a room full of enemies is made via a scalable wall at the end of a platforming section. This gives you interesting retreat scenarios and greately enhanced cover, but limits your ability to make use of all of your equipment.

Perhaps the most interesting scenario, however, is the chase level. In this scene, you are in the back of a flatbed truck in a convoy. The enemies have spotted you on the truck and so enemies in other trucks are shooting at you, your truck, your ally's truck and basically anything else nearby. In order to survive, you have to jump from truck to truck, clearing enemies as you go, so that the you don't end up flying over a cliff in one of the trucks as it is taken out by your foes. The entire scene looks like it was shot for an action movie and is incredibly fun.

There is very little that I can really complain about in the game: the acting is extremely well done; the gameplay is mostly solid; and the plot is interesting enough to keep me playing. Perhaps my only complaint is due to my play through on the highest difficulty (which they call "Crushing"). On the highest difficulty, due to the increadible ease of dying, all of the relatively minor control flaws become glaringly apparent. Every time that I died due to the game refusing to make a corner transition properly or shift from one kind of cover to another made me spew curses. Luckily, the lower difficulties (even Hard) tend to be forgiving enough that minor control issues are unnoticable.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves: 1!



Published by XPost^curses