So, anyone play any computer games over the holiday weekend? I gather from his blog that Coyote has pulled himself away from Wiz 8 to do some work on Frayed Knights. That doesn’t count as “playing”, though ;).
In a fit of madness, I reinstalled the Lord Of Destruction expansion for Diablo 2. There were any number of things I didn’t like about LOD, or rather, the patch that came with it. However, for whatever reason, I wanted to try out the Druid again.
Naturally, I went looking for a cheat program. Since this was the original LOD release, V1.07, most programs I came across wouldn’t work with it. Ummm. What, play honest? Did I have a choice?
So I started up a Druid. Y’know, I’d forgotten that playing honest is tough. A slog. It’s work. Not that he died, mind. I know this game well enough to keep my characters alive now.
Well, I got him up to level 9 (and it was only the new toys that kept me staying with it that long). That’s where I said: “Somewhere on the ‘net there has to be an editor that will work with 1.07″. There were many somewheres, actually. Unfortunately, a lot of them also featured “warez”, “keygens”, “cracks”, etc. Not the kind of place I’d want to download from. Or even visit.
Finally, however, persistence paid off. I did find a program that would do the job (yay!). I buffed my guy a bit, and life was much better. No walk in the park, but at least he was a lot more competent.
Druids aren’t really all that great in the offense department (I was running a combination Elementalist/Summoner). I had a regular parade with me: ravens, wolves, and the Rogue merc from Act I. Without them, I dunno if I could have gotten through it.
As it was, if I hadn’t had those ravens, I might still be trying to kill the Big D. Ravens are immortal. They have a specific number of attacks, then fade out. So yeah, Diablo was pretty much pecked to death by a bunch of birds. My guy spent most of his time evading fire and lighting; I don’t think he even got one good shot on Diablo. Kinda takes the edge off victory. So much for Druids. Ho hum.
I gave the Eschalon Book 1 demo the old college try this weekend. I kept getting disease after disease. Considering the rate the priest charges to cure you it felt more like a HMO simulator.
I made a horrible mistake of buying Twilight of the Arnor for Galactic Civilizations. :) Ended up losing more time to that one than I intended to this weekend. But I also played some Wiz 8, and some Rock Band with friends.
I’m kinda amazed I got all that in, what with working on FK, hitting the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival, and reading the fourth Harry Dresden novel (yes, I’m a latecomer - I deliberately AVOIDED starting the series because I knew it would suck me in like that). Oh, and watching some RiffTrax / MST-3K films with friends.
I had a nice marathon session coding for Vespers, and then re-downloaded and played the beginning levels of Doukutsu (Cave Story). Awesome game.
My son bought a MacBook Pro so I spent today setting it up for him. OS X was easy, but setting up BootCamp to dual boot to Windows was what was time consuming. Mostly it was Guild Wars and Steam that he wanted to play that didn’t have native Mac clients. WoW and WC III work fine on the Mac natively.
After playing Fallout2 recently, I decided to install Fallout Tactics to see if I can finally finish it (starting over from the beginning of course).
So far, I like the UI and _some_ of the game play elements of FoT better. However, I really miss the RP aspect.
Well, I’m still playing NWN2 with MOTB. I playing my 5th character now. Still waiting for the next big rpg to come out. Hopefully it will be fallout 3 :) I just hope it won’t be a dud.
Rome: Total War, for the umpteenth time.
Yeah, I’m guilty of doing Labor Day gaming with NWN2. I bought the game with the Expansion pack and am going thru it to try it out. It seems much better than the first NWN campaign was, but that impending first fight was oh so predictable. I’m trying out a roleplaying attempt with a Paladin/Sorcerer/Red Dragon Disciple character. I expect the game to munchkin me at some point and break my roleplaying attempts, but I’ll try to enjoy the journey for as long as I can.
Scorpia, I forgot to add that the Druid can be quite good if you go down the were-animal path. I thought werewolves were basically dime-a-dozen builds, but the werebear can be quite good with his Shockwave stun attack. It can nip those annoying Flayers in their tracks, and that was worth the effort in my opinion.
@DaveO
Hope you enjoy it Dave, anyway the OC is kinda General RPG story with a few surprises here and there, so if you might get bored with the OC just bear with t a alittle. But the really fun part is when you get to the expansion especially if you carried over you char from the OC. Its a whole new ball game from there. and really hard too!
I managed to play “Just Cause” by myself and with my 6 years old (just driving the vehicles and skydiving with him). I also played “Flat Out 2″ and “Trackmania United” (again with my son). When my son was asleep I also managed to play a little “Fable”.
I also read “Twilight” and finished a Lisa Gardner novel while I sweated over my wife reading my novel for the first time. I also scrapped wallpaper off 120 year old plaster walls in the house.
I went back to work today because I’m worn out!
Coincidentally, I’ve been scrounging through my old games while I wait for Spore to hit. I retried Divine Divinity which was a unplayable crash fest on my current computer. Then Dungeon Siege II Broken Worlds was held my interest for a week. Then Silverfall which got shelved again after two days for the egregious load times. Then DII LOD for a few more days. (I love the balance of 1.11. I’ve never used a character editor, and so it would not be my first thought. But, then, I play hardcore even when it’s not implemented as an option. Losing another Barbarian was no big deal to me: I still had fun.)
But this past Saturday I took my son out to shop for a new lunch box, and encountered a Gamestop that I had not been aware of. And so I finally purchased Titan Quest Gold for me and Mario Cart Wii for the kid. I’m on my fifth TQ character (three deaths and one spec that was just not satisfying my play style). TQ should easily see me through to Spore. It’s been fun.
Wow, good comments, folks. It’s great so many spent the weekend having a gaming good time.
Grayson, diseased? Hmm, I don’t recall having that problem when I played the game. What was going on there?
Coyote, yeah, you sure were busy. Sounds like you haven’t quite gotten out of “crunch mode” yet. You need a vacation ;)
Dave, thanks for the advice. As it was, my little troupe actually did well, better than expected, until I reached Diablo himself. Then it all fell apart, alas. But I may look into the werecritter thing one of these days.
Mert, you are definitely a hardcore person. I remember losing my one HC character, a Necromancer, in the original D2. Right there at the bottom of the Durance (that unmentionable lightning guy), just before Mephisto. Oooo, that hurt. After a couple days, I started over and made it through. But I wouldn’t want to do that ever again.
It’s interesting, by the way, to see how many are playing older games and generally having a good time.
Well, Scorpia, if you think playing D2 as being old, what do you think of a person like me playing Wiz 1 all weekend?
it is more a sad commentary of the state of released games in 2008, that over a 3 day weekend you spend it playing something that it almost 25 years old!
(even if it was a good game)
Presto, I think Ag summed it up pretty well. But it’s interesting that such an old game has staying power, at least for some gamers.
Well, SS, Wiz 1 came out in either 1980 or 1981. Therefore, it is almost 30 years old.
About 10 years ago, Interplay released the Wizardry Archives which collected all the Wiz games except Wiz 8. That is why these games play fine under Windows.
Another visual novel, Little Busters!. I have no idea where the three days went … or last evening. :P
Dellaster,
Have you ever heard this song?:
Time keeps on sliping into the future…
That is where your three days went.