Monday 15 April 2013

Solved One Eighth Of The Puzzle On Planet Nirn

Bruce Wilberforce finally boldly went to Fang Lair. Many wolves and skeletons and goblins wert slain, and all that. I enjoyed the architecture in this dungeon; you can clearly see this is meant to be a Dwarven mine, though there are a few defined structures which are useful landmarks. I managed to find the temple at the upper left and looted it most thoroughly. Now Bruce has a couple of Marks of Shield, which could be useful in a pinch.

Eventually Bruce found his way to the prison area in the lower left, along with a logic puzzle that seemed a little too easy to me, so naturally I solved it and didn't get savaged by spiders. Spiders suck by the way - they often paralyse on attack, which lasts quite long enough for me to get my face ripped off. Should probably make a Free Action spell or whatever later. The prison led directly to dungeon floor two. TWO FLOORS?!!

Floor two is very short - a long corridor to a small island in a lake of fire. No enemies to be seen, so Bruce opened a door and sees a FLOATING BLUE HALOED STICK THING which is obviously the staff piece he was sent to get. After nabbing it Ria goes blah blah blah then a bunch of fireballing wolves ported in, so that was kind of scary for a bit, but Bruce prevailed then high-tailed it back to town.

It was about this time I actually reviewed what Ria said, involving some kind of Ice Palace so I assumed it would be in Skyrim, resident frozen north of the Elder Scrolls world. Bruce bobbed around the region a bit trying to get information, then ran into the most helpful NPC ever: Torborn Ulrarsen. Not only did he immediately point out the locations of the Mages' Guild and nearest inn, he also let me know that somebody in town knew where the Ebony Blade was. The freaking Ebony Blade. So I immediately dropped everything to go look for it. In Arena fashion, the clue is only to find a map which leads to the artefact but I went along with it anyway.

You can watch the resulting playthrough here.

The Labyrinth of Sekaml was not only all the frick over in Morrowind but also dull as ditchwater. Looks like Arena's random dungeons are just random collections of rooms with optional rivers/tunnels overlaid on them. Also the entrance/exits locations are very predictable. After figuring this out, Bruce made his way quickly down to the map on the fourth dungeon level. Oh, this was about the time that Jagar Tharn decided to send all his minions after me, which probably spiced up the dungeon delve a little bit. Anyway, Bruce gets the map and tells him to go to some place in Elsewyr. Sigh.

Something something Rattirrogoth was just as boring as Sekaml's effort. In some ways I prefer this to Daggerfall's sprawling messes of dungeons, but it could have done with a little more thought. The Ebony Blade was reasonably easy to procure, not guarded by anything particularly dangerous.

Back in Skyrim, Bruce got a lead on the Ice Palace which will blah blah blah where the stick actually is. It's about this point that I decided to call it a day.

Friday 12 April 2013

Documents Most Ancient

After watching Jesse Cox and my brother play Skyrim for hours upon end, Emily has been bugging me to start a game of my own that she can watch. In natural Lag.Com fashion I've decided to start at the beginning, with The Elder Scrolls: Arena, and then make my way through the series from there. This is one instalment I've barely touched, but it is very similar to Daggerfall in a lot of ways.

Alright then, the adventures of Bruce Wilberforce begin here! We went through the 'lifestyle questions' and ended up with Spellsword, which is a pretty awesome class, so I'm happy with it. So far he's managed to die a few times in the Imperial Sewers, as any good Elder Scrolls protagonist should. After hitting the shift gate he ended up in Ebonheart, which is about as far away from where he needs to be as possible, so he fast-travelled to Rihad to ask QUEEN BLUBAMKA where on earth 'Fang Lair' is, then got told to go to Stonekeep instead.

On an aside I've never played Stonekeep but I have watched a Let's Play - it's one of the zillion games I own but haven't tried out yet.

Anyway he goes to Stonekeep and it is so freaking scary. I've no idea why I find FPRPGs so tense and scary, well except for dying all the time obviously, it's probably just something left over from when I played them many years ago and was terrified; I had to ask my brother to play for me, haha. At least Arena doesn't play random sounds in dungeons like Daggerfall does occasionally. Still, it was a fairly standard crawl - he ended up swimming for a while because for some reason I chose not to beat down the main door, so he explored rather more of the place than he needed to. He only died a few times; he got pretty lucky with loot and now he has at least -6 Armour Rating everywhere thanks to a lot of jewellery drops with -1 or -2 AR on them. The ending was annoying; there's an island covered in Ghouls and attempting to climb up onto it while they hit you is not much fun. Bruce is now level 8 also, which makes my Heal spell cost a good chunk less.

Also found many random magical items, most of which will probably end up being sold once he gets them identified.

Seeing as the next place Bruce visits will be the 'real' dungeon I'm sure it'll be a good deal harder. I was thinking of investing in a strong Create Shield spell to help prevent the amount of surprise damage he ends up taking when the monsters run up from behind and cave in your skull.