Latest Pokémon Champion coming through

My excellent and not at all stupid team took on the entire Elite Four and the Pokémon Champion in Pokémon Diamond with few headaches. At first the sheer level difference was enough to throw me back out, but this game is quite lenient, only charging you the same amount you would have won when you lose, so I rammed into them a few times and lost, only to come back with more experience and Hyper Potions.

Laszlo	LUXRAY	♂	Lv. 49	OT/Lag.Com
Glen	GASTRODON	♂	Lv. 50	OT/Lag.Com
Dirk	DRIFBLIM	♂	Lv. 51	OT/Lag.Com
Evelyn	ESPEON	♀	Lv. 52	OT/Mercury
Ted	TORTERRA	♂	Lv. 53	OT/Lag.Com
Rachael	RAPIDASH☆	♀	Lv. 43	OT/Lag.Com

Laszlo murdered any Flying types that were thrown at him with a nice Thunder Fang, but was also important for taking out rogue Psychic types with his Crunch. Glen used his sheer bulk to wear down a lot of enemies, with a nice Surf and Ice Beam to take out all-comers. Dirk used his extreme speed to take out a few trouble spots with Fly, while ably absorbing a few hits, then finally taking out an annoying Alakazam with his Aftermath. Evelyn's speed and power made short work of several Pokémon, having to rely only on Psybeam and Last Resort for her attacks. Ted was key, with his incredibly strong Earthquake and Wood Hammer. I had to revive him twice to take on the strong Water/Ground types. Rachael was a newcomer to the team, having replaced my questionably-useful Weavile. Though low level, she was able to destroy a particularly badly-engineered Lopunny with ease, and Fire Blast a Bronzong to death.

All deserve their places in the Hall of Fame.

What do I play next?

Thoughts on Crystals for Life 2014

Somehow last time I wrote I neglected to mention anything about Crystals for Life. I had an excellent time at the event this year and I want to go to next year's event too. To this end I have submitted two runs for consideration, and I'll talk a little about them both here.

Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss is the greatest game ever made. The marriage of first-person dungeon crawling and a creative and engaging setting, with the reliance on the intelligence of the player to actually finish results in a beautiful game. I never tire of this classic. I started practising this for AGDQ2012 but it was not accepted into the final line-up, and there have also been some route changes since I learnt the game, so I have some work to do before it's ready. Hopefully, being a short and confusing RPG, it's a perfect fit into Crystals for Life.

Dark Cloud is very different. It's still a good game in its own right, but it is mainly remembered as a cult classic and as the prequel to a better game. Also, this run is perhaps 8 hours long with randomly generated dungeons and items to deal with. The route is almost finalised and I did a single-segment play-through on my stream not long ago. My personal best can obviously be vastly improved but I feel little impetus to practice it simply because the game is so random. Once I do another run through, any future time will be mostly affected by how nice the RNGod feels that day.

The In-laws

So Emily's parents and sister are back in England for general visiting and touristry. Might not have all that much time for gaming in the following days, so here's an update of where I am right now.

I finished Deadly Premonition a couple of days ago. I'd already seen a play through on YouTube before but doing it myself was satisfying, and my audience was appreciative. Also quite an infusion of Gamerscore, haha. It's an amazing game, but I wouldn't recommend it to many people simply because it is so strange and its design philosophy goes completely against mainstream AAA gaming sensibility.

Most of my time lately has been taken up with Pokémon Diamond. My team is Espeon, Weavile, Luxray, Gastrodon, Torterra and the immortal Drifblim. Just reached the Pokemon League yesterday, feeling pretty good about my chances.

Also started to play Geneforge, a western RPG by a company I admire for their willingness to sacrifice all else in the name of gameplay. It's interesting so far, and I hope to find time to continue soon.

The last few days have been spent putting up shelves and generally making our flat look nicer for when the in-laws want to visit. Might post some pictures soon.

Return of the Lag

Haven't written anything for a while!

Went on a trip to Scotland for a fairly belated honeymoon. Had a good time, didn't play any games whatsoever, haha.

Thanks to Xbox Live's Games for Gold thing I own Fable III and Crackdown now. Technically I already have a Crackdown disc but it really belongs to a friend of mine who I somehow haven't given it back to yet. I also downloaded Spartacus Legends because it's free if you have a Gold account. So, three more free games. Oops!

My Unfinished percentage is now hovering at 79.8%, which I guess is a tiny bit lower, but still a far cry from my 65% goal. According to Backloggery I've beaten these games recently: Kirby's Adventure, SoulCalibur II (I actually Completed this one, by doing everything in Weapon Master), RIP2 - Strike Back, RIP3 - The Last Hero, Kirby Super Star (I've actually played this a lot on emulator before, but now I've cooped it with Emily) and Assassin's Creed III (not quite Completed, but fairly close).

A few words about the RIP trilogy: they're arena shooters, which I kind of like, and there's enough variety for it to be fun. RIP2 was my favourite of these, with a higher difficulty than the first one, but not the endless annoying repetition of the third. RIP3 also has a problem with weapons balance; there's never a reason to not upgrade. I've only played through them all on Normal or possibly Easy. I imagine RIP2 Hard would take a long time to get through.

SoulCalibur II was a lot of fun, though some of the challenges in Weapon Master are very stupid. I've previously finished Soul Blade's Edge Master so I knew what to expect, but the randomness involved was very aggravating and it took a lot of swearing to get through some levels. Still, the actual game is good and it made me want to play a little more SoulCalibur V after I finished. So I have a few more achievements on that now too.

Spartacus Legends is a freemium game which is still fairly playable if you don't pay, which is nice, but progress is slow (of course) and the actual fighting isn't the most complex or interesting. If they'd focused a little more on trying to make a good fighting game then it could be a pretty strong title. Unfortunately it suffers from the usual freemium problems and also really irritating music.

Wales Strikes Back: Return of Arran

Our welsh friend has been over for another weekend. This means I've actually been playing games for a change.

Arran saw fit to bring Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance with him, which I maintain is probably one of the top 5 stupidest names for a game yet. It's a hack and slash game with some fun mechanics. It took me probably about 5 hours of play to beat, which is pretty short, but I did only play on Normal. The last boss was around 90 minutes of that, too. When he throws the... thing... at you, the game expects you to do some kind of precision cut on it or you take 100% damage. Well, analogue sticks aren't good for precision, so I died to that attack A LOT. The cutscenes are ridiculous. Buy if you have too much money.

I randomly finished Fable II also. When I last left off, I was just about to recruit Stephen Fry, so there wasn't much left in the game. Killed a rock, watched the main villain die in a cutscene, blah blah. I feel like the Fable series has the most untapped potential in any game series yet. The ending was very underwhelming.

FINALLY beat Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords just now, also. I used a level 50 Warrior with two items which allowed me to stack resistances, which seems to be the only way to beat Bane, as his item/spell setup is the cheatiest thing in the game. The writing is reasonably good in PQ, and I'm glad to finally put this game to rest. Except I want to speedrun it BECAUSE I AM INSANE.

Of course, I'm not the only person who plays games around here! Arran had a Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past save on our cart that he continued to completion. My poor exasperated wife had to guide him through a lot of the dungeons. :)

Emily has also been grinding the crap out of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! - I've seen her beat Super Macho Man a couple of times now, but she hasn't quite managed to close out Tyson himself yet. She has managed to knock him down a few times, though. One day!

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.

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.