Finished Portal 2 last night…

It probably took me about 10 hours to play the game from start to finish.  That’s certainly shorter than I’d like, but it seems about average for a game these days.  And I haven’t touched the co-op yet…  So I think I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of this game.

Thoroughly enjoyed it.  At least as good as the first game…  Better in some respects, worse in others.

I liked that there weren’t so many twitchy puzzles that required you create portals while sailing through the air with split-second timing.  There were a couple of those…  But they were largely absent from this game.

I didn’t so much like that the game was less open-ended.  In the first Portal, entire rooms would be covered in white panels.  You could create portals almost anywhere you wanted.  Part of the difficulty in solving a puzzle was figuring out where to put the portals.  In Portal 2, a lot of the time there’s just one or two white panels, and the difficulty in solving the puzzle is simply finding those panels.

Not going to say too much more about it right now…  Terri is still playing, and I don’t want to spoil anything for her.

Suffice to say it was a terrific game and I can’t wait to try out the co-op.

I’m not a religious guy, so Easter has never been a very big deal for me.  An excuse for cards and candy, but that’s about it.

Apparently I’ve been overlooking an important part of the Easter narrative though – the zombies!

⁵¹ At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split ⁵² and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. ⁵³ They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

I guess I’ve got something to celebrate this weekend after all – the zombie uprising of 33 AD!

Nerf NOW!! has a comic today that illustrates what I’ve felt is one of the biggest differences between Portal 1 and 2:

And the commentary is spot-on:

Portal 2 is an amazing game.

With this out of the way, I will now elaborate on something I noticed, which is how it manages the puzzles along the game’s experience.

In the original: you were thrown into a room, with the goal to leave one way or another, using your portal gun to shazzam your way to victory.

The sequel does more of the same, and adds new pieces to the puzzle, such as the very fun accelerating gel.

However, the white panels where you are able to put your portals are few and far between.The result is that now most of the puzzles are solved by choosing which one of the 4 or 5 panels available will get which end of the portal gun. Probably only one of them even, as the other is usually occupied on a light bridge / gel faucet / gravity beam.

The biggest challenge for me in the end was typically finding the panel in question. Some are cleverly hidden but it’s more often than not, it’s a matter of perception rather than logical thinking. Plenty of times I didn’t know what to do, so I just ended up just scanning around for lonely panels and based on their location, I found what I needed to do.

Still, I don’t think this makes the game worse, I think it just kinda gives it a different feel. Like it’s now a treasure hunt for hidden panels instead of a gravity riddle with portals.

On another note, I’m pretty glad they took out the twitch aspect of some jumps. If you finally found out how to solve a puzzle correctly, now it’s resolution is smooth and simple – no more flinging portals while breaking the sound barrier in mid-air to project yourself perfectly in a tiny gap.

That said; I’d not object to a few of these kinds of challenges on future custom maps, if they end up being made.

It’s a good game, go play it!

Stayed up absurdly late (for me) last night playing Portal 2 – absolutely awesome game.

I don’t want to say too much, for fear of spoiling the game…  But it is simply an awesome game.  I was somewhat apprehensive that it wouldn’t be as good as the original.  Portal is a tough act to follow.  But it’s at least as good as the original, if not better.

I’m having a terrific time with it, and I can’t wait to get home and play some more tonight.

As predicted, Minecraft 1.5 has been released.

* Weather (rain, snow, thunder)
* Statistics
* Achievements
* Detector rail
* Booster rail
* Performance improvements

I’ll grab the update tonight…  Maybe even play around for a little bit…  But I won’t be investing too much time into Minecraft right away.

I’ll have to update our server, which means I’ll be waiting for updates to Bukkit and the plugins we use.  But I also need to find a new way of running MCMA as a service.

I was running MCMA as a service using FireDaemon, which worked fine…  But I can’t justify spending $50 just to run a Minecraft server, so I was only using a demo license.  That license has run out, and now my service won’t run.

It looks like Windows 7 has a built-in command to create a service relatively easily…  But I’m going to have to look up some documentation and play around with it a bit.

And, let’s be realistic here…  I’m going to be preoccupied with Portal 2 for a little while.

–ADDENDUM–

Holy crap, there is absolutely no pleasing some people.  The official Minecraft forums are absolutely swamped with folks complaining about the 1.5 update…

One guy screaming that powered rails don’t work, when it turns out that he’s got the recipe wrong.  And then complaining that when they’re unpowered, they brake the minecart – exactly like they’re supposed to.

Elsewhere we’ve got folks with nonstandard texture packs complaining that they can’t see the new rails.

And then there’s folks complaining that the weather doesn’t happen often enough…  That rain falls too slowly…  That the new rail types don’t bend and twist the way the plain ones do…  That the boosters don’t boost enough…  That there aren’t enough achievements…

Holy hell.  I’d just give up and stop writing code if this was the kind of response I received.

Just finished Dragon Age II…  Fun game, but not quite the sequel I was expecting.

I already mentioned that it didn’t actually follow the events of Dragon Age: Origins.  And I’m OK with that.  It’s kind of interesting to see the bigger picture…

In DA:O you spend the whole game fighting darkspawn and trying to end the blight.  You finally kill the archfiend and it feels like you’ve saved the world.  But over here in Kirkwall they never really noticed the blight.  Sure, there were a few refugees…  But life continued as normal.  The Qunari were more of a problem than darkspawn ever were.  Hell, the blight was just a business opportunity – all the darkspawn are dead now, so let’s run into the Deep Roads and grab us some treasure!

It really makes you realize that there’s more to the world than just Grey Wardens and darkspawn.  That your heroic bit of adventure in DA:O was just the tiniest piece of the puzzle.  And maybe, in the grand scheme of things, not even that notable.

There’s a very stark difference between the Mass Effect series, and the Dragon Age Series.  The ME games are following a specific person’s heroic efforts to stop a specific enemy.  While the DA games are telling a story about an entire world, and all its varied threats and heroes.

And I’m OK with that.

But DA2 didn’t feel nearly as epic or grand as DA:O did.

DA:O had you wandering all across the kingdom of Ferelden.  You start out with your own, unique introduction and tutorial…  Then you make your way to Ostagar…  And then to Lothering…  And then you make your way around to see the Circle of Magi, and the dwarves down in Orzimmar, and the Dalish elves, and you have to get help in Redcliff, and eventually you make your way to the capital city…

All the assorted side-quests take you to geographically distant locations.  You’re actually trekking across the countryside.  You’ve got your own war party, and you set up camp at night.  You’re building a genuine army to hold back the blight.

In DA2, you’re doing various heroic things in Kirkwall.  You never go more than a few miles from the city gates.  You visit the Bone Pit…  And the Wounded Coast…  And Sundermount…  There’s the expedition into the Deep Roads…  But really, all the action happens in Kirkwall itself.

Which makes the game seem much smaller.

Sure, you save the city from the Qunari and start a massive uprising…  But it doesn’t seem nearly as epic as trekking across the land and building an army to stop an archdemon.

And the dungeons get kind of repetitive…

To a certain degree, it makes sense.  Again, you never really leave Kirkwall.  So it makes sense that if you revisit Darktown or the Wounded Coast or whatever, it’ll probably look fairly similar to the last time you were there…  And there are some little changes here and there…

But the fact of the matter is that they re-used the same maps over and over again.  They just threw some rubble across a hallway here, or locked a door there.  There were probably four dungeons in total.  Maybe five.  And all the assorted quests through all the assorted chapters were just variations on those few dungeons.

This, combined with the fact that you never really left Kirkwall, made things start feeling awfully repetitive by the end of the game.

And then there were the little changes to the world I’d grown familiar with during DA:O…

Qunari suddenly have horns.  Maybe they were always supposed to have horns, and Sten was an aberration.  Maybe not.  But the only Qunari I dealt with in DA:O didn’t have horns, and it seemed odd to see all of them running around with horns in DA2.  At the very least they should have featured a few Qunari here and there without horns, so we knew that Sten wasn’t an absolute freak and that we weren’t completely confused.

Blood magic has become virtually synonymous with diabolism.  In DA:O, blood magic was outlawed and frowned-upon…  But you didn’t have to play with demons if you were a blood mage.  And there were a few instances of blood mages who actually turned out to be decent folks.  In DA2, however, pretty much everybody who tinkered with blood magic wound up turning into an abomination.

And the whole abomination thing was really watered down…  In DA:O, abominations were downright scary.  They were something to be feared.  You heard whispers about them here and there throughout the game…  But only really ran into them at the Circle.  And they were fairly tough.  In DA2 you’re practically tripping over abominations, and they really aren’t that much different from any other critter you kill.

I did like how they handled equipment for your companions.  It was nice not having to hunt around for armor for them.  Nice that they had a unique look.  Although it felt kind of odd that you didn’t share armor with your companions…  But you did share weapons.  Would’ve made more sense, I think, to make it all unique – kind of like Varric, and his crossbow.

The storyline was interesting.  Especially how it all wound up tying back in to that Deep Roads expedition.  And it’s interesting to think that you’ve managed to start a huge uprising across the land…  I’m curious to see what happens with DA3.

I also really enjoyed the changes they made to the classes…  Rogues felt far more badass than before.  And warriors were far more mobile.  Mages weren’t nearly as squishy in a fight.  Combat felt more dynamic, more fluid…  Less like slowly whittling down a tree, turn by turn.  Two-handed warriors were viable DPS characters.  Far more mobile.  Able to leap into battle and carve somebody down.  Nothing like the slow, lumbering tanks of DA:O.

It was great to see some characters returning…  Bit characters from DA:O like Merill and Isabela became full-on companions.  And companions from DA:O like Zevran just wander through briefly.  It went a long way towards making it feel like a single world.  Like your actions in DA:O weren’t completely forgotten – even if they weren’t central to this story.

All things considered, a very solid and enjoyable game.  I just kind of wish it’d been a little more like a sequel to DA:O.