Ole Switcheroo

Yesterday I was just sitting around typing on IRC and basking in the glow of my 1247 career points round (double distinguished combat pins and two silver badges) when my computer completely froze up. This was rather odd, but no big deal. Unfortunately upon reboot, I was told that there was an Error Loading OS. I waited a bit and tried again with the same results. Uh oh, sounds like hard drive problems…

I tried searching for a way to diagnose if the main SATA drive had gone bad, but apparently booting from a USB drive doesn’t work that well and I didn’t have any floppies. When I booted from my Vista CD, it found no installation of the OS and said I did not have proper partitions. This I found odd, since my IDE backup HD and my SATA main HD only have one partition each. I also found it strange that when I went to the menu to look for some drivers to load, I still saw both my hard drives available. Even stranger was the fact that their letter designations were reversed, and the IDE was the C: drive while the SATA was the D: drive. Hmmmm…

As I suspected, somehow the BIOS options had changed themselves to try and boot the IDE drive first. I had seen a few things online about Vista doing odd things with the boot order, but after I set the BIOS options to boot the SATA hard drive first I had no problems rebooting. I wonder if this is from the recent pushing of Vista SP1, since I know SP1 changed some of my other computer settings, but it seems odd that the OS can alter your BIOS like that. I ran CHKDSK last night on the SATA, and it fixed some orphaned files, so hopefully my Seagate drive is OK (considering it is only about a year old).

Just Like Yuhtunga Jungle

I finally received my copy of Etrian Odyssey yesterday, after searching everywhere and finally resorting to buying it off some guy in Texas (off Half.com).

So far it’s extremely classic, being all turn-based and featuring random encounters. The map-keeping isn’t actually that bad, and you can put your own notes in. I like the character art, but because most of the action is first-person you don’t actually see your characters all that often. The saving in town system does curtail a bit of the portability of EO, since you can’t grind for 20 minutes and then save, but if no one else is using the DS, you can just pause and close the clamshell.

So far the difficulty of EO has not been underestimated. Even in the freaking n00b-zone, I’ve had frontline guys go down in two hits. It does add to that frantic feel as you try to navigate back to town to recharge your TP (medic starts out with such a small pool) and normal attacks barely scratch the Robber Crabs (or whatever they are called). Once your medic is out of TP, all you can do is either run or hope your slow Alchemist can land Ownzaga before your party dies. I thought I found an awesome grind area next to a TP-restoring fountain in the first zone, but it stopped working after about 4 tries!

I have also created a special party member, aptly named “Scrub,” who has all his skill points put into chop, mine, and take, i.e. the gathering skills. I’ve split the guild into two groups, with the first being a classic balanced group for progression purposes, and the second being a high DPS grinding group to escort Scrub in his adventures.

But It’s Pink

I finally convinced Bunky to get a Nintendo DS Lite. She’d been considering it for a while, but was wavering on the fence. Unfortunately, as soon as she decided to get one, we found they were sold out everywhere. Originally she wanted the black one, but when it looked like that one wouldn’t be in for a while, I managed to convince her to just get the pink one (which we were able to find 4 of at a Target store). She also grabbed Nintendogs, Yoshi’s World, and Mario Kart.

For some reason, Bunky was really against getting the pink DS. I have no idea why, since I think it looks fine, and she is totally a girly girl. She thinks people will not take her seriously, but how serious are you when you are playing Nintendo? So far she’s really enjoying the DS, especially on the rare days off from the office. These DS games are perfect for her because they are not as difficult as the Wii games, and facilitate short (but frequent!) play sessions.

Hellgate Tetris

Flagship posted up the winner of the Halloween contest. The first part wasn’t that great (first 1.5 minutes), but there really is a limit to what you can do with the HG:L characters. There’s no model viewer, so no green screening like in WoW. However, the commercial part was amusing, especially when they mention the inventory and the lack of respecs.

Hellgate Initial Impressions

I’ve gotten a Guardian to level 20, and an Engineer to level 12 (I got him to level 10, then rerolled when I found out how bad the construct drone was), and an Evoker to level 6. I think HG:L will eventually be quite good, but like so many of these MMO games, HG:L shipped with a number of issues.

The Good:

• Quests: The story so far is pretty good, and some of the characters are very funny. Also, I have yet to grind, as the quests take you everywhere you need to go, and net you all the experience you need.
• Party Portal: It’s such a simple idea, but the ability to open a party portal at almost any time (except in Hell, interestingly) and instantly beam over to your party is amazing. This eliminates all the waiting for party members to assemble, and prevents people from getting lost.
• Fun: When things are working smoothly, HG:L is fast-paced and enjoyable. I think HG:L has a very strong foundation. There are a number of really cool moments like the pitch-black level where you wear headpiece flashlights, and the Gundown battle where you have to shoot down the squid ship. A few of the innovative parts are less impressive (like the lame RTS event), but props to Flagship for trying.
• Light Death Penalty: When you die, you can pay a small fee to pop right back up (BATTLE REZ!!!). If you are that cheap, you can also respawn at the last base, or return as a ghost at the beginning of the zone. The last two options are free.

The Bad:

• Chat UI: It doesn’t affect me as much since Velius, Ender, and I use TeamSpeak, but the Chat UI is bad, and has many users complaining. The overall UI is good, but there are some annoying issues that will probably get fixed in the initial patches (like party portraits not showing up sometimes).
• Inventory Management: There is no auto-sort feature, so your inventory frequently gets clogged up. Even worse, the special holiday/event items will continue to drop even when you have already completed the quest. In some ways, being a subscriber could actually be more annoying!
• Subscriber Perks: Unless you must have PVP, I see almost zero reason to subscribe. Compare what you get in WOW with what you get in HG:L when you subscribe, and it’s clear the value just isn’t there.

The Ugly:

• The Memory Leak: This is a bad bad bug, and no matter how epic your computer is, the program will crash at least once every 1-2 hours. The bug is rumored to be related to HG:L taking all the textures in and never really removing them, but even with all settings set to low you will still crash. In some cases, your computer will completely freeze up. With the light death penalty and the shrewd use of party portals, this won’t mess up your progress too much, but it is really annoying to constantly have to exit HG:L and restart your computer. The memory leak should have been resolved before, and it seems that Flagship has not figured out what causes it.
• Quest Bugs: I have not gotten this far, but apparently there are some bugs with a later story-critical quest that will prevent you from progressing. This is a bad bug as well, but it will probably be fixed pretty quickly.

Did Someone Say Tree?

HG:L has been picked up, and is awaiting testing. In the meantime, here are some anticipated trees:

1. Engineer: From threads, it seems like this minion-summoning class is meant to be more of a damage/support hybrid, so I decided to concentrate on minion ranged damage and engineer ranged damage. Most pets tend to die in melee from what I’ve seen, so I expect the pet to be more of a dot-bot than a crappy tank. I put a point into Sprint for the 20% movement bonus which may be useful when soloing I maxed most of the useful party skills, tactical stance, and nanobots (which must be good because it is in the final tier, haha).
2. Evoker: The skill tree seems to be broken, as you cannot allocate points to Elemental Drain. I left 6 points behind to max that skill, and possibly put a point into Sprint. I like the way lighning spells look, so I went down that tree, but I don’t really know which spells will be most useful. I focused a little more on AOE damage, just so the character will play differently from other ranged damage classes. I expect there to be some very large mob groups in HG:L.

The trees are sorta primitive right now, and they don’t really tell you what all the ranks do. I’m hoping level 50 is pretty easy to reach. No clue yet on the third class. Videos and skill descriptions for Guardian sound a little lame, but I would like a melee class.