Anjin Unleashed

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

I wish that I could count on you all having played Bastion though to the end because I so want to talk about spoilers. I'm not going to, but it is taking every bit of self-restraint to do so.

A hidden RPG - It amuses me to no end that Bastion is actually an RPG. Only they obfuscated or filed off just about every number you could find. Funny thing is that I don't miss it all that much. You have health points, but you don't know how many. You earn experience points and levels, but you have to go to the distillery to see your level. You discover weapons, but you find out how effective they are by testing them out. The weapons can be upgraded, and you can see the effects of the upgrades, but only when you are looking at them in the forge. And it works. Even though the stats are in the background, you spend your time focusing on the game and making interesting decisions, not whether you have enough Agility or Stamina.

So many weapons - One of the coolest things about Bastion, and one that sets it apart from other action RPGs, is the huge variety of weapons in the game. In most Diablo-like games, you have a melee weapon and a ranged weapon, but with a huge variety of stats. In Bastion, each weapon introduces a unique play style. And the beauty is that there is no bad combination of weapons. They are all effective so choose what is most comfortable, or most fun, to you.

Fantasy western - The tone and style of the game reminds me quite strongly of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. The game has a western feel, from the weapons and characters to the music and the story. It is so different than most games and is a welcome change of pace.

The end - Ugh! I so want to talk about the ending! It really is great. Supergiant mixes things up right at the end giving you new abilities and forcing you to make big choices. So brilliant. Good enough that I immediately started again with the New Game Plus option. I want to see how everything turns out if I go the other way.

This will probably be my last post about Bastion until you folks all swear that you've beat the game. Now get to work. I'm counting on you.

After a long week of rumors, Gearbox has finally announced that Borderlands 2 is in developement. Scheduled for release in Take Two's 2013 fiscal year (starting April 2012), it is still a way off. But at least we have something to look forward to.

Borderlands had been a huge surprise to me. I have mentioned more than once that I've purchased both the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game, including all of the DLC. When I blew out the graphic card on my PC, I started over playing on the console. It's slick mixture of Diablo loot and quest with a tongue in cheek shooter made me a lot happier with the game than I expected. So I am eagerly looking forward to the new game.

There is more information to come in Game Informer. You can see the magazine cover image here.

MMO-Champion is reporting that Blizzard, overlords of World of Warcraft juggernaut, have copyrighted the name Mists of Pandaria.

Folks, I highly doubt that Blizzard is launching an entire expanion about the Pandarians. If anything, this will be a mini-expansion available in the Battle.net shop to add a new starting zone.

In the fullness of time, if there were more leaks, I will admit that I was wrong. But I just, I can't see it.

Here are a few odds and ends. I'm not really in the mood for writing a full post today, but I do have a few thoughts rattling around my head.

We just came out the other side of an EQ2 bonus weekend. My play time: zero. An all too common occurance recently, but I was busy this weekend. Being a grown-up sucks.

Since I haven't had time to even play free games, I cancelled my subscriptions to World of Warcraft and EVE Online. With the former, I really have enjoyed my time back with the game, but I haven't had the time to dedicate to playing. For the latter, I subscribed primarily to see the launch of Incarna. It launched, I saw it, I uninstalled. I'm likely to head back to WoW some day, but the chances of my playing again EVE are slim to none.

Despite all of my protests above, I did find the time to finish Bastion. I had to trade sleep to do so, but it was so worth it. I'm contemplating another blog post because I really enjoyed the game. Enjoyed it so much that I put it on my list of potential Top Five games for the year.

Although I loved the movie Firefox way back when I was a kid, I never knew it was based on a book. So when my father-in-law showed up with a copy of Winter Hawk, a follow up to Firefox by Craig Thomas. I never have been a huge fan of the techno-thriller, but I asked to borrow it when he was done. Not sure when I would get to it, but I am intrigued.

After a bit of trouble, I finally received a copy of C3i Magazine issue 25. If you don't know what that is, be assured that you are not alone. C3i is the house magazine for GMT Games, one of the largest remaining board strategy game publishers. It is a beautifully produced magazine with interesting articles. And it comes with so many extras that the supplemental material is a thick as the magazine itself. I haven't read a great board game magazine like this since Avalon Hill's The General. But since issues are only produced when preorders reach a certain level, I'm have no idea when the next will come out. I had better savor what I have.

And that's it. Not much more to say about the Diablo III thing except what I posted earlier. I am still amused that those two tweets showed up one right after the other. Have a good one, everybody.