Leveling Down

Want that single gamer point? Be prepared to put in many hours for it…

Surprisingly, while the game got relatively negative reviews, I found Infinite Undiscovery to be pretty enjoyable and have already picked up tri-Ace’s next 360 RPG: Star Ocean: The Last Hope. Unfortunately for me, it looks to be even more crazy and hardcore than Infinite Undiscovery, but one game at a time I guess.

This list of tips and notes is what I put together as I was playing through the game for the third time – the Infinity difficulty mode. For those of you that are playing it on Normal difficulty or Hard difficulty, the tips that I give in this article will still generally be valid. I prefer to write guides for the hardest difficulty of a game since it can address every difficulty mode. Keep in mind though that I will be mentioning spoilers as well since I will assume you have already beaten the game once or twice and need help with a playthrough on a harder difficulty. Can you believe that the prison escape at the beginning of the game is perhaps the most difficult part of Infinity Mode?

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Over 80 hours into this game already. But I’m excited because that means a new game to play is around the corner…

Infinite Undiscovery – A few more Achievements left in the game to get and I will be totally done. I’m hoping to get them this weekend, when I beat the optional end-game boss on the hardest difficulty for that 1 Achievement point. By beating her, I should also hopefully unlock the other most difficult Achievement in the game – one that relies on me having collected every one of the unique 880 items in the game. If I don’t get that Achievement, I’m done anyway – not going through it again and trying to collect every single item.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 – Finally got the 1000 in the game! cmfl3x and I played a few online matches this week and it wasn’t bad, but without matchmaking, it’s time for me to part ways with the game. It seems like no one really plays 2v2 online though, as it took me maybe 20 minutes before being able to find three other players to start a game.

Street Fighter IV – Still playing this, especially whenever my brother has time to play. We’ll just hop in a room and play for hours. Surprisingly, my Sagat is giving his Abel a little more trouble than we both expected, so either I seem to be catching up to him in fighting game ability or I’m learning how to use the imbalance of my character against him. I prefer to think it’s just the former, but I’m sure it’s a mixture of both. I hit my current goal of breaking 2000 Battle Points this week, and I’m definitely starting to see higher level players. Played against a 4500 player once, and when I lost, I only lost 1 point and he only gained 1. Wha?!

Peggle – Been playing this on my DS. I’m sort of addicted to the game. I never played it much before, but with it coming out for the DS I figured I’d try it out and now I’m playing it on my subway commute home from work every night. I can definitely see why the Japanese are addicted to Pachinko – Peggle seems to take that addictiveness of watching a ball bounce around different pegs but also adds more pinball-like gameplay enhancements that are now making my subway trip home far too short each night.

Resident Evil 5 – Still struggling for a long time trying to decide if I should go pick up the game today since Toys R Us is giving out a $20 gift card with it. The thing is, I don’t know what to put the $20 gift card towards. I think it expires at the end of the April, so it’s kind of forcing me to have to use it sooner rather than later. Maybe I’ll just get at 1600 point card or something.

Street Fighter IV online with my brother was how I spent the majority of my gaming this week.

Street Fighter IV – Finally convinced my brother to pick up the game, and we’ve been spending a good amount of time this past week playing it online. Even though he had barely played it prior to picking it up, he proceeded to destroy me right after we started playing. I was only able to win one of the 8-9 matches we played and I was using Sagat! But still, ever since then he’s started using Abel and that’s all we play. I’ve been learning a lot though from playing with him and while he’s clearly better, playing with him is actually making me better too so I’m happy about that.

Infinite Undiscovery – When will this game end?! Going on 60 hours or so now and have just beat the game on the hardest difficulty. Now all that remains is that final optional (ridiculously tough) end-game dungeon and I’ll be able to move on. Too bad I’ll need about another 10-15 hours in this dungeon before I can walk away victorious.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 – cmfl3x and I beat the campaign early this past week so he could move on to Halo Wars. Some of those missions make me wonder if it’s even possible to beat with an AI partner on Hard difficulty. Maybe I’ll try it out sometime since we’ll be putting out a review for it next week.

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts – Picked it up since it was on sale at Amazon for $20 this week. I wasn’t too impressed with the demo, but it seems like people that play it say it’s awesome: the equivalent of playing with Legos but in a video game. So I guess I’ll just have to see for myself. Add another game to the backlog…

Crysis & Crysis Warhead – Both were on sale for $10 each at Best Buy this week so I picked those up too. At first I wasn’t planning on Crysis Warhead due to the intrusive Securom DRM, but apparently EA has released patches on Crysis Warhead, Spore, and Red Alert 3 (on the PC) that allows you to deauthorize the game on your PC so you don’t run out of installs. My PC gaming backlog is almost up to double digits now…

Resident Evil 5 – Comes out next Friday but the sad news is: it’s a 7 hour game. What a massive disappointment. Resident Evil 4 was a 20 hour game and this is about the same length as Call of Duty 4 or Gears of War but without any sort of multiplayer. It’s practically Army of Two and even Army of Two had multiplayer! Grr.

Street Fighter IV (360) – Is the game serious? Am I supposed to go through all Challenge modes with every single character if I want to get all the titles/badges? Dang that’s going to take forever. I’m doing Time Trials now, and it doesn’t make sense to me that if I lose to opponent 14 with time remaining, I can’t continue. It’s Time Trial, not Survival mode after all. -_-

Mercenaries 2 (360) – Heard the game was sort of glitchy, but for $9.99 at Best Buy this week it was cheap enough to throw into my backlog.

The Orange Box (PC) – I wanted to pick up Team Fortress 2 for the PC since it continues to keep getting new content and maps, but didn’t want to pay $20 for it. I was hoping Valve would put it on sale on Steam for half price like they did with Left 4 Dead, but when I found it for The Orange Box for $15 at Circuit City during its liquidation this past weekend, I sprang for it. Then what happens? Team Fortress 2 goes on sale for $10 during the week right after I just bought Orange Box. I would have preferred to just buy that instead but what can you do.

Company of Heroes (PC) – Also at the same Circuit City liquidation, I was able to find Company of Heroes Collector’s Edition for a little under $10. I remember playing this game years ago but lost my copy so I sprang for it again. I can’t really remember the mechanics behind it, but I certainly enjoyed it. I figure it’ll be good training for Dawn of War 2.

Infinite Undiscovery (360) – The majority of my gaming time for the last month has been spent playing this title, but now that I’m on the hardest difficulty playthrough, there is light at the end of the tunnel! I’m putting together a guide to Infinity mode as I play through it as well.

Infinite Undiscovery is worth a look for 360 Japanese RPG fans, but maybe not for the Japanese RPG initiate.

I’ve been playing this game for over a month now, but what can I say – it’s a Japanese RPG and I only get a couple hours each night to play video games. So, I’ve been slowly making my way along, and have spent about 40 hours total on the game: 20 hours to beat it on Normal difficulty and then another 20 to beat it on Hard difficulty. I actually beat the game on Hard difficulty a little under 10 hours because I raced through it, skipping all cutscenes and optional quests, but then had to put in another 10 hours to gear up and grind to beat the optional end-game dungeon. I’m currently playing the game on the hardest mode, Infinity, and I’m about 10 hours in but it’s going ultra slow because enemies are a lot stronger and I’m trying to nab the last few Achievements I didn’t get on the previous times through. At my current rate it’ll take me probably another 30 hours or so to beat, which means I’ll have ended up spending over 80 hours to get the 1000 Achievement points for this game. Some may wonder if it’s worth it, and my only response is that depends on how much of a Japanese RPG fan you are. I actually enjoyed the game more on subsequent playthroughs – meaning either the game is just more fun to play once you know what to expect or the cutscenes kind of bored me and I skipped them all the second and third time around.

Good
- combat system is fun and a lot more action packed than a typical Japanese RPG
- crafting is intuitive and you can make some really cool gear with it
- several difficulty levels extend replayability

Bad
- storyline takes a while to pick up
- actual game length is pretty short for a Japanese RPG: about 15-20 hours
- not a game that is easily accessible by those that have never played a Japanese RPG before

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Halo Wars – While the demo was enjoyable, it didn’t scream out as a Day 1 purchase for me. Still trying to decide, as the controller makes it pretty simplistic but it does have campaign co-op. But cmfl3x and I haven’t even finished Red Alert 3 co-op yet…

Dead Rising 2 - About time! Hope with the new developer it’s as good as the first one was.

Infinite Undiscovery - Wow. The game is actually a lot more enjoyable on these harder playthroughs. Who would have thought?

Starcraft - had a dream about it this past week. Talk about crazy – I haven’t played it in years, and here I was dreaming I was in a RT 2v2 mirror match with a Terran and Protoss on both sides. After an initial skirmish with my Terran and the enemy Terran, all was pretty quiet as I massed ground units. My Protoss partner was massing Carriers, and apparently so was the enemy Protoss player. I soon discover that the enemy Terran player was massing Battlecruisers, but I’m stuck with all these siege tanks and no air. Great. I plop down 4 Starports (where did I have this kind of money?) and begin massing Wraiths. I then send my squads of Wraiths to take out his Battlecruisers, and scan once in a while to take out the enemy Observer. Not sure how it ended up but then the alarm went off and I woke up. What the heck kind of dream is that? I don’t remember the last time I actually dreamed I was playing a game, especially in this much detail. It wasn’t even like made up stuff that would occur in a dream – all of these Starcraft game mechanics were still quite present and adhered to.

It’s somewhat silly, but I mentioned to my wife the other day that I think my general mood seems dependent on what game I’m actually playing at the time. If the game is awesome, I’m in a great mood, but if it’s kind of boring, I’m “blah.”

It hasn’t been helping lately that I’ve been playing a string of mediocre games, like Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway, Prince of Persia, and now Infinite Undiscovery. I guess coming off of better games like Call of Duty: World at War, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Gears of War 2, and Dead Space just makes it all the more difficult.

Infinite Undiscovery – Seemed like there was a lot of potential at first when I started playing the game, but it ultimately isn’t delivering as much as I’d like in the end.

Burnout Revenge – Decided to pop this in to give myself a break from the mundaneness of Infinite Undiscovery. I stopped playing it before because the load times got too annoying, but now that I’m able to install it to the HD, it’s a bit faster. Actually reminds me of the Time Trials of Mirror’s Edge, as I’m collecting stars from doing well on courses but it’s also proving to be just as frustrating with restarts.

Shadowrun - Saw it on sale on the PC for $3 so I went ahead and bought it. It’s the first game that has cross platform 360/PC play, so I was actually able to log into Live when playing it on my new PC. For some reason, it feels more enjoyable to play it with the 360 controller though. Maybe that $3 wasn’t worth it as I’ll probably end up going back to the 360 version.

The combat system of Infinite Undiscovery is probably its best feature.

I’m little over ten hours into this Japanese RPG game and it’s actually not horrible. I remember how it got slammed in the reviews, but I figured that these days, most Japanese RPG games get poorly reviewed because they aren’t innovative enough or have enough marketing behind them. And I was kind of right about the reviews being overly harsh. Some of the things I heard were definitely negatives, but at the end of the day, it still had a certain appeal to me.

Infinite Undiscovery actually plays a little like a single player World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XII. While I feel that Final Fantasy XII is much better game due to its game mechanics, its storyline was terrible and I wasn’t able to finish it because I just didn’t care enough about the characters to see how it concluded. Infinite Undiscovery doesn’t have the gameplay depth or length of Final Fantasy XII, but it makes up for it a bit by having a more interesting storyline and enjoyable characters.

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Command & Conquer 3: Red Alert – cmfl3x and I finally completed the Soviet campaign! Slowly but surely we’re making our way through. Expect my impressions on the game soon.

Infinite Undiscovery – Only about nine hours in and seems like I’ve barely scratched the surface of the game. Annoyed a little bit that you can only save at predesignated spots, so it’s tough to stop until you get to the next one. I guess that’s typical of “old-school” Japanese RPG games though so I’m sort of used to it already.

My new PC – Most of this past week was spent messing around with my new PC. After installing my new graphics card, I started going through and installing all sorts of games that I bought years ago that ran a little sluggishly on my old system: Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, Oblivion, Age of Empires III, etc.

With my new machine and graphics card, I’m able to run Battlefield 2 on 1280×1024 at max settings for everything and still rock a 70+ framerate. I decided to be a little more adventurous and download the Crysis demo to see how it would go. Outlook: not good. On 1280×1024, even at its lowest settings, I had a framerate in the teens. The smoothest framerate I could get was about 40 when running in 1024×768 at the lowest graphics settings. Graphics looked kinda blocky at that level. Freaking Crysis. I can’t even run it on medium settings on 1024×768 without it stuttering haha

I also went ahead and re-installed World of Warcraft on my new machine, and my patching is fully caught up now (after several hours of torrenting through all the patch downloads). I want to give the 10 day trial for Wrath of the Lich King a shot, if anything at least to see how the game runs on my rig. Also, since I already have a level 60 I can try out the Death Knight class. I just need to figure out when is the best 10 day time for me…

Infinite Undiscovery – This game is definitely not as bad as the reviews say (never trust professional reviews on JRPGs these days) and is actually pretty fun. Too bad I have to play through it three times if I want all of the Achievements though…

Prince of Persia – Hopefully I can get through this by the end of this weekend and get rid of it next week. Fell asleep a couple times last night when I was playing it.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 – Seems nearly impossible for cmfl3x and me to be on at the same time long enough to continue our co-op campaign these days. The AI seemed like a pushover until our last mission we just played. We nearly got worked there.

Unreal Tournament III – Decided to open this up a few nights ago and check it out. I then proceeded to drop it about 10 spots in my backlog queue as I completely lost excitement to play it. Maybe I’m just not cut out for that type of old school gaming anymore…

and finally…I got a new PC! Dell has been having awesome deals this past week, so I bit on one.

My new rig arrived with the following for $475 shipped after tax:

- slim tower case
- Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 Wolfdale 2.66GHz 3MB L2 Cache
- 4 Gigs of RAM
- 640 GB hard drive
- DVD+/-RW
- Wireless network card
- Microsoft Vista Home Premium
- 256MB ATI Radeon HD 3450 supporting HDMI

When I received the PC, I discovered that the new graphics card only had DVI and HDMI output. I run a dual monitor setup, and one of them is VGA so I was kind of screwed there. I could have gotten adapters for both (an HDMI to DVI and a DVI to VGA) but figured might as well just get a good graphics card while I’m at it. The only problem is that my PC is in one of those smaller tower cases now so I can’t use normal sized PCI cards. Instead, I had to learn about something that’s called a “Low Profile” PCI express card (I’m totally out of it when it comes to PC stuff these days). So to look for a new graphics card, I had to find ones that could actually fit in my system and still deal with my meager 250W power supply. I ended up spending about $100 (good thing my wife doesn’t read this blog) on a 1 GB GeForce 9500 GT. Apparently that’s the best graphics card for someone in my situation: low profile slot, 250 W power supply, and has a VGA port. I’ll just transfer this current HDMI out graphics card to my HTPC so everything works out. I’m all excited now though to play more PC games again. Bring on Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3!! (And maybe bring on Crysis while I’m at it haha)