Category Archives: Gaming

Torchlight, great game…

Over the Christmas break, I grabbed Torchlight for Kristin and me from steam really cheaply ($10 & $5, respectively) which is showing itself to be a decent investment.   I was a bit hesitant at first, as I had really loved Diablo and Diablo 2, which this game is modeled after, but never really gotten into other genre games like Titan Quest.  After buying it for Christmas for Kristin and watching her play for about forty minutes, I knew the next time I saw it on sale that I should buy it.

Basically, you are a hero in a fantasy fiction land with wizards and trolls and you have swords and pistols and magic spells with which to kill the bad guys.  It is a click fest with hoards of enemies coming at a time with each needing to receive a click to be attacked.  There is loot to pick up in the form of upgraded weapons and armor to go with the fairly cookie cutter story line.  If you are familiar with Diablo, then this is all familiar.  If not, then this may be something new to be tried when the game is cheap.  It typically sits around $20 and occasionally drops to $10 and rarely to $5.  I wouldn’t expect the $5 price again too soon.

I’ve managed to log some nine hours into the game on what I suspect is too low of a difficulty setting for my game-play expectations.  I started on normal, which is great if you are looking for casual gaming.  I will see it through though as I think I am getting towards the end.  Unlike Diablo where you carry your character forward, you instead retire your character to bestow benefits on the next.   How this works is a bit mystical but I am looking forward to checking it out.

If I have a grip so far, however, it is that the action gets a bit muddled in the mobs and sometimes it feels like I am barely part of the action.  Walking around with a small army (8+) of summoned henchmen and the ability to setup “traps” which are more like auto turrets, I find my character not even involved in the battles.  Last night I beat a main level boss without actually shooting that boss myself.  Another boss battle against three minibosses at once went so quickly that I only had one left to target in the first few seconds.  As this is likely a function of the games difficulty level, I am looking forward at trying it again at a higher difficulty level.

The art and graphics are pretty good for a budget game.  They are more abstract and exaggerated  but effective.  One of the benefits of this are some really low system requirements with an actual “netbook” mode for your mobile gaming fix.  The test PC in this case has been one that might have been high end three years ago, a 3800+ x2 processor, a 9600GSO video card and 4GB of ram.   It runs the game at a resolution of 1920*1080 with the eye candy on high without hiccup.

Game rating: A

Solid & stable fun for the right price that runs on just about anything.  This is what PC gaming is all about 🙂

Now I just need to put this down long enough to be Mass Effect before the sequel comes out…

NATLAN2009.5

It happened, and I thought it was pretty awesome 🙂

Unfortunately, no pictures were taken.  Doh.

Please leave me some comments if you have any feedback.

Looking at the first weekend of April for the full up NATLAN 2010.  We’ll be looking to get a full 24 people for what is likely to be some great Team Fortress 2 action.  What do you all think about that?  T-shirts and the whole bit 🙂

–Nat

Mass Effect = Awesome

Mass Effect was received with critical acclaim some three years ago or so.  My sister, Liz, gave it to me for Christmas last year.  Knowing that it was an epic title that would take some time to complete I waited until Kristin was gone to start it.  Well, I started the game and played it twice.  The save system that shows that in the two times that I have played it, I have dedicated 16 hours of time.  Most games would already be done, I am maybe a third of the way done.

If you played and enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic, this is your game.  Same game mechanics, huge universe and a great story so far.

It also happens to be $10 on Steam this weekend.  You should pick it up, that way we can commiserate over the time we spent on it 😉

–Nat