More Adventures in Vegas

It's time to return to that type of post I haven't been doing much of lately, one where I talk about the games I've been playing!

First off, for anyone who missed my Tweet from late last night, I was able to find and order a white admiral uniform costume, and a set of red contact lenses (they're even to my perscription!) so I will officially be dressing up as Grand Admiral Thrawn for Halloween. Yes, there will be pictures. You can look for them in the upcoming 300th post of this here blog.

Yesterday, I spend almost 5 hours of my morning playing Dawn of War II with Creech as we worked on the game's Last Stand mode achievements. This mode is similar to all the other "Horde" modes out there, where we had to fight off wave after wave of enemies. In five hours of trying, we only got to wave 20, the final wave, twice, and got raped both times. It seems a pretty damn hard mode to clear. After each game, you get experience to level up your character and earn new abilities. I was playing as the Hive Tyrant and went from level 1 to 11 in the process. There is an achievement for getting to level 20, so all the time spent was still in persuit of a goal, even if we couldn't clear the mode completely.

I must say I started to get really bored of the mode though. Perhaps because the Hive Tyrant is a surprisingly boring hero class. There's little to do beyond spawn some warriors, who then go out and do the fighting for you. Besides casting minions and picking my target to attack, there was little else to do. Yawn. Can't wait to get to level 20 and clear this mode so I don't have to play it anymore. I'm sure Creech wants that outcome just as much, as that will give him all 2000 of Dawn of War II's points. (The man is, after all, an RTS mastermind)

I also got online to play some games of Starcraft II with my brother and Sabre (who has sold his soul to World of Warcraft), and it was quite a lot of fun. I enjoy the game's campaign and a good coop bot-stomping, but how much I'll get into the competitive multiplayer remains to be seen. As usual, I was originally better at the game than my bro, but now he can completely kick my ass. He's the type of gamer who plays fewer games, but the ones he gets into he logs A LOT of hours in, and becomes exceptionally skilled at. Halo would be the trademark example, but I'm sure Monster Hunter could be on the list, and Starcraft II will be. I wish he had a Raptr account so I could see just how many hours he logs into some of those games LOL. I'm at the other end of the spectrum, I like to play casually through a lot of stuff, and then move on to a new experience, rarely digging in deep enough to become a true expert at a game. For me, the highest compliment I can give a game is that it stays fun from the time I put it in for the first time to the point that I have every achievement. As my completion percentage will attest, most games don't stay interesting to me that long.

Today (and again later tonight) I've been adventuring in New Vegas. Like Fallout 3, the game does a great job of creating a sense of exploration and the feelings of accomplishment that come with completing a quest or finding something interesting. My travels thus far today have been along the main questline, with some interesting diversions in the city of Novac. It seems one family in Novac finds one of their cattle killed every night, and can't figure out why. While it's not a formal quest, solving their problem has some very tangible rewards, like the approval of the people of Novac, which can be cashed in towards a free apartment. So, much to my delight, I now have an appartment to store some of my stuff, which will take some of the edge off of Hardcore mode's weight rules.

While exploring Novac, I encountered Boone, the man who snipes from the mouth of the town's dinosaur by night. His wife was sold off into slavery, and he wanted me to find out whodunnit. He handed me his beret, and asked that if I find out who did it, I wear the beret as a signal, and take that person in front of the dinosaur so he could snipe him or her to have his revenge. I sleuthed around town and learned who it was, and did as asked. Vengence was delivered by an almost hilariously gory headshot. After turning in the quest, I talked Boone into joining me, and now I have my first companion (and the achievement that goes with it).

Now, Boone and I are off to the nearby rocket factory on the "Come Fly With Me" quest, which tasks us with removing some ghouls from the place to the people of Novac can continue to pull junk and supplies from the place. Where will happen in my New Vegas adventure next? I don't know, but I've been loving every minute of it so far.

On a different topic, Raptr and its ability to track your play time has made me wonder just what games I've played the most. If I were to make a real all-time leaderboard of what games I've played the most, which games would make the list? Unfortunately, I'll never know for sure (other than EQ2 is absolutely #1 right now), but the the best extent I can, I'm going to try to find what contenders I have and construct a list that shows the top games. I'm also going to break it into two categories: Verified and Estimated. Verified are games where either from Raptr or the game's own timers, I can see exactly how much time I played. Estimated means there's no way to be sure, and I'm making the best guess I can. I'll share the results of this mission once I have the list built to my satisfaction.

As I commented on in a Previous Post, EverQuest 2 is the runaway winner for most time I've ever sunk into one game. I would need to log over 820 Hours into a different game to take the title! Now that Raptr is tracking my Magic: The Gathering Online playtime, that game has the chance to take the title over the long term, though it will still count idle time as played time, and there is often more idle time than actual playing when competing in a tournament, so the numbers for that game will have to be taken with a grain of salt.