Old games, new fun.

Today is going to be a little different. I've been a bit pressed for time and playing a lot of games with my friends. With a recent steam sale the idea came up to get a game we can all just mess around with and have fun.

The game we ended up getting was Titan quest. One of the people in the group has a physical copy and played it a few times and said good things about it. We all get it downloaded and installed and we run into some trouble with user privileges on our various computers, vista and win 7 seemingly requires you to have the game running as admin even if win 7 makes your account by default not admin, and me being a moron and thinking custom games was the multiplayer mode and we get in. After a few dozen crashes as for some reason connecting to a game likes to crash it.

After that comedy of errors and swearing we get on our merry whole sale Greek slaughter. The game plays like Diablo 2 in a lot of ways. Use potions, use skills, kill things, get randomized loot, and do a few quests. Though this game takes out the need for buying town portals by giving you what is effectively an infinite one. This is fine as this is something we're looking for. Nothing deep, just run around and play a game that's semi auto control while making horrible comments over steam.

Things we discover is that a few glitches exist in the game for whatever reason. I talked about the crashes on joining game but there were quite a few more. For whatever reason at some point our day night cycles desynched which was pointless but caused a bit of confusion. More fun things include some player models turning invisible but their effects still happening. Cue random ripples of psionic energy randomly appearing all over the place and wreaking everything. Though the best one so far has been one of the players having a glitch on summoning pets, they are sometimes erroneously flaged as hostile to other players so more often than not we end up hitting it in the flurry of battle instead of the enemy until the glitch fixes itself. This is much to the players dismay and he's considering not healing us anymore.

In the non glitch department we've taken looting to odd extremes. Partially because of one of our players supposed OCD about keeping things tightly tucked away or sold but we loot everything. Gear that gets us only 1 gold gets picked up and sold. Thus turning the games interesting feature of mobs having the gear they drop into a horrible thing. Only generic monsters have nothing, every satyr, centaur, skeleton, and even some zombies I think have something on them. And a few have full sets of armor. So clearing one group leaves an area covered with not only corpses but inventory screens worth of items to be sorted through and ferried back to the local sales person. Even the person who insisted on this said he would not be able to do it like this if he were soloing the game, he'd give up. Yet with 4 people we can take a few minutes to clear out an entire stage worth of equipment.

Speaking of equipment this game uses a lot of Prefix item name suffix effect generation.  I actually like this, it makes each run of the game unique and proposes a lot more decisions on what you want your character to be as you go through. Not quite required as you can seemingly stick with some gear for a very long time but I do like weighing my options when it comes to my weapons. Personally this multilayer game trying to go for high spike damage as it is recorded in a stats screen.

So far it's been a fun game, well worth someone else's money as I couldn't pony up the money at the moment, I'll catch him next steam sale. I really haven't done LAN things as a kid, usually my shared gaming experiences has been around someone playing a single player game and talking about things. Sometimes the game, sometimes not. So far it's been a fun change of pace that I hope we don't burn out.