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Diary of a Witcher : Part 1

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During the Steam summer sale, I purchased a copy of "The Witcher 2". I started playing it in Eyefinity on my PC but the frame rate was a bit poor and it really needs a gfx card upgrade to run sensibly. If I was on just one monitor I've no doubt my 7870 would laugh in the face of it, but a resolution of 5,760x1200 is just too much.

I want to hold off on upgrading until the new range of cards is released later in the year. As I've never played the original game I figured I'd play that first while I wait.

It runs on my three screens really well, although there is a bug which means the cut scenes only work if you turn the lighting down to basic. This isn't a disaster as it all still looks lovely. Being an older game I can get good frame rates too so everything is nice and smooth.

The hot waitress
You play the game as Geralt, a Witcher. I'm still not 100% clear on what a Witcher is, though it seems to be something to do with slaying monsters. So far I've only played a couple of hours into the story, I've defended against a castle siege though the Salamandra (the bad guys) managed to escape with some mutagens. I've saved the life of Triss Merigold by creating a magic potion and then I slept with her. The next day we all split up to try and track down the Salamandra, I headed South and seem to be in a village called Vizima.

I visited an Inn and got chatting to one of the waitresses, she seemed hot. The next thing I know, she's outside being hassled by some bandits, so I killed them and walked her home. She told me to meet her in a barn the next night with some wine. That's as far as I've got up to now, I'm guessing if I do as she asks then I'll be getting lucky again! I'll let you know how that pans out next time.

Earthbound (Wii U)

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earthboundI’ve never played Earthbound before. That’s not really surprising, as it never came out in the UK, and I wasn’t that much of a SNES gamer anyway – certainly not to the point of wanting to import US games.

I didn’t really know that much about the game either, apart from that it was an RPG, set in roughly the modern day, in a relatively “normal” setting, and was absurd. And had Ness from Super Smash Bros in it. Or the other way round. Or something.

Naturally, given all this I knew about Earthbound, I bought it the very second I could, despite the (apparently, according to some) horrendous overpricing. How very dare Nintendo try to charge a ludicrous SEVEN POUNDS for a SNES game that never came out in this country and costs just £200 on eBay? *rolls eyes*

Enough of that. More of the game. Oh the game! Oh, the silly pervy nonsensical game! The game I’m utterly lost in and have no idea what to do next and it just doesn’t matter.

I’ve been sent out on adventure, in the middle of the night by my mother (who doesn’t seem especially concerned for me), whilst my seemingly absent father sends me money on an hourly basis to my bank account to fund my endeavour. My little sister has set up a delivery company, and one of my neighbours invited me into the hole he’d dug under his house to she his “secret”, but I had to come alone. Uh huh.

My dog can talk. Other dogs can also talk. The police are obsessed with roadblocks. I went to the first town, Onett, and had to fight the local street punks and their leader (and his robot) so that the police (whom I then had to fight) would let me explore an area of the map populated with homeless cabaret performers, so that I could reach a cave and finally make it to a giant footprint in the ground which I then recorded the sound of in a stone.

Then I went to Twoson (the second town – can you see the naming scheme?) fighting possessed Retro Hippies and Salary-men before ending up with a mushroom growing out of my head that kept flipping the direction controls around which the doctor couldn’t help me with but a creepy old guy who hangs around the hospital waiting room was happy to give me $50 to buy said fungus. And I bought a mouse.

Then the bike shop man gave me a free bike, and I went to the market which was run by a criminal who wants me to find a lost girl from the local nursery for him, while other characters in town variously say I should meet her and/or she’s been kidnapped. The two roads out of Twoson were impassable, one because the tunnel was full of ghosts which carry you out once you’re halfway through, and the other because a giant pencil was blocking the path (as the game says) “for some reason”. Naturally, a smelly fat boy called Apple Kid and who is one of two inventors in the town, is able to help by conveniently inventing a pencil eraser for $200 and some food.

This allowed me past the pencil, and into an area full of UFOs and sentient trees (that explode) and robots and other baddies. Some of which cause me to catch a cold because lasers. I had to run away after a while because my health and PP (like magic points) were low, and the magic butterflies that appear randomly to replenish PP by “relaxing you” (uh huh) didn’t appear frequently enough to rely upon them.

And I then bought a for sale sign, which I’m unable to sell. And a man stops me every now and then to take pictures of me, asking me to say Fuzzy Pickles. Frankly, I’m concerned there’s no Operation Yewtree in Earthbound, as it bloody needs it. Every other person is a pervert.

All this is how far I’ve got. I’m guessing there are at least another six areas to get to, judging from one of the items I’ve collected, so there’s miles to go yet. And I’ve nobody else in my party either, aside from my dog and the boy next door who left ten minutes into the game.

Earthbound reminds me a lot of Contact (for the DS), which is no bad thing. It’s certainly a lot of fun, and I’m loving the completely nuts story. Definitely going to get me my seven quid’s worth.

Earthbound (Wii U)

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earthboundI’ve never played Earthbound before. That’s not really surprising, as it never came out in the UK, and I wasn’t that much of a SNES gamer anyway – certainly not to the point of wanting to import US games.

I didn’t really know that much about the game either, apart from that it was an RPG, set in roughly the modern day, in a relatively “normal” setting, and was absurd. And had Ness from Super Smash Bros in it. Or the other way round. Or something.

Naturally, given all this I knew about Earthbound, I bought it the very second I could, despite the (apparently, according to some) horrendous overpricing. How very dare Nintendo try to charge a ludicrous SEVEN POUNDS for a SNES game that never came out in this country and costs just £200 on eBay? *rolls eyes*

Enough of that. More of the game. Oh the game! Oh, the silly pervy nonsensical game! The game I’m utterly lost in and have no idea what to do next and it just doesn’t matter.

I’ve been sent out on adventure, in the middle of the night by my mother (who doesn’t seem especially concerned for me), whilst my seemingly absent father sends me money on an hourly basis to my bank account to fund my endeavour. My little sister has set up a delivery company, and one of my neighbours invited me into the hole he’d dug under his house to she his “secret”, but I had to come alone. Uh huh.

My dog can talk. Other dogs can also talk. The police are obsessed with roadblocks. I went to the first town, Onett, and had to fight the local street punks and their leader (and his robot) so that the police (whom I then had to fight) would let me explore an area of the map populated with homeless cabaret performers, so that I could reach a cave and finally make it to a giant footprint in the ground which I then recorded the sound of in a stone.

Then I went to Twoson (the second town – can you see the naming scheme?) fighting possessed Retro Hippies and Salary-men before ending up with a mushroom growing out of my head that kept flipping the direction controls around which the doctor couldn’t help me with but a creepy old guy who hangs around the hospital waiting room was happy to give me $50 to buy said fungus. And I bought a mouse.

Then the bike shop man gave me a free bike, and I went to the market which was run by a criminal who wants me to find a lost girl from the local nursery for him, while other characters in town variously say I should meet her and/or she’s been kidnapped. The two roads out of Twoson were impassable, one because the tunnel was full of ghosts which carry you out once you’re halfway through, and the other because a giant pencil was blocking the path (as the game says) “for some reason”. Naturally, a smelly fat boy called Apple Kid and who is one of two inventors in the town, is able to help by conveniently inventing a pencil eraser for $200 and some food.

This allowed me past the pencil, and into an area full of UFOs and sentient trees (that explode) and robots and other baddies. Some of which cause me to catch a cold because lasers. I had to run away after a while because my health and PP (like magic points) were low, and the magic butterflies that appear randomly to replenish PP by “relaxing you” (uh huh) didn’t appear frequently enough to rely upon them.

And I then bought a for sale sign, which I’m unable to sell. And a man stops me every now and then to take pictures of me, asking me to say Fuzzy Pickles. Frankly, I’m concerned there’s no Operation Yewtree in Earthbound, as it bloody needs it. Every other person is a pervert.

All this is how far I’ve got. I’m guessing there are at least another six areas to get to, judging from one of the items I’ve collected, so there’s miles to go yet. And I’ve nobody else in my party either, aside from my dog and the boy next door who left ten minutes into the game.

Earthbound reminds me a lot of Contact (for the DS), which is no bad thing. It’s certainly a lot of fun, and I’m loving the completely nuts story. Definitely going to get me my seven quid’s worth.

Tex Murphy: Under A Killing Moon

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Before I got my new shiny triple screen setup which you can read about over in this post: Triple monitors, calibration & Eyefinity. I decided to do some old school gaming. I'd recently learnt thanks to Niaz (@gospvg on Twitter) that a new Tex Murphy game was coming out. This had me tremendously excited as I had fond memories of the series.

I still had the games on the numerous CDs they came on, but as they were designed for a time before Windows these games ran in MS-DOS. This meant it wouldn’t be a trivial matter to get them running on modern PCs. Fortunately while searching the web for a method to do just that, I stumbled across the GOG website at http://www.gog.com. This made it possible to purchase the games at a very cheap price ($9.99) download them and run them in Windows! I decided for the stress free life and to get playing the games sooner rather than spend my weekend trouble shooting, I'd just pay up.

I'm glad I did, the whole process was very simple and I'm sure I'll be using GOG.com again in the future!

Once back in the game, the memories came flooding back, it was very nostalgic! The one thing that struck me more than anything else though, were the clunky controls. This was a first person point & click adventure game. But, this was in the day before "mouse-look" had been discovered. So instead of moving with the traditional WSAD keys, you moved with the mouse. Looking up and down was done with keys! It was most bizarre and I never truly got used to that. I was able to get by, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't hamper me somewhat.

The graphics engine was very dated too, but really after the first few minutes I wasn't bothered by that. The story line was interesting enough to keep me playing to the end, even in the tricky "stealth" section towards the end which was made far worse by the control scheme.

I played the game over a weekend, the voice acting is dodgy in places, but overall the writing is excellent and the video sections are both funny and move the story along nicely.

If you have missed out on this series of games I suggest you give them a shot. Just be patient with the controls and allow yourself to get to the bottom of the mystery. I'll be attempting the follow up "Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive" and the sequel to that "Tex Murphy: Overseer" soon before the new game comes out later this year. Hopefully they will have fixed the controls in the new game!