Long day today. Wouldn’t have been that bad except the weather in Oregon has just been wrong this year. A long time ago, in a place just on the other side of town, I was a child growing up in Portland. Way back then 90+ degree weather was something that happened on one or two days every other year. I think we’ve had sixteen days so far this year over 90 degrees, including the hottest day in recorded history for Oregon (115 degrees).
Had to head across town to do some work (2 hours by bus on a freaky hot day, ugh) so I stopped at the GameStop I frequent along the way and had a happy surprise. My pre-order for CO placed there had been in something of limbo as they hadn’t gotten enough pre-order cards shipped to them to fulfil all of their pre-order requests so I was thinking of just canceling my pre-order with them and getting my $5 back. Already had a back-up plan to get the game elsewhere but when I arrived the clerk (whose name I forget) had a pre-order card for me. Apparently he had driven all around town yesterday checking the other GameStops to try and get any cards they had left to fulfil the rest of the pre-orders at the store he worked at. Very cool.
So I pre-ordered Persona for the PSP while I was there (looking forward to that, I played it on the PS1 ages ago but the translation rather stank and big chunks of the game had apparently not even been included in the US version of it) and also picked up a XBox 360 controller that wasn’t wireless.
I wanted to try out how the CO controls work with it and after running through the tutorial again (this time with a Sorcery powerset character) I have to say that it was pretty slick. Very smooth game play, had a lot easier time with the camera using the Right Stick than I had had with the mouse on my earlier playthroughs. It just felt very good and very fun. Kind of like when I used to be on a caffiene / sleep-deprivation buzz while playing CoX and felt the need to jump on everything and run around while playing my Blaster. Had no real benefit there, but in CO it matters a bit more it seems and is just really fun to do.
On the downside, still not sure entirely what all the buttons do and doing the ‘Interact’ with the up on the D-Pad is a little wonky. Basically if you have more than one choice of item to interact with (an NPC to talk to standing next to a baricade you can pick up) I kept ending up in this state where I was just swapping between choosing which one to interact with and I haven’t figured out yet how to select one. Instead I’ve been either just clicking on the one I wanted with the mouse or moving my character around until I was in a position where there was only one choice to interact with and then it works fine.
Sure there is a more elegant way of doing it but given this is the Open Beta still and I don’t have a manual explaining the controls I am just having to make do.
While the controller was fun, I didn’t really like the Sorcery powerset much. The energy builder was find (Eldritch Bolts) but the starter power (Eldritch Blast if I remember right) was kind of annoying. You could tap it for a wholly unimpressive attack or hold it down to charge it with as much energy as you have and fire a much more impressive attack (often one-shotting or coming close to one-shotting minions). But something about it just didn’t appeal to me. After the fun smackdowns in Might and the sheer silly awesomeness of Munitions I found Sorcery a little flat.
Likely it gets better later and I’ll go back and try it more later but right now there are still so many powersets I haven’t tried or even really seen yet that it just isn’t keeping my attention for the moment.
Going to go back and play some more later tonight. Not sure if I’ll talk my Might/PA character (Protector Bot 1) out and finish the Desert Disaster, or my Munitions character (Miss Wolf) to finish the Crisis in Canada.