and let me tell you it was as awesome as it gets. So awesome in fact that we finished it twice!
It all started on Tuesday 17th of January, exactly a week ago from now. I had just finished working for the day and we were chatting online, planning the upcoming weekend with my friend as we had agreed on dedicating it to gaming (drinking was only in a minor part as my friend is going sober for 6 months and is closing in on the half-way mark). So my friend, who I've got to come up with a nickname for, suggested I take a bus and get to his place already on Tuesday since he didn't have work all week. It was late and
I still had to work the rest of the week so doing that was out of the question. I took the bus on Wednesday instead.
So Wednesday around 3pm after work (I woke up early for this!) I headed to the bus stop with a large bag full of stuff I'd need. At this time we hadn't yet decided on what the game of choice would be so I also packed extra batteries for Wii/Xbox controllers. We were planning on playing some icehockey as well so I had to bring my skates and gloves as well as clean clothes. All-in-all I packed a huge freakin' load of stuff.
At this point I'd like to mention I have the option of working remotely so I also brought my laptop in order to work during the two days before the weekend. Seeing as how my friend is a bit sluggish in the mornings, there was no problem waking up before him and getting work done during the morning and afternoon.
We were surprised to see that the Dungeon Siege 3 copy he had ordered, arrived on Wednesday and our problem of "which game to choose" was solved. So the weekend schedule looked pretty much like this: Wednesday we played DS3 for around four or five hours on co-op, offline mode, normal difficulty.
On Thursday
Left 4 Dead 2 arrived and we had a go at it but weren't able to get online due to some connection issue so we finished one of the campaigns. It felt like a fun game so I'm sure we'll get back to it some time. We also played some rounds of
NHL12 as a team, online, in rated games. We lost. A lot. Needless to say we got very pissed off at the laggers and cheaters that were matched up against us because our connection was perfect and our teamwork was genuinely flawless. Scout's honor.
Come Friday we were back at it with DS3 and we sure went to town on that bad boy. We finished the game with the first two characters, Lucas and Reinhart and clocked it at 13 hours or so. Friday was entirely devoted to this and an episode of The Walking Dead, season 2.
Of the two characters, Lucas is a fighter type character who wields a sword and plank in one stance and a two-handed sword in the other stance. During our playthrough there was never a need to use the so called tanking stance. A good offense is the best defense I said as my friend bashed through skulls with his enormous, bleeding sword. Lucas was also the only pure melee character in a world of whirlwinding and area-effect spamming monsters. The least they could do is give him significantly more survivability instead.
Lucas "Snape's hair" Montbarron
My choice of character was the mage-type Reinhart. Now this guy was pretty impressive. Of all four characters, his 50%-chance-of-bouncing-to-other-targets lighning spell easily scored the highest damage hits. It was slow to cast, but impressive. Reinhart was also the character with more depth to his playstyle as you actually had to change stances during combat in order to be efficient. He also caused the best laughs after I discovered two things about his smaller area trap spell: It's quite useless in most situations, but it makes an awesome "DONGGG" sound when you place the trap. Now combine these two with the fact that the trap spell is under the same button as his kickass lightning spell, only in a different stance. See where I'm going? Each time I would attempt to cast a lightning but messed up with my stances, there would be a great big sound effect to inform us of my blunder. You can hear the sound right here in the
Reinhart gameplay trailer.
Our geeky supermage Reinhart Manx
Now we'd finished the game, including the downloadable content we grabbed during the first playthrough, but we still had no idea what the other two characters were like. So we decided to try it out on the DLC-included Hardcore difficulty. We were both pleased to see that our characters were ranged, which meant we could do some more dodging and shooting instead of whacking with a sword and dieing of multishot missile eating contests (stand next to a boss that shoots eight missiles and see how many you can eat!).
For this second round, my character was the firemage/spearwielder archon Anjali. I say spearwielder but her spear stance was a melee fighting stance with horrible spells and the only times I used it was to move in towns a bit faster with her dodge roll. Anjali started to shine a bit more towards the end of the game, once she got a massive slowing effect as well as some stunning chance on her pillar of fire spell. The area of the spell wasn't enormous and trying to hit a moving target with it was as annoying as a crying baby on a bus. Or in any other crowded area for that matter. Still, I enjoyed the game just as much the second time as we made a lot of different choices regarding the story. These choices also affected the ending in different ways and made it fun to see how our actions had an effect on the final events and futures of the various characters and groups. Since we played Mr Niceguy on normal difficulty, it's probably needless to say we were complete assholes the second time around. What's this? Free the slaves? I don't think so.
Careful, Anjali's hot. Sort of.
The last character we hadn't tried, was the one my friend chose. Katarina. She's a ranger type with guns and dear me can she use them. Her dual shotgun attacks are a fast, close range, stun inducing, focusgenerator while her long range rifle shots cause mad damage to anything that moves. Whether it's on screen or off screen. Not very surprisingly my friend found this to be his favourite character. An excellent damage dealer from start to finish.
Katarina isn't dressed to kill. She's dressed for a raunchy porno...
Now I mentioned this second time we played it on Hardcore difficulty. We played it through Saturday and Sunday in order to finish it all before the weekend was finished. While the game itself took about 10-12 hours to finish on the second time around again, it took us longer in terms of dieing and reloading. The higher difficulty setting was clearly visible in the damage and hit points of enemies, but as we'd become more familiar with the game during the first time around, it wasn't all that much harder as long as we were cautious. The only real issue we had was the first end-of-chapter boss called Rajani. This bitch was just pure evil and it took us closer to an hour to finish her off in an epic 10 minute dodgefest. Rest of the bosses fell after a maximum of two or three tries but we were still satisfied with the difficulty. Secretly we were hoping for even more of a challenge and longer battles with the end bosses. The satisfaction of beating Rajani was just undescribable.
So our extended weekend came to an end and our fun with it. We ended up with a twice finished DS3, around five or six NHL12 matches, a chapter of L4D2, a couple of Worms Armageddon three player fights and some Xbox360 arcade classics which I'll mention later. I'll tell you right now though, they're SO not worth the pricetag. If you've read this far, I salute you and hope you found it at least a little bit entertaining and informative. As a co-op game, I would give Dungeon Siege 3 a nine out of ten score due to excellent teamwork and replayability.
