Thursday gaming: LBP, EQ2 and W101... again.

Wizard 101, why can’t I quit you?

I spent most of the night last night working on my LittleBigPlanet level. Well, almost. I spent most of last night feeling like an idiot. A frustrated idiot.

Since LittleBigPlanet is based around a physics engine, everything you make there has to actually work to some degree. I started working on a sorta free-floating player system as is used in the hugely popular Gradius level, and got it kinda working, but I didn’t like it. Then I decided to make a game set not in space, but underwater, and the space ship becomes a submarine – or a bathysphere, really, since the thing has to be connected by chains to a hidden, remote-controlled trolley which handles the mechanism of bringing the bathysphere through the level.

First part of the level, you control only the depth of the bathysphere as you negotiate a maze of twisty passages, all different, looking for treasure and prizes. Then comes a boss fight where you’ll have to hit various buttons with the bathysphere to defeat it.

Second part, you control the speed, but not the depth. Your depth will be adjusted by lifts that will bring you up and down, ending in another boss fight. Not sure how you’ll defeat that boss.

Third will be a shooting level, along with mazes and lifts and stuff and a bigger boss battle and again, dunno anything about that because after about three hours work last night, I’d only just managed to get the bathysphere working and under player control. (I’d spent some time running levels in LBP before I got started).

Now that that’s working, making the first part of the level will be pretty easy; just drawing in the maze and placing the traps. But I bet it’s harder than it looks.

I’d love to get back to Befallen but it’s beyond my ability to make levels yet. I have to work up to it. I am hoping this will do the trick.

After that, I logged in to EverQuest 2 with my necromancer and grouped with Said’s conjurer in Ruins of Varsoon. That worked out amazingly poorly. Lots of death. So we decided to head over to Loping Plains and see if the Haunted House was still open, but it wasn’t (got Said some druid rings and the Butcherblock griffon towers, though), and by then, it was getting a little late.

So I thought I would just log into Wizard 101 for a COUPLE OF MINUTES to try and farm the clockwork spider from the haunted towers before their Halloween event ends today. Turns out there are three towers, and they aren’t all the same. I soloed what turned out to be the baby, easy tower about a dozen times – no pets. Maybe another tower, oh look, this one is a teensy bit harder but still no pets. What’s this? A THIRD tower with rank 4 mobs in it?

Oh, that’s the one with the pets. It was also fairly tricky. There was a level 12 wizard hanging around, so I recruited him and we ran the tower three times. We got some imp pets (I got two), but no clockwork spiders. I ran it again this morning and still, no spider.

I hope to run it a couple more times before it ends tonight. I only just found out YESTERDAY that this tower has a rare pet in it, so I’m a little late to the party.

But the takeaway lesson from all of this is that, even though I’m at the end game and there really isn’t much more I can do to progress my character (I could make an alt, I guess), I am still in love with Wizard 101.

I’m not that hard to please. If you make an MMO both fun and challenging, I’ll give it a shot. W101 is both.

Plus, out of all the MMOs I play, W101 is the one that works best on my computer (as did WoW when I played).