Airbrushed (Day 127)

I lost a ton of Secret of Mana progress because my laptop restarted in the middle of the night. Even though I had been saving frequently, ZSNES reverted to a much older save for reasons too complicated to go into here. Suffice it to say that it is very irritating, especially considering how determined I was to finish the game. There is still hope, however. If I can find someone to play the multiplayer with me, I'll have renewed interest in the game and will even start it over from scratch if that person so desires. Until that point, I'll probably have to put the game on hold--and Seiken Densetsu 3 with it.

In the meantime, I'm investigating a few Steam games I haven't played in some time. After fiddling with my PC settings to get PS2 games to run more smoothly, I've discovered that well, pretty much everything runs more smoothly than before. This includes such games as Orcs Must Die!, Audiosurf, and Torchlight II. I've finished both Orcs Must Die! titles and played them both to death. They're fantastic twists on the tower defense genre with extremely high production value and excellent gameplay. Audiosurf is a well-known Steam classic that allows you to use mp3s from your music library as levels in a puzzle/rhythm game hybrid. Torchlight II is another game in the popular PC action RPG genre that includes such classics as Diablo II.

I would have completed Torchlight II a very long time ago if I hadn't committed to playing it on Elite difficulty. It's a pretty good game, but I feel I don't enjoy it well enough to invest the amount of effort required to grind through such a hard difficulty. I also find optimizing gear in these lootfests to be a chore. Comparing two pieces of gear for the same slot is an exercise in tedium--do I want 9% life steal, 4% attack speed, or 13 armor stolen on hit? How could I possibly calculate which of those stats are most useful to me in a timely fashion? It's muddled and convoluted.

Suppose I find a piece of armor that is a +20 armor upgrade but a significant drop in DPS? When is it worth it to make the change? What if a piece of gear is a massive upgrade but has no gem slots--whereas the piece I'm wearing has 2 or 3? I understand these kinds of decisions are exactly the kind of thing some gamers are looking for and it only enriches the experience for them--but that's not me. I'd much rather work with a simplified gear system with streamlined stats. Alternatively, stats would be more random but you have the option to reforge stats for optimum distribution.

None of that stuff would matter that much if I wasn't playing on Elite difficulty. It's important that you have the best possible gear you can find and the best possible skill setup, or you will be dying painfully--over and over. You're left with little room for experimentation. It's not a fair criticism of the game at all because it's an optional difficulty level for players that want extra challenge--but it's only resulted in me being in over my head and I'm too stubborn to go back now.