Invalid characterset or character set not supported Gaming Progress: Granne Gozzo is dead





Gaming Progress: Granne Gozzo is dead
November 22, 2015

I haven't had much progress this week because I spent more time writing and submitting reviews. I had three drop this week, two for RoG (The Park and Star Ocean: First Departure) and one here at HG (Dark Meadow: The Pact). For the most part, Risen 2, Jack Ketchum, and Ambrose Bierce soaked up my free time. I've plugged over 30 hours into it now, and I don't think I'm very close to the end. At this rate, it'll probably take me longer to complete than the first Risen did.

I'm still undecided how I feel about this game:

The story is merely adequate rather than engrossing or even slightly interesting...
...but the quests it offers are pretty neat and not too "fetchy" (although there are still a few fetch quests, which I don't necessarily mind).
There are loads more skills to learn than in previous installments, including many of new ones that mesh well with the game's pirate theme.
However, there are also a lot of them that are either useless or tricky to figure out. For instance, I still don't know how to riposte during combat.
You can also learn to train a parrot that interferes with your fights by throwing sand in your opponent's eyes or doing various other things to mess with them, giving you an "unfair" advantage.
...and a monkey, too. There are only a few scenes where you can use him, but he can crawl into out of reach areas and steal loot for you.
There's a lot of looting to be done, but most of it is sell fodder. Rarely do you come across a piece of equipment that's actually an improvement over your current attire/arsenal.
However, you can find legendary treasures that give you passive bonuses, some of which increase your skill ratings and others boost whole attributes (which in turn bump up your skills). They don't need to be activated in any way, either. Just nab them and you automatically acquire their boost.
Sadly, there are scores of chests that contain useless miscellany. You might force open one particularly difficult locked trunk and find something like a few pieces of gold, a raw chicken leg, and a bottle of rum. Yipee.
Whoever wrote the dialog for this game had a hard-on for the word "fuck." Now, I'm not bothered almost at all by profanity and I understand that this is a pirate-themed game and pirates weren't exactly known for clean speech, but there are some exchanges were every other word is the f-bomb. I sometimes feel like the main writer behind this one was a fifteen-year-old who just discovered dirty language. Recently, I recruited a gnome who can speak a human language. He ends every other sentence with "Fuck yeah!" It was kind of cute the first time, but it's grown pretty irritating now. Then again, the character (Jaffar) in general is pretty annoying.

Anyway...

Risen 2: Dark Waters (PC)
I've completed all of the necessary nonsense on Antigua. There's one segment that was a bit creepy where you enter a seaside cave to fight what you've been told is a hobgoblin. The damn thing turns out to be a leviathan, which in the Risen lore is a hulking humanoid sea monster that looks like Silent Hill on an ocean cruise. Thankfully, I had Venturo with me and he pumped a few good musket shots into the thing before it could cause much damage. They're able to cripple you with crushing blows, so it's good to deal with them as quickly as possible.

I eventually completed the storyline quests, which mostly felt like filler, and shoved off to the Isle of Thieves. There I met a huge, although not unexpected, plot twist, eventually discovered a village of gnomes, and recruited Jaffar. His chief put me up to fighting a boss called Granne Gozzo that's been devouring gnomes. The creature was of fair size and very powerful, plus it had the ability to eat my equipped weapon with the flick of its slender tongue. As you can tell, I reloaded a lot. After a few tries, I worked out a rhythm wherein I rolled all over the place and fired a musket shot at him when I was far enough away. Each bullet only tore off a sliver of his HP, but I had nearly 300 when I started the fight. I don't think I used more than maybe twenty or thirty, but the bottom line is Granne Gozzo is dead. Currently, I have to talk to Jaffar, as I've completed his fetch quest and shall be leaving the Isle of Thieves soon.


Pid (PC)
I started this one not too long ago. It's a 2D platformer where you play a child in a futuristic time period marooned on an alien planet. You have a device you can throw on the ground that creates pillars of light that push you upward. You can also attach these to the wall or diagonal surfaces to travel at trickier angles. Right now I'm still trying to get to the city near the beginning of the game. I've been told the path I'm heading will lead to a dining hall. I'm not sure how long until I get there, though...


The Abandoned School (Android)
I intended this to be mobile horror review #4, but have given up on it. It's basically a graphic adventure where you solve "puzzles," but the solution for each one is pretty obtuse. During one stage, you're supposed to continuously tap on a window (repetitive tapping is pretty much all you do throughout the game) to break it, do the same for a fluorescent light, and then again for a fuse box of some kind. Two eyes will appear in the darkness, and the only way to interact with them is to tap a basketball to make it roll to the middle of the hallway, then again to make it roll towards the eyes. A bat will fly out, bite the screen, and congrats you've completed the level. Huh? Did I miss something? The stage after that has an item that you tap that crashes the whole game. I removed the app after that and decided not to review it--it would have been a 1/5 regardless of the crash. I've since booted up the game Sisters, though I didn't play it much. For a mobile app, it shows some promise.

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