Torchlight -- All-In-One.

I've completed Torchlight earning the full two hundred points in fifteen hours. Torchlight was developed by Runic Games for the PC and was released in 2009. It became an Internet darling and I forgot it even existed. The game was ported and became part of Microsoft's House Party promotion where I became aware of it once again. I ended up playing the Xbox Live Arcade version which was released just over a week ago. Torchlight is a Diablo clone. But it's not just a Diablo clone, it's a Diablo Clone from Travis Baldree, Peter Hu, and Max and Erich Schaefer. Travis Baldree made Fate as well as Mythos. Two popular Diablo clones, and the Schaefers were responsible for Diablo and Diablo II. You essentially couldn't have a better pedigree when going to make a Diablo style game. The game is a single player dungeon crawl wherein you'll slay thousands of monsters for loot. You can choose from three classes, Destroyer, Alchemist, and Vanquisher. Destroyer is your warrior or tank. Alchemist is your magic user. Vanquisher is your ranged attacker. I played through the game as a Vanquisher. The gameplay follows a specific formula. Get a quest, go to the dungeon and kill shit and grab the loot. Return to town to turn in quests, get new ones, stock up, and go back into the dungeon. Rinse and repeat. Every five floors or so of the game's thirty five floor dungeon you'll face off against a boss. The game looks great. It has a very lighthearted cartoonish style that is appealing. The controls are perfectly responsive and simple. Musically the game is just there. Nothing memorable about the music, but nothing offensive about it either. The voice work is toward the low end of the scale. The story is sparse and almost nonexistent. But that tends to be a good thing in these sorts of games. The dungeon is randomly generated moving forward. It saves previous floors should you have to return to them for some reason. The floors are large and well varied in theme and help keep things interesting. You're not slogging through the same looking floors for the entirety of the dungeon. Something that is extremely important in this kind of game is the loot. Torchlight keeps the loot flowing. You're constantly getting new loot to check and the game offers up various ways of altering it both with and without risk. Loot whores should be more than satisfied. The game has a couple of flaws in my opinion. The interface is a tad clunky to deal with originally but you do get used to it. I also really wish that the game was online. Adding just another player online would move Torchlight from a solid game pretty far towards being a great game. I'm giving Torchlight a 7.5. If the sequel hits Xbox Live Arcade and features online, I'm definitely there day one. If not, I'll wait for a sale...

General Update.

It's been a good while since the last update. I ended the last update saying I was going to play an old classic and then I was going to do something probably a bit stupid. I did just that. The classic was Faxanadu, which hit the Virtual Console on Magus' birthday as I was looking around for his gift. Perfect timing I'd say. So I sent him a copy and then said why the hell not and got one for myself as I hadn't played it in forever. Not since a friend rented the NES original all those years ago. Faxanadu is still kick you in the balls hard and still just as fun. It's a weird little action RPG from the awesome Falcom via Hudson. Magus seemed to enjoy having it kick his ass. As for the doing of something stupid, that was replaying Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 to round up all the missing achievements. It took me roughly one-hundred and fifty hours and three and a partial playthroughs of Mass Effect and one playthrough of Mass Effect 2. The original Mass Effect having some of the worst achievements ever conceived led to the three and a half playthroughs. In doing this I was able to create a renegade character to import into Mass Effect 2 that enabled me to earn that final missing Mass Effect 2 achievement of completing the game on insanity. Mass Effect turned out to be the most time consuming as I needed to earn most of the weapon achievements and all of the complete the game with each squad member achievements. I played through the game from scratch in hardcore to unlock insanity. I earned two squad member achievements and all the weapon and tech achievements associated with the class. This was the difficult playthrough as I had to climb the hill here. I then started a game by importing that character for insanity, taking two other squad members along for those achievements. Doing this allowed me to start fully leveled and essentially at the top of the hill for my insanity run. Which was surprisingly easy. The rest of the time was spent completing the game in casual difficulty to unlock the final two squad member achievements. The half a game was a result of creating the classes needed to unlock the final weapon and tech achievements. I was ready to move on to Mass Effect 2. I imported my shiny new renegade character into Mass Effect 2 for the lone achievement I needed, the insanity run. Turns out I quite liked my infiltrator playthrough in Mass Effect so that's the renegade character I brought forward. Turns out that's one of the harder classes to play through Mass Effect 2's insanity difficulty. And I had to do insanity from the bottom of the hill, so that turned out to be a true bitch. And it all almost fell apart in the end. I lost the loyalty of one of the crew members literally right before the point of no return. I managed to have said character survive the game by avoiding using them at all for the entirety of the final mission. If the character had died in the final mission, it would have meant another full playthrough to rectify the situation. It really was a giant pain in the ass to do all of this, but in the end it feels well worth it as I'll be able to experience the end of the awesome Mass Effect trilogy from both sides with characters of my creation. My paragon soldier Erin, and my renegade infiltrator Asia. Another plus, I sparked enough interest in Magus that allowed him to talk himself into tackling the same project. As the saying goes, misery loves company, and I'll get to enjoy listening to him talk about his experience knowing what's ahead of him and behind me. I'm just glad there is a bit of time before the final Mass Effect 2 download content arrives. No pun intended as the DLC is called The Arrival, and it will bridge the gap leading into Mass Effect 3. Next up for me I'll be doubling up on a couple games. One digital, one retail.