PixlBit

I had planned on picking up some more Skylanders today, but didn't. I just played a whole lot of Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon with Mark and some randoms online.

Mark had leveled up his charcter to rank 6 over the week, and so he and I started Chapter 3 on Hard to see if we could finish the game on that difficulty. For the first 3 of the 5 levels in Chapter 3, we had several differnent random players drop in. They stayed, I guess, to farm level 3-2 for weapons (the best level for that in the game), but by level 4 they had left, and Mark and I had to get through the last two big fights with an only slightly useful bot. The bot is good to have around because it will revive a downed player very quickly, but it doesn't do the kind of serious damage that a real player does. Despite that, we managed to beat the game on Hard. I got the achievement but Mark didn't, so we had to go back and do levels 2-5 and 3-1, then he got it too.

Then we tackled Inferno difficulty. We got to level 1-5, I think, before we hit a battle that took a long time and which we ultimately failed. Little things in the mechanics of the game become really annoying at this difficulty level. One is reloads. You reload like in Gears of War: a bar appears and you can hit the "x" button at just the right time to half the reload time. Thing is, the zone you need to hit on most weapons is tiny. I would get it maybe once out of every ten times. In a very long battle, where you're always in danger of being overwelmed by ants and spiders, the reload times seemed incredibly long.

Also, big enemies take an enormous amount of damage, so you hit them over and over again before they finally go down, and it's hard to tell how close you are to victory on them because they don't have a health bar. Subtle cues like the color of a spawn hole, the size of a giant tick's back, or the color of the weak spot on robots tell you generally if you're getting close, but close could be another ten rockets up the spawn hole. In the meantime, you're being overrun by ants and spiders, and shot at by flying bees and wasps. It becomes a real grind in the bigger levels. 

So, after losing a long battle, where you don't get to keep experience or weapon drops, we quit out to start over and have some fun playing our now rank 7 characters on Hard difficulty, and work on some kill numbers for achievements. It's really fun when you're overpowered and just plow through hoards of enemies and wreck whole sections of a city. I realized, though, that being rank 7 on Hard difficulty meant I wouldn't get experience points - there's a cap on XP on Hard. So I switched to my Rank 5 Tactical Armor, so I would level.

During this run, I worked on revives for an achievement and realized I could kill the AI bot and revive him over and over in between battles. Mark saw what I was doing and both of us had fun beating up on the bot and reviving him. He was really grateful each time. 

It occured to me once that the insect enemies behaive like The Flood in Halo. They just rush you suicidally. Robots are a little smarter, but not much. It makes it nearly impossible to hold a position in the field like you might in a real military situation. Instead, you're better off to never stop moving which, realistically, is quite rediculous. 

Another thing. I read in E.O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth the other day that ants can spray formic acid as a defense mechanism. In EDF the ants do this too, but I never knew what the stuff was they were shooting at me. All day I was yelling, "Ah, not the formic acid!". 

I'm thinking that I might be just about done with EDF: IA. Inferno mode is just such a crazy grind that I'm not sure I want to do it. I do, however, have two achievements I can get pretty quicky: one for 25K kills, and one for revives, which, because I discovered that dirty trick with the AI bot, will be a cinch to get. Then I may move on. We'll see.