RE5 Professional Mode Completed

T and I wrapped up the professional mode - jeez there were some headache moments.

All of the Hit-A-Button-To-Avoid-Damage/Death sequences are really, really fast - you have to be ready for them when you see the windup animation, not when the button flashes on screen. If you are in the middle of an animation of your own (shooting, healing, etc) you wont have time to do the button-check.

Ndesu (El Gigante) in the driving stage was a pain. First of all, NEVER let yourself overheat. Just tap the fire button repeatedly, dont ever hold it down for longer than a second or two. You will be screwed otherwise. Shoot his face to interrupt him or if you have no other targets. Shoot the parasites when they appear.

When Ndesu is going to throw a stone, we are supposed to shoot the boulder and nothing else. (once the freebie drum explosion that makes him drop the boulder is used up) It took a while of trying to figure out what to shoot. The easiest way to ensure hits is to start off aiming at the spot above his head where the boulder will stay a while. Follow the boulder movement from there. If you wave the gun up and down too much, a lot of the shots miss due to the bullet travel time. If you spend too much time missing, you will get hit.

Also, always take out the molotov majini every time - he does some serious damage and you get delayed from the damage animation where you flail around. Chris needs to do this with his instant-shooting machine gun, Sheva loses too much time spinning up her chaingun, and is better off working on Ndesu's exposed small parasite targets. The arrow guys Chris should shoot too, but the big ndesu parasite is higher priority if it shows up, you can afford to take a few arrow hits. Also to note, you can shoot the arrows and molotov down with the guns, though not really reliably.


The Excella fight was short but I wanted to note that we did it by having T use his M93R to sweep the little snots that were on the deck, and me blasting away with a SW-500 magnum on the glowing parts of the Orouboros. We didn't use the laser, it was too slow and kept getting us killed, even while running over to pick it up. We just stood by the entrance, and cause I could take out the left eyestalk quickly, we never had to do a button-check sequence. We did have to heal a few times. You should have seen how many ammo drops there were on the screen, the floor was covered with ammo and money. Though it would have been suicide if tried to move over to grab them.


Another pain in the neck spot was the Jill fight. Basically if she hits you with her VZ smg, you die. If you get kicked, you die. The reason for this is cause you are trying to catch Jill between Chris and Sheva, and you will be too far away from each other to heal in time. We also accidentally killed Jill many times cause our weapons (Magnums, sniper rifles etc) were too hard hitting. Here's the formula we developed in the end to beat her:

• Bring a basic, accurate gun that does low damage.
  
• Shoot Jill to stop her machine gun spin. (reason #1 for low damage weapon) You can get away with this perhaps 2 or 3 times.
  Though if you stay close enough she wont ever do this.
  
• Chris spams the X button liberally while trying to restrain Jill.
  
• Shoot the chest box when Jill is restrained. (reason #2 for low damage, if you miss)
  
• Dont go for a pull-off right away after shooting the box once, wait till the thing is totally sparking and damaged. We had to shoot it 4 times.
• After shooting the chest box, don't do the throw. Back away a bit and try to go for another restrain and shoot.
• You CAN shoot the box while Jill is not restrained, but we couldn't do it reliably and we killed Jill a few times trying it. Hence we didn't do the throws or try to get random shots in, maybe you'll have better luck.
  

The Wesker fights were still pretty much the same. The unaggroed player should be shooting Wesk while the aggroed player runs around. I'll put notes for all 3 fights here:

• Dont let Jill shoot you, she likes to shoot from above, so stay behind pillars when you can.
• Dont rely on button-checks to knock down a charging Wesker, just move sideways, and then start running.
  
• Wesker doesn't like being restrained and breaks out almost right away - after you have a successful grenade detonation that stuns him, don't start restraining him until the other player is close enough to quickly administer the injection. (he stays in the stun animation way longer than the restrain animation)
• Use your heavy guns on him in the last fight, you are not going to get close enough to restrain him. PSG-1 for long shots, Magnum for close shots. He will shoot blobs of Oro at you as well, so you'd better be dodging if you are being targeted. No such thing as trading shots in Professional mode.
• In the plane, you can skip cinematics by pressing the back button, to get to the button-check steps more quickly. This one wasn't so bad actually since there are no distractions (applies anywhere really)

This is the 2nd game I've gotten to 1000 acheivement points!

Upsen.

Resident Evil - Professional Mode

I went through the last level of Veteran mode with T and we unlocked Professional Mode on my Xbox 360. It went pretty quickly, but it was a little bit disappointing, since I was fooling around with the rocket launcher and we took out the end boss before he even jumped up to the ledge to chase Sheva. I mean, I was lobbing rockets at him nonstop before he exposed his weak spot, and it wasn't doing anything, but as soon as the spot appeared, he was down. We were stunned that we could actually kill him with sheer damage and not go through the whole complex sequence of button tapping and scope aiming. it was a bit disappointing actually, as it became easier than the Wesker fights where rockets were being dodged left and right.

So anyways we went on to the Professional Mode to give it a try. (we left the rocket launcher behind, cause of the disappointing end-game stage earlier) In professional mode, even if you are wearing armor, a Majini grabbing you or even SHOOTING you with an arrow means you are instantly in dying status. It makes the solo sections quite a bit tougher. A dog mauling, strangely enough, was minor damage, at about 20% while armored. Also, enemies weren't actually any harder to kill than they were before, they just do nastier damage when they actually hit.

We didn't really get far enough to see what enemy gunfire does, I'd imagine it would put you into dying status since arrows do. Then again I could be wrong, it is a Capcom game after all, where a punch does 400pts base damage and a machine gun bullet does 200pts after $100k of upgrades.

We went through 1-1, 1-2, and 2-1, taking down the Executioner and Chainsaw Majini with shotguns, SW-500 magnum and Beretta M93R. You get a heck of a lot more points for clearing levels at this difficulty, I think we scored 2000 points on an A and 2500 points on an S, double the usual amount. There was definitely a lot of ammo missing from the stage - even the resupply points were empty. However that didn't really matter to the unlimited ammo option we had available. Speaking of unlimited ammo, it really does kill your accuracy rating when you know you can just fire off some more bullets to ensure a hit. I should stop doing that, it's costing me in points.

Upsen.

Achievements: (aside from Veteran finish)

While waiting for T to finish a game of Virtua On, I picked up the Lead Asprin achievement at the beginning of stage 3-2 - snipe a majini and 3 or 4 of them will rush your platform. Just blow their heads off as they jump up. It took me a few re-loads to get the sweet spot.

Also picked up the Masters of Removing while solo - I let Sheva shoot Jill's electronic system while I restrained her, until one of the animations was of blood instead of electrical crackle, then I manuevered Sheva into restraining Jill, and did the removal. It was actually pretty quick once you know what you need to do.

Living Room Rearrangement

I posted about this on my regular blog but I figured I'd comment on it here too since it affects my gaming experience. I picked up a wall mount for the living room LCD TV.

I had an Ikea office table in the living room that I put my LCD TV and 20" LCD monitor on. It was a convenient setup but not really great for space considerations. It was also a mess magnet - collecting DVDs and stuff like game controllers both above and below the table, not to mention a ton of dust. I had wiring for everything running everywhere behind the TV, since the stereo and other eletronics weren't that close to the wall socket.

The TV wasn't centered to the couch which was annoying, and there wasn't really any room for the front satellite speakers, so I had one on a stand and the other just kind of sitting on a ledge near the staircase.

You can see the old setup in the picture below.

Functionality: Good - Asthetics and Space: Bad

Anyhow, after I set up the wall mount, I dragged the table down into basement storage. Ditto for all my rarely used game controllers (read: rock band) - into the basement until next time I need it. I stuck the 20" LCD monitor on my wife's upstairs computer since there isn't any room for it here now, as she was still using an old (but nice) 15" NEC CRT.

The best part is that the Oil-PC now has a decent spot that is nice and visible.

This looks cool, but where do I do my computer gaming now?

Here you can see the bracket behind the TV.

There's a lot more space and it looks much better now but I still haven't figured out what I'm going to do for computer gaming. I mean there is nowhere to put the damn keyboard and mouse except on the couch. I can't play CoH from the couch. This is why I've mainly been on my Xbox for the past while. Maybe I'll rig some snack tray table or something, I really dunno at this point.

Heck maybe I should build a new PC and stick it in another room. :D

Upsen.

RE5 Cooldown

I've let the game sit there for a bit, as I've finished collecting most of the achievements, including all the BSAA Emblems.

I got Ride the Lightning and Be the Knife by taking Sheva's gun away from her. You can even do it mid game and she will happily disarm herself entirely and hand you her last weapon. Well, she still has her knife, but in cover mode she will hardly ever try to use it.

I still have to get the Lead Asprin one. I think I will have to try it in Mercenaries when the foes are jumping off the ladder to get up to you.

Also should try to get the one where you take down a truck by killing the driver (in the driving stage rather than on the bridge on foot.)

I've been playing Fallout 3 instead, and will post about it another day.

Upsen.

Achievements to go in RE5

Remember to say thank you when your partner heals you. I mean, use the stupid thanks-button option that makes the character say "Thanks Pardner!" or "I owe you one!" in the game.

Who uses a thanks-button when you have voice communications? Saying thanks is much easier than pressing a thanks-button when you're still knee-deep in Licker Beta monsters trying to stay alive.

Anyways, after I found out about that 30 point achievement, I took the unlimited rocket launcher, and a big stash of herbs in all the other slots for both Chris and Sheva. Then once the game was loaded up, I blew myself (Chris) up over and over with the rocket launcher, and Sheva would heal Chris. Every time she healed Chris, I pressed the thanks-button. After a couple save and loads, I got the achievement. So instead of blowing up just Chris, I blew up both Chris and Sheva to exit the level - how is that for achieving a certain level of trust?

I still dont have the achievement for killing Majini with a electrical transformer - the AI is too efficient with weapons to let an environmental object do the killing.

Likewise for Be the Knife and Lead Asprin- the AI wont stop and let me try arrow deflections or wait for a Majini to jump in, it just snipes instead.

Maybe I'll try doing a game where Sheva is not armed, or just try it in multiplayer some time.

Upsen.

p.s. Almost done collecting BSAA emblems!

Resident Farmer 5

E and I finished our game last week, due to one delay after another. However, the delays meant that both of use had managed to pull off a significant amount of item and money farming. We were both armed to the teeth, armed with Sig 226s instead of M92s, and heavy weapons like 6 rocket launchers and Magnums with 300 rounds to spare.

I did various bouts of Stage 5-1 through the lickers for gems, 3-1 swamp for the rockets and eggs, and 3-1 village for magnum ammo.

We played from stage 5-3 to the end, so that involved a few irritating points where we ended up going to the FAQs. What steps were they?

The first Wesker fight. Now that was an annoying thing - all his dodging. We just ended up running around and wasting ammo for Wesker's declared 7 minutes. We didn't even find the L.Hawk pistol upstairs while running around.

The Jill scene where you have to tear off the box. Shooting killed her. Grabbing the box just meant getting kicked. We went through half a dozen dead Jills and maybe 10 boots to the head before we hit the faq, and found that we were supposed to shoot the box without hitting Jill, getting electrical sparks instead of blood. After a couple more dead Jills, we got it. So annoying. I used a heavy damage, fast, single shot weapon for it, the S&W M500. I couldn't imagine plinking through the box's HP with a pistol or machine gun. Maybe it counts the number of hits on the box, which would be nice, but we didn't try it at the time.

The Excella fight. Where the heck are these lasers they were talking about? We ended up defeating her with raw firepower and a lucky hit with a rocket. It wasn't excessively tough but I was kind of irritated we didn't find the lasers.

The reaper bugs. Don't use a magnum on them - I had to spend too much time aiming and died many times when the one shot missed. A shotgun is much better, less aiming required - it is enough to destroy the bug's soft parts. A rocket launcher is even better cause it chunks them even without waiting for an opening.

The 2nd Wesker fight - That official rocket launcher found on the stage works totally differently than the regular one you get in the game. Also the part where he plays catch only works in the dark? I guess we missed that part, but we managed to get him on the 2nd try, which was lucky. I managed to use all the grenades all over the map on a subsequent retry and ended up just winning by brute force damage, and took a while.

The ending is much easier with 2 sniper rifles, we only had one which made it a little more challenging. I was playing Sheva and had the rifle, which means I died a few times while E was figuring out how to aim at Wesker without a scope.

Now all I have to do is get some BSAA emblems and some more gems for achievement points.

Upsen.