The Rage Bar

Digging deeper and more greedily into Roguelikes

2012-01-07T09:33:00.004+01:00

This morning I thought I'd go a bit more in depth on the phenomenon that is the roguelike genre, seeing as I've recently mentioned it in my reviews of Dungeons of Dredmor and The Binding of Isaac, and also because the genre remains completely unknown to perhaps even most of today's avid gamers.

There are even different opinions about what types of games can be called roguelike. For a game to fit that label for me it must meet a few requirements. For starters, that it is turnbased. Roguelikes are not about fast action or good reflexes, but as carefully as possible exploring its dungeons because of its second requirement, the completely unforgiving difficulty it must offer. For me, the nail biting suspense and rage inducing moments that lead up to every character's gory deaths is perhaps the largest factor that defines a roguelike. Carefully, step by step and searching every corner for traps, hidden enemies and secret rooms and knowing that even then, my character can very possibly be dead in the next couple turns to some invisible frost ball flinging ogre mage, or impossibly strong golem. The third and as important as my previous requirement is the element of randomness. Dungeon floors and room layouts have to be random, the same goes for the enemies. The same goes for found loot, shop contents and preferably, starting stats and gear loadouts. Finally, characters that die are lost forever except to memories and a high score table. No saving before opening each new room or drinking some strange potion that could grant you a wish, or destroy your innards with poison. This is commonly referred to as permadeath, but other terms used can be DiD (dead is dead), or "hardcore".

As mentioned before there are different opinions of what games can be called roguelike. I've seen it used for both games like the Diablo series, and The Binding of Isaac. While I can see the logic since both rely heavily on randomly generated content, I still have to disagree simply because they are not turn-based games. I'd call them action RPGs at best, or just action games. The roleplay factor in these games are well, close to nil. Dungeons of Dredmor gets a roguelike stamp of approval from me though, despite the option to turn off permadeath. At least permadeath is enabled by default, clearly encouraging players to enjoy the game properly. :) I would love to hear what others feel on the roguelike label, what are your requirements to fit the genre?

The game that started it all, Rogue.
Screenshot from Wikipedia.

I'll leave that subject for now, though because I also wanted to take a nostalgic look back at some of the roguelikes I've played. There are unfortunately still a lot of them I haven't even tried out due to the amount of time it takes to learn and enjoy each of these games fully. Did I mention that these games tend to be darned hard?

Now then! Roguelikes are a genre I've enjoyed a bit on and off up through the years. The game that introduced me was Rogue, the game that coined the genre itself, hence roguelikes. My godfather had a home computer (fairly rare at the time, this was mid-80's) with the game installed. To be brutally honest though, I was too young to really understand what was going on and didn't really appreciate Rogue as I probably should have. Space Invader'ish games were far more interesting! Rogue was also a relatively simple game, at least compared to the myriad of games succeeding it over the years.

Nethack in all its ASCII glory.
Screenshot from Wikipedia.

My next encounter was Nethack which I copied on floppy disc from a friend some time after I bought my first home PC. Nethack was a far more advanced game and the first I really put a lot of hours into and learned to play properly. The main quest was similar to that of Rogue's but also introduced side and class quests. It also introduced classes for that matter if I remember correctly, deities to worship, different playable races, inventory and gear and such. Nethack really had me hooked.

Ragnarok. Now with graphics!
Screenshot borrowed from www.roguetemple.com

Around the same time, after I had played Nethack to death I also found a game called Ragnarok. This game is fairly unique in that its one of the first roguelikes to use graphical interface and game worlds instead of ASCII signs. I am not 100% sure now but I also believe the game was initially not freeware, unlike most games of its kind even today. Ragnarok was a pretty darn fun game, and I appreciated the norse mythology it was built on. It also introduced some new features to the genre such as changing character classes during the game, and even let your character permanently polymorph himself into incredible (or laughably puny) monsters. While not among the top roguelike games ever, Ragnarok might be a suitable place to start for players looking to ease into the genre thanks to its use of graphics instead of Ascii.

Glorious, endlessly replayable ADOM.
Screenshot from Wikipedia.

The last game I want to round this up with is the fantastic postcardware game Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM). This is easily the roguelike I've thrown away the most hours and days of my life on and remains my favourite game of the genre today. Released in 1994 by Thomas Biskup and frequently updated until 2002 expanding in its features, this game is still essential to have on my HD and I actually still have fun playing it from time to time. I must have gotten several hundred brave adventurers killed on this title.

ADOM is the most deep roguelike I've played so far. It offers a wealth of race and class choices to play as, an alignment system, talents(or perks), a complex deity system, different victory conditions (as if anyone ever gets that far), tons of quests and powerful artifacts. It is also very content rich with many different dungeons and other places of interest to explore, including a world map to explore with its many dangerous random encounters. This all added up, ADOM is an endlessly replayable game, the game experience is wildly different each time, and thats even before you start playing around with all the amusing race and class combinations you can play. Many classes are also considerably harder or easier than others. A halfling farmer will find it almost impossible to survive even the first levels of exploration, while a gray elf wizard or troll warrior may have a significantly easier time, at least initially. Unless said trolls encounter any ghosts of course.. Just a couple hits from them will age them to the point they die on the spot of old age.

ADOM is highly recommended from me, for anyone interested in the genre who hasn't played it yet. I'm tempted to recommend it to beginners as well, but I have to admit the game is really, really complex to get started on and will probably discourage newcomers, better then to start with for example Dungeons of Dredmor and then play ADOM. :) It is available for a number of operating systems, but I think the best would be the MS-DOS version. It is the most updated one anyway and can be played fullscreen unlike the windows version.

These are the roguelikes I've spent the most time on to date. I'm still enjoying Dungeons of Dredmor quite a bit and will probably be playing that for a while still, especially now that it has proper mod support. Once that's done, I'm thinking I should try out Angband, but I'd love to hear from you all what YOUR favourite rogulikes are, that I should sink my teeth into!

'till next time!

Review: Dungeons of Dredmor

2012-01-02T00:26:00.003+01:00

Dungeons of Dredmor + Realm of the Diggle Gods DLC

Brought to us by indie games developer Gaslamp Games, Dungeons of Dredmor (DoD) is something as rare as a commercial Roguelike game released July 2011 for online distribution on PC/Mac/Linux. In it, the player takes on the role of an unfortunate soul shoved down into a dungeon filled with monsters and traps, but also the main villain himself Dredmor who must of course be vanquished.

Roguelike games are a genre that may need a bit of introduction for gamers not familiar with them. A roguelike game is a turnbased rpg adventure heavily based on randomly generated content (usually some sinister dungeon), you will never know what is behind that next door you open. Roguelikes are also harshly unforgiving because of said randomness, and normally have no issues pitting you against overwhelming numbers of enemies even upon taking the first few steps with your new character. A true roguelike also allows no saving and reloading as you play. While technically possible on a number of these games it is referred to as save scumming and is typically looked down on by fans of the genre. And finally, the bulk of roguelike games out there use ASCII symbols for graphics to represent the dungeons. Your character might be an @, a goblin might be a blue colour lowercase g, and a hobgobling a green one, and so forth.

Dying is fun!

As such, Dungeons of Dredmor stands out as a roguelike title already in a couple of these aspects. First thing you'll notice is this game has graphics, rather decently put together 2D tiles and and animated game sprites as well as ingame music and sound effects. The graphics are in no way jawdropping, but functional and have a certain charm. The next difference from other games of its genre is that Dungeons of Dredmor has an option that allows you to save your character as you play (although it is disabled by default to encourage playing with permadeath).

Survived a Monster Zoo, somehow

This and certain other aspects of of the game that I will also touch on means that DoD is a great place to start if you are just starting out with roguelike games. Even on its easiest setting, DoD can be cruel in its ways to get your character killed for beginners. Even so, playing with permadeath is greatly preferred (at least for me), as there is a whole lot of fun to be had experimenting with different skill sets for your character and figuring out their advantages, and of course their weaknesses.

Despite the sometimes cruel random encounters and deaths you're bound to experience, DoD still has to be considered an easy roguelike game compared to some of its peers. It is also very basic in its game features. There is no choice of races to play as or long lists of available classes to choose, instead character creation consists of playing male or female character (purely cosmetic choice) and picking your skills from a list that are considered warrior, rogue, wizard or crafting skills. Each time you gain a level all your stats increase slightly and one skill point is spent to improve one of these skills, which will also give bonus stats relevant to the skill.

The game controls are also simplified a bit as well, allowing your character and monsters to move only up, down, left or right and all creatures move and attack at the same speed, one action per turn. This in contrast to other roguelikes which allows diagonal movement and attacks and usually features somewhat complex movement and attack speed formulas. This took me a bit to get used to, and is perhaps the first thing experienced roguelike players will immediately dislike when playing DoD. The game is in other words as far as roguelikes go, rather shallow.

That's not to say the game is bad. While designed to be accessible for beginners, there are certainly a lot of challenges and fun to be had exploring the dungeon, and a wide range of skill choices coupled with the randomly generated levels, loot and enemies make for a game that is true to its genre very replayable. Figuring out if this is a game for you can be a bit hit and miss, there are certainly many who will not fall for this game whether it is roguelike pro players or those who just don't like the turn based exploration and combat. If you are not one of those though you can expect to spend many, many hours on DoD. I myself must have rolled more than 100 different characters on it, and I'm not quite ready to put the game away yet either.

To keep things interesting down there, DoD is also full of all sorts of references and nutty or sadistic humour wherever you look, even down to the stat explanations on your character page. Or the screen congratulating you each time your character dies.

Yeah thanks, feels good!

On launch, DoD was full of all sorts of bugs that have for the most part been ironed out now through patches, but there are still quite a few left. There's even a Steam achievement for having the game crash on you. Its not only game performance and stability that has suffered, but also various gameplay bugs such as skills not working at all like they should, ability effects calculated from the wrong stats and stuff like that. Most of these have now been fixed and I'm sure the rest will soon follow, though, Gaslamp Games seem to take post release game maintenance quite seriously and follow feedback from their players closely. Don't think I've often seen suggestions posted on a developer forum and seeing the game update with it through a patch shortly thereafter, it certainly impressed me.

Also available for a pittance is a newly released DLC which adds a solid bit of content to the game and is well worth getting if the game is enjoyable. The DLC expands the dungeon from 10 to 15 floors, adds several new character skill trees, ton of new monsters and items and also a lot of new floor layouts etc even on the earlier levels. I'd be sceptical to such an update sold as DLC to flesh out and make the game more varied, but it offers so much content I have to say its well worth the small sum it costs.

To form some form of conclusion here: DoD is a great entry point for players new to roguelikes. I've read about many who have started playing this, got hooked and then moved on to ADOM or Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and such. Even if you're used to the genre the game should still offer many hours of funs, but personal taste will matter a bit more. Personally I enjoy DoD immensely and expect to spend a lot more time on it. Even though it is a somewhat simple roguelike compared to others, I still have a long way to go before I can say I've mastered everything it has to offer.

On a 1 - 10 scale then, I'd rate Dungeons of Dredmor an 8. Fantastic game in my opinion with points withdrawn for all its bugs, and that it is not quite as deep a roguelike as I'd normally prefer. Still, its well worth a look!

TLDR;

+ Solid roguelike game thats easy to get into
+ Art, Music and SFX instead of just ASCII and your imagination
+ Replayability. Don't be surprised to see on Steam stats that you've spent several hundred hours on this thing, once you first get stuck in.
+ Hundreds of references to other games, films, books, musics and probably a lot more that I've not spotted yet
+ Mod support! Allows heavy tweaking of DoD, including stuff like more skill trees to choose from, new monsters to encounter, fancier stuff to craft or discover on the dungeon floors, etc etc

- Gameplay mechanics a bit too simple for my taste
- No manuals or guide available for the stuff that isn't self-explanatory. How is one supposed to know what skills on character creation belong to which type of build? (warrior, rogue, mage)
- Still has its bugs.

Coming up:

2011-12-31T08:07:00.000+01:00

Figure as I'm already back to writing here I might as well hit the ground running. In additions to the reviews posted tonight you can expect the following over the next few days:

Reviews for Dungeons of Dredmor, Defense Grid: The Awakening, Jamestown, Limbo, Trackmania 2:Canyon and more, in no particular order.

Review: The Binding of Isaac

2011-12-31T07:26:00.002+01:00

The Binding of Isaac is a PC and Mac indie game available on Steam for around €5. Despite being written in Flash, this is a surprisingly deep game that has a lot of content.

How can you quit when this is the exit prompt?

In it, you control Isaac who lives a secluded but happy life with his mother in a house on a hill. He minds his own and she minds hers while watching christian TV. That is, all is well until mother hears the voice of God, telling her to kill her son to prove her faith. Overhearing this, Isaac panics a bit in his room, but just before mother enters his room, knife in hand to finish the deed he finds a trap door in his room and escapes into the basement, where.. well, things just get worse to be honest.

Welcome to the basement

Intro done, as mentioned things just get worse and darker. As you might have picked up by now, this game is not afraid to shock, and does so in the most charming way. Binding of Isaac features a very, very dark story, and a whole lot of messed up stuff to discover. Despite the smiley faces and kind of cutey art seen on some screenshots of this game, it is not absolutely not child friendly.

Binding of Isaac is at heart an action shooter/rpg blend type of game, with similarities to oldschool shoot'em up games while also borrowing heavily from Roguelike type of games. You control Isaac using keyboard controls WASD and either arrow keys or the mouse to aim bullets (or well, tears, or.. other stuff.. or.. number one. or other stuff.), as you navigate the freaky levels under your house seeing and killing a lot of stuff not meant for mortal eyes. It plays very much like a typical shoot'em up game or action RPG in the sense that the actual gameplay puts heavy (and sometimes unfair) emphasis on reflex and twitch skill, but it also has a heavy RPG/Roguelike element in that all the stages are randomly generated, there is no telling what enemies, or powerups or other things you might run into.

Room full of turds, and theyre smiling, great.

Surprisingly, the game has a lot of depth as mentioned before. There is a ton of unlockable items that can drop as you play the game more times, as well as unlockable characters and even more, doing well or completing the game unlocks deeper levels under Isaac's house and extra bosses. In short, I've spent around 10 hours on this game according to Steam stats, and there's still a lot of unlockables I haven't discovered yet, and I expect I won't remove the game until I've discovered the majority of them.

Because playing The Binding of Isaac is FUN. It may just be me, or maybe it requires a special kind of humour to appreciate Binding of Isaac, but it has me giggling, gasping and cursing like I haven't in a very long time, too long. I never imagined this simple game would hook me like this, but it has.

Money's on Larry

I'd also like to make a special mention of the soundtrack for this game. It is one of the few games I have actually gone out to buy the OST for, with its plain awesome synth-zelda-mario-castlevania-christian-occult themes. I highly recommend youtubing for some of the soundtrack pieces, if the interest takes you, or even better, buying it of course.

There's been a lot of praise so far. I do have a couple issues with The Binding of Isaac, though. First of all, the game can sometimes crash, though rarely. It seems to be related to combinations of items you pick up during play. Second, despite its simple looks this game can be quite taxing on your machine. I experience quite a few slowdowns on levels with a lot of enemies, while playable on just about any low spec PC or Mac be aware this game can try your CPU/GPU at times.

Sorry bro :(

TLDR;
+Occult-christian theme that gives goosebumps
+Addictive replayability
+Soundtrack, its awesome

-Not 100% stable and may crash at times, somewhat odd for a flash game

8/10 - An indie release that should not be afraid to go toe to toe against larger releases

Edit: I found out there's a demo for the game you can play at http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/581168 to try for yourself.

Review: Batman: Arkham Asylum

2011-12-31T05:51:00.005+01:00

Oh boy, this one has been so long overdue I don't even know where to begin apologizing. Do note, this is not a review for Arkham City, this is Arkham Asylum. Yep. I got this game in one of the Game of the Year discounts on Steam, which was a pretty good while ago too.

To get the tech stuff done with, this review is based on gameplay on PC through Steam and Games for Windows Live on an average spec PC. Don't mind the not-maxed graphic settings and lack of extra anti aliasing on my screenshots please, I know this game is still a beauty to behold on the right specs and won't critizise looks.

Oh, snap!

I don't know where to begin on this one, bear with me.

You're Batman!

The game opens with awesome cinematics, as you drive The Joker to Arkham Asylum to be put under arrest or treatment, I don't even know what you're supposed to do with that guy, have a feeling I'm not alone on that one. As you take over the reins of batty, he decides to escort Joker into the Asylum to make sure he gets put where he belongs, he's got a feeling something isn't right...

Spoiler alert. Things aren't right. Joker kills his guard and escapes into the asylum aided by his consorts, triggering a prison riot just to make things suffiently interesting, leading Batman into a intricate trap created just for him. I think that's as far as I will go on the story stuff, to not spoil the it completely for people.

Never saw me coming

So! You're Batman! This needs to be emphasized, as it is pretty awesome in itself. You rock the Batcave. The Batmobile. The bat.. gadgets, of which there are quite a few. All awesome, of course. Another given though, is that you are the favourite kill target of all the inmates in Arkham Asylum, allied with Joker or otherwise, which leads to quite a bit of fisticuffs, which are all awesome, too.

Batman:AA is a third person beat'em up along the lines of God of War. What sets this game apart from most of the others of its ilk that I have played before though, is that while Batman is Awesome(!), he is very much a human, and getting shot by shotguns, and machine guns, and stuff like that.. will actually kill him. And so, quite a large part of the gameplay revolves around using the environment, the tools at your disposal, and in a pinch, some stealth. And then with the fisticuffs!

This results in a very pleasant game where you can if you wish be planning, use traps, gadgets and stealth to get where you need to go, or if you want (and have the skillz!) kick ass head on. Like it or not, though, Batman's brains and gadgets will be needed as well outside of the combat parts of the game. I'd say roughly 50% of the game's story involves some manner of detective work on your end. If you buy this game expecting to brawl your way from start to finish you will get stumped, pretty badly.

The combat in itself needs to be explained a bit finer detail, I feel. While its certainly possible to mash buttons to get through, the combat is laid up to reward parrying and combination attacks against multiple enemies. When you're fighting the goons of Arkham Asylum, the game speed actually slows down so you can time your attacks, blocks and throws. This might not sound like a big thing, but when you take advantage of it, keep your cool and get your groove on in battle, the fighting takes on an almost movie-like feel when you emerge from seemingly overwhelming battles unscathed, taking down a large numbers of goons in one seamless combo. You can't help grinning to yourself and feel like you are Batman. You're awesome. If my awful describing doesn't help, you just have to try it yourself, really.

Bit of Crane poison flashbacks

Including all the time you spend fighting, you can expect to spend a whole lot of hours on Batman:Arkham Asylum, especially if you are a completionist. To go with the main story of the game is a ridiculous amount of hidden areas, trials and areas unacessible until you come back later with the proper tools.

I'm a bit ashamed to admit, I'm not sure how much of this all is included in the Game of the Year edition and left out of the base game, but be sure to get the GOTY version. I'm not sure, but I think its the trials outside of the campaign that consist of the GOTY content, but they are actually very fun also. There's a wide variety of trials to take on, from endless brawl rooms to sneaky takedowns and other stuff in there complete with online leaderboards, to see how bad you are.

Bit of Crane poison too much

This particular rant is exclusive to the PC version of Batman: Arkham Asylum.
Before I round this up, I need to adress how much trouble this game can be to play on PC. Before reading further, if you have Xbox or PS3, get this game there instead. Sssh.. Just don't. No, don't buy the PC version.

And here's why: In order to play Batman: Arkham Asylum you need to install and somehow find an updated version of Games for Windows Live, otherwise known as the Devil. I really hope Ubisoft won't read this and pick up on these ideas, because just managing GFWL has to be the most tedious business ever. Don't expect to install this game and get started. Don't think you can buy this on Steam, download, and play it. No, install the game. Done ? Ok, it didn't launch ? Hm ? Ok lets search a bit online. Oh.. (10 minutes of Googling later) you need Games for Windows Live. Okay, cool.. downloading.. Start game. WTF? Still not getting in? Damnit, I wanna play this, lets google a bit more.. Okay, needs an update. Search for GFW update. Okay, got it, downloading. Start. Still not getting in !? WTF did I just download? GFWL Marketplace? Why can't I just download the GFWL update I need to play this game? There's no update links anywhere, no sensible way to figure what downloads I need to get from windows update, what the heck ? --- Pass 2-5 hours depending on your level of PC competence and previous experience with GWFL, including reading about how GWFL is all but abandoned as a platform, exclusively used as a tedious form of DRM these days... Play game.

MY GOD!

End rant.. I think, I'll try to be good now.

Okay.. I'm fine, I think. So.. In conclusion, if you have a console, this game is mandatory in your collection if you happen to like any kind of action games that involve a bit of fighting, and isn't shy to throw a few fairly logical puzzles at you now and then. If you only have a PC this is still a great game but expect to have a heck of a fight just to start the damn thing. Console versions imo are far superior than having to cope with several layers of DRM on PC, even if the PC version supports 1920*1080+ with AA and consoles don't.

TLDR;
+You're Batman
+Really well choreographed battles
+Gorgeous, audio and visual

- PC version (review) has hideous DRM

10/10 - Yep. It's that good, DRM woes on PC aside, unfair to take points on that.

Review: Age of Empires III

2011-12-31T04:15:00.006+01:00

Sometimes, when you're as old as I, some classics stick out. This can be a good thing, or a bad thing based on how well they age. Many, many games older than say 5 years from release will simply refuse to play since they rely on outdated drivers and other programs that are no longer supported. Others may run, but seeing the game running again will probably completely ruin whatever childhood worships you once had on such games. And don't even get me started on the games that are non-compatible on current systems, and most likely never will be enjoyed to their fullest rights.. Unless of course someone 5-10 years down the road from now decides to write a retro review, such as this one I'll admit, and prove me wrong.

Home boys in Amsterdam busy sending me stuff

Bit of a sidetrack there, back to aging of games. Some games don't age well at all then as mentioned. Then, there's the odd game that not only plays just like you remembered it, they are actually forward compatible with whatever hardware your today's computer is packing, making them a better experience than you even remembered them to be.

Age of Empires (AoE) III is one such game.

In it, the player takes hands on control of a country of their choice and drives it to domination of their opponents. This will usually happen in an action RTS'ly (real time strategy) manner, when the gloves come off. The trademark of the AoE series though is really solid development through different ages of development not only in the choice of military units, but economy as well and a wide range of tech for both.

What this boils down to, is that a typical multiplayer (or vs bots, or combinations+bots) match will be fast paced, and very strategic as especially your early military units can decide if you win or lose even in the first few minutes, but somehow AoE still feels.. deeper, than, say, Starcraft 1 or 2. Even if it doesn't play all that different.

Bit of religion warfare

AoE also boasts a town levelling system that has to be said to have been ahead of its time, by letting players level up their countries of choice, giving access to cards that can be used during matches. These cards come in all varieties, some can be used from the get go, others are late tech ones. You have your cards that make your markets more efficient, and your workers mine gold faster, and then there's the cards that ship an army fort to your base, or large units of troops. Think of these cards as your typical perks choice in for example Call of Duty, they specialize your empire. If you pick purely economical ones, you risk getting rushed by an army of pikemen if the opponents have military cards in use, unless you put some effort into early defenses. Much like in any RTS really, just a bit more random. If you go all in economy at the start of a game, you will get owned by a quick tech+military card push.

I've mostly talked about multiplayer quirks and features so far, which I realize may have been an odd place to begin, but it is a strong point, even if you probably wont find any human opponents to play against playing AoE III today. Fortunately AoE also features a pretty solid solo campaign with your typical assortment of RTS assignments through four Acts of missions that also roughly follows technology advances through the early settlement of America in the years 1500-1850. This is a quite big difference from previous AoE games where you'd typically play from the middle ages or earlier.

New Amsterdam in the making

To get down to the gameplay in specifics, AoE III plays very much like your today's RTS game in most regards. There are three types of resources that all have to be managed using settlers, your explorer and fishing boats to manage. Despite being a quite old game by now, anyone familiar with Starcraft, or the more recent Command & Conquer games will know exactly how to play. Click drag and drop to select groups of units, ctrl to make hotkeys for groups, rightclick to send units to do their stuff, the usual business. Here's where I need to point out a game flaw though, and a pretty big one at that. Your units will show some odd attack behaviour, whether you leave them to their own devices or have them attack move somewhere. You can't trust them to not just stroll past a platoon of enemy forces, being shot down in the process. Even if you directly command a group of units to do the most basic things, such as attacking a unit or building that is clearly unobstructed, and in range, the little buggars won't always do it! (And then, sometimes they do just as you tell them, just to piss you off since you spent a minute on the ready with the cursor over them in case they decide to be stupid.) If you're used to churning out an army and sending them out with an attack move while focusing on base stuff, you will definitely need some adjusting to this game.

Now then, I will finish off the review with what I started talking about initially. Please forgive me for the awful structure of this review, and thank you if you managed to bear with me thus far.

Have some dutch cannon balls, evil dock!

Age of Empires III remains a remarkably slick game even today. It supports all the common widescreen resolutions that really weren't common back in the day, all they way up to 1920*1080 (and beyond? Thats as high as my monitor goes), and uses what has to be considered decent shaders even by today's standards, reflections as well as support for anti aliasing, resulting in a game that will not look awfully old at all on today's computers, not to mention almost all computers will be able to just max all details and get it on.

In conclusion: If you can bear with some oddities with military unit micromanagement, Age of Empires III is a surprisingly strong RTS title that can offer gameplay challenges to match most recent RTS releases. If you're a fan of the genre and happen to find AoE III for cheap somewhere, go for it.

TLDR;

+Feels authentic, colonizing Americas style

+Decent OST, very good SFX. Musket shots and cannon fire in particular sound very meaty

+ A lot of content provided bought at budget somewhere

- At times awful unit AI, needs careful micromanagement. Even then, things can get weird...

- Old game, don't expect to find online opponents (though its fairly easy to set up, should you have any)

7/10

Review: Fallout New Vegas: Old World Blues DLC

2011-07-24T17:53:00.003+02:00

Could it be that I'm posting a review on a current release for a change? Indeed I am, for SCIENCE!

Introducing Old World Blues, the courier picks up a signal from a crashed satellite at the Mojave Drive-In. Investigating it doesn't reveal much, until the clock strikes midnight and this suddenly happens:

Midnight Science Show

Further interacting with the satellite gives you some premonitions about the content ahead. Starting the DLC is recommended for characters lvl 15 and up, once started you are not able to leave until it is completed, but afterwards you can enter and leave Big MT as you please. Companions can not follow you to Big MT, but you can bring as much equipment as you desire as you come and go. Accepting that and examining the satellite further, the Courier is then knocked out and wisped off unconscious to Big Mountain, while the DLC intro plays.

You then wake at the top of some strange dome, feeling strangely heavy and wearing patient scrubs. Quick examination reveals cranial and torso scars, and so Courier sets off to find out first of all where the hell he is, how to get away from here, and perhaps most importantly, why your brain has been surgically removed and how to get it back!

Welcome to Big MT

And I think that is as far I will go in regards to the story of the DLC lest I spoil it too much. As can be presumed also from the trailer that was released your courier finds himself in a mad scientist show. And what a show this is!

This DLC presents itself in a completely different way than F:NV and any previous addons. From start to finish you feel like you're in .. indeed, a 50's midnight science show with all the wonders and madness it brings. Another big difference is the "feel" itself. While the previous parts of the game has its comedy moments it is mostly focused on the dark state the world is in post-nuclear war, the ongoing conflicts in the Mojave and such. This time, the story is glazed in a thick layer of wit, innuendos and all sorts of crazy comedy, and I have to say I love it! The character gallery is also interesting. Frankly I found them all to be villains although perhaps not intentionally, and there is not a very big cast of characters, but they are just plain fun to deal with, especially the many "personalities" that can be activated in The Sink, your home in Big MT.

Want my seed, do you?

This next part I want to talk about is weird, because it is almost like the developers read my last reviews especially the one of Honest Hearts and adressed some of my issues there. Which is silly, I posted it only a few days ago before I started playing Old World Blues. Anyway, in those I critiqued lack of open ended gameplay (Dead Money) and short plot lines (Honest Hearts). Old World Blues combines the best of both worlds and while Big MT is not a particularly huge area to explore, it still is because it is literally littered with various kinds of underground installations and research centers to poke around in. It's by far the biggest amount of addon content released so far. Not only that, but there are a wealth of quests and while several are optional they will still help you in some way towards to conclusion. I was very pleased with the amount of content in Old World Blues, and while I took my sweet time getting through it trying to explore as much as possible, I'm positive there are a good few places and things to discover still for my next play, through. And I am definitely going back to Big MT!

Apocalypse Toaster!

Old World Blues also seduces players who like to scavenge and tinker with stuff. Big MT is LOADED with loot! There are new kinds of all types of items, weapons and armor, some of which can be upgraded through optional quests or craftable mods. Two of the weapons in particular stood out from the rest for me, and a certain piece of armor as especially interesting to use. There are also a slew of perks and implants that can be installed on our poor brainless Courier. In short, the amount of "stuff" to collect, interact with and upgrade/craft from is more than satisfactory, at least for me.

The combat gameplay is also fairly varied. There is roughly the same amount of different types of enemies that were found in Honest Hearts, but the battles are overall slightly more challenging, and certain enemies are plain nasty to deal with. It feels reasonably well balanced. I personally would have liked it to be even more challenging, but then my Courier was fairly high level when I played through this, having been through both Dead Money and Honest Hearts on the same playthrough he was I think around level 28 by the time I went to Big MT.

As a sidenote, does anyone else feel the levels just come way too quickly in this game ? Having played through the three DLC's my courier is now level 37, and he hasn't even set foot in Freeside or The Strip yet! For my next play through I will definitely go armed with mods that rebalance things a bit, like Project Nevada and some other favourites that were not updated at the time of playing Old World Blues.

Another of my soft spots in New Vegas and all its expansions are the lore stuff to piece together. Even though I didn't feel I explored 100% of Old World Blues, I still found a number of very interesting lore tidbits of major and minor influence. There are links back to the Mojave and certain events in Fallout 3, but also to the Dead Money DLC. I'm sure some of you who played Dead Money will remember mentions of "The Big Empty" by some of the characters there, which refers directly to Big MT and is perhaps a more relevant name seeing as Big MT is a huge crater, instead of a.. mountain. As much as I'd like to spill my discoveries however this is not the place for it, but fellow lore buffs should enjoy them.

Fallout 3 flashback anyone?

Verdict:

I think this about sums up my impressions from Old World Blues. If you've read this far you will no doubt have picked up that I am this time around very pleased with my experiences from the DLC. For €9.99 I definitely felt I got my money's worth. I was in particular pleased with the completely different presentation of Old World Blues that takes itself far less serious than previous installments. I was very entertained from start to finish, and can't wait to go back to Big MT!

Overall score: 9 / 10

+Great setting

+Fun and bizarre story

+Scavenger's paradise

+Polished release, not a single game crash (once I'd disabled mods not up to date)

+ Good amount of quests and places to explore

- Once finished your character is potentially completely overpowered compared to Mojave quests and enemies. My courier can kill a Legendary Cazadore with one shot on Very Hard after finishing the DLC's

Official trailer:

In support of everyone affected by the attacks on Oslo and Utøya

2011-07-23T06:13:00.001+02:00

My thoughts are with everyone affected by this senseless tragedy. This refers to the bomb attack in Oslo that killed at least 7, and the unimaginable attacks by a gunman at a youth camp on Utøya which as of yet has more than 80 confirmed children and youths killed, reported by the police as of Sat 23rd at 4 AM CET.

A truly black day for Norway, which has not seen an attack of this kind on our own land since WW2. Again, I wish everyone affected by this tragedy be it injured or casualties, the strength to get through this.

SSFIV:AE SFCCL Season 3 call to arms for PS3

2011-07-23T00:21:00.001+02:00

This is just to help getting SSFIV:AE players informed about the several years running PS3 league for Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition. Third season is just starting, check out SFCCL website for more info. 2 Separate divisions of US and EU.

Review: Fallout New Vegas: Honest Hearts DLC

2011-07-21T05:30:00.004+02:00

Wear Sunscreen!

Scanning frequencies on his radio, the courier suddenly picks up an unfamiliar signal on his Pip-Boy, which turns out to be a contract offer as caravan escort on a mission from the Mojave into Utah, to establish trade with a friendly tribe. Surely enough as the Courier is used to unforeseen hindrances, shortly upon arrival, things go terribly wrong. The escort mission quickly turns into sandbox adventure of its own in a habitat quite different than what our courier is accustomed to.

And with that its time to welcome adventurers and curious souls to Fallout: New Vegas - Honest Hearts. I will try not to spoil too much besides what we were teased with in the trailers.

Starting off, the courier gets to meet the Burning Man aka Joshua Graham, aka former second in command supervillain of Caesar's Legion. While I'm sure some lorebuffs would already be sold at this point, there's a bit more to this expedition. The primary mission of the courier gone terribly wrong, he is instead forced into dealing with a conflict between foreign tribes of the Utah natives, just to be able to make his way home.

This all said, its time for my own thoughts on the DLC:

First off, Honest Hearts has a much more open mission structure than that of Dead Money. While not comparable in size to the New Vegas area, Honest Hearts still offers a much more exploration friendly experience. The Utah world, while fairly small, is also a completely different experience to explore which is a very welcome addition to players who have gone through the original story in New Vegas a couple times. Instead of endless desert wasteland, the player is instead introduced to the big canyons including its tourist traps and other features.

Scenic view from Honest Hearts

As mentioned, the mission structure is also a bit more open and while there is still an overlying objective from the beginning, the Courier is welcome to make any number of detours along the way. I personally found the exploration and discoveries very satisfying, and while I won't spoil anything further I suspect any Fallout lore buff will enjoy all the little discoveries there are to be made immensely.

While there are dozens of locations to discover and pillage, I still found this DLC fairly short, made even more clear after I just finished another run through both Dead Money and Honest Hearts. Having been through them both before, this time I focused only on completing any quests and significant rewards, and just getting through the whole thing. I spent about 4 hours on Dead Money, while Honest Hearts was finished in just under 2 hours. While I appreciate the open enviroment of Honest Hearts, I am still a bit disappointed in the low amount of missions and gameplay time it offers. I felt the same way after my first play through it, and it actually took me several months to consider heading back to Honest Hearts after I had been through it once. For me, that is a long time, I am a total New Vegas junkie and find myself starting new characters and trying out new mods on a weekly basis.

From a gameplay perspective, I have to say I enjoy Honest Hearts over Dead Money or even the original game. In that regard the DLC impresses, and there are of course the advantages of another 5 levels added to your level cap, but also some new perks and quite a few more crafting options. The focus on crafting in particular appealed to me, and feels like it picked up on a few things that should have been in from the Vanilla release already. Of course, there are mods which expand on such already, but I feel I can't weigh that into my opinion of a DLC as I feel it should be weighed against the developer releases.

So, the crafting is expanded a bit, but so is the combat. There are a multitude of enemies of different types. There's tribals, new types of mutated insects, the return of a feared adversary in Fallout 3, and some other goodies. To make that whole experience complete are of course a slew of new weapons, mostly focused on Guns, Melee and Unarmed weapon types this time around. However, the combat doesn't usually challenge the Courier a lot. This will of course vary depending on your character's specialization. On my last play through I had a level 22 Courier with Speech, Science, Repair and Guns maxed, and Energy Weapons, Melee and Unarmed at 25. Playing on Very Hard and mostly rushing through the content I can't say I felt much resistance from my foes. I suspect the "And Stay Back" perk contributed a lot to my success though, talk about overpowered perks.. :)

Firefighters Utah Dpt. post-nuclear war

In conclusion, I think that the Honest Hearts DLC does a decent job at expanding the original game. It should have had a few more mandatory missions I feel, but then again exploring can be its own reward, and is this time around. This DLC is also much more open than Dead Money which is very welcome, not to mention the lack of lame gameplay gimmicks which annoyed me to no end in Dead Money, and still do. So, as a DLC I would have to say Honest Hearts is a better experience than Dead Money. It's worth picking up, even if you, as I, wasn't blown away by the first DLC. I do wish it was a bit longer though.

Verdict:
+Lots of exploration to do
+Lore fills in some blanks in New Vegas story
+- More varied combat than Dead Money, but poorly balanced (Too easy!)
-Short
-Low replay value

For number lovers, I'd give Fallout: New Vegas - Honest Hearts a strong 6 out of 10, which is more than I would give in my Dead Money review here, except I didn't give it points.

Wondering how well SSFIV:AE plays on your PC?

2011-07-18T14:33:00.001+02:00

Find out for yourself with the SF4 benchmark tool that was released for along with SF4 a while back. SSF4 should be running the exact same engine, so while this benchmark demo is rather old, it should still be very accurate to determine how well your computer will run it.

Also for online play, please make sure you tweak your graphics settings so you can maintain 60 fps at least average, preferably a bit higher to avoid dipping below which can cause annoying and input wrecking slowdowns on both parts!

The benchmark program can be downloaded here, or you can just google for it and find a download location better for you.

The big SSFIV update post

2011-07-17T00:04:00.002+02:00

Hey!

A lot has happened in the Street Fighter scene over the last couple months, that I haven't updated on at all.

Starting off with the most obvious bits, Super Street Fighter Arcade Edition is out for a while now on consoles, but is also finally available for PC which is the first update since original Street Fighter IV was released ways back. I haven't looked up prices everywhere but it goes for around €40 on Steam. A bit pricey but still a mandatory upgrade for existing PC players, and a highly recommended buy for newcomers. From what I've seen the PC version plays great after a quick patch that adressed some controller issues. Unfortunately if you own a PS3 Madcatz stick and your PC uses a Nvidia chipset (Or was it Intel processor? Look it up yourselves if this affects you!), you will still need to purchase an adapter to use it on the PC.

On the community side of things, my old online community Streetfighter4forums has finally had a mass exodus of users after a long line of site problems and downtime caused by DDOS attacks. Sad times, but the new community at 2dfighters.net is shaping up real well in the short time it has been up and comes highly recommended for any fighter fans. Its main focus is still Street Fighter since most of the current user base have come over from our old site, but it aims to cover a broad assortment of fighter games.

Shortly after the PC release of SSFIV:AE, ex-wow, SC2 and various game caster Totalbiscuit surprisingly did a couple videos on the game, one of himself noobing it up with Dan in an online game, and another video where he attempted some casting for replays. I found them both good to watch, and hope it is something he will expand on. For anyone interested the videos can be seen here and here, do thumb it up and/or leave some encouraging words if you'd like to see more.

Last bit of news, to get the ball rolling after the launch of 2Dfighters.net there is one large tournament which is already underway for XBOX and PS3, and another one still in planning. The first tournament is the World Warrior Tournament (PS3, XBOX), matches are already being played and results from our matches are being uploaded here for PS3, will update again when its up for XBOX as well.

Ending the update with the first match uploaded from the tournament matches I've had so far where I got a thorough stomping by Subes88. I've played one more which was slightly more even against KanyeWestAddict which isn't uploaded yet.

Match replay here, Blogger.com is being stupid and won't let me embed it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exG5budJwbc&feature=player_embedded

Till next time!

Team Fortress 2 goes Free to Play!

2011-06-24T06:08:00.012+02:00

The strictly online class based FPS shooter Team Fortress 2 has been a quite popular game in the four years that have passed since its release, and today, surprisingly it was announced that it is now completely free! This news comes with the "Über Update" for the game which (also free of course) features a number of new items, a new map and other tidbits which I have shamefully not updated myself completely on.

What I will say though is that Team Fortress 2 is one heck of a game and it is almost sad to see it join the Free to Play market as many of its brethren are of questionable quality. Perhaps TF2 will change that view?

For anyone who hasn't played Team Fortress 2, here's a quick rundown. Playing as either a Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Demoman, Heavy Weapons Guy, Medic, Spy, Sniper or Engineer, help your team beat the opposition in online objective based battles. The objectives are typically based around capturing or defending key locations or Intel (CTF), or having one or both teams trying to escort a bomb cart to their locations.

All classes play wildly different and also have a wealth of options for loadouts that slowly unlock as you play. Or if you are not the patient type you can buy whatever you want from the TF2 store through microtransactions. In all but a very few cases though, the different loadouts are not straight upgrades as they come with sometimes drastic changes to damage done or taken, or plainly change the way the class plays completely. As an example I would use the Demoman who can swap out his grenade launcher for a claymore sword and a targe shield, which lets him charge enemies and return health while increasing his damage for each decapitation. As opposed to lobbing grenades all over the place as he would normally do. Or you could have your medic use a healing gun that when fully charged gives your target guaranteed crits instead of invulnerability, the difference there should be obvious. Or you could give your Heavy Weapons Guy a Sandvich to eat instead of his secondary Shotgun.. The amount of customization should be apparent by now and adds greatly to the already varied and (amazingly) fairly balanced gameplay.

There are just way too many weapons and things to say about the game's classes and weapons, so I'll just say...

Its free, be good to yourself and get Team Fortress 2 right away!

OH YEAH:

I guess some introductions are in order...

Meet the Team:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiV_X15OWYM

(Copyrights wont let me embed the video. Clicky, go 720p and enjoy 10 minutes of glory)

... and the medic:

and the spy:

Edit: Just a quick update on the update. You can indeed get the game for free now and it servers are bustling with new and returning players, almost enough to make an old Heavy teary eyed *sniffs* However, there are currently some problems with the master server list, meaning many will not be able to get fresh server lists for the time being. The quick play and regular server lists are thus broken for now (fix incoming) but your favourites tab still works (not that this helps a completely new player or anyone with an empty favourites list).

Edit on the edit of the update on the update!

Seems the server list is working again so should be go for all! Merry gibbings o/

Review: Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition

2011-06-19T06:11:00.010+02:00

Foreword:

The review for this title is to be considered a DLC review as it will cover the updated content only. Readers not familiar with Super Street Fighter IV are advised to search up some reviews of the full game first.

Released June 7, and available as standalone purchase for Xbox 360 and PS3 June 24th in America, and June 28th in Europe, with a PC release in sometimes in July, Super Street Figher IV Arcade Edition is the most recent, and according to Capcom the last update to the Street Fighter IV series.

Before I get started, I'll need to stress this once more, this review is for Arcade Edition only, not Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition as shortly available in stores. I will only cover updates from SSFIV to SSFIV:AE as updated by the online upgrades available on 360 and PS3.

New Characters:

Starting off with what everyone will care about and of course the main selling point of AE, the characters. There are four new combatants, but Arcade Edition has also thrown in a huge list of minor and major balance change to existing characters

Introducing the new characters:

Evil Ryu:
What if Ryu shook Akuma's hand and embraced the fullest potential of his dark energies? He gets a much improved zoning game (as if it was bad before !?) with fireballs on almost instant recovery, some of Akuma's combo options, his Demon Super, and a couple new tricks of his own, is what happens. The only things that prevent E Ryu from being a straight upgrade to Ryu 2.0 is his lower stamina and stun resistance in line with Akuma, and slightly weaker pokes. Evil Ryu can also teleport like Akuma, but it is slightly weaker and more prone to punishment lowering its utility use.

Oni:
Oni is a new character created for AE, a demon of pure evil. His fighting style resembles that of Akuma, but he also brings a few tricks of his own that make him a very offensive fighter. Most noteworthy are his air specials, with his air dashes that with some skill lets him control zoning, a demon super that can be used both on ground and in air making for some potentially nasty surprises, and finally his ultra fireball attack which is the only fireball ultra that can be executed in air. Add to the mix very damaging and fairly easily executed melee combos, a ground based special that can cross up (and be comboed into both ultras with the EX version), and you have Oni. To balance him, Oni has slightly lower stamina and stun than average, a surprisingly weak fireball game and a pretty poor focus attack.

Yun:
Returning from the Street Fighter III alongside his twin brother Yang, Yun is an extremely offensive fighter. Yun is all about speed, offense and juggles. He has a number of mostly safe specials to use for building meter quickly, and his super further enhances his offensive play, letting him perform seemingly endless juggles. In line with his offensive nature Yun has very good normals, with strong pokes and useful target combos. His weakness is when he gets countered, Yun does not handle defence well on wakeup and when pressured. He also has fairly low stamina and stun resistance.

Yang:
Yun's twin, Yang paces himself a bit more in combat and as such has better reversals and defense, and while he puts on pressure when given the breathing space, his main strength is his agility coupled with crossups, resets and mindgames with the opponent. His mantis slash move which behaves like Fei Long's Rekka allows him to close on the opponent safely, and he uses a crossup throw and easy combos into either ultras to deliver damage. Yang is not perfect either however and has a poor dash, below average stamina and stun and a bad focus attack with limited range.

I was initially sceptical to all four new characters, I have to admit and I still believe there were some much better options for new characters to bring into SFIV than the ones we got. That said, the ones we did get do bring some varied combat styles to the roster and they are despite what many would cry, well balanced. No, Yun&Yang are not horribly overpowered, they have glaring weaknesses that give them a lot of trouble, but just like in SSFIV there are matchup differences where certain characters will have an advantage over certain others, this is nothing new. And this comes from someone who has NOT changed mains to Yun! ;)

The rest:

Other than the new characters there is nothing too impressive going on. There are a few multiplayer and replay updates that are very minor and do not in anyway justify a price tag, such as the ability to put a room name on your endless lobby (only endless, not ranked/tournament etc) These are basic functions that should have just been patched in, in fact I'm annoyed thinking about how Capcom has held this back probably for a very long time just to make Arcade Edition look beefier.

With the release of AE there are now two sets of ranks, one for SSFIV and one for the Arcade Edition. Swapping from AE to regular takes but a second, but much like you would expect from DLC's and expansions by now, you can not with AE play with someone without it without swapping back, so players without AE will not be able to combat any of the new characters.

One thing I was downright disappointed in is that nothing at all was done to improve network and online play. NAT 1 and 2 users will still experience problems hosting and sometimes joining online games, sadly.

Verdict:

Arcade Edition's four new characters are all fairly interesting and for the most part play well with the rest of the SSFIV roster. This alone makes the upgrade worthwhile for its fairly reasonable pricing, although the rest of the Arcade edition features should have been included as patches (long ago I might add).

One thing that deserves special mention is that the release of Arcade Edition marks the introduction of SSFIV to PC, finally! I personally can't wait to see if the game becomes as competitive on PC as it currently is and has been for some time on the consoles.

Final verdict for the Arcade Edition DLC:

4/10

+ 4 new characters
+ (not included in the score) Now on PC!
-Not compatible backwards with SSFIV without switching versions, current players are almost forced to buy AE to continue competing.
-Other than the new characters, the other selling points for Arcade Edition just look like a ripoff to make you pay for a patch.
- Yun and Yang are good additions, but I can't help but feel there were better choices for new or imported characters than Evil Ryu and Oni
- While new characters have intro and ending cinematics, none of the new characters have any dialogue in their rival battles, very half assed.

Edit: I feel the need to point out, my rating does not reflect my view on the complete product "SSFIV:AE", merely the extra content delivered through the DLC, which leaves a lot to be desired. SSFIV:AE as a product is despite some problems still one of the best fighter game options on the market currently.

Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm official updates!

2011-06-02T19:52:00.001+02:00

There's a landslide of new info and goodies on the official SC2 site! Various tidbits about the story for the second campaign, art pieces, new videos and whatnot. Looks veeery delicious so far!

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/game/heart-of-the-swarm-preview/

Play CoD Black Ops multiplayer for free this weekend

2011-06-02T15:18:00.001+02:00

Hey ya,

Just saw on Steam news that we will get a free weekend of Call of Duty: Black Ops (multiplayer only) this weekend. Great chance for anyone who hasn't checked it out yet to have a good look at it. Can also start pre-loading the game today to have it ready to go for the weekend!

I've played a lot of Modern Warfare 2, so I gave Black Ops a pass as it seemed bit too similar, but I'm definitely going to take advantage of the free weekend to see what the fuss is all about. o/

Short Review: Fallout: New Vegas Dead Money DLC

2011-05-29T05:58:00.008+02:00

Dead Money - Fallout:New Vegas DLC. Letting go is the hardest part...

Dead Money has been out a while, but since I'm doing a review for Honest Hearts I feel I should start here with the first official DLC for Fallout: New Vegas.

Released Dec 21 2010 for Xbox 360 and Feb 22 for PS3 and PC, Dead Money is the first DLC released for Fallout: New Vegas. As usual I will try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible.

After installing Dead Money, the Courier picks up a radio signal inviting him to the grand opening of the Sierra Madre Casino. The level cap is also raised by 5, and there are some new crafts available right from the get go, even if the player decides against starting the DLC content. Many of the crafts require parts only accessible in the area Dead Money plays out in, of course.

It is recommended to be around level 20 when heading to investigate the radio signal that starts the DLC. Upon starting, it should come as no surprise that the Sierra Madre was actually a pre-war casino. Its grand opening never happened because of the atomic war that laid waste to the world, still the radio signal is broadcasted, luring scavengers to it, like our Courier.

The Dead Money DLC features a long quest chain in an closed off area around the Sierra Madre with some exploration options in the urban areas it plays out in. There are three possible unique companions that will work with or against you while there, none of them available in the regular game afterwards, but after completion one of the recruitable companions will have some new dialogue and depending on your choices, a significant bonus to performance. It also features a few new weapons and armors making the trip there quite worthwhile.

Now for my thoughts on the new quests and the gameplay of the DLC itself. First off, let me say that Dead Money fits so perfectly into the Fallout: New Vegas experience, I'm almost suspecting it was done pre-launch and deliberately released later as DLC. I loved learning about the Sierra Madre, its inhabitants and the history around it, and apart from the Courier being stuck inside there until its completed, the DLC fits into the main game perfectly.

Game play wise, and trying not to spoil it too much, I have to say that there are certain elements in Dead Money that annoy me a great deal, to such an extent it took me months to get back inside the Madre on a new character in Fallout: New Vegas after I had been through it the first time. Some of the elements really don't fit in, and feels like they were just thrown in after the story was done to add some gameplay difficulty to get through it. I've now played through it twice, taking some different routes and I can safely say I will not go back into Sierra Madre, ever.

In favour of the DLC is the great setting it puts you in, lore buffs will love finding out the history of Madre and some of the characters you meet, and the characters themselves are really well done. It is a real shame the Courier can't bring any of the new companions back after you are done at the Madre. Also, once you've installed the DLC the level cap is automatically increased by 5, so there is no need to go through it with each character created, which is nice. Not that this is a selling point, it is very easy to install mods for the game that lets you xp up to level 50 or above should you want to. There is also a new type of enemies that may require some different tactics to dispose of. The downside is, with two exceptions, this new enemy type makes out the majority of the combat in the DLC, and makes no appearances outside it.

So, in conclusion:
+ Great additions to the Fallout lore and meshes with the regular game lore quite well
+ Entertaining NPCs and companions
- The forced gameplay changes in the DLC areas that I really don't like (Spoiler alert: Radios!)
- Combat gets boring, just one type of enemy the whole way through (yes, there is varieties of it, but its still the same enemy type and tactic required)

DLC Trailer (possible spoilers)

World of Warcraft: Premium Real ID cross realm LFD service

2011-05-20T03:59:00.002+02:00

Before saying anything else, if you haven't already seen it, go here and see the extra charge premium feature we got coming.

I'll just say it right away, I really can not recognize the old Blizzard Entertainment that put customers first anymore.

I got a million things to say but can't really put it into any rational structure at the moment so I will just say this. I pay a monthly subscription fee to play your game, I am by definition a premium member. In the MMO market you can not charge a subscription fee and expect people to pay money on top of that to get access to your game's features!

God! I want to say so much more on this, I will perhaps when I can put it together in a more or less intellectual wall of text that can make sense.

Short Review: Civilization V Denmark DLC

2011-05-17T12:24:00.002+02:00

Goddag! This will be a very short one. I bought the Denmark civilization DLC for Civilization V, just wanted to drop a few thoughts on it.

Denmark in Civ V is a Viking based civ, with two unique units, the berserker that comes with the amphibious promotion, and second is the Norwegian ski infantry that gets bonuses on snow terrain and hills. Danes' trait lets them move faster while embarked, and don't lose all their movement points when making landfall which can make for some nasty surprise attacks. The DLC also includes a scenario in which you fight for control of Northern Europe. In it, research, happiness and culture are all locked, letting you focus on massing an army to take England, and to win it you need to conquer English towns to build a number of shire courts before you can construct the "Domestate Book" in London (After conquering it of course).

Now then. I'm happy to see a scandinavian Civ make its entry on Civ V, naturally a Viking based one. The Civ itself is decently balanced, with strong invasion bonuses but nothing else, no unique buildings or traits that improve simming. I've played a number of games with the DLC enabled, and it makes for some fun play especially when you control Denmark in archipelago and continents maps. However, when you encounter Danes controlled by the AI, they are very puny. There doesn't seem to be any AI scripts for Denmark to play the Civ as its designed. Even on an archipelago map I just played on, when I encountered Denmark they were tiny, had barely expanded to nearby islands at all, made no incentive to expand onto enemy islands and just bent over to take it when I declared war. I had high hopes for Denmark to be the "Inca of Civ 4 at sea", but that is simply not the case. If you play Denmark yourself you can do some very agressive play on sea based maps, but unfortunately whenever you encounter AI Danes you can sit back and rest assured they will be effortless to conquer should you want to.

When buying the Denmark DLC you have the option of buying a bundle with a few extra map types, which I didn't opt into. I can swallow paying for extra civs with proper diplomacy menues and such, but I won't pay for maps when there's already an abundance of maps for free download from the Civ V mods section. I would recommend you do the same, don't pay for single maps when similar or better maps are very easily available already.

To sum up, I felt a bit scammed after paying for the Denmark DLC. It lacks AI scripts that lets the computer do anything meaningful with the Civ, making this a very low value purchase compared to modded civs that play better, sans the animated diplomacy screens.

Replay test from Team Fortress 2

2011-05-15T12:50:00.001+02:00

Hey again, just posting to show you my first attempt at replay recording/editing/youtubing with the new features on Team Fortress 2. Not many games have this kind of feature, seems pretty cool to play around with.

Edit: Click the youtube link for the vid if you decide to watch it and go 720p! It took fricken ages to upload the thing :D

Modding guide for Fallout:New Vegas PC

2011-04-29T08:19:00.009+02:00

Bison Steve by end of time (Nevada Skies)

Update: Adding link to "Modding Fallout NV Tutorial" written by Gopher who himself has a few slick mods under his belt. So far three parts written which cover how to properly install mods and avoid conflicts, I'd consider these a must read for anyone not 100% sure what they're doing when tinkering with mods, such as myself! Much more detailed than my newbish how-to posted below and also includes very useful youtube step by step directions.

Hi folks, time for another post and this time I want to talk about the use of mods to enhance your experience while playing the open ended RPG Fallout:New Vegas (FNV from now) on the PC. What I will do is first talk about basic modding how-to's and getting the tools needed, and then I will simply list some of my preffered mods, what they do and how to install them. Bear in mind there are literally hundreds more mods out there primarily found at www.newvegasnexus.com , but I will for starters focus on mods that are easy to get going and not likely to conflict with other mods and cause nasty game crashes.

Get off! (Very Voracious Vermin)

But before we do that, we need NVSE and FOMM installed:

Go to your FNV folder. It is in the steam folder found in either \program files or \program files (x86) on your default hard drive if you use Steam, otherwise I hope you know where you installed it. Once you're in the FNV folder, create a new folder called 'mods' or something else you'll remember, this is where we will save our mods for FNV initially. No mods will be working from this folder alone, but it is handy to have a common place to store them and copy from, in case of reinstallation needs. Also, if you happen to mess up your installation of FNV completely to the point you have to reinstall the entire game to get it going again, you can keep the \mods folder as is to save yourself some time redownloading and do fresh reinstalls from it.

Get the NVSE (New Vegas Script Extender) program. What this does is open up code a lot of mods rely on, and I really couldn't explain it better even if I wanted to, but suffice to say without NVSE, most mods you try to install simply wont work. Extract that file to the \mods folder, and once that is done, navigate to the \mods folder and the folder that should be created inside it now called NVSE_beta1_10 or similar, then copy the entire content of that folder to your FNV folder, which will be the same folder you have the FalloutNV.exe. and the fallout launcher in. If you see those, you're in the right place. If you've done it right you will see a new file called nvse_loader.exe and a SRC folder in your main FNV folder. To make sure you've done it right, you should launch the nvse_loader.exe file and if everything is well you should be running FNV (with extra mod power, wooh, not that you'll notice that right away).

Now, get Fallout Mod Manager (FOMM from now). Some will say you don't have to use it, I say fuck off, you have to use it. Save it to your FNV\Mods folder. From now, you play FNV using the Fomm.exe file you just installed, not from steam or using the FNV launcher. Setting it up should be very troublefree, at least for now seeing as we didn't install any addons yet. Take a moment to run the Fomm.exe, check the menu, check that launching FNV from it works.

New bounty hunter quest chain? Don't mind if I do. (New Vegas Bounties)

If you got this far, you're ready for enjoying mod powered FNV! Get someone to pat you on the back, and read on if you wish for my suggestions of good starter mods for FNV, or if you feel confident so far, head to Newvegasnexus.com and go crazy.

Here are my picks of addons to get started with. I personally use a few more, but I'll start off listing the ones that cause the least amount of trouble with mod conflicts. Once you get your feet wet you can expand your list of mods, but take care when installing and read the comments and instructions, there are a lot of mods that will not play nice with eachother. For your own sake, remember to save all mods downloaded to beforementioned FNV\Mods folder for installation and future use. Onto my list then!

Badsprings more like it (Monster Mod)

1. Nevada Skies

Adds much needed atmosphere to the game through beautiful, unpredictable and sometimes dangerous weather changes. Also makes nights look like actual nights.

As this is the first mod mentioned I will do step by step instructions for installation. First off, head to the mod page, and the files tab on it. For all mods you will want to read any instructions, but for this one, we will need to download the files called Nskies 0-6-3-ESP (or more current similar file), and Nskies 0-6 Data. Once downloaded extract both files to your FNV\Mods folder. That done, right click and copy the file called Nevada Skies.esp to the folder called "fallout new vega\data". If you don't have a \data folder in your main new vegas game folder, create it. Next, go back to the \mods folder and copy the meshes, sound and textures to your fallout new vegas\data folder as well.

If you've done all that, the mod should be installed and ready to play. Launch the Fallout Mod Manager we installed earlier, and you should see Nevada Skies.esp in the mod list. Make sure it is checked and click "Launch NVSE". You can either start a new game or continue an existing save, this mod only changes weather effects. If it all works you should see a pop up box shortly after the game has started welcoming you to Nevada Skies. The mod also gives you an item you can use from your Appearances tab in your Pip-Boy to adjust weather settings as you like and enable special mood settings. If you find nights are too dark, use the thermograph cheat menu to add Friend of the night perk. If everything is working out so far, then congratulations, you've installed your first Fallout New Vegas mod. :)

2. New Vegas Bounties

Adds a fully voice acted and fairly long action oriented bounty hunter quest chain to the game. I like this mod a lot, it blends in perfectly with the regular game and just adds more fun stuff to do and some unexpected plot twists. To install, download and follow instructions similar to mentioned above but as always when installing mods, make sure to read over the author's notes for installation, launch FNV using FOMM as usual and make sure New Vegas Bounties is enabled, launch and enjoy.

3. Monster Mod

Adds a lot of nasty enemies to the game and enables outdoor respawns, so don't feel too safe crossing the Mojave where you've gone safely before. Adds a lot of variety and challenge to enemy encounters throughout the game.

4. The New Bison Steve and Lucky Casino

Adds a quest chain that meshes in well with the FNV quests to restore the Bison Steve to its former glory after liberating Primm. End rewards promises partnership in the restored casino.

So much pain (A World of Pain)

5. A World of Pain

Freaking massive mod that adds close to 100 new areas to explore and loot (if you survive that long). New areas, new monsters, new weapons and a few quests as well. Note, some areas may bring lower specced PCs to their knees.

6. Bettergameperformance

For the non-cutting edge gaming computers, this mod significantly increases frame rates by editing out doodads the game loads but isn't using. It's sorta strange this stuff is even needed, but it does help, at no cost. The game doesn't actually use the items this mod removes, so there's nothing lost except memory used.

7. Better Performance for Older PCs

Improves frame rates by removing blur effects when the player gets hit, light effects (not muzzle effects) on gunfire and removing junk items loaded outside the strip, to improve framerates while inside it.

That's just a few of the more popular mods. Again, these were picked mainly for the ease of installation and how much they bring to the game. There are a ton more mods out there that I'd like to touch on such as cosmetics and weapon and crafting mods, but that will be for another update if I still feel like it.

Enjoy. :)

Bad bad Google.

2011-04-03T03:34:00.002+02:00

So! Last thursday Microsoft filed a "formal complaint with the European Commision" "as part of the Commission’s ongoing investigation into whether Google has violated European competition law". Apparently the underdog Microsoft feels squeezed out of the online search tools market, and are taking steps to get Google's influence reduced to make room for other search engines.

Hello ?

Is this Microsoft the same as the one that was fined €497,000,000 in 2004 for abusing its power in the PC market? The same Microsoft that refused to pay up and in 2007 was sentented to play not only that amount but an additional ~€250,000,000 in fines? The same Microsoft that has had complete control of the PC software platform since.. MS-DOS ?

They fought for three years to dispute the fact they have have nearly complete monopoly on the PC software platform, and now they say Google has too much of the online search index market? Poor, poor Microsoft! I so feel your pain, being pushed to the side like that, really, it must be awful...

Review: Trackmania Nations

2011-03-30T04:38:00.004+02:00

Trackmania Nations Forever, released by Nadeo in 2006 for PC

Hey again, this is a special treat for you all. You see, this game is free :) If this stuff sounds even a little bit fun, you're not losing much by heading over to www.trackmania.com to grab it, or if you have Steam installed, just click here to install it directly.

Trackmania Nations was released for free in 2006. Trackmania is a hugely customizable racing game that mixes stunt car racing with stuff like loops and trick jumps in sometimes wild tracks with very competitite online time trials, which has kept this game of interest even until today.

Trackmania Nations delivers the thrill of perfecting your lap times and those track records down to the millisecond. The driving is completely arcadelike with you controlling a F1 car (more cars if you upgrade to Trackmania Nations Forever, for a price), and its just you against the clock. In singleplayer and multiplayer both there are other drivers, but while you see them on the track as you drive, there is no collision detection at all.

The game offers single player trials that have you fighting the clock to overcome increasingly tricky tracks will test your abilities to even make it through a round, once you get a bit further into it. There's nothing special to this game mode at all, its just you, the track,and the clock. The fun lies in the complexity of the tracks and that unforgiving timer that just forces you to try again until you can beat the tracks in time for the Gold.

Multiplayer is where the game shines, even in the free Trackmania Nations version. As soon as you hop online you are introduced to tracks each crazier than the last, thanks to an already established game community who have taken the track designs to heights you wouldn't believe (literally). Depending on what servers you join you may find the tracks too hard to navigate even, but most servers tend to rotate tracks that are more or less understandeable.

Keeping the whole online thing going is an online ranking mode and those with a strong competitive mindset will get a kick out of perfecting the tracks and trying to crush the track records.

Presentation wise the interface is fairly clean, although navigating leaderboards and servers can be a little confusing at first. Graphically there is nothing too fancy schmancy going on, this is after all a 5 year old game. Still, despite not looking awfully advanced it hasn't aged badly either, and for a game like this that requires millisecond precision I'd rather prefer 60+ frames per second than eyecandy.

Overall this game while old now is still going strong with very alive competitive online play. I have not tried the upgraded Trackmania United Forever version myself but it adds a number of new cars but more importantly several new track designer enviroments other than the "stadium" set included in Nations. For a free game, its definitely something I'd recommend checking out.

Final verdict: 7 / 10

+ Thrilling competitive play online

- Single player while okay for practicing loses interest fairly quickly

- Slightly aged graphics and presentation

Official trailer:

Review: Gran Turismo 5

2011-03-28T12:19:00.005+02:00

Gran Turismo 5 by Polyphony Digital, released late november 2010 for PS3 only

This title was rather hard to write the review for. After numerous delays during development and massive hype for the game, portraying it as the ultimate racing game ever my expectations were sky high. Even after getting the game for myself to check it out I have waited a bit before doing the review, to allow for a more objective look. For me it has been a has been a mixed experience. Objectively speaking though ? Darn good game. Me, I was truthfully expecting a bit more.

The game is based around earning credits and levels for winning all kinds of races, events and cups and spending these to expand your car park and upgrade your rides. This game features over 1000 cars! Its quite ridiculous really how may there are, but the drawback to this is that about 800 of these cars are not that well modeled, so called standard cars. They lack interior view also. The rest of them are called premium cars and look absolutely gorgeous, all of them, the attention to detail on them is very impressive. You'll notice right away though that the difference between the two types of car models are rather big, and I had expected the standard cars to be better made. The premium cars are great, but the rest look like they are mostly directly copy-pasted from GT1-4. There is also a very noticeable difference in graphic quality when it comes to the tracks you race on themselves. It would seem the developers went for giving the most famous tracks all their attention making for some rather impressive visuals indeed, but at the cost of all the others which are merely okay. One particular thing I noticed though is how poorly shaders and shadows are handled. Often especially the shadows around the cars can look plain bad, I had expected this to be top notch.

The audio is also a mixed experience. The engine sounds are amazing, almost all the cars have distinct engine sounds you also very clearly hear the extra kick in the rev after installing car engine upgrades or turbochargers and such. It really is a joy to listen to. In stark contrast to this is the sound you'll hear the first, second and every time your car makes contact with anything, be it crashing full speed into a wall, other cars or trading paint with them. All these things have just one sound, a loud BONK. Imagine a guy hitting a large plastic bottle. Its an awful sound, I really wonder what the heck went wrong, its such a joke. It doesnt even sound like anything remotely similar to any sound a car would make coming into contact with anything, its simply amazing they put this into the game. Regarding the game music, most of it didn't do much for me. It is a mix of classic themes used largely when navigating the menues that work well enough, and the race music is what I'd call a mix of light pop music, very uninspiring. It didn't matter that much to me though, I soon turned the music down anyway to hear the engines better. If I could just turn off the damn BONK sound....

Back to the game play itself then. There are a wide variety of modes to play in, and first and foremost is the A-Spec which is your career mode, with single races and cups spread across different levels of skill and car requirements. I found this game mode the most fun compared to the rest, but the difficulty varies wildly. Most races you can just take any car that meets the requirements, tune it up a bit and leave all opposition in the dust off the starting grid. Other races require you to use certain cars that can be damned hard to get hold of. In many of the classic car races especially this becomes a problem, but the cars that fit specific races can also vary wildly in performance, making it sometimes very hard to get not only the required car class, but also one that will actually do well. On the whole though, I could appreciate the wide variety of races for anything from classic cars of various types and pickups up to supercars.

Following this mode is B-Spec which offers the same, except you act as manager instead. Here the AI drives your car, but the player instead directs the driver on how agressive pace he should keep. An interesting idea, but all you really do is tell your driver to increase pace or slow down, based on how "hot" he is getting. When your driver has other cars near and there is overtaking going on, it makes him lose his temper more easily which leads to him making more mistakes, so really the only thing you're doing is watching how agitated he is getting and adjust him accordingly. I like that B-Spec is in the game, its not a bad idea, but I think they should have done a lot more with it as it really isn't that involving for the player, and bottom line it gets rather boring, pretty fast.

There are other races and game modes as well. There are online races of course, and time specific seasonal events, some with online leaderboards which is a very good idea. There is also a very extensive Licences system where you learn the finer details of driving well in races like proper braking, cornering, drifting etcetc. Passing these licences are relatively easy, but getting gold medals in all of them is nightmarishly difficult and require perfect understanding and timing when handling your car. This is all excellent stuff in my book. Finally there are special events which feature things like special races on the Top Gear track, NASCAR driving school and some rather awesome rally events, and more.

In short, game play wise there is a staggering amount of content to enjoy in Gran Turismo 5, easily the most full featured racing game I've played. If you want to get everything out of this game you are in for a long and mostly very enjoyable ride.

There is one more thing I need to bring up that for me is another drawback of the game, and that is the presentation itself of the game through the menu system and some other quirks. I wish the interface would have more functions to help you find the cars you need for the events you want to take part in on the car market. As it is now, unless you have a very good memory you will need to write down specific models of cars allowed in some races before heading to the car dealerships to search. The dealerships could also use more options for sorting and searching cars. Its an inconvenience, admittedly not a huge one but I at least got rather annoyed with how cumbersome it could be to find the right cars needed. Next is the menues themselves, they are a mess to navigate with buttons all over the place in glorious chaos. I get that they GT mode menu was designed to look fresh and colourful but it should have been a lot cleaner laid out. Also, the load screens... There is loading screens for just about any single menu item you enter, sometimes rather long ones, and then when done ? Just as long load screens to get back to the previous pages. Annoying, this should have been done so much better! The load screens before races are long as well, but that I can live with as I understand there is a huge amount of data to load for them, but the menues?? This may seem like a minor gripe, and perhaps it is, but when I'm playing the game it throws me off a bit with how much time it takes to do everything thats not actually in the races.

So, I think thats about me summed up for my review of Gran Turismo 5. I had as admitted huge expectations. The game itself was a king size mixed bag. It does almost everything right when it comes to the actual racing action, its darn fun to play. It is also extremely full featured, there is so much content here I don't think I will ever truly finish it, and that's totally awesome. But it also has its number of flaws. Some odd design choices, poorly implemented B-Spec mode, very variable quality on the cars, tracks and audio all drag my rating down a bit.

Verdict:

As objectively as possible then, from me this game recieves a 9 / 10, just barely. What you get with this game is so much, and the love for racing shines through in every aspect of the game from the developers. If all of those minor gripes I've touched on in this review were improved on before the game shipped, this would have been a 10. This may seem a high score considering my negative points of the review, but really, some of it is just nitpicking, the game is great, and if you haven't already got it, and want a feature rich, deep and fun to play car racing/"simulator" (still won't call this game a full fledged simulator), then go pick up Gran Turismo 5!

As always, I would love to hear comments about my reviews! It doesn't matter if it was a great read or if it made your face red with rage, I'd love to hear about it. Feel free to reply with any comments or questions you might have.

Official launch trailer:

What's up next, and thoughts on game security measures.

2011-03-25T13:32:00.000+01:00

Just a quickie post about the upcoming reviews. I got Gran Turismo V a while ago but haven't had the time to get into it much until now so there's a review coming soon on that. Also, I bought Batman: Arkham Asylum Game of the Year edition on wednesday from steam at 75% discount, so thats next as well. Only got a few hours on Batman so far but I can easily see why it recieved such praise from the press, apart from the ridiculous Securom and Games for Windows Live stuff required to play the damn thing on the PC..

While on that train of thought, I was getting rather pissed off installing Batman and getting past the security to be able to actually play the game, I am curious what others think about these barriers of security even for strictly single player games?

My own take on it is that games that require you to be online, should actually have some online content in them. It is completely unacceptable that a 100% single player game requires continuous online connection to Steam/Games for Windows/Ubisoft etc. I can tolerate a one time authentication of your game version online, but that's it. Also, as long as these security measures fail completely in the sense there are always stuff like cracked versions, no-cd executables and windows live disablers, these barriers against piracy are only really hurting the legitimate customers who has to cope with getting past them, sometimes getting faulty errors even in the process hindering them from enjoying the games they've bought.

From what I read on Steam forums, a lot of people who bought Arkham Asylum on wednesday recieved securom codes that didn't work. Supposedly fixed now, though and fortunately I didn't have this problem myself.

I did however have so much trouble getting Games for Windows Live set up for Arkham Asylum I felt royally screwed over, all the while I know there are very simple to use cracks that disable Games for Windows Live completely on some games (I used this for Fallout 3 myself just to get rid of the useless thing that actually made the game perform worse). When these systems serve only as intrusions and obstacles to overcome for paying customers, and all of these systems are so easily bypassed just doing a quick google search, why do we have them ? Because it feels like they are just here to make their customers miserable!

Review: Darksiders

2011-03-20T07:56:00.013+01:00

Darksiders: Released 2009 for Xbox and Playstation 3, Released Sept. 2010 for PC

I picked up the PC version of Darksiders from Steam this weekend at 75% discount. If my review sounds like something you might enjoy then I strongly recommend hurrying over to Steam to get this title while the discount lasts, it currently goes for $10. This review is also somewhat hastily written as I wanted to get it posted while the title is still offered at a discount.

My first encounter with this game was the demo released for the consoles a good while ago, and I admit I dismissed the game very quickly as just another God of War clone. This weekend though, it was on sale at 75% discount on Steam, and the combination of a pretty sweet price and the fact this was something as rare as a God of War'ish game on the PC triggered a buy for me. I should also point out again that this review is based on the PC version of the game. Without more delay then, on to the review!

Introduction:

In Darksiders, you take the role of War, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The horsemen are part of a neutral force called the Council in the eternal battle between heaven and hell, and they step in when needed to make sure neither side gain too much ground. The war between heaven and hell has raged for ever, but a truce was signed when the race of Man emerged. While a puny race, they also seemed cunning and could have a major role to play in the war. And so, both forces agreed to stay their assaults while the race of Man developed until they were prepared to play their part, the uneasy truce bound by seven sigils that when broken would signal the beginning of the final war.

As the game begins, the battle has seemingly begun again with the forces of heaven and hell duking it out on a modern time Earth, and War enters the fray to oversee, and make adjustments here and there where needed. However it becomes soon becomes evident that the sigils are still intact, and War is thus placed on trial before the Council for misconduct. By misconduct we mean triggering events that led to extinction of mankind. War is victim in a divine conspiracy plot, and has to make things right again on an Earth ravaged by the forces of Hell where mankind no longer exists, or accept death in failure as his punishment for his crime.

Bad Steam screenshot, 1280*720 with weird scaling by Steam uploader. But I least I got a scythe!

Gameplay:

Darksiders is a pure hack and slash action game with some light puzzle elements, very similar in style of gameplay to the God of War series and all its clones. To be fair, I feel the game is closer to Dante's Inferno than God of War, in parts both for the somewhat simpler combat than God of War, and more focus on story and lore.

There are some differences though. Where in God of War and Dante's Inferno you have light and heavy attacks, your main attack and secondary attacks in Darksiders use different weapons, leading to some fairly interesting combination options. War also has powers and spells he can use, such as different kinds of attacks and abilities to heal himself or briefly become resistant to damage.

The main focus of the game is battles which are fast paced and typically involve any number of fairly weak enemies, 2-3 medium strength ones or a strong enemy. There are also of course a good variety of boss battles, and some light puzzle elements. You are also rewarded for exploring the enviroment as expected of games like these, with a number of secret areas or places that require pixel perfect timing or positioning to reach.

I have to admit, a large part of the reason I went and bought this game was a firm disbelief that this kind of game could work well on the PC at all. To put it to the ultimate test I also played it with keyboard and mouse controls instead of a gamepad. And boy was I mistaken! I really couldn't believe it, but Darksiders has showed me that action games like God of War CAN actually work on a PC. With my keyboard and mouse setup, the mouse constrols the camera from a 3rd person view behind the character like any typical action game of its ilk, and left and right mouse buttons are used for primary and secondary attacks. In addition the middle mouse button triggers item use, and Caps Lock+numbers 1-4 is used for spells and abilites. Shift is used for locking on enemies and modifier for certain attacks, Alt is used for block, dash and also attack modifier. E uses stuff in the enviroment, and space jumps. And it works, really, really well. It would be better to have a gamepad still, as the capslock abilities in particular can be somewhat uncomfortable to use as quickly as you need to, but still, I was very surprised with how well it works!

Woops. My bad.

Presentation:

So the control scheme is wildly reworked from the consoles, but what about the rest of the game ? Graphics wise, there are literally no video options. You can set the video resolution, and thats it. No low-medium-high sliders, nothing. But! The game is actually well ported for the PC, believe it or not. I tested this on a rig with a puny Geforce 220 (lowest end of graphics cards really) but still it plays pretty darn well at 1440*900. I had low framerates and a game crash at 1920*1080, but really, I can thank myself for that. At 1440*900 and lower the framerates were very smooth, and pretty good quality as well. On the whole, despite the complete lack of customization I was impressed with the performance of the game. The graphics are through and through good quality, and it doesnt look overly jaggy at lower resolutions. Even going down to 1280*720 everything still looks pretty decent.

The battles are fluid, gory and feel 'meaty'. War has a lot of devastating attacks, combos and finishers that all feel crunchy. I will however point out that the sound work is only decent, nothing out of the ordinary there. I would also sometimes have the audio wildly out of sync with the video on the ingame cutscenes. This could very well be a problem with my system only, though.

The game UI is what you would expect from a game like this, non intrusive and minimalistic. Menues however are actually a bit poor, they can be confusing to navigate and dont respond well to mouse input, I really had to use shift and ctrl+arrows to navigate. This is poor for a PC game but not only that, many console games have far cleaner and easier to understand menues. This is however the only drawback I can point to that shows its console origin.

Verdict:

For a PC game, this title is almost a must have especially if you can get it at a low price like this weekend's Steam discount! I was hugely impressed with how damn well this game actually works, being what it is, and being on the PC, especially when using standard mouse and keys controls. This game is fun, good looking, and pretty long. I havent been through the whole thing yet but can already tell its longer than Dante's Inferno which gave me many hours of entertainment. If you're thinking of getting it for a console instead, you probably wont feel disappointed either, it really is a good game, but there are already other really good games of its kind out there as well, so it would be down to which game you prefer among the myriad of good games out there. On the PC, this is the best action game since Tomb Raider, and thats no small accomplishment. It has way tougher competition on the console market.

I must also mention the story of the game which sucked me in right away once I started playing the retail game, it is pretty much 100% bad ass. Never understood much of what was going on when I played the console demo, I bet I'd have bought this game a lot sooner if I had any idea how interesting the story and concept was.

All in all, I give this game a good 8/10.

If you have thoughts on the review or the game, feel free to leave comments below as I'd love to hear them.

Official trailer:

SSFIV: YT'ed spars with Rightbackbill

2011-02-20T10:51:00.002+01:00

Hello again, I was privileged enough to get a spar session against the fierce Irishman Rightbackbill a few days ago. RBB mains a very technical and agressive Gen but plays other characters as well. We played 10-15 sets of matches and he offered to upload a few of them to the Streetfighter4forum.com youtube channel, which I of course didn't mind at all, despite the savage beatings he gave me. ;) He uploaded four of the matches and very politely added a couple of my wins, but I want to show his badass Gen so here is the first video from the sets. If you want to watch the rest, and more battles uploaded by the forum users at Streetfighter4forum.com, visit the youtube channel linked above. :) If you see this RBB, thanks for the fun matches!

World first Grammy award for a computer game!

2011-02-16T08:28:00.006+01:00

Hey, delicious news for you this time. I'm very happy to report that The "Baba Yetu" main title theme for Civilization IV was not only nominated for a Grammy award this year (Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s)), but won it as well! While Civilization IV was released back in 2005, it was included on the fresh release "Calling All Dawns" (Which won an award as well!), and thus qualified for this year's nomination. If I'm not completely mistaken now, this is the first time a music score for a computer game has ever got a Grammy award, how cool is that!

The Baba Yetu is originially a Swahili Christian hymn, more precisely a translation of the Lord's Prayer. I have loved this particular piece of game music since the first time I started Civ IV, and found myself unable to start the actual game, cause I was struck stunned listening to the menu music. The Civ IV interpretation of Baba Yetu has also been a feature of the Video Games Live project concerts for years.

Included are the Video Games Live concert version of the song (cause I think its the best, and its introduced by the composer), and the originial nominated song. :) Change the youtube videos to at least 480 for better audio compression!

VGL version (dont mind the 15 sec ad at the start):

Nominated official version:

SSFIV spar session

2011-02-15T03:04:00.006+01:00

Heyhey, I had a good spar session with Sunsunmcnasty again this weekend, haven't sparred with him in a very long time now. He gave me a lot of help when I was trying out Gouken as my secondary char, and plays a damned mean one himself. He was kind enough to tape our session and youtube it for me, so here it is. Despite us having a bit more input lag than usual it was real good playing you again, Sunsun! Must do again soon. Oh yeah, I'm the Guile player.

If you are interested in fighting games and looking to get connected with a great community, you should visit Streetfighter4forum.com!

Comments re-enabled. (again)

2011-02-09T04:47:00.004+01:00

So... commenting on the blog once again no longer requires blogger.com etc accounts. I'll try to keep watch on the spam. :) Make some noise! To celebrate, why don't you let me know what you think of the current layout and what I should change?

Review ratings explained

2011-02-06T05:21:00.006+01:00

This is just to explain what lies within the scores I rate games by on a 1-10 scale:

1 - No, don't. Seriously, whatever ideas you might have about this game, don't come back to me crying when you tried this game despite seeing this rating here. You WERE warned.

2-3 - This game fails on so many levels it just can't be forgiven. There might be a good game in there somewhere, if you love the particular genre and want it bad enough. But you will have a very hard time seeing it through all the bad this game will throw at you.

4-6 - The game could do a lot better, for any number of reasons specified. The game MAY offer you something though, if you are a fan of the genre or just happen to like it for.. reasons I can't think of. While there might be a solid game in there, it is well hidden behind poor presentation, mechanics or design choices.

7-8 - Now we're talking. Games rated 7 or 8 do a lot of things well. Any game given these scores or higher will have pretty solid gameplay or otherwise satisfy a buyer. Typical flaws with games given these ratings will be game bugs, annoying weird design desicions from the developers or odd glitches/sometimes poor performance or game crashes.

9 - Games rated 9 are high quality releases in almost every aspect you might look at, and you can be sure to enjoy these titles. These games can easily be recommended to anyone looking to burn a few quid, you will be entertained.

10 - Perfection. Game of the year stuff. I encourage anyone having second thoughts about these games to discuss them with me, as far as I am concerned these are instant classics that will be played for several years to come. These games will be remembered by everyone even remotely interested in games for at least 5-10 years to come.

Changes in the pipeline

2011-02-06T04:52:00.002+01:00

I've for a time been less than pleased with the overall layout of the blog and the art, and I will be experimenting a bit over the next few days to see if I land something more.. good.

Edit: It has begun... New template sits well with me, need to sort out how to center the header and do some other tweaks. Like.. a new header, 80 warriors are so 2010. And I don't just write about WOW anymore.

Short Review: Who's That Flying ?

2011-02-06T04:40:00.009+01:00

I have another indie review for you today! From UK Developer Mediatonic, here is "Who's that Flying?" !

Introduction:

Who's That Flying ?? (WTF from now) is a side scrolling schmup as they like to call it these days, a side scrolling shoot'em up game just like you remember them from the NES (Or SNES/Super Famicom) days. The game is available on the PC from Steam for a tenner, and for PS3 and PSP (Not price checked. Maybe Xbox? not heard anything about a release on it, dont shoot me please if its there and I missed it.)

In WTF you take on the role of a superhero assigned to defend Earth. Which would be good except you are on trial to the superhero council or something, for not doing your job defending Earth well enough. There was an alien invasion y'see. The game plays out with the player re-enacting parts of the defence of Earth, as the trial of our hero proceeds.

Presentation:

WTF gives you no nonsense sprite based graphics that will (not tested) probably run on any netbook or low spec PC you try it on. The graphical style is simple and cartoony, but it does the job well. The music and sound effects are very basic but nevertheless does its job as well, getting you in the mood for blasting Earth invaders. There's nothing fancy to see here, even the cutscenes between missions are terribly low resolution.

What the game scores top on presentation wise however is humour, the cutscenes have a lot of tongue in cheek superhero humour, and.. a lot of humour for us lesser beings too. From our hero air-posing for magazine shots, to the evidence room, and between mission briefings, the laughs aren't far away if you enjoy some simple humour.

Gameplay:

WTF is a side scrolling shooter, and a very basic one at that. However, the controls are superresponsive and the action is fast paced, with some special moves thrown into the mix that you might expect from a superhero, but not a shoot'em up game. As Earth's superhero defender, you yourself are invulnerable, but the cities you defend are not. So, you can smash into all aliens you see and can even destroy the lesser varieties with a fancy melee move, but any aliens that slip past you will do damage to your city instead. Let too many aliens past, and it's game over.

Initially the game might not seem so tough, but after the inital stage warming you up to the mechanics things get bad, fast and you are forced to make use of your powers as often as possible. Powers? Yes, you're a superhero, of course there are powers. Our saviour of Earth's standard attack is a repeat fire laser 'blob' that goes in a straight line (If you know Megaman, you know what to expect). However, by defeating a full wave of alien invaders boosts our hero's superpower thingie. As soon as that is charged you can unleash rapid fire 'blobs' or different strength lazer attacks that cut through anything. Already after the first stage you are faced with stronger aliens that require softening up with firepower before you can 'grab' them and finish them with a special move.

I love all of this, enough so I don't even mind the game is strictly singleplayer. There are no multiplayer options, at all.

Verdict:

WTF is something as rare as a recent date western shoot em up, and not only that, it plays damn well and is tons of fun to play. Nostalgics will love revisiting the sidescrolling genre, and the brutality of the gameplay, and experts can set their eyes on high or perfect scores to unlock extra goodies. Despite being a strictly singleplayer game I feel safe recommending WTF for anyone looking for some cheap entertainment and solid shoot'em up action.

7/10

Pros:

- Very solid arcade shoot em up gameplay

- Fun story mode between missions, and humour in general

Cons:

- Very basic graphics and sound. This could be pro, whichever way you look at it. Any PC will run this game flawlessly.

- True schmup enthusiasts will not be overly challenged by this game

- I'd love some co-op options

Overall, a good release for anyone who likes shooting things up, worth picking up for the price. If you don't know shoot'em up games however or am no fan of the genre, this won't get you into it.

Short Review: Magicka

2011-02-04T04:01:00.009+01:00

Introduction:
Magicka is a low budget release available from Steam for €10. In it, you are thrown into a world of dungeons and dragons, orcs and goblins, ghouls and ghosts.. kings and.. oh sod it. A wonderful story of references of all kinds oldschool and retro.

Gameplay:
This game finds itself in an odd place as far as the actual gameplay goes, being a refreshing mix of all things point and click adventure, hack and slash, and Monty Python. As you take on the role of a magician on a most heroic quest, you see whatever you do from a birds eye perspective far up in the sky much akin to action rpgs such as Diablo, Crusader, Gauntlet, and countless more. Nothing new there. The mission at hand is to save humanity as always (most imporantly, the mages), but in order to do so, things get more interesting. Instead of having a basic set of spells as you start, and learning more through experience or skill books discovered, instead you have access to 8 schools of magic to summon destruction from. This right here is the core, and genious of this game. The possibilities you have for mixing together fanciful spells of destruction, salvation, or a mix of both if you feel like it, are limitless. Need to cross a lake? Cast several charges of frost over it and slide safely across. Need to .. surround yourself with healing landmines? Shield and life. Just like you can heal yourself or others with life magic, you can just as easily set yourself, your friends, or any npcs (even plot characters) on fire as well. If you want to heal someone and electrocute them at the same time in a single beam of wonderful magic, then you can do that too.

The game features a single player campaign, multi players doing the same campaign (doesnt work), or challenge levels single or multiplayer ( again, multiplayer doesnt work). I realize this is a crushing sentence over what stands for about 50% of the game's playability, but really, the multiplayer part of this game fails in OH so many ways. Wanna host a multiplayer game? Crash to desktop, or in the best case, manage to host, BUT to keep your lobby up you transfer more data out than NASA does on a busy week. You system is crippled completely trying to host a game. Want to join one? NO, or .. if you are lucky, accepted into a lobby, but then you get a black screen freeze while the game is launching. If you are one of the very few that actually got into a game, and have played it, then hit yourself with a hammer. You should have played the lottery instead and you'd be a rich man. This is SUCH A SHAME. Man, I would give a leg to play this with 3 other mages firing beams of destruction, landmines, fireballing npcs, zapping themselves.. I really am gutted that I can't, because it became apparent right from the tutorial level that this is a frickin awesome concept! You really feel allmighty, or.. death incarnate, as youre playing this baby in the single player modes.

Presentation:
The game is presented in modest 3d top-down graphics. I have to say, considering how basic the graphics are, I am very surprised this game doesnt support netbooks or most integrated laptop graphic cards. You need, for reasons I dont understand, a fairly strong, current generation graphics card to play this game. You won't even be able to launch it on a netbook or most laptop, devs have even warned about trying, its not meant to be. This game looks like something you'd expect from a indie developer 5 years ago, but it sure doesn't play like it. This kind of system requirement is a big let down, it makes no sense this shouldn't be able to play on most all current or last gen computers.

The sound work however has a lot of charm. Listening to the npc's talk almost makes me want to forgive its other violations with most of the wizards you talk to speaking what seems to be a language mixed of english, swedish, norwegian, probably other languages I dont know, and random gibberish words. You'll love talking to the NPC's from the first moment in the tutorial when you are told "We redan started the dunkadunka" (We already started the party). Supporting the wonderful voice work is non impressive ambient sounds and fairly non inspiring music (with one or two highlights), however.

Another big selling point of this game is all the references made absolutely all the time to old classic games and movies. If you've been around a while, you will spot a reference of some sort every minute at least and feel giddy about it, its guaranteed. From the King's Quest steam achievement that I wont spoil further, through exploring locked doors, to all the other references thrown about at every bend of the road, you will be amused.

Verdict:
I am very torn in my opinion about this game. It is a truly wonderful concept that shows it works wonderfully as you play through the missions in single player. The game does however suffer from such a number of gameplay bugs and poor performance, and especially nightmarish online performance, that it greatly reduces my enjoyment. I will say this: If you have a great computer and used to love games like Gauntlet, or Diablo, but dont mind a slightly more strategic approact, this game is well worth your €10 regardless of the limited online playability. For the rest, I think there is a demo available on Steam, try that and see if it plays okay on your computer. If it does, then YES, get it! Again, even if you cant in its current state play this reliably online, you WILL have fun with it, easily worth the €10 price tag.

5/10

Pros:
- Very creative system for spellcasting.
- Seemlingly endless references and black humour

Cons:
- Terrible game engine, despite looking like something you'd expect 10 years ago, this game wont run well except on current generation graphics cards.
- Terrible netcode, even after more testing after the most recent patches aimed at improving online play.

Let's fight like gentlemen

2011-01-19T08:56:00.004+01:00

Hey again, more Street Fighter stuff. This will be old news for anyone already following the game, but considering Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition is out (finally!) and its console version updates hopefully right around the corner, and (wishful thinking now) maybe a PC version release.. It doesn't seem like such a bad time to work some hype. Arcade Edition of SSFIV will feature several new playable characters characters (should say returning characters from 3S) and a large number of balance tweaks to the existing cast.

If that's not enough, Street Fighter VS Tekken is still being plugged away at and I expect we'll hear more news as it comes closer to release. AND There's ever more sharp looking Marvel vs Capcom 3 coming up in hopefully not that long now as well. And here I thought 2010 was a good year for fighters.. This just keeps getting better!

To whet appetites for fighting like gentlemen (or the opposite) I'm including some footage for Super Street Fighter IV which has been out for a while already but is still going very strong:

Aw.. I can't leave out Hakan, can I ?

Super Street Fighter 4 3D

2011-01-08T18:12:00.006+01:00

Ok so I just read that Super Street Fighter 4 3D will be one of the launch titles for the 3DS. Suddenly getting one of those doesn't seem like such a bad idea... The new features sound pretty cool! Andriasang.com has written about their first impressions of the title.

What is the price tag for a gaming community?

2011-01-05T03:53:00.002+01:00

I've been a bit slack on following the Street Fighter 4 community the last couple weeks given the holidays and all, so I was shocked tonight to see that one of the new owners of www.streetfighter4forums.com was auctioning it away to the highest bidder. Reason was I'm told a sick mother who needs surgery. Its very hard to get any info at this point since most topics discussing the auction have been deleted. (I totally 100% agree with the recent surveys that show a big decline in global democracy over the last few years) We're taking big steps back in terms of development.

But it hasn't even gotten interesting yet:

A forum user at said forum put in a pretty hefty bid to preserve the community, only to see the flippa.com auction closed a brief moment after the bid was placed. I've seen screen prints of another user saying he is getting the site and intends to monetize it, most probably selling the domain for a blog. Meanwhile the auction holder has claimed he was hacked, and I can't find out at this point what that means. He wasn't the one selling the site, for the sake of his sick mother ? (And this is where I have to add, hate to say it but I have big reservations against believing this story. We're on the internet, after all.)

I've been sent some juicy screen prints that confirm what I've stated so far (not my speculations). Another speculation is that once the owner saw he would never get the kind of bid he wanted for the site ($10k) he created false accounts that as beforementioned said they were getting the site and selling it as a blog. (as a sidenote, what kind of blog would be worth that kind of money out of the blue?)

Such drama. I'd love this if it wasn't for the fact my favourite fighting game community's survival depends on the outcome.

This was a lot of typing for what I wanted to ask when I set the topic though. How much do you reckon a gaming community is worth ? I don't have the numbers, but I've been a member more or less since the start and I reckon the site has around 3000 members, with 300-500 returning users on a weekly basis. For some reason the site isn't google indexed at the moment, but when it was it generated a LOT of traffic as well. Is it worth $10k ?

Seems I'm the raid failer type after all!

2011-01-03T03:22:00.003+01:00

Landed into a rather awesome surprise tonight heading to Gadgetzan to do some archeology, just as Deathwing was busy roasting the town... I Stood in the Fire. :(

WoW: Baradin Hold

2011-01-03T03:17:00.000+01:00

Did a writeup mostly for my own use on the so far first and only boss of Baradin Hold, Argaloth and figured I might as well post it here as well in case it helps anyone. This will be for the 10 man version, don't know yet how things change if at all in 25.

Argaloth is a Pit Lord demon imprisoned in Baradin Hold.

Boss abilities:

Meteor Slash - 200k attack divided among anyone in front of him. Leaves a 100% increased fire damage debuff.

Consuming Darkness - Random targetted dot dealing ~8k per second over 15 seconds. Can and absolutely should be dispelled quickly.

Fel Firestorm - Cast at 66% and 33%, players will have to move constantly while he is casting to avoid fires landing at their feet.

Berserk - 5 minute enrage timer, increases his damage by 900% and attack speed by 150%.

Suggested tactic:

Raid splits into two groups consisting of 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps which will be positioned at opposite sides of Argaloth during the fight. It is very important both groups pile up on top of their tanks to even out the Meteor Slash damage. No standing a bit outside to the side, it gets us all killed. :]

At 66% and 33% players leave their "groups" and spread out and keep moving while Fel Firestorm is being cast, but its important everyone gets back to their respective groups on their tanks immediately when its over. The Fel Firestorm is fairly short, but you can also watch Argaloth's cast bar to see how long is left before returning to positions.

Tanks:
Tank swap after each Meteor Slash to avoid the next one hitting players debuffed for extra fire damage. The absolutely easiest way to swap smoothly is to just watch for Argaloth's cast bar on Meteor Slash and switch right as it finishes. Be sure to be in position to resume tanking shortly before the Fel Firestorm ends. Use damage mitigation cooldowns agressively to help healers save mana!

Healers:
The Consuming Darkness must be dispelled or it will burn healers dry very fast trying to heal it. Probably best to have a dedicated dispeller in addition to the two healers, as the fight is very taxing and mana intensive for healers as it is. If healer mana runs out too soon, 3 healers is an option especially while learning the fight, but it puts even higher dps requirements on the remaining 5 dps.

DPS:
DPS'ers should use their cooldowns to increase damage early and often! with 6 DPS in the raid it is expected each one will do somewhere between 8-10k dps in order to get Argaloth down before Berserk. Healers will be very strained through the entire fight and they will love every little thing you can do to reduce incoming damage or light self healing. Don't expect a whole lot of healing during Fel Firestorm.

Everybody wants to love.

2010-12-31T00:23:00.002+01:00

Heya, quick small bonus for anyone who checked out the Final Fantasy 13 review, and haven't watched this already. I'm sure if you've played this game you will have picked up on a certain tension between the heroines Fang and Vanille.. :)

Street Fighter comeback compilation

2010-12-29T01:41:00.005+01:00

LianghuBBB from www.streetfighter4forums.com made a great video featuring a collection of amazing comeback situations from Super Street Fighter IV which was also featured on www.eventhubs.com, and since sharing is caring here it is for your enjoyment!

In before Guile theme goes with everything:

Review: Final Fantasy 13

2010-12-27T18:48:00.009+01:00

Another way overdue review, here is Square Enix's Final Fantasy 13, released march 2010 for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. I played this on a PS3, but the differences between the versions are fairly small. I think the only significant change on the Xbox 360 version is that some cutscenes are rendered, where on PS3 they use the regular game engine. Oh, and there's no disc swapping on the PS3, gotta love Blu-ray.

Introduction:

The Final Fantasy series should be well known to everyone moderately interested in games, but in short, it is a long line of wildly popular japanese RPG's. Final Fantasy 1 was released back on the NES in 1987, and the game's name was anything but random. Square was deep in financial problems, and Final Fantasy was their last attempt to tip the scales before shutting down. The game and all its follow ups have all been instant hits.

Final Fantasy 13 is the first in the series on current High Definition consoles, and Square Enix very clearly put in everything they could to make the game as visually gorgeous as possible, and has also given us a game that is very different from earlier releases, for good and for bad.

The game's story begins with a bang as a riot takes place in one of the cities of Cocoon, an artificial planet suspended high over the lower planet Gran Pulse. In the chaos we are introduced to the six playable characters of the game whose destinies become one and they fight a desperate battle to escape a very grim fate.

Gameplay:

As with the older games of the series, the two main focuses of FF 13 is the story and tactical combat. Outside of the battles, playing this title feels almost like watching a fantasy movie, there is rarely very long between dialogues and cutscenes telling the story as it goes on, and snippets of history that slowly piece together whats going on. It gets pretty confusing, and it doesn't help one bit to have to relate to cryptic names like fal'cie, pulse l'cie, and c'ieth. Still, I thought the story was great, even emotional as you discover the tragic stories of our characters. Fair warning though, if you get bored watching long cutscenes and cinematic clips, this game probably isn't for you.

The realtime tactical battles that make up the majority of the actual gameplay, is great. There's been mixed feelings about FF 13's combat system but I just love it. For the most part of the game, you can not choose which characters to have in your battle team, it depends on where you are in the story forcing you to learn the strengths and weaknesses of each one, and you often play with rather unusual setups. Each character has a number of party roles they can do, but only one at a time. This is where the Paradigm system comes into play and adds a lot of depth to the combat. Paradigms are like a deck of party roles you can set and tinker around with between battles, and while fighting you can change paradigms whenever you like to switch party roles. For example, you might start a battle out with a commando and ravagers to quickly do damage and try to "stagger" (when enemies take damage they fill up a stagger bar, when full they become staggered and take much more damage) enemies, but when taking heavy damage or in preparation for it, you can switch to a Paradigm with a medic and a sentinel to absorb damage. Other roles include saboteurs who cast curses and debuffs on enemies, and synergists who cast beneficial spells on the battle team.

Some (or many, I should say) feel the combat is far too simple, that all you have to do is mash autoattack which lets the game pick what attacks and abilities are most useful. You can also only directly control the battle team leader, other party members do their own thing but use the paradigm roles you've set, and assist on the same target as you. I say the combat system is just great. Everything happens so fast there's rarely time to fiddle around in the menues setting up the abilities you want to use, and once the battles start getting more difficult you often have to switch around paradigms like a madman to keep everyone alive. Some hate on the autoattack function, but I am very happy to have it. There is far more depth to the tactical battles than mentioned so far, to learn more I suggest watching the embedded video at the bottom of this post.

Another big change in Final Fantasy 13 from the older games, is that it is completely linear. You can't at any point until you've completed the game (except when you're on Gran Pulse, that area is a bit more open) decide you want to head someplace else, and there are no quests or sidequests in the traditional sense to do. This point has raised a lot of raging critisism and I'm inclined to agree, I would much have preferred a more non-linear approach with more freedom. One good thing from it though is that the story feels tighter. The linear approach was an intended one from Square Enix, and in their defense I can kinda understand how it would be almost impossible to make it more open while still keeping the ultrasexy visuals of the game.

Presentation:

Simply put, the presentation of the game is incredibly hot. Easily the most visually impressive game I've played to date, Square Enix deserve mad props for the breathtaking visuals. Everything looks fantastic, whether you are exploring, watching cutscenes, poking around in the game menues or doing battle. The game music also deserves mention, as has come to be expected of the Final Fantasy series we are treated with wonderful orchestrated scores that gets you even more sucked into the game.

Verdict:

8 / 10

I wish I could give this game a 10 as I absolutely loved playing Final Fantasy 13, but I can't in good conscience not withdraw points for how extremely linear it is. Also, the battles don't really get exciting until you're well into the game and have unlocked paradigms and developed your characters a bit which takes many hours of game time. As you're playing you get one little new tool to play with now and then for the first few chapters and until stuff is unlocked and fleshed out a bit, all you can really do is "press X to autoattack".

Once that's done with though I was left with a terrific gaming experience with a rich story and tense battles and having one heck of a time the roughly 50 hours it took to complete the main story. There is even more to do after the story is done as all characters unlock more roles and can level even more, and there's a bunch of trophies/achievements doing a lot more after the game is "done".

What are your thoughts about this game? Feel free to leave comments about the game, or my opinions of it!

Official trailer (I recommend clicking the youtube link, and watching this in 720p full screen):

Battle system explained:

Vocaloid win!

2010-12-27T15:31:00.006+01:00

How do people come up with this stuff? So awesome !

Review: Scott Pilgrim vs The World - The Game

2010-12-27T12:58:00.015+01:00

Far as game titles names go, that sure is a mouthful!

This review is long overdue! Released back in august 2010, Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game is a downloadable title available for PS3 and Xbox Live for around $10.

Introduction:
In the mysterious land of Toronto, Canada, Scott Pilgrim is a nobody who plays in a band with his ex girlfriend. His life takes a turn to the epic when he falls in love with lovely Ramona Flowers, but there's a problem. In order to be with his love he has to defeat her seven evil ex'es. Good thing our boy Scott happens to be a world class fighter! And so the stage is set, as you set out to help Scott win his love.

Gameplay:

Scott Pilgrim is a fantastic, retro style, rock solid side scrolling beat'em up game from the 8/16 bit era, bearing close resemblance to old goldies like Double Dragon, Final Fight and River City Ransom. The levels are decently long and at the end of each is one of Ramona's ex'es to defeat. You play as Scott or one of three of his friends from his band, dispensing justice to tons of bad guys with kicks and punches, or umbrellas. Whatever is at hand. Each character has a number of powerful combos and moves available, but they can also pick up almost anything on the ground to pummel enemies as well, including grounded enemies. There's nothing like beating a bad guy to death using one of his friends as a weapon.

There is a slight RPG element as well, as each character can level up with experience up to level 16 to unlock new moves and combos. Foes drop canadian currency as well which can be spent in the many ingame shops for food or items that heal and more importantly, increase statistics like strength, defense and speed.

As a result, until your character is levelled up the game can be pretty dang hard even at the first levels, at the easiest difficulty! This game is very, very challenging, close to "Nintendo difficulty" in the NES 8 bit days. Damn those games were hard. That's not to say I'm not loving it! It has been a while since a game tested me like this, and its very refreshing.

You can play the game alone or in the company of up to three friends on the same system, but there is NO online multiplayer. At all. Apparently a design choice to encourage playing with mates on the couch, but really now, no online multiplayer at all is a big let down for me. Unless you have bought the DLC for the game which includes an extra character and some other new stuff, there is also no option for drop in multiplayer, gotta start the game from scratch if a friend comes over. Could be better. And charging extra for a functionality that should be patched in normally just makes me angry. Ubisoft, I hate you guys. Paying for extra content, ok.. but now we are expected to pay to have our games patched? Get real.

Presentation:
Retro, baby! Everything in this game screams 8 bit nostalgia. From the old school game sprites, the classic beat'em up gameplay to the AWESOME chiptune soundtrack delivered by Anamanaguchi. It's very clear the game is made especially for us old farts who grew up with beat'em ups on the 8 bit consoles and remember them with stars in our eyes. Even the pause music is a tribute to Battletoads. I love it!

Verdict:
7/10

Overall, a great game which at low price tag should be in every console owner's game collection. Very solid beat'em up gameplay with lots of fun, nostalgia and great chip tune music.

Points reduced for limited multiplayer options, and the insult of charging for an extra DLC to improve the multiplayer slightly (but still no online play).

What are your thoughts about this game? Feel free to leave comments about the game, or my opinions of it!

Official trailer:

Hot Pursuit review: Slipstreaming perfection.

2010-11-20T02:27:00.019+01:00

This game has been on my radar since I saw the first reveal and gameplay trailers for it, and it has finally hit the shelves.

Hailed as a reset of the classic games NFS3:Hot Pursuit and NFS: Hot Pursuit 2, it is also the first Need For Speed game developed by Criterion Games, the minds behind the popular Burnout: series. As such, expectations for the game have been very high, as it has been on Criterion's shoulders to completely revitalize a racing series that has fallen far from popular grace with the poorly recieved NFS titles released over the last decade. Equally though, common expectations for the game have been very low, because of beforementioned poorly recieved games.

There were also big expectations from fans of the old Hot Pursuit games and Burnout series, that the game would stay true to its origin. Yes, it had to play like the old Hot Pursuit games and Burnout, two quite different games. All that said, a lot of people are going to have their hopes and expectations shattered by this release, indeed in the three days since the game was released I've read very outspoken objections against the game. "It's not Hot Pursuit 1/2!" "It's not Burnout:Paradise!" "It's not Gran Turismo V!" "It's too arcade like!" "It's not arcade like enough!" Believe it or not yes all those arguments I've seen from people who have played the game (or the xbox360/PS3 demo).

I think the only way to properly review this game is to take it from scratch. Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit is a game that puts the player in the role of an illegal racer in fictive Seacrest County, tearing it up against other racers or their adversaries, the Seacrest County law enforcement. The racers compete against eachother while trying not to get busted by the cops, while cops' sole goal is shutting these races down. On both sides you will find the most amazing cars you can imagine. Yep, in Seacrest County if you're speeding, you run the risk of getting chased down by a Nissan GT-R SpecV, or a McLaren F1 police car. Both parties have access to weapons as well, racers can use turbo systems, radar jammers, EMP missiles and deployable spike strips, and the police have EMP, spike strips, helicopter support and road blocks at their disposal.

This is pretty much the core of the game, and Criterion has made zero effort at making it look any deeper than it really is. What you are getting with this game is gorgeous cars driving at ridiculous speeds in not entirely simulator like ways in gorgeous fictive Seacrest County, in very tense races. And what delicious racing this is! The cars handle well, races feel balanced, and the feeling of speed grabs you to the point you're afraid to blink in fear of missing oncoming traffic or a the exit to that shortcut you desperately need to shake off the cop on your tail.

As mentioned, speed is of the essence and is the major gameplay factor for both sides. And if there was any doubt: This is not a realistic driving game. It is by all accounts a very arcade like racer. All the cars handle and behave differently (Seriously, the Bentley feels like I'm trying to steer a tank at 300 kph!).

I'm convinced there's some "rubberbanding" behaviour by the computer cars, that is to say if you are too far ahead they will drastically speed up to catch up, and when hopelessly behind they slow down a bit. This has always been an annoyance for me and the same is true in this game. Other than that little gripe, the gameplay itself is rock solid. The beautiful tracks you race on are also full of alternate routes you can take either to get a breather from the police, or sometimes save some time. The "shortcuts" are typically dirt roads, and the different cars perform very differently off the tarmac. With a lot of the cars you may opt to just stay on the asphalt instead.

When playing solo, you embark in a fairly open ended career mode as either cop or racer and unlock new races, faster cars and upgraded weapons as you win on either side. You can switch between cop and racer careers at any time. These unlocks as you level are also linked to your multiplayer profile and available car selection

At the core of Hot Pursuit is also the Autolog system, which tracks everything you do when you play, and also that of all your friends who also have the game. This means when you start the game there's a good chance the first thing you'll see is a message that one of your friends has shaved a second off your record time on a race possibly along with a juicy taunt depending on your friends. If you are anything like me, that record has to be beaten. Autolog is in my opinion a small stroke of genius adding a lot of replayability to the game, and it also gives you a sense of playing your friends, even if they're not actually online or in the same race as you. Sort of like Facebook, except for a game.

The multi player races are excellent. There is no noticeable online lag as I have noticed so far, in 8 player races with several players logging in from over the great sea. You have the option of taking part in Hot Pursuit, Race, or Interceptor modes. In Hot Pursuit, the lobby is split into racers and cops in what more often than not turns into an insanely entertaining cops and robbers chase, which strangely doesn't feel unbalanced no matter how skewed the teams look. I've played as a solo cop against two racers and taken them both down, and been on the recieving end of it as well. 6 cops and 2 racers, no problem. I can't really explain how it works, it just does. Race mode is a standard race without law enforcement or weapons involved, also very fun. Finally Interceptor is a 1v1 race between a racer and a cop which I also enjoyed a lot.

There are a couple disappointments with the multiplayer, though. First of all, and a deal breaker for some there is no split screen multiplayer on the same system. You can't race your buddy on the couch unless he's brought his own console or pc, which they normally don't. Playing online with your friends is also troublesome. I can't invite my friends to a lobby and fill the rest of the spots up with randoms. The options are there in the interface, it just doesn't work. I've tried in a number of ways to invite a couple friends and set the remainder slots to public, but it just starts the countdown for next race and no other players join. In the end we had one guy hammer "quick race" over and over until he got into a lobby with 2-3 slots free for the rest of us to quickly to try join. While it worked after a lot of swearing this should have been smoother to set up.

I also have to say, I was disappointed to see you already have the option to simply buy all the cars unlocked on Playstation Store. One pack for racer and cop cars each, both cost around €2 to basically skip the whole game. Downer. But hey, I guess that's what people want.

In conclusion though, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit largely gives me what I want, a "cops and robbers" racing game that does ALMOST everything right. Criterion showed me that they have grown from the bloated beast of fun that was Burnout: Paradise. This game is well tuned, damned fast and intense, and FUN to play. Its multiplayer and Autolog features will keep me playing this beast for a long time!

If you like racing and sexy cars, don't give Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit a miss. 9 / 10 !

Addendum: Bit more playtime under the belt and YES, this game is still very fun. I miss incentive to pursue online modes after maxing out cop and police ranks, though. I love the "Speedwall" concept, which acts as a facebook highscore list where you can challenge your mates for the top of the pops, but where is the equalient of that in online play, I wonder? Why can't we at least chase those fractions of seconds of that record while we're playing human opponents, instead of the single player tracks exclusively? As it stands now, game still a fresh release, everyone who has been playing a bit is between level 15-20 (20 being the max) on bounty, as such there is no real reward for winning any race once you actually hit 20. EA/Criterion, give us a ladder system! Give us "Ranked" mode in addition to the existing game modes, and yes that goes for all the game modes. I want Ranked Hot Pursuit, Racing and Interceptor leagues. Get to work!

Apart from that, Just getting on to surf the tarmac is still a thrill. I have caught myself joining up for races and having a blast at it, all the while I'm maxed out, and win or lose it doesn't matter the slightest. I love the grip the racing has on me while I'm playing, I can't help it!

Adding another video here, if you play it you contribute to the 1 million challenge, for the Hot Pursuit launch trailer to hit 1 million views before des 12th, which will reward its players 3 extra cars as a free download.

Fallout: New Vegas first impressions

2010-10-28T03:37:00.006+02:00

Hey again! I've been immersed in Fallout: New Vegas the last few days, I've not been through the whole thing yet but here are my first impressions from it so far.

At first sight..

From the moment you get started on this game, it feels and plays like more Fallout 3. Which in itself is grand for a fan of that title like myself. Everything is instantly familiar as you step into the shoes a mohave wastes delivery man who gets ambushed by shady fellows and left for dead. As he/she wakes up from the grave, literally you set out to figure out what the heck happened, who put a bullet in my head and how can I get back at 'em. From this starting point the whole game as I've seen so far plays just like Fallout 3, just on a new huge wasteland to explore.

The good..

If you loved Fallout 3, you're gonna love this. A whole new wasteland to explore, and lots of more or less clever humour spread out to snicker at as you discover it. Along the way you will find new monsters to blast, a more involving faction reputation system that forces you to make some choices as well as lots of new salvage and weaponry to have fun with. You can also craft a lot more stuff than in Fallout 3, and you also fairly early on in the game have the option to recruit henchmen and droids to follow you around and help you blast radscorpions.

The bad..

If you didn't love Fallout 3, there is nothing here that will keep you playing. It's more of the same, in fact even as one who loved Fallout 3 I find myself wondering if this whole game shouldn't just be sold as a big DLC or expansion set instead. The game runs on the exact same and unchanged engine as Fallout 3 leaving it with a bit desired as far as visuals and mechanics go. This is especially visible if you also happened to play Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, as the game engine builds on that and hasn't changed that much.

I find the crafting system to be a lot more cumbersome than it has to be. I can't bring up a list of what I can make and what I'll need for it unless I'm standing at one of the crafting places (reloading bench, workshop, camp fire). Its very tedious to visit an accessible crafting location, see what I can do, travel to my stash of salvage and pick out the stuff needed, and head back again to make something. Why isn't there a menu anywhere to view what I can make ? This also makes me feel I should write down a list of stuff I'm looking for to make stuff, since I can't check it ever while I'm out salvaging. How the hell am I supposed to remember to pick up glass jugs in order to craft mass purified water?

The awful..

Ok before I mention anything else, this is one of the WORST PS3 ports I have ever played. And I have played Bayonetta, Red Dead Redemption and Mafia 2. Fallout 3 which I also played on the PS3 was a very sluggish experience with a lot of slowdowns and graphical glitches. I still loved it though. Fallout: New Vegas is the same, only worse. I can't walk around in the vast open areas for more than 5 minutes MAX before my PS3 freezes up forcing a restart of the game, and whatever I had been doing those last 5 minutes is all gone as well unless I remember to manually save the game every 50 steps or so. I haven't played this yet on PC or XBOX, but if you are going for the PS3 version of this game, please heed my warning that you will need to butter yourself with a fair bit of patience for this game. The more I think about it, the more annoyed I get. Bethesda spent a couple years working on this title since Fallout 3, only to release a game that looks and plays exactly the same, even runs on an unmodified game engine from the original Fallout 3, but somehow performs a lot worse. How is that even possible ? Fallout 3 didn't crash my PS3!

Edit! I've tinkered around a bit on Fallout 3 as well after playing New Vegas and surprise surprise, for some reason Fallout 3 suffers the same kind of freezes now as well, after enabling the DLC's for it. Yay.

Also, the henchman AI behaviour is AWFUL. They get stuck virtually anywhere when you're out exploring, and if you don't turn around to check now and then there's a good chance theyre bumping against a small rock on the ground a couple miles behind you.

First impressions so far..

Despite the critisism so far, its still Fallout which is in my book a pretty darn cool thing. I've focused on changes from Fallout 3, and not mentioned any of the things that made that game so awesome in the first place. I'd recommend checking out a review or two of Fallout 3 before deciding if this is a game for you.

6 / 10

Fallout: New Vegas is a great addition to the Fallout universe, but keeping some flaws from the original Fallout 3 and adding a lot more fairly critical flaws go a long way to lower my enjoyment of the title.

Edit! Further into the game...

Thats right, despite the fairly low score I gave this game intially I'm still playing it. I'm trying to follow my own ideas of what would be an objective verdict of the games I give feedback on. Personally despite the fairly gross flaws I can't put Fallout: New Vegas away. I'll say it again, if you enjoyed Fallout 3 you're going to love this and keep playing it until you have explored all the locations on the Mohave Wastes. I enjoy my time in New Vegas, I really do. Enough so that I am putting up with the PS3 crashes that occur increasingly often, much to my frustration.

I've narrowed the causes for the crash down a bit and it seems to only happen in large open areas surrounded by mountains. This goes for 50% of any area you try to explore in this game. I've found I my PS3 console will always crash within 30 seconds if the following conditions are met: I'm in an outdoors area, I have just zoned out from say exploring a vault or similar, there is a lot of terrain being loaded and finally, open areas with a lot of creatures and buildings. I have not experienced game lockups while exploring indoor areas. The crashes do come more frequently as I'm further into the game though, not sure why that is, maybe the increased size of the save files. I've done what little troubleshooting i can for my ps3. All other games run fine. I formatted the ps3 hard drive and did a fresh game files install. Set all system options to default, nothing's helping. Dunno what else to do, I wish I had a good enough PC to play it there instead, I'm really disappointed with this PS3 port especially considering it runs on the very same unmodified engine and Fallout 3 released 2 years ago.

More Civ V

2010-10-12T00:43:00.001+02:00

I've been focusing a lot on this game in my last few posts. It is a game I want to love but currently am not sure what I think about. The hours I've put into it over the last few weeks tell another story though, I'm badly hooked on it, despite what I would call pretty glaring flaws with the game. I know the AI has some fairly serious problems, I'm not entirely sold on how diplomacy is handled in the game and that the game is also bugged, producing very strange graphic anomalies or unexplainable slowdowns on my system.

That didn't stop me from getting up in the morning last weekend and starting a new game on it. What's worse I was not able, at all, to put the game away to do other more sensible things until I had finished the game some 12 hours later in the same day. Considering how hooked I've been on Civ IV, at least I was able to save the game and close it when I knew I had more important things to be doing.

I have however decided to let the game lie for a bit, in wait for patches to develop it better. Or for mods to come out that do the same job. Whichever comes first. Knowing myself I will then be all over it again.

I've read a lot of reviews for this game, and I noticed a lot of game journalists fell into the same trap as I did when I wrote my initial report. Civ V is sexy, it looks good, its easy to get into yet hard to master, everything is very slick. So my review, just like so many others out there was mostly full of praise on how awesome everything is in this game. I can't help but think this is exactly the kind of response Firaxis was looking for when releasing this game. The game reviews mostly rate this game close to perfection. But in the 10-20-30 hours max a reviewer gets before he has to write his verdict, a lot of flaws that are not so apparent at first sight do not reveal themselves before the deadline.

I wont rehash for the 'th time the pros and cons about Civilization V, instead I will link to what I find the fairest game review I've read so far for it. So without more ado, here's Tom Chick's review on 1UP.com.

Followup comment on Civ V

2010-09-28T02:59:00.010+02:00

Hey again!

At the time of writing this, I've had a couple more evenings to spend on Civ V after my review'ish post about it a few days ago.

The reason I'm following it up is because I have a few adjustments to give the game overall after a bit more time with it, taking into consideration some things I missed during play before my first evaluation of the game.

What has become more glaringly apparent after a bit more play time is some serious, and I mean pretty bad flaws with the coding for AI behaviour which are all related to their military strength from what I've seen so far.

A couple examples:

The A.I thinks reasonably well for land based warfare (they understand using ranged units and artillery and tries to place infantry up front), but if they decide they want to take a city or city state that has tiles surrounded by water, they fail. I don't mean just they're doing a bit worse, I mean they fail really bad. On an "Earth" map I held a city near Mexico that had only two land tiles next to it, and I was able to hold it without using any defenders at all, just city retaliation and bombardment during my own turns. This was against a Japan AI who already has a strong military advantage and the opponent controlled at the time all of North America having a vast city advantage over me who had about half of South America. He had a big army advantage as well as I had placed most my effort into maintaining civ happiness and getting my tiles worked instead of army strength. In the end my Japan AI opponent lost 25-30 Samurai and silimilar strength units against my undefended coast city before I had units out to answer the call to war.

Next example:
In the very same game, and in the next 10 turns following my massive victory against the japanese invasion, when I had my military units out (which were at least 1-2 tiers below Japan in tech), I was able to take one of his coast cities with great help from 4 frigates I had bombarding, to which the AI had no answer other than using city attacks. On the very next turn Japan approaches me and begs for peace. He wants peace so badly he offers me control of all his cities except his capital.

Wait, what !? You read right, I took one city from him which was pretty small size and although it had difficult access by land it had no great value, and Japan pretty much threw in the towel. Of course I accepted his request and in one single turn I had taken North America..

Thats pretty messed up if you ask me. Even if I were to outsmart my AI opponent, I had no idea something like that would happen, I was rather expecting a gruelling trench war for territory that would most likely last the rest of the game. Instead he just gave me ALL his cities (around 20 cities) except his capital.

If thats not enough he then displaying very amusing diplomacy. For the first few turns he was very careful and hailed me as a great conqueror, then a couple turns later he threatened with war if I continued expanding on his borders (he gave me all the cities surrounding his capital, there was nowhere to settle really even if I had wanted to), and then about 10 turns after that, he declared war on me and of course got snuffed out within a couple turns.

Ergh.. The computer opponent behaviour of this game has some pretty serious issues. I've learned through other articles about Civ V that the game in fact only had two programmers working on the entire AI programming. And about 30-40 graphics artists.

Seriously, SHAME ON YOU FIRAXIS. I really hope the AI gets some love in a shortly released patch, otherwise I don't see this game having very lasting appeal.

Another major gripe I have at the moment is how poor the multiplayer apparently is. According to Zeitgeist at Zeitgeistreviews.com (good game review site btw!), the multiplayer part of the game has severe performance issues for just basic play. Believe it or not there is also no way to save your multiplayer games it seems, which is a pretty big turn off far as I'm concerned. I don't think most people if any would sit with for a multiplayer session of Civ V and finish the entire game in one sitting. SHAME ON YOU FIRAXIS.

There's also reports of graphic anomalies during multiplayer, including players having all their unit animations turned off.. Whats the deal with that ?

The "good news" is, none of these issues are really game breaking to the effect they cant be fixed with some patching effort from Firaxis. The real question is though, will they bother, now that the game has already been out a few days, gotten rave reviews and is selling like candy?

Edit! On a gaming forum I mentioned how the AI gave away almost all its cities, someone asked if I had downloaded the patch to adjust the AI so it no longer is so desperate for peace it will give you anything and everything. There IS a patch on Steam I noticed but it makes no mention of adjusting AI behaviour. Gonna look around and see if there's some secret patch somewhere I should be getting.

Edit #2! Multiplayer games still autosave, I'm now told. So continued multiplayer sessions should indeed be possible. :)

Civilization V review'ish

2010-09-26T07:58:00.005+02:00

So, being a junkie for Civ IV:Beyond the Sword and its wonderful mods and modmods such as Fall From Heaven 2 and Rise from Erebus, there was never any question if I was going to get this game or not. I would have bought it even if all game reviews butchered it completely. If you're reading this and felt the same way about Civ IV as me, then don't bother reading further, go download the 100 turn demo on Steam and get a feel for it yourself.

If however you haven't played Civ in a while or you're completely new to these turn based games of conquest, read on.

I'll try to keep this somewhat short and to the points, covering the principles of the game and the most noteworthy changes from previous titles in the series.

As the game opens you take control of one of many upstarting tribes in an unexplored world, and its your job to make sure your people dont get gobbled up by barbarians or other civs while advancing in technology (or falling way behind) from just finding out what a wheel is, to how you can eradicate nations with nuclear missiles. True for any version of these games there is never a shortage of challenges, whether you're a warlord bent on conquering the world, talking and trading your way to domination through diplomacy or just trying to keep the barbarians out of your cities, and Civ V is no different.

If you like this kind of thing, you are guaranteed to have fun with this game and lose precious hours of night time sleep. I thought I had it bad with Civ IV, but this is even worse. When I started playing this game a couple days ago, I was playing from 6 pm and got so sucked into it I was VERY surprised when I threw a glance at the watch and saw it was suddenly 4 am in the morning. One.. more... turn... Its kinda scary really, this game should really come with some kind of warning.

If this hasn't scared you away yet, I'm just going to list the biggest changes to the game from Civ IV:

As shown in the photo above, the world is now hex based instead of squared. Game is more tactical and also feels a bit more like a traditional table game aka Axis and Allies, Risk etc.
No more than one military unit per tile. HUGE change forcing drastic rethinking of how to use your army. No more stacks of doom! You normally have very few army units compared to previous Civ games and micromanaging them is key.
Ranged units have more than one tile range. Positioned correctly your cannons can fire from behind your front line units without retaliation.
Religion and espionage mechanics from Civ IV are gone. There are still some religion based civics and buildings in the game but it doesn't affect relations with other civs like in the other games.
Civ happiness affects your entire civ instead of each city, and dipping too far into unhappiness causes big penalties to production, growth and army efficiency.
City States. These are basically mini-civs that are limited to their own starting city and don't compete to win the game, but they can still play a large role. They give missions, can be conquered or if they like you enough give you bonuses in form of free units or extra food or culture.
With the basic research in place all units can take to sea without need for making ships. All your units can embark water tiles and move around and make landfall on islands and other continents, but they can not fight ships and are vulnerable to attack without escort.
Cities can be tough to conquer. They can only have one defender garrisoned, but even without defence it can take many attacks to break them, and they also fire back at attackers and can launch ranged attacks on enemies in range during their turns.
Civilizations are more specialized with special abilities. Some of these are currently a bit too strong I feel and could use some balancing. Japan's military units for example always fight as though they are full health essentially making each of their units very deadly even if they have just a sliver of health.

There's of course a lot more changes in the game but from my own time playing it so far these are the biggest differences from previous games.

Verdict:

Given that you enjoy strategy games and can get your head around all the differences from Civ IV and before, I can guarantee you are going to have very many hours of fun and frustration with this game. There are also a lot of mods already released and more to come, promising even more ways to play Civ V through mods if and when you get tired of the original game. My impressions are based solely on single player experience, I haven't tried MP yet but even disregarding that part of the game completely I can still easily recommend this game for any strategy game enthusiast.

Edit! A bit more play time with the game has reveales some issues with the game I found worthy of writing about, please read this as well before taking the final dive into the wallet for this game.

The wowstead.com disaster

2010-09-24T22:06:00.001+02:00

I learned some time ago that Curse got their hands on Wowstead.com guild sites, and a week ago wowstead made the move to curse. It has been a total disaster from start until present. For starters the database transfer itself took for reasons I can't understand several days to finish. Our guild site and all others went down without warning and didnt come back up for close to three days. And it gets "better". All site customization got wiped, all widgets and plugins gone or simply don't work at all, noone except our gm and I think now some officers can actually view our forums. The new site is also slooow. And for the last couple days its been a gamble if it would even load.

This should be a valuable lesson to community hosting sites like wowstead how NOT to do a site move. Its a complete joke and by the looks of it our guild has pretty much decided we're closing up shop on wowstead. I don't have any exact numbers on how many wow players relied on wowstead hosted guild sites, but I doubt I exaggerate when I say tens of thousands of players are currently screwed over. Its been a week since the move and still nothing except the shoutboxes seem to be working on the new sites.

What a joke.

Taking it down a notch

2010-09-24T04:53:00.002+02:00

Since moving back to my old server with what is now known as The Orphans, I've had a drastic change of play style.

On Bloodscale I was expected to have close to 100% attendance to 3-4 days of raiding per week, and performance during raids was very closely watched by raid admins and class leaders. There were social aspects there as well, but much more "clique" than what I'm used to. The members there were also mostly quite young of age, with the typical "excitement" (read: rage and drama) that often comes with it.

Back on Defias, I'm pretty much a casual now. In a sense.. I play more than most casuals probably, and when I do join a raid, I try to take that seriously and pull my weight. It has been a couple rocky months for our guild to stabilize a bit after the original Orphans Grim was destroyed where it was difficult to host raids, but that's coming to a change.

For the last month or so now, we've actually had roughly 3 raids per week scheduled, but there's a catch. Due to peoples playtimes varying greatly since we're mostly older people with varying RL commitments, the raids are quite short. So one raid can be as short as 1 1/2 hours, letting us just get the weekly raid quest done, take a wing in Naxxramas, or some of the smaller raids like Onyxia and Obsidian Sanctum.

Initially I was not a big fan of the short short raid times set, but its admittedly growing on me. As I told our raidleader one evening, it feels like I barely have time to get my "raid groove" on before we're done for the night. However I've discovered it can be pretty nice to not have to dedicate the whole evening to a raid, and as a bonus the guild is laid back enough that there is no required attendance percentages required. If people don't feel like doing a raid one night they're free to say so and if we find out we're too few to go somewhere, we usually find some extras out of guild or cancel it to try another night. No biggie, no drama. And I'm pretty much loving that. :)

I'm also blessed with "working with" others in our raids that don't freak out if a mistake is made which is in my book pretty awesome. There's a lot of players out there who don't raid at all, for fear of getting cussed out something fierce if they make a tiny mistake, and this is a total non-issue on our runs. I think we got a few this might sound familiar to among our members and I'm happy they can come raid and see a lot of cool fights which they normally wouldn't dare to go to otherwise.

My only gripe right now is how we effective we spend our 1-2 hours of raid time. Something that is unavoidable with barely having the raider base to host runs is that we're forced to spend some time often to get something going. Its not that uncommon we have to spend close to an our past invite time still poking people to join. I don't really see what we can do about that without destroying the laid back style we do these runs, which I at least would like to keep that way.

Another thing is that we're typically with one or more who have never been to the raid we're doing before, so a lot of time is spent before each boss explaining things. Thats also hard to avoid, I hope its something that will fix itself as we hopefully get more returning raiders, I'd love if everyone would have spent 10 mins on wowwiki reading up on the encounters, but it seems bit too harsh considering sometimes more than half the raid hadn't even signed up to join in advance and join spontaneously when we're forming it.

We're also spending more time than necessary from killing a boss, to moving on with next trash groups or boss. Loot distribution can typically take a while as our raiders are too darn polite and very hesitant to call out on drops that can be used as upgrades. We're currently using Master Looter, and I'm thinking it might save us a lot of time if we just go with Group Loot. A simple need for mainspecs, greed for offspecs, pass otherwise and an enchanter grabs and shards the loot might save us 10-15 minutes of mucking around before we move on after a kill.

Ok, that was actually a lot of typing over whats just a minor gripe. I'm just thinking of ways to let our bite sized raids get as much as possible done in our sessions.

If you have other ideas for how one might optimize our efficiency without turning the whole thing too hardcore, feel free to let it out in the comments section. :)

Peace!

Comments re-enabled.

2010-09-24T03:19:00.002+02:00

Just a short post to notify that blog comments are enabled again, not sure why exactly they were turned off, but hey.. Anyone can leave comments at this point but if the section gets flooded with spam and ads it will get switched to registered users only.

Life signs detected

2010-09-22T04:45:00.004+02:00

Hello again!

I just remembered I have a blog, wow. Well, thats not entirely honest, it has been in the back of my head for a good while suffering neglect. No more, at least for now. We'll see what happens. Was shocked to see its a good year since my last update! So much has happened.

Quickest possible recap:

1. Moved Warrior and Priest to another server to play with some friends in new guild. Good times were had.

2. New guild ravaged by drama, mostly raiding related.

3. Fed up. Break.

4. Heard old guild was taken down, lots of fuss, many friends wondering what was going on.

5. Moved Warrior back to old realm and also resumed playing older characters there with remnants still around after old guild got nuked. New guild launched for those left who still wanted to stick around.

6. Damage control. Raid oriented members of old guild quickly leaving new guild as we didn't have organized raiding going yet.

7. Rebuilding. A few months later, the massive leaks from new guild have stopped, we are recruiting again and growing, and are blessed with a new member who is doing a great job organizing some raids again on our own.

8. Good times are had!

I am hoping to find the time to write more here in the coming times with World of Warcraft: Cataclysm about to hit us hard. I've been following Totalbiscuit's updates from his betatesting of Cataclysm closely and made myself a lot of thoughts about it. Too much to go into right now as I'm planning to keep this post short, but so far? Cautiously optimistic about it, it could turn out pretty darn cool. But yes, more to come.

Until next time!

Warrior Q&A, food for thought

2009-07-20T15:19:00.008+02:00

I just read through the posted Warrior Q&A after stumbling over Spinks' thoughts on it over on her blog.

Both the full Q&A session and Spinks response on it gave me a lot to think about and are worth checking out.

I'll just dive right into it!

Vads comments on 3.2 Warrior Q&A:

No warrior discussion in general is complete without the rage mechanic brought up, but what I got from the GC on it is pretty much a "We know you are too gear dependant, but we're not really sure how to fix it." The dev team have my full understanding that in its current form, the rage and gear dependance is a bish to balance. But so far, can't see anything is happening to prevent bad geared ones from sucking balls, to Best in Slot clad ones inducing nerf after nerf.

I have no master solution to offer either but my tip would be to look at how Death Knights runic power is generated, it is more stable and perhaps that mechanic with a minor influence from damage dealt could be a way to go?

Both my Paladin and Warrior are glad the value of shields for tanking was brought up also and that the way their damage reduction is totally unsignificant in "endgame" tanking hasn't slipped off their radar. Even getting a crit block with trinkets and shield block popped wouldn't make the tiniest difference on many of the bosses in Ulduar and this problem will only get bigger unless fixed somehow.

But how to do that while making sure it doesnt turn shield tanks completely invulnerable against weaker hitting mobs or other players? One possible road was mentioned to buff shield block values significantly, but also reduce chance to block by the same amount. Using shield block then would actually be a good tool to survive the damage increase from General in Ulduar, if each of those blocks would shave off 5k+ more.

I have another suggestion to add too, simply change shield block value completely from fixed values, to a percent based mitigation on top of the armour reduction. Add diminishing returns or make the block percent value gained per item so low it will be impossible to stack up "over the top" to keep it balanced, and we're fixed, too. Or yet another possibility, keep block value as is but instead change the armor stat from the shields into the mentioned percent based reduction.

I liked to see the (lack of?) differences between arms and fury is still being looked at, there's for and against having Arms as the PvP spec and I can certainly feel those wishing to tear it up with Fury or Protection in BG/Arena, but I think ultimately we should keep it as it were from the get go..

My vision of how the talent specializations should be:

Arms as THE PvP spec, a versatile spec with powerful debuffs and (hopefully, one day..) resilience, I miss that feeling of being tough to take down in PvP and I wont mind at all trading some outgoing damage for it.

Fury as the raging and reckless dps monster spec, focusing raw damage and little to no defensive tricks. I miss 1H fury too, I somehow feel it fits better with the frenzied berserker style combat I picture fury warriors should do.

Protection.. yeah. Tanking of course but seeing how successful the other tank capable classes can be in bg's and even in arena, why not Warriors too? Overall, Protection Warriors work quite well in their current form and can tank anything, I still hate the spamminess of having to use hs/cleave on every damn 1.6s swing manually in addition to the regular gcd abilities though. But I think I've said more than my piece on that matter in other older posts.

I may do more on this later but that is what I had to offer on 3.2 Q&A for now. Like Spinks, I actually like these Q&A sessions with Ghostcrawler quite a bit, but I will be a bit sceptic about taking anything said by the fellow without a grain of salt.

We are after all reading an interview with the guy that said Juggernaut would never be nerfed, because it would cripple warriors in PvP again. Then mere days later we saw the crit bonus chopped off (used to be 100%)... and then again increased charge cooldown by 5 seconds...

Yay, I got some whine snuck in this time as well, better sign off now!

Still around

2009-07-19T12:58:00.005+02:00

I've had a bit of a break from writing, but I'm still around, on WoW and checking various blogs etc.

Since my last update I've mostly been working on the Paladin, got him ready for raids while getting a steady fix of pvp. Of course I couldn't go into raiding without trying out Protection Paladin tankage, to compare it with my Warrior, but hes main spec is Retribution, mostly cause it was just easier to get up to speed for the raids that way.

First off, anyone saying Rets are all about placing your face on the keyboard need to actually give it a try themselves. Granted its not incredibly complicated, but while dpsing I am juggling a heck of a lot more abilities than most my dps counterparts. That said, I'm not really a fan of the FCFS (first come first serve) cooldown based play style. There's not much thought behind it and you just watch your cooldowns and the damage happens. It'll get looked at for 3.2, but the only real game play change so far seems to be that I'll have to keep a look out for Art of War procs to use Exorsism. Will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Tanking on my Paladin I have to say has been a lot of fun! In contrast to Warrior tanking, there's no button mashing involved whatsoever and it is in most cases quite relaxing. Paladin AoE tanking is not what it used to be, that is still a stronger point for Warriors, shown in particular on fights like the arena floor at Thorim (or is it Hodir? I always mix those up). Paladins lay down Consecration and hope for the best in most cases not really getting aoe aggro on anything while Warriors have the edge there with decent burst aoe threat from Thunder Clap and Shockwaves.

This weakness aside, I think I contribute a lot more with the Paladin than my old Warrior, having similar survivability and threat output but also bringing a lot of buffs and powerful defensive cooldowns, this goes for Retribution and Protection both of course.

PvP with my Paladin has been a mixed experience so far. I'm all for not being able to insta gib all classes. I do quite well against dps classes, depending on how well they're played. Rogues have been giving me more trouble than I expected, often being forced to bubble before I've been able to do any damage at all, and the really excellent ones will then proceed to wtfpwn me again after its out :)

Going toe to toe against any kind of healer is my biggest problem though. Its just not possible to kill a healer unless I have a dps train with me and kill them in a single stun. A few days ago I revived the old Warrior for the purpose of PvP only, and while he still has his nemesis counterparts, he does a lot better against healers now. Teamed up with a Druid as rusty as I am for some 2v2s and its still a rock solid combo. :)

Anyways! I reckon I've ranted enough for one sitting, I'm parting for now with a screenie from our recent and first 10 man Yogi kill! Go TOG!

The Gimp is back

2009-04-21T00:29:00.011+02:00

Zero points for guessing what the post title references, especially if you peeked at the picture above. :)

I'm still around, mostly busy levelling the paladin trying to get him prepared to rejoin the raid crew at some point. He's just dinged 78 and entered Sholazar Basin and I hope to revisit the jungle mayhem that was Stranglethorn Vale. I've made a point of attacking any and all alliance I see regardless of level and gear and seeing the stuff he can pull off both in instances and in pvp has made me more sure than ever that I've made a good choice in choosing to bench my Warrior for now.

The timing could also not have been better for levelling an alt with the introduction of Dual Speccing, normal instance runs have been dead on my server but being able to switch specs greatly improve the chances of getting something going. More on that in a later post.

I had to mug and rob old Vads to get all the flying training purchased last evening, so it was real nice to see he's found a new occupation in Grizzly Hills, doing something he should be good at, taking punches from Vrykul. :)

In other news, I didn't manage to pay my initial ISP bill on time after I moved and they were surprisingly quick to lower my bandwidth, so I've been levelling in jerkovision playing at 200-500ms since level 73. Its pretty shocking I'm still able to rape almost any alliance I see out in the wild considering its normal these days to have 1-5 sec delays on my abilities, and as mentioned above I do play rather agressively PVP-wise. I got my salary today though so regular latency, here I come. :)

To date I've had three fights I couldn't manage, one was at 72 in Borean Thundra when a 80 Boomkin wanted to play cat and mouse (to my defence I got him to 30% after a res with my bubble on cooldown. Also despite the gross level difference he never attacked me unless I had pulled a mob or three, flying comfortably overhead waiting for me to do something), another was a 80 elemental shaman in naxx25 gear that was called in to help after I ran over a guildmate of his a few times, and finally I had a hard time against a well played frost mage at my own level no less, who knew how to outlast my bursts etc and finally got me down on our third encounter, kudos to him for that.

PVE-wise I'm having fun as well, done a lot of instances both as healer and DPS and I see a lot of potential. At level 71 I started passing a few of the DPS'ers I've had to endure in heroics on my tank and more recently at 77-78 I've started matching and passing a few DPS'ers in level 80 10-mans.

I had forgotten how fun healing can be, also.

While I would love to try raiding in these roles though there is a big possibility I'll be forced into picking up tanking again, I'm hearing on a daily basis from the guild that there is a lack of tanks. Which is somewhat amusing since there really isnt, they're out there. But granted, they're not all 100% ilvl213+ geared. If I see raid after raid failing on the tanking role though I will try to do something about it, I like the guys too much not to. :)

There's a lot more I'd like to cover but it wont all fit into one post, so expect another post a few days covering my take on Dual Specs, 3.1 changes now that we've seen them in action, and other random issues. :)

Peace outside!

I fart in your general direction.

2009-04-04T00:14:00.007+02:00

Now that I have your full attention (see what I did there?), the topic for today's post will be the fine art of taunting, with a solid dash of whine thrown in for good measure.

Taunts then! A vital tool for warrior tanks in all shapes and sizes, choice words of aggravation are constantly thrown at our enemies to make them emo rage on us instead of for example the squishy looking healer they were just chewing into. Some poor mobs have taken so much verbal abuse over the years that they have learned to turn a deaf ear to such insults but for the most part, taunts work well.

In most cases PVE at least, but over the years many a warrior including myself have wished for the ability to have some use in pvp as well besides being able to force pets to switch targets for a second. It has fallen on deaf developer ears though, until the introduction of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

Which as we all know made non-Death Knights endangered species in large part I suspect to their awesome spell, Death Grip. Other than the very cool "Come here!" factor, it has a number of uses, first and foremost being the Death Knight taunt ability. It is also by far the most effective tool they can use for getting casters included in the rain of AoE. Or out of if, when used by the less intelligent Death Knights. They can also burn it should a spell need to be interrupted.

All in all its a darn cool ability, but remember the mention of wishing taunt had a PVP use? Death Knights get that too, in fact it has more uses than you can shake a stick at. It is nothing short of incredibly powerful for forcing enemies repositioning. They have a healer in the back? No problem, drag him right into your own group for instant gibbage. Your priest friend getting sodomised by a rogue? No problem, just pull him off. Stuck in a frost nova with the mage loading up a pyroblast? We'll have none of that, force him back in your reach and interrupt that spell of hurt while you're at it.

So, am I angry they have such an awesome ability while warrior Taunt does nothing at all whatsoever in PVP ? Actually, no. While it is a very versatile ability, it has a significantly longer cooldown than our taunts, forcing them to think a bit about when best to use it. And Death Knights don't have Charge, Intercept and Intervene of course, so I understand that they need this to close range quickly on targets in PVP.

All fine and dandy then, at least until recent game patches got Paladins also a taunt ability and God knows they needed one, their old 3 target of friendly target taunt was awkward and awful in use.

So in 3.0.8 I think it was, Paladins got Hand of Reckoning. Now, look at the tooltip on that ability. Notice that puny 1 damage? That is PVP utility, basically taking the good old warrior Taunt, and improving it by adding instant interrupt and caster pushback at a very low mana cost.

Basically, what Warriors have been asking for the last few years. I was so surprised when I was doing AB on my new Paladin alt Vanor and found out I could use that for example to prevent base captures in Arathi Basin. It surely doesnt spell doom, but it does have a PVP use.

The ability also has shorter cooldown than it takes to take a flag in AB or EotS, so there's nothing to stop paladins from plinking someone trying to tag something while they're dealing with other players or healing a bit for as long as they feel like it.

And it pisses me off! First because it is something Warriors have requested for so long, only to be ignored and given to Paladins instead (I am still happy you guys got your regular taunt for PVE though). Second, this is far from the first time something like this has happened and it brings to my mind just how milked dry the Warrior class is. Pretty much all abilities that have some use have been passed around to various classes or their pets.

They even get improved in the process! Hunters get Aimed Shot with MS debuff, except theirs is ranged of course. Paladins got Divine Storm, Whirlwind plus heals. All tank classes have their varieties of Last Stand and Shield Wall, the last tricks Warrior tanks had up their sleeves that gave us an edge in survivability on bosses.

And I'm not against the tanking classes being even in performance, but having given out those Warriors are actually the WORST tanks around. Lets see what we got.

Single target threat? Nope.
Aoe threat? No sir. Thunder Clap and Shockwave may take snap aggro but watch the other tanks peel them off in one tick of their aoe abilities! Gosh they're so neat!
Survivability? Think again, our Druid has max stamina+avoidance on all gear since he is crit immune from spending 3 talent points.
Good tank DPS? Don't be ridiculous!
Raid utility then, I mean come on we have Commanding Shout!? Sorry mate, Fury Warrior handling that since paladins got better buffs than his Battle Shout. Look... just get on the short bus, I think one of our rogues saved you a seat in the back.

*Sigh*

On the whole, is there anything at all which is unique to the Warrior class anymore except Commanding Shout and a melee attack that has a cast time(how cool is that!), and having a large amount of our abilities including debuffs of various kinds ?

Someone, cheer me up! :S

News report live from the dark side

2009-03-30T01:34:00.006+02:00

We have cookies! Don't tell me you didn't see that one coming. Unless you were expecting a Darkfail rant, a game I have no intentions of touching.

By dark side, I am referring to my new little alt boytoy that you can see to the left, Vanor. You see, he's a paladin. Most who know me will know that I have a deep loathing for them. I could go on about knowing thine enemy and stuff, but the bottom line is I want to taste that overpoweredness for a change. ;)

So far, my presumptions have been spot on. He is so easy to play, cuts things to shreds before you can say hammer of justice. The scary thing is, I'm enjoying playing this char a lot, he's perfect for winding down after a long evening of raiding, or changing scenery a bit from the regular daily quest grind.

I might just keep levelling this guy for my 2nd 80 project instead of my priest that is currently on hold at 73. We'll see. It might just be that he's in a sweet spot right now, I did a bit of battlegrounds to get him the defiler plate and some other goodies (Bind on account gear, with 10k honor shoulder enchant and crusader).

He is currently level 44 and almost finished in Stranglethorn Vale which has been a blast to revisit, it hasn't changed the slightest. Meaning, if you stand still for just two seconds there is some alliance druid or rogue gnawing at you, or you're feared with dots ticking away. Or some raid decked 80 pops out of nowhere as you quest to impress you with his insta-gibbing skills. Awesome zone!

I have also been to an instance or two and witnessed myself that awful itch to comment (in the spirit of helping of course) when you're suddenly in a completely different role than you're used to and observe other tanks in action. So far I have managed to limit myself to suggesting to a warrior that untalented slam spamming with with a 1.8 speed onehander is probably not your best aggro tool. But it is a struggle ;)

Tanking tips

2009-03-28T22:04:00.012+01:00

Hello again,

After the tanking issues with heroic strike was brought back in the spotlight over at Tobold's blogspot it feels fitting do a writeup on things you can do yourself to relieve your fingers and your poor keyboards, and perhaps also up your performance a bit as well.

The first and most important thing you can do to help keeping up with regular tank moves and continuous heroic strike spam, is to remap your keybinds. There is no golden rule on how exactly it should be done, we all have our preferences but a good start is to keybind as much as possible to the keys around your WASD movement keys (assuming you use those). Cram in as much as you can and think about which abilities you use the most (HS, Shield Slam, Revenge, Devastate, Thunder Clap and Shockwave for me, for example), you want those in easy and comfortable reach.

Once that is done, consider what more abilities you also use on a regular basis, perhaps Cleave and medium cooldown abilities such as shield block, last stand and such. Often you have short time to react when the need arises for them, so get those keybound as well. It goes much faster than taking your eyes off the battles to mouseclick Shield Wall or Challenging Shout. Shift, Alt and CTRL modifiers are great for these. Once everything is set, practice. For me at least it can take quite some time for my fingers to get used to new binds. :)

The other big thing that can save you a lot of stress, and in some cases free up some key binds is to get sorted with some macros. At the risk of losing cred with the super hardcore tanks out there who shun macros like the devil, here are some that are very useful to me.

Edit: All these macros use #showtooltip, to get ability tooltips when you mouseover the macro icons and to make cooldowns display properly. For this to with you will need to select the first icon available for the macro, the red question mark. When you start using the macro the icon will change to the skill specified and display things proper.

Charge/Intercept + Victory Rush:
#Showtooltip Charge
/cast Charge
/cast Victory Rush
More a general use macro, most of us keep charge and intercept in easy reach, but using this you can combine them and remove victory rush from your bar, freeing a slot up. The beauty of this macro is that despite having two so different abilities macroed together, they will never conflict, either you charge if you are in the appropriate range, or if you're in melee and hit it, it will attempt Victory Rush. Swap Charge in line 1 and 2 with Intercept if you want to set one up for intercept as well. (Edit: Just make sure you have the mob you want to hit targetted for Victory Rush, and not a mob in the next trash group! ;) )

Shield Slam/Devastate/Revenge + Start Attack:
#Showtooltip Shield Slam
/cast Shield Slam
/startattack
Get rid of that Attack icon finally, if you haven't already. Very simple macro that makes sure your autoattack is on, useful when the mob you had targetted just died and turned your autoattack off and you start on the next one in the pack. If you don't have enough rage to cast shield slam, it will still make sure your white hits are running, getting you rage again. I've set up Shield Slam, Devastate and Revenge all to also do /startattack. Again, to make this work with Devastate and revenge, just swap the skill names in line 1 and 2.

Shield Slam/Devastate/Revenge + Heroic Strike + Start Attack:
#Showtooltip Shield Slam
/cast Shield Slam
/cast Heroic Strike
/startattack
Same as above, but with heroic strikes thrown in as well. Use this with care please. There are some fights where you are drowning in 100 rage non stop such as Patchwerk in Naxxramas, Malygos and also Sartharion with extra drakes. On those fights, setting yourself up with this macro will save your fingers a lot of strain. In most other cases you will not be swimming in rage and using this macro then will leave your rage at 0. Heroic Strike should only be used when you are sure you can do it in combination with your other regular moves, otherwise you will lose a lot of aggro instead of getting more. On my tank I have those macros ready in the interface for it, and replace my shield slam/devastate/revenge buttons with this modified one for those select boss fights. (Obsolete, don't do this in Cataclysm, seriously)

Shield Block + Blood Frenzy:
#showtooltip Shield Block
/cast Shield Block
/cast Blood Frenzy (or other beneficial ability that doesn't trigger GCD)
/use [name of useable trinket here]Before I made that macro I kept forgetting to use Blood Frenzy all the time. Now if its off cooldown, it goes off with the shield block, adding an extra bit of oomph. Same with the last line. (For example, at time of editing this I'm tanking with a mastery trinket that has a /use for 20 sec extra str). I'd never remember to use either of those without some help like this, I know, I'm weak. :)

One more thing that is a popular choice for reducing stress around keeping up heroic strike spamming, is the option to bind /cast heroic strike to your mouse wheel. Roll that thing and it'll cast heroic strike 4-5 times per second, the downside and the reason I don't use this myself is that I can't zoom my view then, using the wheel for that is just too convenient and quite often I have to change the zoom level to keep a clear view of what's going on. (Again, outdated, don't do this)

Added by Raeli, not tested:
Mousewheel down Heroic Strike:
#show Heroic Strike
/cast !Heroic Strike
/run if UnitExists("target")==nil or not UnitIsEnemy("player", "target") then CameraZoomIn(1) end

Mousewheel up Heroic Strike:
#show Heroic Strike
/cast !Heroic Strike
/run if UnitExists("target")==nil or not UnitIsEnemy("player", "target") then CameraZoomOut(1) end

This was what I had to offer for now, as always comments are welcome, in particular if you happen to have other genious tips to offer that I've missed completely. :)

Tank safe!

Things I wish Blizzard would have considered before shipping WotLK

2009-03-27T22:43:00.011+01:00

For anyone new to my blog a quick introduction is in order. I am a WoW player, having WoW as my main and only serious gaming pursuit since it launched. I've found a passion for the Warrior class and have taken my loved orc through clueless trispeccing and tanking in Molten Core with 31 arms spec, being owned (and owning before choice balances were implemented) in PvP, to pursuing the deep reaches of raiding in TBC and WotLK as a tank.

Despite the negative title, this isn't a Blizzard bashing post. Wrath of the Lich King added a lot of fun to the game and despite things I like to heartache about, far as MMO expansions go I have seen them lot worse. DAOC expansions spring to mind, with the exception of Shrouded Isles they were all awful. But I have never had so much fun levelling in new content as I did in Northrend, job well done!

Nevertheless I have some serious concerns and I'll break my bullet list virginity on this blog by pointing out some glaring things I've found or found missing rather, while fooling around on WoW that I wish developers would have noticed and done something about, before they shipped WotLK. Having all that out of the way then, lets get on with my list of concerns.

PVE Progression: Up until 3.0 we always had a ladder to climb before taking on "endgame". Even at level 60 I was doing Dire Maul runs to get those blues that would help in Molten Core. Having some T1 from Molten Core was a requirement for stepping into BlackWing Lair, and you were in for a tough time trying Zul'Gurub if you hadn't spent some time preparing for it. Even if you had a strong guild to carry you, there were attunements to finish before even being allowed inside the raid instances. Today this is all history, you ding 80 and go 25 man malygos for ilvl 213 epics without much hassle. Why did you eliminate the whole concept of progress, Blizzard? I thought you wanted to keep subscriptions running?
Raid content: To clear the raids available once we're done levelling we need a total of 5-6 hours, just a few months after the expansion has been released. To make it worse, the only raid that takes more than 20 minutes to clear is recycle material from level 60. I realize you think you did a great job with Naxxramas at level 60 and want more people to see it, but come on. You did nothing whatsoever to update the instance to make it interesting 2 expansions later besides raising mob levels accordingly and removing some trash. Also, I strongly believe the lore buffs who were actually interested in seeing the glory of Naxxramas had ample opportunity to do so joining retro raids at level 70. How could you think the player base who has an interest in raiding would be satisfied with a 3 hour Naxx rehash and two single encounter raids at level 80 ? All of this being easily puggable ?
Hard mode: You may have been looking down on those playing this game to stand out and be a notch above the rest, but this is ridiculous. Its beyond ridiculous. You're basically having the player core who actually did Naxx at level 60 not only having to do it again at 80, but you try to create game content out of making all kinds of silly conditions to get achievements. If you wish to reply with the "1% of the players saw Naxx at 60", please see point two.
Gear advancement: At level 60 and 70 we had an excellent balance on our self progress. Yes it was a grueling process to reach the end, but we had a clear path to take. Even purely social players were content knowing that before they'd get to do AQ40, they would have to gear up for it. That meant gearing for MC doing 40 (Edit: Went a bit fast indeed, wrote 60 man) mans, doing a bit of farming in MC, ZG and AQ20 for the next tier, collecting some pieces from BWL before taking on AQ40, and finally some gear from that place to be able to carry your weight in Naxxramas (Edit: I'm old and forgot that AQ40 came before Naxx *blush*). We had a similar climb in TBC. By skipping the need for this gear climb, I think you've made a grave mistake by ignoring completely how long this gear grind kept people busy, playing your game. Today you have all content available for players signing up with unenchanted, green gemmed quest rewards. Blizzard, if you have an interest in keeping us playing, bring back the progress grind (yes, I said it).
Dungeon set armor: We've had our dungeon 1, 1.5 and 2 sets and while they were not strictly required to take on the next gaming tier if you had suitable replacement pieces, they were mostly useful, added class flavour and many many players took pride in completing their sets. I think the upgrade quests for the dungeon 1 sets were fantastic and I had lots of fun working to complete it even after I had gotten my fair share of drops from molten core. Why did we lose those ? The old sets had issues where they were not really useful for certain specs, but with a little effort you could easily have implemented a token drop system for 5 mans for dungeon tier armor in WotLK to let players pick dungeon tier armor suited for their specs. For me and many others feeling finished with the game, just working on completing or improving our sets like we could in the past would add a lot of replay value.

Plea to the developers: Listen to the concerns above, you will find each of them are actually helping you in keeping the WoW subscribers staying. While some of my concerns are undoubtedly rant-like, they are meant to be constructive. I will also urge you to reconsider the stance you've taken on the pace new content is added. To quote a blue post:

"Ulduar has a ton of bosses. While I’m sure some players would love for us to deliver an instance with that level of content every month or so (and throw in a 5-player run to boot!), it’s not in the cards, at least not for the next couple of years."

This looked almost like a WoW suicide note to me, if its one thing your game needs, it is more content, and lots of it. Under normal circumstances I would understand you not wishing to over saturate the players, but as it stands WotLK is lacking severely in level 80 content. A large part of it is based on 10 or 25 man Naxxramas, and for more players than I suspect you realize, this is old content already.

Get to work, we know you can do wonderful things and you still have a LOT of unexplored material already present in the WoW realm. Ravenholdt, The timbermaw cave in Aszhara, Uldum in Tanaris, whatever lies beyond the great wall in Silverpine forest.. There is much more that I can vouch for a lot of players wishing to explore further, make use of it first and put your creative idea minds to work on other fresh things further down the road.

In closing, I would like fellow blog readers visiting to voice your thoughts if you made it this far before closing the page, let me know if you think these are valid concerns or if I'm just being a whining troll, anything goes!

So a Prot Warrior and a Death Knight walk into an arena...

2009-03-25T23:50:00.008+01:00

Time for another PVP update!

The Muscleteers 2v2 tank team is still at large, boldly shield slamming away despite impossible odds. Hidden rating, how I loathe thee!

Last week I suffered a bit of big numbers envy, and decided to give Fury PVP a spin. It's not the first time I embark on the ship of fail that is PVP'ing on anything that isn't protection spec, but I figure as my pvp gear has improved to well above average now I can't do that bad no? Well, wrong.

We did a number of games and while I of course didn't expect to live long with a death knight partner instead of a healer, the pure humiliation any kind of setup put me through was just appalling. Being easier to bring down I can live with, but nibbling away like a toothless kitten while one Hiroshima nuke after the other gets dropped on my head.. Well, it didnt go well. I did some practice rounds before our rated games started and after those were done I landed at 4 wins, 5 losses.

What really threw me off was how easily any class in any spec shrugged me off, and even healer classes were rarely stressed despite bringing the fury 50% heal reduction. The only thing I can think of that might have worked would be to go in PVE dps gear, but being a tank in raids, my kit is far from good and seeing how ridiculously fast my 26k hp while sporting 812 resilience gets blown away, I can't imagine surviving even a mean stare in PVE gear. I saw several 6-8k instant cast crits taking solid chunks of hp at a time, while I was returning fire with 800 max white hits, and in rare cases up to 3k crits. With weapons so slow most casters can get a couple spells off between the pushbacks..

I have always liked the Fury play style, but this is just.. meh.

So, today it was back to Protection pvp spec 2v2. It was nothing short of a night and day experience let me tell you, compared to the fury fails last week. We went off on a 5 win streak before running into a Ret Pala+Blood DK comp that gave us trouble. We won the first match where they tried to focus me down but kept running into them and they quickly learned, focusing down my DK partner first and winning the next two encounters, before we finally landed a second win by managing to separate them and chew up our respective targets.

There are few things sweeter than reflecting hammer of justice in a paladin's own face. Except sending a warlock running from his own death coil.. or watching a mage instantly combust from a pyro+fireball reflect. Ok reflecting things get me all giddy quite often.

Bonus tip: If you PVP with a Death Knight, make damned sure they do their best to raise you as a ghoul if a team member dies! We have won a good number of games now where I tanked for as long as possible while nuke teams burn their CD's, only to have me raised as ghoul to quickly dispatch the enemies. As a ghoul, you keep your stat bonuses and if you happen to be a melee, you're looking at 1.7k non crit spam, a heavy finisher and of course the stun finisher.

Raiding, 3.1 and achievements.

2009-03-24T01:35:00.001+01:00

Every now and then I read forums. I visit new blogs. Curious to find news about the game, fresh info about 3.1, whatever, I do it. And more often than not I regret taking the effort lately, as the general gossip and bits of news to be snapped up, have never been so grave from my POV.
Thousands of players are waiting eagerly for the next big content patch for WoW, hoping for months of fresh content to battle against. Ulduar has since it was announced been hailed but perhaps more importantly hyped as the next, harder, tougher, unforgiving raiding tier. The vast majority of the wow population has seen all WOTLK has had to offer so far and are rightfully feeling bored out of their minds. If you wonder why that is, Axiom offers great insights, and although all emo sensors known will overload upon loading his blog, he does have some fair points. He is also one of the causes for my heartache in the first paragraph. Its downright depressing reading, fresh as his lingo might be.
Now, I didn’t start writing here with the intent to bash his blog though, and for what it is, he writes well. What I wanted to vent about is this snippet, snagged from his blog which was in turn taken from mmo-champion apparently.
Raids & Dungeons - Hard Mode
Ulduar has a ton of bosses. While I’m sure some players would love for us to deliver an instance with that level of content every month or so (and throw in a 5-player run to boot!), it’s not in the cards, at least not for the next couple of years.
Instead, what we tried to do with Ulduar is offer a lot of different ways to play the encounters. While the progress-oriented guilds may clear it quickly, we hope that some of the hard modes will offer them a lot to chew on. All of the players who are somewhere between barely being able to clear the instance and the “world first” crowd should be able to find a comfortable difficulty level as well.
Your old model towards end game was a success, it brought you eleven million players.
Most of whom never had a chance to finish a raid. They didn’t get to see some of the best art in the game, hear the unique music or voice over, or in many cases even see the villian at the end of their quest line. From a production POV, instances are very expensive. It seems an odd choice to lavish all that attention on such a tiny percent of the player base.
At the same time, we know there are players who love a challenge and are willing to do almost anything to beat a raid-destroying boss provided they also have a shot at the best loot. They don’t want the instances to be over too soon. They like banging their head against the wall.
And so hard modes were born. We tested the water a little with Obsidian Sanctum. We’re going full bore with Ulduar.
Lets take a moment and review what they are saying here. So.. If I read this right, we get an instance puggable within the first weeks, that will follow the achievement hunter model of Sartharion. Great.. Let me offer my piece on just that.
Ever since I learned and experienced that the new take on raiding at 80 was based on the achievement hunter formula, I’ve found a growing distaste for raiding. It started with looking over the heroic 5 man achievements and the stupid, stupid drive to complete them and peaked with Sartharion 3D. Or so I thought. It seems this has been deemed a great way to provide content for raiders and it is going “full bore”, whatever that means, in Ulduar. I don’t like the sound of it.
Not one bit in fact, and I completely agree with Axiom on the point he makes in another post. It is the same damned instance, 10 and 25 just means we do it twice per reset just with 24 or 9 others. When we clear it, we will go back next week for the same instance again, and when we feel confident about the gear collected from there, guess what, we will go and do the same damned instance again.
Leaving a few raiders out for the sake of 10 achievement points, doing the same bosses with an add or two for another 10 points, neglecting parts of the tactics for the bosses so that they are no longer dumbed down enough for your average PUG for another 10 points..
I want to ask you readers, what is the worth of those achievements, the completely useless score you earn, the slightly recoloured proto-drake you might get instead of one that drops in a 5 man heroic or from the oracles rep? Do you feel the same drive to compete and try to reach for those, compared to the old raid progress formula, where you had raiders working to beat Lady Vasjh, and others were wiping or defeating Illidan or Kil’Jaeden? When we didnt have every single purple hunting player stuck in the same damned instance ?
Is this what we want?

Under construction

2009-03-16T13:28:00.004+01:00

I had a mate make a nice header image for me to use on the blog, thanks a bunch Rhuk it looks great :)

Now then, as you'll see, something looks very off about the title.. I've looked inside out on all the layout options i can find for the blog, but surely there must be some way to have the picture centered, instead of automatically left aligned ?

Preferably without nuking the entire layout for a new one? Halp!

Edit: I r pro html haxor and found it finally!
Edit #2: I r noob. Seems title is centered on IE, but left aligned on Firefox3. Argh!
Edit #3: Lisandra to the rescue! Can't check on Opera/Firefox atm but it looks like its fixed now ?

When you find yourself in times of boredom..

2009-03-16T00:39:00.001+01:00

Spice things up a bit!

I came up with an idea for silly evenings of hopefully, fun, that is basically stolen and modified from Diablo 2 Ironman tournaments, where you try to get as far as possible in the game with severe restrictments.

In that game, it meant starting a level 1 character and seeing how far you can get in without any help allowed from higher level chars joining or passing down gear, and also no town visits to repair and buy/sell gear was allowed, what you found as you killed your way was what you could use. This was a quite popular tournament type back then, and I've been toying with the idea of modifying this quite a bit to try with the RUIN raiders and WoW.

I'll give a brief rundown on how to possibly do this here, but please help me if you see any problems that I don't or things that should be added. This is of course totally pointless, but... if the game's getting dull, why not make our own fun ?

So without further ado!

Project Ironman:

Introduction:
As the result of a Guardians strike in the Caverns of Time, things went a bit out of hand, and mysterious forces managed in their attempts to mess with things to turn back time on Azeroth, and great evils long thought defeated and part of history are again all bent on making things unpleasant for your average person living on Azeroth.

As if that was not enough, the powers of the great heroes who in their time vanquished these foes are also revoked, possibly also to prevent death knights from just going back and soloing them again. So what do we do? Well, as the good heroes and heroines we are, we go back and re-school the bads!

Rules for participation:
Any high level (80? 70? 60?) character may join.
Basic gear allowed only, whatever gear your char has currently is assumed to have gone poof. (25g for example start fund, any choice of vendor equipment allowed, no AH)
Start zone: Molten Core or maybe Zul Gurub (depends on signups and how hard it will actually be, havent tested)

Goal:
Beating the bads of WoW once again, from start to finish, using only what we find on the way.

And thats it pretty much. For this to work I'd guess it needs about 20+ interested. So, my questions are, does this sound like something that could work/be fun? And has anyone tried something similar before? If so, please share your experiences with it!

I need a hero!

2009-03-12T05:12:00.002+01:00

Back with a vengeance and generic update postage! Post title might make more sense further down.

Despite little writing going on here, I've been about and busy as usual, here's the rundown..

PVP: Done a LOT of honor grinding and Wintergrasp, finally kitted with 4xsavage, 1x hateful, rest epic honor rewards including both 80 trinkets, sitting comfortably at 775 resilience now. Been running VoA vigilantly each wednesday but warrior items are mysteriously gone for 4 weeks straight, bleh! Only upgrades left now is the 40 mark pvp helm from wintergrasp, two pieces from VoA and well.. Arena rating requirement gear. Still, what I have now is getting good enough that its worth putting on instead of tanking epics.

Oh and.. Ding 50k lifetime kills :)

The (mis)adventures of arena tanking team, "The Muscleteers" continues and we've actually gotten quite good at teamplay now. Getting even better at decimating 2 dps comps and uh.. still working on the dps+healer setups. Paladins and priests are hard to get down, druids are doable as they tend to get careless and open for burst if it looks like they are winning (hi2u last stand, enrage regen, shield wall, shield block, spell reflect, open can of whooparse), and finally shamans are quite manageable. With Gag Order shield bash, conc blow, shockwave, fear, shield bash, charge stun does a great job locking them down. :)

Interesting thing to notice, despite all the strengths of death knights, my two partners really struggle against both caster and healer teams on the matches they play dual dk when my string of stuns and interrupts isnt there. Talked a bit about it and they will try to time better their 3+3 interrupts, if they get it right I dont see why they shouldnt be winning a lot too. Also and perhaps a teamplay issue, one of the dk's is frost or unholy, the other goes blood spec for our games and we seem by far to have an easier time with the blood spec approach.

PVE: Raid side of things our raid community has made progress too, first by defeating Malygos25 and second, after a bit of wipeage taking down Sarth+2 drakes! On our first Malygos kill the dragon died from dots after enrage just as our last raider fell off his drake, guess it can't get much closer. The next week we managed it with everyone up after a few tries, ended with a super clean kill. :)

Sartharion with two drakes was even worse for us, we had a whole evening cleared for it and it took many, many tries to get it done. I'm proud of my raid companions for not giving up though, its butting our heads against those progress walls that make us stronger and I think everyone there will agree it felt bloody great when it finally worked out. Well done, RUIN! :)

Related to raiding, I've noticed is that our signup pool is slowly shrinking. There's logical reasons for this of course after content has been beaten, many players join for the ride against beating the raids but have little interested in farming the last pieces of epics out of them. I hope we can still field some farm runs to prepare for 3.1 though, I bet I'm not the only one with a big list of upgrades to nab out from Naxx25 still.

Sillies: Tonight I was lured along for retro sillies again, first by a guild run to Sunwell Plateau (bit low attendance but got to Felmyst. Full stop there though... Damn gas breaths).

If that wasn't enough I was also lured along for another nostalgia spree by a couple mates. We did ZG for the mounts (no luck), went to SSC and fished up lurker a few times for the achievements and then for kicks 3 manned Karazhan. Pretty wicked fun aoe tanking big big big groups of trash after it got a bit easier, thunder clap and shockwave on some 25+ mobs will never get old for me I think (room outside 2nd boss, for the occation winamp had picked Bonnie Tayler's I need a hero for me, very fitting!) :) Curator (I pulled 3 trash groups+Curator in one go... godly healing Blackie!),Aran, Illhoof (1 healer, healer sacrificed.. errr..), Netherspite (pala died early, warrior and shaman 2-manning 50% and down, 3 beams, glorious chaos), Chess event (we wiped once!) and of course Prince (I failed at moving out of fire and got retri pala killed in a fire again, d'oh) were all also very entertaining fights :D

In other silly news, to spice up 5 mans which started getting a bit dull now I've also started a little side project.. Time Attack mode! Simple enough, clock starts from fist pull and stops when last boss drops, tracking the best clear times for each heroic run, should be fun :)

Hmm.. Perhaps this could develop into one of those blog fads we love to hate, post best clear times of x instance? For now I have UK clear in 21:01 and Culling of Stratholme full clear with drake boss 21:20, what times can you pull? ;)

Thats all for now, Vads out.

Tonight's raid canned, we tune in to extreme UI makeover.

2009-03-02T22:12:00.001+01:00

I went to work on my outdated interface and here we go, extreme UI makeover, WoW style.

I kept some elements from my old UI that I liked and moved things about a bit, resized here and there, changed some things like buff frames and minimap, formatting for unit frames, tried to hide buttons and bars etc I dont need and tried to make everything blend together as best I could.

I've seen a lot of minimalist UI's but there's no way you're going to get me to ditch my action bars, sorry :) I need my cooldowns visually and I hate using extra cooldown addons, so this is what we'll stick with. I'll trim it down a bit more (I dont really need those craft buttons for example), but for half an hour's work I'm pretty happy with the new look :)

Apart from the action bars which I dont want to do away with, is there anything else I can hide ? Details I've missed, things like that. Figure as I spend a lot of time watching this screen, it might as well be kind to the eye. As long as I'm already trying to tweak it a bit I'd be happy to hear some opinions. :)

Update:
Took a raid shot as well to show the extra frames etc. Oh and looking a bit closer at the minimap I reckon the red runes should be toned down a bit, looks a bit intense.

Breaking the habit

2009-03-02T08:32:00.001+01:00

No, I'm not going to start singing, you can keep reading.

Tobold wrote today about the focus many WoW players have on the content to come in patches and throws in the idea that we are much more focused on that, than what is the current game.

Guilty as charged, here. I have not copied over to PTR to playtest Ulduar (I'll play it when its done, tyvm), but I am keeping a very close watch on all the class changes and of course especially those that affect warriors. Must.. resist.. sidetracking..!

But yeah, like many I find myself mostly finished with WoW 3.0.8. Still raiding on regular schedule to complete my tank gear, but it doesnt feel like its needed really, and theres nothing new to take on. NO, killing the same bosses on a onewheeler while jumping through flaming hoops to get 10 achievement points is NOT new content.

Still, there's PvP. But I'm not built for hours and hours of endless arena/bg grind, so the time spent there is somewhat limited as well. I farmed around 70k honor total this weekend, including cheating a bit by handing in a bunch of bg tokens for honor, and for me thats nothing short of exceptional. :) Just another... 99200 honor to go for belt and trinket..

So, I might actually follow Tobold's lead and fill some dead time in WoW with trying out some other titles. Well, I already have a bit as some previous posts here show. I got a copy of GTA 4 that has mostly been unused, I installed it and got put off immediately by all the graphic glitches and performance problems. If Rockstar has some fix out for that by now I might give it a try again. I loved the other games in the GTA series :)

There is still that WAR account I can sneak onto. Last time I was on there I had a witch hunter in the making that was actually kinda fun to play, if the account is still alive I may try that out again as well.

Oh and I want to try out Fallout 3! And of course Starcraft II and Diablo III when they're out. Gah, so much funs to be had! Aaanyways. Thats a bit down the road, and despite today's rant edition I still enjoy WoW quite a lot so giving up on it is not an option as of yet. But I think getting some variety in will only help keeping my interest in WoW up.

Quake Live "open beta"

2009-02-26T01:33:00.002+01:00

Quake Live has just launched, which is nothing less than a browser based, free to play online first person shooter, Quake III Arena with extra bells and whistles! I have tried it, being a die hard quaker back in the old days and I got a seriously good feeling about this one. Been long since I held a rocket launcher or a rail gun in my digital hands, but the fragging is still oh so sweet!

About the "open beta" tag, the game is pretty much done. Apparently ID Software werent sure just how they would release the thing like a normal title so they just put that tag on to have their backs covered if something goes awfully wrong. It will still be free to play when it goes out of beta as it is called, but there will be an option to pay for premium giving you server and clan hosting and lots more.

Setting it up is easy, you visit the site and register, download a 3 mb browser plugin, restart your web browser and you are good to go. The site and servers are hard pushed currently though so there may be quite the queue to get in. When I went in this afternoon there was a 22.5k line, this evening it had climbed to 50k. It goes a lot faster than your average wait time on a full WoW server though.

The futuristic rocket launch-em-up style of Quake III may not be everyone's cup of tea, and if you go in expecting Crysis graphics you will be in for a let-down. But for anyone else looking for a good, fast-paced online gibbing time, go!

Update:
Queues are down to 1k-5k when I have been on so it takes a minute or two only. Proof of the plagues online FPS's, aim bots have surfaced though and apparently quite many are using it.. Why oh why do people invent these things, thought the point of games are, you know, playing them and not have someone/something do it for you?

Update 2:
Queue times are gone completely, and the game plays very well, no noticeable lag at all even on servers with 150+ latency. Not run into obvious aim bots in a while so I'll assume that's dealt with. Also Player skill ranking seems to be working now, which basically lets you very easily join servers with players on your own skill level, quite neat. :)

The daring adventures of The Muscleteers!

2009-02-25T21:43:00.002+01:00

Start of week two for our spanking tanking 2v2 arena team, and the first points started trickling in. Oh and if you look at the honor tab.. 14 wins 16 losses total and down by 208 points, what's up with that !?

Our rating got destroyed a bit by 7 losses from 10 played in the first week, but having played a bunch of games today the rating has climbed up if just a little. We made some slight changes and the performance difference was plain as day!

Gear:
We changed from wearing whatever resilience and dps gear we had, to our shiny tanking sets, with just the odd few 80 epic pvp pieces we got thrown in. With all the str and hit/expertise on tanking sets now, the raw difference in dps stats was disturbingly small compared to using gemmed and enchanted dps epics+savage and up pvp gear. Big plus with all that health against caster dps and well, melee dps hate us for obvious reasons.

Spec:
Last week I went in with a pvp oriented prot spec, with stuff like improved disarm, safeguard, the whole shebang. I respecced last night back to proper tanking spec for Malygos 25 and figured I'd give it a spin in arena as well and surprise surprise.. I didnt notice any difference, at all. So basically your typical raid tanking spec.

Opsidius however changed his spec more dramatically, going from unholy tanking, to blood tanking, and this was the big big difference we noticed, the amount of self healing and whatever it is he does to heal me was just huge!

Tactic:
Everything here is subject to change, remember we're playing at rather low rating atm.

Double DPS teams are easy as pie, really. Using our oh shit cooldowns as they open their burst we just brute force our way through it while Opsi provides moderate but steady healing.

Any team with a mage we kill whatever the other player is first. Mages are a nightmare to get down, no matter what spec they pack. I dread the day we'll run into double mage teams. The good thing is that if we make it through all their cooldown abilities, all they do is kite, which they do well enough mind but they're not really killing us either.

Healer+DPS teams are still as expected the hardest, decent dps as tanks do now it still lacks a bit on really forcing the healer into panic mode and wasting mana or even going oom eventually. However, something that works is having the DK start wearing the DPS down while I glue myself to the healer, this usually made the healer try to kite me and run around corners, and as soon as they do that I join on the dps. We managed a few times to kill the DPS then if he wasnt at full hp before the healer could help him with the DK plus me throwing in the lovely but short burst dps that is Concussion blow+Shield slam+Shockwave+heroic throw. :) Tiny bit of luck on the crits there and we're talking 7-8k damage in a 3 sec or so.

Verdict:
Of the 10 matches I played today we won 8 of them! Tables turned completely from the results we had last week, and I can't wait to go back in for more. Arena tanking might be cheesy, but it is also darn good fun! :D

On Warrior PvP

2009-02-22T23:37:00.003+01:00

Last night (in the late hours of course), I had a rant-session on my guildchat about how I feel warriors are left behind in the stone age compared to all other classes and how they have become less and less viable for PvP.

It should come as no surprise I had just been to a series of disasterous BG's prior to my outburst. I went in first with a pvp tweaked fury build which was total humiliation, then again with a pvp oriented prot build, with no sign of improvement.

Now there's no hiding if you armory me, that I havent done a whole lot of pvp since WotLK launced but before that I used to be quite active, playing weekly on 3 teams in fairly ok teams, so I have a fairly good idea on how to kill other players dead. Being on a rp-pvp server also forces reminder lessons daily. ;)

Anyway! Its a common trait among WoW players to always consider their own class underpowered and I am no exception, but the kind of response I recieved was mildly shocking. I had 4-5 guys playing different classes telling me that prot warriors are so unstoppable and can kill anything, this was just after I had been kited around by a mage in EotS while a druid was healing me for a couple minutes, couldnt touch the bugger at all.

I replied that yes, 1v1 protection warriors are strong against certain classes, funnily enough arms and fury warriors, enhancement shamans, warlocks and priests. I also said that protection dps requires that I take a heavy beating, in group pvp people have to be idiots to feed me rage while there are easier targets to wear down. And some other mumbo jumbo, if you play a warrior as well you will know all the arguments.

But still, they wouldnt budge and were adamant in saying prot warriors are awesome for bg, arena, you name it and that was when I took them on their word, and offered them a chance to do some arena with the awesomeness that is Prots. Two death knights took the bait, which led to the birth of.. The Muscleteers! (2v2) We did some initial rounds last night and ended on 3 win - 7 loss, but there is room for some improvement on teamplay and we're going to play a lot more hopefully. So we now got a fabulous tank team running around on Rampage battlegroup with unholy and blood death knights, and me.

What we noticed right away is that it takes them some time to figure out which of us to go for. I'm obviously prot with my shield out but have limited self healing and deal considerable oomph if focused, and my death knight mates are quite resilient too with self healing and high damage. On most of the matches they went for me, which in double dps teams meant we won the match. We had as expected great trouble with healer teams though, especially with a paladin involved. I have really no idea how to counter the absorb shield, high armor, heavy healing.. Advice welcome.

At any rate, this should mean for some amusing evenings between raids, will post stories of great victories and defeats, possibly or most likely with a dash of whine!

Browser games

2009-02-21T18:07:00.001+01:00

Not related to WOW or MMO's at all, I still have to share with you a wonderful browser game site I found: Armor Games ! Theres like a bajillion flash games there, and the three I've tested so far, Sonny, Sonny 2 and Super Mafia Land are all wonderful! Off to test what looks like a tower defence game next, speaking of wasting time, the hours I spent on TD's on WC3 battlenet... :)

The Sonny games are basically tactical combat games, Final Fantasy style and you get one guess only what kind of game Super Mafia Land is.. Perfect site to waste some time at (server maintenance, downtime at work etc).

Glad I stumled over this site and wanted to share the goodiebag with you all. :)

My friday night

2009-02-21T09:57:00.000+01:00

So as I was going home from work last evening I was all excited to relax and have some fun in the game, perhaps do a 10 man with my guild.

I get home, dig out my lame screenshot to post here and log on. I sign up for a Naxx10 set to start at 22.00 and the next thing that happens is a mate asking if I'd be up for tanking the daily heroic, good for warmup!

So we blast through Violet Hold in what turned out to be my mage friend and 3 randoms, still it went ok, no wipes though I felt a bit sorry for my healer, all three dps were in the 1000-1500 range so it was a bit of an endurance test.

We finish there and minutes later a guild group is asking for tank to run some heroics, I'm all over it and we tear up Halls of Lightning and even get the Loken achievement. Awesome, disregarding most of the group got blasted to shreds in the last aoe. Details!

Its now 20:30 and I'm asked to join for another, but I figure I could use a breather between heroicing and diving into Naxxramas, which was understandable. So I get out of the group, do my cooking daily as I'm preparing a pasta for dinner, eat and look at the time, 21:15.

Hm, still some time left before the raid starts, and I notice I'm quite tired, nothing a 15 min power nap wont sort, right ? So I hit the couch, set an alarm just to be sure and close my eyes.

Next thing I know its 07:30 in the morning, d'oh.. Sorry Orphans! Seems I'm just not built for weeks of 11-13 hour work shifts, hope it gets a bit calmer here! And yes, I'm writing this from work too.

Looking forward to the "Minus fifty fucking DKP!" yells next time we're on TS ;) At any rate, I probably deserve that just for the sake of crashing so early on a friday evening, raid or not.

I must be getting old.. Can't blame it on alcohol either, the shame!

6th Screenie

2009-02-20T16:49:00.001+01:00

My hopes of avoiding this screenshot passaround thing entirely failed me, as Yakra over at Mirror Shield tagged me for it. Not one to step down from a challenge I present my incredibly lame contribution! (click the images for full size ones if they're a bit small)

Cant strike gold with every screenshot taken, can we? *blush* So, what I got for you is basically me loitering in Shattrath seeing one of those oversized pets for the first time, and for some reason I found it screeny-worthy. :]

Oh well, guess it can serve to show what my UI has been looking like. This shot is quite old of course but it hasnt changed all that much since then. Added another screeny to show what it looks like now, and indeedy, its mostly the same apart from pitbull frames and minor cosmetics. Oh and feel free to gasp in awe at my incredible AFK-sit a mile up in the sky skills!

Now for the hard part, passing the challenge on. Urgh. Not been around that long so the full list will take a bit. But for now, here are the challenged:

Ixobelle
BigRedKitty
Namthe

I'll look for a few more to poke, later tonight. :)

Heroic Strike, the Warrior's worst friend

2009-02-18T01:45:00.011+01:00

Edit 19/07/11: This blog entry is horridly outdated and shouldn't be read in any serious manner by anyone. I want to point this out because it has been one of my most read posts even until today. Heroic Strike got "fixed" although not in the way I wanted. I'm not exactly thrilled about it being an extra button push for instant (awful) damage at 50-70 rage either. I'm glad Heroic Strike is an instant attack now which is something warriors needed, but even in freak occurences where it keeps critting, using it with our 0 cost procs, and incite, it remains an afterthought, a trick to push out a couple hundred dps in rage satiated situations.

In the current Firelands tier of content, there are a number of fights where Warriors are fed rage, where the current heroic strike and its counterpart cleave are spammed on their 3 second cooldowns, but I'm not entirely sure I want Warriors DPS based around that. And come on, you know a nerf to heroic strike/cleave is coming just because of these fights, however pitiful rage dumps they are.

Oh, and Warriors whether tanking or dps are still spamming their heroic strike/cleave hotkeys like crazy, even more so in situations where it can be kept up thanks to Inner Rage. Was that the best "fix" Blizzard could think of, really ?

With that out of the way, if you want to read my ancient rant about Heroic Strike with the mechanic it used to have, read on.

What about Heroic Strike, exactly?

For those uninitiated in the "fine art" of protection warrior tanking, it is an essentual tool for keeping up aggro during any raid encounter. It has been in the game since day one and has always been useful while tanking for dumping rage and gaining extra threat, but these days it seen more as a mandatory keypress every 0-0.5 seconds (can think of at least one wws +video to show it, will try to dig it out tomorrow), just to be able to keep aggro and let those dps'ers show their true potential.

There's countless WWS logs out there on single target bossfights where the tank takes lots of damage, where good tanks do 0-5 autoattacks. Over several minutes. Thats a lot of heroic strike hammering. While the warrior tank is doing this, he or she is also spamming his regular short CD abilities, and it all adds up to AT LEAST 3-5 key presses per second if the tank is on the ball, as expected.

There has not only been concern but also obvious evidence that this kind of keyboard mashing is not only expensive as it obviously destroys your keyboards rather fast, but also causes hand and arm motor damage. There have been numerous suggestions as to how to ease the job of putting out acceptable tps and ragedumping, which have largely gone unnoticed.. until now!

This is perhaps the best news I've heard in a long time ( ok that says something about my life in general, I KNOW ), I sincerely desperately hope Blizzard acknowledges this and takes action for a fix before permanent hand and arm nerve injuries join the usual line of counter-effects warriors have to deal with while doing their job, and this is no call for nerf, but being forced to mash our keyboards to stumps doing the same job a DK does pressing 4-5 buttons every 5 seconds (assuming GCD reducing "aura", even less without it), it ain't right.

I am hoping for a heroic strike toggle, instead of manually using it constantly, perhaps even with a lower rage limit for activating it to make sure rage is conserved for the regular GCD's. Here's to hoping... *crosses fingers*

Update: Found the video mentioned above, Patchwerk 25 man 1m54s kill, tank doing average 10.5 keystrokes per second, 3.3k dps. The video spawned a very interesting debate over at tankspot, well worth reading (link includes video and discussion board). High quality download available at filefront, recommend taking 5 mins to download it, its just 105 mb. If the topic isnt of interest it may still be worth a watch if you like raid encounter vids, or angry music! ;)

Too soon, Executus!

2009-02-17T00:48:00.001+01:00

Or about bleeding time, all depends.

Time for an overdue update! Moving and being rather busy in general the blog project has been on forced hold for a while, but it looks like things are getting somewhat normal now. Actually they have been for a few days now but being stuck without an internet connection for 3 weeks, naturally my first priority has been to get some serious gaming done!

On the bright side, seeing how eager I've been to get back in the game showed me I'm not nearly ready to put WoW away, good thing considering the game was starting to feel a bit bland. Really missed the guildies and just goofing around, it is good to be back :)

After I returned to WoW I've been to a Naxx10 which we cleared about half way in 3 hours, joined a followup run in Naxx25 where we cleared our way to Kel'Thuzad, wiping at 5% on him just long enough over our scheduled raid time that we decided to call it rather than going again (he's so going down tomorrow, guild got him on 25man before but not while I've been about to see it). We also had a rather sweet first evening of tries with Sartharion with an extra drake up.

He went down on our third go and seeing how chaotic it all turned with just one drake up, I gotta admit I'm a bit psyched about trying it with more of them! Was good fun.

Finally though and what was perhaps the highlight since I picked up the game again, we had an old school Molten Core and Blackwing Lair raid! I hadn't been to those places in ages and despite the obvious steamrolling, it was really sweet being there again, brought back good memories. To make it all the better, an old friend who has been farming MC for months now trying to get his last Binding of the Windseeker for his Thunderfury sword joined as well, and would you believe it, the damned thing dropped ! Well earned, Zagar :)

We had some other fun drops too, one of our hunters picked up Ancient Petrified Leaf and I'm now purely for nostalgic reasons the happy owner of Ashkandi and The Untamed Blade , two beautiful swords! Good times..

Unrelated, I am searching for some decent wow related plugins to put on the blog, I would be very grateful if visitors could point me in the right direction. Looked at an armory plugin but it didnt really seem to work at all, is there any of the sort out there thats compatible with blogspot pages?

Wrapping it up here for now, as a final note I am very interested in feedback on the blog. Anything goes, constructive or otherwise. ;) Stay tuned!

Lunar Achievements Aid

2009-01-25T00:19:00.001+01:00

Just a quick post, as the Lunar Festival is upon us and if you find yourself feeling lost trying to track all those Elders, look no further than Wowwiki for the big picture. Been a great help to me!

Thanks to Big Bear Butt for the pointer, and good coinhunting. :)

WotLK, modern day's Bread and Circus?

2009-01-23T00:31:00.001+01:00

Starting off, I'd like to talk about something that isnt Warrior specific at all, but something that has gotten a lot of attention with the Lich King expansion.

One of the biggest cries of critisism regarding WOTLK has been how easy it is to beat when taking on what we have so far been offered in terms of endgame raiding. Page up and page down on official forums are filled with topics stating how much this expansion sucks because of The Disney Approach , making everything available for the masses to enjoy. But is it really worse than before or an improvement from the TBC and vanilla days?

On one side, we have the serious raidguilds with a select few achievements to pursue ,for example Obsidian Sanctum with three drakes, when those are done or more likely long before it, boredom sets in and we get the forum topics and blog rants mentioned, and who can blame them for it ? The very reason they exist seem pulled away under their feet.

Dont get me wrong, the achievement mentioned and some others in Naxx 25 are indeed way hard to pull off. But in the end, all they have done at the end of the day is the same instance that a majority of casual raiding guilds manage as well, just in the most stupidly complicated way you can imagine. In a genious but very transparent way Blizzard created means to turn one boss, lets use Obsidian Sanctum again as example, into four different ones. I for one can understand well how they feel a bit cheated.

Now then, not to play the devil's advocate but to keep it objective, lets have a look on the other side of the raiding scene, that of the casuals as we like to call it.

On the flip side of things we have what is probably the majority of WoW players, the casuals who like to raid, but for different reasons can not be cutting edge in raiding progress. Reasons may be RL commitments reducing play time, lacking the amount of dedication needed for it, bring in what is primarily a social guild without a good raid alliance or a combination of it all.

Up until the release of WotLK they have effectively but cut off from a part of the game, the deep raid instances that needed mad skills (blackwing lair, naxxramas, aq40 in the vanilla days), or long and difficult attunement chains (Hyjal, BT before the open for all patches). A large portion of these players, myself included, never as much as killed a trash mob in Naxxramas before it was made the entry level raidinstance in the latest expansion.

They have missed out on a large chunk of cool scripted and game lore related events, isnt it great that they too can enjoy that part of the game too now without it being a requirement to have many hours free each day to hunt reputations, key chains, attunement quests ? They wont be downing OS three drakes on this side of 2009, but they will get to see everything on offer lets say, even if they just join a LFG channel pug for it.

So.. Who is right? Are things better now or worse than before ?

In closing, I will say that while I definately am not cutting the edge on the raiding scene (heck, I havent even finished Naxx25 or done Malygos 10 yet), I am very much in the camp complaining about the dumbing down of PVE. I loved the times when Idling in Orgrimmar I could see players proudly flashing their tier 2-3 armors, Sulfuras and Thunderfuries , the creme de la creme of the server, dreaming that one day I would too be there (and indeed I am the very lucky owner of a vanilla Sulfuras hammer :) ) It kills me to see the guys I used to admire so wear the exact same gear even though they are still much more hardcore on the raiding than me, I miss having those goals to reach for and the oh so sweet satisfaction when you finally reach it!

So dear reader, I am very curious to hear, which base do you belong in and why ?

About the author

2009-01-17T23:06:00.000+01:00

First of all, welcome to my humble blog spot! For anyone happening to stumble by here's a quick introduction.

I am a WoW player, known as Vads, orc warrior residing on EU-Defias Brotherhood since it launched one year after the game launched. Prior to that I had a human mage on Ragnaros which wasnt quite my cuppa (far as pvp servers go it was allright, mind), so I made a human rogue on Argent Dawn by the name of Arja. Never been that content with the base game so when I discovered Roleplaying servers it was a very natural switch. Found myself a rather zany doomsday cult RP guild, and got stuck right with it, right until we had the introduction or RP-PVP servers, at which point me and the bulk of said cultist guild found it a natural move. Since my arrival on RP-PVP Defias Brotherhood I have never looked back!

While I have always personally been very achievement oriented I thrive best in a casual enviroment, therefore I was thrilled when I eventually joined The Orphans Grim , a RP slash PVE oriented guild catered for senior citizens (Read: 25+, in the online realm that counts as senior I reckon). Thats not to say we weren't raid oriented, mind. While not cutting edge we cleared our way to Sunwell before Wrath hit the shelves. And yes, I know pve got nerfed before then, but at least we were IN Black Temple before it. :)

Post Wrath I still play my warrior as my main character, tanking as I have since Arms spec was rave for MC and BWL tanking, so while I didnt have the pleasure unfortunately of tanking AQ40 at 60, and the deepest recluses of Sunwell at 70 I still dare say I have some experience doing what I find the most enjoyable experience of WoW is, namely tanking big bad baddies. I am also very much for world pvp and well, pvp in general, which will be reflected on in future posts.

On the guild management side I also have some expertise. Lead first a pvp guild on Ragnaros, then taking on officership in a roleplay guild, until I took on shared guild leadership in a council of a RP/PVE guild where while I am still a member, I recently stepped down as I realized current work and RL, as well as regular raiding obligations were keeping me far too busy. Dropped the leadership role and is currently quite ok working my ass off, raiding some in the evenings and leaving it at that.

As I am writing this we are still working on on 25 man content of WotLK, raiding 25man 3 evenings per week and mostly being silly the rest of the time.

And that about sums your author here up until now!

Its in the way you look

2009-01-17T12:32:00.002+01:00

Working on the layout and feel of the blog still. Getting rather jealous of those real spiffy looking blogs I've been reading for a while, while I am still trying to get a colour theme going that wont cause a migrain to read. Also need to see if I cant get some basic art going here, want to keep a simple look without well, page looking totally plain. We'll see!

Quite busy at work so not had much time to get down to actual blogging, until it calms down a tiny smidge I'll be happy if I can just do some minor stuff here every so often.

If anyone happens to stumble by, I'd be glad if you drop a line about the layout, whether its likeable or no. :)

The Rage Bar

2009-01-16T11:15:00.003+01:00

Greets and welcome to my little web blog. Topics ranted about here will largely be generally related to the digital crack that is World of Warcraft, but also thoughts about my favourite class, the Warrior. Musings about PvP, PvE, PvDeveloper, possibly some very light theorycrafting. No need to reinvent the wheel when we have ElitistJerks already.

As I'm sure can be seen easily, this is a very just-now established blog with not much substance (yet!). As I get settled in here and used to blogging, there will be more!