I smelled a rat when I checked out Steam today only to see 3 listed special deals of the day. What? Normally they offer 5-6 games.
So I pop on over to Shacknews to see what's really on offer. (I have developed a fondness for that site for cutting-edge game news.)
Sure enough, I see that Max Payne 1 and 2 and a whole bevy of Civilization 4 games are on offer, along with the other games that I can see on Steam.
Curiously, searching up the games in Steam yields nothing, and when I click directly on the links, takes me to the dreaded page that says "Sorry, this game is not available in your region."
I need to figure out which moronic publisher locked these for Singapore and boycott them because this is just insane.
No, really, I get that Grand Theft Auto is locked out for Singapore probably because of some kind of MDA ban where they are terrified little impressionable kiddies will start speaking like niggas in the 'hood and throwing open car doors to hijack them. Threat to national security and all. (Nevermind that the stricture is now getting relaxed and we can actually get them under an M18 banner in brick-and-mortar shops now, phew.)
I get that Silent Hill: Homecoming and its ilk are locked out, maybe because you're nervous about gory horror blood and gore and torture sequences and the very phallic big bad Pyramidhead will traumatize a cushy Singaporean population who cannot deal with monsters in the dark. (Nevermind that I can catch Silent Hill gameplay videos on youtube just fine, and I swear brick-and-mortar stores stock variants also.)
But... come on... Max Payne?
I BOUGHT Max Payne from Tec-Drome. I'm sure I saw Max Payne 2 from the same place, though I can't recall if I bought it. Max Payne is an ordinary FPS with bullet time, and Sin City cartoon-style introduction cutscenes. I certainly don't remember any gore scenes. At least, if there were any, they were completely overwritten in my mind by the F.E.A.R series. (Maybe an entire corridor turning into plastic-y blood, if I'm not mixing games. But that could be F.E.A.R I'm thinking of.)
The F.E.A.R. 2 demo which I finally got around to trying out completely takes gore over the top to the point that I wigged out of getting the game. We're talking gallons of blood in an abandoned high school, with unlucky soldiers splattered on the ceiling after a creepy encounter with the supernatural Alma. We're talking about a game which ends...spoiler warning... with your male protagonist getting locked in a chair and raped by a feral naked adult Alma and then entering some kind of nightmare hell dimension where she puts your hand on her tummy and you realize, omg she's pregnant. (Just talking about the sequel's over-the-top nature is already a mindfuck. *shudders* I liked the more spooky suspenseful original, but the sequel goes beyond my limits. And lookie, it's completely available for my region.)
Max Payne's publisher is Rockstar Games. Perhaps due to the Grand Theft Auto and Bully series, which would get unabashedly banned here if MDA had their way, Steam found it easier to just lock them out completely, or Rockstar Games wanted to take all their toys home to play. Max Payne may have been an unfortunate casualty of that kind of political fallout. So maybe that's understandable. (Even if $2 for a Max Payne game is bloody frackin' cheap.)
Leaving Civilization 4 unavailable to my region is just spectacularly DUH though.
I'm trying and I'm trying to figure out what could be offensively wrong about a Civ game. Coming up with nada.
My best theory is that Steam locks out the publisher if they have a controversial game in their listing for a region. Take Two Interactive / 2K Games is the publisher of Civ 4. Take Two also has Bioshock in their stable, which is unavailable on Steam as well, lending proof to the theory. They also publish Manhunt and Manhunt 2 - which is no doubt controversially banned in Singapore, and may be the cause of the fallout.
That's a really weird way of locking out a game though.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Spot the Audio Difference
Viewers on youtube claim that this song is much like the other.
Thoughts?
There is certainly an aural leitmotif in both of them that is similar, methinks. I'm not musically inclined, I have not the right words and I might be giving the entirely wrong name to it - it's sort of the broken up chord progression of 4 repeating notes (Doom doom de doom) in the background and the heavy crashing drum beat.
But I think the instruments playing the melodies are different, and playing unique riffs at their own pace.
What's fascinating to me is that one is very dark, depressing, almost monotonous in its despair and the other has more trumpets and horns blaring creating a heroic, noble sacrifice sort of orchestral drama.
Yet with a very similar underlying leitmotif, just drowned out at various parts.
I certainly don't think to point fingers and scream rip-off though. To me, music rips each other off all the time. (Especially James Horner ripping himself off for Braveheart and Titanic.)
What's great is creating new emotional and audio riffs, even out of the same building blocks...
Like one of my favorites off OCR-remix
Or my favorite mashup/remixer of all time who puts together pop songs in a way that I can never listen to just one of the lone parts anymore but need them mushed together.
P.S. Has anyone spotted yet that I am already driving myself into a Heavy Rain hype frenzy before 2010 has even rolled around?
*Puts Mars on repeat loop one more time while marveling at how sneakily David Cage named his character Ethan Mars to reflect the audio theme*
Thoughts?
There is certainly an aural leitmotif in both of them that is similar, methinks. I'm not musically inclined, I have not the right words and I might be giving the entirely wrong name to it - it's sort of the broken up chord progression of 4 repeating notes (Doom doom de doom) in the background and the heavy crashing drum beat.
But I think the instruments playing the melodies are different, and playing unique riffs at their own pace.
What's fascinating to me is that one is very dark, depressing, almost monotonous in its despair and the other has more trumpets and horns blaring creating a heroic, noble sacrifice sort of orchestral drama.
Yet with a very similar underlying leitmotif, just drowned out at various parts.
I certainly don't think to point fingers and scream rip-off though. To me, music rips each other off all the time. (Especially James Horner ripping himself off for Braveheart and Titanic.)
What's great is creating new emotional and audio riffs, even out of the same building blocks...
Like one of my favorites off OCR-remix
Or my favorite mashup/remixer of all time who puts together pop songs in a way that I can never listen to just one of the lone parts anymore but need them mushed together.
P.S. Has anyone spotted yet that I am already driving myself into a Heavy Rain hype frenzy before 2010 has even rolled around?
*Puts Mars on repeat loop one more time while marveling at how sneakily David Cage named his character Ethan Mars to reflect the audio theme*
Monday, December 28, 2009
2009 Video Games Retrospective 2
The Ones That Got Away
World in Conflict: Soviet Assault
I just picked this one up from the still-ongoing Steam sale, and am quite pleasantly surprised. From the screenshots, I had thought it was an FPS with the photorealistic explosions and warplane in the background, and was all set up to do battle with crosshairs and iron sight until the point I started the tutorial where they taught me how to use a camera and gave me a unit of men to control. Oh.
It's set in an alternate modern day world where the USSR decide to invade. It's really an excuse to spread mass visual carnage across a civilian city like Seattle, while twisting around some story tropes for effect. This is the first time I've had a CO (Commanding Officer) who wasn't a gruff old Obi-Wan Kenobi or otherwise respectable figure to follow, but instead someone who has serious issues with taking all the credit for success, pushes blame to others, is a coward and is generally quite an annoying guy you wish the enemy would put a sniper bullet in, but you still have to follow him anyway cos he's your CO.
It'll tide me over while I sit and stare at the two Company of Heroes games for $15 each, and wait to come to a decision. Annoyingly enough, I own the first game but never quite found the time to finish it, but never did get the expansion that is now bound in the Gold edition, nor did I pick up the standalone Tales of Valour.
Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena
I anticipated this one quite eagerly. I went and bought the thing lock, stock and barrel. I haven't even made it on board the spaceship Dark Athena yet. Not for lack of trying, though. My momentum was quite abruptly killed when I got past 3-4 map levels and then hit some kind of loading bug which irrevocably crashed the game. Since this bugger is on a save checkpoint system, my attempts at reloading kept getting me into the no-progress crash point, and I never did get around to trying another "New Game" attempt, or a re-install.
The Ones I've Yet to Finish
Defense Grid: The Awakening - Nice tower defence. I'm currently trapped at that point in the levels where things have gotten exceedingly complex and require significant strategic thought I'm not yet willing to input and/or some game guide reading to understand the theory behind it, which usually means I stop playing the game instead of doing any of the above.
Plants vs Zombies - another tower defence. This one is more casual. I play it now and then when I'm in the mood. I'd make more progress on it had I put all the PopCap games on the same Steam login as my main account, but I had some sort of insane rationalization of letting my mom play the casual games collection after I was done in order to justify buying the ton-of-games pack. So now I have to log out and log in, which kind of puts a small crimp in the 'pick up and play' casual gameplay.
Fallout 3 - Y'know, I don't know what happened to this. I gave up chasing my dad into some big sewer maze by a Washington monument in favour of traipsing across the radioactive wilderness as an indepedent sharpshooter. I brought a wary alliance between a small town and a group of vampire-like mutants. I recall a microcosm of that between a skyscraper full of elitist human snobs and zombie-like mutants who hated each other, which I don't recall how it was resolved. I was hiking to some whacked out robot facility in the boondocks cos Moira told me to, and I'm suicidal that way, when I got vaguely bored with precision placement of somewhat ineffectual bullets into the brain circuitry of R2D2 lookalikes, saved my game and never came back.
The Ones That Are Still Pending
It's kind of ironic these are all the games that are now on heavy Steam offer. The worst part of it is, I bought quite a number of these fellas at the standard $50 SGD at Tec-Drome (marked with a *). I guess I better just treat it as a brick-and-mortar charity donation to keep the Uncle still going so that I have a place to get discounts on PC and console hardware.
Resident Evil 5 - Zombies! In Africa! At least, I think that's the idea. I've never tried a game in the Resident Evil series. Should get around to, some day. The problem with it sitting in my Steam list is that L4D occupies the 'zombies' niche in my brain over this.
Ghostbusters* - Essentially the Ghostbusters 3 movie. Or so I hear. If it's 80% as good as Batman was, it should be worth playing. Haven't gotten around to installing it, and my hard disk is approaching full though.
Prototype* - Looks like an insane action blend of a superhero and Assasin's Creed, mixed with some shapeshifting and a dose of GtA. How it actually plays, I have no idea. It's on the 'get around to installing someday' list.
The Last Remnant - Some sort of Final Fantasy-esque inspired mix with combat you don't actually control. I have no idea how this thing will play and how long I'll last.
Dead Space* - This was a leftover 2008 game. I have the box. It's just not installed. How stupid is that? I could have just waited until the Steam blowout sale. I hear it's pretty good, but I dunno, I haven't been in the mood for anything Space Doom-supernatural themed (or World War themed, for that matter) for ages because the genre is all worn out.
Mirror’s Edge - 2008 too. Bought cheap on Steam. Due to visit some day when I want a non violent vertiginous speedrun game, I guess.
The Ones I Haven't Bought Yet
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2
Left 4 Dead 2
I'm positive these two games are good. I liked the originals. I'm just not willing to buy more of the same at full price. Steam, mark them down faster!
Anno 1404 – Dawn of Discovery
Anno 1701 - 1701 A.D.
I haven't played a good city-builder economic sim in forever. The Total War series is a decent mix, and visually quite spectacular in terms of big set piece battles and tactical maneuvering in formation blocks, but it is so interminably slow. I wanted to try X3 as a space economic sim, but I couldn't figure out how to fly the goddamn spaceship when it plopped me in the game. (I picked up X2 in the hopes that it is less complex.) The Anno series looks quite fascinating with all its resource chains, but they're still so expensive.
Tropico 3
I have warm fuzzy memories of the first Tropico. In fact, I picked up the first two games on offer and quite enjoyed messing around with them for a while, but y'know, eyebleeding pixelated graphics vs prettier graphics and Steam achievements... Again, the price is not too thrilling yet.
Command and Conquer: Tiberium Series
A long long time ago, I played Command and Conquer: Red Alert (1, 2, or 3) I have no idea which. It was at the behest of a JC friend, who had unexpectedly taken a shine to the game, while refusing to play anything else RTS-related, such as the (imo) far superior Warcraft or Starcraft variants at the time. I found the cutscenes hopelessly cheesy, had no major clue as to what most of the units actually did, but somehow through beginner's luck (or the application of cross-game RTS principles), demolished her soundly in the first and only multiplayer game we played. I seem to recall nukes. I never did get asked to play another game. :/
(Some people find it very hard to have their illusions shattered in RTSes, I guess. After all, they did so well in singleplayer! To lose to a self-confessed Red Alert newbie! Me, I'd always assumed at least 50% of the people online could RTS better than me, if not 75%. I may have gone through one or two singleplayer game levels for research purposes prior to that fight though. :P)
But anyhow, from that impromptu trial wherein I was actually discovering the tech tree of the side I was playing mid-game, I was not impressed with the series theme or its gameplay, and went on to be a Blizzard 'craft fangirl instead, striking off anything with C&C in its name as not worth bothering with. There would be far superior modern world RTSes in the future.
It wasn't until the recent advertisements for Command & Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight that have registered the fact that there is a sci-fi themed Tiberium series in the same vein as the Red Alert modern-theme series. This sounds a touch more interesting, but I am finding it quite difficult to even locate the games. Missing on Steam for the lose. :/
Heavy Rain
Can. Not. Wait.
Feb 16, 2010 cannot come too soon.
World in Conflict: Soviet Assault
I just picked this one up from the still-ongoing Steam sale, and am quite pleasantly surprised. From the screenshots, I had thought it was an FPS with the photorealistic explosions and warplane in the background, and was all set up to do battle with crosshairs and iron sight until the point I started the tutorial where they taught me how to use a camera and gave me a unit of men to control. Oh.
It's set in an alternate modern day world where the USSR decide to invade. It's really an excuse to spread mass visual carnage across a civilian city like Seattle, while twisting around some story tropes for effect. This is the first time I've had a CO (Commanding Officer) who wasn't a gruff old Obi-Wan Kenobi or otherwise respectable figure to follow, but instead someone who has serious issues with taking all the credit for success, pushes blame to others, is a coward and is generally quite an annoying guy you wish the enemy would put a sniper bullet in, but you still have to follow him anyway cos he's your CO.
It'll tide me over while I sit and stare at the two Company of Heroes games for $15 each, and wait to come to a decision. Annoyingly enough, I own the first game but never quite found the time to finish it, but never did get the expansion that is now bound in the Gold edition, nor did I pick up the standalone Tales of Valour.
Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena
I anticipated this one quite eagerly. I went and bought the thing lock, stock and barrel. I haven't even made it on board the spaceship Dark Athena yet. Not for lack of trying, though. My momentum was quite abruptly killed when I got past 3-4 map levels and then hit some kind of loading bug which irrevocably crashed the game. Since this bugger is on a save checkpoint system, my attempts at reloading kept getting me into the no-progress crash point, and I never did get around to trying another "New Game" attempt, or a re-install.
The Ones I've Yet to Finish
Defense Grid: The Awakening - Nice tower defence. I'm currently trapped at that point in the levels where things have gotten exceedingly complex and require significant strategic thought I'm not yet willing to input and/or some game guide reading to understand the theory behind it, which usually means I stop playing the game instead of doing any of the above.
Plants vs Zombies - another tower defence. This one is more casual. I play it now and then when I'm in the mood. I'd make more progress on it had I put all the PopCap games on the same Steam login as my main account, but I had some sort of insane rationalization of letting my mom play the casual games collection after I was done in order to justify buying the ton-of-games pack. So now I have to log out and log in, which kind of puts a small crimp in the 'pick up and play' casual gameplay.
Fallout 3 - Y'know, I don't know what happened to this. I gave up chasing my dad into some big sewer maze by a Washington monument in favour of traipsing across the radioactive wilderness as an indepedent sharpshooter. I brought a wary alliance between a small town and a group of vampire-like mutants. I recall a microcosm of that between a skyscraper full of elitist human snobs and zombie-like mutants who hated each other, which I don't recall how it was resolved. I was hiking to some whacked out robot facility in the boondocks cos Moira told me to, and I'm suicidal that way, when I got vaguely bored with precision placement of somewhat ineffectual bullets into the brain circuitry of R2D2 lookalikes, saved my game and never came back.
The Ones That Are Still Pending
It's kind of ironic these are all the games that are now on heavy Steam offer. The worst part of it is, I bought quite a number of these fellas at the standard $50 SGD at Tec-Drome (marked with a *). I guess I better just treat it as a brick-and-mortar charity donation to keep the Uncle still going so that I have a place to get discounts on PC and console hardware.
Resident Evil 5 - Zombies! In Africa! At least, I think that's the idea. I've never tried a game in the Resident Evil series. Should get around to, some day. The problem with it sitting in my Steam list is that L4D occupies the 'zombies' niche in my brain over this.
Ghostbusters* - Essentially the Ghostbusters 3 movie. Or so I hear. If it's 80% as good as Batman was, it should be worth playing. Haven't gotten around to installing it, and my hard disk is approaching full though.
Prototype* - Looks like an insane action blend of a superhero and Assasin's Creed, mixed with some shapeshifting and a dose of GtA. How it actually plays, I have no idea. It's on the 'get around to installing someday' list.
The Last Remnant - Some sort of Final Fantasy-esque inspired mix with combat you don't actually control. I have no idea how this thing will play and how long I'll last.
Dead Space* - This was a leftover 2008 game. I have the box. It's just not installed. How stupid is that? I could have just waited until the Steam blowout sale. I hear it's pretty good, but I dunno, I haven't been in the mood for anything Space Doom-supernatural themed (or World War themed, for that matter) for ages because the genre is all worn out.
Mirror’s Edge - 2008 too. Bought cheap on Steam. Due to visit some day when I want a non violent vertiginous speedrun game, I guess.
The Ones I Haven't Bought Yet
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2
Left 4 Dead 2
I'm positive these two games are good. I liked the originals. I'm just not willing to buy more of the same at full price. Steam, mark them down faster!
Anno 1404 – Dawn of Discovery
Anno 1701 - 1701 A.D.
I haven't played a good city-builder economic sim in forever. The Total War series is a decent mix, and visually quite spectacular in terms of big set piece battles and tactical maneuvering in formation blocks, but it is so interminably slow. I wanted to try X3 as a space economic sim, but I couldn't figure out how to fly the goddamn spaceship when it plopped me in the game. (I picked up X2 in the hopes that it is less complex.) The Anno series looks quite fascinating with all its resource chains, but they're still so expensive.
Tropico 3
I have warm fuzzy memories of the first Tropico. In fact, I picked up the first two games on offer and quite enjoyed messing around with them for a while, but y'know, eyebleeding pixelated graphics vs prettier graphics and Steam achievements... Again, the price is not too thrilling yet.
Command and Conquer: Tiberium Series
A long long time ago, I played Command and Conquer: Red Alert (1, 2, or 3) I have no idea which. It was at the behest of a JC friend, who had unexpectedly taken a shine to the game, while refusing to play anything else RTS-related, such as the (imo) far superior Warcraft or Starcraft variants at the time. I found the cutscenes hopelessly cheesy, had no major clue as to what most of the units actually did, but somehow through beginner's luck (or the application of cross-game RTS principles), demolished her soundly in the first and only multiplayer game we played. I seem to recall nukes. I never did get asked to play another game. :/
(Some people find it very hard to have their illusions shattered in RTSes, I guess. After all, they did so well in singleplayer! To lose to a self-confessed Red Alert newbie! Me, I'd always assumed at least 50% of the people online could RTS better than me, if not 75%. I may have gone through one or two singleplayer game levels for research purposes prior to that fight though. :P)
But anyhow, from that impromptu trial wherein I was actually discovering the tech tree of the side I was playing mid-game, I was not impressed with the series theme or its gameplay, and went on to be a Blizzard 'craft fangirl instead, striking off anything with C&C in its name as not worth bothering with. There would be far superior modern world RTSes in the future.
It wasn't until the recent advertisements for Command & Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight that have registered the fact that there is a sci-fi themed Tiberium series in the same vein as the Red Alert modern-theme series. This sounds a touch more interesting, but I am finding it quite difficult to even locate the games. Missing on Steam for the lose. :/
Heavy Rain
Can. Not. Wait.
Feb 16, 2010 cannot come too soon.
2009 Video Games Retrospective 1
Sites all over seem to be doing one of these. I figure I may as well do my own for posterity.
Best Personal Gaming Experiences of 2009
Batman: Arkham Asylum - This one was a sleeper hit. Came out of nowhere, wasn't expecting it, and was very surprised at all the rave reviews that followed. I'm not really one for Marvel or DC universe superheroes, though admittedly the dark modern gothic-punk vigilante archetypes who are more villain than superhero take up significant room in my psyche. The game got put onto a "get sometime" list, and sometime came during the Steam Early holidays sale when it got slashed to half price.
On giving it a go, I knew I was in for a one-game marathon until done. Very few games hold me that way - all of them cinematic experiences. The graphics of Batman were very in tune with a 2009 release, almost PS3-like in its realism. The storytelling and voice acting had a suspense that rivaled that of Riddick, and I found I was looking forward to meeting each new yet familiar interpretation of Batman's arch-enemies. Gameplay nailed the feeling of being Batman, able to pound the crap out of a dozen minions, yet stealthy and intelligent and strategic and devious when he wants to be. Combat animations and action sequences were fluid, containing variants that never seemed to grow old. Best of all, it was easy to pick up and difficult to master; the narrow harrowing balance-seeking path to Shangri-La that few games get right. I never did figure out how to string combos longer than 7-8 hits until nearly finishing the game and toying with the separate challenges.
The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition (the remastered version) - In a way, it's kind of sad that my best game experiences of the year harken back to nostalgia. Then again, Monkey Island is a classic, that was very fondly relived.
One of the few games I actually bought on Steam for full price, the instant it was released, I regret it not one iota. I marathon'ed this one also, marveling at how faithfully it was put together and reflected the original, while significantly updating the graphics to a point which was no longer painfully pixelated to look upon. The voice-acting and score was also top-notch, nothing that jolted you out of the nostalgic immersion (a la Geoge Lucas' excesses of CGI effects), but instead layered on top for extra-crunchy goodness.
Indigo Prophecy - It's crazy, I know. It's not even a 2009 game and yet it ranks in the best gaming experience I've had this year? Well, it's not my fault if no one has succeeded yet in creating a heart-pounding emotional suspense and mystery the way Quantic Dream does it.
I've had good scares with F.E.A.R, I've enjoyed B movie teamwork versus zombies with Left 4 Dead, I've been immersed deeply in a Fallout 3 world, I've had some cinematic action thriller rollercoasters with Call of Duty 4, Batman, Riddick, etc. But not since 2005 has any game created an emotional buildup that lodges right into me and will not let go. Notice I keep stressing emotion. Years later, I had clean forgotten the details of the story on my replay, but the emotional immersion was just as addictive as I had remembered. Something about the camera angles, soft scenes, interactivity, voice acting and soundtrack digs in deep noir chords that are more reminiscent of the feelings you get watching Sin City or a good movie, versus playing a more normal game.
Admittedly, there is a sizeable amount of anticipation hype payoff in my recent Indigo Prophecy playthrough because I have been working myself up for Heavy Rain the entirety of this year with only glimpses of released cutscenes on preview sites to tide me over.
(No simple picture can recreate the mood this game builds. Instead, I shall point to a machinima someone made, which is essentially the game with all the interactivity removed. Indigo Prophecy Episode 1)
Honourable Mentions
aka Stuff I thought about, but didn't quite make the cut.
Aion - Nice graphics. Sweet animations. Best polearm combat I've seen in an MMO. I really dig the special mez they have which is a paralysis which freezes you right in the midst of a combat animation for a great-looking visual. I like the blend of PvE and open-world PvP in general. Grindy-ish. It's a good WoW 2.0 for people who don't like WoW and can put up with some oldschool non-easymode leveling. But let's face it, it's still the same old holy-trinity inspired MMO with a fancy coat of paint. Nothing uber-spectacular in terms of innovation.
Torchlight - It's like a more polished version of Dungeon Runners with none of the fart jokes. It's like a slick cartoony version of Diablo with none of the multiplayer goodness. It's a well-built levels and loot pinata. Good for some casual fun. Definitely worth $5 or $10, but I've shut out the memory of whether I paid $20 for it. Even if I did, it's not a loss, I've spent more for less gameplay (Spore, Final Fantasy MMO, etc.) But y'know, experience-wise, it's pewpewsliceslice cha-ching, oooh shiny, look how fast my weapon shoots, badaboom, ding!
Warhammer: Dawn of War 2 - Relic has balls for innovating on the franchise, I'll give them that. The original Dawn of War was a spectacular RTS that let you muck around with the fantastic races of WH40K and let each unit carve the other to bits in visually and thematically appropriate ways. It left the base-building convention in place while introducing control points for resource capture. Well, DoW2 ripped up the base-building, and I can't say it's better for it... just... different. The singleplayer of DoW2 is neat, a campaign where the tactical combat of DoW2 fits very neatly with the concept of Space Marines that bulk out in heftier and heftier wargear. I still can't get my mind around the multiplayer, by taking out base-building, it leaves a very micro-managing style of game where you run units around in five directions for resources, control and combat, hoping you can keep track of them better than other players or the computer (kinda a lost cause for a casual.)
The Sims 3 - It actually got me to buy a casual, 'girly' game. Quite a spectacular achievement. I enjoyed the mood variables (more random yet explainable interactions) and short-term goals (eat food! find a friend! get a job! They provided directional hints, basically.) and alternate career paths to success options that were missing in the earlier Sims, where you had to work an office career, marry and have 2.5 children in order to reach success. Didn't play it long, the mundane has a way of boring the crap out of me, alas.
Dragon Age: Origins - Just how many marketing tricks does one game need? Hype videos focused on blood, gore and heavy metal. A Flash game. A character creator 'demo.' Special items unlocked with bonus codes obtainable from various sources. A social networking site. Digital versions with 'exclusives' and DLC. I think I got more entertainment out of watching the marketing gimmicks than the game. The cutscene dialogues and characterisation/voice work was decent enough, but I am still stalled on the combat.
Without a D&D franchise, or perhaps because of WoW's pervasiveness, the combat is so MMO-like, it is personally quite apalling. Ranged > melee. The rogue has to position on flanks/backs for backstab attacks, which seem to be increased damage criticals. Mages get to spec into damage-dealing nukers, crowd-control/buff/debuff or healers. The warriors get taunt and a shield...or they can be two-handed damagers. Yes, you can pause and give orders, but once you unpause, everything flows in fluid real time and you're better off setting tactics so your henchie AI works for you. Normal combat is tank-and-spank, and begod, you'd better pull if there's too many for you. There are elites you have to dogpile once you clean up the trash in a hurry.
Big boss mobs appear to be like a raid boss, where positioning is important... at least, in the one big setpiece battle I finished, there was a gruesomely hard hitting, knock-backing ogre. It was mostly melee though, with one ranged rock attack you could kinda dodge. So after 4 repeated tries at tank-and-spank and watching my warrior get plastered because I had no healer, lacked significant aggro-holding, etc... I switched EVERYBODY to a ranged weapon, put them at 4 compass points, and whichever character got the ogre's aggro, I sat around pause-kiting the bastard to death. Took 5 minutes. Barely anyone got hurt. I'm sure some people were exceedingly thrilled at this - those who like to learn something once, that is. My reaction was mostly, OMG, why do I have to use MMO gameplay strategies in my RPG?
Best Personal Gaming Experiences of 2009
Batman: Arkham Asylum - This one was a sleeper hit. Came out of nowhere, wasn't expecting it, and was very surprised at all the rave reviews that followed. I'm not really one for Marvel or DC universe superheroes, though admittedly the dark modern gothic-punk vigilante archetypes who are more villain than superhero take up significant room in my psyche. The game got put onto a "get sometime" list, and sometime came during the Steam Early holidays sale when it got slashed to half price.
On giving it a go, I knew I was in for a one-game marathon until done. Very few games hold me that way - all of them cinematic experiences. The graphics of Batman were very in tune with a 2009 release, almost PS3-like in its realism. The storytelling and voice acting had a suspense that rivaled that of Riddick, and I found I was looking forward to meeting each new yet familiar interpretation of Batman's arch-enemies. Gameplay nailed the feeling of being Batman, able to pound the crap out of a dozen minions, yet stealthy and intelligent and strategic and devious when he wants to be. Combat animations and action sequences were fluid, containing variants that never seemed to grow old. Best of all, it was easy to pick up and difficult to master; the narrow harrowing balance-seeking path to Shangri-La that few games get right. I never did figure out how to string combos longer than 7-8 hits until nearly finishing the game and toying with the separate challenges.
The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition (the remastered version) - In a way, it's kind of sad that my best game experiences of the year harken back to nostalgia. Then again, Monkey Island is a classic, that was very fondly relived.
One of the few games I actually bought on Steam for full price, the instant it was released, I regret it not one iota. I marathon'ed this one also, marveling at how faithfully it was put together and reflected the original, while significantly updating the graphics to a point which was no longer painfully pixelated to look upon. The voice-acting and score was also top-notch, nothing that jolted you out of the nostalgic immersion (a la Geoge Lucas' excesses of CGI effects), but instead layered on top for extra-crunchy goodness.
Indigo Prophecy - It's crazy, I know. It's not even a 2009 game and yet it ranks in the best gaming experience I've had this year? Well, it's not my fault if no one has succeeded yet in creating a heart-pounding emotional suspense and mystery the way Quantic Dream does it.
I've had good scares with F.E.A.R, I've enjoyed B movie teamwork versus zombies with Left 4 Dead, I've been immersed deeply in a Fallout 3 world, I've had some cinematic action thriller rollercoasters with Call of Duty 4, Batman, Riddick, etc. But not since 2005 has any game created an emotional buildup that lodges right into me and will not let go. Notice I keep stressing emotion. Years later, I had clean forgotten the details of the story on my replay, but the emotional immersion was just as addictive as I had remembered. Something about the camera angles, soft scenes, interactivity, voice acting and soundtrack digs in deep noir chords that are more reminiscent of the feelings you get watching Sin City or a good movie, versus playing a more normal game.
Admittedly, there is a sizeable amount of anticipation hype payoff in my recent Indigo Prophecy playthrough because I have been working myself up for Heavy Rain the entirety of this year with only glimpses of released cutscenes on preview sites to tide me over.
(No simple picture can recreate the mood this game builds. Instead, I shall point to a machinima someone made, which is essentially the game with all the interactivity removed. Indigo Prophecy Episode 1)
Honourable Mentions
aka Stuff I thought about, but didn't quite make the cut.
Aion - Nice graphics. Sweet animations. Best polearm combat I've seen in an MMO. I really dig the special mez they have which is a paralysis which freezes you right in the midst of a combat animation for a great-looking visual. I like the blend of PvE and open-world PvP in general. Grindy-ish. It's a good WoW 2.0 for people who don't like WoW and can put up with some oldschool non-easymode leveling. But let's face it, it's still the same old holy-trinity inspired MMO with a fancy coat of paint. Nothing uber-spectacular in terms of innovation.
Torchlight - It's like a more polished version of Dungeon Runners with none of the fart jokes. It's like a slick cartoony version of Diablo with none of the multiplayer goodness. It's a well-built levels and loot pinata. Good for some casual fun. Definitely worth $5 or $10, but I've shut out the memory of whether I paid $20 for it. Even if I did, it's not a loss, I've spent more for less gameplay (Spore, Final Fantasy MMO, etc.) But y'know, experience-wise, it's pewpewsliceslice cha-ching, oooh shiny, look how fast my weapon shoots, badaboom, ding!
Warhammer: Dawn of War 2 - Relic has balls for innovating on the franchise, I'll give them that. The original Dawn of War was a spectacular RTS that let you muck around with the fantastic races of WH40K and let each unit carve the other to bits in visually and thematically appropriate ways. It left the base-building convention in place while introducing control points for resource capture. Well, DoW2 ripped up the base-building, and I can't say it's better for it... just... different. The singleplayer of DoW2 is neat, a campaign where the tactical combat of DoW2 fits very neatly with the concept of Space Marines that bulk out in heftier and heftier wargear. I still can't get my mind around the multiplayer, by taking out base-building, it leaves a very micro-managing style of game where you run units around in five directions for resources, control and combat, hoping you can keep track of them better than other players or the computer (kinda a lost cause for a casual.)
The Sims 3 - It actually got me to buy a casual, 'girly' game. Quite a spectacular achievement. I enjoyed the mood variables (more random yet explainable interactions) and short-term goals (eat food! find a friend! get a job! They provided directional hints, basically.) and alternate career paths to success options that were missing in the earlier Sims, where you had to work an office career, marry and have 2.5 children in order to reach success. Didn't play it long, the mundane has a way of boring the crap out of me, alas.
Dragon Age: Origins - Just how many marketing tricks does one game need? Hype videos focused on blood, gore and heavy metal. A Flash game. A character creator 'demo.' Special items unlocked with bonus codes obtainable from various sources. A social networking site. Digital versions with 'exclusives' and DLC. I think I got more entertainment out of watching the marketing gimmicks than the game. The cutscene dialogues and characterisation/voice work was decent enough, but I am still stalled on the combat.
Without a D&D franchise, or perhaps because of WoW's pervasiveness, the combat is so MMO-like, it is personally quite apalling. Ranged > melee. The rogue has to position on flanks/backs for backstab attacks, which seem to be increased damage criticals. Mages get to spec into damage-dealing nukers, crowd-control/buff/debuff or healers. The warriors get taunt and a shield...or they can be two-handed damagers. Yes, you can pause and give orders, but once you unpause, everything flows in fluid real time and you're better off setting tactics so your henchie AI works for you. Normal combat is tank-and-spank, and begod, you'd better pull if there's too many for you. There are elites you have to dogpile once you clean up the trash in a hurry.
Big boss mobs appear to be like a raid boss, where positioning is important... at least, in the one big setpiece battle I finished, there was a gruesomely hard hitting, knock-backing ogre. It was mostly melee though, with one ranged rock attack you could kinda dodge. So after 4 repeated tries at tank-and-spank and watching my warrior get plastered because I had no healer, lacked significant aggro-holding, etc... I switched EVERYBODY to a ranged weapon, put them at 4 compass points, and whichever character got the ogre's aggro, I sat around pause-kiting the bastard to death. Took 5 minutes. Barely anyone got hurt. I'm sure some people were exceedingly thrilled at this - those who like to learn something once, that is. My reaction was mostly, OMG, why do I have to use MMO gameplay strategies in my RPG?
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Necrophiliac Nostalgia
Just had an Indigo Prophecy marathon. Steam says I've been playing it 11-12 hours, sounds about right, except I took a break for lunch and dinner.
It's been years since my first playthrough. In retrospect, the palatability of the story has gone up from 60% OK to 80% OK.
(Mild spoilers follow. It's ok, the plot is bizarre enough that it won't make sense unless ya play the game, and the game is really to be played for the mood and emotion of the first part, which are the good bits.)
Playing with the benefit of hindsight let me pick up all the supernatural elements foreshadowed from the beginning. Thus armed, the frame around my worldview was broad enough to accept a sort of occult-themed genre, even when the story took a leap off the roller coaster into Illuminati conspiracies and end of the world-saving stuff.
I was even ok with the Matrix-like Neo elements of crazy ass midair kungfu and slo-mo bullet dodges. As I said, my frame of reference was a more Unknown Armies or Mage: The Ascension viewpoint - where one starts out like any ordinary mortal and then suddenly has his or her eyes Opened and Awakened to the crazy shit that exists between the cracks of the city.
Taken from that slightly off-kilter supernatural-esque RPG angle, a lot of the previously fucked up batshit that I'd called a turd of a narrative in the last part of the game was relatively believable... as long as I suspended disbelief from a "Magic Exists in this World of Darkness" perspective.
EXCEPT
It is still terribly obvious that there is a big gaping hole where the plot for a trilogy was intended to be somewhere in the later three-quarters of the game.
The deal-breaker this time around was some shit-sloppy characterisation of a previously very sympathetic tough-as-nails female detective named Carla Valenti.
For three quarters of the game, she is a fantastic US Marshals-like focused police investigator, hot on the heels of the male protagonist Lucas Kane, wanted for a bizarre ritualistic murder.
She slowly experiences her own version of Awakening to the strangeness of the world, discovering inconsistencies with the seemingly open-and-shut murder case, and bumping up against the supernatural in several incidents. This leads her to believe that Lucas is no ordinary killer and start giving him the benefit of the doubt, to the point where she meets up with him and in swapping tales, realize that the stakes are way higher than their individual confrontational struggle.
So far so good. They make a pact within the same scene to save the world. Okaaay, that's a teensy bit of a stretch, but still swallow-able.
At this point, the story falls completely off the rails in terms of plot devices. (The suspicion is that this tale was originally meant to be a trilogy, Quantic Dream's publisher up and defaulted on them, leading them to beg a teensy amount of money from Atari who would only sponsor them for Uno Game. One. Yi ger. No more. So suddenly two games worth of plot had to be compressed into about three chapters.)
Carla's characterisation also takes a screaming plunge off plausible into puke-inducing stereotypical love interest, mixed with a good dose of wtf.
Y'see, somewhere in the supernatural mix, Lucas actually dies... and is resurrected Gandalf-like to finish his saving-the-world destiny. And Carla NOTICES that his body is not warm. His hands are cold as ice. His breath doesn't form clouds in the depths of winter. Lucas is Zombie Neo.
For whatever reason, this makes him completely irresistable. Carla keeps giving him googly eyes. On the penultimate day before the Ultimate Ragnarok Battle, Carla curls up on a mattress in a run-down apocalyptic-style train station besides Lucas... and decides to have hot zombie sex with him. Or rather, should I say COLD zombie sex.
As if this is not cringe-inducing enough... after all, I can juuuuuuuuuuust about, if I try veeeeeeeeeeeery hard, pretend that this is an END OF THE WORLD hot brief lust affair for warmth and human comfort...
...Carla's fucked up scriptwriter decides to make her confess her deep undying attraction to Zombie Neo. "I love you, Lucas" she says. Fade to black...
(...and the sounds of a million players retching in horror.)
I doubt any number of playthroughs makes this betrayal of characterisation redeemable. It still feels just as wrong as before.
Everything else, whacky mystical and symbolic bits and all, was foreshadowed. Besides an awkward reference to a special 'child' foretold earlier on, there is just no bloody conceivable way that Carla and Lucas, as the story is presented, should be shagging.
Here's the part that really leaves me feeling cheated. There's a plainly written gap of 27 days between Carla and Lucas' first potentially distrustful meeting where she realizes that this guy is stone cold in a literal sense... and the part where the world has frozen over and the doomsday of the universe is due to begin at midnight the next day, and Carla goes "did you know I love you Lucas, let's fuck."
What the sam hill happened in those 27 days?
A ton could have happened. Or just a few significant events that would draw Carla and Lucas closer together and thus made the culmination a little easier to handle.
(Except the concept of making love to a cold dead body is still grounds for lots of eew.)
But because the audience is never shown this, and the story moves way too fast at the last bit, we're left clutching our heads going, what the hell? And trying to block out all the painful traumatic bits while remembering the sweet parts of Indigo Prophecy.
The silver lining in the cloud: David Cage seems to have recognized his screwed-up ending error. The world was given a little taste of the storytelling and emotion-building potential of the video game genre. For what it's worth, Indigo Prophecy broke a lot of new ground, even as it chewed up the plot ground it stood upon and revealed exactly what audiences loved and what they simply would not stand for.
I am so looking forward to its spiritual successor - Heavy Rain, in the hopes that this time, they do it right, and that this time, having proven that there is market potential in even the flawed Indigo Prophecy, they only release it when it's good and done.
(At least there are no gaping vagina-toothed alien space monsters that I hear Borderlands destroyed all player trust with.)
It's been years since my first playthrough. In retrospect, the palatability of the story has gone up from 60% OK to 80% OK.
(Mild spoilers follow. It's ok, the plot is bizarre enough that it won't make sense unless ya play the game, and the game is really to be played for the mood and emotion of the first part, which are the good bits.)
Playing with the benefit of hindsight let me pick up all the supernatural elements foreshadowed from the beginning. Thus armed, the frame around my worldview was broad enough to accept a sort of occult-themed genre, even when the story took a leap off the roller coaster into Illuminati conspiracies and end of the world-saving stuff.
I was even ok with the Matrix-like Neo elements of crazy ass midair kungfu and slo-mo bullet dodges. As I said, my frame of reference was a more Unknown Armies or Mage: The Ascension viewpoint - where one starts out like any ordinary mortal and then suddenly has his or her eyes Opened and Awakened to the crazy shit that exists between the cracks of the city.
Taken from that slightly off-kilter supernatural-esque RPG angle, a lot of the previously fucked up batshit that I'd called a turd of a narrative in the last part of the game was relatively believable... as long as I suspended disbelief from a "Magic Exists in this World of Darkness" perspective.
EXCEPT
It is still terribly obvious that there is a big gaping hole where the plot for a trilogy was intended to be somewhere in the later three-quarters of the game.
The deal-breaker this time around was some shit-sloppy characterisation of a previously very sympathetic tough-as-nails female detective named Carla Valenti.
For three quarters of the game, she is a fantastic US Marshals-like focused police investigator, hot on the heels of the male protagonist Lucas Kane, wanted for a bizarre ritualistic murder.
She slowly experiences her own version of Awakening to the strangeness of the world, discovering inconsistencies with the seemingly open-and-shut murder case, and bumping up against the supernatural in several incidents. This leads her to believe that Lucas is no ordinary killer and start giving him the benefit of the doubt, to the point where she meets up with him and in swapping tales, realize that the stakes are way higher than their individual confrontational struggle.
So far so good. They make a pact within the same scene to save the world. Okaaay, that's a teensy bit of a stretch, but still swallow-able.
At this point, the story falls completely off the rails in terms of plot devices. (The suspicion is that this tale was originally meant to be a trilogy, Quantic Dream's publisher up and defaulted on them, leading them to beg a teensy amount of money from Atari who would only sponsor them for Uno Game. One. Yi ger. No more. So suddenly two games worth of plot had to be compressed into about three chapters.)
Carla's characterisation also takes a screaming plunge off plausible into puke-inducing stereotypical love interest, mixed with a good dose of wtf.
Y'see, somewhere in the supernatural mix, Lucas actually dies... and is resurrected Gandalf-like to finish his saving-the-world destiny. And Carla NOTICES that his body is not warm. His hands are cold as ice. His breath doesn't form clouds in the depths of winter. Lucas is Zombie Neo.
For whatever reason, this makes him completely irresistable. Carla keeps giving him googly eyes. On the penultimate day before the Ultimate Ragnarok Battle, Carla curls up on a mattress in a run-down apocalyptic-style train station besides Lucas... and decides to have hot zombie sex with him. Or rather, should I say COLD zombie sex.
As if this is not cringe-inducing enough... after all, I can juuuuuuuuuuust about, if I try veeeeeeeeeeeery hard, pretend that this is an END OF THE WORLD hot brief lust affair for warmth and human comfort...
...Carla's fucked up scriptwriter decides to make her confess her deep undying attraction to Zombie Neo. "I love you, Lucas" she says. Fade to black...
(...and the sounds of a million players retching in horror.)
I doubt any number of playthroughs makes this betrayal of characterisation redeemable. It still feels just as wrong as before.
Everything else, whacky mystical and symbolic bits and all, was foreshadowed. Besides an awkward reference to a special 'child' foretold earlier on, there is just no bloody conceivable way that Carla and Lucas, as the story is presented, should be shagging.
Here's the part that really leaves me feeling cheated. There's a plainly written gap of 27 days between Carla and Lucas' first potentially distrustful meeting where she realizes that this guy is stone cold in a literal sense... and the part where the world has frozen over and the doomsday of the universe is due to begin at midnight the next day, and Carla goes "did you know I love you Lucas, let's fuck."
What the sam hill happened in those 27 days?
A ton could have happened. Or just a few significant events that would draw Carla and Lucas closer together and thus made the culmination a little easier to handle.
(Except the concept of making love to a cold dead body is still grounds for lots of eew.)
But because the audience is never shown this, and the story moves way too fast at the last bit, we're left clutching our heads going, what the hell? And trying to block out all the painful traumatic bits while remembering the sweet parts of Indigo Prophecy.
The silver lining in the cloud: David Cage seems to have recognized his screwed-up ending error. The world was given a little taste of the storytelling and emotion-building potential of the video game genre. For what it's worth, Indigo Prophecy broke a lot of new ground, even as it chewed up the plot ground it stood upon and revealed exactly what audiences loved and what they simply would not stand for.
I am so looking forward to its spiritual successor - Heavy Rain, in the hopes that this time, they do it right, and that this time, having proven that there is market potential in even the flawed Indigo Prophecy, they only release it when it's good and done.
(At least there are no gaping vagina-toothed alien space monsters that I hear Borderlands destroyed all player trust with.)
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Holy Holidays Steam Sales!
I missed being the first to lurk around their website. Keen and Graev clued people in first. But this is insane, 100s of games on offer, with the periodic bonus deals with 34 hours left on the clock.
May I point out that Defense Grid: The Awakening is a crazy steal at $2.50 if you like tower defense type games in the slightest?
I think I got it for $5 or $10 and I don't regret the price I paid for it at all. Very high production values. Good strategic tower defense game.
Mirror's Edge at $5 is the same price they offered during the early holidays sale. I can't say any more than that as I haven't tried the game out yet.
Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl is ridiculously cheap at $2. Yes. $2. Or $1.99 to be penny-pinchingly exact. I have to say it's not exactly a fantastic FPS, but it's got sort of Fallout 3 scenery, decently voiced NPCs and some kind of freeform quest system which I kinda lost the thread of and lost interest in the game shortly after.
The Eidos Collector's Pack is a hefty $50, after a 50% discount, but when you consider it includes Batman: Arkham Asylum (which is going for $33.49) as well as a shitload of other games - including Deus Ex (oldie but goodie, apparently), the Hitman series (decent but not spectacular), some Tomb Raider bits, a Thief game and some lesser known extras... It's also CRAZY. In a good way. Heck, I'm wishing I didn't already own so many of the games in there so that I could justify getting it.
Try not to look too hard at the obscene prices The Witcher and Chronicles of Riddick are going for this Christmas. Not to mention, if I'd waited a little longer, I could have picked up a $10 month-long trial of Champions Online. Oh well.
In fact, make up for it with Indigo Prophecy, at $3.39.
I own the bloody game, and I honestly can't be arsed to find the disk to go through the install...and then download whatever patch there is. For that price, I'm tempted to just get it, let Steam install it for me, and play it.
This is perfect timing, as Quantic Dream's next offering - Heavy Rain is coming out in early 2010... I hope. I've been waiting for a year with a PS3 for Heavy Rain (good thing I got it 'free' off starhub with one of their ubiquitous bonus deals...goodness knows how much we've actually been paying starhub to warrant a free PS3)
If you like adventure games, Telltale Games is offering the most insane EVeRYthing pack for $50. That's Sam & Max seasons 1 and 2, Wallace and Gromit, and Tales of Monkey Island and some other extras.
I guess I am forewarned for next year. Anything I can put off til Christmas, I should do so.
May I point out that Defense Grid: The Awakening is a crazy steal at $2.50 if you like tower defense type games in the slightest?
I think I got it for $5 or $10 and I don't regret the price I paid for it at all. Very high production values. Good strategic tower defense game.
Mirror's Edge at $5 is the same price they offered during the early holidays sale. I can't say any more than that as I haven't tried the game out yet.
Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl is ridiculously cheap at $2. Yes. $2. Or $1.99 to be penny-pinchingly exact. I have to say it's not exactly a fantastic FPS, but it's got sort of Fallout 3 scenery, decently voiced NPCs and some kind of freeform quest system which I kinda lost the thread of and lost interest in the game shortly after.
The Eidos Collector's Pack is a hefty $50, after a 50% discount, but when you consider it includes Batman: Arkham Asylum (which is going for $33.49) as well as a shitload of other games - including Deus Ex (oldie but goodie, apparently), the Hitman series (decent but not spectacular), some Tomb Raider bits, a Thief game and some lesser known extras... It's also CRAZY. In a good way. Heck, I'm wishing I didn't already own so many of the games in there so that I could justify getting it.
Try not to look too hard at the obscene prices The Witcher and Chronicles of Riddick are going for this Christmas. Not to mention, if I'd waited a little longer, I could have picked up a $10 month-long trial of Champions Online. Oh well.
In fact, make up for it with Indigo Prophecy, at $3.39.
I own the bloody game, and I honestly can't be arsed to find the disk to go through the install...and then download whatever patch there is. For that price, I'm tempted to just get it, let Steam install it for me, and play it.
This is perfect timing, as Quantic Dream's next offering - Heavy Rain is coming out in early 2010... I hope. I've been waiting for a year with a PS3 for Heavy Rain (good thing I got it 'free' off starhub with one of their ubiquitous bonus deals...goodness knows how much we've actually been paying starhub to warrant a free PS3)
If you like adventure games, Telltale Games is offering the most insane EVeRYthing pack for $50. That's Sam & Max seasons 1 and 2, Wallace and Gromit, and Tales of Monkey Island and some other extras.
I guess I am forewarned for next year. Anything I can put off til Christmas, I should do so.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Game Lifespan
Could it be? Is this representative? 3000+ players of one multiplayer game responded to a census survey, of which one of the questions was:
Time Playing
* Less than half a year: 7%
* Less than a year: 7%
* 1 year: 13%
* 2 years: 20%
* 3 years: 26%
* 4 years: 16%
* 5 years: 7%
* More! 4%
It fits my hypothesis (that chances are quite likely, by the 4th year, despite how much you like an MMO, you're going to burn out and quit, at least for a little while for a break) and is a nice bell curve to boot.
Time Playing
* Less than half a year: 7%
* Less than a year: 7%
* 1 year: 13%
* 2 years: 20%
* 3 years: 26%
* 4 years: 16%
* 5 years: 7%
* More! 4%
It fits my hypothesis (that chances are quite likely, by the 4th year, despite how much you like an MMO, you're going to burn out and quit, at least for a little while for a break) and is a nice bell curve to boot.
System Seduction - Teams!
I'm frappin' nuts.
Call it my Seeker or Explorer nature or what have you, but I have this crazy love (some might say obsession) with learning more about new systems in game mechanics/design.
Especially when they are clever tweaks to promote team play.
Cooperation is a rare thing in the first iteration of games that "graduated" past two or more players sitting in front of a shared monitor screen offering hints/tips/advice in physical form.
In FPSes, the first multiplayer implemented was free-for-all deathmatches. Pewpew. Haha, I got more kills than you! Competitive in leaderboards and point score.
I watched games that promote teamplay in FPSes with much fascination. There was Counterstrike, which simulated the whole terrorists versus counter-terrorist aspect, and the crazy-at-the-time notion of asymmetrical but equivalent team goals - plant the bomb, defuse the bomb!
Team Fortress Classic brought the concept of classes. Specialist gameplay to allow different players' strengths to shine. A scoreboard that reflected not just player kills, but also an overall team score. The burgeoning notion that even if you had 100 kills and your team lost, it was a crushing defeat.
Natural Selection brought in even crazier ideas. A Commander for the Marines who had a top-down view and created an overall strategy that the aliens had to react to. Asymmetrical routes that small aliens could take to ambush marines. Different combat styles and classes and even structure-building. The notion of sacrificing individual points for overall team success. Maps that funneled players to LOOK in the same direction together for more comradely feeling.
Sure, there were other games. Day of Defeat brought a more lethal few-shots-dead system into play, forcing you to stick together, rush together or die in a turkeyshoot. I'm sure Call of Duty and the Battlefield games and Tribes brought their own design spins on teamplay into the mix, I just have no experience with them.
The crowning pinnacle of co-op teamplay design in FPSes still has to go to the Left 4 Dead throne. At least for now. Never before has an FPS so sneakily reinforced the notion that if you don't stick together, you DIE. Seeing other players through walls in any other game is called a "hack" and a "cheat." Here, they turned it into an information device so that players can find each other. You have the whole "look in the same direction" aspect that brings people together. Friendly fire isn't. Should you give in to the urge, the entire game is derailed and the experience sucks shortly after.
So suffice it to say that sampling MMO teamplay design is another crazy lure of mine.
A lot of MMOs do it poorly. Very poorly. Especially MMOs in the classic fantasy vein.
The LFG tool is usually a chat channel. LFG LFG LFG! LFM! LF HEALER, GTG once we got one! PLEASE?
It's fun to see how CoX twisted the player search tool into a relatively decent one for teams, yet the etiquette is still to send a tell first. CoX also has the benefit of being FUN and non-stressful to team due to non-holy trinity reliance and room for "leechers." More on that later.
WoW's new LFG tool is the talk of the town. It's just a spin on automated player-matching that FPSes and PvP battleground/scenarios do all the time, really. Except going cross-server really opens up the pool of available players (at that time, at that level range, wanting to do one particular dungeon instance.)
Therein lies the problems with the classic system. It's stressful to team. It's a high-stakes gamble. You're driven by greed for a tangible reward, else you wouldn't put yourself through the agony. What agony? Travel time to the dungeon instance. Risking costly death penalties due to another's poor performance. Hoping you've a tank that knows the map and how to tank/hold aggro. Waiting for a healer who masochistically enjoys playing whack a mole with green bars. Praying no one in the team is clumsy on the keys and accidentally pulls aggro that would wipe the party out without a chance to recover. You creep forward, one mob group at a time. It's such a pain to fight that wherever you can avoid it, you do... by hugging close to walls and platforming on cliffs that weren't really meant to be scaled in order to save time towards the last boss who holds the reward. That MAY pop. That you MAY win, with a lucky dice roll. If your teammates weren't jerks who ninja'ed it away from you by needing when they were supposed to greed. Repeat until reward won.
Or you hit burnout with the system as the case may be. Did I mention that if you're a healer or tank, you're doubly screwed? You have no chance to practice what you're supposed to be doing in a team unless you're with friends who are really patient while you're learning. PUGs expect you to know wtf you're doing or they kick or run out of patience and run away in a hurry.
Me, I gave up the notion of teaming in LOTRO simply because I'm a tank who has no time to learn the dungeons, and has poor gear due to very casual gameplay. Fortunately, Turbine realises they have a ton of such soloists in the world and adjusted the Guardian class to be a decent soloer at the cost of tankiness, and the new Skirmishes give me some of the mass chaos of a multi-character brawl without actually having to talk to another player. So yay. (That's not to say that LOTRO doesn't support some very strong social bonds from its setting. It's just how I play LOTRO.)
Aion is my WoW 2.0. The lore and graphics just attract me a lot more. It pretty much copies the old classic system in every damnable way, just shy of the forced teaming that would make me quit. I put up with it now and then because I missed the whole experience in WoW, but the more I learn, the more I get fed up with grouping. I do it because I want to speak knowledgeably about the whole teaming shebang, but I'll be damned if I can put up with raiding 3-7 times a week in any game.
Some games tweak the grouping system a little.
Some force cooperation for survival and profit. Darkfall Online or Eve Online is much better played in big groups, but alas, the finding of the groups is still sink-or-swim. You'd better have done your research and found your friends, or if you die as a newbie, too damned bad, tis your fault. It's one way of doing it, but I'm a little too carebear for that, so I prefer not to sample beyond a no-stakes trial.
Some don't force cooperation at all. They let you rely on yourself more often than not. Oddly enough, I consider all these pretty fail games. Champions Online, Fallen Earth, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa are the only examples that come to mind offhand. Yes, you can team. Not sure why you would want to. There's rarely any synergy unless you build specifically for teaming. No higher-stake reward/incentive (be it actual loot or fun.) Sometimes, it's even feels like it's fighting the game design in order to play together with friends.
Seems like the key is to offer a balance. And viable choices between the two extremes.
Age of Conan lets you band together for survival in a PvP server. You have your PvE raids where people group for greed/loot. Solo quest if you want to. WoW, LOTRO, Aion, Vanguard, EQ, WAR, you name it, they generally follow this multiple option vein.
I have a deep abiding fascination for MMO games that move past this model though.
Guild Wars brought us the hirelings to form your own team. It brought us big-sized mob groups that have linked aggro, mobs with class skills, using tactics like a PvP team.
DDO instituted the reward only at the end of the dungeon. No mid-dungeon combat xp. You log out halfway, you forfeit it all. Ouch. It's a design decision I don't personally agree with, but I gotta give credit where it's due for being -different-. And they happily copied Guild Wars for hireling companions, and brought in solo options and micro-transactions when they realised their forced teaming decisions were sinking them quite steadily. Guess we are learning what the market can support.
I'm crazy about A Tale in the Desert's sneaky socio-political teaming aspect. They start you off with tasks that anyone can solo. They put in bottlenecks which could be conquered by reinventing the wheel on your own, with sufficient time and grinding... or if you're just not stubborn about independence, by being friendly and accepting other people's help. (Or a free public facility built by others out of the generosity of their hearts and desire to encourage newbies to stick around.)
ATITD has tasks which force you to talk to people. Or you just don't get the task done. Your choice. There are tasks that bring you in competition with people, and tasks that get you to cooperate with people. Your choice. You can barter trade with people for tasks they're better at. Like it or not, you are interacting with people. Somehow. It's not quite close-knit teaming, but the design naturally forces you to form a community.
You SEE the same people in your region. You HEAR them over a regional chat. REGIONAL chat, mind you. They see and hear you. It's a niche game, so everyone remembers each other's names. There are tasks you can do as a duo. As a quartet. And larger weirdass numbers like 7 and 11-12 and as big a region as you can possibly beg/con/persuade into helping you. The entire game is built around accomplishing these tasks that make you interact with people. It's nuts. It's crazy clever nuts.
It's only too bad that some of the easier tasks get hopelessly repetitive and chore-like, and some of the harder tasks involve way too much brainpower, spreadsheet calculations, and extended lengths of time like 1-6 RL months. (Obvious timesink is obvious.) The middle ground tasks are more skill reliant and nice, though there are a few time critical ones which can get obsessively nuts. (8 hour stopwatch, log in, tend, log out! Kinda Eve-like.)
But still cool because the systems are so different.
(Kingdom of Loathing is different and cool too, but I've never tried their teaming mechanic, so I can't comment.)
Now I've found another seduction of systems. Puzzle Pirates is built around puzzles. Normally found as casual flash games, these puzzles have evolved around their own pirate-y theme. They challenge the intellect, being easy to pick up and hard to master. I'll go into combat mechanics another time.
I'm a fan of their teamplay. There's the option to solo in Puzzle Pirates: it's called sailing with the navy, and is useful for practising puzzles in a non-stressful setting and improving one's puzzle standings. It yields small returns, but still something, and can be done in very piecemeal bites. Good for people who have to AFK in a hurry.
But ah, pillaging with a crew is where it's at. That is the standard accepted manner of gameplay, so at all hours of the day, you're going to find people looking for PUGs.
Newbies get automatic hyperlinks to click that send job queries to captains seeking crew members. So far, the folks I've met are very accepting of newbies. Maybe it's my particular crew who are highly supportive, but I like it. What I find deeply ironic yet encouraging is that I barely talk and I still get automatic acceptance.
Perhaps it's the culture of the game. It's hard to type and chat if you're dragging a puzzle around, trying to do your best. Maybe these guys have learned that the best way to encourage a newbie to stick around and develop an addiction to the game is to keep dangling temptations in the newbie's face.
Each pirate player contributes to the running of a ship. The captain gets to navigate and battle navigate. Officers (more trusted members of the crew) tend to man the guns (it's a minigame that takes a considerable amount of skill). The normal grunts and rookies get to sail/rig, do carpentry and work the bilge (duty puzzles.)
Each is a minigame puzzle, and your skill at it contributes to the overall successful running of the ship. It's well-arranged in the sense that each of the tasks grows in complexity. Frankly, I don't want to learn about battle-navigation as a newbie, it's all I can do to master the main duty puzzles. I'll be ready for that later.
I love the sense of contribution. If you do poorly, the ship does poorly. Conversely, if everyone does well (or passably), the ship runs well and you get to rob NPC brigands and pirates for loot that is shared out at the end of the pillage. Captain decides how the loot is split, and quite amusingly, most captains do an even split. It seems the principles of cooperation and altruism are alive and well in Puzzle Pirates.
This free-to-play MMO has incorporated one important principle. Teaming has to be fun. You're not bound to stay the entire pillage by the way. Even if you leave earlier, you get your share of the booty dependent on how many ship battles you were present for. People bounce in and out as their time permits, with the more hardcore staying and sailing on to reap more rewards.
If anything, the temptation comes from my crew. After I stayed on for a pillage, I found myself promoted from jobbing pirate/cabin boy to full fledged crew member and Pirate rank. (Except that to reap the benefits of Pirate rank, you need a Pirate badge which costs 1 Doubloon.)
Thank goodness for the Doubloon Exchange. I had 6000 pieces of eight I wasn't going to spend on vanity cosmetics, so what the heck, I picked up 1 Doubloon and bought the Pirate badge. This unlocked the Gunnery minipuzzle for me to try out and some other stuff (like getting a fair Pirate's share at the end of the pillage.) Nice enough.
Today, I found myself sneaking on to practice some puzzles. (Shhhh...) I went sailing with the NPC navy and put myself on the Do-Not-Disturb mode I newly discovered. Interesting twist on AFK, shutting off chat channels, tells, invites, etc.
Mid-puzzle, mysteriously, I noticed a message turn up saying, you need a badge to enjoy all the privileges of your rank. Huh? What rank? Did the Navy promote me when I wasn't looking? What the hell unlocked?
Eventually, I discovered someone in my crew sneak promoted me to Officer rank from Pirate. Talk about blind press-ganging! Being an Officer allows you to buy/sail your own ship, probably unlocks more minipuzzles and so on. It also costs 8 Doubloons to get an Officer badge.
Ehh... Personally, I'm not ready yet to take the leap to Officer. Tis not the money. I'd spend $10 on Puzzle Pirates over $15 on Champions Online. Tis the responsibilities and the learning of MORE puzzles that I don't want to deal with just yet.
Call it my Seeker or Explorer nature or what have you, but I have this crazy love (some might say obsession) with learning more about new systems in game mechanics/design.
Especially when they are clever tweaks to promote team play.
Cooperation is a rare thing in the first iteration of games that "graduated" past two or more players sitting in front of a shared monitor screen offering hints/tips/advice in physical form.
In FPSes, the first multiplayer implemented was free-for-all deathmatches. Pewpew. Haha, I got more kills than you! Competitive in leaderboards and point score.
I watched games that promote teamplay in FPSes with much fascination. There was Counterstrike, which simulated the whole terrorists versus counter-terrorist aspect, and the crazy-at-the-time notion of asymmetrical but equivalent team goals - plant the bomb, defuse the bomb!
Team Fortress Classic brought the concept of classes. Specialist gameplay to allow different players' strengths to shine. A scoreboard that reflected not just player kills, but also an overall team score. The burgeoning notion that even if you had 100 kills and your team lost, it was a crushing defeat.
Natural Selection brought in even crazier ideas. A Commander for the Marines who had a top-down view and created an overall strategy that the aliens had to react to. Asymmetrical routes that small aliens could take to ambush marines. Different combat styles and classes and even structure-building. The notion of sacrificing individual points for overall team success. Maps that funneled players to LOOK in the same direction together for more comradely feeling.
Sure, there were other games. Day of Defeat brought a more lethal few-shots-dead system into play, forcing you to stick together, rush together or die in a turkeyshoot. I'm sure Call of Duty and the Battlefield games and Tribes brought their own design spins on teamplay into the mix, I just have no experience with them.
The crowning pinnacle of co-op teamplay design in FPSes still has to go to the Left 4 Dead throne. At least for now. Never before has an FPS so sneakily reinforced the notion that if you don't stick together, you DIE. Seeing other players through walls in any other game is called a "hack" and a "cheat." Here, they turned it into an information device so that players can find each other. You have the whole "look in the same direction" aspect that brings people together. Friendly fire isn't. Should you give in to the urge, the entire game is derailed and the experience sucks shortly after.
So suffice it to say that sampling MMO teamplay design is another crazy lure of mine.
A lot of MMOs do it poorly. Very poorly. Especially MMOs in the classic fantasy vein.
The LFG tool is usually a chat channel. LFG LFG LFG! LFM! LF HEALER, GTG once we got one! PLEASE?
It's fun to see how CoX twisted the player search tool into a relatively decent one for teams, yet the etiquette is still to send a tell first. CoX also has the benefit of being FUN and non-stressful to team due to non-holy trinity reliance and room for "leechers." More on that later.
WoW's new LFG tool is the talk of the town. It's just a spin on automated player-matching that FPSes and PvP battleground/scenarios do all the time, really. Except going cross-server really opens up the pool of available players (at that time, at that level range, wanting to do one particular dungeon instance.)
Therein lies the problems with the classic system. It's stressful to team. It's a high-stakes gamble. You're driven by greed for a tangible reward, else you wouldn't put yourself through the agony. What agony? Travel time to the dungeon instance. Risking costly death penalties due to another's poor performance. Hoping you've a tank that knows the map and how to tank/hold aggro. Waiting for a healer who masochistically enjoys playing whack a mole with green bars. Praying no one in the team is clumsy on the keys and accidentally pulls aggro that would wipe the party out without a chance to recover. You creep forward, one mob group at a time. It's such a pain to fight that wherever you can avoid it, you do... by hugging close to walls and platforming on cliffs that weren't really meant to be scaled in order to save time towards the last boss who holds the reward. That MAY pop. That you MAY win, with a lucky dice roll. If your teammates weren't jerks who ninja'ed it away from you by needing when they were supposed to greed. Repeat until reward won.
Or you hit burnout with the system as the case may be. Did I mention that if you're a healer or tank, you're doubly screwed? You have no chance to practice what you're supposed to be doing in a team unless you're with friends who are really patient while you're learning. PUGs expect you to know wtf you're doing or they kick or run out of patience and run away in a hurry.
Me, I gave up the notion of teaming in LOTRO simply because I'm a tank who has no time to learn the dungeons, and has poor gear due to very casual gameplay. Fortunately, Turbine realises they have a ton of such soloists in the world and adjusted the Guardian class to be a decent soloer at the cost of tankiness, and the new Skirmishes give me some of the mass chaos of a multi-character brawl without actually having to talk to another player. So yay. (That's not to say that LOTRO doesn't support some very strong social bonds from its setting. It's just how I play LOTRO.)
Aion is my WoW 2.0. The lore and graphics just attract me a lot more. It pretty much copies the old classic system in every damnable way, just shy of the forced teaming that would make me quit. I put up with it now and then because I missed the whole experience in WoW, but the more I learn, the more I get fed up with grouping. I do it because I want to speak knowledgeably about the whole teaming shebang, but I'll be damned if I can put up with raiding 3-7 times a week in any game.
Some games tweak the grouping system a little.
Some force cooperation for survival and profit. Darkfall Online or Eve Online is much better played in big groups, but alas, the finding of the groups is still sink-or-swim. You'd better have done your research and found your friends, or if you die as a newbie, too damned bad, tis your fault. It's one way of doing it, but I'm a little too carebear for that, so I prefer not to sample beyond a no-stakes trial.
Some don't force cooperation at all. They let you rely on yourself more often than not. Oddly enough, I consider all these pretty fail games. Champions Online, Fallen Earth, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa are the only examples that come to mind offhand. Yes, you can team. Not sure why you would want to. There's rarely any synergy unless you build specifically for teaming. No higher-stake reward/incentive (be it actual loot or fun.) Sometimes, it's even feels like it's fighting the game design in order to play together with friends.
Seems like the key is to offer a balance. And viable choices between the two extremes.
Age of Conan lets you band together for survival in a PvP server. You have your PvE raids where people group for greed/loot. Solo quest if you want to. WoW, LOTRO, Aion, Vanguard, EQ, WAR, you name it, they generally follow this multiple option vein.
I have a deep abiding fascination for MMO games that move past this model though.
Guild Wars brought us the hirelings to form your own team. It brought us big-sized mob groups that have linked aggro, mobs with class skills, using tactics like a PvP team.
DDO instituted the reward only at the end of the dungeon. No mid-dungeon combat xp. You log out halfway, you forfeit it all. Ouch. It's a design decision I don't personally agree with, but I gotta give credit where it's due for being -different-. And they happily copied Guild Wars for hireling companions, and brought in solo options and micro-transactions when they realised their forced teaming decisions were sinking them quite steadily. Guess we are learning what the market can support.
I'm crazy about A Tale in the Desert's sneaky socio-political teaming aspect. They start you off with tasks that anyone can solo. They put in bottlenecks which could be conquered by reinventing the wheel on your own, with sufficient time and grinding... or if you're just not stubborn about independence, by being friendly and accepting other people's help. (Or a free public facility built by others out of the generosity of their hearts and desire to encourage newbies to stick around.)
ATITD has tasks which force you to talk to people. Or you just don't get the task done. Your choice. There are tasks that bring you in competition with people, and tasks that get you to cooperate with people. Your choice. You can barter trade with people for tasks they're better at. Like it or not, you are interacting with people. Somehow. It's not quite close-knit teaming, but the design naturally forces you to form a community.
You SEE the same people in your region. You HEAR them over a regional chat. REGIONAL chat, mind you. They see and hear you. It's a niche game, so everyone remembers each other's names. There are tasks you can do as a duo. As a quartet. And larger weirdass numbers like 7 and 11-12 and as big a region as you can possibly beg/con/persuade into helping you. The entire game is built around accomplishing these tasks that make you interact with people. It's nuts. It's crazy clever nuts.
It's only too bad that some of the easier tasks get hopelessly repetitive and chore-like, and some of the harder tasks involve way too much brainpower, spreadsheet calculations, and extended lengths of time like 1-6 RL months. (Obvious timesink is obvious.) The middle ground tasks are more skill reliant and nice, though there are a few time critical ones which can get obsessively nuts. (8 hour stopwatch, log in, tend, log out! Kinda Eve-like.)
But still cool because the systems are so different.
(Kingdom of Loathing is different and cool too, but I've never tried their teaming mechanic, so I can't comment.)
Now I've found another seduction of systems. Puzzle Pirates is built around puzzles. Normally found as casual flash games, these puzzles have evolved around their own pirate-y theme. They challenge the intellect, being easy to pick up and hard to master. I'll go into combat mechanics another time.
I'm a fan of their teamplay. There's the option to solo in Puzzle Pirates: it's called sailing with the navy, and is useful for practising puzzles in a non-stressful setting and improving one's puzzle standings. It yields small returns, but still something, and can be done in very piecemeal bites. Good for people who have to AFK in a hurry.
But ah, pillaging with a crew is where it's at. That is the standard accepted manner of gameplay, so at all hours of the day, you're going to find people looking for PUGs.
Newbies get automatic hyperlinks to click that send job queries to captains seeking crew members. So far, the folks I've met are very accepting of newbies. Maybe it's my particular crew who are highly supportive, but I like it. What I find deeply ironic yet encouraging is that I barely talk and I still get automatic acceptance.
Perhaps it's the culture of the game. It's hard to type and chat if you're dragging a puzzle around, trying to do your best. Maybe these guys have learned that the best way to encourage a newbie to stick around and develop an addiction to the game is to keep dangling temptations in the newbie's face.
Each pirate player contributes to the running of a ship. The captain gets to navigate and battle navigate. Officers (more trusted members of the crew) tend to man the guns (it's a minigame that takes a considerable amount of skill). The normal grunts and rookies get to sail/rig, do carpentry and work the bilge (duty puzzles.)
Each is a minigame puzzle, and your skill at it contributes to the overall successful running of the ship. It's well-arranged in the sense that each of the tasks grows in complexity. Frankly, I don't want to learn about battle-navigation as a newbie, it's all I can do to master the main duty puzzles. I'll be ready for that later.
I love the sense of contribution. If you do poorly, the ship does poorly. Conversely, if everyone does well (or passably), the ship runs well and you get to rob NPC brigands and pirates for loot that is shared out at the end of the pillage. Captain decides how the loot is split, and quite amusingly, most captains do an even split. It seems the principles of cooperation and altruism are alive and well in Puzzle Pirates.
This free-to-play MMO has incorporated one important principle. Teaming has to be fun. You're not bound to stay the entire pillage by the way. Even if you leave earlier, you get your share of the booty dependent on how many ship battles you were present for. People bounce in and out as their time permits, with the more hardcore staying and sailing on to reap more rewards.
If anything, the temptation comes from my crew. After I stayed on for a pillage, I found myself promoted from jobbing pirate/cabin boy to full fledged crew member and Pirate rank. (Except that to reap the benefits of Pirate rank, you need a Pirate badge which costs 1 Doubloon.)
Thank goodness for the Doubloon Exchange. I had 6000 pieces of eight I wasn't going to spend on vanity cosmetics, so what the heck, I picked up 1 Doubloon and bought the Pirate badge. This unlocked the Gunnery minipuzzle for me to try out and some other stuff (like getting a fair Pirate's share at the end of the pillage.) Nice enough.
Today, I found myself sneaking on to practice some puzzles. (Shhhh...) I went sailing with the NPC navy and put myself on the Do-Not-Disturb mode I newly discovered. Interesting twist on AFK, shutting off chat channels, tells, invites, etc.
Mid-puzzle, mysteriously, I noticed a message turn up saying, you need a badge to enjoy all the privileges of your rank. Huh? What rank? Did the Navy promote me when I wasn't looking? What the hell unlocked?
Eventually, I discovered someone in my crew sneak promoted me to Officer rank from Pirate. Talk about blind press-ganging! Being an Officer allows you to buy/sail your own ship, probably unlocks more minipuzzles and so on. It also costs 8 Doubloons to get an Officer badge.
Ehh... Personally, I'm not ready yet to take the leap to Officer. Tis not the money. I'd spend $10 on Puzzle Pirates over $15 on Champions Online. Tis the responsibilities and the learning of MORE puzzles that I don't want to deal with just yet.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Game is missing
When you cancel Champions Online, they give you a little exit survey. Choose ONE of the following reasons for why you canceled...
Game is missing: What specifically is missing from the game?
Not enough missions
Not enough loot / bad loot/ items
Not enough different zones
Not enough low level content
Not enough mid level content
Not enough high level content
Player versus player (PvP) is lacking
Technical: What technical issues are you having?
Technical Issues/Graphics
Technical Issues/Sound
Technical Issues/Other
Technical Issues/Latency
Gameplay: What specifically is wrong with game play?
Bugs/broken content
Game too easy
Game too hard
My role / powers are lacking
Not enough instances / boring instances
Not enough raid instances / boring raid instances
Languages / localization
Languages / too many languages
Billing: What specifically is wrong with billing?
Monthly fee to (sic) high
Micro Transactions
Other: Specifically
Playing another MMO
Harassment
Bad customer service
Interfering with school/work
It's causing relationship/marriage problems
Weekly Maintenance
Other reasons (triggers comment box)
Relationship problems? You wish. I stared. I twiddled around with the options. I wondered which insane person wrote a survey in which they pretty much repeated two categories twice (gameplay and game is missing.)
And I just couldn't find the "game is just not fun, no urge to log in" choice.
(Or the "all of the above" choice, since I surely can't decide on the one main reason.)
So finally I found the "Other reasons" and typed it in myself.
Ironically, I got less far in one month of having bought the game (albeit on sale), than I did on a free weekend. No biggy. If I ever feel the urge to revisit, the option is now always there.
I did get an FRAPS movie of my lil animal beast character jumping around with acrobatics on, which possibly was the only thing I really fanatically enjoyed in CO.
Game is missing: What specifically is missing from the game?
Not enough missions
Not enough loot / bad loot/ items
Not enough different zones
Not enough low level content
Not enough mid level content
Not enough high level content
Player versus player (PvP) is lacking
Technical: What technical issues are you having?
Technical Issues/Graphics
Technical Issues/Sound
Technical Issues/Other
Technical Issues/Latency
Gameplay: What specifically is wrong with game play?
Bugs/broken content
Game too easy
Game too hard
My role / powers are lacking
Not enough instances / boring instances
Not enough raid instances / boring raid instances
Languages / localization
Languages / too many languages
Billing: What specifically is wrong with billing?
Monthly fee to (sic) high
Micro Transactions
Other: Specifically
Playing another MMO
Harassment
Bad customer service
Interfering with school/work
It's causing relationship/marriage problems
Weekly Maintenance
Other reasons (triggers comment box)
Relationship problems? You wish. I stared. I twiddled around with the options. I wondered which insane person wrote a survey in which they pretty much repeated two categories twice (gameplay and game is missing.)
And I just couldn't find the "game is just not fun, no urge to log in" choice.
(Or the "all of the above" choice, since I surely can't decide on the one main reason.)
So finally I found the "Other reasons" and typed it in myself.
Ironically, I got less far in one month of having bought the game (albeit on sale), than I did on a free weekend. No biggy. If I ever feel the urge to revisit, the option is now always there.
I did get an FRAPS movie of my lil animal beast character jumping around with acrobatics on, which possibly was the only thing I really fanatically enjoyed in CO.
Pirate Pwned
There was once a peasant who hailed from a village,
He got bored landlubbing so he hired on for a pillage,
His merry cap'n wanted a spot of PvP,
cept when he attacked, the joke was on we.
Full disclosure: I get a virtual bandana if a friend clickeths this link and tries the FREE game out. And 5000 pieces of eight if said friend purchases a microtransaction, but I think that's hoping for too much.
He got bored landlubbing so he hired on for a pillage,
His merry cap'n wanted a spot of PvP,
cept when he attacked, the joke was on we.
Full disclosure: I get a virtual bandana if a friend clickeths this link and tries the FREE game out. And 5000 pieces of eight if said friend purchases a microtransaction, but I think that's hoping for too much.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Seeker-Achiever
I have to say I fail to be very surprised. I guess I'm doomed to play everything I possibly can. It's not the worse doom I can think of.
Your BrainHex Class is Seeker.
Your BrainHex Sub-Class is Seeker-Achiever.
You like finding strange and wonderful things or finding familiar things as well as collecting anything you can collect or doing everything you possibly can.
According to your results, there are few play experiences that you strongly dislike.
Learn more about your classes and exceptions at BrainHex.com.
Your scores for each of the classes in this test were as follows:
Your BrainHex Class is Seeker.
Your BrainHex Sub-Class is Seeker-Achiever.
You like finding strange and wonderful things or finding familiar things as well as collecting anything you can collect or doing everything you possibly can.
According to your results, there are few play experiences that you strongly dislike.
Learn more about your classes and exceptions at BrainHex.com.
Your scores for each of the classes in this test were as follows:
Friday, December 18, 2009
The Commerce of Christmas
It hadn't really struck me that Christmas was just around the corner, until I logged into Aion (after more than a week away) and after hours of running around zones grinding xp and money, zoned into the Asmodian main city of Pandemonium.
There, I was greeted with a burst of unusual sound. An Aion-esque Christmas-y tune. One thing I have to say for Aion, they have good musicians on staff, a la Guild Wars.
I looked up, and saw a display worthy of Orchard Road itself.
Further exploration yielded the Aion version of Santa Claus and his Red Nosed Reindeer. In this case, Santa Shugo and his Red Nosed Granker was selling some festival fireworks and party food. Par for the course. Most impressive was the actual functional piano keys next to him. In the vein of LOTRO, you could make music by jumping up and down on the keys. I suspect an organised musically-inclined Legion (guild) might actually be able to play the thing together.
My sidelong browsing of the web alerted me (about 3 weeks after the fact) that there had been a spate of account thefts in Guild Wars lately, possibly due to folks using the same password for websites that they use for their actual game.
While I take extra special care to avoid that sort of faux pas, I figured I might as well log in to check my account too - though a hacker would find scant little of value on my age-old casual characters, and despite me frankly not remembering what the hell I caried, I figured holes in my storage and zero money on me might be dead giveaways.
Fortunately, everything was intact. Less fortunately for me, as I was logging in, I spied an advertisement for Wintersday Costumes selling in their Guild Wars store. Yes, microtransaction-based no-effect-but-cosmetic Grenth and Dwayna Wintersday Costumes selling for $9.99 in a Limited Edition twopack.
I've been curious about microtransaction-based free to play games lately. DDO is on the to-play-one-day list. Maybe Allods Online if it transitions out of beta. And last night, I thought, what the heck, Tesh (of Tish Tosh Tesh fame) has been going on and on about Puzzle Pirates, so I might as well give it a shot. Free-to-play is the easiest sort of no-risk to take, and the instant I smell too much money demanded, I can always be out of there in a flash.
So I gave Puzzle Pirates a spin. It's quite fun, actually. But for the purposes of this post, I was quite amused that on my microtransaction server (Doubloon Ocean - Hunter), clothing beyond the basics (rags, simple shirts) for pirates cost 1-3 Doubloons.
Talk about cosmetic! Your Puzzle Pirate avatar is literally that. A little cartoony snowman about an inch high. For a fancier art asset that is literally a cartoon line drawing, real money was going to be exchanged?!
Well, the Doubloon rate at its most expensive turns out to be $2.95 for 12 Doubloons (so 25 cents a Doubloon). USD, anyhow. So maybe some people don't turn a hair at dropping a quarter on a cuter pirate hat.
I was comforted to discover that Doubloons could be bought and sold for the in-game currency of pieces of eight (PoE). About 1 Doubloon for around 2850 PoE was the current going rate. While this would take quite a while of puzzling for a solo player (I was pulling about 100ish PoE in 10-15 minutes, I think), I was fortunate enough to get sucked into the group play of pirating for a crew and the group task (which took about 2-3 hours committment, and was apparently a fantastically good one with a sizeable haul, netted me about 6000 PoE.)
So fair enough going for Puzzle Pirates, folks who want to put in the time are able to get by. Folks who have no time and too much money can also enjoy themselves. And the twain can meet in the middle by virtue of the Doubloon Exchange. No doubt, as one gets deeper into the game, the temptation of buying a couple Doubloons for oneself becomes stronger, but fair enough, if you liketh the game enough to play it that much, you may as well give it some money and so on.
But yeah, back to cosmetic options. I had no such urge to clothe my character in Puzzle Pirates. Heck, I found the ragged shirt and pants option quite cute, actually. And it marked me out as a newbie to be patient with, so why hide it?
The Grenth Wintersday costume in Guild Wars however...
That bloody artist should be given a Christmas bonus, because it triggers a strange emotional awesome-gotta-have-it urge in me. It is so fucking cool.
The Dwayna costume isn't too bad either. I can see tons of ladies falling head over heels over the pretty wedding-ish dress. The male version, I can see my ranger running around in it, or a mage-kind of character.
Logically, though, this urge is ridiculous. The Guild Wars devs have empathetically made it clear that there is no in-game advantage to these costumes. While wearing them in PvP, they disappear, so you cannot mask your class. There's no cool title that comes along with the costume nor can you stick it up in your Eye of the North monument as a graphical trophy (though I wish they did, it would sweeten the deal somehow.)
Morever, in Guild Wars, other players see your characters at a significantly lower resolution (in order not to lag like crazy in crowded cities). So the "damn-look-how-awesome-I-am" factor is diluted. (Not to mention, all it would really indicate is how much money you have to burn, rather than any significant achievement in-game.)
Fancy costumes also imply that other people are going to eyeball it. Guild Wars, the lone warrior game? Unless you had a big social guild or pvp network going, maybe then it might be justifiable.
About this time, the real life parallels struck me. Out there, right now on the city streets, there are throngs and throngs of people shopping for fancy clothes. And they are putting down anywhere from $40-400 to $4000 for these cosmetic items. Whyever for do they do it?
Does it boost their self esteem? Their momentary happiness level?
Do they like the look of it?
Do they like the look of themselves in it?
Is it for showing off prestige/reputation/wealth to other people?
And how often do they get to display the clothing in a manner that justifies the purchase?
For $10 USD, I can, regularly do, buy old digital games off Steam. For $10 USD, I could put down money on Doubloons or a DLC for Dragon Age or Fallout. Would that somehow be more substantial than buying digital clothing? And why?
Does it help me waste more time?
Does it help me exercise intellectual capacity or challenge my creativity?
Does it somehow contain more unexplored potential than an art asset?
I could easily rationalize off the purchase of the art asset as supporting the company, paying for the free papercraft they've made available for download, unsoweiter.
But I continue to muse about the psychological value of 10 bucks to different people, and why folks make the choices they do about what they wish to afford. Does it boil down to Maslow's Needs Hierarchy or a variant thereof? Who knows...
There, I was greeted with a burst of unusual sound. An Aion-esque Christmas-y tune. One thing I have to say for Aion, they have good musicians on staff, a la Guild Wars.
I looked up, and saw a display worthy of Orchard Road itself.
Further exploration yielded the Aion version of Santa Claus and his Red Nosed Reindeer. In this case, Santa Shugo and his Red Nosed Granker was selling some festival fireworks and party food. Par for the course. Most impressive was the actual functional piano keys next to him. In the vein of LOTRO, you could make music by jumping up and down on the keys. I suspect an organised musically-inclined Legion (guild) might actually be able to play the thing together.
My sidelong browsing of the web alerted me (about 3 weeks after the fact) that there had been a spate of account thefts in Guild Wars lately, possibly due to folks using the same password for websites that they use for their actual game.
While I take extra special care to avoid that sort of faux pas, I figured I might as well log in to check my account too - though a hacker would find scant little of value on my age-old casual characters, and despite me frankly not remembering what the hell I caried, I figured holes in my storage and zero money on me might be dead giveaways.
Fortunately, everything was intact. Less fortunately for me, as I was logging in, I spied an advertisement for Wintersday Costumes selling in their Guild Wars store. Yes, microtransaction-based no-effect-but-cosmetic Grenth and Dwayna Wintersday Costumes selling for $9.99 in a Limited Edition twopack.
I've been curious about microtransaction-based free to play games lately. DDO is on the to-play-one-day list. Maybe Allods Online if it transitions out of beta. And last night, I thought, what the heck, Tesh (of Tish Tosh Tesh fame) has been going on and on about Puzzle Pirates, so I might as well give it a shot. Free-to-play is the easiest sort of no-risk to take, and the instant I smell too much money demanded, I can always be out of there in a flash.
So I gave Puzzle Pirates a spin. It's quite fun, actually. But for the purposes of this post, I was quite amused that on my microtransaction server (Doubloon Ocean - Hunter), clothing beyond the basics (rags, simple shirts) for pirates cost 1-3 Doubloons.
Talk about cosmetic! Your Puzzle Pirate avatar is literally that. A little cartoony snowman about an inch high. For a fancier art asset that is literally a cartoon line drawing, real money was going to be exchanged?!
Well, the Doubloon rate at its most expensive turns out to be $2.95 for 12 Doubloons (so 25 cents a Doubloon). USD, anyhow. So maybe some people don't turn a hair at dropping a quarter on a cuter pirate hat.
I was comforted to discover that Doubloons could be bought and sold for the in-game currency of pieces of eight (PoE). About 1 Doubloon for around 2850 PoE was the current going rate. While this would take quite a while of puzzling for a solo player (I was pulling about 100ish PoE in 10-15 minutes, I think), I was fortunate enough to get sucked into the group play of pirating for a crew and the group task (which took about 2-3 hours committment, and was apparently a fantastically good one with a sizeable haul, netted me about 6000 PoE.)
So fair enough going for Puzzle Pirates, folks who want to put in the time are able to get by. Folks who have no time and too much money can also enjoy themselves. And the twain can meet in the middle by virtue of the Doubloon Exchange. No doubt, as one gets deeper into the game, the temptation of buying a couple Doubloons for oneself becomes stronger, but fair enough, if you liketh the game enough to play it that much, you may as well give it some money and so on.
But yeah, back to cosmetic options. I had no such urge to clothe my character in Puzzle Pirates. Heck, I found the ragged shirt and pants option quite cute, actually. And it marked me out as a newbie to be patient with, so why hide it?
The Grenth Wintersday costume in Guild Wars however...
That bloody artist should be given a Christmas bonus, because it triggers a strange emotional awesome-gotta-have-it urge in me. It is so fucking cool.
The Dwayna costume isn't too bad either. I can see tons of ladies falling head over heels over the pretty wedding-ish dress. The male version, I can see my ranger running around in it, or a mage-kind of character.
Logically, though, this urge is ridiculous. The Guild Wars devs have empathetically made it clear that there is no in-game advantage to these costumes. While wearing them in PvP, they disappear, so you cannot mask your class. There's no cool title that comes along with the costume nor can you stick it up in your Eye of the North monument as a graphical trophy (though I wish they did, it would sweeten the deal somehow.)
Morever, in Guild Wars, other players see your characters at a significantly lower resolution (in order not to lag like crazy in crowded cities). So the "damn-look-how-awesome-I-am" factor is diluted. (Not to mention, all it would really indicate is how much money you have to burn, rather than any significant achievement in-game.)
Fancy costumes also imply that other people are going to eyeball it. Guild Wars, the lone warrior game? Unless you had a big social guild or pvp network going, maybe then it might be justifiable.
About this time, the real life parallels struck me. Out there, right now on the city streets, there are throngs and throngs of people shopping for fancy clothes. And they are putting down anywhere from $40-400 to $4000 for these cosmetic items. Whyever for do they do it?
Does it boost their self esteem? Their momentary happiness level?
Do they like the look of it?
Do they like the look of themselves in it?
Is it for showing off prestige/reputation/wealth to other people?
And how often do they get to display the clothing in a manner that justifies the purchase?
For $10 USD, I can, regularly do, buy old digital games off Steam. For $10 USD, I could put down money on Doubloons or a DLC for Dragon Age or Fallout. Would that somehow be more substantial than buying digital clothing? And why?
Does it help me waste more time?
Does it help me exercise intellectual capacity or challenge my creativity?
Does it somehow contain more unexplored potential than an art asset?
I could easily rationalize off the purchase of the art asset as supporting the company, paying for the free papercraft they've made available for download, unsoweiter.
But I continue to muse about the psychological value of 10 bucks to different people, and why folks make the choices they do about what they wish to afford. Does it boil down to Maslow's Needs Hierarchy or a variant thereof? Who knows...
Thursday, December 17, 2009
The Ubiquitity of MMO Perspective
Is it possible to burn out on Dragon Age and find it too grindy?
Yes, the single-player game. I'm currently facing a mild variant of this extreme, for the simple fact that I've identified the Dragon Age gameplay pattern.
It constitutes of a map (read: zone / level / town / city) of limited size, in which there are a number of NPCs scattered around. You run around with your character, and talk to them, entering into cinematic cutscene dialogues, making choices that may or may not have consequences and picking up quests to do. This is the Exploration phase.
Following which, there is another map (read: zone / level / dungeon / instance), wherein it contains more hostile enemy NPCs than conversation-makers. Therein lies the dungeon crawl component, where you PAUSE-ATTACK-PAUSE-ATTACK (read: die and reload wherever necessary) and bash/creep/fireball your way to the big boss at the end and map victory. This is the Action phase.
I'm currently stuck at the forefront of one such Action phase, because I'm at the bottom of a very tall tower and I strongly suspect this will involve several tower maps full of enemies to fight past before I get to another immersive conversation setpiece where I get to make seemingly meaningful dialogue choices.
Problem is, I don't find the fights very fun.
They've moved on from a strict D&D turn-phased battle mechanic to something a little more fluid and real-time. Very MMO-like, actually.
Dragon Age classes involve the warrior, rogue and mage. Customization turns mages into either ranged aoe death dealers, or healers, and I'm sure there's crowd control, buff and debuff mixed into the choice too. Rogues can be melee dual-wielding dervishes that get to stealth and backstab, or ranged machine-gun (sorry, bow/crossbow) nukers. Warriors get to be... you guessed it, shield-wielding tanks, or two-handed barbarians of destruction. They also can dual-wield, but "everybody knows" that if you wanna dual-wield, you may as well be the rogue who can do more damage.
There are a couple of tweaky options like getting your warrior to be a mage-fighting templar, some deathknight reminiscent extra skills, the mage can be an arcane warrior that wears armor and a sword, a ranger rogue can summon animals (huntard!) and so on.
But whatever. It's a very MMO combat system, if you ask me. Combat abilities/skills are fired off in real time by hitting an MMO-like sequence of 1, 2, 3, 4 buttons, that go on cooldown. The AI will play the other characters you aren't currently controlling, based on a set of tactics you can program in.
And yes, there are hate and taunt and aggro mechanics.
It's like a lopsided holy trinity because you can quaff heal potions (er, use health poultices, that is) to shore up your health if there is no spirit healer mage type.
While I'm sure this works decently well at higher levels, and is easy for all who have played World of Warcraft (read: everyone who games) to grasp, my moment of grumpiness arrives at level 3-4, when none of my characters abilities have matured, period.
Because my own protagonist character is not a mage, I was minus a mage in my first action combat map, and this turned out an exceedingly miserable state of affairs. Two warriors, two rogues, and me with no clue how to properly apply a backstab. My characters seemed to like to run off by themselves on the default AI settings to go and massacre things from the front anyhow.
There was a great deal of the supposed 'tanks' falling over and dying once I ran out of health poultices, plus a lot of the rogues overdoing damage and cheerful stealing of aggro from the warriors who weren't high enough to have a decent taunt yet.
Couple that to the final scripted encounter which consisted of a mage boss who would run away when attacked... into a pre-arranged ambush location of archers and snare traps, and proceed to snipe with these horribly lethal spells of a setting where magic is viewed as rare and powerful.
This was grotesquely unenjoyable as all four of my guys were melee. My final winning strategy involved me switching my two rogues to ranged archery, while my warriors died soaking damage long enough to whittle part of the enemy group down - including said grotesque mage boss.
I've now frozen at the second combat map as my combat layout involves 2 warriors, 1 rogue and 1 mage... with zero health poultices. Turns out, micromanagement of the mage is not very easy, and most of his spells do friendly fire damage. Yes, friendly fire damage.
I am starting to grumpily realize that I can't really roleplay a design concept if I want to be battle effective at the same time. And that ranged uber alles over melee. It's like a Champions Online kind of unhappy deflated feeling. :(
Apparently my best bet in the long run is to set up one tank (with a force field cast on him eventually for zero friendly fire), one mage spirit healer, one mage nuker, and then the rest ranged machine-gunners.
That's assuming I can tolerate the frapping dungeon crawl through goodness knows how many levels of tower first.
Yes, the single-player game. I'm currently facing a mild variant of this extreme, for the simple fact that I've identified the Dragon Age gameplay pattern.
It constitutes of a map (read: zone / level / town / city) of limited size, in which there are a number of NPCs scattered around. You run around with your character, and talk to them, entering into cinematic cutscene dialogues, making choices that may or may not have consequences and picking up quests to do. This is the Exploration phase.
Following which, there is another map (read: zone / level / dungeon / instance), wherein it contains more hostile enemy NPCs than conversation-makers. Therein lies the dungeon crawl component, where you PAUSE-ATTACK-PAUSE-ATTACK (read: die and reload wherever necessary) and bash/creep/fireball your way to the big boss at the end and map victory. This is the Action phase.
I'm currently stuck at the forefront of one such Action phase, because I'm at the bottom of a very tall tower and I strongly suspect this will involve several tower maps full of enemies to fight past before I get to another immersive conversation setpiece where I get to make seemingly meaningful dialogue choices.
Problem is, I don't find the fights very fun.
They've moved on from a strict D&D turn-phased battle mechanic to something a little more fluid and real-time. Very MMO-like, actually.
Dragon Age classes involve the warrior, rogue and mage. Customization turns mages into either ranged aoe death dealers, or healers, and I'm sure there's crowd control, buff and debuff mixed into the choice too. Rogues can be melee dual-wielding dervishes that get to stealth and backstab, or ranged machine-gun (sorry, bow/crossbow) nukers. Warriors get to be... you guessed it, shield-wielding tanks, or two-handed barbarians of destruction. They also can dual-wield, but "everybody knows" that if you wanna dual-wield, you may as well be the rogue who can do more damage.
There are a couple of tweaky options like getting your warrior to be a mage-fighting templar, some deathknight reminiscent extra skills, the mage can be an arcane warrior that wears armor and a sword, a ranger rogue can summon animals (huntard!) and so on.
But whatever. It's a very MMO combat system, if you ask me. Combat abilities/skills are fired off in real time by hitting an MMO-like sequence of 1, 2, 3, 4 buttons, that go on cooldown. The AI will play the other characters you aren't currently controlling, based on a set of tactics you can program in.
And yes, there are hate and taunt and aggro mechanics.
It's like a lopsided holy trinity because you can quaff heal potions (er, use health poultices, that is) to shore up your health if there is no spirit healer mage type.
While I'm sure this works decently well at higher levels, and is easy for all who have played World of Warcraft (read: everyone who games) to grasp, my moment of grumpiness arrives at level 3-4, when none of my characters abilities have matured, period.
Because my own protagonist character is not a mage, I was minus a mage in my first action combat map, and this turned out an exceedingly miserable state of affairs. Two warriors, two rogues, and me with no clue how to properly apply a backstab. My characters seemed to like to run off by themselves on the default AI settings to go and massacre things from the front anyhow.
There was a great deal of the supposed 'tanks' falling over and dying once I ran out of health poultices, plus a lot of the rogues overdoing damage and cheerful stealing of aggro from the warriors who weren't high enough to have a decent taunt yet.
Couple that to the final scripted encounter which consisted of a mage boss who would run away when attacked... into a pre-arranged ambush location of archers and snare traps, and proceed to snipe with these horribly lethal spells of a setting where magic is viewed as rare and powerful.
This was grotesquely unenjoyable as all four of my guys were melee. My final winning strategy involved me switching my two rogues to ranged archery, while my warriors died soaking damage long enough to whittle part of the enemy group down - including said grotesque mage boss.
I've now frozen at the second combat map as my combat layout involves 2 warriors, 1 rogue and 1 mage... with zero health poultices. Turns out, micromanagement of the mage is not very easy, and most of his spells do friendly fire damage. Yes, friendly fire damage.
I am starting to grumpily realize that I can't really roleplay a design concept if I want to be battle effective at the same time. And that ranged uber alles over melee. It's like a Champions Online kind of unhappy deflated feeling. :(
Apparently my best bet in the long run is to set up one tank (with a force field cast on him eventually for zero friendly fire), one mage spirit healer, one mage nuker, and then the rest ranged machine-gunners.
That's assuming I can tolerate the frapping dungeon crawl through goodness knows how many levels of tower first.
Monday, December 14, 2009
The Gun That Wasn't
This is the most hilarious case of mistaken identity I've stumbled over in some time. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the incident.
http://www.geekologie.com/2009/12/man_gets_swatteamed_over_lego.php
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/police-storm-toronto-office-for-lego-gun/article1387652/
http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20091203/lego_gun_091203/20091203?hub=Toronto
A completely understandable, but funny as heck story.
I have to say though, the BrickGun models look quite awesome indeed.
http://www.brickgun.com/SMG/BrickGun_SMG.html
Me ordering or assembling one in this country would probably lead me to disappear forever due to the Internal Security Act though.
Maybe if I just buy the digital instructions to drool over some day. Can't get arrested for an unreal (digital) manual to assemble a unreal (replica Lego) gun, eh?
Hahaha.
Course, there's ordering the bricks separately, but real Lego bricks cost too damn much anyhow. I'm just impressed with the stuff people concoct outta Lego - talk about the ultimate player created content franchise.
http://www.geekologie.com/2009/12/man_gets_swatteamed_over_lego.php
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/police-storm-toronto-office-for-lego-gun/article1387652/
http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20091203/lego_gun_091203/20091203?hub=Toronto
A completely understandable, but funny as heck story.
I have to say though, the BrickGun models look quite awesome indeed.
http://www.brickgun.com/SMG/BrickGun_SMG.html
Me ordering or assembling one in this country would probably lead me to disappear forever due to the Internal Security Act though.
Maybe if I just buy the digital instructions to drool over some day. Can't get arrested for an unreal (digital) manual to assemble a unreal (replica Lego) gun, eh?
Hahaha.
Course, there's ordering the bricks separately, but real Lego bricks cost too damn much anyhow. I'm just impressed with the stuff people concoct outta Lego - talk about the ultimate player created content franchise.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Between the Devil and Deep Blue
12 hours later, I am slightly better off than where I started, but only slightly.
It has been a herculean effort at problem diagnosis, involving:
in no real particular order.
As mentioned above, last night, in between calls to Starhub complaining of slow download speeds and web surfing, and after assuring tech support that we'd hooked up to the cable modem directly, we were led to some bandwidth utilities to test available bandwidth.
My desktop computer stumped everybody by downloading a file from a local Singapore server (probably Starhub's own) at an astoundingly phenomenal pace of 0.18 megabits per second. Slow, that is.
After some messing around, tech support guy asked us to hook up to another computer instead, so my dad hooked it up to his computer, which had previously been giving problems 6 days before (mine started 3 days ago).
Well, the speedtest clocked in at an equally astounding 23 megabits per second. Fast, that is.
"..."
With that revelation, tech support guy said, "Oh, no problems on Starhub's part then. Bye!"
Dad said, "I'm sleepy, and I have an all day seminar to attend tomorrow. It's 4am. Yer on yer own. Good luck!"
:(
So began the process of systematically eliminating every vaguely probable cause I could think of that affected my computer alone.
Lots of virus scans. Just in case something snuck in. But I didn't even remember plugging anything in or doing anything funky within the last 3 days. All I did was start up Steam on my regular daily pilgrimage to see if there were any deals, and one day it didn't work anymore. :/
Cleaned out all the dust, in case something was lying across some vital electronic connection on my ethernet network adapter card.
Ran safe mode, with networking capability, only to find the same sluggish results.
Amusingly, since Starhub had recommended their bandwidth tester, I decided to go the whole hog and test bandwidth with speedtest.net which lets you connect to stuff all over the continents... guess what I found?
Local Singapore server downloaded the test file at 0.14-0.18 megabits/sec.
Malaysian server downloaded the file at 1-2 megabits/sec.
And a server all the way across in San Francisco downloaded at 2-3 megabits/sec.
Hell, my upload speed was faster than my download speed for the local servers.
T'was freaking weird.
I checked the Starhub maintenance message again, and they are STILL conducting server maintenance over the period of 14-18 Dec now.
To me, that suggests they could be doing some tweaks to their packet shaping protocols, because I observed some of my speedtests ramping all the way up to 23 megabits/sec for about 5 seconds, before the bandwidth abruptly throttles down to 0.14 megabits.
There was one last possible difference between my computer and the other two computers which work fine at 23 megabits. About 4 months ago, I'd done a registry tweak to improve Aion's ping, the infamous TCPAckFrequency change from 2 packets to 1 packet acknowledgements.
Perhaps... just perhaps, there was some overly "clever" network engineer at Starhub who assumed that the majority of people leave it on the default and did some tweaks to improve bandwidth traffic, while blocking or ramping down bandwidth of those computers which seemed to talk to their servers too many times?
So I edited the registry again and removed the value. Upon restart of computer and cable modem, my local speedtest shot up to 23 megabits/sec.
"..."
Not believing my eyes, I tried it a few more times, getting less promising results. There was still occasional bandwidth ramp downs all the way to 1-2 megabits/sec, but they weren't hitting the phenomenally insane 0.18 megabits of "speed."
Being a skeptical scientist, I put the TCPAckFrequency value to what it was previously, restarted, and voila, 0.18 megabits of consistent suckage.
So I deleted the value again, replugged everything back to router and country the way it was, restarted, rebooted, and my net connection is... better.
It's still not great. But I'm running Aion (if rubberbanding) while the speedtest is achieving a shaky 2-6 megabits/sec on the local server which consistently coughed up 0.18 megabits with the registry value enabled.
I must have got caught in some bastard's throttle trap. :/
Presumably if I don't tax my bandwidth by a major download while I'm playing Aion, I might be able to achieve websurfing with gaming once more.
Except the reason why I tweaked my registry value in the first place was to lower my latency, which was an alarming 500-800ms in Aion. The Aussies have it worse, 700-900ms, and they've taken to tunnels like Lowerping and stuff.
If I recall correctly, I had 300-500ms ping with the registry tweak.
Now it's back to 500-700ms averages.
It's still playable. Which is more than I can say if I were playing from Aussieland. But well, between the devil of being unable to have enough bandwidth to multitask and getting my ass kicked by Deep Blue (or other similar computer or human enemies), I think I'll pick the multitasking.
*sighs*
It has been a herculean effort at problem diagnosis, involving:
- 1 sleepy father
- (moral support + calling up and pre-empting Starhub because somehow a girl's voice makes tech support think of clever questions like: "Is your power switched on? Can you check that all your connections are plugged in properly? Can you reformat Windows?" He gave up at the point when we determined the problem seemed to be with my computer only. Meaning, both hes.)
- 1 extra desktop
- (to finally figure out that hey, when directly connected to the modem, the speed test runs fine at 23 megabits/sec)
- 1 laptop
- (me verifying the next day that yes, indeed the problem seems to lie with my computer only, sighs)
- 1 vacuum cleaner
- (in case dust was clogging up some important component of my hardware - grasping at straws, but what the heck...)
- 1 "stolen" keyboard
- (robbed from my dad's computer, cos my logitech gaming keyboard has one eeny tiny flaw - it can't start windows safemode because the F8, or any other keys for that matter, do not work until the USB port is activated, at which point Windows has started up)
- countless cable modem restarts
- (bout par for the course)
- 8m of ethernet cable
- (to hook up my computer directly to the cable modem, bypassing router and the ethernet cables buried in the walls to take them out of the equation)
- a bunch of bandwidth speed utilities
- (utilities.starhub.com and www.speedtest.net were my favorites)
- several virus scanners and hours of scanning
- (they didn't find nothing. In the slang sense, ie. they found nothing whatsoever.)
- 1 haphazard attempt at disk cleanup
- (just in case 1.8 gigs of swap file were slowing my C drive to the point that download bandwidth was affected. Well, I uninstalled Bioshock and some other things, and I'm now sitting on 10gig free in C and 40gigs free in D. Still no go.)
in no real particular order.
As mentioned above, last night, in between calls to Starhub complaining of slow download speeds and web surfing, and after assuring tech support that we'd hooked up to the cable modem directly, we were led to some bandwidth utilities to test available bandwidth.
My desktop computer stumped everybody by downloading a file from a local Singapore server (probably Starhub's own) at an astoundingly phenomenal pace of 0.18 megabits per second. Slow, that is.
After some messing around, tech support guy asked us to hook up to another computer instead, so my dad hooked it up to his computer, which had previously been giving problems 6 days before (mine started 3 days ago).
Well, the speedtest clocked in at an equally astounding 23 megabits per second. Fast, that is.
"..."
With that revelation, tech support guy said, "Oh, no problems on Starhub's part then. Bye!"
Dad said, "I'm sleepy, and I have an all day seminar to attend tomorrow. It's 4am. Yer on yer own. Good luck!"
:(
So began the process of systematically eliminating every vaguely probable cause I could think of that affected my computer alone.
Lots of virus scans. Just in case something snuck in. But I didn't even remember plugging anything in or doing anything funky within the last 3 days. All I did was start up Steam on my regular daily pilgrimage to see if there were any deals, and one day it didn't work anymore. :/
Cleaned out all the dust, in case something was lying across some vital electronic connection on my ethernet network adapter card.
Ran safe mode, with networking capability, only to find the same sluggish results.
Amusingly, since Starhub had recommended their bandwidth tester, I decided to go the whole hog and test bandwidth with speedtest.net which lets you connect to stuff all over the continents... guess what I found?
Local Singapore server downloaded the test file at 0.14-0.18 megabits/sec.
Malaysian server downloaded the file at 1-2 megabits/sec.
And a server all the way across in San Francisco downloaded at 2-3 megabits/sec.
Hell, my upload speed was faster than my download speed for the local servers.
T'was freaking weird.
I checked the Starhub maintenance message again, and they are STILL conducting server maintenance over the period of 14-18 Dec now.
To me, that suggests they could be doing some tweaks to their packet shaping protocols, because I observed some of my speedtests ramping all the way up to 23 megabits/sec for about 5 seconds, before the bandwidth abruptly throttles down to 0.14 megabits.
There was one last possible difference between my computer and the other two computers which work fine at 23 megabits. About 4 months ago, I'd done a registry tweak to improve Aion's ping, the infamous TCPAckFrequency change from 2 packets to 1 packet acknowledgements.
Perhaps... just perhaps, there was some overly "clever" network engineer at Starhub who assumed that the majority of people leave it on the default and did some tweaks to improve bandwidth traffic, while blocking or ramping down bandwidth of those computers which seemed to talk to their servers too many times?
So I edited the registry again and removed the value. Upon restart of computer and cable modem, my local speedtest shot up to 23 megabits/sec.
"..."
Not believing my eyes, I tried it a few more times, getting less promising results. There was still occasional bandwidth ramp downs all the way to 1-2 megabits/sec, but they weren't hitting the phenomenally insane 0.18 megabits of "speed."
Being a skeptical scientist, I put the TCPAckFrequency value to what it was previously, restarted, and voila, 0.18 megabits of consistent suckage.
So I deleted the value again, replugged everything back to router and country the way it was, restarted, rebooted, and my net connection is... better.
It's still not great. But I'm running Aion (if rubberbanding) while the speedtest is achieving a shaky 2-6 megabits/sec on the local server which consistently coughed up 0.18 megabits with the registry value enabled.
I must have got caught in some bastard's throttle trap. :/
Presumably if I don't tax my bandwidth by a major download while I'm playing Aion, I might be able to achieve websurfing with gaming once more.
Except the reason why I tweaked my registry value in the first place was to lower my latency, which was an alarming 500-800ms in Aion. The Aussies have it worse, 700-900ms, and they've taken to tunnels like Lowerping and stuff.
If I recall correctly, I had 300-500ms ping with the registry tweak.
Now it's back to 500-700ms averages.
It's still playable. Which is more than I can say if I were playing from Aussieland. But well, between the devil of being unable to have enough bandwidth to multitask and getting my ass kicked by Deep Blue (or other similar computer or human enemies), I think I'll pick the multitasking.
*sighs*
Friday, December 11, 2009
Intarweb Blockade
Something seems up with the internet.
Or at least, all my available connections to it.
At home, I'm experiencing intermittent spurts of connectivity. 75% of the time, my one main connection to anything runs smoothly as per normal (say 200kb/s or more type of pipe), and 25% of the time, it jitters to 23kb/s.
The major problem is when I open ANOTHER connection to the internet. Now this includes: multiple tab browsing while web surfing, Steam (downloading game update + the Steam browser), downloading while web surfing, download accelerator, and horror of horrors, web browsing in the other monitor while playing an MMO.
You never quite realise how much you're dependent on something until you don't have it any longer.
I was quite miffed with Steam actually. For a moment, I thought my account had been hacked. But after a furious frenzy of analysis, I came to the conclusion that between trying to download several game updates at once / open the Steam store browser / open the popup for news and advertisement with the huge picture download, Steam was hanging due to just being unable to deal.
If 3/4 of my Steam games weren't bought at 50% or less of the retail price, I would have been quite frustrated at being unable to access them. As is, I consoled myself with the fact that I wouldn't want to pay $25-30 extra per game just to have them always accessible and clogging up my desktop with icons.
Eventually, I got it to behave by virtue of pausing every single game update and closing the advertisement popup box, so that it only concentrated on sluggishly opening the Steam store browser.
Something else I miss: web-browsing while playing an MMO. Come on, I read half my rss news sites and comments-troll while killing the 7th of 10th foozle. There's also the whole cyborg issue of accessing third-party item/quest databases for when you can't be arsed to run about in circles any longer.
Well, either my MMO plays fine, and no site gets accessed. "The connection has timed out" - to Google.
OR I surf fine and everyting seems hunky dory, and then I notice that my avatar has either a) frozen in place, b) has been running in the same area for the past 10 minutes now via rubberbanding or c) been ass-raped by an aggro'ed mob while unable to react intelligently in any manner.
Well. Fuck.
You have to understand that the two MMOs I am currently playing are Aion and LOTRO.
In Aion, when you die in PvE, you go back to a spawn point (which I have inconveniently placed far from where I am questing because I am too miserly to change it, and it is convenient for a quick teleport to a group quest dungeon) AND you pay through the nose to remove xp debt AND you lose a small percentage of unrecoverable xp for good.
It is not pleasant to die to a mob in Aion. It just kinda kills all desire to continue until the next day. Especially when it wasn't through any gameplay fault of your own.
In LOTRO, when you die, you go back to the nearest spawn point AND you take a significant equipment hit which you have to pay to repair and because I'm a Guardian, all that heavy armor costs a bomb. It's the equivalent of 8 quests worth of 200 silver, or a good 30-60 minutes mob grind.
Fortunately, with relatively recent changes to Guardian soloability, my refusal to team with anyone and thus die in PUGs, a spring clean of my inventory to open up slots for vendor trash, and being high enough level that humanoid mobs drop decent coin, it's no longer PAINFULLY CRIPPLING to die, but still an inconvenience.
So web surfing and MMO'ing together are right out.
Checking the Starhub website indicates that they are doing some upgrades to server maintenance between 9-11 Dec. They SAY that they are doing it so that you may only experience intermittent access between the 2am-6am period, but well, saying != doing.
I hope this is a temporary thing that is caused by their server upgrades. I'm thinking they may have sneakily limited us to one main connection and throttled everything else so that their backups are not swamped while they are doing maintenance.
If this continues over the weekend, I am going to pick up the phone and do some serious bitching at tech support. Probably won't do anything constructive but make me feel better.
If they think that this is a very clever "cure" for Bittorrenting and want to continue... well... they're going to get an earful and then I'll have to look at other ISP alternatives. Grr.
I don't know. Maybe it's not Starhub's fault. Maybe it's something up with the internet as a whole. Singapore or a bigger router downstream or some DNS going down.
Cos I'm facing some issues opening multiple tabs and downloading my mail at work too this morning.
I'm not sure if my work connection is via Starhub or Singtel, so not sure if it's an ISP problem or the whole damn country's problem. Oh well.
Or at least, all my available connections to it.
At home, I'm experiencing intermittent spurts of connectivity. 75% of the time, my one main connection to anything runs smoothly as per normal (say 200kb/s or more type of pipe), and 25% of the time, it jitters to 23kb/s.
The major problem is when I open ANOTHER connection to the internet. Now this includes: multiple tab browsing while web surfing, Steam (downloading game update + the Steam browser), downloading while web surfing, download accelerator, and horror of horrors, web browsing in the other monitor while playing an MMO.
You never quite realise how much you're dependent on something until you don't have it any longer.
I was quite miffed with Steam actually. For a moment, I thought my account had been hacked. But after a furious frenzy of analysis, I came to the conclusion that between trying to download several game updates at once / open the Steam store browser / open the popup for news and advertisement with the huge picture download, Steam was hanging due to just being unable to deal.
If 3/4 of my Steam games weren't bought at 50% or less of the retail price, I would have been quite frustrated at being unable to access them. As is, I consoled myself with the fact that I wouldn't want to pay $25-30 extra per game just to have them always accessible and clogging up my desktop with icons.
Eventually, I got it to behave by virtue of pausing every single game update and closing the advertisement popup box, so that it only concentrated on sluggishly opening the Steam store browser.
Something else I miss: web-browsing while playing an MMO. Come on, I read half my rss news sites and comments-troll while killing the 7th of 10th foozle. There's also the whole cyborg issue of accessing third-party item/quest databases for when you can't be arsed to run about in circles any longer.
Well, either my MMO plays fine, and no site gets accessed. "The connection has timed out" - to Google.
OR I surf fine and everyting seems hunky dory, and then I notice that my avatar has either a) frozen in place, b) has been running in the same area for the past 10 minutes now via rubberbanding or c) been ass-raped by an aggro'ed mob while unable to react intelligently in any manner.
Well. Fuck.
You have to understand that the two MMOs I am currently playing are Aion and LOTRO.
In Aion, when you die in PvE, you go back to a spawn point (which I have inconveniently placed far from where I am questing because I am too miserly to change it, and it is convenient for a quick teleport to a group quest dungeon) AND you pay through the nose to remove xp debt AND you lose a small percentage of unrecoverable xp for good.
It is not pleasant to die to a mob in Aion. It just kinda kills all desire to continue until the next day. Especially when it wasn't through any gameplay fault of your own.
In LOTRO, when you die, you go back to the nearest spawn point AND you take a significant equipment hit which you have to pay to repair and because I'm a Guardian, all that heavy armor costs a bomb. It's the equivalent of 8 quests worth of 200 silver, or a good 30-60 minutes mob grind.
Fortunately, with relatively recent changes to Guardian soloability, my refusal to team with anyone and thus die in PUGs, a spring clean of my inventory to open up slots for vendor trash, and being high enough level that humanoid mobs drop decent coin, it's no longer PAINFULLY CRIPPLING to die, but still an inconvenience.
So web surfing and MMO'ing together are right out.
Checking the Starhub website indicates that they are doing some upgrades to server maintenance between 9-11 Dec. They SAY that they are doing it so that you may only experience intermittent access between the 2am-6am period, but well, saying != doing.
I hope this is a temporary thing that is caused by their server upgrades. I'm thinking they may have sneakily limited us to one main connection and throttled everything else so that their backups are not swamped while they are doing maintenance.
If this continues over the weekend, I am going to pick up the phone and do some serious bitching at tech support. Probably won't do anything constructive but make me feel better.
If they think that this is a very clever "cure" for Bittorrenting and want to continue... well... they're going to get an earful and then I'll have to look at other ISP alternatives. Grr.
I don't know. Maybe it's not Starhub's fault. Maybe it's something up with the internet as a whole. Singapore or a bigger router downstream or some DNS going down.
Cos I'm facing some issues opening multiple tabs and downloading my mail at work too this morning.
I'm not sure if my work connection is via Starhub or Singtel, so not sure if it's an ISP problem or the whole damn country's problem. Oh well.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Pictures from an Exit...bition 2
Right now, I'm "Disconnected from the Server" at the load screen to a zone. The strange thing is, the client knows how to detect that and tell you that, but it doesn't know how to go back to the login screen. This means that if you ever get disconnected while in the loading screen (very often), you have to ctrl-alt-del and kill the client entirely.
Not that I am that keen on logging back on. I just feel kind of disinterested in the game. It seems caught up in a vicious cycle.
1) People don't want to team, because there is no teaming culture and they're used to soloing, because it's been possible to pick up certain powers to build a strong soloing character.
2) The powers that aren't strong, and good for soloing, tend to be pretty gimp and useless. These powers tend to either have been broken from start and never fixed, or useful once and then heavily nerfed.
3) Devs nerf the strong powers. Your previous soloing build become weak, and you're not sure what new build to use now.. The powers keep getting tweaked so it's like trying to build a house on a foundation of sand.
4) You can't solo your group missions (which you probably shouldn't be able to in the first place), but finding a team is a terrible chore because nobody wants to team. And besides, your build is all wacky now.
Strangely enough, I seemed to have hit upon some "broken power" by trial and error. Regeneration passive defense was not doing it for me, so I just tried out various powers to give my character more durability. Enter the Circle of Primal Domination. I tried it and was surprised at how effective it was, and have been relying on it ever since.
Then it got nerfed. Okay, from a gaming viewpoint it was overpowerful. But the thing is, using it meant you couldn't move. The only time you moved in the fight, was if you got knocked out of the circle, and you are trying to get back inside. It made some enemies terribly tedious to fights because you become more susceptible to mez while in the circle (you end up being mezzed a significant portion of time).
I looked over the patch notes when it happened but didn't really take note of it until I logged in and started an instance. Boom! In a few seconds, the first group of enemies had wiped me.
Okay...
Already so many powers are considered pointless, broken and useless. But they're not fixed. It's smash the nail that pokes out down. In the end, when the nail are all flush against the wood there will be true balance?
Meanwhile, I'm sure people are moving on to the next good combo of powers.
Fountain/statue/waterfall in the city. Millenium city has really huge scale to it. The statue is stories tall, the water falls down into a waterfall and at the bottom of it is another enemy hideout.
Nice guns in the villain hideout.
Evil scientist and supervillain contemplating evil plasma TV shows...
Scale...Millenium City is awesomely 3-D, in a way that makes sense. Grandville feels contrived, but here you have quite normal skywalks between skyscrappers.
Mmm hmmm...looks familiar...
Nice skyline in the more Chinatowny part.
Some supervillain lair.
Near the seaside. Aeroplanes, a pier, and an ocean you can jump into.
Not that I am that keen on logging back on. I just feel kind of disinterested in the game. It seems caught up in a vicious cycle.
1) People don't want to team, because there is no teaming culture and they're used to soloing, because it's been possible to pick up certain powers to build a strong soloing character.
2) The powers that aren't strong, and good for soloing, tend to be pretty gimp and useless. These powers tend to either have been broken from start and never fixed, or useful once and then heavily nerfed.
3) Devs nerf the strong powers. Your previous soloing build become weak, and you're not sure what new build to use now.. The powers keep getting tweaked so it's like trying to build a house on a foundation of sand.
4) You can't solo your group missions (which you probably shouldn't be able to in the first place), but finding a team is a terrible chore because nobody wants to team. And besides, your build is all wacky now.
Strangely enough, I seemed to have hit upon some "broken power" by trial and error. Regeneration passive defense was not doing it for me, so I just tried out various powers to give my character more durability. Enter the Circle of Primal Domination. I tried it and was surprised at how effective it was, and have been relying on it ever since.
Then it got nerfed. Okay, from a gaming viewpoint it was overpowerful. But the thing is, using it meant you couldn't move. The only time you moved in the fight, was if you got knocked out of the circle, and you are trying to get back inside. It made some enemies terribly tedious to fights because you become more susceptible to mez while in the circle (you end up being mezzed a significant portion of time).
I looked over the patch notes when it happened but didn't really take note of it until I logged in and started an instance. Boom! In a few seconds, the first group of enemies had wiped me.
Okay...
Already so many powers are considered pointless, broken and useless. But they're not fixed. It's smash the nail that pokes out down. In the end, when the nail are all flush against the wood there will be true balance?
Meanwhile, I'm sure people are moving on to the next good combo of powers.
The way down a snowy crevasse to another supervillain hideout. They also have zombies there... :P
Fountain/statue/waterfall in the city. Millenium city has really huge scale to it. The statue is stories tall, the water falls down into a waterfall and at the bottom of it is another enemy hideout.
Nice guns in the villain hideout.
Evil scientist and supervillain contemplating evil plasma TV shows...
Scale...Millenium City is awesomely 3-D, in a way that makes sense. Grandville feels contrived, but here you have quite normal skywalks between skyscrappers.
Mmm hmmm...looks familiar...
Nice skyline in the more Chinatowny part.
Some supervillain lair.
Near the seaside. Aeroplanes, a pier, and an ocean you can jump into.
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Pictures from an Exit..bition
The thing that really, really impresses me about Champions Online, is how it really has a 3-dimension, detailed environment for you to play in.
Lasers! Pew pew!
They have radio towers that you can actually walk into. The radio towers have equipment inside.
Very tall radio towers too...
I finally got to make my Nemesis. After the first Nemesis mission, it was nice to see everyone clapping at me.
The Nemesis mission took place in a museum, and there were some nice looking pieces there
submarine?
Not sure what this is. OpenSuSe fossilized?
This is a nice set piece from one of the missions.
But if anything, that mission was representative of what Champions Online is like. Beautifully detailed environment, clever missions, dynamic battles and mobs, but ultimately, full of bad balance and bugs.
After I entered that mission and completed it, I realised that the door had disappeared. It was still there, but I couldn't click out. I sent a ticket for a GM, picked up a book, and started reading.
Half an hour passed. No GM.
I quit, and logged back on, but it brought me back to the map.
Finally, I asked my supergroup: how do you get out of this? They offered some suggestions. Submit a support ticket and wait for 10 hours (9.5 hours left!), relog (tried it), or join a pvp queue and teleport out. The last worked, fortunately.
But yep... I know that when the free month is up, I'm taking the pictures away, and memories of something that could have been great but ultimately was not. Something like AoC.
Lasers! Pew pew!
They have radio towers that you can actually walk into. The radio towers have equipment inside.
Very tall radio towers too...
I finally got to make my Nemesis. After the first Nemesis mission, it was nice to see everyone clapping at me.
The Nemesis mission took place in a museum, and there were some nice looking pieces there
submarine?
Not sure what this is. OpenSuSe fossilized?
This is a nice set piece from one of the missions.
But if anything, that mission was representative of what Champions Online is like. Beautifully detailed environment, clever missions, dynamic battles and mobs, but ultimately, full of bad balance and bugs.
After I entered that mission and completed it, I realised that the door had disappeared. It was still there, but I couldn't click out. I sent a ticket for a GM, picked up a book, and started reading.
Half an hour passed. No GM.
I quit, and logged back on, but it brought me back to the map.
Finally, I asked my supergroup: how do you get out of this? They offered some suggestions. Submit a support ticket and wait for 10 hours (9.5 hours left!), relog (tried it), or join a pvp queue and teleport out. The last worked, fortunately.
But yep... I know that when the free month is up, I'm taking the pictures away, and memories of something that could have been great but ultimately was not. Something like AoC.