Unfortunate Happenstance

Sadly my gaming rig is suffering from some hard drive problems, so I can't really play anything at the moment. It could be motherboard issues, there's a tiny chance it's a memory issue but after running memtest no errors were found, so I'm going with hard drive problems since I can hear it clicking, though very rarely.

I've had an issue almost identical to this in the past, the only difference so far is that I don't have any corrupted files yet. So rather than continue to try and use the thing until all my files corrupt, I'm going to copy them over to some of those 4 gig usb drives before trying to run anymore tests. Currently it crashes almost randomly, with no real warning. Explorer is what always crashes, so I'm thinking my windows is corrupt.

If I have a virus, my services.exe is acting really strangely, but neither malawarebytes nor adaware can find anything. Adaware says they found a registry error, and fixed it, but I'm not so sure what that had to do with anything.

I had something else to say about my hard drive but I just can't seem to remember it at the moment.

I'll try and get a post up for Monday, but this is the reason why Friday's post never happened, because my PC started crashing all the time. Right now I'm on an old laptop that I've never really used before, but the freedom of movement is quite nice.

Achievements in the future

We all know that achievements are fun to complete. It’s the addition of another bar that slowly goes up and records our progress; it tells us how much closer we are too awesome in a game. It’s a lot like the experience bar, but instead of only providing desire for more levels; the achievement systems most new games are including are able to promote the same feeling towards almost any part of the game.

The origins of the achievement system lay with the concept of a 100% clear. This was promoted in many RPG games by providing certain endings depending on what actions you took in the game, or how much of the game you completed. The more things you did right in a game, the better you’re ending. The achievement system always worked best with RPG games because they were a type of game that provided choice to players, whereas games like the original FPS’s and RTS’s would only provide a single path, and no sense of choice. That’s the origins though, the first time an actual achievement system was used that provided rewards to players was with Xbox live from Microsoft.

Probably the original FPS achievement concept can be traced to multiplayer versions of games, where you could go on kill streaks. The higher your kill streak, the better you were as a player. Players could look at their kill streaks and quantify their ability. And it’s not just about counting the kill streaks for themselves, which they could do anyway in their heads. No, kill streaks are integral to the upbringing of achievement systems because they provided a way to show off to everyone else that you were playing with, just how good you were.

Most RTS games still don’t provide any real sense of choice. Warcraft 3 did an okay starter job as one of the first to provide choices to the player, while Dawn of War leans closer to an RPG and does it better. Despite these choices in the narrative, RTS games continue to lack any real achievement system; the game play just does not fit the mold. Achievement systems fit perfectly with RPG’s, and so as FPS games get closer to becoming RPG games, like Modern Warfare 2, there is a lot more room for achievements as rewards, and statistics to show off to other people.

Achievement systems provide players with many new tools. Players can see what they have accomplished in the game, how they stack up to other people around the world if they care about that sort of thing, and it gives them ideas for things to do in the game that they might not have thought of doing before. Just because a player randomly picks up a special flag or something in some part of the game world doesn’t mean that they’re going to go scour the rest of the game for them as well. But when a player picks up that flag and you tell them how many flags they have left to gather before unlocking something special, well then they go out and try to get more of them.

Just having a single objective like having to gather flags does not make an achievement system though. Super Mario games have long had you collecting coins, other games have had you collecting keys, some money; but those aren’t achievement systems, those coins and keys were a way to complete the game. Achievements are all about choices and promoting players to spend more time within the game world than is necessary to actually complete the game itself. In other words, they work like a kind of mini game, and the rewards associated with achievement systems can’t be a part of the requirements to complete the game. If they are, then it isn’t an achievement.

If you aren’t a fan of having an achievement system in every game ever made from here on forth, then the future isn’t looking bright for you. Practically every game in development or recently released has an achievement system. They typically aren’t so much used as a means to reward players anymore as they are to extend the life of a game. When a player completes a $60 game in less than 10 hours, they feel like it wasn’t really worth the money, especially with MMO games on the market providing unlimited play for very low fees. With an achievement system developers can quickly and easily extend the life of a game probably over double or triple the original time that an average person would have spent on it. Good news for gamers and their wallets, though perhaps bad news for gamers who are addicted to games.

Achievement systems will continue to expand in the future. Especially as more and more games offer the player different paths and choices to go down in terms of storyline, there will be more incentive to make sure players recognize the different stories available to them. LotRO was the first MMO to use an achievement system, and they gave a reward for everything, but other companies quickly realized that achievements in themselves were reward enough, that there was no need to integrate real status effects into them. The perk system with Modern Warfare 2 is a great example of a company that uses achievements as a means of unlocking more abilities... it's also a great example of how developers have to tread carefully when they offer any sort of upgrade system that overpowers the player. The number one reason that players want dedicated servers? So they can turn the perks OFF.

Personal Notes - I’m enjoying updating at midnight each night, which means I write the article before hand. Unfortunately it seems that means I won’t always have top quality articles; this one has no references or anything for example. I can think of all the references I would love to add, but I don’t have the time to go search the web for the sites : ( I hope to return to this topic in the near future and right a real piece on: What the future of the achievement system might hold?

Like the Achievement browser game, where you do nothing but try to do achievements, it’s rather hilarious, the entire point of the game is to complete achievements. I know it was made by Armor Games, and I should have discussed it in the article above, but time constraints work in funny ways sometimes. And something else… but I’ve forgotten since I didn’t write about it : /

I’ve also had hard freezes on my system 5 times tonight. After the 4^th I finally started paying attention and figured it out. Apparently the last Chrome update, which has caused Chrome to start over caching and pretending as if I don’t have cookies enabled, is now also causing massive memory overloads whenever I stream anything… from Any Website. Hulu, animewoot, veoh, cnn, youtube, etc., very annoying. This is the reason I quit using Firefox during I believe the launch of the 3.0 update, because it broke the browser and nobody would admit that it was broken from Mozilla. That’s when I first switched to Chrome. Funny because I am now switching back to firefox, and we will see if it has gotten any better. Everyone suggested I use Opera, but I don’t have it installed on this computer and updating Firefox was much quicker.

What does the future hold? - A look at MMO games

MMO games have come a long way since their humble beginnings, and they appear so prolific that it makes one wonder: just how much further can they go? Aion was just released, Blade and Soul is coming from NCSoft in the future, as well as Guild Wars 2. Blizzard has an unannounced MMO title that they are working on, and there are new free to play MMO’s hitting the market almost weekly. By the same token, many MMO’s are seeing dwindling numbers; Mythic has recently cut half of their Warhammer Online staff, the Matrix Online shut its servers entirely a few months ago, and Aion is already losing many subscribers if the forums are to be believed, practically all of whom came from WoW with many who aren’t going back.

There is of course the blame for the unusual tidal wave of hot non MMO games: Modern Warfare 2, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2, Assassins Creed 2, Bioware 2, etc.. All top notch games, all being released between Q4 2009 and Q1 2010. If there was a war going on between MMO publishers and non MMO publishers, this is probably what it would look like. The point being, all of these are amazing titles for gamers, and due to the now standard additions of RPG elements within multiplayer environments, as well as the achievement systems all single player games now have, there is a lot of time to be spent away from MMO games.

Quickly, MW2 multiplayer is not bleeding into the MMO seen. Yes, it’s online, yes, it’s multiplayer, no, it is not an MMO. This is because it does not have a persistent world. There is a lobby, you connect to a game, the game loads, you play the game, you disconnect, and you’re back in the lobby. That’s not how MMO’s work. MW2 is a FPS RPG though. Just like the traditional MMO is an RPG, MW2 is one of the culminating transformations of including RPG elements into FPS’s. I say culminating because it’s been done before, even in MW1, but Activision has really hit the RPG aspect dead center this time.

With that out of the way, we can get back to the issue at hand. MMO games are here to stay, and it looks like they are attempting to push the boundaries. As mentioned before, a traditional MMO is a multiplayer RPG game with a persistent world; from Ultima Online to Everquest to WoW and beyond. While the traditional model still works, WoW can vouch for that, most producers have realized that in order to compete with WoW, the investment isn’t worth the payout and risk.

Taking Aion as an example, the game is more polished than WoW was when it launched, and it is seeing improvements constantly, but players are already disillusioned. In order to break into the traditional MMO market right now, you need a game that has seen practically 2 additional years of polish, much like Warhammer Online and Age of Conan are just now approaching. Aion of course launched after having been released for 1 year in Korea, so it still has a year to go before enough polish has been applied. Of course, by the time a game has gotten 2 years of polish, most interested players have bought it, tried it, and then tossed it to the side, looking to the new great thing on the horizon that promises better features and graphics than the now outdated MMO can provide. It is a vicious cycle.

Developers aren’t willing to just let this gold mine slip through their fingers though, despite the risks. Some decided to destroy the reputation of their companies to try and make as much money back as possible for investors, like Age of Conan did. Others keep pushing at it as long as they can, knowing they have an A list title on their hands, but things just aren’t clicking, which is what is happening with Warhammer Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online. Later developers have treaded lightly on the outskirts of the land mine that WoW has turned the traditional MMO market into, and have come up with some fresher concepts.

EvE Online created a persistent world with no rules, a sandbox. Or I guess a “universe” would be a better term. They’ve managed to garner a ton of attention and a solid fan base, despite the “low compared to top list MMO” numbers. Then there’s the rash outbreak of free to play MMO’s as well and here is where innovation is at its peak. Low budget companies throwing concepts together in a mad hope that something sticks and makes an impact on players long enough for them to gain a profit on their investment through micro transactions.

It may be strange to think of it, but games like Evony Online are actually MMO’s. They are multiplayer, they are online, and they have a persistent world that players can interact in. Though many of these browser games are missing the massively part. You could argue that Guild Wars was never a true MMO because it didn’t allow for large amounts of players to accumulate in a single location for adventures, aka lacking on the “Massive”. But that word has basically been forgotten from the acronym, as MMO has come to take on a meaning despite what it originally stood for.

The point of bringing up Evony is to showcase an example of just how much further MMO’s can go. While Evony Online is a browser MMO and is very bare bones, Dawn of Fantasy is a new MMO coming out that fleshes out the basic concepts. Dawn of Fantasy was most likely in production before Evony ever was, so there is no suggestion here that it is literally a take off of it. And before Evony Online ever did it, Glitchless’s Race War Kingdoms did it, but that’s another story. Dawn of Fantasy isn’t a typical MMO, it’s a MMO RTS. Base building, unit and army control, all with a world to conquer. While players are not destroying forests and digging up mountains (as far as I know anyway) in this game, they are building cities and armies in the RTS style and fighting with other players in an RTS style, all in the persistent online world of an MMO. Other MMO’s have allowed you to modify the game world before: Darkfall Online, Age of Conan, some A list MMO that I forgot the name of, Star Wars Galaxies as well. An actual RTS MMO though is one of the new directions some developers are going in order to try and scoop up part of the MMO pie. (note - I don’t condone actually playing Evony Online )

The next step in MMO development, the true “next-gen” is going to go beyond genre mashing though. Some people have been fantasizing about the possibilities for decades, just waiting for the technology and resources to match up so that it can be created. While all MMO’s require a persistent world, and many MMO’s allow players to interact and change things within those worlds, nobody has made a game where players can truly interact with the land itself: cutting down trees that are literally cut down and will take a long time to grow again assuming that they are given the chance, killing rabbits that actually disappear and don’t just respawn 2 minutes later, digging into mountains and having caves left behind. MMO 2.0 is another name for it, and there’s a small possibility that this is what Blizzard-Activision has in mind when they refer to their next-gen MMO that they are making.

MMO’s have a lot of life left in them, and they are going to keep invading the gaming world for years to come. If there is a genre out there, then it can be made into an MMO. Another spin on MMO’s is bringing them to consoles. EvE Online is doing this with their new MMO addition Dusk514, and FPS console MMO set in the same universe as EvE Online. While not next-gen, definitely a step forward for the MMO platform. MMO games have muscled their way into the same platform definition where one would only use the words “single player” or “multi player” in the past. It’s not just a multiplayer game, it’s an MMO.

Audio Surf is a game that is meant to let you enjoy your favorite songs in a more interactive manner. The song is turned into a race track of sorts, with you controlling a space ship that’s flying on it. There are 3 channel paths the space ship can go in and the simplified concept of the game is to collect the colored blocks and dodge the grey blocks. Timing is important as you have to constantly weave through the three different paths in order to dodge possible obstructions. Three possible channels related to an audio track with colored objectives to “collect”, where have we seen that before in a video game…

While the game at a glance is nothing revolutionary, the key concept here is that you can turn any song into an obstacle course to fly down. There are no more limits, if you have an audio file in an mp3 format then there is a very good chance it will play. I don’t suggest trying to load any audio books though as it will take forever. A 4 minute song generally only takes about 15 seconds to render the first time, and thereafter if you ever want to play it again the game has the information stored and it will load in less than 5.

Some audio files of mine would not play, even though they are mp3 and work fine in any media player on my computer. Most likely they require a codec that Audio Surf doesn’t support, but that’s probably an easy fix for the future, if the developers feel like it.

Back to the revolutionary part: the concept itself isn’t revolutionary, but coming across a finished product like this is rare enough that the word is justified. People have been adding their own sound tracks to audio games for a long time, but that typically took effort because you then had to actually program the game around the music. Audio Surf scans the mp3 file and then creates the game for you.

There’s a good reason major companies haven’t created games like this, and it’s not just because they can charge you money for each song you download from them. Whatever algorithm the game uses to read your mp3 file isn’t of very high quality, and it can often make obstacle courses that are inconceivable to complete. No game company wants to create a product that is as badly hit or miss as this one, and so it isn’t done. Well, almost no game company.

The game states that the faster a song is the more difficult it will be, but that isn’t true. Some very fast songs are jokes, while some very slow songs are literally impossible to play. Sometimes the rhythm is even messed up completely, and so your song will stutter start, going fast-slow, fast-slow, making it impossible to get into a regular groove. Often when the game stutters to a halt, or suddenly speeds up really fast with no visual queue that this is going to happen, you’re going to hit a lot of grey cubes.

If you want to get a perfect score on a song, don’t expect to start it up and just do it, because it won’t happen. To really beat a song, you will have to memorize whatever course is thrown out at you from the game. The track isn’t flat like it is in Rock Band or Guitar Hero, instead it undulates with the music. While this looks cool, your spaceship can be thrown into blind turns with no hope of surviving unscathed. Some people will probably get seizures from this as well.

The main mode of the game is simple enough. Catch all the colored blocks, dodge all the grey ones. There are many more modes, but they all lack any sort of explanation. Two sentences and a bunch of hints you can scroll through do not suffice as an explanation. After putting in over 5 hours I still have no idea how the scoring system works, and it’s largely irrelevant since in most of the modes you can’t actually choose what color blocks come at you. Supposedly if you get 3 blocks of the same color together, you get a score bonus, but I haven’t seen it.

Despite the large amount of issues with how levels are created, and how there is only mode worth playing; it’s still an enjoyable game. For those with an elitist passion you can grind out a song over and over until you make it into the number 1 spot on the online database, for that song. Only some songs are registered with the online system, but I think they will recognize any song you could find on iTunes. You couldn’t for example… play this song and expect the system to score you online. The game is made for short session play, but long load times hurt using it that way.

The game only costs $10, and it’s probably worth that much for entertainment. It also comes with a wonderful demo, so you can test it out before buying and see if you’d actually spend much time with it. I’m going to rate it a 3/10. Nice game, nice concept, but there just isn’t anything there, and oh, so very poorly designed to handle the musical anomalies it was made for in the first place. As a niche genre piece it’s great, but as a game, it isn’t much of a game.

Here's a sample of some guy playing it on youtube, as you can see, he's dodging the gray blocks, and going after the colored ones, which change color along with the background etc.

DragonAge:Origins First Impressions

Big questions are generated in one’s mind when a sequel to a classic is made. If this was a review from a gaming website I would pontificate my opening sentence into a run on of analogies and big questions. Instead I’ll just pretend for a moment that I was Tycho.

Dragon Age: Origins; the named sequel to the famous Baldur’s Gate series. A series which spanned a number of games, from the party mode story telling in all of the PC versions, to the button mashing festival on the PS2, Xbox, and even the GameCube.

This time, the same game has been released for the PC as well as the Xbox360 and PS3. Past incarnations of Baldur’s Gate titles have always played differently on the PC than on other gaming platforms. The PS2 and Xbox games Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, and its sequel BG: DA2, were both single hero dungeon romps. In other words, you only ever controlled one character, ever.

The PC versions of Baldur’s Gate all involved party control. Yes, you had your main character, but then you had all these supporting people you could choose from to fill out your party and bring new skills to the table. It made for a more tactical game.

It plays faster than the old PC versions, which may or may not please players, and it plays slower than the old console versions… which again may or may not please players. The controls take a little getting used to, especially if you were expecting one extreme or the other, because it just kind of settles in the middle. You can play the game with party members doing nothing but throwing support as you go on a rampage, or you can play the game and pause as often as you like, the difficulty menu explains it pretty clearly. Easy and Normal mode are more like the old console versions, while the difficult and whatever the last one was named settings, the description tells you that you will want to pause the game a lot.

Enough of its past though, Dragon Age: Origins is a brand new game. Origins is based in a "new" fantasy world, though it is still filled with elves, dwarves, humans, trolls, and orcs. For the first time the elves aren’t really powerful, and instead it’s just dwarves and humans as the politically strong races. Not exactly the awesome new world as was suggested… but as far as generic fantasy worlds with a mild twist go, it’s a fun world. Some people are actually calling out todays fantasy worlds as nothing more than rehash, and from a look at Origins, they'd be right.

Role playing different kinds of characters can extend the life of the game greatly, and I suggest that you do the following. Read the description of your race, class, and starting area, and then before actually starting the game come up with an outline of how you want your character to behave: mean or nice, likes or dislikes other races, interested in love or not, likes men or women, all of the basics. If you’ve played through the game before than you can further flesh out your character before starting, but if you haven’t then don’t try to stretch yourself just yet, because you discover a lot during your Origin Story. I strongly suggest you come up with an outline for your character first, because while how you react is tested almost constantly, it can feel like a letdown when you give in just to get an easy reward, cursing your weak will later which you exchanged for shiny loot.

There are six total Origin Stories and they are one of the best fleshed concepts that Bioware has pulled off. Each of them lasts about 3 hours of game play. These six stories are crafted in order to give your character a particular outlook on the world. They can influence if your character likes the church, or other races, or even their own race. The Human Noble story is the best crafted of the ones I have completed, because it takes you along for the ride without forcing options at you. Some of the other stories, especially the Daelish Elf one, feel extremely forced and can easily ruin any sort of immiscibility you have with the game. I suggest if you want to play a good character, play the Human Noble storyline, and if you want to play a bad character, play the City Elf storyline, and go from there.

Unfortunately this forced storytelling method rears its ugly head throughout the game, destroying any sense of immersion at key points in the storyline. One second a companion will be saying “I’m tired of waiting, let’s go do this,” and the very next scene he will say “I don’t like where this is going, we should do this.” Complete destruction of immersion. It’s also really painful trying to play an evil character. The game just does not want to let it happen. Even the evil characters in your party will get mad at you if you act “too evil”. It’s very sad.

Despite all this, it’s still an incredible story and fun to play through as different personalities. If you want to play a personality besides “neutral good lover of all”, then expect the story to piss you off at points, not giving you the proper options to do what you want. Nothing is more annoying than having someone call you a dirty slave worthy city elf not fit to be in their eyesight and then having the game not give you the option to gut them. The fact that the game can make you feel such emotions though, even if at the game itself more than the characters in the game, shows how well crafted it is, drawing you in and making you feel attached to your character.

The game is rumored to last over 100 hours even if you don’t do all of the side quests. So it is a huge game, and having the ability to play through it with multiple personalities can only extend the enjoyment. Honestly though, most people playing this game aren’t going to be big into role-playing, and will probably only end up with two personalities, good to see what good does, and as evil as possible. What’s that? Sounds like KoTOR? If you are into role-playing, this game can provide a solid 6 or more adventures. I don’t consider the male/female option of playing through as a real character changer.

The much hyped Mass Effect style conversation system falls flat, as previously mentioned. More errors involve cut and paste conversation, where it doesn’t matter what you say, the end result is the same. This creates a confusing illusion that what you say doesn’t have any effect on the conversations, when in reality it just rarely has a real effect on the conversation. The further into the game you play though, the more your conversation choices make an immediate difference.

The biggest problem with the conversation system is that you don’t always know what you’re saying. By this I mean that you think you’re saying one thing, you read the line and go yeah, I would say something like that, but then the person you’re speaking to responds in a totally unexpected manner, and all of a sudden you realize that what you chose to say could be stated with a different tone and mean something completely different. It’s reminiscent of those terrible point and click puzzles, or “logic” flash games, where the answer is only visible if you are the creator, not because you’re supposed to solve anything.

Those are the two most frustrating things wrong with Dragon Age. The conversation system not providing enough information on how you are saying something and the lack of choices to react as your character would. You might say “it’s impossible to provide all the possible reactions”, but that’s not true. There are six origins, each one makes you feel a certain way about the world, and it shouldn’t be a surprise when a blood thirsty city elf who hates humans by DESIGN wants to kill or confront anyone who insults them. Acceptance, Ignorance, Confrontation. Three results, all you need, I’m sure somebody wrote a book on it 30 years ago. Giving two identical options of acceptance is just bad design.

Well, those are my first impressions of Dragon Age: Origins. I plan on playing some more of it in the near future, and I’ll probably have some closing impressions as well. It is a good game, despite my obvious problem with the conversation system, and I suggest that anybody who has played the original PC Baldur’s Gates buy it. If you want nonstop action, you could get it but you’d probably be happier with Modern Warfare 2. If you’re a fan of Western fantasy RPG’s, then this is a staple game that you will enjoy.

Aion "Actually it's not me, it's you."

Aion is a beautiful game, probably the most beautiful MMO out on the market. But just like an obnoxious girl, you have to balance out her sexual appeal to how willing you are to stand for her bullshit.

Aion. I love crafting in your game. It is a solid experience with a continual churning of mini rewards that make me feel like my time is well spent in upgrading my character. I love all the quirks and polish snuck into the world itself like hidden Easter eggs just waiting to be found. Every zone, many of the quests, NPC names, have little parts to them that can make you chuckle if you take the time. I love your ridiculous graphics that make my PC feel like it’s running a marathon, you are so beautiful. It feels like watching those old-school high-rendered next-gen top quality video game commercials, but this time the game play actually looks that way. I love how many different monsters you have in the world. I love how PvP is not an option, but a way of life.

All of that just isn’t enough compared to your bad side.

My video card is up to date, I have a dual core processor, sure I’m not as buff as I used to be a couple years ago, but you didn’t even know me back then! Aion is intended to work with PC’s like mine, but due to coding complications, or Something, the game has a major problem with dual core processors. Many players actually got better results by turning off one of their processors.

The problems range from frame rate spikes to rubber banding, which is basically the same thing as rollback lag, to just not working at all. These aren’t isolated incidents, many players have had to deal with these problems, and NCSoft suffers from a sever lack of support. Make that a lack of any support. They offer a forum where players can talk to each other about problems, but no one from their company actually chimes in with any assistance. Maybe that’s better than being told to delete your WTF folder for everything from lag to lost loot… but not really.

Now, there’s nothing worse than going out with your significant other, or maybe just someone you hope will be, and discovering bugs hopping off of them onto you and biting you. Okay, so that example is a bit extreme, but gold spammers and bots in Aion are just as invasive, if not as disgusting. You cannot enter a city without seeing a gold seller sitting somewhere, and you won’t go a single game session without having your chat box filled with at least a couple gold spammers.

The problem with bots and gold spammers further highlights the disconnect between the developers/community leaders and the players. In the most recent patch, players couldn’t even block gold spammers anymore, which means that their chat boxes were filled with gold spam endlessly. I hope NCSoft put the block functionality back into their game, and that it was just a bug, but launching with such an error really does make the game unplayable. There was a recent article somewhere, if someone else remembers where please put a link in the comments, which discussed how MMO companies typically take one of two stances: either an open community forum with developers or a closed one. NCSoft definitely takes the closed version; it was even mentioned in the article that way. It is a major turn off when you have a problem and you have no idea how to go about fixing it, and neither does anybody else, because it’s not your fault, it’s the games fault.

Other gripes with Aion are that some of the classes suck at soloing. Templars for example can’t solo worth a damn. If you want to solo, either take a high damage class or a healing class… oh wait, that’s actually everyone except Templars. So just don’t roll a Templar. Yet NCSoft is probably wondering why there is a tank shortage…

The final stake through my heart? The grind. I don’t mind grinding, I don’t mind getting my hands dirty, putting in my time, scraping together the pieces in order to foster the growth of something fantastic. But Aion asks too much. The level cap should have been 30, not 50, because once you pass level 30, the experience needed to get from one level to the next is exorbitant, and it only gets work. Going from level 49 to 50 takes over 1 billion experience points. Someone did the math; it’s the same amount of XP you would need to get from level 1 to 45. A game that requires some grinding is okay as long as you’re enjoying yourself. A game that promotes bots to grind because there’s no way a human being in their right mind could sit through that much time is not a game you want to be around. Even if she makes the best damn cookies in the world.

And by the way, it's also a terrible sign when the company is already churning out another MMO that looks so similar to the one you were just playing. This guy at Massively.com is already talking about it, Blade And Soul, and honestly I can't blame her. Though I will disagree. Blade and Soul will be great for 2 months and then fail. If you want an MMO from NCSoft, stick with Guild Wars 2.

Shadowmourne Released

344... +400 strength stacking...

Just the 344 DPS, with an almost 1600 top end damage, is incredible. I don't think even one of these will be seen on live servers for at least 5 months, especially with the new gated system for releasing wings of ICC, but when someone does get one, this is going to be nasty in PvP. The 10 stack reward of a 2k damage effect is meaningless really, but the strength bonus, if it actually stacks up to 400 is a huge boost. That's basically a ~900 AP bonus.

If the Soul Fragment things do stack, giving +40 strength each, then you're looking at about +200 strength on average, minus a little for the downtime of 0 strength and 40 strength, plus the top end wouldn't actually exist, so it's more of a scale between 0 and 360, which gives an average of +180 strength. Still greater than any trinket or set bonus I think, not to mention in addition to them.

If I got this, I would purposefully take out my other JC only +str gems and slot them all into this weapon, just to make it even more OP than it already is.

No Longer a Correspondent

Well, it looks like MMORPG.com has finally shut the doors on their correspondent program. No word on why exactly, but I'm honestly not that surprised. Keeping track of so many different writers, many who probably only wrote a couple articles and then left, was probably too big of a headache compared to the return value. It appears they also hired a good number of additional staff to handle all of their important news issues, so they should be good for the future. It was a very enjoyable experience, and I'm glad I was able to participate in it. Getting paid to write, even if it's a negligible amount, felt really good. It looks like I'll have more time to spend updating this blog now though.

I'll go ahead and update today with the last article I wrote for MMORPG.com. I naturally would never repost something elsewhere that I've written for someone, but my last article was pulled due to a misunderstanding on its content. "Promoting cheating" was the reason, though they're also shutting down the program so that would have been reason enough for me. If you ever want to read my old articles they can be found here, though you'll have to sift through to find articles written by Robert Duckworth, the websites search feature can't seem to narrow it down any further.

My last article in its submission form... honestly barely different from its final form.

Swing Timers and Animation Cancelling

Whenever you do anything with your avatar in an MMO you get visual feedback. If you press the forward button then your character starts moving forward, if you use a special attack then you get to see some flashy lights. Those are all animations. Some things you do with your avatar will cause an animation that locks your character into place, essentially removing control of your character from you until the animation has been completed. For example, in Aion if a Ranger uses their Stunning Shot, they are locked in one place until the approximately 1 second animation has been completed, losing all control over their character, they cannot even cancel the shot if they want to by moving. Animation cancelling helps fix this, and is done by revoking the games process which locks your character into an animation sequence. The action continues anyway, but the player is allowed to maintain control over their character. So going back to the Ranger example, they would be able to shoot the Stunning Shot faster by cutting down or completely eliminating the animation before the shot is fired.

This is not something new with Aion; it has been around for a long time in video games. Some players consider the concept to be cheating, while others consider it just another aspect of a player’s grasp of skill over a game. It can definitely feel like someone is cheating if they are using it against you and you do not know how to respond. Whether or not it is considered cheating seems to depend on the community that surrounds it. A factor is how easy it is to successfully cancel an animation, the easier it is to do the more acceptable the practice appears to become. WoW, as must almost always be mentioned when discussing MMO’s, actually does not have any animation cancelling. Character avatars in WoW are never locked into an animation for anything, and it makes the game feel incredibly smooth. WoW used to have another issue though that is sort of like animation cancelling, but is more related to swing timers, which will be discussed first. (Img#1 – Lovely View)

My personal experiences in Aion have mainly been restricted to a Ranger and a Templar so far, so those are the two classes I am going to use in my explanations. The Templar does not have the same amount of animation canceling that the Ranger has, but they do involve the important concept of swing timers. Each weapon has an attack speed associated with it, depending on what type of weapon it is. A Templars Great Sword for example has an attack speed of 2.4 seconds. This means that every 2.4 seconds, the Templar will swing their weapon for a normal auto attack.

The issue here is that when a player uses a special attack, it will delay their swing timer. So if I press a special attack on my Templar 2.3 seconds after their last auto attack, I will not get another auto attack until the animation for my special attack has finished, plus a little bit of extra time even. It actually lowers your damage if you hit special attacks back to back, because you never give your avatar time to get any of their auto attacks in. Normally you would think that special attacks would hit for more damage than auto attacks, and they may at some of the higher levels, but when you take into account a weapons extra hit chance, the auto attacks often hit for more than the special attacks. Great Swords are classified as a “Very slow 3 hit weapon”. This means that for every auto attack done by a Great Sword, you have a chance to hit your target 3 times instead of just once, while special attacks only ever hit their target once.

Auto attack animations, unlike special attack animations, do not restrict your character from using new abilities. In order to maximize your damage, you have to press your special attack right after the auto attack animation starts. You will deal your full auto attack damage, plus your special attack damage, and while going through your special attack animation which you are locked into, your auto attack timer is counting down, coming off the timer shortly after you finish your special attack. Doing nothing but chaining all your available attacks one after the other hurts your damage output by a lot, making solo leveling almost impossible if you do this, and of course not bringing your full potential to a group either.

One thing of note is that because you have over written your auto attack animation, your auto attack damage is applied instantly rather than after the animation. So using your special attacks this ways also lets you spike damage closer together, instead of having it laid out evenly. (Img#2 – Auto Swing)

The Rangers auto attacks work the same way as the Templars, though Rangers deal a lot more damage with their special attacks than they do with their auto attacks. In a PvE setting the ranger will want to do the same thing a Templar does, waiting until right after their auto attack animation starts before using a special attack. In PvP though, Rangers will want to do something different. If someone is chasing you, you typically cannot afford to stop and stand there, letting them close the distance to you while you charge up a 1 second special attack. The solution: cast your shots instantly by canceling the 1 second cast time animation. This is also very good practice for solo questing. Rather than use a trap on every mob, or constantly switching back and forth between melee and ranged attacks, you can kite them and still deal special attack damage.

The process to get instant cast shots out of a ranger sounds a little complex, but actually doing it in game will show that it is not that hard to pull off. The first thing you have to do is make sure that your auto attack timer is fully charged. If you have your attack turned on, then your auto attack is turned on, and the timer will recharge itself no matter what direction you’re facing or if you’re in range of your target or not. So as a Ranger, make sure that your auto attack is turned on, but is charged, so it has not fired in the last few seconds. The only way to really accomplish this is to have your avatar turned away from your target.

Next, you will want to jump. If all you do is face away, charge your auto attack, and then press your special attack, you will turn around and go through the same 1 second cast. So you are jumping, and starting at right before you land, up to right after you land, is the time where you want to hit your special attack button. You also want to make sure that when you are landing your target is in your frontal cone of vision, so you want to go from facing away from them to facing towards them. I have noticed that sometimes if you spam your special attack that it will push you into the cast animation, whereas if you just press it once or twice you will get an instant shot. And that is really all there is to it. Instead of taking over a second of cast time to fire off a supposed zero cast time instant shot, you take less than a quarter of a second before you can start moving again in whatever direction you please.

You will not get your auto attack shot out of this because you are resetting the auto attack timer by shooting your special attack. For Rangers, this is not that important anyway since auto shots do so little damage when compared to special attacks. Also, while your character is not going through the animation for their casted shot, they are frozen from committing any new special attacks until the animation timer that they cancelled would have finished. But instead of firing the special attack at the end of the animation, it is fired instantly and you maintain full control of your characters movement throughout the time where normally you would be stuck in one place. (Img#3 – 15% Cast Time Perhaps)

A few of the other classes probably share the same issues with auto attacks that the Templar and Ranger do. The Gladiator for example I can imagine. I do not see any of the caster classes having to deal with these issues because if they move they cancel their spell casts. Rangers cannot cancel their attack animations by moving, and neither can melee classes. Spell casters may have their own form of animation cancelling but I do not have any experience with it if they do. I have seen an in game advertisement by a player from a private store selling a type of food that transforms you into something else, claiming it cuts down on casting animations by 15%, and thus increasing your casting speed by 15%, but they were AFK so I never got a real answer.

I have noticed a general acceptance of animation cancelling for Rangers. NCSoft has done nothing to stop it from happening for 10 months, and it does not appear to make Rangers over powered. Instead it looks as if it is an intended feature of the class. Forced animations are one of the sad side effects of pushing a game to look better rather than play better, often leading to that annoying clunky feeling. Cutting down on lengthy character animations, as well as the concept of global cool downs between activating abilities, are the two main methods I have seen over the years used to combat this issue.

- Averice

DJ Hero *Preview*

DJ Hero - Saving the world 2 mixed beats at a time.

The villain has stolen your princess and she’s locked in the castle! It’s up to you and your trusty record scratching box thing, to perform a grueling series of events involving the mastery of timing, pressing, scratching, sliding, holding, and bobbing your head along to the beat. You finally have made it to the end of your journey! Only to have some little guy tell you that you wasted all your time. But then, it’s all about the journey, isn’t it?

No, that storyline has nothing at all to do with DJ Hero’s storyline. You can pretend if you want though, since DJ Hero doesn’t actually have a storyline as far as I could tell. Maybe it did, I only spent one hour with the thing, and it was a demo copy so I only had access to a single 3 set of songs. Supposedly that’s how it works, just like DDR used to do it.

Again, I only spent about 1 hour with this game, so if you think this review just doesn’t cover all there is to the game, there’s the reason. That said, I feel that 1 hour is all the time needed for a game like this. There is no growth in this game. There is no character development or plot line, there’s no unlocking of cool new abilities to blast your foes with. All of the growth will come from the player themselves as they gain skill at using the turntable. It’s essentially Guitar Hero with a turn table instead of a guitar. Well, instead of 5 buttons you get 3 buttons, a slider, and a little disc to turn. That slider is actually the most difficult part.

Like other games of its ilk, DJ Hero is no pushover once you get to the harder difficulty levels. You will feel like you are actually accomplishing something that takes skill, and so even if you’re not actually learning anything worthwhile, the game still works. The whole experience was rather empty, but if you like this kind of music and you don’t mind the $90 price tag, and you like the Guitar Hero style of game, then there is zero reason not to buy this.

Oh right, add to that list: if you don’t mind playing by yourself. DJ Hero is a single player game through and through. Supposedly a friend can come over with their own $90 turn table and plug it in and you guys can compare your scores in person rather than online, but… that’s about it. Whenever something like this comes up with a game all I can think of is Four Swords Zelda for the GameCube. You’ll be happy its single player though once you realize just how silly you look getting all into scratching on the little plastic record.

The mixed beats are of high quality, most of them made specifically for this game by real DJ’s. It is a little disappointing that the maximum number of mixed beats is only ever two songs. They could have really spiced things up and made some real 20 minute sets with over 10 different tracks at once, but for some reason they felt to take that out and leave you with bite sized chunks of minimalist mixing. The game pauses between each mixed song in a set, tallying your score up for you, letting you know how you did, before starting the next song. If you feel like a DJ when you play this game, then you might want to find out what DJ’s actually do.

The lack of creativity from the player is also apparent. Now maybe I missed something about having a free style icon letting you know when you can scratch to your heart’s content, but even if that is in the game it doesn’t make up for zero player mixing. All of the songs are premixed, it’s actually hard to play them in the game until you’ve played it a few times and know how different parts are going to sound because the beat will randomly change and you’ll be stuck wondering why you just missed a series of notes. Since you can’t actually hear the beat anymore once you miss the first note, and the beat changes as you hit that first note, you can’t use the audio to help you DJ. You end up being forced to spend way too much of your attention on watching the timing of the track on the screen, and not enough on enjoying the music you’re playing. In other words, the game can feel more like work than play, which honestly is a non issue in Guitar Hero, unless maybe you’re playing the drums. But even then, at least the beat is constant; you got that working for you. DJ Hero says no.

If you do get this game, the first thing you need to do is set up a comfortable place to play it. Then you need to set up a massive sound system, subwoofer if you can, and blast the neighborhood. It really is important to play comfortably and at the right height, because otherwise you’ll end up getting blisters on your scratching hand. Actually, you should go out and invest in a special DJ Glove. Then you can DJ Hero whenever you feel like it no matter where you are.

Final hits? Solid beat game. New style of music and a new way to play it. Niche marketing to the near extreme. If you liked playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band when you were by yourself, but like this kind of music more than rock and roll, you’ll like this game.

Batman Arkham Asylum *Review*

Everyone else has said it, and you really can’t get by without repeating it. Batman AA (Arkham Asylum) is probably the best movie/comic book character to video game translation ever made. Perhaps the reason for this isn’t so much the idea that someone finally got the formula right, but the fact that technology has finally caught up in the gaming developing arena to actually be comparable with what you would see in a movie.

I’ll be honest, 2K Games could have easily made Batman AA just as good as Rocksteady did. I mean, Bioshock is Batman without the Batman. Sure they might have gone with the first person mode instead of third person, but then again you are the character in Bioshock, while in Batman you play as Batman. The 3^rd person perspective of Batman AA was perfect for this very reason. You aren’t just playing a video game as some guy, you are Batman.

I compare Batman AA to Bioshock also because of its world creation and how immersive both games are. Both games deliver in mass amounts. Rocksteady actually managed to tell a Batman story that hadn’t been told before, all while maintaining the rich world of Batman that everybody knows.

Like I started with, technology has reached the point that a games graphics can be so good it can compare to a movie. Obviously the storyline has something to do with the games greatness, but nothing can really bring out the quality as much as these graphics. It just wouldn’t be the same game if this was made on the PS1, it wouldn’t have that last punch of quality necessary to make it a game worth of the franchise. When the entire franchise is based on the art form known as the comic book, and then also sided up next to a box office extraordinaire movie, you’ve got to make an amazing game, and technology is what let them do it.

Graphically the game is gorgeous. The environments are well crafted, the island is actually really large and as the game progresses the amount of terrain you’re able to cover just keeps expanding and expanding. The skyline of Gotham City from Arkham Asylum is beautiful. You can’t ever get there, but you wish you could. At some points the lighting changes are a bit too drastic, like when the entire screen gets saturated in pink and red. All of the characters are well crafted; you can even unlock little pictures of statues of them that you can analyze up close as you go through the game. It’s really unfortunate though that after how good the game looks, half of the game will be spent staring at a washed out screen in what is known as “Detective Mode”.

Detective Mode gives Batman X-Ray vision. Kind of silly when you stop to think about it, and I’m not sure what the excuse is that he can see enemies through up to 3 walls and rooms away. Other than just showing you enemies if the camera goes in that direction, it also pulls up a handy little box that literally tells you how many enemies there are in a location. Incredibly useful, but is a complete drag on how immersive the game is. Detective Mode is also the only way to tell if certain walls or grates can be moved, because it highlights them in a nice bright orange compared to the blue that it washes the screen out with. You have to spend many of the stealth sections of the game permanently in detective mode so you can keep tabs on the enemy the entire time. It literally saps all color and life from the game when you turn it on, and it could have been implemented so much better.

Back to the character models, Batman is a little stiff at times, especially when he’s walking, but it’s most likely intended since Bruce Wayne’s a stiff guy anyway, not to mention that tight leather outfit kind of restricts your movement. Does anyone else remember the old batman movies with Alicia Silverstone where we heard stories about how their leather outfits were so tight they constantly had to be repaired after simple things like bending over? They had to make room for their nipples in those things they were so tight. That’s how Batman looks when he’s walking around or running through corridors. When Batman starts to fight though… everything he does becomes incredibly fluid.

Watching Batman fight against thugs is like watching a good action movie. He’s able to juggle 20 enemies at once just coming at him; countering guys sneaking up on him with quick rapid knockdowns, punching, leaping, flying kicks, not to mention batarangs and other tools all useable on the bad guys. The combat system is well made for both the stealth situations and for the mass combat situations that Batman finds himself in. While fighting the game goes into automatic bullet time effects if you’re pulling off a particularly vicious move, which looks great.

If only the controls were just a little better. I played the game on the PC with a keyboard and mouse, and it’s obvious rather quickly that this is not how you should play the game. I can’t think of any way in which Rocksteady could have really fixed the issue for most of their game. It’s a 3d issue with having to use the mouse for movement, targeting, and countering. The problem is that when you play the game with a keyboard and mouse you only have 4 directional buttons, which leaves you with the end result of only 8 possible directions to move in at once. Enemies don’t come at you on a square grid they come at you from 360 degrees.

You’re supposed to make up for this lack of directions with the mouse I guess, but when you’re attempt to target enemies and jump over them and now instead of just pressing the gamepad in the direction of the guy you want to attack or counter you have to move the camera and then move Batman, and I don’t think there are many people who can actually do that in the amount of time you’re given. If you want to truly enjoy this game, plug in a gamepad, because it’s just not as good as it could be if you don’t.

Now I don’t know what possessed the guys over at Rocksteady to do this, but you go from a game that’s 100% 3D combat in the beginning, to a game that slowly turns itself into a fixed camera mode, some of the boss fights even use a fixed camera! It is horrible. There’s a reason bad games are made with fixed cameras, because the camera ruins the game. Again this wouldn’t be as much of an issue if you have a gamepad to play with, but a lot of the enjoyment disappears from the game when you aren’t fighting the bosses and instead you’re fighting the controls. I know I died countless times due to Batman only having 8 directions to move in. When you take the camera control away from the keyboard player, you took away any hope he has of doing anything successful. The last 15% of the game was almost pure frustration because of this. I know games bosses are supposed to be hard, but this isn’t how they’re supposed to be hard. Besides fighting the controls the bosses were actually complete jokes, so that’s another let down.

I think one of the major problems with the game is how you can extend any fight as long as you want by simply vaulting over the bad guys. Even the giant mega bad guys that are supposed to spell death when you get close to them can be vaulted over if you find yourself in a bad situation. Honestly that was my saving grace since I didn’t have a game pad, I couldn’t have even completed the game without this cheap vault move. It really all just comes back down to the controls, it’s what turned this game from a masterpiece into just a really, really good game.

Basically the game looks great but you don’t see it half the time because you have to use Detective Mode. The fighting looks awesome but blows without a gamepad, and fixed camera gaming blows for 3D fighters, hell it blows for 2D fighters where you can move up and down on the screen, we’ve known this for over 30 years! The boss fights are as simple as fighting the normal thugs you run across, find the twist and go, talk about bland. Which brings up another annoyance, when you die the game gives you a “hint”. The “hint” is actually exactly what you have to do to beat the boss, and you can’t Not see this unless I suppose you close your eyes and spam the start button until you hear the cut scene starting again. I’ve died before even getting to a point where I might need the hint, and having the entire boss fight ruined for you because of it is incredibly obnoxious.

10% Music Atmosphere: 8/10 – Nothing memorable, but it doesn’t have to be memorable, it has to set a mood, and AA definitely has a mood. This score probably isn’t fair since I was too engrossed in the game to notice the music, but it’s fair enough since it didn’t stand out.

10% Sound Effects Atmosphere: 7/10 - Sound effects were good, but at the same time completely pointless. This probably shouldn’t be worth 10%, but for now it is. I mean, you’re in a sneaking situation and you bust down a grate and then run all over it, making all sorts of loud noise, and the guy 3 feet from you doesn’t even notice.

50% Game play: 9/10 – This probably would have been a 10 if I had played it with a gamepad, but I didn’t, so it doesn’t get one.

15% In the Genre: 10/10 – For a comic/movie to video game… game, that is a 3D fighter/puzzler, this is the top.

15% Graphics: 10/10 – These graphics are amazing. The only awkward moment is when you walk through water and the camera gets all shimmery but Batman himself doesn’t get wet. His bat suit is just that awesome.

Final Score: 90 – Means Awesome, but it could’ve been better.

On LOL and AA

League of Legends came out a few days ago and I've managed to play a couple games since then. LoL is still in some sort of launch stage right now where players can play as any Champion they want without paying extra money. It's supposed to last for a little while longer, a couple weeks I believe, so if anybody is looking into finding out just which Champion type they like most then they should start playing now. Not all of the features are currently implemented, but you do get to gain experience that will carry over into the first "pre-season" stage of the game.

LoL is set up to work in seasons; so there will be pre-season weeks, and then probably a few months or so of an actual season as players battle for supremacy. Whether or not you get everything wiped at the end of a season I'm not sure yet, that would suck if you did though, and I kind of think you will lose all your experience. Not that it's exactly hard to gain back, but it's still a number of games just in order to gather it all.

The artwork style is superb. I think it's cell shaded for the Champions and mobs, and it just looks very well on the ground they're using. There's even many different kinds of maps, only two available at the moment with one being in beta, but that's already got me interested to see what else they can come up with. They technically have 3 maps, the third being the tutorial map, but it's a 1v1 map and LoL really isn't meant to be played as a 1v1 game.

If you've ever played DotA, LoL is basically the same thing but better. All of my personal issues with DotA that I can think of have been resolved. Buying things in the shop with recipes is fast and seamless. You can select the end recipe and all the parts needed are highlighted right there on the screen and you don't need to go search for them. Character movement even feels smoother, much easier for me to control then the Champion's in DotA. Speaking of controls, the hot keys have been remapped and it creates a much much better feeling game. Q, W, E, R, D, F, are the skill hot keys. The tutorial mentioned A and S but I don't remember ever really using them. The skills themselves don't feel so overpowered as last time. Positioning feels more important than raw power, usually.

The match making system so far is great as well. The game chooses people for you to play against based on your personal record, or that of your combined teams. If you want to read it yourself they have a giant post on it, I only skimmed it after getting halfway through since I already know how the Blizzard Arena system works. The three games I found were all found very fast, I played two solo games. The last game I played was with a friend and to do that I had to invite her into the game, and then hit the start button and solo players all flooded in the extra 8 spots. Or maybe some of them were also 2 or 3 players, I couldn't tell. It did take me 2 games and a lot of questions of others there to figure out how to actually invite a friend into my game with me, and at first I was sorely disappointed with the matchmaking system, until I figured out how to do this.

I'll go ahead and explain it here in case anyone is curious. Basically you click on the Play button, just like you would for a practice game or if you were going to enter a game solo. From here you click on the group pre-made button, and it brings you to a screen with options for what kind of game, how many players etc. all those options are locked right now though. Then you click okay, and then it takes you to a screen where you can invite people off your friends list or people that are in the same chat rooms you're in. Once you have everybody in there, then you hit start and the pre-game continues like normal as if you had entered a solo game, but everyone that you invited is on your team. You cannot use this system to play ranked matches against people you want to, if you want to play a ranked match against someone you know then you'll have to play a practice match.

That's enough on LoL for now, I'll try and write up a review later. These reviews are mainly for my own practice at doing them, the above isn't a review just a blog post.

Arkhan Asylum. Game is awesome, what can I say. Oh yeah, I can say one thing. If you are a perfectionist, do not play this game on the PC without a gamepad, because fighting is very hard with a 360 degree system and you're limited to 8 directions with the W, A, S, D keys. I have half a mind to just put the game down and go buy an xbox.

Defense Grid - The Awakening *Review*

Aliens are invading your planet and it’s up to you to stop them! That’s the gist of this Tower Defense game, and it’s already a better story than 99% of the Tower Defense games out there. I’ll let you decide if that’s saying something or not.

If you have played a Tower Defense game before, then you can jump right into this one, the entire genre basically screams conformity. If you haven’t played one before, then it really isn’t that complicated. There is something you want to protect, and then there are lots of creatures trying to steal it from you. You build defensive structures, or Defensive Towers you could call them, that kill these creatures before they can take your precious items. The more creatures you kill, the more money you make, the more towers you can build. The genre is surprisingly addictive despite how similar each game is. There’s something about lining up the perfect defensive gauntlet so that not a single creature survives that just makes you want to do it over and over again.

In The Awakening, it is your job to protect some funky glowing balls that are called power cores. There are all the standard tower defense monsters. Fast little guys that speed by everything unless you slow them down, massive groups of cannon fodder that die to AoE damage towers, bulky monsters which are basically immune to AoE damage, and then boss monsters which are just giant, slow, and refuse to die. Thankfully The Awakening isn’t a complete repeat of the past, as they’ve thrown in some nasty new monsters as well. Imagine a Boss monster that takes forever to die, and when you kill it, two more boss monsters spawn from its guts. Yeah, they went that far.

You’re given access to a ton of towers to help you defeat all these baddie aliens, but unlike the aliens who have a lot of nice variety, many of the towers over lap on their purposes. A lot of the towers you gain access to later in the game completely trump the ones you were using earlier, and it just feels like you got an upgraded version of the same thing. Flame Towers for example, are awesome, until you get Concussive Towers, and then you wonder why you even still have the option to build a Flame Tower. It does look a lot more fun roasting the enemy with 6 fully upgraded Flame Towers, but when the aliens don’t die to that you’re kind of in trouble.

The same issue with the towers is also an issue with the aliens. What kills an alien on the third wave may not kill the exact same looking alien on the fourth wave. Aliens actually get stronger for each wave they go through, but there is zero visual representation for this. Every alien looks the same no matter how strong it is in relation to another alien of its same type.

The graphics are very nice. The particle effects on fire and the designs of the aliens and just the landscape are all very good looking. The three levels of zoom don’t ruin the experience either, you really want to sit in at the closest zoom to watch the action, but you really can’t afford to ignore the zoomed out tactical view.

The music is enjoyable for a little while, though I wouldn’t exactly call it memorable. I can’t even remember if each level had a different song or not. The sound effects are right on the mark though. Hearing your fully upgraded Cannon Tower shoot triple guns into an unsuspecting alien is wonderful.

The game does start having problems once you get past the first 10 levels though. It’s about this time that you realize most of the tower space you’re given to build towers is just there to mess you up. Even on the large maps you end up concentrating all of your attention to a tiny portion of it, creating a gauntlet of death is all good and fun, but when you’re ignoring the rest of the map it just feels like you’re missing out. Why bother even having the rest of the defense grid if all the action is going to take place within the same 5 by 10 hallway of death?

The flying aliens are a particular annoyance as well, and not due to difficulty, they’re actually the easiest alien to handle in the game. They offer some nice cash infusion, but they really feel empty when compared to the other alien types on the map. It’s because they lack any sort of interaction. All of the ground aliens come together and support each other with, if nothing else, sheer numbers. Flying aliens just make you watch the radar screen and spend money on missile towers if you see that some are going to be coming soon.

The game gets even more annoying as you progress to the “hidden” levels, the last 4 of the 20. Why these levels had special locks on them, when all the levels before them were locked in the exact same manner, just graphically different, is beyond me. These latter levels further stress the concept of the developers that there is only one right way to do things. You put your towers in this order, with these variations, in this spot on the map, and that’s how you’re going to win, anything short of that is asking for all your power cores to be stolen. Tower Defense games are supposed to be about making choices and finding different ways to a solution, not making you find the one possible solution that just barely scrapes by.

That brings up the last major issue with the game, and really the worst of them all. Your towers might fail because you placed them wrong, or they might fail because the game randomly decided that you didn’t destroy that one alien this time, when all 99 other times you would have. Hitting the backspace key returns you to a previous checkpoint, often times you will then see a wave of aliens go through your death gauntlet once more, but then each time they go through it’s a different outcome. Sometimes they die early, sometimes they die late, and sometimes they magically don’t die at all. One of the maps is literally you holding down the fast forward key and then hitting the backspace after 30 seconds after seeing that the wrong outcome occurred.

Oh right, one more complaint. Now this one isn’t unique to Defense Grid, and is more of an issue with the genre in general, as it has happened in many other games of this type. Every few seconds the game checks to see how many resources you have, and then gives you a percentage of that as interest, increasing your money pool. If you have less than 100 resources you don’t get much, but when you have in the thousands of resources, you’re getting a heft amount every few seconds. But if you spend resources on upgrading your towers then you ultimately lose out later on. Compared with the already perfectionist nature the game drives you towards with the ending levels, this is just another nail in the coffin to a game that lives in a genre of choice, but only gives you a singular solution to beat it. And don’t even try the achievement modes unless you want this perfection requirement times 50.

This is still a very good game. The length of the game is about perfect for the price I would say. $5 to buy it off of Steam, $10 on Xbox Live, if you enjoy tower defense games then go buy this one. It is a solid 10 to 15 hours of enjoyment. If you haven’t ever played a tower defense game before, then go look online for a free one and play it instead. Freearcade.com has a good number of them, and if you enjoy the genre then spend the money on this one, because it’s probably the best out there at the moment.

10% Music: 5/10 – Decent, but not memorable.

10% Sound Effects: 8/10 – Some of the sounds are excellent, but then there’s a lot of sound that is just nonexistent. That narrator gets so old.

50% Game play: 6/10 – Great the first time through. No real replay ability despite the achievement modes. Sure, you can play again, but it won’t be nearly as enjoyable. The story is also rather lackluster.

15% In the Genre: 10/10 – The best Tower Defense game in the genre.

15% Graphics: 7/10 – It’s a beautiful game for what it is, but it never makes you go wow.

Final Score: 68.5 – No idea what that means, first time I’m using this scoring method.

Beginning of the comic

I'm going to start working on the comic with some real effort tommorow. My drawings are still somewhat not that great, but I think I'll be able to manage. I mean Dark Legacy is drawn on a sheet of lined paper, then uploaded and colored so... yeah. I don't have a scanner, but I guess this old digital camera will work to start. So, hopefully it can work.

If you haven't seen it, it has language but it's rather good, CCP's rap video called HTFU by Permabaned. A nice twist on words for the name of the band. Now my only question is, when is Blizzard going to release something even more awesome? Since Blizz isn't underground though, they should go for some more mainstream kanye style. Speaking of kanye, which you have to include P. Diddy in with that, which brings me to this video I can't believe I like by Ke$ha. Tik-Tok is the name of the single, as well as her album. This song, with the video, is just the perfect mixture of california, pop, the 80's, rap, techno, and rock all mixed into one. I mean, she's singing about a young Mick Jagger while also having lyrics regarding the way a DJ works the party. It's a pretty amazing song. I say I can't believe I like it just because it's so pop.

I was reading penny arcade the other day and noticed that gabe mentioned that Aion doesn't even really get going until level 10. I gotta say, that's what I thought at first too. Then you hit level 20... and go wow, the world just opened up a lot more. And then, and then you hit 25 and can go into the Abyss. I haven't hit 30 yet, but I'm pretty sure 25 to 50 is the real game, since I believe there are two different levels of Abyss zones. If they can get rid of the bots, make leveling 15% faster, and crafting/gathering etc. 40% faster, and fix the controls, they would have a top of the line game. Right now it's a little below top of the line. Everything works, but it's not that perfect. It's a hard thing for many gaming companies to get right, and it's surprising, you put all this money into your game, but then the camera or controls suck. Developers need to focus beyond the final dollar and work on making the damn thing run right first.

Wow vs. Aion once more

Not a full blown review, but I will say that, despite how much I loathe WoW right now, I'm still logging into it over Aion. Aion requires concentration, lots of effort, you can't multi-task, you should probably be in a group with other people. I can't afford all those things when I have a chance to play, and so I'm back to WoW in part... though WoW is making it harder to do these things as well. Lower time before you get kicked from a BG, lower time to enter a BG once you get the queue, it's all rather sad for casual players like myself.

I applied for a job at IGN the other day, but I'm pretty sure my application was rather horrible. They asked for my resume, so I used my resume... but my resume doesn't exactly consist of all my MMO experience, which is what the job was about. I really should have probably added in a cover letter, and just made a resume fit solely for that job... but the whole process confuses me to be honest. They use an outsource program to take in resumes, and the outsource program only asks for a general resume, it doesn't want any type of cover letter or specific details, so I feel that while I completed the outsourced resume part right, I really f'd up when it came to the real resume and now I probably won't get the job. I didn't have all of the qualifications in the first place, but it still would have looked better if I had just listed my MMO experience instead of the crap that's on my actual resume... which really is crap. I need a real job so bad. Money, experience, for my resume to show I'm doing Something... sigh.

The Death of WoW

Don't worry, nothing killed it. It killed itself.

WoW right now is one of the most retarded MMO's on the market, and sadly, they're still one of the best despite that. But seriously. Wrath is one of the worst MMO expansions of all time. I've been playing WoW for a long time, I know my classes, I know how to PvP. I stood there free casting against a resto druid today. Just me and him. My gear isn't great, but I have 800 resilience and one of the worst level 80 ranged weapons in the game. The problem is that scaling is completely out of control. Vanilla, woulda had a chance. TBC, woulda had a chance and it would have been a very skill centric combat, even when resto druids were considered OP back in S3. In Wrath I have MS, MS is up 100% of the time for 40 seconds, that's 5 Aimed shots by the way. The druid doesn't drop below 95% health... 95% health. Full rotation, no movement on either of our parts, he's not even in ToL form, he's in fucking caster form.

Needless to say, the game is dead. Not just to me obviously, if you ask for Blizzards numbers you'll see just how low their subscriptions have gone. Even more interesting to look at would be just how low the average play time has gotten per account. I can't imagine it being much more than oh, 10 minutes a day on average. There aren't that many raiders. There were a lot of BG players. Now there's none. BG queues are 10 minutes long, nobody is playing.

Why is it so hard for Blizzard developers to understand what the community wants? Vehicle combat is horrible. SotA is horrible. IoC is horrible. You think they would have learned something about making BG's when everybody ranked EotS as their least favorite, and AV as on of their most favorite, BG's. Even the god damn broken AV was ranked higher than EotS.

Hey Blizzard. Guess what. IoC is nothing but another EotS. And it fucking blows. You developers should be ashamed of yourselves.