Fable 2 thoughts!

Fable 2 has turned out to be the great game that I thought it was going to be. So much so that I have had to delay my play time of Fallout 3! This game is so much better than the first, graphics are great, fighting is wonderful, more things to do, and coop multiplayer that isn't great but it's there.

My only concern is that the story itself is rather short. There are a good number of other things to do in the game, but to me a lot of them feel like time sinks in order to mask the shortness of the actual game. Like the fact that I can get a job in the game, what's the point of that? I have job in real life, why would I want to work in a game that I am playing to relax! And the whole marriage thing too, at least being married in real life isn't as tedious as in the game.

But in all, this is a great game that everyone should play!

Empire:Total War event!

On Oct. 24th, I was able to go to San Francisco to an event for Empire:Total War. This was the first event I have had the opportunity to attend, and it was a blast. I met Mark and Kieran from Creative Assembly, and they were fantastic.

If you are at all interested, you can check out the info from the event here.

What was really cool was after the event, we were treated to a real live naval battle sail event, on the ships themselves! Being the smart guy that I am, I made sure to bring my camera and take a few pictures of the sail event.

These are just a few of the shots that I took at the event. It was a great day out on the bay, sunny, cool, and nice and windy, perfect for some naval maneuvers!

Fallout 3 midnight launch on Monday!

Earlier today I received a phone call from Gamestop letting me know that they are going to be doing a midnight launch for Fallout 3 on Monday night!

So I will be heading over there tomorrow night around 10pm to wait in line for my copy. I actually preordered the collectors edition for the PC, but I could only find a pic of the Xbox version really quick.

Guess I better play some games tonight and tomorrow before I get my copy, cause I have a feeling that I will be a bit busy after Monday night!

Some randomness...

Since I haven't posted much lately, I thought I would just throw some thoughts together into one post...

I have been playing Dead Space on the Xbox 360 for the past few days, and it's much better than I thought it would be. I thought it looked like crap after reading about it and seeing some screenshots, and because it's made by EA, but I was wrong, it's actually very good. It's what System Shock would be like if you removed all the rpg, added some really nice graphics, and changed the game from a fps into a Resident Evil clone. But it works, and I am having alot of fun.

I'm hoping to get some time in with Fable 2 before I lose more time when Fallout 3 is released on the 28th.

I haven't played alot of Warhammer lately, but I have been having alot of fun with my Black Orc running scenarios while questing, which is what I thought you are suppose to do. Seems to be some dislike for scenarios floating around the blogosphere lately. Two things really that bothersome, players just camping out in the warcamps, and the amount of xp gained in a scenario has become the new grind to gain rank, both take away from open world RvR. I agree that something needs to be done to encourage players to do more ORvR. But I have noticed that my enjoyment has increased alot when I began to que up more scenarios while questing. Problem is that scenarios give out too much xp and questing gives out too little, that's why I try to mix both in during a game session.

The new Star Wars MMO was finally made official, really looking forward to that. Here's hoping that SWG will finally be able to be put to rest and taken out of it's misery.

Max Payne movie is not nearly as bad as critics say it is, but it's not a good movie either. How can you make a movie out of an action game, but take out all the action?

The World Series started, not really interested, the Raiders beat the Jets on Sunday, surprise surprise, and the Sabres are undefeated, woot!

Tired of NHL 09 online!

Last night had to be the worst time I have ever had playing some pick-up online team play in NHL 09. I play defense, I like playing defense, and I think I am pretty good at playing defence. I was a little rusty last night I will admit, I haven't played a game in about a week. But the verbal abuse I received last night was completely uncalled for.

Really I am just tired of the online aspect of NHL 09 now. I love the human factor with online play, but either there are no more team players, or I just have the worst luck in playing games with asshats who don't know how to play hockey as a team.

Here's how the night went; look for a game for almost ten minutes, finally get in one. Endure verbal assault on how to play hockey from a moron who only likes to hang on the other teams blue line so he can get the pass and make a crappy deke and turn the puck over, we lose 0-3.

Next game starts better, is better except for the elitist short power forward who is a massive puck hog. I turn the puck over once in front of the net which results in a score for the other team, it happens. Have to hear about more about how I need to play my position. Of course no mention of the many block shots I had, or the four assists. And we won this game 7-2!

Still, I press on and try one more game, and it freezes on me just before the end of the first period. Just the motivation I needed to end the night and go to bed.

Early Max Payne impressions.

Early reviews for the new Max Payne movie are in. And to no ones surprise I think, the critics hate it. Seriously, is any one shocked about this.

Of the three reviews that are currently out, only the review by Variety is even worth reading. It at least had some comments on what was wrong with the movie. After reading all three reviews, I got the feeling that none of the film critics have ever played a Max Payne game, a shame really. The central theme from the reviews seem to be that the script is bad.

Well I will be going to see this on on Sunday, and I'll give my thoughts on the movie afterwards. I tend to enjoy game to movie adaptations, and I'm a huge fan of the Max Payne games, so I might be a little biased, we shall see.

Warhammer Online one month later...sort of.

For many people, yesterday marked the one month anniversary of playing WAR. I was one of the unfortunate ones that did preorder the game, but was unable to get a beta and head start key from a certain retailer, **coughGamestop blowscough**.

I have spent a good amount of time looking around the blogosphere for comments and concerns both positive and negative on the state of the game one month after launch. Just like everything else in the world, you have those who love the game, and those that think the game is worthless, but everyone agrees that there some areas that need some fixing.

One major concern is the popularity of the scenarios, and the lack of open world RvR because of them, and that the game is grindtastic without said scenarios. The reason why these scenarios are so popular is because it is easier and quicker to gain rank then it is to do questing. The unfortunate side effect is that there tends to be little PvP in the RvR lakes in the game.

There have been many comments on what can be done to remedy the situation in order to move players away from the scenarios and into the RvR lakes. Mythic has taken notice and has taken a few steps in the right direction with the Experience Enhancements that they have introduced in the past week, and only time will tell if it works.

My main concern for WAR is the shallow PvE content in the game. I can only comment on what I've played, but what I have played hasn't been all that great. There are other factors as to why scenarios are so popular than just gaining rank, like the rewards you can earn and the amount of travel it takes to get to and around a RvR lake. But if the PvE was more satisfying, then I think you would see more players out running around and possible doing more open world RvR like Mythic wants.

I personally like the game, but I really enjoy PvE questing, and with the uninspired PvE content, WAR is not keeping my interest like I was hoping it would.

Fable: The Lost Chapters

With Fable 2 just around the corner, I thought I would revisit Fable for the original Xbox. Not that it's going to be necessary but I wanted to see how the original compares the number two when it does come out later this month.

I am having alot more fun this time around than I did the first time I played Fable, but that might be because I was playing the PC version with it's awful control setup. One thing I have noticed is that Fable does not run to well at all on a 360 when hooked up to my monitor. And the higher resolution really distorts some of the games graphics as well.

So I should be done with this in time to try Fable 2 for a week till Fallout 3 is released a week later! Until then, I leave you with this oldie but goodie.

WAAAGH Journal 3

Lately I have been having a bit of the blahs with WAR. Is is a bad game? By no means, so then what is it then? I think it's the thin PvE content and that the Order are not as interesting to play as the Destruction side.

I have come to the conclusion that Mythic did not want two parts to their game, a PvP side and a PvE side like WoW. Instead, it seems that you will need to have a decent mix of PvE and RvR, and in particular Scenarios in order to rank up and gear up as well. That's not a bad thing at all, but it does take me out of my comfort zone and requires me to change my play style some.

I was very resistant to the idea of having to PvP because the PvE is lacking, and so far the two classes that I had tried that with was no fun for me. So last night I decided to try a couple of new classes, the Dwarven Ironbreaker and Engineer.

The Ironbreaker is a tank in every way, low damaging attacks with lots of hit points high resistance to enemy damage means taking down a mob is slow, but I can take on multiple mobs at one time. I did enjoy the Ironbreaker some, and was able to get to rank 4 last night before moving on to another class. I am really interested in trying out a tank class in the scenarios.

So then I moved on to the Engineer. The Engineer is a ranged dps class with a pet, but not just any pet, but a gun turret! I had an absolute blast with Snorkle the Engineer, so much so that I joined several scenarios while out questing. I was able to reach rank 6 last night, and am currently doing Dwarven chapter 2 PQ's.

There are some other Order classes that I want to try out, but I think that I might have found the class I am going to stick with for awhile. I do plan on playing some classes on the Destruction side some more, I do enjoy the Black Orc, and the Witch and Disciple of Kaine seems really cool as well. But maybe, just maybe I have found the cure for my 'meh' blues with WAR!

Too Human, a hidden gem?

I fired up Too Human again last night and actually tried some multiplayer, and I forgot just how much I liked this game. Yes there are some things about the game that suck, but I find it to be a great game that is very much underrated. So Today I was looking around TooHuman.net, and came across this video from a few guys at GamePro who seem to enjoy the game.


I will admit that I was initially turned off from the game because of the scores that I saw online. But once I saw the game being played at a friends house, I knew I had to have it. I really enjoy this game, and think it does not get the credit it deserves.

EDIT: Ugh, well it seems that the video is not working, which is unfortunate, oh well.

WAAAGH Journal 2

Well, my second journal update still finds me with little to post about. I have hardly touched my Shadow Warrior, leveled my Warrior Priest to rank 8, and created a few Dustruction characters on a new server to try them out.

I did do some adventuring last night with my Warrior Priest. Started doing a chapter 4 public quest in Norsca. Eventually joined a group that was also doing the same quest. Once that was done, we moved to the chapter 5 PQ where I found myself dead on more than a few occasions. Seeing as how the mobs where rank 11 and higher, I found myself having little fun, so I joined the Nordenwatch scenario.

My experience there was even less fun. I got my virtual butt handed to me on a plate. So much so that I was actually looking back on my time with the Shadow Warrior more fondly. Alot has to do with the fact that there were alot of rank 10 and 11 Destruction players in the scenario, but that was little consolation.

WAR uses only three archetypes, Tank, DPS and hybrid Healer, with DPS broken into melee and ranged. After a bit of play time with both realms, I began to notice that the classes from both realms played very similar to one another. Well I decided to look into this, and found this at the Hammer Wiki.

-Mirror career is a career within a realm (either realm of Order or Destruction) that has a similar gameplay mechanic to a career from the opposite faction. The mirror careers are created in order to maintain balance among the factions, and also to give the players with certain gameplay preferences a choice between Order and Destruction, not forcing them to forego the preferred realm in order to get the desired gameplay.Mirror careers are also called Pairs or Paired careers.

It's great that I was able to pick up on the fact that the classes, or careers, played similar, not so great that they actually do.

October 21st could live in infamy!

Well Gamespot has an article on the impending LucasArts-Bioware announcement taking place on October 21st in San Francisco, only a few short miles away from me! As of now, everything points to a new Star Wars MMO based in the KOTOR timeline, heck, even the cover of the invites seem to reveal that!

New Star Wars MMO to be announced soon!!

Shacknews has a link to an article over at CVG saying that the new Star Wars MMO from BioWare will be officially announced by the end of the month. You may remember that at E3 this year EA CEO John Riccitiello confirmed in a casual under the radar sort of way that BioWare was indeed working on a Star Wars MMO. Not much has been said since then. Check out the Shacknews info here.

All I can say is, ABOUT DAMN TIME!!

War against used game sales!

It would seem that some game developers have come up with a way to try and stem the tide of used game sales with exclusive content. Basically a game will come with a code that can be used to access exclusive content for that game, the key is that the code has a one time use only, meaning that you can't go to your local game store and buy a used copy to get the exclusive content. That is of course if the code has already been used.

It's an interesting idea, and one that I fully support. You can check out the full article at Shacknews.

Altdorf is free!!!

Well, it would appear that the information about Chaos taking over Altdorf wasn't completely true, or rather the were not completely known.

Here is a response from EA that I found over on Tobold's blog about the situation;

I think your concern is completely valid and I don't fault your original blog post. I'm not here to tell you that you are wrong. Like I said, I wanted to give you more information about your concerns.

As you correctly stated, there was a bug, since fixed, that incorrectly set the postern doors in the fortress so that players from both Realms could access the inner Fortress. This allowed them to circumvent many of the fortress defenses with a smaller force than usually necessary and do it much quicker than would normally be possible.

On top of that issue, the time required for players to capture the two fortresses had been incorrectly set to 36 hours. It is now correctly set at 12 hours. This gave those same players three times the normal time allotted to achieve their goal of capturing both fortresses. This also means that without a fairly massive force, players may be able to take one fortress with a 3:00 AM raid, but not both. Instead they will have to play into the day and the chances of a successful player defense rise with every hour that passes.

On Karak Eight Peaks, Altdorf was put into a contested state and Destruction was able to initially win this stage of the fight. However, the same forces that so "easily" defeated the fortresses were unable to defeat the Bright Wizard College and Sigmar Temple Public Quests. These quests gate access to the King, so Destruction never fully captured Altdorf. Because they could not accomplish this goal, the City was held a brief time while the Destruction players attempted, several times, to successfully complete the City Public Quest, having given up on the other Public Quests. At this point, the forces of Order gladly re-entered the City and pushed out the remaining Destruction forces.

The end result of this was that while a small dedicated group was able to make use of two incorrect settings in our game to get to Altdorf, they were unable to accomplish anything meaningful once inside the City. Now that Fortresses have been corrected to work as designed, it would take a much larger force much longer to get to Altdorf.

You have to keep in mind that a City capture is a long multi-stage process that requires all of the following elements (I will use Aldorf as my example).

1) You must capture two fortresses in Tier IV within 12 hours of each other. To gain access to a fortress you must seize and hold the neutral Tier IV zone and your opponent's zone in two separate racial pairings. Once you lock down one racial pairing, you only have 60 minutes to capture its fortress. Should you fail, then that racial pairing reverts back to a neutral state and you must begin anew.

2) You must then fight in contested Altdorf and gain control much like you would in a zone. There are two Battle Objectives, a Public Quest and opposing players you must contend with in order to accomplish this.

3) Should you accomplish the first two tasks, the opposing realm is ejected from the city. At this point you have one hour to cement your hold on the city. You must complete the Temple of Sigmar and Bright Wizard College Public Quests within the next hour. If you manage this feat within one hour, you then lock down the city for 24 hours and unlock the King. If you fail, then you have one hour before the city is re-opened to opposing Realm players.

4) If you defeat the King, then you can unequivocally say that you captured Altdorf.

It's certainly possible that a massive well-organized force operating in the dead of night could seize and hold a Capital City over the course of a great many hours. Then again, if you organize a fairly large fighting force and utilize good strategy and timing to strike quickly and effectively, you should be rewarded for that behavior.

I would be happy to answer any follow-up questions you have. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to elaborate on the City capture.

It's great to see a quick response from EA, and that it truly is an epic task to take an opposing factions capital city!

Chaos take Altdorf, end is near!!

While reading Tobold's blog, I saw this post from today about how the forces of Chaos have already laid siege and taken the city of Altdorf, the Order capital city. For those who don't know, capital city sieges are suppose to be the uber end game content for Warhammer Online. I appears that a group of about 30 Chaos around 15 minutes to accomplish something that Mythic stated would take months.

You can read more on siege here. Personally this gives me an uneasy feeling. If the end game is that easy, then what is the point to playing till the end? I am not an end game type of player, but WAR is different. You're not raiding to get the coolest stuff, you're doing Realm vs Realm combat, fighting for your faction to the death!! If all it takes is a few minutes work, then it doesn't have the appeal that I thought it did.

Here's hoping the Mythic works on this quickly.

WAAAGH Journal 1

I figured it was time for me to start my gameplay journal of Warhammer Online. Unfortunately this journal won't be very informative because I have been playing now for almost two weeks.

My first character that I created was a High Elf Shadow Warrior. I have reached Rank 12 and progressed to the Tier 2 area, and am looking forward to trying the Tier 2 scenarios. One good thing Mythic did was allow all races having access to other races scenarios, the best update thus far!

I mentioned it before, but WAR just is not grabbing me like WoW did or CoH did. But then I decided to try a few of the other classes in the game, one of them being the Warrior Priest, and that's when I began to feel the hook that I have been looking for.

I just am not having all that much fun with the Shadow Warrior. Rank progression seems to slow, the PQ's tend to be too difficult and not very fun, if I get spit on chances are I will die, and I'm not all that thrilled about all the running around back and forth to do quests then turn them in. It could be like that in all areas, but it eats alot of time having to travel around like that, and it breaks up the flow when trying to play.

But I am having alot of fun with the game, so not all is bad. Hey, check out my WAR sigs!!


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Well now...

Sheesh, no posts for over a week, ouch. I had a four day weekend that went from Sat-Tues, and seeing as how I do most of my blogging at work I wasn't there to do any blogging at all. I prefer to do my blogging at work because there I have at times a large block of free time to dedicate to reading bloggs and posting. There are just too many distractions at home for me to take dedicated gaming time to do.

Add the fact that I've been playing alot of 360 and Warhammer Online, and, I just re-installed Civ IV, and one could see where all the blogging time has gone!