Worth a buck.

I have played Darkfall for maybe an hour now and seeing as how the trial is only a buck I thought I would try it. So here is my initial thoughts; it's crap. It looks like crap, plays like crap, it's plain crap.

More power to those who gave it an actual chance or even stuck it out and are still playing. As for me I will probably try one more race for about an hour and then uninstall this load of poo.

The verdict is in!

Well, with my two week trial for EVE Online coming to an end I have gone ahead and purchased EVE Online and will continue my adventures in New Eden for at least one more month.

I am really enjoying the game thus far, more than I thought I would. The new tutorial does a great job at getting new players acclimated to the game, and the five career agent missions help new players by giving some really nice items and plenty of ISK.

With EVE being a sandbox MMO and not a theme park MMO like I am comfortable with I really need to make sure I don't become overwhelmed. So in my month of play time I need to continue to learn more about the game, learn to maximise my skill training and join a corporation. For now I will be running npc agent missions, but hopefully I can get myself into a corporation so I can get myself into some PvP. Yes, I want to PvP, maybe even try some piracy!!!

Batman Arkham Asylum on sale!

For those of you who are thinking about buying Batman Arkham Asylum but were holding out may want to read this article over at Joystiq. It would seem that the game is on sale through the Games for Windows' Games on Demand for only $12.49!

That is dirt cheap and well worth the price in my mind. The only sticking point is the GWL Games on Demand service, I have not used it so I have no idea how it works compared to Impulse or Steam. Batman is one of the few GWL enabled games so it's a bonus if you are into achievements.

A bit of EVE.

You may not have noticed from looking at my Raptr profile but I have been playing quite a bit of EVE Online. That dreaded sandbox MMO with a huge learning curve, overwhelming amount of things to do and with some unforgiving PvP.

I don't know what it is but every so often I want to play a space-flight sim. I do own a few of those types of games; Darkstar One, X2 and a couple X3 games, Freelancer, and I think that's it. But when I think about it, it's not necessarily the space stuff I am in the mood for but a ship type game in general. Whether it be in the unknown reaches of space or on the high seas, sometimes I just want to pilot a ship and blow stuff up.

Right now I am really enjoying my time with EVE Online, much more than the last two times I gave the free trail a try. The tutorial is much better and easier to follow now, and there are these career agents that you can do missions for and they will teach you various aspects of EVE's gameplay. But the best part is you get free stuff for doing the career missions so it's worth doing them all.

My free trial ends in a week and there is a good possibility that I will finish all of the career agent missions by that time. I am worried that once I finish those missions that my interest in the game will decline. Say what you will about the kill ten rats quest hub type of MMO's, it's what I am familiar with and EVE is not like that.

I do believe there are other agents that do give out missions and there's always the possibility of hunting pirates, but will that be enough to keep my interest? I guess I will see in a week won't I!

It's not that good.

I don't know what it is, but whenever I hear someone talking about Bioshock 2, I just want to violently kick them or their dog for saying just how great the game is.

But on the flip side, I still want to play the multiplayer, if only it didn't have such ass sucking peer-to-peer matchmaking.

Completed: Bioshock 2

I finally finished the single-player for Bioshock 2 on Friday night. I have been able to play some of the multiplayer and it's not bad, it won't compete with Modern Warfare 2 but it was a pleasant surprise.

Right now all I can say is if I had a choice between Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock 2, ME2 hands down. It's not a good sign when I would rather play multiplayer instead of the single-player.

No gamepad for you!

I actually saw this last night on the Bioshock 2 message boards, and again this morning on EvilAvatar;

Hey guys,

I talked to the dev team about controller support for BioShock 2, and I want to let you know that we won’t be adding this into the game in a patch. The decision not to support the controller was not made lightly, and to add it now would take a complete re-envisioning of the UI that the team worked so hard to create.

I’m sorry for those of you who are disappointed, and I want you to know that your comments and concerns have been heard and will be taken in to account when we are planning in the future.

Thanks,

-Elizabeth

For the record, the controls for Bioshock 2 on the PC are better than the first game. With that said, they are still not great and it would have been nice if the PC version had support for a gamepad or wired Xbox controller.

The biggest complaint for me has to be the mouse controls; you use the left button for firing weapons and the right button for firing off plasmids, pretty standard stuff. The problem is that on screen your left hand is your plasmids and the right hand is your weapons, so the tendency is to press the wrong mouse button because you are reacting to what you see on the screen.

Another problem regarding the controls, they differ some between the multiplayer and the singleplayer. Cycling through your plasmids and weapons works great in multiplayer because you have a limited number to work with, but it's completely different on the singleplayer side and it's frustrating.

But all of these problems would be cured if there was controller support for the game. The sad truth about Bioshock 2 is it's a console port in every way but the controls.

My bit of nerd rage.

Do you ever listen to a podcast and suddenly go into instant nerd rage over something that is said, or a certain topic of discussion? I did today.

The host of the podcast was talking about Star Trek Online and about how the community is really good for that game and just ignore the forums because of all the hate for the game. For some reason I had this knee jerk reaction and about turned off my mp3 player because of it.

But after writing this post three different ways, I realized that it's really much ado about nothing. I think my reaction came from the bad taste in my mouth left by Champions Online, Cryptic's other MMO. I do think that the official forums for any MMO only tell part of the story of the overall health of the game. But I guess if you were to use that same logic with WoW then one would think that game should have been canned along time ago.

I guess the morale of the story is not to take everything so personal, it's just a podcast for goodness sakes.

Mass Effect 2 done!

Well 2010 is already shaping up to be a kick ass year for games, that is if the rest of the year has games like the last two I just played then it will. I am attempting to finish Batman Arkham Asylum for a third time on a third format and I just finished Mass Effect 2 for the PC.

In case anyone was wondering, Mass Effect 2 is freaking awesome!!

Arrrrrrrrrrr.....

According to the email I received last night, Pirates of the Burning Sea are closing all but two servers and I can transfer any and all characters that I may have on those particular servers that will be no more.

One would assume that server closures are a sign of how healthy a game is doing which might not be so good, just ask Warhammer Online and Star Wars Galaxies. Personally I think it's an indicator that a game does not have a healthy player base, just my opinion.

The nice thing is that I don't need to have an active account to transfer my one and only character and I am getting a free month of play time to decide if I made the correct server choice. A free month of play time, awesome.

I really enjoyed my limited time with PotBS during the middle of last year, but like a few other MMO's that I was playing, I cancelled my sub because of Champions Online and eventually Aion, both games I was reviewing.

The great thing is that I have been wanting to try this game out again, but have been unwilling to spend the money to reactivate my sub. SWG is also free this month for me so I can log in and see all the cool stuff they have released recently is about, and then log out bored!

It's all about the attributes.

It seems that lately I have been in a MMO funk; I don't have much desire to play the two I have subbed at the moment, a desire to play MMO's that I am not subbing for now and a realization that I wouldn't play them anyways.

I then began to wonder what it was in or with WoW that compelled me to play that game for over 2200+ hours according to Xfire. I have been using Raptr instead of Xfire now, but Raptr pulled over all my games with time played when I signed up, nice! Here's something I didn't know till I looked; out of the top 10 games I have registered time playing, 6 of them are MMO's. The game I have played the second most is Star Wars Galaxies with almost 990 hours played! I do know that amount would be higher if Xfire had been out when I began playing SWG years back.

But back on topic, I was wondering why I have played so much WoW and why are there all these other MMO's that are good but are just not grabbing my attention like the big one did at one point. A couple of weeks ago I came to the conclusion that it boils down to the skills and attributes.

Hopefully I can explain this as well as it sounded in my head! I have played so much WoW that I have a pretty good grasp of the attributes do and how they affect the various skills. In LOTRO for example, I have very little idea what the various attributes do and how they affect skills for combat or what to look for in armor and weapons. It's the same thing with EQ2, WAR and to a certain degree AoC.

I understand that this is a simplistic view and that there are other aspects to a MMO like combat, exploration, questing, crafting, etc. But when you think about it, attributes affect almost every aspect of a MMO. Age of Conan back at launch is a great example of a MMO that had attributes that had little affect or made little to no sense within the game.

So my thinking is what if I take the time to learn how the attributes work in LOTRO, how they affect my skills and learn to play my class. Goes without saying right? But it is something I have not done much of since the game launched. So if I learn the attributes, finding a build and learning the skills, maybe the game will be that much more interesting for me and I will renew my sub for another three months!

So my goal is to do just that with LOTRO, stay tuned!