The Coffee Break

Coffee Break! Time to take a moment, step away from the World, that is Warcraft and discuss other things.

I recently picked up two new DS games.

Desktop Tower Defense is a below average game derived from a browser based game which is free. I only picked it up because the box said "Game of the year" but apparently that was a marketing ruse. It's your typical, build turret, upgrade turret, defend against on coming army. Nothing too spectacular. Very low end graphics and the game can provide some entertainment, but at $20.00 it's pretty much a rip off. If you have a PS3, I would recommend PixelJunk Monsters, which is a much better game and half the price or just play it through a browser.

The second and much much better game I purchased is Grand Theft Auto: China Wars by Rockstar Games. It's a top down version of their very popular console series and let me say, it's a lot of fun and challenging. It's the typical set up, you are small fry in a big mafia, Yakuza to be precise. You do odd jobs for your uncle till you can start branching out and making new friends, all the while trying to find out who killed your father and stole the family heirloom.

Driving around town is a good portion of the game. There are lots of side missions some of them entail you working in the drug trade. One of the more difficult aspects, at least for me is the driving. It isn't as easy as one would expect, the controls are very similar to those used in previous versions of the console game, but since the DS is much smaller than a console controller working with the left and right bumper buttons while trying to zip around town takes some getting use to and it takes time coordinating your moves so it feels more natural. Also keeping your car on the road does seem a bit difficult, but it is a bit forgiving on damage and running over people, meaning the cops don't start after if you run over one person, unless it's a cop. But if the law starts chasing after you, no fear, just run them into other cars or building structures until they crash or explode, this will generally discourage those following and eventually they will give up pursuit. The game is also chalk full of naughty language so it's definitely not for kids. The humor is there, just inbetween the F-bombs.

At $35.00 it's a little above my normal DS game price range, but I don't feel like I got robbed amd the cost is about equal to the amount of fun I've been having, which is always a plus, since I've only scratched the surface.

The only other game purchase I have made in the past few months is Sims 3, but I'm not ready to speak about it just yet indepth. It is a time sink, and a lot easier to play, for me at least, than previous versions. But if you want more info on the game for now, check out Ysharro's blog.

(Course, knowing me, I've probably already mentioned all that a few blogs back. Memory is one of the first things to go, right?)

Other than that, I've really not been playing anything except World of Warcraft. I am, however, looking forward to trying out Wii Sports Resort, which came out last week and Scribblenauts for the DS, which should be hitting shelves in a few weeks. I also have my eye on a few Monkey Island games, the old version, which has been reskinned and the new episodic version, have recently been released and I've very interested in picking something up, but since they release it on both Steam and XBLA, its hard to choose. I'll probably have to consult the gaming community to see which is better.

See, it doesn't have to always be rants and WoW!

*Personal Point*
I've lost 27 lbs. on Weight Watchers.

The West Coast

Well, I've not had a chance to blog for a while now because I've been in Anaheim, California. Oh and thats not some picture I found on the internet, as usual, I actually took it this afternoon.

Yes, my life is hard.

I've mentioned in the past that I work for an audio visual rental and staging company from North Carolina and this week, we've had the wonderful opportunity to be doing a show in the Anaheim convention center. The very same convention center that in a few short months Blizzard will be taking over with it's annual BlizCon.

It's been a wonderful stay so far. The hotel is very nice and I've had no issue with them, accept maybe the roach that ended up in my in room coffee machine. The Convention center people have been wonderful to work with, but it is a city facility, so everything is done at a snails pace. Lets not forget it took us 3 hours to get our gear in the room because the local AV company put a boom lift in the freight elevator that was too heavy and shut the elevator down for a few hours. But, other than those small things my stay in California and specifically Anaheim has been great.

I did make it over to Disneyland a few times, but it just wasn't as much fun without the wife, whom I had to leave home back in North Carolina. Still, it was nice to visit the west coast mouse. I picked up a few souvenirs but I am always reminded by co-workers that I can't take the park home with me. I took lots of pictures which I hope to share at some point.

I think it was a good thing for me to disconnect from WoW for a while. I was playing every night after dinner and started getting up early in the morning to do dailies before work. It's just nice not having to worry about what I'll do next in the game.

Don't get me wrong, I'll probably be back at it hard once recover from my jet lag, but for now, its been a very nice vacation from gaming. Course, I do have my DS with me.

The Future of Gaming

The Quest For Fun

Greetings Evil Doers or Loyal readers. I know it's been few days since I posted anything, but I have a very good reason, honest.

This weekend I've made the trek to Atlanta to play PC games with friends over a lan network. Sure, we could have all played online and saved a bunch of gas and money, but I prefer doing it old skool sometimes. I mean, hearing my friends over Teamspeak or Ventrilo isn't as much fun as seeing the looks of surprise and shame on their faces as I trash them from across the table in CTF match after CTF match. (Did I not mention this is a fantasy piece I'm working on for a magazine!)

Course at this point, since my arrival Thursday at midnight, sitting in a car for 5 hours, it would at least have been nice to have killed someone in a CTF match instead of watching one of my friend use his Jedi mind powers to trick all our non MMO friends into playing WoW. I can't really fault him, not with the RAF being what it is and our Wednesday static group can always use new blood. The guild has now gone from 7 players to 10, which will be nice once we teach all the noobs how to do instances and get them geared for Kara, but that's way down the road.

We actually have a name for our get togethers, GameFest. I know, it's cheesy, but it beats what we've called other get together's, like Hardware Fest, or what friday ended up being, Install and Patch everything Fest. When you don't keep your games updated, it makes it very hard to play with others who have spent the time to do so. We also found out that installing most Steam products tends to make people edgy a bit more than they should be and that not all games like being run on lans or dedicated servers. When I first started setting up, I thought I was at Hardware Fest because my machine refused to start, but eventually with some TLC it did.

We did manage to play a little bit of WoW, of course. You can't indoctrinate new disciples without at least showing them how good the water feels, especially when the baptism is going to cost them $15.00 a month. However, I don't have any more character slots, (Note to Blizzard, need to add one new slot per expansion, please.) so I just gave them encouragement and advise on the sidelines while I leveled up my 19th level Rogue. I did manage to play a few solo skirmishes in Red Alert 3 after I had gotten it installed and the mega patch downloaded. I'm looking forward to playing that this weekend with the rest of da crew.



To top off the first night of fun, a few of us did manage to get in a little Company of Heroes co-op. The first map we played was a good refresher course for me, seeing as how I've not played the game for 2 years and this map came with the game. The second map was a custom, downloaded map which I have entitled, "We hate you and want yo to play all night map". It started off as 4 humans verses 2 Hard and 2 Expert computer players, but about 10 minutes into the map, the only guy that knew the map well, got disconnected from the game and was replaced by a computer player. After that, the rest of us, struggled for 2 hours trying to capture more ground, but the game wasn't having any of it and when 2:30am arrived I was ready to call it a draw. Course, the sad thing is, it's 8am the next morning and here I am blogging. I'm a very sad geeky person, if truth be told.

After writing about the pitfalls of the first day, I almost reconsidered titling the blog entry, The Life Support, Part 3, but decided that even though PC gaming is a pain in the ass at times, with the set up, the patching, the drivers and so forth, the truth is that it's a fun adventure, especially if you do it with friends you haven't seen in a few years. In future postings, I'll try not to cast a dreary shadow over PC gaming as a whole and just hope that it remains, so I can have more weekends like this in the future.

The savory flavor of MMO's!

What is the most enjoyable part of an MMO? Is it in depth character creation, like in City of Heroes? Is it the detail to the stories lines that drive the game like those in World of Warcraft? Or could it be the complexity of a game like EvE online? How about the unique combat system in Age of Conan?

I ask this because most MMO's have basically the same core, which is to quest, level up and get loot, then repeat. Sure, there are lots of arguments that it's a little bit more complex than that, but if you boil it all down, its all the same. So what makes us pick up one MMO over another? Why are we so picky about the questing and looting in one over that of another MMO? I know that bugs and performance issue take some credit for steering people away from one to another, but let's say it's not an issue, what then makes us play one over the other?

I'm just curious....what is the spice that they add to the soup of your favorite mmo which causes you to play it over another?

The Slide Show

I am still enjoying WAR, but, as with all great things there is always an issue with some of the bad things.

Question for game developers?

So, you build a game which is going to have tons of players interacting with one another on a regular bases because your content is player driven. Now, add to this chaos all the spell effects and other animation that might take place, starting to get a mental picture of all this?

What happens? Major game lag.

So, if you know this is going to happen, because by happen stance this sort of thing has happened in EQ2 and WoW, which if your any kind of game developer working on an MMO, you have to have at least tried those games once, why don't you prepare for it?

It being the ridiculous amount of stuttering that a character goes through when moving from one over populated area to another?

I mean, if you know that you're game will have open RvR zones where say, teams of up to 40 vs 40 will be battling over the same small keep, why can't you make the graphical lag better so that systems which meet or exceed the games hardware requirements aren't getting a small slide show of the action? I left LOTRO because of the way the trees moved every time they got rendered as you approached them in the game and it actually drove me freakin crazy, now I have to deal with a stutter every time I play WAR?

Be prepared I say. It works for game developers and boy scouts. If it has happened before in other MMO games, like gold farming and video lag due to many players being in one area at the same time, why can't you have a plan ready to implement when the time arises? I mean, we crashed a zone when we started gathering our CoW forces to take a keep, how silly is that?

And you thought this was going to be a nausating recap of all the fun I've had in WAR? BAH!

Download video drivers they say. Adjust your in game video settings they preach. We'll I've done that and I have to say, it ain't me. So, I have done a few things that might make a difference. I've adjusted my in game Vram or Video Ram to a larger number and this seems to have helped, my video card has 512mb of memory so that should be ok for now. I have also purchased some 2 more gigs of memory from Newegg. Apparently, memory is really cheap these days and it should be arriving sometime next week, if the Gods premit. I've not had the best luck with Newegg in the past with shipping dates.

Well, that about it. I will give an update as soon as I can on any possible improvements. The issue isn't on my end, game developers must have known this was going to be an issue. It's like not knowing it will snow in Canada in the winter, that bears have claws or that baseball is really boring.

They just didn't seem prepared.

Someone please advance the slide.

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