Weekly Gaming Journal 06/14/2009

Time for the (Semi-)Weekly Gaming Journal, round 2. I thought I'd start this week with some feedbacks on the various E3 announcements in addition to my normal gaming blog. Now that E3 is back to its previous level of craziness, it's impossible to be a gamer and not get excited about what you favorite game companies have in store for you. For me, this means SOE and Nintendo.

SOE didn't have much to show off at E3. Their only new announcement was the release of Kung Fu Hustle: The Game, which was kind of a let down. Not many details have been released yet, but I've read in a few places that its business model will probably be similar to Free Realms. I honestly don't see this game taking off in the US, as it is based on an extremely obscure IP. Even without the tie in to the movie, I just don't see many American gamers being drawn to a side scrolling, beat-'em up style game. SOE did begin to spill more details on The Agency, including finally revamping the website and releasing some gameplay videos. It could be a decent game, but unfortunately I don't think it will be a successor to PlanetSide's style of gameplay. DC Universe looks like the most promising game in SOE's future lineup. No announcements of any expansions for EverQuest or EQ2, but these are typically saved for Fan Faire anyway. So, in short, not much to really blow you away from SOE at this point. I suspect for the foreseeable future, SOE is going to continue being known as the house that EverQuest built.

I was more or less disappointed with Nintendo's efforts. All of their announcements were mostly sequels or slight revisions of previous games. After the past 3 years of seeing the Wii, the Wii Fit, the DSi, and Nintendo's ongoing list of innovative games, this year felt like a let down to me. It's been said before, but the features in the MotionPlus should have been included in the Wii Remotes from the start. The fact that it has become yet another accessory that you need to click in and out of the remote when you switch games makes it even more annoying. I would also feel pretty disappointed with Wii Fit Plus. That said, I will probably be picking up Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Metroid: Other M (even if the name is horrible). My wife and kids are excited about New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story.

On to EverQuest, I'm now up to level 30 in EQ2. I spent last week finishing up the few loose ends I had in Antonica. This week I split my time between Thundering Steppes and Butcherblock. I never did like TS, and in fact my previous two brushes with EQ2 ended after I spent more time that I liked in that very zone. It just isn't particularly interesting to me. While Nektulos Forest has a more atmosphere, it was never enough to keep me interested. Luckily, Butcherblock was added in the Echoes of Faydwer expansion and it is an excellent zone. Plus there's a nice nostalgia factor for those who played EQ1. The quests offer better XP and the zone is visually more appealing. Right now, I'm most interested in finishing my Feral Strength set (initial Berserker class armor) and starting my Brell Serilis devotion quests. Hoping to have a good bit of this knocked in the next couple of weeks.

Althought adventuring has been moving along nicely, finding the resources to keep fueling my crafting is getting to be more of a challenge as I only managed to get up to Armorer level 23. I spent most of the day yesterday and this morning running around TS harvesting. At least this leads you to new areas that you probably wouldn't have bothered to stop and look at if you were just questing as normal. Now that I'm level 30, I'm going to try and slow down adventuring for a bit until I can catch my crafting level up.

Although most of my time lately was spent in EQ2, I did manage to log a few hours in Free Realms getting a few levels on in Brawler and Miner. My wife picked up a couple of TCG starter decks for my son and me last night. We've spent some time today playing a couple of rounds and had a lot of fun. Andrew really loves board and card games, so I'm glad this gives us a hobby to keep up with together. Unfortunately, the card that contains your code to redeem for in game items was blank in both of our decks. I'm happy to say that the SOE support staff has been very responsive and they are working on getting us some codes.

Lastly, I spent a few hours in Vanguard this morning, trying to put in a little bit of time before my free month runs out. I started learning the Diplomacy card game last week. It's not bad and definitely adds something to interacting with NPCs. That said, the more I play Vanguard, the more obvious it is how so much of the game feels rough around the edges. For a 2 year old game, it lacks a lot of polish that some of its peers have. I think there are many interesting concepts in Vanguard, but the implementation is keeping it from breaking out. I hope that SOE continues to keep the game going, though. I think if SOE San Diego could meld mechanics from Vanguard, EQ2, and potentially pieces of Free Realms into a future title, it could be very compelling.

That's all I have for now. Here are the requisite character screenshots:

  

Weekly Gaming Journal 05/31/2009

Lately I've been feeling the need to blog more often. I thought I would start by doing a weekly gaming journal covering my progress in whatever games I've been playing during the past week.

I cancelled my Warhammer account a few months ago after reaching rank 40 and renown rank 42. I still think it's the best game for RvR and there's a lot of other things they got right in the game design. At the time, though, we were trying to do a heavy crunch to cut back on our personal finances, so I decided to take a break.

In the interim, I tried playing around with some free to play MMOs and seeing what they had to offer. The only game I stuck with was Runes of Magic. A lot of people are billing it as World of WarCraft with a F2P business model. It's not a bad game, but it felt like a step back to me as progression can get very grindy if you don't spend the money on XP potions and other items. I may return to it at some point, but at the time I was trying to save money, so doing the whole RMT thing for in game items didn't appeal to me. I do recommend it if you are looking for a combat heavy MMO with a low barrier to entry.

Next I decided to go back and spend some time completing Half-life 2. I know, I'm way late to the party. I got Half-life 2 with Orange Box, which I mostly purchased for Team Fortress 2 and Portal. I also started on HL2: Episode 1, but didn't make it very far. During this time, I satisfied my multiplayer itch by splitting my time between Team Fortress 2 and Quake Live.

Not long after I finished Half-life 2, I got an e-mail notifying me that I had been accepted into the Free Realms beta (who didn't?), so I started playing that. I was instantly hooked. The graphics are the best I've seen in a F2P MMO and I am really impressed with the streaming technology they developed for the game. By time beta was over, I had gotten my son revved up for it as well (his current favorite past time is playing Wizard101). Unless you absolutely can't stand the cartoony game world, I think everyone should try playing this game at least once.

Playing Free Realms left me wanting to go back to something a little more achiever oriented. I started to get nostalgic for EverQuest II. I also considered going back to World of WarCraft, because I know more people that play it, but I think I prefer EQ for a couple of reasons. The community is more mature and close knit. Achievement whores get to show off their collections in their apartments and homes. Also, I feel like the crafting mechanics are fleshed out better. Since the only expansion I had on my EQ2 account was Desert of Flames, I picked up The Shadow Odyssey and reactivated my account. I rolled a Dwarf Berserker / Armorer, Atris Firebeard, on the Guk server.

This week was pretty slow for me. I spent most of my time in EverQuest II trying to wrap up my various quests in Antonica before moving out into Thundering Steppes. Not very good XP, but I enjoy reading the quest dialogs and getting the background of the of the game. It's always funny to me the way most starting zones in MMO's are written as if some major new Gnoll / Goblin / Kobold assault is just over the horizon and that you, the intrepid adventurer, have arrived at precisely the right moment to foil their plans. Not very original, but still fun to see what the game designers have cooked up. Right now, I'm up to adventure level 22 and crafting level 21.

I also spent a little time in Free Realms leveling up my Brawler skills, which I got to 7. Card Duelist is still my highest skill at 14. Not much to go on about here except that I'm pleasantly surprised that the Brawler dungeons are starting to get longer and more complex (but not overwhelmingly so). I just hope I don't have to play back through them when I level up Ninja, but I'm thinking I probably will since the space in the game is pretty limited at the moment.

After running around EQ2 a little yesterday morning, I noticed that SOE had given all former Vanguard players 30 days of free game time, so I started downloading the (huge) client to give it another shot and see if the game had changed at all. While I waited, I decided to dive into Legends of Norrath. I've been putting off playing the game, but after playing through the tutorials again, I started to get the hang of it. The game is very complex and it takes a little while to get your head wrapped around the rules and the strategy of completing quests vs. attacking the opposing Avatar. Now that I've gotten things figured out, I can say that I've throughly enjoyed the few scenarios I've completed. I plan on playing it more when I'm time deprived.

Vanguard had finished downloading when I got up this morning, so I jumped in and rolled a shiny new Dwarf Warrior on the Seradon server, which I managed to get up to level 5 in about 2 hours. This time I skipped going through the Isle of Dawn and went straight to the Dwarf starting site. I'm glad I did, as I got right into fighting and questing. If you've played EverQuest before, Vanguard is easy enough to pick up without any tutorials. The controls feel a bit loose to me compared to EQ2/WAR. You can definitely tell it's an Unreal engine game by the graphics, which I'm not a huge fan of. That said, I'm loving the layout of the world. Most moden MMO's feel very "flat" to me. Much like EverQuest before it, Vanguard is full of mountains with winding paths, deep valleys, streams and lakes, etc. This may be limited to the Dwarf starting area, but I had flashbacks of climbing the long road to Highpass Hold after traveling through the plains of Karana from Qeynos. Vanguard has done a good job of making me feel that I am traveling through a far off and distant world. I probably won't be subscribing after the 30 days as I can't justify the extra cost right now and I'm committed to EQ2, but if I ever upgrade to Station Pass again, I'll definitely be playing it more.

Whew! That was much more than I planned on writing. Hopefully I'll have this much to write about every week.

Pics!

Thoughts on the Zune HD

Microsoft announced the Zune HD today. I thought I'd repost my thoughts from a comment I left on the Houston Chronicle's TechBlog (just a few grammatical / spelling errors fixed):

So far, it looks promising. The Zune has always had many nice features. Two things that concern me that I think might keep it from passing up the iPod Touch.

I don't see any mention of it being able to run 3rd party applications like the iPod Touch. Microsoft needs to really work on building an application store for the Zune the same way they have done with games on Xbox Live Arcade. Apple has one mobile OS for the iPod Touch and iPhone and applications run seamlessly on both. Microsoft needs to come up with a way for developers to write an application that will run on all of it's mobile offerings, including Windows Mobile phones and the Zune. They have the perfect vehicle for doing this in .NET, but they still aren't taking advantage of it. Bonus points if they figure out a way to also get those applications on XBLA.

The second thing that concerns me is the Zune Music Store. If you look at all of the subscription based music stores, almost all of them have migrated to focus on being a DRM-free, downloadable business model. I don't think people want to pay to stream music because WiFi is still not ubiquitous enough to justify it. Even if Microsoft was going to roll their own music store (again) and allow it to be based on DRM-free WMA files, I think they would find more success. Personally, though, I believe they should back off WMA and just partner with an MP3 based store such as Amazon or Napster.

Honestly, while I think the feature set is very compelling, I think they aren't quite connecting the dots through to the end. The iPhone and iPod Touch are compelling because they are mobile computing platforms, not just a mobile phone or PMP.

Album cover meme

Saw this over on BullCopra. I thought it was an interesting experiment.

1. Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random... Read More” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
   The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2. Go to "Random quotations" or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
   The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3. Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
   Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

Here are my results:

Adding Disqus comments

Let's see how well they work...