Twas The Season To Be Gaming

Posted by Stropp on January 11, 2009

Well, I haven’t been terribly much inclined to do much blogging lately, as you might have noticed. Please say you’ve noticed!

But I have done a reasonable amount of gaming over the last two months. And, it’s been at a reasonable relaxed pace, when I’ve felt like it.

I guess that’s the curse of blogging about games, especially when they are fairly time consuming ones like MMORPGs. There’s a bit of a conflict. Do I take the time to write a blog entry, or spend more time questing for the Sword of a Dozen Truths. The bigger issue, at least for me is that to write about MMORPGs, I have to spend time immersed in the genre: The news, games, and other blogs.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the genre. It’s truly a passion for me, and if I could make a living around it I wouldn’t think twice — well maybe I would, but not three times. But sometimes it’s good to take a break, a step back, smell the coffee, get a breath of fresh air, and indulge in any number of other cliches. And that’s sort of what I did over the last months.

But I did do some gaming, and had a bit of low pressure fun too. I just played what I felt like playing.

Spore

While not really purchased in the last months, a little before actually, I gave Spore a bit of a go.

Honestly, really disappointed. It’s a terribly limited game, especially in the early stages. There’s only really one type of environment regardless of planet choice, and your environment has absolutely no bearing on how your creature evolves or even what evolutionary options are available.

The choice you make for your creature are only really upgrades to speed, combat, and social interaction.

The game is pretty, I’ll give you that, but unless you’re really into designing naughty, sexy critters, that’s all it has going for it.

Fallout 3

I ended up buying Fallout 3, despite the earlier news that it was being modified due to the interference of the Australian censors. I’m really glad I did too, because the game was absolutely brilliant. I thought that it captured the essence of Fallout 1 (I didn’t play 2 and TBoS), and it didn’t lose anything due to the perspective, style, and combat changes.

There were a couple of system freezes though, most specifically in the abandoned house in the VR vault scenario. I could barely spend a minute in that place without a almost complete system lockup.

The ending I thought was a little weak too, especially given the NPC options available. However, this is changing in a downloadable content ‘expansion’ due out on the XBox 360 version in March and hopefully the PC version later.

Fable 2

After FO3, I spent a bit of time playing Fable 2 on the 360. I’ll be honest, I got distracted somewhere in the middle and haven’t finished it yet. It’s a decent game, I think much better than the original game, but I haven’t really felt captured by the game. I reckon it will be one I go back to time to time, rather than being entranced to play for hours and hours.

Warhammer Online

After a good start, I started to get a little bored with it. I got my Witch Hunter up to around 16 or so, before Fallout came out and haven’t been back.

The reason for that might be that I really hammered it, and created a lot of alts early on to get an idea of gameplay, especially for the PvP aspects. Unfortunately, Mythic undercooked the PvP before release resulting in a bit of an imbalance. Only a few scenarios popped out of the many available, and World PvP was woefully undermanned.

That may have all changed in the last month or so, but I have a feeling it will be a few more months before I look at WAR again.

Then again, 2009 could be a year with a bumper crop of MMOGs. Jumpgate, Earthrise, Darkfall, Spellborn, just to name a few. Could be mighty distracting.

World of Warcraft

So I succumbed to the lure and created a Draeni Shammie on Rexxar and joined up with the Casualties there. Had a bit of fun just before Christmas getting my level up in the starting areas.

I haven’t done any of the Wrath content yet, I’m tempted to pay the 25 USD to transfer my Dwarf Pally to Rexxar so that I can created a Death Knight on that server. I’ll wait and see.

Then Christmas came.

Free To Play MMORPGs

I downloaded and created accounts with several of the free to play MMOGs that are available. I loaded up Wizard 101, Dream of Mirror Online, and Cronous.

Both Wizard 101 and DOMO are pretty good, and much to my surprise come pretty close to the quality standard we expect of a AAA title nowadays. Cronous not so much. Within, 20 minutes of creating my character, he got stuck in a gap between the walls and couldn’t get out. No stuck command, and no help of any kind from players or GMs. Stuff that.

DOMO on the other hand, pretty decent. It has a real anime feel and is designed (I think) for a much younger audience — as is Wizard 101 — I felt a little silly hunting Pu Pu’s. It just sounds wrong. And what’s with the quest to knock of Baby Bow Wows. I’m a cat person, but killing puppies… yoiks!

Wizard 101 is a card battle game. You build up a deck of cards and then go out and battle monsters, or duel other players. As I said it is designed for the young ones in mind, so there are limitations of chat, and naming. I found the quests engaging, but did reach one limitation where I needed to become a subscriber or purchase some ‘currency’ to allow me to get into an area. Good fun.

Everquest

I don’t really know why, but for some reason I got a little nostalgic — maybe it was something I read — so I loaded up the original Everquest once again. Man. It’s been years since I last spent any time there, early 2002 I think. It didn’t cost me anything, I have the Station Access subscription, so I guess you could call that free to play too.

The first thing I noticed, outside the tutorial in Gloomingdeep Mines, was that the game is much easier to level that it was when I left in ’02. It’s also much easier to solo for a wider range of classes too from what I read on the forums. Not all the players are happy about this of course, I think it’s great idea, nothing wrong with gameplay being accessible.

Anyway, I created about five characters and leveled them all to between 11 and 12 over a day or two each. There’s a Ranger (Punkarella), Necromancer (Stropp), Wizard (Struke), Shaman (HairyLeggs), and a Beastlord (Stroppcat). My favorite, definitely the Wizard, except for the damn slow mana regeneration. From zero it takes about three minutes, and I burn through that in two or three mobs. I’m not that patient.

Red Alert 3

Finally, my gaming odessy includes Red Alert 3 for the PC.

The thing I always liked about the RA games was that they didn’t take themselves too seriously. Red Alert 3 is not an exception to this rule. Just in the opening scenes, we have Tim Curry, and a large Japanese war machine with high tech Samurai and giant robots. Even later we have George Takei as the Japanese Emperor.

The gameplay doesn’t suffer either. You effectively get an assistant who has his or her own base, and whom you can direct to a certain extent.

And man, the Russian adjutant who gives you your orders and mission briefs. If the Russian military actually had their female soldiers in uniforms like that, I might consider defecting!

So. Is that enough gaming for you?

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