Interesting compilation of video game footage set to an instrumental piece. I find it strangely emotion provoking, with tones of loss, hope, and sweet struggle... Or maybe I'm just in a mood...
Oh Guild Wars 2, it has been a long beta weekend. Such a laggy weekend indeed! With the pre-purchase (notice I didn't say pre-order) of GW2 it gave us access to a beta weekend starting on Friday and ending Sunday. I made preparations with some old gaming friends and jumped in this weekend. I hope you enjoy my thoughts.
First off, the game is beautiful. NCSoft has a stellar art department and their stylized art direction is consistent throughout the game thus far. Most quests have an audible cutscene to depict the situation at hand. Definitely blows reading a wall of text out of the water.
Each race has its own starting area and they feel very different. Even though I... Read All
Oh Guild Wars 2, it has been a long beta weekend. Such a laggy weekend indeed! With the pre-purchase (notice I didn't say pre-order) of GW2 it gave us access to a beta weekend starting on Friday and ending Sunday. I made preparations with some old gaming friends and jumped in this weekend. I hope you enjoy my thoughts.
First off, the game is beautiful. NCSoft has a stellar art department and their stylized art direction is consistent throughout the game thus far. Most quests have an audible cutscene to depict the situation at hand. Definitely blows reading a wall of text out of the water.
Each race has its own starting area and they feel very different. Even though I wasn't very drawn in I'll give them credit for making each race feel very distinct. We got to play the Charr, Human and Norn races this weekend. The Norn are very nature focused, revering the spirits of the animals and the spirit world that only shaman can travel into. They are large too, I was towering over my Human friends. The Humans are exactly wat you would expect, homeland lost they fight on with unwavering spirit. Nothing too special here but the female characters are really beautiful. Lastly I tried the Charr as I wasn't very excited for them. I think they have the strongest story in the beginning. They are singularly focused on their militaristic lives. I was impressed that their gritty and visceral heritage played well into their storyline.
I played Guild Wars 1 quite a bit and have fond memories of that game. Though the characters and story are easily recognizable, not much is the same. Everywhere you run there's a "dymanic quest" which doesn't feel dynamic at all. If you ever played Warhammer Online you remember the public quest system. Well, this is public quest of steroids. The quests became so repetitive and boring I actually started avoiding them.
PVP is something I participated in quite a bit. I played a battleground, which almost put me to sleep, but I kept coming back to WvWvW. That stands for World vs World vs World if you were wondering. In a 4 continent battle putting 3 servers against one another in a very long battle of taking and holding objectives, WvW can be a blast! At times it becomes mindless as you run around in huge groups zerging each other. You will quickly find out that melee is painful, being on the front lines means getting focused pretty hard. Even on my warrior I was mostly using a rifle in combat. There is much less mindless auto-attacking as you need to use skills, dodge attacks and projectiles and revive teammates. The biggest problem I faced was being unable to melee enemies in certain situations due to so much server lag.
All in all it was a fun weekend. Beta's aren't meant to be perfect and this was sure was not. Lots of disconnects, lag and bugs to report. I hope the feedback makes the release a better product. After waiting so long for this title I am a little disappointed. I miss some of the simplicity from the original Guild Wars. Now we can jump in a persistent world, but that doesn't make up for some of the best balanced collaborative PVP I ever played in the original.
I played a lot of the first one, but never really got involved. For someone who has a problem computing to a subscription, the guild wars series definitely appeals to me. I'm glad to hear they fleshed out the char, they were prettycool in the first game.I had high hopes for the dynamic quests - so I house they fine time that to make it less obnoxious.
I will play at launch since I pre-purchased it. But I am no where near as excited as I was.
Just asked my friend his opinion. He said he liked the beta, but was unsure of the WvWvW. He thought he would have liked it best and was unsure he would want to do it much at launch. Maybe it'll get better when we can level and get better gear.
Last night I went to the Magic: The Gathering Avacyn Restored pre-release party at Red Castle Games in Portland.
Red Castle Games is a pretty cool games store. It has a very large selection of awesome board games ranging from Settlers of Catan, Arkham Horror, Castle Ravenloft, Pandemic and others as well has a hefty supply of Magic, Pokemon and other collectable cards. It also has a farily large set of games you can pull of the shelf and play if you want. One such game, Hero Quest caught my eye as it has been out of print for quite some time. I asked at the front if it was for sale as its hard to find and alas, it was not.
My friends arrived and we started with a card... Read All
Last night I went to the Magic: The Gathering Avacyn Restored pre-release party at Red Castle Games in Portland.
Red Castle Games is a pretty cool games store. It has a very large selection of awesome board games ranging from Settlers of Catan, Arkham Horror, Castle Ravenloft, Pandemic and others as well has a hefty supply of Magic, Pokemon and other collectable cards. It also has a farily large set of games you can pull of the shelf and play if you want. One such game, Hero Quest caught my eye as it has been out of print for quite some time. I asked at the front if it was for sale as its hard to find and alas, it was not.
My friends arrived and we started with a card game I was unfarmilar with called "We Didn’t Playtest This At All." The game is pretty awesome but winning is pretty random as the cards range from wildly overpowered to useless. Then again, I guess thats the point entirely.
After a few games of "We Didn’t Playtest This At All" we moved into a few hands of Magic. I won a few and lost a few. According to one of my friends my Goblin and Elves dueling deck is worth quite a bit due to it being rare. Odd, I just picked it up round 2007 for about $20. Come to find out, it is worth about $150 new.
Whoa! Anyways, I never really thought about it but they are both really good decks. I used the Goblin deck VS a few others and it did pretty well. The Goblin deck is very aggro and fun because if you get a good hand you not only knock around the other player pretty well but if a Golbin dies it does direct damage to the other player as well.
The sealed deck tournament started around 12p and I opened my 6 packs around 12.30p. I created a rather safe Red and White deck with the cards I had. I had a few Humans and Angels so I decided to construct for those bonuses with my Instants and Enchantments. Turns out going on the "safe" side was bad because I handily lost my first two matches. Doh!
7 hours into the tournmanet and 2 straight losses(each round is the best 2 of 3 games) I decided to call it an evening at 3.30am. It was a pretty fun experience meeting people and watching how people play. I have to say there are some really great Magic players out there and I am a beginner in comparision. Stil, learned a bit about some new to me card mechanics like miracle cost. Since I attended the pre-release I got the special Moonsilver Spear foil. Its pretty overpowered and as such will add to one of my decks :)
Very fun and I plan on doing it again in the future. I am going to hang out with one of my friends and go over the cards I picked and figure out a better strategy to constructing a deck. According to the guys I went with I had a pretty solid set of cards but I needed to go a different direction. When the deck is worth showing, ill list the build here.
It's just so weird to see people referencing Star City Games all over the internet. That's about 45 minutes from here, it's where I went a few times to grab booster boxes back when I was playing more since they're way cheaper than anywhere else in the area, and... they're apparently one of the major MtG authorities on the Internet.
You'd expect the place to be a massive warehouse, but it's mostly just full of tables for tournaments, with all the goods behind the counter taking up less space than most small hobby shops.
jdodson Admin Post Author
wrote on 04/30/2012 at 08:24pm
Awesome, they just came up after a quick Google for the Goblin and Elves dueling deck. Cool they built up their online portion so well!
A co-worker was telling me recently about pack wars. You take a booster pack, two lands of each color, shuffle it all together, and that's your deck. Optionally, no peeking before the game starts.
Totally random results, but often hilarious.
jdodson Admin Post Author
wrote on 05/02/2012 at 11:16pm
Huh. That could be cool! :)
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Ever since I first heard about it, EVE has tempted me. I don't really have the time, and I doubt I could really pull off explaining the monthly subscription to my wife, but a game where this happens sounds... entertaining. All of the other games try to make you "believe you are part of a larger world." Well, guess what: this game actually let's you interact with everyone and change the world, even if it's for destructive purposes Just like the real world.
Any of you MMOers out there... do you think your game would let this happen?
Ever since I first heard about it, EVE has tempted me. I don't really have the time, and I doubt I could really pull off explaining the monthly subscription to my wife, but a game where this happens sounds... entertaining. All of the other games try to make you "believe you are part of a larger world." Well, guess what: this game actually let's you interact with everyone and change the world, even if it's for destructive purposes Just like the real world.
Interesting. I sort of give it to EVE a bit for letting this happen. They do allow practically anything to happen so if certain people want to blow up things haphazardly then it makes sense that they would allow it as it could happen in real life.
Anyways its cool to see that there are MMO's that do allow anything to happen but if I sunk a ton into a great ship and it was destroyed for little reason id be pretty upset.
Tungsten Post Author
wrote on 04/29/2012 at 01:25am
I am wondering how they got those bad-ass ships though...
Guys. Holy crap. It's not like this is my first foray into Steam. I've been using it for simpler games for ages now, but I'm more into it since I'm playing more "serious" games on it.
But I *just* finally decided to see what pressing shift+tab to access the Steam community did. That thing is badass. You can get a full tabbed browser in your game as you're playing it.
Why had I never checked that out before?
Guys. Holy crap. It's not like this is my first foray into Steam. I've been using it for simpler games for ages now, but I'm more into it since I'm playing more "serious" games on it.
But I *just* finally decided to see what pressing shift+tab to access the Steam community did. That thing is badass. You can get a full tabbed browser in your game as you're playing it.
Good tip, I have Steam too but some of these in game key presses illude me.
shift+tab. Try to run that in my mind like a mantra.
SHIFT+TAB!
Azurephile Super Member
wrote on 01/24/2014 at 03:24am
LOL You sound like me when I first discovered it. Tim was the first person to chat with me while I was playing Terraria. Then I was like, "whoa," because I had been saving my game and exiting Steam so that I could go check out the Terraria Wiki. Interesting stuff!
Wow, Travis seriously hit up Steam a year+ ago? Man, seems like a lot longer than that.
But yeah, that's about right for me too I suppose. Maybe two.
Azurephile Super Member
wrote on 01/24/2014 at 04:58am
I'm not sure how long I've been on Steam, I suspect that it's been less than a year. I found out that Portal was on Steam for free, so I created an account and tried it out. I thought the game was humorous, but the puzzle aspect of it had me feeling stupid, so I uninstalled it. Then, Travis gifted me Terraria, which is only the 2nd game I have on Steam. Otherwise, I tried a Ys demo. That's about it. It's kind of sad, I think, thinking of how I've had friends that have been on Steam much longer and have many more games in their library, but then it goes back to my whole, "I'm oblivious" idea when it comes to modern gaming.
Travis Admin Post Author
wrote on 01/24/2014 at 05:08am
No, no, I've had it since the HL2 days, just barely using it. :)
Looks like the Diablo 3 free beta weekend blew the doors off battle.net a bit:
"Diablo 3's weekend beta went about as smoothly as a hamster in a ball rolling down an erupting volcano – which is to say it was completely normal for a high-profile beta test. Saturday saw a peak of 300,000 concurrent players, Blizzard community manager Micah Whipple (Bashiok) tweeted, reporting the full number of testers for the weekend was "a lot.""
Friday night was quite laggy, Saturday was better but battle.net was out of commission until 9.50am. Some of my friends on Mac had the game crash a few times. My Windows client was stable but lagged out a bit. On Sunday battle.net was pretty... Read All
Looks like the Diablo 3 free beta weekend blew the doors off battle.net a bit:
"Diablo 3's weekend beta went about as smoothly as a hamster in a ball rolling down an erupting volcano – which is to say it was completely normal for a high-profile beta test. Saturday saw a peak of 300,000 concurrent players, Blizzard community manager Micah Whipple (Bashiok) tweeted, reporting the full number of testers for the weekend was "a lot.""
Friday night was quite laggy, Saturday was better but battle.net was out of commission until 9.50am. Some of my friends on Mac had the game crash a few times. My Windows client was stable but lagged out a bit. On Sunday battle.net was pretty flawless. Hope there is as much interest in the game at launch and they have sorted through the majority set of issues.
Valve will finally release the Portal 2 simplified level editor and rating system May 8th! Looks like it will be free DLC for all PC players and there is no word on it coming to consoles. Awesome.
I don't generally do much in the area of level editing but I plan on giving this editor a spin as it looks pretty straight forward to use. I picked up the PS3 version and that came with a free steam copy. Its cool they are releasing this so far after launch!
I don't generally do much in the area of level editing but I plan on giving this editor a spin as it looks pretty straight forward to use. I picked up the PS3 version and that came with a free steam copy. Its cool they are releasing this so far after launch!
I thought I already had it... That's pretty sweet. That Steam Workshop is looking pretty cool right about now. Good job Valve.
jdodson Admin Post Author
wrote on 04/27/2012 at 11:11am
This looks to be a simplified level editor and rating system for user uploaded levels. So something a bit easier to use and allows uploads for all it seems. The UI does look fairly easy.
Direct from the article: "For those that have doubted the exclusive Phoronix claims for quite a while now that the Steam client and Source Engine are in fact being ported to Linux, the doubts can be nearly laid to rest. Even I began to wonder how long it would take before the clients for their popular games would be publicly released under Linux. However, after confirming the information perhaps a bit too soon, their level of Linux interest is much more clear after spending a day at their offices. A meeting topped off... Read All
Phoronix has confirmed that Steam is going to be released on Linux:
Direct from the article: "For those that have doubted the exclusive Phoronix claims for quite a while now that the Steam client and Source Engine are in fact being ported to Linux, the doubts can be nearly laid to rest. Even I began to wonder how long it would take before the clients for their popular games would be publicly released under Linux. However, after confirming the information perhaps a bit too soon, their level of Linux interest is much more clear after spending a day at their offices. A meeting topped off the day with Gabe Newell regarding Linux where he sounded more like a Linux saint than an ex-Microsoft employee. Valve does have some great plans for Linux beyond just shipping the client versions of Steam and their popular games on the Source Engine."
This is awesome for gamers because it gives us a path outside Microsoft and Apple for PC gaming. Many moons ago I played all my games on Linux and it wasn't pleasant. Wine worked spottily on certain games and native game support wasn't widespread. Now that Valve is entering the area I imagine this will change for the better.
I have to imagine this is a front runner for a Steam Box. Reason? If all your stuff runs on Linux, your Steam Box will no longer have a Microsoft requirement and you don't have to license and Operating System to Microsoft for every unit sold. Makes the cost of producing a console cheaper and Valve can do whatever they want with the box itself. Oh and the article says they are hiring Linux kernel folk too.
Step 1: Steam on Linux, a few games run. Step 2: More games run, publishers follow. Step 3: Shop around a new kind of console based on Linux. Step 4: Goodbye consoles as we know them.
You know the Steam Box is all speculation, but the Linux Steam client is real and totally awesome on its own. Cool times ahead for sure.
This is a fun version of trivia and getting to know your fellow members. Sometimes it helps to look at the date of the source, as some answers are outdated. Again this is fun and not to difficult.
This is a fun version of trivia and getting to know your fellow members. Sometimes it helps to look at the date of the source, as some answers are outdated. Again this is fun and not to difficult.
Wow, thats really cool. I like the zoom in filter the video used.
So many memories.