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Oh Guild Wars 2, it has been a long beta weekend. Such a

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.

jdodson Admin wrote on 04/30/2012 at 12:02am

Do you see yourself playing this very much after launch?

What did your friends think of the beta weekend?

Tungsten wrote on 04/30/2012 at 12:38am

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.

Tungsten wrote on 04/30/2012 at 12:39am

Stupid phone keyboard

Chowda Post Author wrote on 04/30/2012 at 04:33am

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.

jdodson Admin wrote on 04/30/2012 at 05:30am

I hope so. Would you recommend picking up the old game? I never got it and maybe it's worth playing?

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Last night I went to the Magic: The Gathering Avacyn

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

Travis Admin wrote on 04/30/2012 at 04:52pm

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!

Travis Admin wrote on 05/02/2012 at 08:17pm

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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Any of you MMOers out there... do you think your game would

http://bulk2.destructoid.com/ul/226632-/K3TJe%20-%20Imgur-620x.jpg

Any of you MMOers out there... do you think your game would let this happen?

http://www.destructoid.com/eve-players-band-together-to-destroy-the-economy-226632.phtml

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.

jdodson Admin wrote on 04/28/2012 at 08:24pm

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.

I find the reasoning to allow it interesting. Its sort of the "broken window parable" that I don't generally subscribe to. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

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...

jdodson Admin wrote on 04/29/2012 at 07:18am

Lots of time?

Tungsten Post Author wrote on 04/29/2012 at 01:43pm

Maybe the market will respond and people will start maKing bank doing escorts

jdodson Admin wrote on 04/29/2012 at 04:35pm

If people stick with the game they will adapt something like that.

jdodson Admin wrote on 04/29/2012 at 04:38pm

Or maybe blockade some sectors like we used to do in the ol Tradewars days.

Jason_Taylor wrote on 03/05/2013 at 06:19am

lol. I'm in goonswarm and while I didn't partake in the burning of Jita personally, I do know that the repercussions were felt around the universe.

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Search Google for Zerg Rush.

Guys. Holy crap. Its not like this is my first foray into

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?

Tungsten wrote on 04/27/2012 at 09:55pm

Ya, I've used it for all sorts of things. It's great. I usually just use it for the clock though.

Now that I think about it though, I've been alt-tabbing out of skyrim to look up console codes. Guess I don't need to do that anymore.

jdodson Admin wrote on 04/28/2012 at 12:29am

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!

jdodson Admin wrote on 01/24/2014 at 04:50am

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. :)

jdodson Admin wrote on 01/24/2014 at 06:21am

Travis: Ah, yeah, me too but little compelled me back then I got some Bundles....

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Looks like the Diablo 3 free beta weekend blew the doors off

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/546667_200311833421040_177648035687420_322024_1633520084_n.jpg

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

Portal 2: Valve Will Release Simplified Map Editor on PC

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!

-
http://www.giantbomb.com/news/portal-2s-perpetual-testing-initiative-launching-may-8/4107/

Tungsten wrote on 04/27/2012 at 10:24am

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.

Travis Admin wrote on 04/27/2012 at 04:53pm

I'm so glad they gave free PC copies to PS3 purchases.

jdodson Admin Post Author wrote on 04/27/2012 at 05:32pm

I am too. Makes me question the value of other games that don't do it.

jdodson Admin Post Author wrote on 04/27/2012 at 07:42pm

Updated with the new DLC video. Check above.

Travis Admin wrote on 04/28/2012 at 02:58pm

I love Cave Johnson. Actually, I love everything that guy does. Even the Farmers commercials.

jdodson Admin Post Author wrote on 04/28/2012 at 05:05pm

He is a good character actor. Apparently this was all done before the end of P2?

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Phoronix has confirmed that Steam is going to be released on

http://ironhammers.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/steam.png

Phoronix has confirmed that Steam is going to be released on Linux:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=valve_linux_dampfnudeln&num=1

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

This is a fun version of trivia and getting to know your

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 two player game. The strategy is fun while

This is a fun two player game. The strategy is fun while the limited amount of rules make is simple and challenging.