UltrViolet Gaming

I loaded up the World of Warcraft Burning Crusade 10-day trial the other night and found that, to my great surprise, my WoW characters were still available after over 3 years of inactivity.

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I enjoyed the Age of Conan trial enough to plop down the measly $20 to upgrade to the full version (which gets you 32 days of playing time).

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I downloaded the Age of Conan free trial a while back and played a character through level 18 (which doesn’t take very long). This is a game I’ve always wanted to try, but never got around to it until now.

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Normally I play one game at a time, finish it, and then move on to the next game.  When I got a PS3 Slim, though, I bought a stack of games to play, and in the last couple of months of 2009 I picked up some new releases and a lot of good deals from Steam.  So I have quite a backlog of games to play right now.

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Modern Warfare 2 is one of those rare sequels that is actually an improvement over the original.  The single-player campaign took me about 7 hours to finish on regular, so don’t buy this game for single-player.  The lasting value is in the multi-player experience, which is similar to, but subtly improved from, Call of Duty 4.

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Normally I only play one game at a time, but Need For Speed SHIFT is pretty one-dimensional so I’ve also started FarCry 2 for the PS3.  The story is nothing like the original FarCry, sharing only a name that honestly has nothing to do with anything.  This time around you’re running (and driving) around an enormous chunk of Africa.

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I'm currently playing Need For Speed SHIFT on the PS3. It's pretty good but it takes a lot of work to turn off all the silly music.

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I finished my first game on the new PS3 Slim last night:  F.E.A.R. 2.

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I picked up World in Conflict (with Soviet Assault expansion) for half price from Steam a couple weeks ago (yeah, I’m pretty fond of waiting for half-price weekend specials, if you hadn’t noticed).

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I heard this excerpt on Gamers With Jobs Episode 149 and I thought it was so funny I should post it.  They were responding to a listener who asked what their families thought of their podcast and gaming.

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I basically finished* with Fallout 3 a few weeks ago, which I got from Steam for like $25.  I’m actually glad I didn’t pay full price for it because I didn’t think it was that great.

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I finished the solo campaign of Call of Duty: World at War (PC version), which I picked up from Steam for half price last weekend.  It’s another excellent Call of Duty production, but gameplay-wise there was nothing innovative about it.  It’s just new stories and new locations.

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During most of the huge gap that I didn’t post anything about gaming, I was usually playing Grand Theft Auto 3 and GTA: San Andreas, which I got in a big Steam package for like $29.99.  Now I understand why everyone thought those games were so revolutionary and awesome.

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I picked up FarCry from Steam for $9.99 a couple weeks ago.  It’s pretty cool, but it’s not blowing me away.

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I downloaded Bioshock from Steam for a measely $19.95 a while back.  If you're one of the six or seven people who haven't played it already, it's a very cool game.  Definitely a five... out of five.  It's not a very long-lasting game, though, as is typical of the gaming industry these days.  And it's not the hardest game in the world, either.  I played it on all three difficulty settings, and on the hardest setting, it started out kind of hard, but I got used to it after a while and it became rather easy to beat down the splicers.  On the easy setting, it was ridiculously easy.  Fun to whack everyone with the wrench, though.

Before I wasted my money on WAR, I toyed with the idea of getting EVE Online instead.  The idea of a spaceship-based MMO is fascinating -- it harkens back to the golden age of TradeWars on the local dialup BBS -- and I've wanted to try it out for, well, years.  So now that WAR is gone, I went ahead and downloaded the 21-day EVE Online free trial through Steam and played with it over the 3-day weekend.

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One quick note on the WAR Cultivation skill:  I applaud the concept -- it's a very cool idea to be able to plant seeds and grow them into herbs and things.  Unfortunately the implementation in WAR is just awful.  It takes about 2 full minutes to grow a single plant.  Which would be fine if you could start it, then go about doing something else.  And in fact you can -- but you can't if you want to add water and nutrients, because you have to add those things by dragging them from your inventory to the cultivation window at specific times during the growth cycle.  So you can only drag over soil in the beginning, water in the middle, and nutrients at the end.  Which means you have to sit there doing nothing else but maintaining the cultivation window for 2 full minutes while a plant grows.  That gets old really fast.

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Okay well I cancelled my WAR subscription and uninstalled it.  Mrs. Krehbiel was starting to get annoyed and it was way too much of an uninspiring game to try to defend it. :)  I should have stuck with my personal ban on EA games I guess.  It's kind of a huge disappointment when a game released in 2008 is basically an exact clone of a game released way back in 2004.  You wouldn't think it would be possible for there to be even less innovation in the gaming industry, but there you go.

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More notes from WAR.  I don't know what it is about MMOs that inspire a lot of commentary.  I guess everyone has an opinion about how to make MMOs better.

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I was wandering around Altdorf the other night, which is the capital city for the Empire (ie. the humans).  I don't remember why I went there -- probably to find someone to fulfill some quest.  Or maybe just because it was enabled on the map where it wasn't before.  Anyway, I was anxious to see it because capital cities in MMOs tend to be crowded, interesting places with lots of things to see and do and bustling activity everywhere.  (I'm thinking of Stormwind and Ironforge from WoW, where crowds of players packed the streets, begging for gold and hawking their goods and services.)

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Darkfall sounds like it might be a cool new MMORPG on the horizon.  The screenshots look really nice, and the feature list sounds impressive.  I just signed up for the beta on a whim.  (I put "Crayola Clan" as my clan hehe.)  I will do an excellent job of testing how their game runs on a crappy PC gaming rig.

...and day 2 of not being able to play because I haven't received my pre-ordered copy in the mail yet.  That part's not surprising, but it is beyond belief that Mythic made the unbelievably retarded decision to disable the head start codes a couple of days after launch.  Honestly the more I read about Mythic's business practices, the less I want to play this game.  But I guess I'm stuck with it now, since mine has already shipped.  I don't think I'll have a problem putting it away within a month, though.

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Since I can't play WAR anymore because it now requires me to enter the CD key from the CD that hasn't arrived yet, I guess this is a good opportunity to write down some more impressions of WAR.  (Yes, once again, people who pre-order games get screwed.)

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Well I finally got the WAR beta client downloaded, unzipped, installed and patched up for the head start (a process that stretched over two days and nights), and I played a little bit on the Grimnir server last night.  That means I got a one day head start on the retail public riff-raff, since the public launch is supposed to be today, the 18th.

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Okay I ordered Warhammer Online (aka. WAR, which stands for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning).  It'll probably arrive in a week or so*.  If you don't know, WAR is an MMO (massively multiplayer online) game that I've been looking forward to since I first heard about it in 2006.  (It's in the same genre as World of Warcraft, which I played for a couple of months last year.)

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